The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  There were stretches of time now when Myrra forgot that she was going to die (that everyone was going to die). Maybe it was impossible to hold on to that kind of information for any length of time before the brain tried to process it as something else. It was too much carnage for one mind to stand.

  In Kittimer, especially, she had been able to forget. Instead of thinking about the sky cracking open, she would get distracted by Charlotte’s laugh or a new sound she was trying to make. Instead of remembering the way Imogene’s body had hovered in space for a moment before falling, she would get caught up in the intricacies of a stained glass window or the carved rib-like arches of a cathedral.

  But then the feeling would return—just walking down the street, or midway through feeding Charlotte, with the spoon poised midway between a baby food jar and Charlotte’s mouth, Myrra would remember how fleeting all this was, the thought would strike her like a lightning bolt to the chest. An electric, adrenaline-fueled anxiety would return, she would feel her breath quicken and her muscles tense. Her life, Charlotte’s life, everyone’s life was stacked on the end of a burning matchstick.

  She was feeling that anxiety now as she tried to explain to Tobias what she’d experienced in the past weeks. It was all ratcheting up in her, every fear was flooding back. And Myrra felt her senses sharpen as they had before—the gleam of the light off the metal shelves suddenly grew brighter. Every individual nerve in her wrists pricked against the abrasion of the handcuffs, in pain, but singing: I am alive. Of the drab cement of the floor and walls, Myrra could suddenly make out every shifting shade of gray, every grain of pulverized rock that made the paste that had hardened into the surface before her. And she was grateful for each sensation, she found it all beautiful, even as the tension in her body wound tighter.

  Where was Charlotte? She wished she could see Charlotte.

  Tobias listened to the story with a dispassionate look—difficult to make out what he thought—asking the occasional question for clarification or to spur the narrative along. When she mentioned the emails she’d read on Marcus’s tablet, Tobias’s face perked up in recognition. Had he read them too?

  It hurt her to relive all this. Myrra was acutely aware she was breathing too fast and that her voice was getting higher. In a distant, disaffected part of her brain, she heard herself thinking that she must be on the edge of a panic attack. She tried to focus. She had to get ahold of herself. This conversation needed to go a certain way, she needed to get Tobias on her side, and she wasn’t going to be able to do that if she couldn’t keep control of her own emotions.

  Tobias held up a hand, a signal to her to stop talking. He tapped a button on his tablet, pausing the recording.

  “Are you all right?” Tobias asked. He looked concerned. “Do you want some more water?”

  “No—” Her voice broke a little as she said it. She wished she had the range of motion to slap her own face. Get it under control. She took a breath, a consciously deep, drawn-out breath. “Charlotte. I’d like to see Charlotte, please.”

  “I can’t do that yet, we need to finish this statement first. Take a moment, if you need, to breathe and calm down.” He sounded sympathetic but professional. Myrra’s heart fell. She hadn’t yet managed to get him. She could tell by the tone of his voice, his body language, that he remained detached.

  “Do you believe me?” she asked. There was a desperation in her voice that she wished weren’t there.

  “I believe you’ve told me the truth about everything that’s happened to you.”

  “Do you believe what I’ve told you, that the world’s going to break apart?”

  Tobias sighed and shifted in his chair. He looked down at his hands, thinking. In some ways, she knew, Tobias was trying to draw her to his side the same way she was trying to draw him to hers. He had an investigation to wrap up. He had people he wanted to impress.

  “I understand what you saw, and what you were told, but I can’t believe it.”

  “But I saw the schematics—”

  “I’m sure you did. But just because something was broken doesn’t mean they didn’t find a way to fix it,” he said, looking up again. “I’ve read through your family’s file—” Myrra jolted up, thinking he meant her mother, then realized he was referring to the Carlyles.

  “They were wealthy, but they were also tense, troubled—Marcus Carlyle could have easily fallen prey to paranoia. We’ve traveled through space for over a hundred years. I’m sure the world’s been cracked, dented, impaled, any number of things. But it still keeps going. We’re not going to know about every little chink in the world’s armor; information like that is what causes people to panic and riot.”

  Myrra searched his face. He seemed adamant, stubborn, even. “I appreciate that you believe it, and I appreciate that everything that you’ve gone through up until this point would mess with a person’s head enough—where you would end up believing in something so catastrophic. I—” He paused again, looked into his hands again, as though searching for the next thought.

