The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  “I get it,” Sem interjected, nodding and trying to pick up the conversation. “The world is really fucked up. The class system? The government? It’s enough to never sleep again…”

  “No—no, not like that,” Myrra talked over him. “I mean, it is fucked up, but what if something else was broken, something physical? I mean, this whole thing is technically a ship. There are mechanics that can go wrong.” Myrra watched him. He wasn’t buying it. None of this was coming out right.

  Behind Sem’s head, near the ceiling, Myrra suddenly noticed a crack in the wall. How had she not noticed it before? This entire city would fall into rubble. Sem followed her eyes and looked back at her with a smile, as if he had finally locked on to her particular brand of paranoia.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry about that—there’s been a lot of tremors in the region. Have you guys been feeling those in New London?” He was keeping his voice deliberately light. “But we had a structural engineer come through and analyze everything. You don’t have to worry.

  “I can get you a discount on the room, if it’s bothering you,” he added, gesturing to the crack.

  “No—I don’t care about that,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s not it at all.”

  She needed to change tactics.

  “Just—just think about if the world were ending next week. If there’s anything you’ve been wanting to do—moving to Palmer, New London, anything—don’t wait to do it.”

  Sem shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “Um, this is a weird conversation…”

  Myrra sighed and buried her face in her hands. This was not going to go the way she wanted it to go. It was too big a concept. She was surprised she believed it, even after reading all of Marcus’s data spreads.

  “Though I guess if I only had a week to live, I would stay in Nabat,” she heard Sem say through the fog of her own thoughts. “New London’s cool, but, I mean, my family’s here. Who wants to die surrounded by strangers?”

  Myrra didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t want to think about what that meant for her. Silence settled in like a fog around them, broken only by intermittent gusts of wind outside the window. Sem stood, moving slowly and delicately, as though he were trying not to startle a particularly skittish animal.

  “I think I ought to go,” he said.

  After an awkward goodbye, Myrra lay back down on the bed and waited for the blue light of dawn. It had been a mistake, a selfish one. Telling Sem the truth wouldn’t save him from anything. He already had a life, with roots and people who loved him. It was just so lonely, being the only one to know. There were others, she supposed, who knew this secret, but certainly no one she could interact with. And, as it turned out, it was a secret she couldn’t divulge even if she tried.

  She envied Sem his roots and attachments. She thought again of her mother. Maybe she still had family, somewhere. A picture came to mind: Myrra running into her mother on a crowded city street, completely by chance. It was a small world. These things happened. Or maybe she would rescue her from a cold anesthetized institution, or from some underground prison. Just as quickly, she batted those thoughts away. She wasn’t a kid anymore, dreaming of imaginary lives. Don’t think about her. Don’t think about it.

  Myrra could fill up the sea with all the things she refused to think about.

  14

  TOBIAS

  I was looking through some background information…” Tobias started, trying to sound as casual as possible and failing. Simpson glanced at him from behind a pair of lowered sunglasses. It gave Tobias the unfortunate view of both Simpson’s sarcastic look and his own nervous expression in the warped reflection of the mirror lenses. The lens view of himself showed his hair sticking up in places, slouched shoulders. He straightened up to a more confident posture and tried to pat down any cowlicks without looking too obvious about it. He hadn’t slept well.

  Another twenty-four hours had come and gone with no sign of Myrra Dal. Tobias was appalled to find himself on a pool deck instead of in a precinct office. Simpson, of course, did not seem to mind. He was sunning himself on a chaise longue. Tobias perched on the edge of an adjacent deck chair, thinking about how best to bring up the other deaths he’d discovered.

  Tobias had received permission from the Palmer office to set up additional cameras—all access points in and out of the city were now covered by surveillance and facial recognition. If the software caught Dal’s face, an alarm would sound on his tablet. With the cameras in place, they were no longer tethered to the area around the ferry terminal, and Simpson had insisted on exploring. They were currently passing the time beside a large kidney-shaped swimming pool in Apogee Park, a green zone located atop Palmer’s highest tower, in its largest atrium. The park was furnished with rolling lawns and lush trees, all flourishing from being nearer to the light of the water’s surface. All other seats around the pool were occupied by scantily clad women and men teasing their nakedness with all the latest fashions. He and Simpson stood out in their collared shirts and slacks.

