The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  An older woman lying on her side with the tablet in front of her face, speaking slowly and clearly to be understood through the bad signal: “I love you. I miss you. I love you. I love you. Be well.”

  Myrra hiked down with Charlotte to the newly formed beach, ostensibly with a volunteer cleanup crew, but really hoping she’d spot a boat worth stealing. Charlotte was unhappy to be in the sling again, though Myrra’s back had gotten used to it. She was less and less able to envision letting Charlotte go. It was getting to the point where she didn’t even mind her crying, so long as this tiny living being was there with her, breathing against her skin, interacting with her.

  The sand was littered with objects, so densely it was difficult to walk. She compiled a list of her most interesting finds as she stuffed everything into black plastic bags: one purple high-heeled shoe; a scallop-shaped makeup compact; a brown leather wallet (Myrra pocketed the cash inside); a pack of playing cards that had condensed into a single sodden brick; a pink crystal doorknob; the bottom half of a traffic light; lots and lots of broken glass. There were plenty of boats too, but none that looked as if they’d still float.

  Security littered the streets, much more than before thanks to the influx of Palmer SB. Myrra wasn’t sure if anyone would still be looking for her in the midst of all this chaos, but she wasn’t about to let her guard down. Two days ago, there had been a million ways to get out of town, and now, nothing.

  There was always a way out. She just had to find it. Until then she kept off the main streets as much as possible and wore large sunglasses whenever she went out; hats, scarves, anything she could use to hide her face.

  A man in a suit who was staying in Myrra’s room approached her to complain about the thickness of the mattresses.

  “It’s my back, you see,” he said, giving Myrra a smile that he seemed to think was ingratiating. He reminded her of Marcus. “You wouldn’t happen to have any extra bedding or blankets I could use, just to pad things up a bit?”

  An older man trailed behind him, holding his luggage with a vacant expression on his face. Contract worker. The man in the suit caught her looking at the bag man. He held out his hand for a handshake.

  “My name’s Richard, by the way.” He gestured with his head to the tired man behind him. “That’s Bram, my secretary.”

  Bram didn’t speak or give any expression of greeting. He looked straight ahead, seemed to be looking through her.

  Myrra didn’t return Richard’s handshake but did give him a small false smile to match his own. She repeated what she had been told by emergency personnel: only one mattress per person. Myrra had given up her own bed to a family of five; she saw Richard glance at their pillows with a covetous look.

  All transit had stopped. She could leave on foot perhaps, but it was harder to buy food at this point, and she didn’t know how far it was to the nearest town. Myrra could go hungry, but Charlotte couldn’t. And she couldn’t leave Charlotte behind now. Before, there had been a guarantee that she would be noticed, at a hospital, on church steps, or even left behind in the hotel room. But in a sea of refugees, who would notice her or have the resources to take care of her? Myrra wasn’t going to let Charlotte go unless she knew the baby would be well cared for, whatever time was left.

  She knew how far it was to Kittimer, some volunteers had told her, but getting to Kittimer required a boat. A few men stayed down on the shore, working with hammers and nails, sheets of metal and vinyl, patching together bits of shattered fiberglass, making what repairs they could to the boats that seemed worth repairing. Myrra kept her eye on them, visited often.

  Myrra ran into Sem one day while she wove her newly-purchased stroller through the lobby. His eyes were bloodshot, and she smelled liquor on his breath.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. He leaned into her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  “This is crazy,” he said, not responding to her question.

  She tried again. “Have you been sleeping?”

  Maneuvering him with both shoulders, she lowered him gently into the chair behind the reception desk. Sem’s eyes looked a little watery. He wasn’t looking directly at her; instead he stared out at the front door.

  “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told you,” she said.

  “Told me what? It was just an earthquake.” He burrowed his body into the upholstery.

  Myrra moved her hand down to his cheek, and Sem leaned into it. His eyes closed.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said, half mumbling. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She stayed until she felt sure that he was asleep.

