The Earth Moves

A hundred miles under the ground, slivers of rock as big as cities prepare to gently caress each other. The pressure from their touch like fingers on skin, as contact is made just before a massage. But the pressure builds not over seconds nor minutes, but over years. The moment when movement starts is but a chance event of a minute in a decade.

A hundred miles is much further than Amy can see from her chair on the eighteenth floor of the skyscraper where she is visiting her client. Despite the absence of clouds, even up here the haze restricts her view to perhaps five miles. Too restricted to make out the dramatic peaks of the half ring of mountains that protect the city to one side. Mountains gestated millions of years ago from the depths of the earth. Mountains that were taller then, possibly taller than any other peak in the world, before the long period of erosion whittled them to their fractured height.

Beneath Amy is the standard blue office carpet, rough and hard wearing. Eighteen floors of rough, hard wearing blue carpet. Then the foundations, born on a structural engineer's drawing, built from numbers, designed to withstand any earthquake of predicted magnitude. Amy has heard it said that some of the tallest buildings are built on rollers. It is unlikely that the tallest buildings would collapse.

Amy doesn't normally work in this building. She lives in a house in the suburbs, and has her own office in a nearby town. Both simple, low designs, two storeys, square, straight lines. She stares at the view for a long time, taking in everything she wouldn't normally see. The patterns of the freeways, crossing each other with long elevated sections. The enclosed roof spaces of the buildings below her, deserted at this time of the day save for a lone gardener on a terrace of small green bushes that she can see below her as she leans forward, her nose accidentally nudging the glass.

She takes a tissue out of her pocket and gently rubs the small, almost invisible greasy mark from the window, then cocks her head slightly to catch the sunlight passing through that space to make sure that she has completely wiped off any trace.

It's not something she normally does, but today her childminder was not available, and she knows that this client will not object to her bringing along her baby, who sleeps as she always does at this time of day, in a small basket by her feet, just under the table.

Amy thinks about how many chance events have happened already that day. This meeting for one. It should have been yesterday, and it was to have been at her office, but at the last minute her client postponed. Today she should have been a hundred miles away, on the first day of her holiday. And she is early, having made an uncharacteristic mistake in her electronic diary. She shouldn't be here, now. She was never meant to be here now.

A hundred miles directly below, one city sized slab of rock lays hands on another, and the pressure builds so much that the rock starts to move. Sometimes it's a fraction of an inch, but this time it's twenty feet. Amy looks down at the city and struggles to make out a lorry on the freeway that probably measures twenty feet in length. And she sees it move slightly to the side. Then move again, this time more pronounced, and make contact with the central barrier. Then the picture blurs, and the glass window shakes, and she feels that she herself is shaking. All around her, the world starts to crack open. The window glass fractures, the ceiling starts to fall like rain, the floor judders back and forth like a rope bridge. Eighteen floors up, there is no longer anything to stop Amy falling.