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The young woman’s braids were coming apart in the midday heat. Wispy pieces of hair were plastered to her forehead with sweat. Her eyes—a lovely brown—looked far, far older than her face.
“I’m very sorry, señorita,” the engineer said, as kindly as he could. As he spoke, she took a breath, as if to interrupt—but her mouth only trembled closed. She was a foreigner, he’d thought earlier. A tourist, overdressed and out of place. Now, he wasn’t sure. Her Spanish was flawless.
And her ancient eyes were fixed to the rubble behind him like she loved it.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing left,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s no one left.”
Her strange gaze flickered to him, but he was an afterthought. Barely visible. Her eyes drifted back to the ruins.
She smiled, still not looking at him.
“You’d be surprised,” she whispered.
——
“I’m not surprised,” Ernesto’s wife told him, from where she was looking out the window. Her palm was pressed to the glass. There was a crack right through the centre. The sun caught in the sharp edges of it, gleaming. The new band around her finger, gleaming. She glanced back at him slyly. “You take me to the nicest places.”
She could still make him blush, even after all these years.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, glancing up at the apartment’s roof. A sprinkle of plaster dust landed on his nose. “Well,” he amended, sneezing. The lease was folded up, heavy, in his shirt pocket. “…It could be worse.” He looked up again, speculatively, at the slowly-spreading splinter creeping out from where the light was attached. “I could fix that,” he decided.
“And the lamp? And the fridge? And the record-player?” Yolanda darted closer, and he caught the smell of her—hairspray and herbal soap. The sharp, glinting light caught in the gleam of her hair. “And the window?” she whispered, a hand finding the collar of his shirt. She smiled as she kissed him, teeth nearly catching the bottom of his own lip. Joyful and clumsy.
“All in good time,” he promised, around the shape of her mouth.
——
“All in good time,” the groundskeeper promised grimly. “It will happen to you all in good time, Señor Kaufman, as it happens to all of us.”
The small sausage dog in Victor Kaufman’s arms yapped sharply, as if in disagreement.
“Be quiet,” he told her gently. In deference to his bags in the other man’s arms, and the many stairs before them, he kept his tone genial. “I’ve never heard of a building giving people nightmares, before.”
“Not nightmares,” the groundskeeper—Victor hadn’t heard his name, and was half-certain it was far too late to ask for it again—grunted. “Not always. Just strange. Last night,” he said, heaving the first of Victor’s two suitcases up the final step to the third floor. “The Angel, sinking into mud. The night before,” the other suitcase came with another grunt, “a house. Splintered, rising from the earth. You’ll have them too, señor. The building dreams.”
The latest Elvis crooned scratchily from the floor above. Bonita whined in his arms. He shushed her again, gently.
“I know you’re young, but we must be good neighbours,” he whispered. “Yes? Yes.” He looked up at the groundskeeper, at the top of the stairs, and was suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve been so kind to help me. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”
The groundskeeper’s cragged face softened at once, surprised. Freed from the grip of his scowl, his eyes were clear. He wasn’t quite as old as he looked, Victor thought. In a certain light—
“My name,” he said, “is—“
——
“—Dolores,” she said, grinning. “But you can call me Lola, if you like.”
The ancient sausage dog at the foot of the stairs squinted up at her suspiciously.
“I haven’t made any friends, yet,” Lola said, offering a hand—to shake, or to sniff. “Maybe you could be my first.”
Her braids were unravelling in the midday heat. Her mother never tied them tight enough. She could hear her calling, from the open door on the fifth floor, but she didn’t want to go inside, yet. The building was cold, even the courtyard. It smelled like something she couldn’t describe. Almost like the air before a storm—but not quite.
The dog limped forward, eyeing her cautiously. A small, wet tongue darted out to lick her knuckles. She smiled.
“Ah,” a gentle voice crooned, from the top of the stairs. “There you are, Bonita.”
An old man in a thin, well-pressed shirt made his way slowly down, knuckles white around the plastered railing. Lola watched his unsteady feet across the tile with mild alarm, but once he stepped to the bottom, he crossed the courtyard with ease.
