The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Well, if he wanted to lie about his life, he could lie about it. That’s what she did, most days. But she would watch him.

  The man clicked off his flashlight and put it neatly back in his pocket. “He’ll be OK,” he said, gesturing to Sem.

  “So you just carry a flashlight around everywhere?” she asked.

  He smiled a little. “I like to be prepared.”

  Charlotte flopped over sideways onto the tile floor and wiggled back and forth, trying to roll toward some shelves holding bleach and sponges. She hadn’t yet figured out crawling, thankfully, but Myrra still rushed over to grab her before she could get at the chemicals. Once again immobilized, Charlotte fussed in her arms.

  “I can watch him till he’s sober, if you need to get back to bed.”

  “Don’t you need to sleep too?”

  The man laughed, a little mournful. “Me? I haven’t slept in days.”

  He was giving her an odd look again, not the look a stranger would give, the look of someone with a level of investment in her life.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him, sizing him up. It was a strange combination, to like a person and to also not trust him.

  “David,” he said, which didn’t feel quite right. “What’s yours?”

  “Emily,” she said, though she’d wanted to say, “Myrra.” She wanted to be honest, in some way, to counteract his lies.

  “Emily,” David repeated, and smiled with a hit of irony in his expression that she couldn’t comprehend. “It’s nice to meet you, Emily.”

  18

  TOBIAS

  Tobias waited until Myrra Dal was out of the room, then let his expression crumble into panic and concern. He flipped through each moment of the conversation in his head. Had he given anything away? He didn’t think he had. He needed to talk to Simpson. He looked down at his wrist. His watch read five thirty. Was that too early to wake him?

  The young man—Sem, apparently—groaned again from his spot next to the toilet. His tan cheek was fused to the white surface of the bowl, and as he slouched farther toward the floor, his mouth and eyelid stretched up a little on one side. First things first. He needed to get this kid some water. Then food. Then coffee.

  Myrra Dal seemed familiar with Sem. It would be worth it to have a conversation with him, anyhow. There wasn’t much food left in the hotel’s storage rooms, but after he talked with one of the hotel’s cooks, a man named Georg, they managed to find a box of instant mashed potatoes. Sem would be able to keep that down. Mashed potatoes or porridge had always worked best when he’d needed to get David and Ingrid back on their feet.

  When he got back from the kitchen with the heated mixture, Sem was still drifting on some sort of a high, but he at least was able to sit up a little better. Tobias dragged his body a polite distance away from the toilet and spooned him some mashed potatoes. Sem felt the substance on his lips before opening his mouth. His eyes were slits. He chewed the mash needlessly, with slow exaggerated movements, like the sloths Tobias had seen as a kid in the New London Zoo.

  Five or six spoonfuls later, Tobias ventured a question.

  “So,” he said, raising another bite of mashed potatoes to Sem’s lips. Sem opened obediently. “Do you know Emily very well?”

  He waited for Sem to chew and swallow the bite. He decided he wouldn’t tell Sem that he was Security. Not yet. Myrra Dal had a way of drawing people to her side.

  “Emily,” Sem said slowly. “Emily works in communications.”

  This wasn’t helpful. Sem took another bite. The mashed potatoes were getting lukewarm; they had a more paste-like consistency now, but he was still gulping down each spoonful.

  “What about Emily? Did you talk to Emily much?” Sem didn’t register the question. Tobias snapped his fingers in front of Sem’s eyes. “Hey, Sem, what do you and Emily talk about?”

  “Emily—” Sem said, but then failed to finish his sentence. Tobias sat back, giving up for the moment. Maybe he would get more out of him in a few hours. He could check back in the guise of a concerned stranger.

  His thoughts drifted back to his conversation with Dal—she was surprising. Most contract workers he’d talked to had a certain built-in submissiveness to them, even if they were finding ways to rebel, even if they’d attempted escape. It was something that was carefully taught to them from birth, and it was hard to shake. Even if your higher brain might question authority, that deep-down conditioning held on.