  “Anything interesting?” Simpson asked, inviting him to continue. Tobias saw an amused twinkle in his eye just before Simpson pushed his sunglasses back up on the bridge of his nose.

  Over the past day, as Tobias had set up the cameras, worked with Simpson to connect the feeds, and done half a dozen other tasks for the investigation, all important but all mindless work, the three other deaths had stuck in his mind, coming up again and again, as unwanted as an earworm chorus of a bad song. He had vacillated over and over throughout the day, deciding sometimes that the deaths meant nothing, then deciding that they were related to some monumental conspiracy, then deciding that the whole thing was something his brain had concocted out of boredom. But still, the thoughts persisted. His only hope was to bounce the information off Simpson, sound as nonchalant as possible, and hope that Simpson would be a good barometer for how to react.

  He sent out his test balloon.

  “I noticed that Marcus Carlyle wasn’t the only high-level death we’ve had this past year. There’ve been three others who’ve died that had his level of security clearance.”

  Simpson’s eyebrows rose behind his glasses, but his expression stayed stoic.

  “Does Barnes know?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told him,” Tobias said. Simpson didn’t reply, just sat silently, waiting for Tobias to give him the rest of the information.

  “Last night I asked Barnes about some holes in Marcus Carlyle’s hard drive files, and he told me to leave off investigating Marcus. Apparently some government guys came in and removed sensitive data before we got there.”

  Simpson let out a long stream of air, half a whistle, half a sigh.

  “And now you’re worried that Dad is going to give you a slap on the wrist for not listening to orders,” he said. Tobias didn’t really know how to respond. Simpson was right, but Tobias didn’t want to give him any more reason to treat him like a kid.

  “I’ve had spooks wipe evidence before,” Simpson continued. “It’s a pain in the ass. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s more common when you’re working with someone as high up as Carlyle.”

  Tobias sensed a chip on Simpson’s shoulder about this. He didn’t like being patronized either, at least not by bureaucrats.

  “Still,” he said, “it was a good instinct to follow up on that. I’m not saying the deaths mean anything, but it would be stupid to rule them out. Barnes gets pressure from a lot of places, from above and below. Sometimes that paralyzes a person.”

  It was the first time Tobias had ever heard Simpson criticize Barnes, and he almost moved to defend him, out of sheer loyalty. Instead he held back and gave Simpson the space to talk. Simpson was saying things that Tobias had been too afraid to think the night before.

  “Keep that in your head. Once we catch Dal, we’ll see if she knows anything. Barnes doesn’t have to find out about any of this until we know more. It’ll be easier for him to see the good decisions from the bad
that way.” Simpson smiled at him. Tobias smiled back, smiling at himself in the sunglasses.

  Tobias turned and grabbed his tablet off the side table. There hadn’t been any alerts from the facial recognition, but he glanced over the grid of video feeds all the same. “How much longer, do you suppose, before Myrra Dal shows up here? How long does it usually take to chase someone down?”

  Simpson bobbed his head from side to side, noncommittal. “It depends on the case. Sometimes it’s really cut-and-dried to find someone, especially if they have friends or family. But aside from the McCann kid, Dal had nobody. Nobody alive, anyway.”

  Simpson looked down for a moment, his lips drooping into a slight frown. Maybe he pitied her. Tobias didn’t pity her per se, but he worried about how much he empathized with her. He wondered if she had ever felt close with the Carlyles—some families often referred to their maids and household staff as “a part of the family.” Tobias knew such thinking was common, though he personally assumed it was a psychological out, a way to keep guilt at bay, more than an actual sign of affection. Some even left their servants money or heirlooms when they died, though it was notably rare for an employer to free a contract worker in their will. That would require much more legal work, to bequeath a servant their contract. Most of the time it stretched past the bounds of a boss’s generosity. The Carlyles’ will, Tobias had noted, did not bequeath any money to Myrra Dal. Imogene and Marcus had maintained a nice professional distance from the help.