The dog yapped once—happily, maybe—and hobbled to his shadow, tail wagging.
“Hello, señor,” Lola said, suddenly shy.
“Good afternoon,” he said, smiling down at her. “Is your name Dolores, by any chance?” He glanced up. Then, he glanced back at her, an eyebrow raised. “Your mother,” he told her, “seems to be wondering where you are.”
Lola scuffed her sandal against the tile, tracing the line of a small crack with her eyes.
“We came from Oaxaca,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave. I don’t want to go inside.”
He hummed thoughtfully. “I came here from somewhere else, too,” he said. “Many people do.”
She frowned. “Don’t you miss it? Where you came from, before?”
“Oh, always.” Bonita yapped again, and he crouched down with a painful groan to stroke her shiny head. His boney fingers moved very carefully. “But I’ll tell you something, Dolores.” He looked up at her, smiling. His eyes crinkled. “You’ve come somewhere very special. This building dreams, you see.”
“It’s cold,” Lola said. “It’s sad.”
“It’s lonely.”
“Buildings can’t be lonely.”
“This one can.”
“It looks like it will break apart,” Lola said, nose wrinkling in disgust. The toe of her sandal caught in the cracked tile.
The old man placed a finger to the side of his nose, like he was telling her a secret.
“I think,” he told her, still smiling, “it looks like it’s trying to hold itself together.”
Lola glanced up, into the tiled roof above her. The plastered walls were stained and old. Fault lines ran up from the ground like tall grass. The sun beat down on the top of her head, but this close to the stairwell, her arms were raised with goosebumps.
“Maybe,” she said.
——
“Maybe,” Pedro said skeptically, looking up at the building. The smell of fresh paint was overwhelming. It didn’t quite cover the cracks near the foundation. The earthquake—which had nearly brought Pedro’s tin roof down on top of him, not to mention half the buildings in the city—had left reaching shapes, shattered tiles. From this angle, it almost looked half-swallowed. Sinking slowly into the ground. It would never hold.
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well,” the foreman said, sniffing. “You’re ten. What could you possibly know?”
“Well, I painted it, didn’t I?”
“The parts you could reach.” The foreman scruffed a hand through Pedro’s hair. “You did alright,” he conceded.
“I think I did better than alright.”
“You earned your wage, and no more,” the foreman said wryly. “If that’s what you’re implying.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure why they keep repainting this one. It’s not worth it. It’s empty, half the time.”
Pedro frowned. “Why?”
The foreman scruffed his hair again.
“Because,” he said. “It’s haunted.”
——
“It’s not haunted,” Ernesto insisted.
Yolanda rounded on him. “I’m not crazy,” she said.
“You’re not crazy,” he agreed quickly. “But it’s not haunted.”
She swiped her grandmother’s rosary from his fingers with a scowl. He caught the scent of her—hairspray and herbal soap—and something sharper. The air before a storm. Engine oil. The smell of dirt after rain.
“If you’re not praying, you’re not helping,” she said dismissively, sweeping into the kitchen. The strange, phantom smell of her trailed behind. “I’m calling my brother.”
“We don’t need a priest,” he called after her, fruitlessly. “We just need—we just need—“
Across the room, the record-player clicked on. Helpfully. As if to fill the sudden, awkward silence. Elvis began to croon, softly.
Ernesto swallowed. The ceiling creaked. More plaster dust sprinkled on his nose.
“—a doctor,” he said, muffling a sneeze.
——
“—a doctor,” Victor said, but Pedro shook his head, eyebrows descending into a comfortable scowl.
“No, no.” He batted a hand, emphatically. Bonita whined at his feet. “No.”
“You can’t stay in this chair forever,” Victor said gently.
“I’ll die in this chair, if it suits me.”
“You’re being contrary.”
“You’re being a fool.”
“You can’t stay in this place,” Victor whispered, “forever.” He swallowed. “I can’t take care of you. I want to. I want to, but I can’t. My hands shake. I wish I could carry you, but I can’t. I can’t carry you.”
