The search and rescue effort moved painfully slowly due to all the twisted and mangled debris piles. Twelve hours in, fifty-eight bodies had been recovered, but no one alive had been found at all, and best estimates were that only about one-tenth of the site had been gone over so far.
Then a whooping cry of joy, and proof of a miracle. The northeast elevator had gone straight down its shaft as designed, and luckily nothing had caved in on top of it. Firemen had worked their way to the elevator car’s roof, and wrenching open the emergency escape hatch, looked down at five terrified but hopeful faces and one tiny bundle wrapped in pink sleeping soundly in her mother’s arms.
It was the Tanners, a young mom and dad headed home from the fifth-floor maternity ward with their second child and h
