The skyscraper groaned beneath them.
Not the sound of settling steel or wind passing through empty floors. Something deeper. The sound of a structure that had taken more than it was built to hold, standing only because it had not yet realized it should fall.
Zane sat with his back against a concrete pillar, Lily curled against his side, her breathing uneven but steady. The smell of salt water clung to everything. Their clothes were heavy with it. Their skin tasted of it. The city below them was still drowning.
From this height, the flood looked almost peaceful.
Water stretched between buildings like a gray mirror, swallowing streets and cars and everything that had once been ordinary. Here and there, rooftops broke the surface, small islands where people had gathered, waving, waiting, their voices too far away to hear.
A helicopter passed somewhere in the distance. Too far. Too slow. There weren't enough of them. There never were.
Zane watched a woman standing on the edge of a collapsed convenience store roof. She was holding something against her chest. A child, maybe. Or a bag. He couldn't tell from here. The water was rising around her feet. She kept looking up, kept scanning the sky, kept waiting for someone to see her.
No one came.
He looked away.
Lily shifted beside him. "How long do we wait?"
He didn't have an answer. "Until someone finds us."
"And if no one does?"
He looked at her. Her face was pale, streaked with salt and whatever tears she hadn't been able to hold back. She looked younger than sixteen. She looked like she needed someone to tell her everything would be fine.
He couldn't do that. Not anymore.
"Then we wait longer," he said.
She stared at him for a moment. Then she nodded slowly, accepting it, because what else was there to accept.
Below them, the woman on the rooftop stopped looking at the sky. She sat down. She held whatever was in her arms a little tighter. The water kept rising.
Zane closed his eyes.
The rescue came three hours later.
A military helicopter, low and loud, its blades chopping the air into something violent and alive. A soldier descended on a cable, his uniform dark against the gray sky, his movements quick and practiced. He found them huddled beneath the broken windows of the skyscraper's thirtieth floor.
"Anyone else up here?"
Zane shook his head.
The soldier looked at Lily, at the way she was holding her arm, at the bruise spreading across her temple. His expression didn't change. He'd seen worse today. He'd see worse before the day ended.
"Can she move?"
"She can move," Lily said. Her voice was steady. Stubborn.
The soldier nodded once. He hooked her into the harness first, his hands efficient, impersonal. She looked back at Zane as the cable began to lift, her face small and scared and trying so hard not to show it.
He watched her rise through the shattered window, watched the helicopter swallow her, and then it was his turn.
The cable bit into his ribs as they ascended. The city tilted beneath him, a world turned wrong. From above, the flood was worse. Entire neighborhoods reduced to scattered rooftops. Cars floating like dead insects. Bodies, too. Some moving. Some not.
He looked at the sky instead.
The evacuation center was a school on the eastern edge of the city, one of the few structures the wave had not reached. Its halls were packed with survivors, their faces blank with shock, their voices low and hollow. Soldiers moved through the crowd with clipboards and bottled water, cataloging the living while the dead remained where they had fallen.
Zane found Lily near the gymnasium doors, a foil blanket wrapped around her shoulders, a cup of something warm in her hands. She looked up when he approached, and for a moment neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say that either of them could put into words.
He sat down beside her against the wall. She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, her fingers finding his beneath the blanket.
"Marcus," she said quietly.
He stiffened. "What about Marcus?"
"I haven't seen him."
He told himself not to think about it. Told himself there were thousands of people here, that the school was crowded, that Marcus was probably somewhere in the chaos, looking for them the same way they were looking for him.
But the minutes passed. Then an hour. And the thought grew heavier with every face that wasn't his.
He was on his feet before he realized he had moved.
"Stay here," he said.
Lily grabbed his wrist. "Zane—"
"Stay here."
He left before she could argue.
The hallways were a blur of movement and noise. Names being called. Children crying. Someone shouting for a medic. He pushed through it all, his eyes scanning every face, his chest tightening with every stranger.
He found Marcus near the back of the cafeteria line, sitting on the floor with his back against a vending machine. His arm was wrapped in a makeshift bandage, red seeping through the fabric, but he was awake. He was alive. And when he saw Zane, his face broke into something that was almost a smile.
"Ghost."
Zane stopped in front of him. He wanted to say something, something sharp, something that would hide how relieved he was. But the words wouldn't come.
Marcus laughed weakly. "You look like you saw a ghost."
"I'm going to kill you."
"You survived a tsunami just to threaten me. That's commitment."
Zane sat down beside him. The floor was cold. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
Then Marcus said, "Your sister?"
"She's okay."
"Good." He paused. "Sam?"
Zane shook his head. He hadn't seen Sam. He hadn't seen Noah or Claire or any of the others who had been in the theater when the wave hit.
Marcus nodded slowly. He didn't ask again.
They sat together in the fluorescent silence, two pieces of wreckage that had washed up on the same shore, and waited for the world to tell them who else had made it.