“I’ll die in this place,” Pedro told him, gently. “If it suits me.” He leaned back in his armchair, so he could smell the rain better. The window was open. The woman above them, the one who had just moved in, was yelling for her daughter again. “It suits me,” he said.
Victor covered his eyes with his hands and sunk into the chair across from him. There were two chairs, against the window. Two plates, in the kitchen, and two cups, in the bathroom, and still—two suitcases. Gathering dust in the corner, where Pedro had set them down thirteen years ago.
“Maybe the earth will shake,” Victor said. “Maybe the earth will shake, and she’ll come. Maybe the earth will shake, and she’ll come, and she’ll talk some sense into you.”
“The earth won’t shake,” Pedro said quietly. He smiled. “No dreams, last night. She’s asleep.”
“The crack, in the tile, in the bathroom—“
“It’s the same.”
“I think it grew.”
“No. It’s the same, this week.”
Victor glanced away, to the open window, to the warm lights refracted through the streak of raindrops.
“It’s the same, this week,” he admitted.
“She’s asleep.”
“Yes,” Victor said softly. Bonita whined, at his feet. He picked her up with a groan, and placed her gently on his lap. “…she’s asleep.”
——
“Don’t wake her up,” Yolanda hissed, swatting at him with the baby blanket.
“I’m not—“ Ernesto protested.
She shushed him, violently. They both froze, waiting—but beneath them, in the crib he’d bought second-hand and painstakingly restored, Isabel only yawned and rolled away from them, dismissively.
The line of Yolanda’s shoulders relaxed. She sighed.
“Our baby has a level head,” she said, a little wistfully. “She’ll be alright, won’t she?”
He kissed the crown of Yolanda’s head. “Of course,” he said. “We’ll all be alright. We’ve got each other.”
“And the King.”
“And the King.”
“And the ghost.”
“And the ghost,” he said, having long given up.
“And you’ll fix the ceiling in Isabel’s room.”
“I will fix the ceiling in Isabel’s room,” he promised. “I—“
He looked up, eyes tracing the reaching line of the fracture in the ceiling. The fan and the light, he realised, were swaying. The back of his neck prickled with unease.
“Well, that’s alright, then,” Yolanda told him, tucking her head into the crook of his neck. She swayed along with the song trickling in from the sitting room. Isabel needed music to sleep, Yolanda maintained. Ernesto didn’t mind. Far be it from him to turn off the King. Her arms around him, Yolanda swayed—
—and the light above him swung—
—and the floor beneath him buckled—
—and the crib slid towards him, like it was on the deck of a ship in a storm—
—and the ceiling cracked—
And someone was screaming.
It might have been him.
——
The tēlpochcalli was shaking, and Tlacaelel had never been more afraid in his life. He was meant to be braver than this, he knew. Braver than the younger boys, braver than his siblings. Brave enough to do the job he was meant for, with honour, and with piety.
Instead, he was cowering behind a rock, too afraid to move.
But the earth itself was trembling, and a scream had filled the air, and the ground had split to his right with an angry, pulsing crack—
And as he watched, a woman dragged herself from the fissure, pale hands scrabbling at the damp earth. Her coat was the same colour as the sky. Her hair was maize-yellow, streaked through with dirt. She shimmered like the horizon on a very hot day. Her strange eyes fixed to him desperately, from where she clung to the earth.
“ Otiquihiyohuih,” she gasped.
“I think I should be saying that to you.” Tlacaelel frowned. “Are you a god?”
“Oh,” she moaned, squeezing her eyes shut. “I hope not.”
——
Victor hadn’t believed him, at first. Buildings, after all, couldn’t dream. And even if they could, he’d often thought, what would they possibly dream about? Bricks and sawdust and people’s voices. Footsteps and singing and rain.
This building, Pedro had told him, dreamed about the past. Feathers and blood and floods. The future, sometimes. Red skies and smoke and the drone of machines. And stranger things, too. Splintered houses and seas of sand and oceans of stars.
“It puts words in my head, sometimes,” Pedro had said, gnarled hands wrapped around his favourite mop. “Mathematical equations. I barely learned to count, you know.” He’d smiled—a rare thing, a lovely thing. “If you stay,” he’d said. He’d paused, then. “If you stay,” like a strange sort of promise, “then you’ll hear it, too. It will be a friend to you, as well.”
