Free Lighthouse Island by Paulette Jiles

the bow wobbling on her hat but she went on in a calm stride down a long passageway. A woman ran past with her hat askew, asking. Is there another one?
    You got me, said Nadia, and kept on walking.
    The air in the passageway filled with choking dust but Nadia found a deserted tool room. She went into the room and came upon a glass two-quart bottle of water with the name Joe Fineman written on the koozie. She jammed it in her tote bag.
    Now she was a water thief. Now she was in trouble. There would be no explaining this to a magistrate. She had stolen someone’s water allowance. Death by cactea opuntia .
    She casually walked out the back of the building. Dust still hung thick in the air and a siren sounded and she saw a man lying in a heap of clothing and dust along with a purse, a torn package, scattered among fallen brick. She saw a pair of round eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames and picked them up.
    Emergency workers in orange coveralls came running through the dust scrim and shouted at her to go back but she walked on toward them. The telephone poles were down and electrical wires curled in the rubble. Nadia waved her hand and shouted that she was a property accountant for the Interurban Low-Rise Reconstruction Architectural Committee and that she had to make a quick sketch of the remaining foundations. She had to. That was her job. Did they want to see her ID? She was bluffing about the ID but she said confidently, Don’t try to obstruct me, please.
    The ten-story building had collapsed down on its own footprint in a cascade of bricks and flooring. The buildings on either side were also cracked and swaying, and between them a deep hole and someone crying out in long demented moans.
    Nadia ran to it. A hole had opened up in the building’s foundations. Stuff hung down into it, linoleum and strips of wood and snarled wire. She teetered uneasily on the edge to see that two feet below her, a set of ancient steps marched downward. She sat on the sliding linoleum of the edge and dropped down onto the first step and then the next and the next and disappeared into darkness.
    She ran down the stairs past a man lying to one side of the staircase, head-down on a kind of avalanche of broken tiles, bricks, and lathing. She stopped to gasp for breath and swallow. He was lit as if by a spotlight from the sun lancing down the hole. His lips were a bloody, sparkling crimson. A hard hat fallen from his head lay farther down like something from a decapitation.
    He said, Are you Medisave?
    Yes, she said. How did you get down here?
    I was blown down here, he said. He didn’t move. He seemed to be able to talk perfectly well. He tried to lift a hand. Get a stretcher.
    Is there anybody else farther down? she said. Her voice was not steady and she had to hold tightly to the railing.
    I don’t think so. Go up and get an ambulance for me.
    Okay. She hesitated. You’re sure there’s nobody else down here?
    Not as far as I know. His hand scrabbled in the broken stones and tile, a long slope of wreckage. He said, It went off before they cleared the area.
    What is this hole? What was in here?
    Old entrance to the trains, he said. Go on. Go up, get an ambulance for me.
    I will, she said in a sincere, lying voice, but instead of turning and going back up the shaky staircase she ran on down, into the underground, below the city, descending through archaeological layers one after the other, time reversed, down into the age of the big Urban Wars with its burned soil and brick and occasional unexploded ordnance and then below that the age of cell phones and handheld devices and multiple TV channels and pizza deliveries and then the mysterious caves full of stored food and supplies and finally the squashed layers of LP vinyl recordings and calendars with numbered years. Below that, the train tunnels.
    S he stood powdered with mortar dust and sticky with cooling sweat on a dimly lit platform. The train tracks were a few feet