As the sound of the explosion faded into ringing silence, the only sound Josh could hear was the sound of his own heart beating in his chest.
*thump*
Time ran at half speed. He felt as though he were moving in a jar of honey.
*thump*
Vickie stood with her arms still outstretched as if holding back a tidal wave. Her eyes were unfocused. Josh tried to reach out to her through the Force, but it was as if she wasn't there.
*thump*
"Are you okay?" he heard Becki ask.
The word "Perfect" barely escaped Vickie's lips before she slumped to the floor.
*thump*
Josh leapt across the hallway to Vickie's side and again tried to reach out to her, but she felt no different in the Force than Becki or Mike. Changing tactics, he tried to push her into a healing trance. It didn't take.
*thump*
The sound of a single pair of feet running up the stairs echoed in the hallway for just a few seconds before Josh Nolan appeared. "Are you guys all right?" he asked, sounding a thousand miles away.
*thump*
Time snapped suddenly back to its normal speed. "Josh!" he called out to Crispy. He glanced down at Vickie for just a second before exploding into motion. "Josh, I need you to go downstairs and keep the cops out of here for a few minutes!" He glanced at Mike, kneeling over Vickie with a nearly pained expression on his face. "Mike, get Vickie back to the apartment. I tried to put her in a healing trance, but it's not working. Becki and I are going back in there."
"We're what?" Becki protested.
*thump*
Why was Crispy still here? "Josh, move!" he yelled at Crispy's back as the Aussie pocketed his disguise and smeared ashes over himself. Crispy said something in response, but Cochran was already turning back to Becki.
*thump*
He grabbed Becki's hand and pulled her towards the door of the ruined apartment, while Mike gathered Vickie up in his arms and headed for the stairs. In the distance he could hear the first sound of a police siren.
*thump*
He pulled Becki past Crispy as they reentered the apartment. "I'm set," Crispy informed him as they passed. "Good luck. I may be a while."
"Yeah, you too," he muttered in reply.
*thump*
The air in the apartment was thick with drifting debris and acrid, metallic odor, but surprisingly there was no smoke. A fire hadn't started in the wake of the explosion, but it likely wouldn't do them any good to breathe the air for too long. And the sirens were getting closer.
*thump*
"What are we looking for?" Becki asked.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Anything that's different than it was before."
"Everything is different than it was before." She moved on into the living room anyway.
*thump*
As he quickly surveyed the apartment, the island in the kitchen caught his eye. Or rather, the place where it was earlier. The island had been reduced to a few shards of wood sticking up from the floor like a cave full of tiny stalagmites. The back wall of the kitchen and all its appliances were smashed backwards into a third of the space they'd originally occupied.
Josh stood in the center of the space and looked both up and down. Above his head and below his feet the room's horizontal surfaces were uniformly black for a diameter of six feet. Past that the blackness streaked ceiling, floor, and walls in an insane starburst.
"This is where it happened," Josh said aloud to the thick air.
*thump*
A muffled gunshot sounded from below. Past the point of noticing such things in the aftermath of the explosion, Josh didn't even flinch. Farther away, but getting closer by the moment, police sirens screamed through the streets of Paris.
*thump*
He kneeled down in the center of the remains of the shattered island and ran his finger along the surface of the black debris. His finger came back covered in the same sort of soot Nolan had been smearing on earlier. He broke off the largest wood fragment he could find and examined it closely, wishing he'd brought a hand scanner along.
"Hey, Josh, look at this," Becki called.
*thump*
He crossed the room in a few long strides, still holding the remnant of the island. When he joined Becki, she indicated a hole in the wall that exposed a narrow empty space. "Looks like the explosion knocked this loose," she said, nodding to a square piece of wall lying nearby on the floor. She reached into the hole and when she drew her hand back she held a backpack. It looked to be an ordinary bag a university student might carry.
Josh unzipped the bag and peered inside. "Oh wow, this should keep us busy for a while," he said as he showed Becki a decidedly non-Terran datapad he found inside. They rummaged quickly through the contents of the bag and found that roughly half its contents had their origins somewhere other than Earth.
*thump*
Another shot rang out downstairs, followed by the sound of a car tire exploding. Angry shouts and the blare of horns followed the banging sound of booted feet running across metal. A moment later, another shot exploded a bit further away. Then the sirens arrived directly below them, followed almost immediately by a new sound of feet - many this time, rather than a single pair - running up the stairs.
*thump*
"Come on, let's get out of here," Josh said as he dropped the wood fragment into the backpack. Becki zipped it shut and threw it over her shoulder. They escaped onto a metal fire escape through a shattered window in the back of the apartment just as the Paris police crashed into the apartment.