  He’d felt her watching him, sizing him up. After the life she’d led, or, to be more accurate, the life she’d survived, she probably sized up everyone that way upon meeting them, trying to suss out motives, weaknesses. He felt a twinge of worry, hoping he’d passed the test. No. It would be fine. He hadn’t given anything away.

  It felt good to interact with her. He felt a small pang of guilt just thinking it. Good wasn’t quite the right word, but it was some kind of a breakthrough to talk to her, even if it was under false pretenses. She had better posture than he’d imagined. Her voice was lower. It was strange to hear such a low voice come out of such a small person.

  That first day he’d sat in the corner in the lobby, and seeing Myrra Dal walk by in person, right there in front of him, had been a shock to his system. He had been able to recognize her from the worker’s permit photo, but she looked very, very different here. A lot of it seemed to be money—her hair was still wild, but now it was styled in such a way that the wildness looked purposeful. Her stained work clothes had been replaced with a stylish purple day dress and high-heeled boots. Even the baby stroller she pushed looked top of the line.

  There was also something in her expression that set her apart from the mob of refugees in the lobby. Everyone here still went about daily tasks: making phone calls, checking in on the state of the trains, running out to find food. But they were operating in a sort of haze, as though only a portion of their brains was devoted to such things and the rest of their thoughts were concerned with figuring out, cosmically, how they’d ended up in the situation they were in. Myrra Dal displayed no such confusion. It was as if she’d expected the earthquake. She seemed very tense, as if her body was always on high alert, waiting for a blow. She held on to Charlotte with a particular intensity, as if at any moment a bomb might go off and she had to be ready to shield her. And she seemed constantly tired. Deep-in-the-soul tired.

  It could have simply been her status as a fugitive, but there was something in the way she looked around at the crowds of people, wary of them and worried for them, that suggested she knew something that she was keeping back. Tobias thought again of Marcus Carlyle’s suicide, of the other deaths, and wondered about the connection. He both wanted to know more and was afraid to know.

  “Can I have more water?” Sem asked, raising his head to take a look around. His speech was still slurred, but there was at least a little more color to his skin. Tobias went to the tap and refilled the glass.

  “Emily,” Sem said again, staring at a fixed point on the stone wall as though it were another person engaging in the other half of a conversation.

  “Yeah, did Emily and you talk much?” Tobias asked, for what felt like the millionth time, shutting off the tap and bringing the glass over to Sem.

  “Emily told me the world was going to end,” Sem said, his face twisting up and frowning. “That’s a messed-up thing to tell someone. She told me that, and then the earthquake happened, and it’s just… it’s really messed up.”

  “Was she joking?” Tobias asked, the question out of his mouth almost before it had entered his head. It seemed the only feasible response.

  “No,” Sem said, and coughed a little on his own spit. His eyes watered. “She seemed really, really worried about it.”

  Tobias didn’t know how to respond to that. It wasn’t the sort of information one received without immediately dismissing it as ridiculous. Myrra Dal believes it’s the end of the world. Maybe it was a new religion among the workers. Cults popped up sometimes. But that didn’t
sound right. Not for Myrra Dal. He tucked the information away in his brain to think about later, but for now it was impossible to dwell on. He lifted the water glass to Sem’s mouth and tilted it until the water reached his lips. Sem closed his eyes and swallowed, grateful.

  Sem shifted his gaze from the spot on the wall to Tobias.

  “The world’s not going to end, right?” He was looking at Tobias now as if Tobias were the ultimate authority on such issues.

  “No, the world’s not going to end,” Tobias said, trying his best to reflect that authority. Sem let out a long breath, letting the frown crumble and open up into crying outright. He seemed unburdened, as though he’d just confessed his sins.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  He curled up in a ball on the floor, propping his head on his arm. He seemed immediately ready for sleep.

