It took a few moments for me to even realize what had happened.  When you see a quake happening in a show, there's always all this time, and everything is shaking, and people have time to realize "oh gosh, it's a quake, I'm scared!", or "let's run outside!"  But in this case anyway, the first thing I remember was lying on the ground with rubble on top of me.  Well, on top of the mechsuit that I was inside, anyway.  I suppose it might be that I hit my head when my mechsuit got knocked over by falling concrete, so that I lost the memory of the actual moment of the quake, or else it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to realize what was happening until it was over.

It was dark, with the only light being the dim red glow of a few indicator lights inside my mechsuit.  As I looked around, and realized that I was trapped under the rubble of what had been Building 10, my first thought was, "well that's it then, we all die now".  I wondered, briefly, if this is what Charlotte's parents had felt like, if what happened to them was that they got buried under the rubble in Building 29.  Did they survive, for a while, to realize that they were trapped, and it was all over?  Did they have time to worry about what would happen to Charlotte, or any of the rest of us?  Were they able to talk to each other, in the dark and cold, before the end?  Or did it all happen instantly?  Or maybe, perhaps worst of all, one of them was killed instantly but the other was still alive for a while, waiting for the end, knowing that they were the last adult alive, thinking they had failed.  They hadn't failed, actually, they kept us alive long enough to pull together, and the training videos they made were helping us to learn more every day about how to survive and keep things running.  But they wouldn't have known that; maybe they died thinking they had failed.

It took me a few confused moments to realize that, because I was inside a mechsuit and so was everyone else who came with me to Building 10, maybe we might not be dead.  I had to admit that I didn't feel any great amount of pain, like anything was broken or bleeding.  It wasn't going to be as simple as just standing up and brushing off the rubble like shaking dust from your suit when you've been Outside, but it also wasn't like getting buried under rubble when you're not in a mechsuit.  I was alive, none of my bones seemed broken.  I wondered how the others were.

"What was that?" came the voice of Olivia over the radio.  No one said anything.  I momentarily panicked, thinking that maybe I was the only one in Building 10 left alive.  Then I realized I hadn't actually said anything yet, either.  I tried to, but my voice was not working at first, I guess from shock.  I heard Liam chime in first.

"There's been a problem," said Liam.

"OH MY GOD!" came Olivia's shriek.  I realized that she must have looked over, through the glass walls of Building 3, and seen that Building 10 wasn't just cracked, now, it was crumbled into a pile.

"This is Oliver," I managed to croak out.  "Still here.  Everybody, sound off."  Then I closed my eyes and quietly thought 'please, please, please', I'm not sure to whom.

"Emma," came another voice, croaking out just that one word, but well enough to talk at least.

"Ava, and this whole trip fucking sucks and I hate it and I'm pissed off at everyone who wanted to do it, especially me," said Ava.  I couldn't help but smile.

We all waited.

"Noah?" asked Liam.

Nothing.

I wanted to scream, but I bit down on my lower lip and started focusing on getting my mechsuit working.  I seemed to be able to move all of the mechsuit limbs, at least a little.  My main illuminator was broken, apparently, but there was a different one for when you needed something extra bright, so I turned that on.  It was still working, and I was able to look around.  I forced myself to slow down, to look around and see what pieces of rubble were resting on what other pieces, to figure out which ones were safe to move first.  I realized that the machinery that mom and dad were next to had not been knocked over, and some of the longer chunks of concrete were leaning against it (well, crushing in the top of it with one end is a better way to put it).  By moving just a couple of the smaller pieces, I could crawl into a small triangular space with the machinery standing up on one side, and the sloping pieces of roof above me.  I had to be careful when I moved one of them off my leg (well actually off the leg of the mechsuit), so that I didn't move it too much and bring the whole mess down on top of me.  But then I was sitting up in a little triangular space, my back to the machinery.  Looking over, with a shock I realized I was sitting right next to Dad.  Well, his dessicated and frozen corpse, anyway.

