The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 15

  “Where are we?” Tobias asked. He knew there were plenty of smaller towns between Palmer and New London, but he always glossed over their names on the transit lines. Just little blips to mark the time: Bethlehem, Liauso, Ilva, Mbaska, Nabat.

  “I don’t know,” Simpson said. “Probably the closest town to Palmer. Kittimer, maybe?”

  Tobias turned his head this way and that in the dim light, trying to assess what was going on, trying to assess how he could be of use. Almost by telepathy, Simpson told him, “We need to keep everybody calm.”

  With that he strode forward and flipped open his badge wallet in one raised hand, the other hand waving about to make space.

  “All right, folks, let’s back away from the ferry platform—” he shouted out. Tobias didn’t know how he had the strength to do it; his own vocal cords felt stripped.

  Without arguing, the crowds immediately followed Simpson’s orders. People are willing to listen to any authority in this kind of chaos.

  In the dim light on the far side of the cavern, Tobias could make out a number of tunnels labeled with illuminated “Exit” signs, and another, larger sign above, carved into the wall, that read “Welcome to Nabat.” Nabat. Tobias remembered seeing that name on a brochure once.

  Tobias swallowed down a few drips of saliva in an attempt to soothe his raw throat. Then he followed Simpson’s lead and, ignoring the pain, joined in shouting and herding groups toward the exit tunnels.

  The actual town of Nabat was breathtaking. The sheer size of the cavern structures was one thing, but Tobias was most impressed by the stonework: the intricate carvings around the pillars, the smooth precision of the building facades. It reminded him of the surviving Italian marble sculptures in New London’s Classical Museum.

  The Nabat Security Bureau was decidedly smaller than what Tobias was used to in New London, and with the population having essentially tripled overnight, everything in the offices was chaos. He and Simpson were greeted upon their arrival by an Agent Demir, who quickly ushered them down the nearest hallway. Tobias noticed they were following signs labeled “Jail Block.”

  “The transit tunnels were damaged by the quake, most of the boats are capsized on the beach, we can’t get anyone in or out,” Demir said, waving his hands wildly above his head to emphasize his point. They turned a corner and were met with a corridor of ten barred cells, five on each side, cut into the stone walls. Each was filled with dozing members of the Palmer Security Bureau, its iron door ajar. The lucky ones slept on the one or two metal bunks each cell afforded; others slept on cots laid out on the stone floor.

  “Most of the refugees are being taken in by families in the area,” Demir continued. “But since you two are Security, we’ve set aside accommodations for you here in the station.” He gestured to two empty cots wedged in the corner of the farthest cell on the left. Demir at least looked apologetic. “It’s the best we can do,” he said.

  “What happened to the prisoners you were housing?” Simpson asked.

  “We cut them loose. Nothing to be done, we needed the space.” Demir shrugged. “Mostly just drunks, anyway.”

  Tobias didn’t necessarily approve, but he couldn’t think of a better way to handle the situation. He and Simpson wandered to their cots, stepping over other sleeping bodies on the floor.

  “When you’ve had some rest, we could certainly use your help,” Demir said from outside the cell, leaning against the bars. “Our bureau is not equipped to handle this many people.”

  “Of course,” Tobias replied.

  They lay on the floor for hours, mostly staring at the ceiling and sleeping fitfully. Tobias’s mind wasn’t quite right; when he closed his eyes he could still feel people crushing him from all sides. Every half hour or so, Simpson would try to get a call through to his family, but the tablet signals were all jammed. Tobias thought of New London. Had it been hit as badly as Palmer? He wondered if Barnes was OK, but didn’t try to call. Simpson was proving how futile that was.

  He was still thinking of Myrra Dal. His brain kept putting pieces in parallel: Marcus Carlyle’s suicide, his compatriots’ possible suicides, the earthquakes, Myrra Dal. There was no real logical reasoning connecting any of it. Just a feeling. A feeling that Tobias tried to keep at bay—he wanted to look at only one piece of the puzzle at a time, otherwise the sense of foreboding was too great for his mind to take. He needed more sleep. He needed to find Myrra Dal. Somehow, he didn’t know how, there were answers there.

