The shear wave hit without warning.
There was no sound. That was because at one hundred thousand feet, the air was too thin to carry the leading edge of a faster-than-sound squeezing wave.
There was only a sudden, violent distortion of the horizon. The stars and the glowing rim of the high sky warping like light seen through the bottom of a cracked glass bottle.
Then the black glass shelf screamed.
The three-foot-thick slab of fiery glass under their feet didn’t just vibrate. It buckled upward along its deep-rock cleavage lines.
CRACK.
A deep gap forty yards wide tore through the center of the campsite in a fraction of a heartbeat.
The floating rock snapped into two unequal halves, the smaller southern ledge tilting wildly at a forty-five-degree angle toward the endless, cloud-choked void below.
