CLICK.

  What's worse than being loved by hateful people?

  Tiffani's throaty laugh came through a lull in the music, just as Wally took a long pull on his glass of pop. Something about the Candle trying to light Toad Man's gas. It startled him. The glass shattered in Wally's fist, dousing his face and hands with sugar water.

  "Cripes!"

  He'd have to scrub his face before going to bed, otherwise he'd break out in new rust spots by morning. This time he'd try to remember to clean the bathroom sink afterward. Nobody got mad at Pop Tart for leaving her makeup stuff all over the bathroom, but they sure got sore when he left his used SOS pads on the sink.

  A guy would think they never scrubbed a pot before.

  He'd been a pimply kid before his card had turned. Turns out you can have bad skin even when that skin is living iron.

  Hunger got the better of him. I wonder if they got any of them Rice Krispies bars downstairs? Maybe he could just slip out long enough to fill up a plate.

  K-chank! K-chank! K-chank! K-chank!

  It's hard to tiptoe when you're three hundred fifty pounds and wrapped in inch-thick iron. But Wally was getting better at it, skulking around the Discard Pile.

  Chank. Chank. Chank. Chank.

  A little better.

  Wally paused at the bottom of the stairs for a deep breath before wading into the fray. It's hard to slip through a crowd unnoticed when your elbows can crack ribs.

  "Look at me, I'm big and important!" said Mr. Berman. Jade Blossom, Matryoshka, and a few of the others stood around him, laughing. He waved his arms over his head. "I'm a rich Hollywood weasel! I'm—" Something crunched when Wally tried to sidle past the group. The television executive howled in pain as he dissolved into a pale-faced Andrew Yamauchi. "Aaah! My tail!"

  "What?"

  "My tail! Get off my tail!"

  "Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry." Wally jumped back. Wild Fox swished his tail around and delicately inspected the tip. The last few inches, where the coppery fur blended into smoky gray, had been flattened. It also had a new kink.

  "My tail . . ."

  Wally spun around to get out of there, only to bowl over Spasm, causing him to splash his drink on Pop Tart.

  "Damn it, you stupid tool. I was going to swi—talk wardrobe into letting me keep this top, too."

  He tried to apologize, but he couldn't form the words around a very violent sneezing fit that nearly knocked his eyes out of his head. Wally bashed a hole in the wall as he stumbled blindly away, trailing apologies as he went.

  "Clumsy oaf! Go crush some rocks or something."

  "Did you hear about his audition?"

  "No."

  "Oh, man. It was classic."

  Wally pushed his way toward the kitchen.

  Somebody had made a pan of Rice Krispie bars. Now, how about that? Wally got the last one, too, until Blrr came zipping past and snatched it from his hand. He found some brownies, but Joe Twitch got those, too. They were having some kind of competition, she and him. For crying out loud!

  Most of the good stuff was gone, but he managed to fill a plate. He didn't feel up to braving the crowd again on the way back upstairs. Instead, he slipped into the library. Nobody ever went in there, not even for a party. Wally didn't, either. He wasn't much of a reader.

  Seated in a leather recliner with a paper plate perched on one massive knee, Wally took his first good look at the library. The first thing he noticed was that the books lining the shelves along every wall weren't actually books. They were cheap cardboard facades with the spines of books painted on them. Up close, there was no mistaking them for the real thing. Maybe they looked real on TV.

  He did find one real book, a dictionary at the end of one shelf. Fanning through the yellowed pages released a cloud of dust and the mustiness peculiar to books.

  They didn't do it.

  The entry on Egypt was short. "A country in Northeast Africa, bordering the Mediterranean and Red seas and containing the Nile Delta. Capital: Cairo."

  Not exactly what Wally wanted. Then again, he wasn't sure what he wanted. Thinking about those people in Bugsy's blog felt like an itch he couldn't scratch.

  It was a long time before the party quieted down enough to let a guy sleep.

  He woke around dawn to the loudest sound he'd ever heard. It was like a couple of freight trains, loaded up good and heavy with taconite ore, colliding head-on in the middle of the room. Over and over and over again. It shook the house so badly that he almost tumbled out of bed. Instead, the bed just collapsed underneath him.

