The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  “What sort of room would you like? Single?” Sem the concierge was talking to her again.

  She tried to get herself back into the conversation.

  “Just go ahead and give me your best room. Biggest bed, fluffiest pillows, the works,” Myrra replied. She could take the longest bath imaginable, then sink down into the softest mattress. That was how to live out the end of the world.

  The concierge looked her up and down. She must have looked like the bad end of a broom—both she and Charlotte were coated in sweat and dust from the road. He paused another moment, then calmly started typing on his touch screen. He lifted it in his hands to show her. The screen displayed images of what looked like a truly breathtaking hotel suite, with prices and specs outlined below.

  “This,” he said, pointing to one of the numbers that accompanied the pictures, “is the cost per night for our finest suite.” He gave her a meaningful look. “Is that price satisfactory?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, a smile starting to grow on the corners of her lips. She kept forgetting, and then remembering with great wonder, that she had money. She handed over the card to Sem, who inspected the name.

  “Apex Unlimited?” Sem looked at her. “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a real estate firm,” Myrra said. “I’m here on business, figured I’d take advantage of the expense account.” These were all words she’d heard Marcus’s colleagues use, laughing to each other over liquor and cigars. She was trying to keep the business vague, but Sem still looked skeptical.

  “This is a city built into a cliff. We don’t exactly have an excess of real estate,” he said.

  “No, I know, but you mentioned that Nabat’s in a downturn… I’m basically a middleman.” Another word Marcus’s friends used with frequency. Myrra spit out the lies as fast as her brain spun them. “If a corporation is looking to relocate, they hire me to scout areas with unused or redundant business space, places where they can get property cheap.”

  This seemed to satisfy Sem. He went from skeptical to very interested. Probably looking for a job, Myrra thought. “Well, if that’s the case, we’ve got redundant everything. We could use new business… aside from tourism, the only revenue we’ve got is data mining—the hard drives stay cooler underground, so there’s huge caverns of them deeper in the cliffs, past the main town. Any of your clients work in data mining?”

  “Communications, mostly.” Again, a word she’d picked up at one of the Carlyles’ parties, a word that felt vague and all-encompassing. It seemed to do the job. Sem nodded knowingly but didn’t ask any further questions.

  “Well, let me know how it goes, or if there’s any way I can help.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sem typed the information in on his tablet. “And can I get your ID for the room?”

  Myrra held out Imogene’s ID with a smile, but she tensed inside. This was her first time using the altered ID. It had looked legit once Boots had finished with it, but there was no way to tell without running it through the system. If the card didn’t work, one swipe would send everything crashing down. She pictured Charlotte being wrenched from her arms, a boot on her back pressing her against the floor while someone wrestled her into handcuffs. She wouldn’t go quietly. They’d have to tranq her.

  Sem took the card.

  “Emily Stein,” he read aloud, and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Emily.”

  “Nice to meet you too.” She kept her smile fixed, tried to seem relaxed.

  Boots had allowed her to choose her own name. Emily was a random choice—one of the characters on Imogene’s favorite soap opera was named Emily. Stein was for Gertrude. She felt a pang of sadness—in the rush to leave New London, she’d left the book tucked in her mattress, along with a few other precious objects.

  She repeated in her mind: Emily Stein, Emily Stein. Easy to remember, and it sounded common enough to not be too memorable to anyone else. Or at least she hoped.

  He swiped the card in and out of a slot on the side of his tablet. Myrra held her breath. After a few seconds, the tablet let out a familiar digital ascending tone and Myrra let herself relax. The ID was good.

  “Great. You’re all set.” Sem handed her a room card and walked around the desk. With him standing up, Myrra was suddenly aware of how much taller Sem was than she. But then again, most people were taller than she. Sem looked down at her dusty backpack and paused a moment.

  “Shall I—?” he asked, gesturing to the bag. Myrra had been dreading lifting it again—it hadn’t even occurred to her that someone else might carry it. She smiled. This was new.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, and followed him down the hall to her room.