  “What a messed-up thing to tell someone,” he mumbled, and then, “Don’t tell my dad about this.” Then he closed his eyes and passed out again. Tobias let him. He had no more questions for now and couldn’t quite figure out how to process what he had just heard, or whether such a notion was even worth taking seriously. He sat on the dingy tiles of the bathroom floor next to Sem, watching this man he’d just met recede back to sobriety in slow, steady waves, like an ebbing tide.

  As he sat there, he thought distantly about the end of the world, distantly because it wasn’t an idea one could ever really get close to or truly inhabit. It was as though the thought were only experienced as a far-off voice on a speaker, half-submerged in radio static, or a muffled argument on the other side of a wall. The world had ended once, generations ago, he’d read all about it in history books. And even then they’d found a way to keep going. Life always finds a way to keep going.

  At length, with Sem still unconscious next to him, he dismissed the idea entirely. The world could not end. It could not end because life exists. We have always existed, Tobias thought, and knew at once that that was scientifically untrue. But it felt true. I have always existed and will always exist. I—we—I—exist and stretch in all directions, backward and forward in time, going on and on in the past and in the future. The world cannot end, because I exist. The world could not end, because I survived the collapse of Palmer. The world could not end because I haven’t yet filed my latest report with Barnes. The world cannot end because tomorrow I will have granola for breakfast. The world cannot end because. Because. “Because” was all that was needed. Anything else was crazy.

  Tobias left the sleeping Sem in the care of his coworker Georg and walked toward the darker streets of Nabat, in the deeper caverns where the streets narrowed and stone arches got lower. He risked getting some distance from the hotel to avoid anyone eavesdropping on the call. One or two people passed him with tired, paranoid faces. It was impossible to be alone anywhere in Nabat right now, but at least here, farther in the caves, he was a little more isolated.

  On his first day of the stakeout, he’d placed a couple of hidden cameras in potted plants near the hotel entrance. He checked them now. The feeds were still good. He’d know if Myrra Dal tried to leave.

  “What happened?” Simpson asked the second he answered Tobias’s call. He must know something was wrong. It was still early in the morning, and they’d mostly been debriefing at night. And Simpson wasn’t due to relieve him on the stakeout until noon.

  “Myrra Dal approached me last night and I had a conversation with her, but I didn’t give anything away,” Tobias said, cutting to the chase. Simpson stayed silent on the line for a few seconds, and Tobias pictured him pinching the bridge of his nose the way he did when he got frustrated.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I swear I didn’t do anything to engage her. I kept a good distance, I didn’t stare—”

  “OK, fine, how did it happen?” Simpson asked, still sounding frustrated.

  “There was a medical emergency with the concierge—he was sick on booze or something worse. She singled me out because I was the only one awake.”

  He heard Simpson sigh through the speaker. “And you couldn’t say no…”

  “The concierge was collapsing on the floor. It would have looked even weirder if I’d avoided her,” Tobias finished.

  Simpson stayed quiet on the line for a few seconds. Tobias could practically hear him thinking. In his current state of overwork and agitation, his first bitter instinct would be to place blame. They were both exhausted. When not watching the hotel, they had been taking turns helping Nabat Security with grievances and crowd control. Sleep was a distant memory.

  Tobias stopped underneath a streetlamp that was lighting a sharp curve in the corridor. There was a large door carved into the wall with a sign above it advertising raw silicon, wholesale. The streets were much more empty back here—nobody wanted to stand around among mine shafts and warehouses. There were small cracks here and there on the walls—Tobias wondered if they’d been there for years, or if the earthquake had caused them. Someone had taken the time to cover the cracks with gold paint. It glinted and winked at different angles under the lamplight. It made Tobias smile, to see something beautiful like that, back this far in the dark.

  He thought about how many cracks he’d seen in the walls lately and thought of Myrra Dal’s prediction. His smile faded. No. It wasn’t worth thinking about.

