Marlon was just stepping through it when the building exploded. And though his first instinct was to run outside and get away from it, he was glad that he didn’t. A huge amount of the structure collapsed into the basement and caused a piston of dust to shoot up the corridor right toward his face. He spun away from it and took it in his back, facing out into the back alley, and there he saw perhaps a thousand loose pieces of brickwork rain down from above. Any one of them, had it struck him on the top of the head, would have killed him. But the doorway—according to seismic lore, the strongest part of a building—held above him and protected him.