The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

later it would simply break. He and Paige and Bethany and everyone in the room would plunge with it, pressed to nothing as the interior of Border Town pancaked to a few stories of rubble down at B51.
    The floor reached the top of its upward heave. It seemed to linger there for longer than should’ve been possible—time itself was hard to gauge just now—and then it fell back toward level, and right past it. The rebar crackled and strained again at the lowest extent.
    But held.
    The floor was rising once more—not quite to even, but close—when Travis heard the screams. They came from directly below: Security Control on level B5. With the screams came the sound Travis had expected to hear all around him—the avalanche roar of concrete falling apart. The floor on B5 had given.
    A second later the screams were gone, washed out by the maelstrom noise of one story after another collapsing in sequence. A steel-and-concrete waterfall rushing down and away. It sucked the air out of Defense Control and Travis heard a high, surging whine somewhere close by. He realized it was an airstream being drawn down through the line of holes the bunker buster had made.
    And then it was over. No more sound. No more air movement. Just the building’s remaining framework shuddering with latent energy from the blast and the collapse.
    Emergency lighting kicked on within fifteen seconds. Wall-mounted bulbs that normally ran off the grid switched to batteries.
    The air was choked with concrete dust. Everyone stood in a daze, looking for one another or for the exits, or doing nothing at all. Travis saw a tech stoop and straighten a keyboard that’d slid partway off a desk.
    Bethany was crying. Paige’s eyes were red but nothing was spilling from them. Travis had no idea what his own eyes were doing.
    He took a step and realized the floor was tilted to a greater degree than he’d first believed. He imagined the entire level, or at least a portion of it, sagging toward some lowest, weakest point.
    He indicated the door they’d come in through earlier. “Come on.”
    As soon as they stepped into the corridor they saw where the bomb had passed. Dead centered in the hall, halfway to the elevator, was a ragged hole two feet wide. There was another in the ceiling straight above it.
    Travis turned the other way and studied the stretch of corridor leading out to this level’s perimeter. On a normal day he could’ve seen the hallway’s far end, some ninety feet away, where a T-junction led left and right at the outer rim of Border Town. He couldn’t see it now; the corridor dipped in a long, severe bow that cut off the sightline. The lowest point seemed to be perfectly centered between the elevator and the building’s south exterior wall.
    Travis stared for another second, then turned away and moved toward the two-foot hole in the floor. He stopped just shy, knelt, and studied the edge. It looked strong enough. He eased forward on all fours and then lay flat on his chest, his head extended down into the opening.
    What he saw, he would remember forever. Beneath him yawned nearly fifty stories of empty space, churning with concrete fog. Border Town, if it’d stood above ground like a regular building, would’ve been a cylindrical skyscraper with the rough proportions of a soda can. Through the dust, Travis saw that only the southern half of the structure had collapsed—as if the soda can had been cleaved vertically down the middle, and one of its sides had then been crushed flat while the other remained standing.
    For all that, the collapse zone looked as big as the world. Stubs of broken floors lined its curved southern sweep like massive, fractured ribs. On the opposite side, the guillotined edges of the north half’s intact levels met the open space in a rough, upright plane. It looked strangely like a stack of balconies facing inward onto the atrium of a highrise hotel, seen from the top floor looking down. Only there were no balconies—just vivisected rooms and corridors and airducts and gushing pipes and sparking electrical conduits, all of it lit up from deep within by more backup lighting. Clothing from torn-open closets spiraled down into the heavy dust, out of sight. Travis saw a bed lying right along the cutoff, ten stories below, its topsheet held on by one corner and the rest fluttering like a streamer in the eddying air.
    Two things came to him, so obvious they barely registered as isolated thoughts. First, his and