When the explosion happened:
Joffrey was in the elevator, singing loudly to himself. He was thrown to the back of the car by the force of the detonation; the lights went out. A red bulb flashed on, bathing the elevator in a stark light as the elevator’s climb became stuttered and uncertain, powered by some unseen generator.
Desdemona Mudrak was standing by the desk on the top floor of the tower, picking at her cuticles and watching Roger as he casually read the titles of the book spines on the shelves and tried to intuit which one was the hidden lever to open the case. The explosion made a ripple-like tremor, decreasing in strength as it made its way up the massive structure of Titan Tower, until it reached the top floor and merely rattled the trophies in their cases and caused Desdemona and Roger to look at each other in a confused silence.
Martha and Carol were in the safe room behind the bookcase, absently munching on pretzels and preparing to dig into the final chapter of Dumas’s jailbreaking masterpiece. The sound of the explosion caused Martha to drop the book.
Wigman had just stepped into the ground-floor lobby of the tower, having just removed an obstinate strand of lint from his otherwise pristine and pleated khakis. He was surprised to find the lobby empty; even the night secretary was missing from his station behind the desk. Wigman was about to say something when the secretary appeared, holding a plastic bottle of water. They both looked very surprised to see each other and equally surprised to see no one else. The explosion’s epicenter was some yards off, just beyond the gate of the guarding wall, but its power was enough to completely shatter the tall plate-glass windows that surrounded the ground floor and throw the furniture, which had been purchased cheap at a liquidator’s warehouse, into the air like beanbag chairs freed of gravity.
Rachel Mehlberg was huddled behind the cover of a stack of pallets with a cohort of fellow saboteurs, holding an unlit bomb in her hand. The explosion sounded, echoing off the cement walls and chemical silos that surrounded the tower, and splashing the dark nighttime scene with bright yellow light and a very sudden and intense heat. She could feel the shock wave rumble her lungs and she nearly fell backward, balanced as she was on the balls of her feet in a crouched position. Someone caught her; it was Nico. He was smiling. “Now,” he said. He lit a match and held it to the fuse of Rachel’s bomb. She let out a loud, prehistoric “WHOOP” and threw it as far as she could.
Elsie Mehlberg was crouched in a square, anodized aluminum duct, barely three feet across, at the front of her fellow Unadoptables-turned-saboteurs: the duct-rats. They’d been waiting for the little blinking red light above the latticed gate that blocked their way to turn green, at which point, they were told, they could safely open it without incurring a shock that would turn them, instantly, to small fuzzy piles of ash. This was a fate that none of them were interested in experiencing. When the green light came on, it was Elsie’s job, being the first in line, to reach out gingerly and undo the latch. It opened with a yawning creak, happily absent of any kind of electric flash, and she began shuffling on her hands and feet down the squat corridor toward the white light in the distance. When the explosion came, it shuddered the building and a very loud noise echoed up the metal vent, causing all the children to duck their heads. The light in the distance blinked out, only to be replaced by a strange red one. Elsie continued forward.
Michael and Cynthia had just returned to the Forgotten Place, to their warehouse home. They’d come back to resume leadership over their fellow Unadoptables as the eldest of the clan; they’d arrived with fresh blankets and fresh food and a promise that their two missing members would soon be rescued. Just as they’d announced this, the high, cracked windows of the warehouse were suddenly illuminated with a glowing light and the children oooooohed their appreciation, knowing that the great operation had begun.
Prue McKeel was on a ship, a prisoner in a belowdecks hold, staring out a barred porthole. The explosion sounded like a distant thud; she saw a flash light up the night, outlining in white the monolithic shape of a tall tower. More explosions followed; many of them, in fact, but a mist had settled over the river basin and she could no longer see the outline of the tower, and the ship’s wooden hull groaned as it began to move its way out of the inlet and onto the surface of the river, safely concealed from prying eyes by the presence of the all-consuming mist.
The Earth was revolving, orbiting a distant sun, one of a series of planetary chunks of rock and magma spinning in the vastness of space.