A Wednesday. There is not a lot happening so far that was different the day before. There is a high of seventy-six degrees and a low of fifty-five. Later on, there will be a cold front running through. It is August; everyone would love a cold front. The air is clear and about as clean as it can get, as it has been for the past three months, with a nice orange rating. Drone presence is high, tiny eyebots constellating the skyline as they zip from one end of the city to the other. Then, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, an earthquake will rip a canyon through the earth of the old city of St. Louis. Before that, though, parents in the suburbs—which are past the tall, reinforced barriers that line the border of the St. Louis slum of Junktown—drive their children to school. They kiss their kids goodbye or they don't. There are good parents, bad parents, and you have known both kinds. Maybe if the bad parents knew what was going to happen with the quake, they would kiss their children goodbye.