This morning, Victor had woken with a word in his head. It was an old word, he thought. It wasn’t a word he was familiar with. It was a word that predated him and outlived him, all at once.
Bonita tugged at her leash. He’d stopped to stare at one of the fissures in the outermost wall of the courtyard. It reached up like long grass to the roof. It was, he thought, just a little bit bigger than it had been yesterday.
And the word in his head, he knew instinctively, was a greeting.
“ Otiquihiyohuih,” he said.
The smell of apple-grass filled his nose, thought he wouldn’t have recognized it as such.
——
The smell of apple-grass filled her nose. Lola smiled, and flipped the egg frying prettily in the cast-iron pan that had been her mother’s.
“You’re just in time,” she said, as the apple-grass turned to ozone. The floor trembled, just slightly. Lola breathed through her nose and closed her eyes until it passed. Small tremors. The earth, settling. She was safe.
Her eyes caught on the thin fracture, above the stove. She was safe.
The egg spat and sizzled. The smell of it mingled with ozone, fading to engine oil, fading to dirt after rain. There was a word for that, too. Sometimes, she woke with it nestled gently in her mind. Mostly, she didn’t remember it.
She turned the egg out onto a perfectly browned piece of toast, and picked up the plate with her free hand. When she turned, the sun was shining prettily through the window, creating shapes on her guest’s cornflower coat, where she was slumped against it in a kitchen chair.
“Dolores,” the Doctor said, smiling.
“Doctor,” Lola said. “You’ve dropped in again. Coffee?”
She handed her the plate. As always, her skin shimmered like a mirage. Sometimes, she was solid enough. Today, she was solid enough. The tremors, Lola thought. Sometimes, when the earth shook, it shook her loose. Sometimes, it shook her loose enough to eat a sandwich, or drink some coffee, or hold a baby.
Mostly, it didn’t.
“You knew I was coming,” the Doctor marvelled.
“I dreamed I was drowning,” Lola said, pouring the coffee. “Next door, Leticia’s daughter made a paper airplane so aerodynamic that I think it’s still flying. Juan Carlos composed a symphony, last night.” She glanced at the Doctor, over her coffee cup. “He’s never touched an instrument in his life.”
The Doctor grimaced, a bit guiltily.
“And there’s a word,” Lola said. “In my mind.”
Two words. Three, maybe.
“It’s alright,” the Doctor said. “Say it.”
“Groundwater-related…subsidence,” she wrenched out.
“Ah,” the Doctor said. Her face fell. “That’s the one.”
——
“Groundwater-related subsidence?”
“The city is sinking.”
“Or maybe,” Victor said, peering down at the buckled tiles in the middle of the courtyard, “it’s that the ground is rising up around it.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Pedro.
“Sinking, you say.”
“Sinking. It was a lake, once, you know.”
“Once a lake,” Victor said. “Always a lake.”
Pedro smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, exactly.”
——
“Exactly,” Ernesto heard, as he blinked himself awake. The world was tilted. He was in a shoebox at an angle, and there was plaster dust coating his face, and there was sun shining in through the shattered window, and there was a stranger holding his baby.
“And quite right, too,” the stranger was telling Isabel, who grasped at the stranger’s maize-yellow hair with reaching fingers. She shimmered and shook like a dream. She spoke, incongruously, with a continental lisp. “I agree completely. They’re doing their best, though. You just have to be patient. They’ll get the hang of it.”
Elvis still sung sweetly, from the sitting room. Ernesto thought of the record-player, helpfully turning on with a click, when they needed it. He thought of the strange smell of his wife, the warm shape of her safe underneath him. He thought of Isabel, always so content. Safe, in the arms of a ghost.
“It’s you,” he breathed.
The woman’s face was blurry and hard to see. Still, he thought. It was a little sad. Maybe that was only right, for ghosts.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me.”