  Birds kept smashing into Nabat’s cliffsides, whole flocks sometimes, leaving their corpses with bent necks and broken wings to litter the stairs and walkways. News was trickling through a bit better now. Apparently this was happening all over. They were pelting high-rise windows in New London and the stained glass churches of Kittimer, same as they were pummeling the stone walls of Nabat. Something about the earthquake, the size of it, had displaced landmarks just enough that it was messing with the birds’ internal navigation.

  At night Myrra slept outside on the balcony, with Charlotte’s bassinet right beside her cot. She’d been nervous about the balcony, but now it seemed like the calmest place.

  One night a seagull hit a wall and fell on top of her, shocking her awake. The bird’s neck was bent at an odd angle, its eyes still open. It moved its beak, working it open and closed, full of confusion. The eyes stared at her as though she were some sort of anchor to life, some way of understanding the circumstances. She sat up and stared back. They stayed like that for another minute or so, hard to tell how long, until the bird stopped moving. Myrra thought she saw, in its eyes, the moment of death.

  Myrra visited the train station again and stared up at the black dead screens. Would it be possible to head out using the abandoned tunnels? She rocked Charlotte back and forth in her stroller, her eyes trailing the cracks in the walls.

  No, too dangerous.

  The station was mostly empty. No trains, no people. A woman with a red bucket was spackling the walls at the end of the platform. She was small, with fine features and fine straight black hair. She didn’t seem the type to work construction.

  The woman dipped a flat putty knife into the bucket, and it came out covered in gold. She scraped the knife across a crack in the wall, and it left a wide golden swipe across its surface. Myrra walked closer. The woman noticed her curiosity and smiled at her.

  “It’s not actually gold,” she said. “It’s gold paint mixed into a construction polymer. Strong stuff.” She took out a rag and buffed the wall, wiping away the excess. The splintering cracks transformed into the splitting branches of a golden tree, right in front of Myrra’s eyes. “This is a version of a repair technique that my grandmother taught me. If something breaks, you don’t hide the damage. Instead you fill it with gold and really let the cracks show. It’s part of the new life of the object.”

  The woman looked down at Charlotte, noticing her for the first time.

  “Oh—” she said. “How sweet! Hello!”

  She danced her fingers in front of Charlotte’s face. They were covered in gold too. Charlotte reached out to try to catch the woman’s hands, but she dodged.

  “No, no,” she cooed. “This stuff isn’t good for babies to eat.”

  The woman went back to her bucket with the putty knife. She reached high above her head to fill in a fissure near the ceiling.

  “Do you do construction for Nabat?” Myrra asked. “I haven’t seen this anywhere else.”

  “I’m actually a structural engineer—the local government hires me to check all the buildings, make sure they’re up to code. This is just something I wanted to do for the town. Felt like a good way to heal something.” She buffed out a stray smear of gold on the wall, bringing her face close to the surface to make sure every last bit was clean.

  “This was a good test for u
s, this earthquake. There’ve been so many little quakes, and now this big one… We’ve got cracks, but nothing collapsed. That’s good!” she said.

  As an engineer, surely she would suspect more, not just take the earthquakes at face value. Myrra ventured another question.

  “Why do you think we’ve had so many earthquakes lately?”

  The woman, about to add another layer to the wall, stopped her golden knife in midair. She froze in thought, a crinkle formed between her eyebrows.

  “It’s hard to say,” she said. “My best guess is that the world is just getting old. Engineers designed it to last a long time, but we’re reaching the end of the journey. Could be that now the world is just going to shake like this sometimes, until we reach Telos.” She tilted her head and looked up, a slight frown playing on the corner of her mouth. “But maybe not. There’s a lot of smart people running the world. We are good at fixing things.”

  She resumed her motion with the knife and swiped more gold onto the wall.

  “That’s what we do,” she said, almost to herself. “We fix what we can, and we move forward.”

  Late one night, crossing the room to fetch Charlotte a bottle, Myrra came across Richard sleeping soundly on two mattresses, one stacked on top of the other. Bram slept next to him, directly on the stone floor.