After the shock of seeing him, or what was left of him, which did not look right but also looked a lot more like him in life than I expected (I guess decomposition can be slow when it gets down to -50 degrees Celsius at night), I also saw his tablet on the ground, near his feet.  He must have had it in his lap, and it fell to the ground when he passed out and slumped forward.  I reached over, picked it up, and found one of the exterior bins on the mechsuit to put it in.  I looked past him, to where Mom was lying on the ground.  For a moment, I wanted to see if I could reach over and squeeze her hand.  It occurred to me that this would not only probably be really gross, like her hand might come off or something, but also I needed to focus on finding the others, who at least might still be alive.  I looked a final goodbye at them and started working out which of the pieces above me was the safest to push upwards.

"Everybody be careful about moving the rubble, make sure you don't bring a pile down on yourself," I croaked through the communicator.

"What?" asked Ava.  "Oliver, was that you?  You sound like shit."

I tried to repeat it a few times, gradually finding my voice, and eventually they got the idea.  Emma said she wasn't likely to be moving anything, anyway, for a while.  Ava freed herself about the same time I did, and Liam a little while after (remember, only one of his hands was working properly even before the building collapsed).  It was hard to move, through and over the rubble of Building 10, which now had absolutely no roof left, but they found Emma and started working together to get her out.  I moved around, looking for where Noah was.  Why hadn't I kept track of where everybody was?  We knew that it was dangerous in there, why did we drift off each in our own direction?  Then I realized kicking myself about what we didn't do before, was not helping anything in the here and now.  I closed my eyes for a bit and tried to remember where I had last seen Noah, and went off to that part of the building.  Then I realized I was doing the same thing again, going off without telling people where I was going to.

"I'm headed to the southwest corner," I said over the communiciator, "that's the last area I saw Noah."

There was a moment, after several minutes of me looking at the pile of rubble and wondering what I could safely move without crushing someone beneath it, when I realized that I might not be able to find Noah, or his corpse, even if I were in the right area.  It was dusty, the equipment underneath the rubble made it a series of high crests and low spots in between, my regular illuminator was not working, and I was crying, all of which made it hard to see very far or very well.  Finally, I decide to start at one spot near the edge, and pull large pieces of rubble away (wearing a mechsuit makes you feel like you're a superhero sometimes, by the way, even if you are crying like a baby), trying to predict how the pieces left would respond so that I didn't cause a collapse that would crush something underneath it all.  Eventually, I found him.

He was passed out, and I panicked as I saw that the faceplate was cracked.  He had been lying there for several minutes now, without proper oxygen.  There was a line of frost along his face, where the cold air of Mars was leaking through, and his breathable air was leaking out.  I took a roll of tape from one of the exterior bins on the mechsuit, and put a line of tape along the cracks, sealing it as best I could.  I wasn't sure how to pick up someone in a mechsuit, not even while wearing a mechsuit myself.  Unknown to me at the time, while I was doing this, the fact that I had taped over the crack in the faceplate, meant that the oxygen supply of his mechsuit was able to repressurize (I think it hadn't actually lost all pressure anyway, since it was just a crack).  Then, a while after that, Noah regained consciousness.  His face hurt where he had frost on it, probably a bit of frostbite there, but he was able to see that he was still alive, and I was hovering over him.

"Dude, if you are an angel, this heaven really sucks," he said, which was Noah's way of saying he was alive and awake.  I kind of yelped in relief and surprise.

"Aaaahh!" I said, or something like it.

"Your singing voice is not so great either," he said, and then Liam and Ava and Emma were headed over to where we were.

"Liam?" he asked, his voice dry and cracked.

"Yeah, Noah?" asked Liam, reaching down to try to help me lift him up.

"I've thought it over, and I don't think the equipment here is going to be usable," he said.  Given that it was all buried under concrete rubble, partly crushed, it was hard to argue that point.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," said Liam.  We lifted Noah (who weighed hundreds of kilograms, in his mechsuit) up to a standing position, and he looked a bit woozy but seemed able to keep it in control.

We stood there, all five of us, and looked around.  We had really come there to see what had happened to most of the adults, including our parents, but our excuse to each other was that we were seeing if the equipment that would allow us to make batteries was still usable.  But either way, we were done.  Building 10 was finished.  Maybe, someday, we might need to come back here and do something about what was left, but not for a long time; there were a lot higher priorities now.  We were not going to get any new batteries out of this building, clearly, so when the batteries we had wore out, there weren't going to be any replacements coming from here.

"Let's go," said Liam.  We trudged back to the rover, which was an annoyingly large distance away, got in it, and Ava drove it back to Building 3.