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They passed through the station The water was rising fast; soon it would be over their heads The next station would colow appeared As they neared, the light congealed into a discrete shaft--an opening in the roof of the tunnel

"There’s a ladder!" Alicia cried Her head went under again

"What?"

Her face ree for breath She pointed "A ladder on the wall!"

They were sailing straight for it Alicia grabbed hold first Michael spun around her body, then, using his left hand, reached out, seized a rung, and hooked an elbow through it At the top of the ladder was a ht beyond it

"Can youpummeled by the current Lish shook her head

"Try, da left "I can’t"

He would have to pull her up Michael reached above her head and drew hirate presented a different proble to drown anyway At the top of the ladder, he raised one hand and pushed Nothing, not the slightest tremor He reared back and shoved the heel of his palain On the fourth blow, it burst open

He shoved it aside, cli water had lifted Alicia halfway up the ladder The light seemed to make a kind of halo around her face

He reached down "Take my hand--"

But that was all he said, his words cut short as a wall of water slaeyser through the open grate and blowing Michael halfway across the street

--

The collapse of the bulkhead just south of the Astor Place station--one of eight retention dareedy Atlantic--was the first in a series of events that no person, Michael included, could have anticipated Freed froh the tunnel with the ha power of a hundred locomotives It ripped and tore It blasted to bits It detonated and crushed and destroyed, plowing through the structural underpinnings of lower Manhattan like a scythe through wheat Eight blocks north of Astor Place, at Fourteenth Street, the water juht north beneath Lexington Avenue, toward Grand Central, the rest veered west on the Broadway line, roaring toward the bulkhead at Ti everything beneath the pavehth Avenue and opening the whole West Side to the sea

And it was only just getting started

In its thundering wake, the water left a trail of destruction Manhole covers blew sky-high Sewers exploded Streets buckled and collapsed Beneath the ground, a chain reaction had co water sought only the expansion of its domain; the prize was the island itself, which, after a century of sodden neglect, was rotten to the core

On the corner of Tenth Street and Fourth Avenue, Michael returned to consciousness with the unsettled sense that the world’s relationship to gravity had altered It was as if every object were eneral repulsion He blinked his eyes and waited for this feeling to stop, but it did not A great font of water was jetting fro at the top into a sparkling mist that cast a rainbow above the flooded street In his ed state, Michael stared at it in astonish else, while also noting, rather blandly, that other things were occurring: loud things, concussive things, things that warranted further consideration if only he could --either that or everything else was getting taller--and bits of s

Wait a second

The structure he was looking at--a nondescript,so A deep respiratory flexing, like a baby’s first breaths of life It was as if this anonymous structure, one of thousands like it on the island, had awakened after decades of abandoned slu cracks ht, balancing on his pally beneath hilass exploded

Michael rolled and flattened hi his head as a million shards rained down Whole plates detonated on the paves Nonsensical words, vile curses, an aural vomitus of terror He was about to be diced to ribbons There wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury, not that there would be anybody around to do that The seconds passed, glass cascading all around hi, for the second time that day, to die