  A white rage sang in her veins. Myrra despised entitlement. It came from a lifetime of acrobatically manipulating herself to accommodate the whims of other people. Myrra knew she shouldn’t do anything that would attract attention, but she couldn’t help herself. She yanked hard on his ankle, pulling him halfway off the mattresses until Richard was startled awake. Myrra loomed over him, bending down so her face hovered close to his.

  “Give him back his bed,” she said, rigid but calm. He looked positively terrified.

  “But—my back—” Richard said, somewhat delirious.

  “Give him back his bed,” she said. “Or I will take you outside right now and shove you over the balcony.”

  Myrra wasn’t sure if she would be physically capable of doing this, but she must have sounded convincing enough. Richard scrambled off and dragged a mattress over to Bram, who awoke and looked utterly confused. But then he looked up at Myrra and seemed to understand. He climbed onto the mattress and was asleep again in thirty seconds. Myrra still hadn’t heard him speak a word.

  The next day, Myrra went down to the shore. One by one, fishermen disentangled the boats that were piled up against the docks. Some liked to talk to Myrra when she came down to visit. One in particular talked nonstop, like a salesman trying to close a deal, big smile, winks, compliments. He was young, strong, and tall, with dark hair and dark features. In another lifetime, perhaps, she would have flirted back a little. But now all she wanted was information.

  “A cyclical engine?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you want. They cost a little more, but you’ll make your money back in energy costs. They barely ever need a recharge.”

  “So does this boat have a cyclical engine?”

  “Of course. But,” the man said, brushing sealant on the underside of the hull, “let me give you some advice: if you’re looking to buy a boat, this isn’t the kind of boat you want. Fishing boats like this are too big, more unruly. What you want is something small and sporty, something fast.”

  Myrra nodded. That might be true, but this boat was the closest she’d found to something seaworthy. Or at least it would be soon.

  He keeps his engine keys in his back right pocket, she noted.

  Myrra stumbled on Sem again in the dark early morning, while bouncing a restless Charlotte up and down the hallways. He was half-conscious, half on the floor, and in the dim light of the hall sconces Myrra could see that his skin looked disturbingly gray. She drew closer to him; the smell of liquor was overpowering, and something else. Something chemical.

  Charlotte let out a small cry, upset that they’d stopped moving.

  “Shhhh…” Myrra said, and smoothed her hair, but didn’t take her eyes off Sem.

  Was he still breathing?

  “Sem? Wake up.” She tapped gently at the side of his face. He grunted in response.

  She couldn’t take him to a hospital, not with all the Security about. She needed to get him somewhere she could look him over. There was a bathroom behind the reception desk—at this time of night there was a chance it wouldn’t be occupied.

  “Come on,” she said, shaking his shoulder and hoisting him up to lean against her. With Sem leaning on one side of her and Charlotte on the other, they only barely made it to the lobby before Myrra’s grip weakened and Sem slipped down to the floor again. Even after a lifetime of manual labor, she was simply too small to carry that much weight. Myrra sighed and looked around. The lobby was still very dark, bodies and cots scattered across the floor. Everyone was still asleep. Almost everyone.

  In a corner of the lobby, a thin young man was sitting awake in an armchair, writing a message on a lit tablet screen. Strange for anyone else to be up this early. The blue glow of the screen illuminated a pale face, casting odd shadows against his cheekbones. With everyone else collapsed on the floor, he looked like a ghost watching over the dead.

  At her feet, Sem heaved as though he might vomit. The young man in the corner perked up and took notice. He kept looking at Sem and then back at Myrra, but he didn’t get up from the chair. His mouth puckered into a confused frown. Whatever confusion he was feeling, she was going to have to force him to get over it. She couldn’t handle Sem alone.

  With silent exaggerated gestures she waved at the young man, beckoning him to join her. He stalled for a few more seconds, looking more at her than at Sem, before he shook it off and walked over.

  Myrra whispered to him, “This man is sick. Can you help me get him to the bathroom?”

