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On instinct, she jerked up the emergency brake and twisted around, reaching out to Emma in the backseat. They grasped hands, as if that would prevent them from falling into the empty space behind the car. The section of the bridge they’d been about to pass over was gone. Inches from her bumper, there was a gaping abyss.
    Chloe stared at Emma and held her breath.
    Then the world stopped shaking. Chloe finally realized they hadn’t been bombed or struck by an airplane.
    “Earthquake,” she gasped. “It was an earthquake.”
    Emma wasn’t screaming anymore. She looked too terrified to cry. Chloe could relate. They might have survived the quake, but they were hardly in the clear. Her compact car was teetering on the edge of a broken section of bridge. She was afraid to move. If she leaned forward to retrieve Emma from her seat, they might plummet to their deaths.
    There was a reason people jumped from this height: the fall was not survivable.
    “You’re okay,” Chloe said to Emma. “Mama’s got you.”
    Emma didn’t know what an earthquake was. Chloe had grown up in San Luis Obispo, a coastal town north of L.A., so she’d felt small tremors before. Nothing like this. Pressure built behind her eyes as she thought of her parents and Josh. Her best friend, Marcy. Emma’s father, Lyle, whom Chloe had wished destruction on a thousand times.
    She hadn’t meant it, apparently.
    Smothering a sob, she glanced around with caution. Most of the bridge was still intact, but the section behind them appeared to have crumbled. She didn’t want to upset the balance inside the car by craning her neck to look over her shoulder. Vehicles that hadn’t careened into the bay were dispersing in the opposite direction. Waves churned beneath the bridge and smoke rose in the distance. She didn’t see any people in her peripheral vision. If someone was getting out of their car and coming to rescue them, she couldn’t tell. Chloe realized that they might be stuck here, frozen in place, for a long time.
    That fear didn’t materialize, however. Something worse did.
    The shaking began anew, swelling like a monster under the water. Violent motion rocked the bridge’s foundations and rattled the VW. Then the slab beneath them dropped in a stomach-curling jolt.
    Chloe let go of Emma and faced forward, horrified. The broken section of bridge tilted at a sharp angle. Now they were perched at the top of a steep ramp, with the nose of the car pointed down. The few remaining vehicles tumbled off the far end. Her passenger side got hung up on the guardrail, but only for a moment. They began a sickening, near-vertical slide. Chloe released the emergency brake in a panicked attempt to avoid a rollover. The VW hurled toward the edge. At the last second, she pulled the emergency brake again and cranked the wheel to the left, desperate to slow their descent.
    It didn’t work. Or, it didn’t stop them.
    After a dizzying 360-degree turn, the car crashed into the opposite guardrail, which was the last remaining obstacle. Then it flipped over the side of the wrecked bridge and sailed into the bay.
    They were only airborne for a second or two. Maybe the slab had fallen most of the distance to the water, or a rogue wave had swelled up to meet them. The details weren’t important. Although she’d studied the laws of physics, she didn’t have the wherewithal to calculate terminal velocity at the moment of death. She closed her eyes and prayed for a painless trip to heaven with Emma.
    Once again, her expectations were thwarted. They landed with a hard splash. Her seat belt yanked tight and she knocked her head against the steering wheel. The impact stunned her, but it didn’t kill her.
    Black spots drifted across the front windshield like virtual checker pieces moving on a game board. She blinked at the fuzzy shapes, disoriented.
    Emma was crying again. Water poured in through the engine, soaking the floorboards. The usually calm bay had transformed into a