  Tobias had just started to drift when his tablet sprang to life and started pinging with notifications. Tobias bolted up in surprise and nudged Simpson awake. “Network is up.”

  Simpson immediately reached for his tablet like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. He heard a speaker connect on the other end, the small muffled voice of Simpson’s wife streaming in through an earbud.

  “Ruth?” Simpson spoke softly into the microphone, cupping his hand over the side of his head to better hear. “Baby? Are you there?”

  Tobias rolled over on his cot and faced the wall, trying to give them a little privacy. He checked his tablet for messages, holding the screen close to his face. A steady cascade of alert boxes popped up on his screen—audit results on Marcus Carlyle’s bank accounts, security alerts from his former creditors, messages his tablet had received postmortem. The IT guys had done an amazing job. Tobias was tapped into all his accounts, all his message feeds.

  He scrolled through each window of information diligently. Carlyle had multiple mail feeds, though it was easy to tell which ones were more important; some were obviously more publicly accessible, continuing to receive ad messages and news updates. Nothing important. His other mail feeds, a government feed and a privatized feed that Tobias recognized by name as very expensive and very exclusive, were almost completely devoid of new messages. Everyone who had anything important to say to Marcus Carlyle knew he was dead. The privatized mail feed had only one message unopened, with the subject line “Escape Protocol.” Tobias skimmed through.

  Feeling fearful for the future? Don’t be. While the path ahead may be difficult to face, it does not have to be uncomfortable or painful. As a member of our Federated Government and key donor to the Unified Science Alliance, we are allowing you exclusive access to our life-planning program, Escape. Simply tap into the uplink below and enter your ID PIN when prompted for further information and instructions.

  Please note this is a limited-capacity offer. Your discretion is appreciated.

  The message sounded like an odd and somewhat vague ad for life insurance. Tobias tapped the link and tried his ID PIN just to see. Access was, of course, barred. No matter. It didn’t have much to do with the whereabouts of Myrra Dal. Tobias made a mental note of it and moved on.

  Bank accounts came next. He scrolled through the lines of data greedily, previous activity on the account popping up at the top, mostly Marcus Carlyle moving funds from one account to another. Down at the bottom of the list there they were, a whole block of new transactions, starting three days ago.

  He scanned the addresses attached to each transaction; mostly they were attached to shops, but somewhere here there had to be a hotel or home rental. There it was, farther down on the list, early in the timeline.

  The Nabat Rafia Hotel.

  Vibrating with anticipation, Tobias wanted to shake Simpson, shout at him immediately, We found her! I found her! But Simpson was still deep in conversation with his wife, his face naked and vulnerable as he asked question after question about the house, the kids, the dog.

  Another ten minutes (Tobias watched them tick by), and Simpson finally hung up.

  “She’s here!” Tobias said in an urgent whisper as Simpson pressed the disconnect button on his tablet. “Myrra Dal! She’s here, look—”

  Tobias shoved his tablet screen in front of Simpson’s squinting face.

  “You did it. Wow—” His brow furrowed for a moment. “Who the hell goes to Nabat instead of Palmer? This place is barel
y a town…”

  “Who cares why she’s here,” Tobias said, a little exasperated. “The point is, she’s here. We have to go get her.” Tobias was already standing up, searching for his shoes. He kicked himself mentally: all this time spent in Palmer, and Myrra Dal was living in the town next door.

  “Wait—” Simpson said. Tobias was tying one shoe, looking around for the second.

  “Wait,” Simpson said again, and he snapped his fingers at Tobias to get his attention. Every time he did that, it made Tobias feel like a dog being trained.

  “Wait for what? We can’t just—”

  “Look around. This town’s in the middle of disaster protocol. We can’t get out, and we’ve got nowhere to hold her.” Simpson gestured around to all the sleeping Palmer agents blanketing the floors of the jail cells. “It could be like this for days.”