  The young man nodded, looking a little dumbfounded. Myrra bent down to grab one of Sem’s arms.

  “Here, let me—” He jumped forward to grab Sem’s other arm, and rose up to take on the majority of Sem’s body weight. Myrra was surprised. The man had a wiry build; it didn’t seem as if he’d be able to lift Sem on his own.

  Together they delicately picked their way around the sleeping bodies until they reached the reception bathroom and set him down next to the toilet. Sem looked at Myrra through dipped eyelids and for the first time that morning seemed to recognize her. He started to speak, but it came out as unintelligible slurring.

  “Shhh, it’s OK,” she said, and lifted up the toilet seat, propping his head near the bowl. She put Charlotte down on the tile in the far corner of the bathroom, still within her sight but out of reach of Sem. Charlotte fussed, crinkling her brow and staring back at Myrra with outstretched arms. Myrra produced a pacifier from her pocket and popped it into Charlotte’s open mouth. Charlotte sat back and folded her arms, still not exactly happy, but quiet. Myrra kissed her on the cheek and turned back to Sem.

  The man crouched down next to Sem, pushing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses farther up on his nose. A deep crease appeared in his forehead as he concentrated on the problem at hand, and Myrra was almost amused at the way his expression matched Charlotte’s.

  “Do you know him?” he asked, looking up at her. There was something odd in his inflection as he asked the question. It felt like someone practicing small talk, but with a more invested curiosity. Like a journalist interviewing a celebrity.

  “I met him about a week ago. He’s the concierge.”

  Sem moaned, and his torso seized. His eyes opened in a sudden shot of adrenaline, his neck went erect, and then he dove face-first into the toilet bowl. Myrra looked away, but she could still hear the sounds of him retching.

  “It’s good he’s throwing up,” the young man said. “Do you know what he took?” He spoke with authority. Maybe he’d be useful in a crisis after all.

  “Seems like mostly booze. Maybe something stronger.” Sem’s face emerged from the mouth of the toilet bowl. He looked pale. A little bit of sick dribbled down hi
s cheek. Myrra went searching through cupboards for a rag, and then made do with a sponge. She went over to the sink, wetted it with cool water, then crouched down between the man and Sem and wiped down Sem’s face. Her knees knocked against the man’s knees, and she put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself.

  He jumped and looked up when she touched him, and again Myrra felt something awkward in his response; hesitation, a hint of recognition.

  He pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket, pried open Sem’s eyelids one by one, and flashed the light at his pupils. “Response looks OK,” he said.

  “Are you a doctor?” Myrra asked.

  “No,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on Sem’s face. “But I’ve seen alcohol poisoning before.”

  Myrra waited, but he didn’t elaborate.

  “Where?” she couldn’t help asking. He looked entirely too young and too clean-cut to have made such a claim.

  He paused a half second before speaking, just long enough for Myrra to catch that he was lying, but briefly enough that she could also tell he was good at it.

  “I worked at a bar for a while,” he said. He kept staring at Sem, checking his eyes and face, but it felt as if he was avoiding looking at her. She looked down at his hands. No calluses. His eyes had that pale bloodshot look that came from staring at screens. Office work? No way he’d worked in a bar, at least not the type of bar where overdoses were common. She felt pricks of suspicion creep slowly up her spine, like the legs of an insect. Without knowing exactly why, she darted her eyes over to Charlotte in the corner, making sure she was still safe.

  She inspected the rest of him. There was something boyish about him. The lenses of his glasses were smudged, he had floppy brownish hair that was a little unkempt. His hands and feet were too big for his body, as though he was still growing into himself. But his eyes didn’t look as young as she’d thought at first glance. They weren’t as bright as they ought to be. There was a light that existed in the eyes when a person was still green and hadn’t seen much. Jake was like that. Boyish or not, this man had eyes that were dimmer with knowing, the type of knowing that rests on you when you’ve come face-to-face with the world and realized that the world owes you nothing. The innocent were never able to pick up on this knowing, but Myrra could recognize her kindred.