——
“I thought it might be you,” Pedro said quietly. The sun was setting, in the window behind him. Victor was asleep in the other chair, Bonita resting at his feet. She snored, with every suspicious breath. A ghostly, shimmering hand reached down to scratch behind her ears.
“Yes,” the Doctor said. She glanced at him, with a face like television static and rippling water. Still, he thought. She always looked a little sad. Maybe that was only right, for ghosts.
“It’s a beautiful night,” Pedro said. “It’s a beautiful view, here. I’ve always thought that.”
“The Mexica built their structures and temples to align with the sunsets and sunrises,” the Doctor said contemplatively. “The movement of the stars and planets, too.”
“Did they?”
“Well. So I’ve heard, anyway. Clever, isn’t it?”
“Doctor,” Pedro said. “You only come visit when the earth shakes.”
Bonita snored, and Victor shifted in his chair. He didn’t wake. Pedro was glad.
“Not all tremors are visible,” the Doctor whispered. She was, he thought, shaking and shimmering with effort. There would be no earthquake, tonight. No cracks in the ground to throw her loose. She had strained herself out of every tiny fracture, every reaching line in the wall, to say goodbye.
“Otiquihiyohuih,” Pedro said, and she smiled, through television static and rippling water. You have expended breath. You have travelled very far. You have endured it.
“Is it time?” he asked.
“It comes for us all,” she said.
“Doctor,” he said, looking away from her to fix his eyes on Victor. “Will you give me a beautiful dream?”
She faded from his peripheral vision, like a strange, blue mirage.
“Yes,” she promised, her voice echoing from every fracture, every line. “Yes, of course.”
Pedro smiled, and closed his eyes.
——
Lola opened her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, with a sigh. “It’s you.”
“3.1 on the Richter scale, overnight,” the Doctor said, from where she was laying on Lola’s bed, hanging upside down over the side. Sunlight streamed through Lola’s curtains, caught speckled blue on her corn-coloured hair. “Not bad. No one hurt. Don’t park in any covered car parks this week, though. Have we talked about the groundwater-related subsidence, yet?”
Lola pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers, hoping it would ward off the Elvis leaking through. The hot smell of blood and the rush of floodwater. The sound of guns and the flutter of hummingbird wings and the vertigo, always pressing at the back of her head.
“I wish you would go somewhere else,” she said. “I have homework to do.”
“Can’t.”
“Have you tried?”
“Oh, Dolores,” she moaned, hair nearly touching Lola’s rug. “Do you ever go in to fix a problem,” she sighed, “and realize you may have actually created it in the first place?”
Lola frowned at her. “No.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Well. You don’t have to go on about it.”
“I knew you were coming,” Lola said, ignoring her. “I dreamed of a sea of sand, and a broken city.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was sad, and I was dizzy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why can’t you go somewhere else?”
“I can go everywhere else,” she said. “In time, at least. Only I seem to have got myself a bit stuck in space. Know your geology? I was rubbish,” she said, stumbling to her feet, shimmering like static. “Only we didn’t have geology, exactly, which explains why I was rubbish.”
“Geology is rocks,” Lola said.
“No,” said the Doctor. “Geology is time. There’s a bit of a rip, right here. In this spot, where your apartment’s built. A fissure, through time and space. Thought it might have been anomalous,” she breathed. “Y’know. Bad. Thought maybe it was because someone had been doing things they shouldn’t have. Turns out,” she hunched over, knuckles whitening over the tops of her thighs, “it’s perfectly normal, and I’ve basically done the equivalent of walking into a volcano…or a glacier crevasse. With no rope.” She sunk to her knees, wheezing. “And no way out. Which, to be fair, humans do all the time…to their detriment.”
Lola frowned. “Normal?”
“I say normal,” she wheezed. “Not normal, exactly. Natural, the way an earthquake is natural. Dangerous,” she breathed. “And sad. And a little scary. It’s not just me, haunting your house. Time is leaking through the fissure. The future and the past, trying to meet. Every time the earth cracks, the fissure widens. Can’t separate them, see,” she said, swallowing. “Time, space. One and the same. Sort of. There’s this bloke called Einstein, he’ll—“ She squinted. “What year is it, again?”