  “They’ll get the tunnels stabilized soon. And there’s got to be someplace we can hold her—a closet, or handcuffed to the cell bars, something.”

  Simpson eyed him. “We can’t stuff Myrra Dal in a closet until the transit starts working. The CWRA would have our heads.”

  Tobias felt sheepish about even suggesting it, but plowed ahead stubbornly. Palmer had been the wrong call. Tobias wanted so to be right, to have the upper hand for once, after following Simpson’s lead this long.

  “Then what do you want to do?” he shouted. A man two cots down grumbled, and Tobias lowered his voice. “Let her go? Give up?”

  “No—we still go after her. Need to get eyes on the kid, at least.” Simpson raised his hands, placating. “We just have to be smart about it. Transit’s down, boats are capsized. Even if she wanted to get out on foot, most of the staircases are damaged. We can’t get out of town, and she can’t get out of town. But we still have the element of surprise. So we keep an eye on her. We tail her, we know where she is at all times, and the second a train or a boat or something is back in working order, we arrest her and bring her in.”

  Simpson paused, waiting for Tobias’s reaction.

  “That sound good to you? Or are you going to bite my head off again?”

  Tobias shrugged. He was still frustrated, but it wouldn’t do to channel any anger toward Simpson. Simpson was right. The best course of action required a little patience. Tobias was exhausted, his body was bruised and sore. He felt like a walking raw nerve.

  “That sounds good,” he said, after too long in silence. Then, to show Simpson there were no hard feelings, “I can take the first stakeout shift, if you want. I think it’d be good, to have just one thing to focus on for a while.”

  “Sounds good,” Simpson said, and crumpled back onto his cot once again. Now that there was no crowd to lead, he looked more empty and shaken.

  “How’s Ruth?” Tobias asked, keeping his tone soft—trying to apologize, in his own way, for snapping.

  “She’s fine. Shaken up, but fine. Kids are good.” Simpson’s eyes welled up a little. “It didn’t hit as hard there as it did in Palmer, but there’s still damage. Some skyscrapers got evacuated, they’re making repairs. And, ah—the Keo Bridge collapsed. But that time of night, almost nobody was on it. Last count the fatalities were twelve injured, two dead.”

  “The bridge collapsed—wow.” Tobias tried to picture the Thamso River without it. Was Barnes’s apartment in one of the evacuated buildings? Probably not, but he worried for him nonetheless.

  He grabbed his bag, the one Simpson had packed for him back in Palmer, and stood to leave.

  “I’m glad everyone’s OK.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Simpson said. “You gonna call him?” he added, sensing the gaping hole in the conversation that was Barnes.

  “Yeah, I will. On my way over.” He didn’t want Simpson watching him when he made that call, didn’t want him to see too much naked emotion.

  “Take care of yourself. Check in once you get to the hotel, once you have eyes on her.” Simpson was already horizontal and half-asleep by the time he finished the sentence. For someone who hours ago had led throngs of people away from disaster, he now looked quite small.

  Tobias wanted to reach out and touch Simpson’s shoulder and somehow through that contact fix everything that was wrong. He wanted to feel Simpson’s worry ebb away, along with his own. He wanted to tell Simpson that he was OK, that his family was OK, that it was all going to be OK, whether that was true or not.

  Tobias walked through the main square of Nabat, inserting his earpiece and dialing Barnes’s number on his tablet. He stopped briefly, looking past the white stone pillars that buttressed the cavern opening and out onto the cliffs and the sea. Boats were piled in shattered mounds at different intervals along the shore, along with the jagged remnants of docks, which looked like snapped twigs at this height. Locals told him the beach had not been there before. Tobias could see, on the pale vertical face of the cliff, deposits of seaweed and silt that showed where the waterline had been before Palmer’s collapse, some five meters above the sand. He looked out at the water and imagined the ghost city that remained deep under the waves. He shivered to think of his own decomposed body floating somewhere in one of the thousands of rooms in one of the thousands of buildings. In another universe, with another set of circumstances, that’s where he was: dead with vacant eyes, fish nibbling at his fingertips.

