The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Myrra kept moving away from the door, but not so fast that a passerby would notice. Tobias pushed through the crowded street toward her, and she looked down briefly at Charlotte and the stroller. Tobias knew what she was doing: she was calculating her odds of outrunning him with the baby. The odds were slim.

  In a split second she made her choice and turned the stroller around, sprinting back toward the hotel entrance. Bad move, Tobias thought. The hotel had no back exits. He was almost disappointed.

  Myrra Dal passed by Sem at the door, whispering something quickly to him. He looked unnerved—Tobias couldn’t tell if it was because she’d just tipped him off or because the last time they’d seen each other, Sem had been vomiting his guts out.

  Dal disappeared through the door, Tobias ten steps behind her.

  As he pushed through the hotel doors, Sem tried to stop him, physically put a hand on his chest—“Hey, man, I didn’t have a chance to thank you earlier—”

  Tobias tried to push past Sem’s hand and felt Sem push back, trying, as casually as he could, to keep Tobias in place. Tobias glared at him, batted his hand away, and continued inside. He could hear Sem chasing him with conversation: “No—wait—!”

  Where was Dal? He spotted her dark tangled hair past the crowd in the lobby, getting inside the elevator, the elevator doors closing. She turned back and met his eyes just before the doors closed, an unreadable expression on her face.

  Tobias was in a panic. Simpson was going to be livid. He didn’t even want to think about Barnes. Where was she going? He’d reviewed the building schematics days earlier. Outside of jumping into the sea, he couldn’t think of a way out.

  He thought of all this as he dashed for the stairs, taking them two at a time, trying to beat the elevator and figure out which floor would be her destination.

  Floor two. He swung open the stairwell door. No one. Floor three, even faster, leaping over three stairs when he could. He swung open the stairwell door; no one was there.

  He kept going to floor four, floor five, getting more and more winded as he went. Was he outpacing the elevator, or worse, was he too late? Dal’s room was on the sixth floor; it was the most likely place.

  He swung open the door at floor six and came face-to-face with Myrra Dal, who was standing in front of the door with her arms raised above her head. There was something in her hands—

  Tobias felt something metallic and cold smash against the side of his head.

  A fire extinguisher. Myrra Dal had been holding a fire extinguisher.

  Tobias heard a ringing in his ears, something wet was running down the side of his temple, but he managed to stay upright. Dal raised her arms to hit him again. He looked past her and saw that Charlotte Carlyle was in the stroller a few feet behind her. Tobias sidestepped her as she swung, stumbled into the hall, between Myrra Dal and Charlotte. He whirled his head around in both directions. The hallway was empty. For the first time in days, now, when he needed help, no one else was around. Everyone was in a room.

  Tobias reached for Charlotte’s stroller and wheeled it back a few paces, out of Dal’s reach. Now he had a bargaining chip. Myrra Dal’s eyes widened in horror, and she immediately dropped the fire extinguisher.

  With one hand Tobias kept a firm grip on the stroller, and with the other he wiped away the blood that was streaming down the side of his head. His sleeve came away with wet streaks of red. How hard had she hit him? He shook the blood off his sleeve as best he could and reached for his gun. He tried to aim at Dal’s chest, but his arm was dipping a little.

  “Myrra Dal, I am detaining you under suspicion of kidnapping, breaking contract, and for possible involvement in the deaths of Marcus and Imogene Carlyle,” he said as authoritatively as possible. He wished Simpson were here. He’d have to wait to call him until Dal was handcuffed.

  Myrra Dal raised her hands in the air, looking both terrified and threatening at the same time, like a cornered animal. It was hard to conceive that a person that small could be that intimidating, but here she was. It was something feral in her face, an expression that suggested that she would go for the throat if she needed to. Her eyes kept darting between Tobias and the stroller.

  “What’s your real name, David?” she asked. She gave no indication that she’d heard his previous statement.