Lola frowned deeper. “Are you okay?”
“Dolores, what’s the year?”
“You are the worst imaginary friend ever,” Lola said. “Even my mother doesn’t call me Dolores.” She sighed. “…1992.”
“Thank you.” She pulled something out of her pocket—a small metal tube that hummed and shook and shimmered as much as she did. She sighed, still hunched over, like she was trying to keep herself from floating away. “Still not calibrated,” she muttered. Then, she groaned. “Dolores,” she said, trembling. “I have to go.”
“Good,” Lola said, turning back to her work. “I’m busy.”
——
“I’m busy,” Tía Isabel said. “Come back later, little Dolores.”
“I’m not little,” Lola said. “Can I help?”
Tía Isabel was old and tall and very beautiful. Lola’s mother didn’t like her, maybe for those reasons, though she claimed it was because she was touched in the head.
“Stand there,” Tía Isabel said. She took Lola by the shoulders and placed her against the wall of the courtyard. As always, it was cold against her skin. “How old are you, little Dolores?”
“Ten,” Lola said.
“Not so little, then. My mistake.” Tía Isabel marked her height with a stubby, chewed-up pencil, her long, dark hair shining in the sunlight. “There.”
She wrote the date beside the mark. 1985, in a small, elegant script. It intersected with one of the fractures reaching up from the ground.
“There was an earthquake, the week I was born. These cracks started then. They’ll grow with you, now,” Tía Isabel said.
Lola frowned. “Isn’t that bad?”
“It’s just the past leaking through,” Tía Isabel said, tracing the line gently with her finger. “It’s what you get, when you build cities on top of cities.”
Lola stepped away from the wall.
“There was a city here, before?”
“A beautiful city,” Tía Isabel said. “And a lake. And before that,” she smiled, “who knows?”
——
In a valley that was not yet a basin—and indeed not much of anything, just yet—the ground shook and trembled and shuddered. At the centre, in the tall grasses, reaching up towards the sky, a blue, static, shimmering shape gasped and cringed in the prehistoric light. Her corn-coloured hair caught the sun, but there was nothing there to see it.
“If I get eaten by a dinosaur,” the Doctor sighed, “I am gonna be so cross.”
——
The window panes shuddered. In the kitchen, a cup rolled off the counter and shattered. In the quiet, evening sunlight, Bonita raised her head and yapped, once. Ozone lingered under Victor’s nose.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a solemn blue shape in the chair across from him.
“Doctor,” he breathed.
“2.9,” she said quietly. “I can’t stay long.”
“Why stay here at all?” he wondered. “You must get bored of us.” He smiled. “We must come and go like mayflies. You could watch calderas form and flood and break apart. You could watch glaciers melt. You could watch this valley being carved out, inch by inch. You could watch it happen, forever.”
“I could,” she said. “Sounds lonely, though.”
The sun disappeared slowly behind the buildings in the distance. The Doctor disappeared slowly, too, until the blue glow had faded. The smell of ozone lingered for just a little while longer, like a friend at the door.
“Yes,” Victor said, eventually. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
——
“Am I?”
“Maybe,” Lola said. “About the groundwater-related subsidence, I mean. No one takes care of this place, anymore.”
“You take care of it,” the Doctor said, flickering like a candle about to go out.
Lola smiled. “I’m getting old,” she said. “This place will collapse on top of me, before they fix it. I used to dream of that happening, you know. I was never sure if it was the future, or the past.”
“Sometimes, a dream is just a dream.”
“Not in this place.”
“Maybe not,” the Doctor whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“You know what I realised,” Lola said, as the sun rose through the window. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked nervously. Elvis crooned in her ear, like a phantom. “You only appear,” she breathed, “when something bad is going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said again.
“Do you come before, or after?” she wondered. She smelled hot blood under her nose, and ozone, and dirt after rain. “Are you the cause, or the result?”
“I don’t think it’s quite so linear,” the Doctor said. And the window shattered—
—and the light above her swung—
—and she heard the beat of a hummingbird’s wings—
—and the floor beneath her buckled—
—and the city beneath her rose up and the city above her sank down—
—and the ceiling cracked—
And the Doctor tackled her to the floor and dragged them both under the table.