  “It’s not— I shouldn’t really say—” Tobias pursed his lips, gathered his words. He looked at her directly and tried again. “I like you. You’re smart. You know how to handle yourself.” He gestured, with a half smile, to the bruise on his forehead. “I know too much about you at this point not to like you. And I can tell what you’re trying to do. But I’m not going to let you go.”

  He had seen through her. Myrra’s hope sank and fell, the image of her and Charlotte together crumbling away to ash. She felt, she felt, and she didn’t want to feel. There was a heat behind her eyes, she could feel the tears coming on, and she hated herself for them. She wouldn’t cry, not in front of Security, not in front of someone so petty. She wanted to shout at him or convince him another way, but she knew if she spoke the tears would come. She had to calm down.

  Tobias at least looked upset at her reaction. Almost a little guilty.

  “I believe in the system,” he said. He was speaking in a level, rational tone of voice. “Not that the system is perfect, but I believe that there must always be a system in place. There are people in my life whom I respect, who count on me—it matters, how we behave in a situation like this. There’s a lot of things that happened to you that are unfair, but you’ve broken the law now too, and I have to do my job. That’s how it works. Cause and consequence.”

  It was unbelievably frustrating. There was no convincing someone so dogmatic. Myrra breathed in and out a few times till she knew her voice would come out even. She felt the tears recede.

  “Does the system matter,” she asked, “if it ceases to exist in a couple weeks?”

  “I don’t believe it will, but yes, hypothetically, it still does.”

  Myrra was readying herself for another rejoinder when she heard a loud noise, somewhere outside, out of the room, out of the building, somewhere off on a distant horizon. It sounded like a screaming metal animal.

  Out of nowhere, her stomach felt as if it were rising up into her chest. Her anxiety and stress must have reached a point of nausea.

  But then she looked over at Tobias and realized there was something wrong with him as well. One hand clutched at his chest, and the other was gripping the seat of his chair hard. He looked confused. He looked scared. She watched him, through her own discomfort, with her heart in her throat. His chest was heaving. At first his eyes searched around the room for a cause, then finally they rested on her. He locked on to her with a questioning look, as though she might be causing this.

  “What—” he said, and fell silent.

  Her body felt buoyant, as if she’d been dropped in a pool of water, and her head felt lighter on her neck. A tendril of her black hair floated in front of her face, a waveform bobbing up and down in the air in front of her. She gasped in surprise as her body lifted off the cement floor and rose into the air. She thought, briefly, that it was a relief after sitting on that hard surface for so long.

  She looked over at Tobias. Tobias w
as still staring at her, a look of shock on his face. His body hovered lightly above his chair, and the chair too was now hovering above the floor, slightly askew in the air. His hair was rippling above his head, shining brunet waves catching the light here and there. It was uncanny and beautiful. His glasses started floating away from his face. Myrra watched as he brought his arm up to catch them, and she saw how that motion propelled his body sideways. He continued to stare at her. She felt as if he was using her as his anchor.

  “How—?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and after that they were past the point of talking. They just looked around in awe.

  Myrra, at this point, was upside down. She looked down at Tobias (well, up; he was drifting above the bottoms of her feet) and felt a little jealous. Her body was now floating in space, but she was still shackled to the shelves, which were fused to the wall. He was free to move about the room; she was stuck on a short chain. Her head was a short distance away from the floor, and if she stretched her arms and legs to their full lengths, she could almost touch the gray ceiling with the tips of her toes.

  Tobias’s head drifted toward one of her feet, and she shoved him lightly sideways, sending his body spinning in the opposite direction.

  “Hey—” he shouted in surprise. Myrra let out a short laugh, and she didn’t know why. She was afraid, of course she was afraid. Tobias laughed too and then also looked confused. Something very wrong was happening. Myrra thought this was probably the end of everything. The sky would tear apart, and then everything would be sucked out into—where? Myrra wasn’t even sure she knew what the universe looked like, outside their contained little world. She’d read books and seen pictures. It was all a lot of black. Just black. And instead of clutching Charlotte close at the end, as she’d planned, she was floating through the air with a man she didn’t know. But through all that fear and confusion, they were, at the same time, floating in the air. There was wonder in that. What could she do but laugh?