  11

  PALMER

  Palmer is one of the rare cities that was built after the world the ship had already taken flight. Humanity is not content standing still. Humans are only content when they are conquering the next impossible thing. So even though the world’s landscape was designed to meet every need, over a century into the ship’s journey, humanity decided to build Palmer.

  There is no space left to build in a world with regions and civilizations ready-made, so the city sits at the bottom of the Palmer Sea. That is how Palmer was christened—it was named after the body of water above it. No one really remembers what the Palmer Sea is named after.

  Palmer is encased in a series of humongous plexiglass domes that sit on the seafloor. People can access the city through a ferry that descends underground in a tunnel and emerges again inside the domed city. It took teams of scientists and architects months to figure out how to pressurize it just so, so that the glass didn’t break, so that the water didn’t rush into the tunnel, so that the glass was thick enough to be stable but clear enough to show the beauty of the surrounding ocean. When the city was finally open for business, all the world’s press called it a feat of engineering.

  Since every section of the world was assembled together with a purpose, and since Palmer came after the world was built, Palmer is a place not of necessity but of distraction. Palmer is where a person goes to find the deepest hotel mattresses, the most delicate cuisine, the headiest cocktails, the most exotic spas, and the most beautiful people. It is also where one goes to find crystal-studded casinos, top-ranked plastic surgeons, clubs to satisfy the rarest sexual proclivities, and chemicals stronger than your average cocktail. Those who reside in Palmer know it is a place to visit but not a place to live. The spectacle fades as one stays there, and that spectacle is replaced with a feeling of decay.

  Nobody dies in Palmer when the world ends. The glass domes of Palmer will cave in months before the true destruction occurs. The city will be evacuated, leaving only empty structures and streets. By the time the world is torn apart, Palmer will exist as a broken snow globe under the water. Algae will coat the buildings. Schools of fish will maneuver their way down the avenues where posh bespoke men and women once walked, eels will have found homes under submerged roulette tables, and the first sprouts of seaweed will be growing on the marquee signs, once brightly lit and now gone dark.

  12

  TOBIAS

  That’s where Ingrid had me try foie gras for the first time. Tobias stared at a spindly little white-painted chair on the corner of a café sidewalk across the plaza.

  Tobias turned his head to another table at the same café. And that’s where David sat hunched with his head between his legs for forty-five minutes, sick after too much single malt. Tobias remembered propping David up to get him into a taxi, even though he was barely higher than his father’s armpit.

  Tobias was sitting with Simpson on a bench in the center of one of Palmer’s outer domed plazas, within view of the ferry terminal exit. In an effort to keep his head in the present, Tobias peeled his eyes away from the café and instead looked around at the walls and ceiling of the plaza, trying to count the fish swimming past. Half the dome was made of reinforced plexiglass, to better filter in the light through the sea above them. The Palmer Sea, with w
ater so clear it barely dimmed the sun as it cast its rays down to the city below. Tobias counted a shark, three mackerel, two groupers, and a swordfish, but when a school of tuna swam past the apex of the dome, massive enough to function as a cloud in the watery Palmer sky, he gave up and lost count. The other half of the plaza’s dome was encased in polished blue stone riddled with tunnel exits and entrances along the bottom. Ferries ambled out of the tunnels with regularity, entering the biosphere through the lazy, meandering canal waters, dropping off their human cargo at the platform, and then looping back through the exit portals.

  The glassy dome was tall and wide enough that it encompassed multiple blocks of buildings in addition to the plaza and ferry terminal, its transparent walls arcing effortlessly above the city’s architectural peaks and girders. The dome itself then connected to dozens of other, larger ones via vast interior arches, so that from the outside the city looked like a collection of impermeable soap bubbles clustered on the seafloor.

  Myrra Dal was still absent from the ferry’s camera feeds. It had been days now, but Simpson didn’t look worried.