  A whump, and then from the floor, Hardhat yelled: "Ouch! God-fucking-damnit!"

  Back home in Minnesota, summer thunderstorms were nothing special. But this was different. First off, thunder was never this loud. Plus, there wasn't any lightning. The house just kept shaking, shaking, shaking. And for another thing, a bad storm came with clouds so thick they turned the sky to ink. But he glimpsed sunrise peeking over the Hollywood Hills as the blinds danced and shuddered over the window. Something dusted his face when he opened his mouth to ask Hardhat about this. He tasted grittiness on his tongue. Plaster, raining down from the ceiling. Boy howdy, was this weird!

  Tornados could be pretty loud. Maybe they were inside one, and the whole house was whirling away like in that scary movie with the flying monkeys?

  "Um," Wally had to shout over the rumbling, "strange weather we're having."

  "Weather? It's a big, motherfucking"—just then it stopped—"earthquake."

  And then it was quiet again, at least compared to the sound of the house shaking apart. New sounds floated through the near silence. Creaking, as the house settled, punctuated with sudden cracks like gunshots. And a little fainter, but still nearby, moans and groans.

  The floor shifted a little bit each time a new gunshot crack ripped through the house. More plaster sifted down, getting in Wally's eyes. He rolled off the mattress and climbed to his feet. The blinds came clattering down in a tangled heap around his feet when he pulled the cord to raise them. The glass in the window was cracked, but it hadn't shattered. Outside, plumes of smoke and dust threaded the hills and canyons, lofted skyward on the beeping of car alarms and the barking of terrified dogs.

  Hardhat joined him at the window. "Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and camel. What a clusterfuck."

  The floor shifted again.

  Hardhat rattled the doorknob. "Door's stuck. Piece of shit."

  Wally tried the door. Yep. It was wedged in the door frame good. "Some folks might wanna stand back." Wally gave the stubborn door a good yank. The doorknob snapped off in his hand, but otherwise the door didn't move.

  Hardhat laughed. "Smooth move."

  Wally stuck two fingers through the hole where the doorknob had been, braced his feet on the floor, and pulled. The door screeched open a few inches, gouging the floor, then cracked in half when it got stuck again. Wally gave up and smashed the two halves of the door into the hallway.

  Apparently they weren't the only ones having trouble. People pounded on doors up and down the hallway. Wally worked one side of the hall, shoving the doors open. Hardhat worked the other side, prying them open with a glowing yellow I beam that he wielded like a crowbar.

  Halfway up the hall they met up with King Cobalt. He seemed to be enjoying himself as he ripped the door frames apart with brute strength. Even tossed out of bed early in the morning, he still wore his Lucha Libre mask. Wally wondered if he ever took it off.

  "I guess we work pretty good together, hey?"

  King Cobalt shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me. I like smashing stuff." His tone suggested that this was the end of the conversation. Maybe he was black underneath that costume, like Stuntman.

  I'm darker than all of them, though.

  One by one, people assembled in the big TV lounge on the first floor. The bamboo floor had buckled and warped, and a couple of thumb-thick cracks in the walls ran from floor to ceiling. The flat screen TV had jumped its mounts on the wall, and was lying facedown on the floor.

  Matryoshka took a head count while two of the camera guys went off to disconnect the gas and turn off the water. He came up short until Earth Witch stumbled through the front door. Wally noticed a pile of bricks strewn across the U-shaped drive. Apparently the chimney had collapsed. And from the trickle of blood on Earth Witch's forehead, she'd been out there when it came down. Sweat streaked her face. People cleared a spot for her on a sofa. When she plopped down, Wally saw dirt on the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands, and crusted under her fingernails.

  Jade Blossom said, "Well?"

  "This quake was strong and very deep," Earth Witch said, "and it caught me by surprise. I was sleeping." She looked around the room. "I couldn't stop it, but I did my best to weaken it. I might be able to damp down the aftershocks a little bit." Earth Witch said this last with her eyes closed, like she was ready to take a nap.

  Just then another gunshot crack echoed through the house, making the walls shake. The cracks in the walls widened a little bit, as more plaster sifted down to the floorboards.