  “I need you to lie facedown on the ground with your hands over your head.” He tilted his head the wrong way, and blood started pouring into his eyes. Head wounds bled forever, he remembered learning in training. He wiped the blood away with the back of his gun hand, as though he were wiping tears from his cheek. His muscles felt slow, as if he were moving through water.

  “I would like to know the name of the agent detaining me,” she replied.

  It felt dangerous to tell her his name, even though, as he flipped through his memory of The New London Security Bureau Handbook, it was actually one of the inherent rights of criminal suspects. He relented.

  “My name is Tobias Bendel.”

  “Now we both have the right names,” Myrra said.

  “Yes,” Tobias said, somewhat needlessly. It was hard to hold the gun up. There were clouds in his head.

  “Why did the Carlyles kill themselves?” Tobias heard himself ask. His mind felt distant from his body. He let go of the stroller for a moment, just long enough to slap himself across the face. It brought him back a little. A little more focus.

  “Isn’t this something you should be asking me later, in some dark interrogation room?” Myrra Dal was watching him with a great deal of focus, as if she was waiting to pounce. She glanced again at the stroller. Tobias took a step back, pulling the stroller with him. He leaned on it a little and concentrated all his strength on keeping the gun raised. The bleeding had to have stopped by now.

  He should have repeated his order for her to get down on the floor, or he should have just tranqed her where she stood, but instead he asked, “Why did you tell the concierge that the world was ending?”

  Myrra Dal’s eyes widened a little. Her hands stayed raised. She was calculating, he could tell, whether to lie or tell the truth. It was a look he’d seen on a million faces in a million interrogation videos. “Just tell me the truth,” he thought, no, said. He’d spoken the words out loud. He hadn’t meant to.

  Myrra Dal’s face crumpled a little.

  “I told him that because the world is ending,” she said, her voice full of exhaustion. There was a fuzzy blackness coming in at the edges of his eyes.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “Good,” she shot back. “Fine. Nobody fucking believes me. I’m not going to waste time trying to convince the person arresting me. Just get back to me in a month, and we’ll see who’s right.”

  Even through his haze, Tobias knew she was telling some kind of truth. He believed that she believed it. The cloudy blackness was closing in. He slapped his face again. He needed to detain her. Simpson would—

  He let go of the stroller, stumbled, and jostled the baby—he’d been leaning against it more than he’d thought. A caterwauling sound rose up. The baby was crying. Myrra Dal flinched, looked pained. Tobias fought the urge to comfort the child. He couldn’t handle the sound of a crying baby.

  He fished a pair of handcuffs out from where they were hooked on his holster.

  “You are prepared,” she said when she saw the cuffs. Was that a joke?

  “Get down on the ground, please,” he said. Even as he said it, he saw his gun arm lower, even though his brain was shouting to keep it raised. His knees buckled, and he felt his body crumple. No control now.

  He saw Myrra come toward him, through the pinhole of his vision, felt her catch him, a safe grip, one hand cradling the back of his neck, another firm and flat on the small of his back, lowering him down.

  “Shhh…” Her voice was close, next to his ear. The voice was panicked, almost guilty. “I’m sorry I had to hit you—”

  He felt the brush of her hand knocking the gun away, heard it dista
ntly as it skittered across the stone floor.

  Despite himself, he felt calm. Tobias let his mind swim. He thought, Let me not wake up. He thought of his little steel desk in the precinct and his little white apartment in the city. He appreciated the life he had. He thought of Barnes, and of all the chances he’d been given.

  Let me not wake up, he thought again. I couldn’t stand the disappointment.

  19

  MYRRA

  The boat cut calmly through the waves of the Palmer Sea. It was dark outside, the water black and impenetrable when Myrra tried to look below the surface.

  The ambient hum of the motor had helped to quiet Charlotte. Poor thing. She was so tired. Myrra had swaddled her again and tied Charlotte’s body in a sling, tight against her torso. She’d stopped screaming, but she would still let out small sounds every few minutes. Myrra could feel the vibration of Charlotte crying against her sternum, as though it echoed back in her own heart.