  “Myrra Dal didn’t take any money,” Tobias mentioned, almost to himself. He and Simpson had looked over that angle a couple of ways. The safe in the bedroom had been opened, but all cards and jewelry were still inside. The only thing missing was Imogene Carlyle’s ID. Their assumption had been that Myrra Dal was smart enough to know that the card accounts could be traced.

  “We’ve covered the Carlyle accounts—all the money’s still there,” Simpson said, but he sat up as well and turned to face Tobias.

  Tobias could feel an idea assembling at the edge of his brain, but he hadn’t quite put it together yet. “How is she getting by right now, if she didn’t steal any money?”

  Simpson shrugged. “Maybe she’s camping. She seems resourceful.”

  “With a baby, though? Babies are expensive.”

  Simpson laughed. “That I know.”

  Simpson looked down at Tobias’s tablet, lying faceup on the deck chair. Tobias followed his glance. Still no hits.

  “Well, maybe she’d been stealing from the Carlyles a little at a time. Maybe this was a long-term plan. I caught a contract worker once, worked in a house just like Dal, who’d managed to rack up ten thousand in nine months without the family noticing. He doctored shopping orders, swiped change off the dresser, pawned the things he was sure they wouldn’t miss.” Simpson smiled and shook his head. “I was actually kinda sad I caught that guy. He was smart.”

  “Marcus Carlyle seemed pretty savvy with money, though.” Tobias had looked through his financial portfolio and had found it dense enough that it took a few tries before he’d been able to read through the thing and make sense of it. He had companies within companies, companies that had been sold where he still maintained controlling interest, companies licensed under a variety of false titles. All the financial institutions tangled up with one another in such a way that only after looking at the whole spiderweb long and hard could you tell that there was a sublime organization to the whole thing, organized to maximize profit and minimize taxation. Marcus had known where his money was at all times.

  “That’s true.” Simpson was now leaning forward a little, taking a deeper interest in Tobias’s line of thinking. “Marcus Carlyle was rich… that special upper-echelon version of rich.”

  Everyone here had been rich at one time or another. Tobias remembered a photograph of his great-grandparents that David had shown him, champagne flutes in hand in a magnificently furnished room, dressed in the best finery, clearly indulging in their wealth. But the Carlyles were part of that stratospheric class, the one where you didn’t just enjoy your wealth but learned tricks to hide it. He felt light rays filtering through the water and glass, warming his pale skin. He looked up at all the beautiful people surrounding him, golden in the sun’s glow, radiant in their idleness and financial comfort. This was the life his parents had been chasing. He looked down at the surface of the pool—the water looked too bright and pigmented, a false blue.

  “What if Myrra Dal took advantage of some money we didn’t know about?” Tobias asked. They had looked into Marcus merely as the victim of a crime, but they could easily dig deeper into his finances.

  “That’s something worth looking into.” Simpson stood up and stretched. It might have been wishful thinking, but Tobias thought he noticed Simpson looking at him a little differently, more like a peer. Simpson offered him a hand and Tobias stood up as well, happy to have an ally.

  “Why don’t you call IT, get his corporate account numbers, start pestering the banks? I’ll come up with an excuse for Barnes,” Simpson added. It felt wrong to keep Barnes on the outside. It shouldn’t be so easy to swap Barnes’s support for Simpson’s. But Tobias knew he was right, and he wanted the win.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “All right. But keep watching the feeds. She’s still gonna show up here eventually.”

  The surrounding sea had been pretty clear of fish for the past hour, but as they gathered their things to walk to the elevator, a large shark swam directly overhead, briefly casting a shadow over the pool. Simpson smiled at Tobias, darting his eyes up at the shark.