  Wally jumped.

  Bubbles went off in search of bandages and hydrogen peroxide. In addition to Earth Witch, a number of people had bumps, bruises, and cuts.

  The others took stock of the damage. If it hadn't been for the cracks in the walls, it might have been difficult to distinguish between earthquake damage and the aftereffects of a major party. As the Maharajah's servants swept up the sizeable pile of glass where the sliding doors to the patio had stood, Diver went outside to check on the pool.

  She returned a few seconds later. "Well, this sucks. The pool is completely empty."

  Wally and a half-dozen others filed outside to see for themselves. The pool technically wasn't empty, because the gas grill had rolled off the upper deck and crashed into the deep end. But it was empty of water. A wide crack had opened along the bottom of the pool, pulling the tiles apart like a long, snaggletoothed grin.

  "I think the grill is broken," said Wally.

  Another crack echoed up and down the canyon. It sounded louder out here than it had inside.

  "Holy shit." As one, they looked at Hardhat, then followed his gaze overhead to the long, cantilevered deck, then to the wall where it adjoined the mansion.

  And then, also as one, they stepped all the way back to the railing at the canyon edge.

  The immense deck wasn't level any longer. Now it sagged, with the far end tilting down over the canyon. It dropped another inch while they watched. The first and second floors of the mansion were cracking apart. And they didn't line up anymore, either.

  Wally added, "I think the house might be broken, too."

  "No shit?"

  "Maybe we should get everybody out."

  "On it," said Blrr. She disappeared.

  Hardhat peered over the fence, down into the canyon. "Yep, we're boned. Used to be a couple support columns at the end of the deck." He pointed to a pair of jagged concrete buttresses perched on a narrow outcrop on the otherwise sheer canyon wall, about thirty feet below the end of the deck. "Quake ripped those sonsabitches right off." Wally tried to see where they had landed, but the shadows and the tinder-dry brush in the canyon were too deep. Hardhat continued, now speaking with the professional authority of a fourth-generation construction worker. "Now the fuckin' deck is coming down, and that cantilever's prying the house apart like a cheap hooker's gams."

  Wally had no idea what his roommate said. But he got the gist of it: the house was coming down around their ears.

  "What kind of moron would build a house that way?" Pop Tart tossed her arms up, clearly exasperated. "This has got to be the stupidest thing in the world to do in an earthquake zone."

  "Jesus, don't be so goddamn naďve, sweetheart. These old houses get grandfathered in all the time. Grease a few palms and any shithole can—"

  CRACK! This time the deck sagged a full foot in one go. Glass shattered on the second and third floors. A quieter "pop" followed the crack as Pop Tart reappeared briefly on the far side of the canyon. She came back a moment later, after apparently deciding that the building wasn't going to collapse just yet.

  A luminous yellow scaffold blinked into existence, extending from the severed buttresses all the way up to the deck. Hardhat grimaced. "I can't do this all day long, but—OH FUCK—"

  The scaffolding suddenly dropped, like it had fallen through a trapdoor. The deck sagged again. An assortment of yellow beams and crossbeams of various sizes flickered in the canyon for several seconds before stabilizing again.

  "What happened?"

  Hardhat gripped the railing, frowning in concentration. "Pool water caused a mudslide. Now the goddamn buttresses are gone, too. Gotta build this motherfucker all the way up from the bottom of the canyon. It's the only solid ground."

  Wally peered over the fence again. Sure enough, now the ethereal scaffold extended all the way from the road, sixty or seventy feet down.

  Blrr herded the others out of the house. Nobody spoke. They stood on the crowded patio, listened to the wail of sirens echoing across the Hollywood Hills.

  Through gritted teeth, Hardhat said, "I'd appreciate it if you cocksuckers did something besides stand around with your thumbs up your asses all day long."

  "Maybe Ana could help." Holy Roller shook the unstable structure every time he moved.

  "No good," said Earth Witch, leaning on Bubbles for support. "I won't move earth up from the roadbed down below—that would make it impossible for emergency vehicles to get through. If I start moving things inside the canyon, this whole house could end up at the bottom. The pool water has made the foundation unstable."

