The floor held through two more breaths.
On the third, the exhibition square stopped being a floor.
The gridded slab Soren was standing on split down its center seam with a crack that killed the band mid-bar, and the two halves folded downward into a dark that had no business being that deep under a reception hall.
Soren was already off the square.
He'd stepped back on the second breath because a man who counts learns to move on the count, not the event.
The nearest guests hadn't counted anything.
The screaming started the way it always starts, one voice, then the room.
◆◆◆◆
"Doors," Soren said, and the word went down the wire and through the hall at the same time.
Joan had the west doors open before the second scream.
Dani killed the hall lights over the exits and doubled them over the doorframes, and three hundred people did what light told them to do, which was run toward it.
