Before the clock even reached the halfway point, Daniel completed the final equation. He put down his pen, looked at the jumble of letters and numbers before him. He felt nothing but the familiar boredom of finishing first in a room full of people who were still bent over their papers, chewing pens, and frowning as if everything depended on X and Y. He lowered himself in his window-sill chair, drew the test nearer, and started to sketch at the margin.

  It was just lines at first. His pen moved on its own, turning the idle lines into a tower of metal and stone. As the shape began to take form, he noticed that it resembled the Big Ben somewhat. His mind immediately went to Emily on her school trip, probably craning her neck to look up at the real thing right now. He added a clockface to the drawing, and without thinking he attempted to set the hands at 11:15, but a faint tremor jolted the desk and his pen slipped leaving the minute hand stuck between 11:15 and 11:20. Daniel scowled and looked up, but the room remained completely normal, as through nothing happened at all.

  London was its typical shade of weary grey outside the window. Cars moved slowly along the wet road. A bus groaned at the lights. On the opposite rooftop, a smear of pigeons shifted as if unseen had disturbed them.

  “Five minutes everyone,” Mrs. Patel called out from the front. “Don’t just sit there doing nothing. If you are finished, read through your answers.”

  Daniel tilted his paper and pretended to look through his solutions. Everything was tidy. He had already double checked his solutions. His eyes slid back to the tiny tower at the margin. He thickened the base and added little stick figures around it. Visitors gazing up. A group of children wearing puffy rain coats. One of them wore her hair in two plaits.

  His little sister was probably pushing herself to the front of the group to get a close-up look at the clock tower while taking pictures. She had texted him a dozen times that morning, including pictures of the bus, her breakfast, and a blurry selfie she took with her best friends.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Mrs. Patel drew a breath to say something. The floor punched upward. Desks leaped. Pens and calculators skittered across the desktops, slipped over the edges, and clattered to the floor. Someone yelped. The lights flickered going from bright to dim, then bright once more.

  “What was—” she was cut off by a second hit.

  The entire place shook as though someone had shoved the building. Chairs tipped, metal legs screeching. A boy in the front row slammed his shoulder against the floor after sliding out of his seat. The windows were shaking so violently that Daniel thought the glass would spiderweb and blow in.

  “Under the desks!” Mrs. Patel screamed, her voice breaking. “Now, under the desks, move!”

  Children scurried in all direction at once. Daniel was diving for cover when someone slammed into his arm. A chair fell backward with a crash. Test papers flew spinning like startled flock of birds. There was a long, ugly groaning sound coming from the ceiling that didn’t sound like a building at all, more like something alive and furious pressing down on them.

  The ground buckled once more and Daniel fell hitting his knees on the floor hard. The room swayed and jittered. A shelf rattled at the back, folders sliding off one by one busting open when they hit the floor. The sound of the building’s roar nearly drowned out the loud, hiccupping sobs of a girl near the door.

  Another shock, like the last smack of a hand on a table, came sharp and sudden. Above them, the fluorescent tubes swung erratically, casting jerky shadows across the walls. One of the flickered, buzzed, then cut out, leaving half of the room in dim grey.

  Then everything stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. The shaking cut off like someone had snapped invisible fingers. The floor settled. The walls stopped moving. The ceiling fell silent.

  Someone was still crying. There was a steady stream of profanity coming from someone else. Glistening in the half-dead light, dust hung in the air in a fine haze.

  “Is…is it over?” a voice whispered from beneath a nearby desk.

  Daniel remained silent. His heart was beating so hard it felt like it was trying to punch a hole through his chest and escape. His hands were shaking as they gripped the leg of his desk. His math paper lay crooked on the table; the little clock tower drawing was now slashed through with a jagged pencil line where his hand had jolted.