  “That’s you,” he said. Tobias blushed with pride.

  Tobias imagined a dark room, not a menacing dark, but a comforting dark furnished only by a single dim lamp and two plush armchairs. He recognized that this room in his head was a composite of hotels he’d slept in as a child and Barnes’s cramped living room, where he’d spent his teenage years obsessively studying. He imagined himself in one of the chairs and he imagined Myrra Dal in the other, as she was in her worker’s permit photo, with wild tangled hair and a gray smock.

  He imagined what they would say if he was able to have a conversation with her.

  “Did you kill the Carlyles?” he would ask.

  “No,” she would answer. “They killed themselves.”

  In his head she was not offended by the question. In his head she kept her gaze fixed on him.

  “Why would they kill themselves?” he would ask.

  “They were afraid,” she would say. She would not elaborate further.

  “That engineer. The secretary of security. Did they kill themselves too?”

  “Probably.”

  Even in his own mind, he was too afraid to follow that line of inquiry further.

  “Why did you steal the baby?” he would ask instead.

  “Because I love her,” she would say.

  In this imagined conversation, Myrra Dal was cryptic, but only because his brain could not create her answers out of anything more than what he already knew or suspected. There were other questions that he didn’t ask, questions connected to governments and to breakdown. These questions hovered as unformed thoughts that Tobias was unwilling to acknowledge, outside of a vague feeling of apprehension.

  In his head she stood up, walked over to him, and wrapped her hand gently around the side of his neck. It was an oddly tender gesture. She looked down at him with black eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You’ll catch me, and everyone will be so proud.”

  The earthquake hit at two a.m. Tobias was still awake in his hotel room, triple-checking the tracking requests on all the Carlyle accounts. He’d just stood up, preparing to make another cup of espresso with the hotel’s coffee machine, when he felt the room shake.

  It was violent enough to knock him off balance. The floor jerked from under him, and he felt his torso veer sideways in the opposing direction. Within seconds his knees buckled and he fell halfway on the hotel bed. />
  There had been occasional tremors before—their world, after all, was traveling through space at high speed, and he’d been taught growing up that earthquakes were usually the result of a collision with an especially large piece of debris. Tobias remembered being in Troy with his mother when he was five and feeling the ground seize under him. He remembered his mother’s annoyance at the spilled wine. But that had been a much smaller, singular motion, over and done with in a matter of seconds. This was lasting much longer and was much harsher. He could hear a screaming in the distance, the squealing sound of tearing metal—Tobias couldn’t remember, was that usually the sound an earthquake made? There’d been a lot of earthquakes lately, but this was the biggest.

  The floor kept shaking; Tobias turned to lay his body flat on the bed. He could see the ceiling fan above him, attached by a single thick wire, swinging in a wild arc back and forth, the fan blades smacking and scraping against the ceiling. Tobias had the vague thought that the fan was likely to break loose if this shaking kept on much longer; he imagined it crashing down on his head, but he didn’t move.

  The wall to the side of the bed bowed outward and cracked. The fan continued to sway and jump, but the wire held fast. Tobias wasn’t sure if he was able to stand up; he kept waiting in vain for the shaking to stop.

  Tobias could not tell if minutes or hours were passing—it was so loud, the world was roaring. Gradually the tremors in the room diminished, as did the shrieking and the noise. When the quake had been reduced to only slight vibrations, Tobias tried to stand. As if to spite him, the floor bucked straight up and down one last time. His back scraped against the corner of a table as he fell, and he screamed out in pain. By the time he landed fully on the floor, the room was still.

  Tobias let himself lie where he’d dropped. He wasn’t sure how badly he’d hurt himself, but he didn’t have the energy yet to investigate. He looked over at the ceiling fan. It continued swaying gently.

  Even after the shaking stopped, there was still noise: a deep groaning, coming through the floor and the walls. Likely the building was no longer structurally sound. He ought to get up, but the thought alone was exhausting. Pain pulsed along his back, warning him against movement.