  She could have left Charlotte at the hotel—Security would have discovered the stroller before long next to their bloodied agent. She was no longer surprised that she’d kept her. Hauling Charlotte around was exhausting and inconvenient. The majority of the space in her bag was devoted to baby supplies. And yet.

  When Myrra fell asleep at night, there was another being breathing beside her. Just like old times.

  Myrra smoothed Charlotte’s downy hair. Charlotte tilted her head up in response, reaching with her mouth until she found one of Myrra’s fingers to suck on. They’d lost her pacifier somewhere along the way.

  Myrra pushed hard on the wheel and realigned the nose of the boat with the highest peaks on the jagged horizon. The man had been right—fishing boats were a little unruly. But Myrra was getting the hang of it. The Kittimer Mountains. The peaks had a strange colorful glow. She’d heard that the glow came from all the stained glass. It was a sight to see.

  Myrra’s hands still shook a little from the adrenaline. The noise it made when she’d brought down the fire extinguisher on his head. She’d thought she’d killed him. It was surprising for her to discover her own ruthlessness, like a low snarling animal that had lived all this time inside her chest. Up until this point in her life, she’d survived mostly by lying, by manipulating, and by hiding. She’d endured violence plenty but had never really inflicted violence upon others. It was a shock to her system.

  The smell of blood too, that unexpected smell of metal, the heat of it. Her senses had simultaneously overlaid the moment with the memory of the women of the laundry all ganging up on her after they’d caught her cheating at cards. She was beating a man and being beaten at the same time.

  Even now, in placid water, far from another human being, Myrra was having flashes of fists coming down on her face. She would have to take new precautionary measures once she reached the opposite shore, but for now she needed to calm down. She at least had a head start.

  She decided to take inventory of her surroundings. It was what she used to do when waking up from a nightmare as a child. Her mother had taught her that: When you wake up, and you don’t know where you are, just start counting the objects in the room. What’s above you? The ceiling with the light bulb and that corner of paint peeling down. What’s below you? That old mattress that sags in the middle. What’s to your right? The table and the clock. What’s to your left? Me, sleeping beside you.

  What was above her now? The sky, the stars. Myrra instinctively looked for cracks, to see if this was the night when everything broke apart. (How matter-of-fact she’d become, even through all the fear. The mind could really adapt to anything.) It was a futile gesture. Even if the cracks were there, she wouldn’t be able to make them out. She had no idea how high the sky was above her, but the entire thing was bathed in an impenetrable blackness right now.

  What was below her? The boat, with its top-of-the-line engine and a tiny cabin under Myrra’s feet. And below that, black water, small silvery waves. The water was a little less crowded with objects now than it had been. After a few days, most of the detritus had sunk back down to the bottom of the ocean or ended up on a beach. But the occasional bottle or shard of furniture still floated around, butting up against the side of the boat as it cut through the current. Myrra pictured the skeleton of Palmer even farther below. An entire dead city was entombed underneath her. Even if everyone got out alive, something still died. She imagined Palmer haunted by unseen ghosts: the empty towers, silent streets, abandoned parks, irrelevant fountains. And when the world gives way, she thought, will everyone here live as ghosts in space and haunt the place we once occupied, among the shards of metal and debris?

  Myrra shook off the image. What was ahead of her? Directly in front of her body was Charlotte, rubbing her face against Myrra’s breast. Her moaning had stopped. She would be asleep in a minute. Myrra smiled. And distantly ahead were the mountains, getting taller as Myrra got closer. They were definitely glowing. One face of the central peak emitted a purple light; another point near the top was an incandescent orange. And parts of the mountains, too, didn’t look like mountains at all but like a set of increasingly tall towers. Like a city stacked.

  What was behind her? Nabat. Caves. Pillars. Stone. Sem. Fear. Waiting. Refugees and crowds. David—no, Tobias. Tobias Bendel. Prying agents. Running. Money. Luxury. New London. Imogene. Marcus. Antiques. Paper and wood. Work. Waiting. Mother. Factories. Contracts. Slavery.