  “Maybe she decided to hide out in New London for a few days, maybe she went for a walk to pick some daisies, but trust me—she’ll head here eventually.” Simpson took an appreciative bite of a muffin half-wrapped in a waxy bag.

  Simpson’s laid-back attitude toward detecting was frustrating—Tobias was itching for something to happen. He couldn’t sit still, picking up his tablet, putting it down. Pulling up Myrra Dal’s file again, coursing his eyes through her life history over and over. He kept tapping again and again on the surveillance footage, refreshing it.

  “Would you calm down?” Simpson snapped, looking exasperated for what must have been the hundredth time in two days.

  Simpson finished the last chunk of the muffin and wadded up the bag into a tight ball. There was a public trash bin a couple meters off—one of the new ones with a compactor attached to the bottom. Palmer always had the newest of everything. Simpson held the ball in his hand aloft over his head, took aim, then let it go in an elegant arcing trajectory that hit straight in the center of the bin.

  “You have no patience,” Simpson said, “and I hate to tell you this, since you seem so determined toward a career in Security, but ninety-nine percent of this job is waiting. You need long-term mental stamina. You are going to burn out fast unless you learn how to pace yourself.”

  “I don’t like it here,” Tobias said, realized it sounded juvenile, then said, “I’m sorry,” almost immediately after.

  From the moment Tobias and Simpson stepped off the ferry in Palmer, Tobias had viewed the city as if someone were holding a grease-streaked pane of glass up in front of his vision. Everything came to him in double. When he bought a cup of coffee it wasn’t just a cup of coffee, it was overlaid with a cup of coffee he’d bought David after an especially late night, when Ingrid and he, still prostrate in a mussed bed, had flung money at him and slurred the words “Coffee. No lights” before passing out again. Or Tobias would bump into a well-dressed man on the sidewalk, and in his ear he would hear the ghost of David whisper, instructing him on how to slip his hand through to the pocket in the lining of the man’s suit, quick and soft like a puff of air. The back of every female brunette head with an expensive haircut was Ingrid; every gray-haired man in a navy silk suit was David.

  “It’s not my favorite place, sure, but it’s not so bad—the food’s good here,” Simpson said.

  Another woman passed by them in a filmy blue dress, a dress that looked exactly like the one Ingrid would wear when David took her out with him on a gambling binge, for good luck. Tobias stood abruptly.

  “I think I need to go for a walk,” he said.

  “Sure,” Simpson said, “I can hold down the fort here.” He let slip an expression of worry. Tobias knew that Simpson was already annoyed at being paired up with someone so green. Surely this wasn’t helping matters. Tobias chastised himself inwardly. Wasn’t he the one to be depended on, a force of stability? He could get himself together, he just needed to readjust his focus, to get used to this place as an adult, under a new set of circumstances. Just distract yourself and think about the case. Get out of your own head, get into Myrra Dal’s.

  “I won’t be long,” Tobias told Simpson. “Just need to stretch my legs.” Already his voice was sounding a little calmer. Good.

  He took off down a sidewalk on the main avenue opposite the terminal, which led directly away from the plaza. Looking around at eye level, he continued to see reminders everywhere, in gilt letters on shop windows, in the warm smell of baguettes, olive oil, and exotic flavored vinegars all laid out on pristine white café tablecloths, or in the way the cement of the sidewalk glistened with some sort of ground-up crystalline stone—Tobias wouldn’t be surprised if they’d used a low-grade diamond to achieve the effect. The glittering surface danced and flashed with light, shimmering and changing its perspective with every step he took. Since he felt familiarity at eye level, he forced his gaze up again, trying to appreciate the city with new eyes. He was approaching a giant vaulting archway that connected this plexiglass dome to the next.

