“We need to get this cleaned up. Hold still.”
Sam nodded and braced himself while I picked out bit after bit of glass until my fingertips ached, but I couldn’t find anything more. Cleaning the wound would help, but first I needed to stop the bleeding.
“This might hurt.”
“It already hurts.” Sam’s voice was rough.
I wanted to say something reassuring, but I didn’t know near enough about what had been damaged to make promises. If it looked bad after we rinsed the blood, I’d call Rin, the medic. For now, I grabbed a big shard of glass and sliced off a length of my nightgown to make a bandage, then wrapped the length of cloth around his hand as many times as it would go. “Hold on to it. Keep pressure.”
“My hand will be fine.” The words came out hard, like commands. Like he could will the cuts to heal.
“Let’s go upstairs and get it properly bandaged. It didn’t sound like any of the support beams broke, so the stairs should be safe.” Hopefully the water lines were intact, too. The lights and everything else seemed all right. That was something.
I started to stand just as the earth jumped and an explosion sounded in the west. Not another earthquake. Something else.
Sam and I scrambled to our feet, careful of the glass as we hurried to the front door. I slipped into the night, icy air stinging my face. “Can you see anything?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “No, but it sounded like an eruption.”
“Not the caldera.” The Range caldera was enormous, stretching in all directions with the city of Heart at its center. If the caldera erupted, there’d be nothing left of Heart.
“Not the caldera,” Sam agreed. He put his arm around my shoulders, holding me close against the chill. “A hydrothermal eruption. Like a geyser, but bigger.”
“How much bigger?” I peered into the night, but clouds obscured moonlight. Even if there’d been enough light to see by, the city wall blocked the horizon completely. The eruption had been outside the city, but it could have been just beyond the wall. There were geysers everywhere.
“Depends. Sometimes much bigger. They’re a response to a pressure change underground.”
Pattering sounds filled the trees and yard, tapping on the house in a strange rhythm. A pebble fell from the sky and hit my head.
With his good hand, Sam took my elbow and drew me toward the house. “Hydrothermal eruptions take rocks and trees with them sometimes, but they don’t happen very often. I’ve seen only two of them, and they were a long time ago.”
As he spoke, a second eruption thundered in the north, and a third in the southwest. The world came alive with tapping, hissing, clattering. Animals grunted and darted through the evergreen trees. Birds squawked and took wing, but there was nowhere safe to fly. Earth rained from the sky as though the world had turned upside down.
“Inside.” Sam’s voice hardened as more bits of stone pattered against the walls of the house. “Inside now.”
“How is this possible?” As we turned for the door, a flash of light caught my eye.
In the center of the city, Janan’s temple shone incandescent.
2
INTRUSION
THE FRONT DOOR slammed behind me, muting the quiet cacophony of the world falling apart. I hugged myself as Sam moved into the shadows, away from the light of the kitchen. “Did you see the temple?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it so bright.”
“I saw.”
“Do you think it’s Janan’s doing?” He leaned on the wall, head dropped as he clutched his hand to his chest. “The earthquake? The eruptions?”
“It seems likely.” I eased into the shadows with him, resting my cheek on his shoulder. His arms circled my waist. My chest and stomach pressed against his, only our nightclothes separating us. “I’m afraid,” I whispered. It was easier to be honest when he was holding me, and when we stood in the dark.
He rested his cheek on top of my head. “Me too.”
“If the caldera is going to do this a lot from now on, maybe the Council exiling me isn’t such a bad thing. It’s probably smart to get away from Range. I’m glad you’re coming with me.”
“I’ll always go anywhere with you.”
We stood together for a while, listening to each other’s heartbeats and the patter of debris on the house. I touched only Sam, avoiding the white exterior wall even more now that Janan’s pulse was stronger.
“Let’s go upstairs and get this fixed.” I straightened and cradled his hurt hand in both of mine. The strip of my nightgown was soaked with blood.
He nodded and allowed me to guide him upstairs. We took the steps slowly, testing the wood before trusting our weight to it. The exterior of the house would be fine after the earthquake—Janan would never allow the white stone to be damaged while he was awake—but the interiors of the houses were all of human construction.