  Myrra thought about Security again, considering the situation as calmly as she could.

  She could keep ahead of them; she just had to be smarter about this in future. She had already chucked the account card in Nabat after pulling as much cash as she could. Hopefully the ID could be altered again, or she could find a place where IDs were unnecessary. Kittimer was low tech, full of temples and religious sects, not security cameras.

  She could keep ahead of them. Anyway, she thought morbidly, she wouldn’t have to outwit them for long. Maybe Kittimer would end up being the perfect place to die.

  20

  KITTIMER

  In mapping the world the ship, the design team originally conceived the interior to be a mirror of the natural world on Earth. Grasslands, tundra, jungles, mountains, deserts, as much flora and fauna as could fit on the food chain. In short, a full set of ecosystems. But as they moved forward with the process, the designers began to regard their adherence to nature as a wasted opportunity. Were there things about the Earth that could be altered, or bettered? Then they started thinking philosophically, about the nature of the natural world: What makes the sea the sea? Is a mountain still a mountain if it’s not made of stone and earth?

  When it came time to nail down the details of the Kittimer mountain range, designers started advocating for artistic augmentation. The mountains became half geology, half architecture. Instead of the usual gray and white, they wanted pops of color. They decided to incorporate stained glass in as many areas as they could. They looked to mountaintop monasteries for inspiration. If they were going to add stained glass, the mountains ought to be a place of meditation and spirituality.

  When the mountain range city was completed, it looked at a distance like a classic picture postcard of the Alps or the Himalayas. Snow still dusted the peaks, jagged outcroppings of rock shot up toward the sky, and there was even a tree line. At other angles, however, you could see that some of those outcroppings were towers and buildings, stacked on top of each other in a pile. Urban roads peeked out here and there behind the rocks and snowdrifts. Under the drifting snow, panes of colored glass replaced stone bluffs, and rose windows replaced basalt columns.

  And in this case, substance also followed style. Even after the designers and their purposes were long forgotten, the Kittimer Mountains evolved to become a region defined by spirituality. Kittimer has more mosques, churches, synagogues, and temples per capita than any other city in the world the ship. Not all who live in Kittimer believe in a higher power, but the entire area is tinted with belief nonetheless.

  Kittimer is
far enough from the epicenter of the quakes that the city is intact when the end comes.

  When the world breaks apart, the citizens of Kittimer consider themselves ready for it. Anyone opting for panic has already left the city. Those who remain break into factions and retreat to favored houses of worship. Some pray cyclical hypnotizing prayers. Some light candles. Some meditate. Some just sit and think quietly on what the afterlife will be. If it will be. People touch each other, kiss, and hold hands. Many are smiling.

  But it is hard to tell if the people of Kittimer are truly as ready as they claim. In the deafening crashing noise that comes before everyone dies, smiles stay on faces, but they’re screwed a little tighter. The hands holding one another grip with a harder desperation. The cycles of prayer accelerate to a breakneck speed. Nobody is really ready for the unknown.

  21

  MYRRA

  Myrra sat outside on a bridge uniting two mountains, supported by arches and pillars that descended deep into the ravines between the peaks. Snow was more abundant near the tops of the mountains, but down at this elevation the only cold was a slight crispness to the air. It was a blue-sky day, beautiful and cloudless. Myrra could see the landscape below with perfect clarity. In front of her, a considerable distance away, was the Palmer Sea. Behind her the mountain range diminished into foothills, vineyard valleys, and, eventually, a blue-green desert. Myrra was curious about the desert, but not curious enough to uproot Charlotte again.

  They would need to buy new baby clothes soon; she was growing. There was still time for little milestones. Charlotte squatted down on the sidewalk in front of her. Each of her hands held tightly to Myrra’s fingers, and she was pulling down on them, harder than usual. Myrra watched her. She squinted and her mouth puckered and pinched. Whatever she was trying to do, she was concentrating hard. She pulled down on Myrra’s fingers again and rocked forward and backward. Myrra scrunched up her face to match Charlotte’s and leaned closer to her.