“Don’t worry, Dolores,” she said, curling around her, buzzing static hands protecting her head, the ozone smell of her overwhelming as the ceiling crumbled, as the building collapsed, as the earth remembered that it had once been a lake. “Don’t worry.”
But a fluttering panic had taken hold of Lola’s heart.
“What will happen to you?” she demanded, beneath the roar of everything disintegrating, the carnal screech of metal and plaster coming apart, the strange, familiar heartbeat that she sometimes mistook for her own. “When this place is gone, where will you go?”
“Don’t worry,” the Doctor said again, the most solid she had ever been. Shaken loose, by the cracks in the earth. Shaken free? Lola wondered. She had some power, she thought, to choose where she went, or at least when. “Like I said,” she gasped, as she began to fade again. “It’s not so linear.”
She touched a gentle finger to Lola’s nose, like she might a child.
“Can’t wait to meet you,” she grinned.
——
There was a blue stranger in the kitchen, and a new crack in the ceiling, and Lola’s mother was nowhere to be found.
The ground trembled.
“ Otiquihiyohuih,” the stranger said.
Lola stared at her. “But you’re the one that’s travelled,” she said.
“Never mind that,” the stranger said. She shimmered like a mirage. She pulled the tablecloth off, without disturbing any of the plates, and ducked under the kitchen table. She patted the ground beside her. “Come on,” she said. “Come sit. Not much time, Delores.”
Lola frowned. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m called the Doctor. Knowing things is sort of my job. Well, only I’m not always very good at it. Case in point.”
The floor shook again, and some of the plates in the kitchen cupboards rattled alarmingly. Lola nearly dropped the colouring book in her hands.
“Best get a shift on,” the Doctor said, and patted the floor beside her again. “Big earthquake. Probably the worst one you’ll ever see. But you’ll be very safe, if you come sit here with me.”
Something in her voice was very hard to argue with. The walls shook, and Lola scrambled underneath, into the stranger’s arms. She smelled like the air before a storm.
“Señor Kaufman said the building dreams,” Lola said. “Does it dream because of you?”
“I think it might dream because of you,” the Doctor said. “All of you.”
“Tía Isabel says it’s haunted,” Lola said. “Is it haunted because of you?”
The Doctor smiled, through static and strange ripples.
“I’m not a ghost,” she said. “I’m just a visitor. I’ll explain later. Well, I have explained later, already.”
Lola stared at her. “You’re pretty weird,” she said.
The Doctor smiled. “Well,” she said, but before she could say anything, the window shattered—
—and the light above them swung—
—and she heard the beat of a hummingbird’s wings—
—and the floor beneath them buckled—
—and the city beneath them rose up and the city above them sank down—
—and the ceiling cracked—
“Don’t worry, Dolores,” the Doctor said, as the ground shook and the sky roared. She’d covered Lola with her body, curled around her, thrown the tablecloth over them both like a blanket. “It won’t last.”
“It won’t end,” Lola said. “It won’t end until the earth takes the city back,” she sobbed.
The Doctor’s cold, staticky fingers brushed the hair out of her face.
“The truth is,” she said quietly, somehow perfectly audible under the scream of sirens and rushing water and the painful wrench of the ground, “the earth will always be trying to take the city back.” Her nose wrinkled. “Groundwater-related subsidence,” she said, critically. “Drain a lake, and spend the rest of eternity trying to keep the lake out,” she muttered. “Suck out the water underneath you, until you start sinking into the mud. If you learn anything from this, Dolores, I want you to remember: once a lake,” she breathed, very seriously, “always a lake.”
“So it’s our fault,” Dolores said. “It’s our fault that it’s always breaking. It’s our fault that it’s sinking.”
“No,” the Doctor said. “Not yours. Not yours at all. Something terrible happened here, a long time ago, because of some terrible people, and this is what’s left. That’s what bubbles up,” she breathed, “when the earth cracks. Terrible things,” she said, “and beautiful things, too.”
