Aftershock

The first blast erased the city centre. The second left the wreckage hanging in the air. Above a crater split by red light, concrete slabs and severed rails remained suspended while ash drifted between them. Streets had buckled into concentric ridges, forcing open the foundations of factories that had stood for centuries. Beneath those foundations, the pressure was still moving. It travelled through buried tunnels, struck sealed shelters, and returned through the steel skeletons of buildings, each impact tearing another district loose. Emergency crews marked the intervals on a wall until the wall lifted out of the ground. Each track on AFTERSHOCK captures a different fragment of that catastrophe: the warning beneath the pavement, the collision overhead, the brief silence before another structure breaks. Beyond the perimeter, instruments continued recording tremors long after their cables had snapped. Then the suspended wreckage began moving outward again.