  “Is the concierge OK?” Simpson asked finally. Tobias reoriented himself in the conversation. This was Simpson’s way of moving past this and absolving him.

  “Concierge is fine. I watched him through the worst of it, he’s got colleagues looking after him now.”

  “Good.”

  Simpson had him go through his entire conversation with Myrra Dal, picking apart every detail of the admittedly short interaction. He seemed suspicious but satisfied by how Tobias had handled himself.

  “OK,” he said. “Hang back for now. Keep an eye on her, but don’t—don’t—talk to her again.” He paused, working something out.

  “This’ll be over soon,” he continued. “Nabat agents told me that the trains should be running again tomorrow morning. The second the trains are back online, we’ll grab her. Together. Just hang on till then. Don’t talk to her anymore.”

  The trains would be running soon. The sentence sounded like church bells in Tobias’s ears. It was the best news he’d heard in a while.

  “Yeah, OK. Good plan,” he said, then realized how perfunctory that sounded. “I appreciate you talking through this with me,” he said, as a follow-up. “I won’t let you down.”

  “It’s OK, kid,” Simpson said. “Just a bad coincidence. This shit happens, more often than it should.” It was the most warmth that Tobias had heard from him since the earthquake. It was enough for Tobias to forgive Simpson for calling him “kid.”

  For his next stakeout shift, Tobias changed location. Instead of a corner chair in the lobby, he was now sitting on a bench across the street from the entrance. Across the street and down the block a little, just close enough that he could still clearly see the door, but farther away, much farther away. Hopefully far enough that Myrra Dal wouldn’t see him or try to engage him, but close enough that he could still see her comings and goings. That was the danger, losing her now, when they were so close to being able to take her in.

  He rifled through his backpack, disentangling charging cords in an attempt to get to his tablet, which had migrated down to the bottom. He realized with some alarm that his tranq gun and badge were also tangled in wires at the bottom of his bag. He retrieved them as well, holstering his gun under his blazer and placing his badge back in the breast pocket. Tobias chided himself—the safety latch hadn’t even been properly secured on the gun. He must have removed the gun while half-asleep. He knew he wasn’t at his best.

  He kept scanning the length of the block and checking the lobby doors. Too many people in the city. It was a miracle that he’d found a spot on this bench. It was a miracle that he’d been able to keep tabs on Myrra Dal at all.


  The hotel’s double doors swung open and another group filed out with wrinkled shopping bags. Two families from Palmer (you could tell the people from Palmer, because they all looked a little disoriented) and Sem the concierge, holding the door for them, looking more sober and much more tired. His shoulders slumped, and his eyes had sunken into purplish sacks of skin.

  Sem looked up and caught Tobias watching him. He gave a wan smile. Tobias raised his arm and waved. He sincerely wished Sem well. He had a feeling that he would have judged Sem more if he’d encountered him before the earthquake. What Sem had done was stupid. But Tobias felt a certain camaraderie—they’d all been through something, and they were all looking for ways to keep going, some with work, some with distraction. Sem returned Tobias’s wave with a small, sheepish rise of the hand.

  Just then, as if conjured by their presence together, Myrra Dal appeared, pushing her stroller out of the second lobby door. She noticed Sem and immediately followed his gaze over to Tobias.

  His coat was open. His hand was raised. His gun would be visible. On reflex, Tobias lowered his hand immediately and sat down, but it was too late. He saw her expression change: at first a smile, a recognition, and then, when she looked at Tobias a half second longer, the smile went away. For a blip of a moment her expression turned serious, and then it was replaced by another smile, a different smile. This was a pretend smile, an everything-is-fine smile, an I-didn’t-see-anything smile, a smile from a person who knew how to mask emotions for survival’s sake.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, Tobias thought. He shoved his tablet back in his bag and rose off the bench. He started toward her—the trains weren’t running yet, but they’d just have to find somewhere to hold her.