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Nothing. She pressed her ear to the cold metal. The stranger on her door was gone, had run off or was dead, and either way the door stayed shut.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. I've been in worse rooms."

She hadn't. But she started hunting for the hinges anyway. It beat standing still. That was when the wall beside the door cracked from floor to ceiling with a sound like a shot.

*** Kavren ***

He'd felt the first heat come up through his boots and he was moving before the tremor ever hit.

Three nights he'd stood at the far end of her corridor, past the reach of the guard on her door, keeping a watch, no one had given him. When the stone turned hot under him, he knew what it was. He'd grown up on the outer line where the crust runs thin. He'd been reading the ground since before he could read words. The sun had surged. The models the scientists argued over in their calm rooms had come true, and they'd come true all at once. The lower levels sat closest to a crust that was starting to cook.

He hit the door of her cell at a dead run. The guard was gone. The door was locked, and a locked door was a problem he'd been trained to solve six ways, none of them fast enough for the noise the ceiling was making.

"Diana!"

"Kavren?" Her voice came through the metal, and for one bad second it wasn't steady. Then it was. She made it be. "The wall in here is coming apart. Whatever you're planning, do it now."

"Get to the far corner. All the way. Tell me when you're clear."

"I'm clear. Go."

He put his shoulder to the door the way he'd put it to a ram in the drills. Once. Twice. On the third the frame gave and took the door with it. The room beyond was full of dust and the ceiling was raining grit and Diana stood in the far corner exactly where he'd told her to be, on her feet, furious and alive.

Then the ceiling let go.

He didn't decide to move. Twenty years had decided it for him a long time ago. He crossed the room, threw his body over hers and his wing over both of them, and the world turned to weight and noise. A slab caught his shoulder and his spread wing and it drove him down to his knees over her. Stone piled onto his back and he held it, teeth set. Diana was under him. He would hold it until it stopped or until he did.

Then it stopped.

Under his wing there was a pocket of air, full of dust and the sound of them both breathing.

"Kavren." Her hands were on his face in the dark. "Are you hurt? The truth, not the guard answer."

"Shoulder. Wing. I've had worse." He got a breath. "You?"

"Furious. Fine. Mostly furious." A shaky laugh landed against his neck. "You came through a locked door and a ceiling for me. We are going to have a very long talk about your instinct for self-preservation once we are not under a mountain."

"I'll look forward to it."

He moved the debris off his own wing a piece at a time, slow and careful, and it cost him more than he let her see. When there was room, he pulled her up against him, and they stood in the wreck of the cell in the dark and held on a moment longer than the danger strictly needed.

Then she went rigid in his arms.

"Plovus." The fear in it was a different fear than any she'd shown for herself. "The nursery. Is the core..."

"The core is the safest ground in the Colony. It is deepest from the crust and the oldest stone." He said it fast and sure, to give her something solid to stand on. "Athena and Varek are up there. They get the children out first. It's the first move anyone with sense makes."

"Then take me up. Now."

*** Diana ***

The core levels were bedlam. That was almost a relief. She'd never been any good at calm, but she could walk straight through a crisis. This was the biggest one anyone had ever handed her.

The corridors were packed with people carrying what they could and children they could barely hold, and the light kept stuttering as the power flexed. Diana put her shoulder into the flow and read it the way she read a council chamber. Kavren cut a path ahead of her that people stepped out of without quite knowing why. Twice the floor shuddered and everyone froze. Twice she said "keep moving" in the flat carrying voice she'd learned on three worlds, and both times they moved for her.

Athena found them before they'd gone fifty feet.

"Diana." She had her own daughter on one hip and Plovus on the other, and she put the boy into Diana's arms before either of them said another word. "He's fine. Slept through half of it, screamed through the other half, then decided the end of the world was beneath him. He's yours, all right."