Everything went very still. In the new, uneasy silence, something beeped and whistled, in the pocket of the Doctor’s coat.
She grinned.
“Dolores,” she breathed, hand diving into her pocket. “Dolores!” She scrambled out from under the table, throwing the tablecloth off, throwing the world back into sharp, glinting light. On her way, she tore a page from Lola’s colouring book.
Lola followed her out, cautiously, and watched as she scribbled something hasty and barely legible with a magenta crayon. She handed the scrap to her like it was the most precious thing in the world.
“Need you to take care of something for me,” she said with a smile, shimmering and shaking like an aftershock, though the ground was perfectly still. “Need you to look after this for a long, long time. And then,” she hunched over with a gasp, knuckles whitening into fists, “I need you to give it to someone. A friend of mine.”
“When?”
“You’ll know when.”
“How will I know who your friend is?”
She smiled again. She touched a finger lightly to the side of Lola’s nose.
“You’ll know,” she whispered, fading. “She has the most beautiful eyes. Just like yours.”
Lola stared at her. “Will I see you again?”
“Dolores,” the Doctor said, gently. “We’ve only just met.”
——
The engineer led her gingerly through the wreckage.
“I did tell you,” he said, apologetically. He offered her a hand, as they stepped carefully over turned up tile and plaster rubble. “It was destroyed completely.”
A taller man approached from across the courtyard.
“He’s not wrong,” he said.
“I’m not giving up,” the woman said, very firmly. Her strange gaze softened, as she took in the ruined courtyard. “You said no one was left.”
“No where left to live,” the engineer said. “No one left, here.”
“But was anyone hurt?” she wondered.
“That’s just it,” the engineer said. “Not a single resident. Isn’t that strange?”
The woman smiled. “Lucky,” she said.
She paused by a stretch of wall, which was barely more than rubble. A crack reached up from the ground, like tall grass. Faint pencil marks tracked its progress. Sometimes, a name was scribbled beside, and a date.
“Dolores,” the woman read.
“Yes?”
They turned. A middle-aged woman stared back at them, curiously. Her hair was long and black. Her eyes were dark and beautiful. She smiled, relieved.
“Here,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her shirt. “I have something for you.”
——
They found her exactly where the note had said. One-hundred-thousand years before, and then some. Before the basin, but not quite before the valley. She’d dragged herself to the southern shore of the southernmost lake and stopped, cheek pressed to the ground, boots in the water.
“And what sort of time,” she demanded scratchily, as Yaz and Dan approached, “do you call this?”
“Practically geological,” Yaz said, displeased. She reached down into the clay with a squelch and grasped her at the elbow. “‘Don’t worry, Yaz’, you said. ‘Just need to take a look inside the anomaly. Won’t be a mo’.”
“To be fair, she wasn’t a moment,” Dan said, taking her by the other elbow. “She was several thousand years of them.”
“Oi,” she complained. “I sorted it, didn’t I? Eventually. In the end. Or in the beginning, maybe. After I accidentally made it worse. Wasn’t a strictly linear experience, I will admit.”
“Doctor,” Yaz said, hands warm around her elbow. Her braids had unravelled in the heat. Wispy pieces of hair were plastered to her forehead with sweat. Her eyes—the most beautiful eyes in the world—looked far, far older than her face.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said quietly.
Yaz stared at her, for a long moment. As long as a breath, as short as an era.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Where to, next?”
The Doctor smiled.
“Actually,” she said. “One more stop.”
——
This new building didn’t dream. Still, Lola thought, as she straightened her tablecloth. She replaced the picture of her mother in the middle. The small figurine of a nervous-looking sausage dog. The cornflowers in a vase—a gift from Tía Isabel, ancient now, and sharp as ever—blue against the calm white of the walls. Already, they were cracked. The city would always be sinking. The past would always be spilling from the fissures. Last night, she’d dreamt of a flood, and woken with an old, familiar word in her mouth.
The smell of ozone filled her nose. Behind her, she heard a wheezing groan, like an old man waking from a nap.
She turned.
“ Otiquihiyohuih,” Lola said.
“Oh,” the Doctor said, grinning. “You have no idea.”