Page 5

The ground moved back and forth.

The shelves began to roll and tip. Books tumbled from the tall shelves. Tinctures crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces and releasing so much perfume that Lore had to turn away, gagging.

She pushed the chair out of the way and dove beneath the desk, just in time to see bits of the ceiling rain down. She knelt, covering her head with her arms, and squeezed her eyes shut. Her teeth chattered so hard from the vibrations of the earth that she bit her tongue, tasting blood. She prayed to the goddess that the desk would hold if the roof caved in above her.

She prayed, as she did every day in one form or another, to survive.

Chapter3

Light, thick with dust, streamed in through the splintered ceiling, illuminating utter chaos.

As quickly as it had started, the phenomenon was over, but the apothecary was in ruins. Lore brushed some dust off her face and hissed in pain. There were small shards of glass embedded in her cheek, and when she pulled her fingers away, they were slick with blood.

She gripped the front of her tunic and used it to cover her mouth from the dust. It took minutes to crawl toward the door; her leather boots kept slipping on the loose pages from torn and battered books.

From the silence, shouts emerged, filtering in from the outside. One voice she recognized better than her own.

“Lore!” Grey shouted. His call was followed by loud thuds against the front door, as if he were shoving against it.

“I’m here!” Lore called back as she climbed over the remains of a bookshelf, ripped open the door, and gripped him in a tight hug.

He held her to him for a moment before he pulled away to look at her, eyes scanning her for injury and lingering on her cheek. When he saw she was relatively all right, he reached out and tugged gently on one of her dust-covered curls.

The familiar gesture helped settle the panic growing in Lore’s chest.

She scanned him, then sighed in relief; he looked shaken but unhurt. His familiar, kind, dark eyes were imbued with warmth, even though he was covered in so much dust it had streaked into a sort of paste on his nose and forehead.

“Whatwasthat, Grey?”

He grabbed her hand, speaking as he pulled her out of the apothecary. “An earthshake of some kind. You’re lucky you made it out with only a few scratches. The shop looks a lot worse from outside. I didn’t know what I would find when I made it through the door.” He exhaled a shaky breath, squeezing her hand.

Lore licked her lips, tasting blood and dust. She followed Grey outside, stumbling behind him. Her vision blurred as they kept walking and tears sprang to her eyes.

Grey said she’d been lucky.

He was right.

Her worst nightmares couldn’t have prepared her for the devastation around her. The buildings on the street were almost flattened, and her stomach turned when she thought of anyone who might have been caught inside. Shops and houses had expelled bricks and wood out into the streets. Black smoke billowed up into the cloudless sky, while far too few neighbors used water from the closest well on the growing flames.

There should be more people out... there shouldn’t be so few of them fighting to preserve this heap of rubble. Lore’s legs trembled beneath her.

“Your family?” she asked.

She glanced at the row of houses across the pond behind the apothecary. It was just a few minutes’ walk from the shop, which was how she had met Grey. He was at the shop almost as much as she was when they were children.

Grey’s house was usually swathed in perpetual shade fromthe tall trees that surrounded it. On a good day, she could hardly see it from the shop. But where there should have been branches reaching up toward the sky, the trees had split during the shake and fallen.

“They’re fine. Ara is shaken, but you know my mom and Aunt Xio—they’ll cheer her up in no time. Though I can’t say the same for our house.”

Lore didn’t know what to say to comfort him, so she cursed, instead. Grey, his mom, and his sister lived in a small house with his aunt and her four daughters. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had since his father and uncle—along with her own—had died in the uprising all those years ago. It was not as though they could afford to just build a new home.

“And the shelter?” Lore choked out, though how could he know? Grey’s house was in town, close to the apothecary. The shelter was not.

They raced through the field toward the small cluster of buildings. The closer they drew and the more she saw of the shelter, the harder it was to process what had really happened. Every window was shattered, and the corner of the west side had caved in completely.

She sped up, tears blurring her vision.

Please, let them be all right.