  The ringtone patched through, a little staticky, but connecting. The thought of conversation made Tobias nervous. He didn’t feel like talking about his own experience with the earthquake. Better to ignore those aftershocks of panic, let them slowly dissipate on their own. But he’d worried about Barnes all morning. He both wanted to know how Barnes was doing and didn’t want to know, didn’t want to confirm anything that would add to the trauma of the moment.

  Four rings before Barnes picked up the call. He would be in his office now, hopefully, if the precinct was still in good shape. New London was mostly fine, he reminded himself. Not like Palmer. Barnes would be fine.

  “Toby?” Barnes’s voice on the other line was gruff and professional as always, but Tobias detected a higher pitch to it, a little strain. Tobias pictured him at his beloved wooden desk.

  “Hi, Barnes,” Tobias said, swallowing down a lump in his throat before he tried to say more. He rubbed his thumb distractedly over some small spiderweb-like fissures in a pillar, letting his fingers follow one crack, then jump to another.

  “Are you OK?” Barnes asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Tobias replied. “I’m sure you got the news… Everybody got out of Palmer OK—so I’m OK.”

  Barnes coughed, and the high tension in his voice eased a little bit. “OK.”

  “Are you OK?” Tobias asked, once he was sure he could keep his voice level. It would feel like letting Barnes down, in a way, if his voice were to break.

  “Everything’s fine here. One of the evidence lockers got a bit banged up—how’s the case?” Barnes was talking a little too fast.

  “Is your apartment OK, are you getting water? I heard there were some burst pipes—”

  “Apartment’s fine. Been trying to keep everybody calm. Mrs. Reed keeps going on and on about her canary, says the bird is permanently scarred, won’t sleep. Of all the things to worry about at a time like this…”

  Tobias laughed. It felt good to laugh. They were in a more comfortable place now, he and Barnes.

  “The case is going good. We know where she is now, we’re monitoring her. Just can’t take her in until trains are running again. But we’re tailing her until we can.” It felt good to sound so in control.

  “That’s good—that’s great. Well done—” Barnes sounded relieved. Tobias laughed again, at nothing in particular. He heard another cough on the other end of the line. Barnes was clearing his throat. “You’re doing good, Toby.”

  Tobias gripped the side of the pillar hard and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to jam down a wave of feeling that was threatening to rise up. He squeezed his eyes so hard he saw sparks behind his eyelids.

  �
�Toby?”

  Tobias punched his own arm in an attempt to distract his body. He took a few breaths through his nose. He allowed his eyes to open.

  “Toby, you still there?”

  Another breath.

  “Yeah—yeah, sorry, the connection’s bad. Sorry—I’m just—” If he could just get his voice steady—

  “I’m glad you’re OK,” he said finally.

  A pause on the line. Barnes cleared his throat again, and the higher pitch to his voice was back.

  “Yes, well—me too.” More coughing. It was starting to sound like a tic. “Well, I should—”

  “Yes, me too—” Tobias said. “We’ll talk soon.”

  “Yes—”

  Then a click, and Tobias was left with the soft roar of the waves below and the hum of the crowd in the square behind him, echoing off the stone walls and the arches of the caverns, a never-ending ambient din.

  17

  MYRRA

  Myrra’s room was no longer her own. Now it was full of people lying on rollout mattresses, clutching what belongings they still had. The Nabat Rafia had effectively been converted into a refugee camp. The lobby was especially crowded; it was the best place to get a tablet signal. Everywhere people were sitting up on their beds, hunched over screens, trying to get a message out to loved ones or find information on the state of a distant city. Myrra picked her way around the bodies and rolling luggage, hearing snippets of conversations.

  One woman, whispering into a speaker: “This is insane. It’s taking me fifteen minutes to upload a single news story. There’s too many people on the network—”

  Another man, camped under a table: “Have you been able to reach Melanie? She should know if there’s damage to the Kittimer house—”