  "Now you're talking my language," said Gardener, pulling a handful of seeds from a canvas pocket on her belt. She flung them over the fence and down into the canyon. A few fluttered away on the breeze, but in seconds the muddy hillside turned vibrant green, as shoots and vines snaked up the canyon like one of those fast-forward nature documentaries. They burrowed into the soil, too, making little sucking and squelching sounds. The smell of fresh vegetation wafted up on an updraft from the canyon.

  Wally looked up at the deck again. Pebble-size chunks of concrete rained into the pool, making a patter like hail on a tin roof. In some places he could see the steel cantilevers that now imperiled the house.

  Holy cow.

  Still looking up, he said, "Um, would getting rid of the deck help?"

  Silence. He looked down again. Some people rolled their eyes, others shook their heads. "Yes," said Joe Twitch like he was talking to a five-year-old, "the-the-the deck is our p-p-p-problem."

  Cripes. Why did they have to get so sore at a guy just for asking? He knew the deck was the problem.

  What's worse than being hated by some of the biggest weirdos you ever met?

  He tried again. "If we got rid of the deck, would that make things better or worse?" He forged onward. "Because the deck is connected to the house with steel beams."

  More silence.

  "So they got iron in them." Wally held up his hands and wiggled his fingers to make his point.

  Through clenched teeth, Hardhat said, "Son-of-a-fucking-bitch, yes, get rid of the deck!"

  The construction worker's approval galvanized the group into action. It was the work of just a few minutes before they had a plan. Most of the discards went out to the street in front of the house, where they'd be safe if things went wrong. Wally, Hardhat, King Cobalt, Dragon Girl, and Pop Tart stayed behind.

  Wally went back inside the creaking house and came out on the deck. King Cobalt took a position under one end of the deck, with Pop Tart at his side. If things went wrong she'd whisk them both away to safety. Hardhat kept his temporary scaffold in place at the other end of the deck. Dragon Girl and Puffy circled over the house.

  Wally kneeled at the junction between the deck and the house. Wham! Wham! Wham! Using his ironclad fist like a jackhammer, he perforated the concrete every two feet. The noise echoed through the hills. Soon a fine layer of pulverized concrete coated his skin. When he scooped away the rubble he found three I beams inside the deck. Two ran along the sides and one went straight down the middle.

  He took a deep breath. Then, like a blue collar Midas, he touched the central I beam. Steel flashed into oxide under his fingertips. A creeping stain spread out from his handprint, first in little needles of rust, then in an orange wave that coursed through the beam. Chunks of corroded metal flaked away and danced around his hand as the house shuddered. Wally willed the rust deeper until it sundered the beam. Puffs of red dust eddied up around his fingers, sparkling in the sunshine until a gust of Santa Ana wind carried them away.

  "That's one," he called.

  The outer beams were too far apart for him to sever at once. As he weakened the second beam, the deck let loose a high-pitched groan. Then it tipped sideways with much shaking, cracking, and the screeching of tortured metal.

  King Cobalt called out from underneath: "Oof!"

  The last remaining beam was so badly stressed that it tore apart even before Wally could push the rust all the way through. The entire deck dropped several feet to where, presumably, King Cobalt held one end overhead. Wally leapt for the second-floor entrance to the house before the masked strongman hurled the deck into the canyon.

  "Yikes!"

  Wally was in midair, approaching the doorway, when he noticed the cameraman standing there. He'd been too busy concentrating to notice the guy filming him as he worked. The cameraman saw a man-shaped lump of iron speeding at him. He yelped, dropped the camera, and hit the floor. Wally tried his best to tuck and roll to the side. He came to a clanking halt in the hallway after rolling over the camera.

  He helped the guy to his feet. "Cripes, are you okay?"

  The man nodded, but he made little wheezing sounds as he breathed. He looked down at the shattered camera. "Damn. That was some beautiful footage."

  They watched as Hardhat released the scaffold he'd erected with his mind. At the same time, King Cobalt used his prodigious strength to hurl the entire deck out into the midmorning air. Puffy swooped down, caught it in his talons, and gently set it down across the canyon.