  It really was a remarkable feat, what these city planners had managed to achieve. Tobias had read that it took six thousand contract workers five years to finish the job. When you thought about the scale of the project, that amount of time was practically a blink, though he supposed it helped that they’d used unpaid labor. It left an enormous budget for everything else. Tobias blinked in sudden recognition as he remembered a detail from Myrra Dal’s file: her father had been part of the Palmer work crew. He pictured the men working in dark makeshift air chambers, laying down stone. When Tobias was feeling idealistic, he called Palmer the height of human achievement. When he was feeling less so, he called it money.

  Tobias passed under the archway now, into the next plexiglass dome. It dwarfed him and swallowed him, the size of the architecture, the people weaving around him on all sides without thought. He was a tiny screw embedded in a massive clockwork. Whatever his agitation, whatever problems complicated his mind, it was good to remember that they were small, existentially speaking. Tobias took comfort in recognizing his insignificance among this wide scatter plot of people, a tiny nanosecond blip in the endless stretch of time.

  “Toby, never forget that we came from a very prominent family,” David Bendel used to say, trying to drum his son’s legacy into his head, as it had been drummed into his by Tobias’s grandfather. “Your great-grandfather was the toast of New York. We had a penthouse on Central Park West, a summer home on Cape Cod. We hosted politicians, magnates, artists, all the important people.” The phrases Central Park West and Cape Cod were evoked frequently, to the point where Tobias imagined them as places bathed in gold. His bubble burst when his father excitedly showed him a picture of Cape Cod he’d found in a history book.

  “It’s a beach,” Tobias said, with little enthusiasm. David gave him a look and shoved the picture closer to his face.

  “Yes, but it’s the right beach,” he responded, exasperated.

  Then the tablet would come out, shoved under Tobias’s nose like desperate documented proof in a trial. You see, Counselors, considering the evidence, it is irrefutable that we were important once.

  Images of his great-grandfather Alan Bendel, a white-haired specter of a man, usually in a blue suit shaking hands with various other white-haired men, sometimes in front of flags, sometimes at podiums behind paintings. Interspersed were images of Tobias’s grandfather, younger, with dark-brown hair, a similar face, similarly clad in a suit, though these images were usually candid, his grandfather at an art opening, laughing amid giraffe-like women with glittering dresses and shiny straight hair, or in a club toasting with whiskey with a crowd of other suit-bedecked men, the flat whiteness of the flashbulb causing flares against their glass tumblers, illuminating their faces against bluish darkness. These family images failed to elicit any sort of emotional response from young T
oby, though he tried his best to nod along as David regaled him with his ancestors’ exploits. Mostly he would just stare for long periods at the photographed faces, as if they contained in their expressions some sort of uncrackable code.

  Much more interesting were the examples that David would show of their former art collection.

  “Alan Bendel loaned this one to the Met—you remember I told you about the Met, didn’t I, Toby?” David would wait for a nod from his son. “Anyway, this one was loaned to the Met a record number of times. They showed this one at the Tate for a Freud retrospective—they used it for the poster—”

  Tobias would tune out his father’s voice like a radio and take in the artworks instead as David swiped through to one and then the next. The smudged, thickly globbed faces of Lucian Freud and the confrontational expressions of Frida Kahlo, the twisting bodies of Egon Schiele, the symphonic swatches of Alma Thomas, the patchwork color of Paul Klee, followed by the engulfing pigments of Mark Rothko, so deep they sucked the air out of your lungs. His favorite, a painting by Roman Opałka, who painted steadily increasing numbers in neat little rows across large swaths of canvas. Tobias absorbed and obsessed over the details of these artworks with the same sort of fervor he held for Barnes’s antique wood desk. He ached to touch them, to see the real paintings in front of him, but the collection was long gone. It was the only thing Tobias mourned from his father’s stories. Tobias thought again of the Carlyle penthouse, with so many paintings and drawings on the walls. He’d cycled through every room in the photographs on his tablet. None were from his family’s collection, though he’d wished it to be so. He had the thought that if he stood in front of one, in the place where the painter had painted, in the spot where his great-great-grandfather must have taken it in, he might at that point understand a little more about himself, how his genetics had decayed from great art collectors to con artists.