  Random objects were floating out of Tobias’s bag, which was still bobbing close to the floor, just a few centimeters off the cement. His glasses case hovered near the ceiling. A spare pair of socks, folded into a ball, bounced off the side of Myrra’s shoulder. Tobias’s tablet floated between them, momentarily blocking his face from view. He looked like a body with a black rectangle for a head. Then it bobbed away toward a wall, and she could see his face again.

  Then a plastic bag lifted itself up past the lip of his bag, as though it were rising in an elevator. Inside the bag was a tiny lump of blue plastic, a figurine of a man with many arms. Her mother’s totem. The bag floated, and the statue floated, independent, inside it. It drifted up between their faces, as the tablet had. Tobias’s face blurred and warped through the plastic.

  “Where did you get that?” Myrra asked. It felt like a violation. That was a secret part of herself that he’d been carrying around next to case notes and spare socks.

  “It’s evidence,” he said, by way of explanation. The words were rational, but he sounded like a kid who’d just been caught stealing gum.

  “Why do you have it in your bag?” she asked.

  Tobias tapped the edge of a shelf with his foot, pushing himself farther away from Myrra. She was still stuck upside down, seeing him upside down.

  “It just seemed important to keep close,” he said.

  More evidence bags floated out of his satchel—she recognized a bundle of her letters to Jake. And one more, containing her book. She’d been missing these things. He wasn’t supposed to have them. They looked clinical, wrapped in plastic, sealed and catalogued. Despite their terrible wrappings, though, she was happy to see them again. Her throat caught at the nostalgia of them, even though it hadn’t been that long since she was sleeping on a mattress, storing these things in the mattress stuffing. So much had happened. She looked at the cover of the book through the plastic.

  “The world is round,” she said.

  “And it goes around and around,” Tobias replied.

  He must have read it. Her eyes narrowed—that didn’t sound like Security procedure. She was about to question him further when another lurching roar sounded off in the distance. This was it. She squeezed her eyes shut. She thought of her mother and the wild look she’d had near the end of her life. She thought of Charlotte’s rosy cheeks and the warmth of her body. She thought of the shades of gray on the walls in this room, and the smooth stone of Nabat’s grand chambers, and the calm pattern of waves in the Palmer Sea, and the sea of people who cycled through New London from day to day, and how beautiful and terrible it all was at the same time, how human cruelty and love could exist all at once.

  She was prepared, she thought, maybe, to die. Then no, no she wasn’t, and she screamed.

  She thought of Tobias next to her, and thought maybe he wasn’t so bad; if you had to die next to someone, he seemed at least like a person who understood her. But Charlotte, she wanted Charlotte. She wanted her mother to be here, she even wanted, in an odd way, to see Jake and Marcus and Imogene again. She hoped Sem was OK, hoped he was with his father. She hoped even Rachel was safe. She hoped someone was holding Charlotte right now, even if she couldn’t be there to touch her.

  And suddenly everything dropped again. She heard the folding chair clang to the floor and heard the softer thunk of a body—Tobias—hitting the floor as well. Myrra landed on the side of her shoulder and cried out in pain, and then cried at the thought that she was, at least, feeling pain. She was alive. She lay on her side and continued to cry, keeping her eyes closed, her arms still extended above at an odd angle to where the handcuffs kept her attached to the shelf. She pulled her knees awkwardly in to her chest and let her body shake.

  Tobias groaned, somewhere away from her, on the cement. Myrra craned her neck to look at him. He was lying on his side, his back to her. The chair had landed sideways on the floor. Tobias took in a sharp breath and sat straight up, like a person waking to a harsh alarm.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Myrra didn’t respond. She’d said it all before. She watched him, her body twisted on the floor, her gaze partially obscured by her armpit. She was too tired to try to sit up. He clutched his side, where he’d landed, and winced.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you move?”

  “You have my things,” she said, looking over at the scattered evidence bags on the floor.

  “It’s procedure,” he said, in a voice so shaky it sounded as if he wasn’t even convincing himself. She stared at him silently, just long enough to convey that she didn’t believe him. He didn’t speak.

  The door of the closet whipped open, and Simpson was in the room now, looking panicked, and—thank God—holding Charlotte. Charlotte saw Myrra and started immediately squirming in Simpson’s grip, reaching out for her. Myrra leaned toward her outspread arms without thinking and felt another stab of pain as the handcuffs hindered her and cut into her skin.

  Simpson held on to Charlotte tighter and looked down at Tobias. “Is everyone OK?” he asked.

  Myrra sat up. Her shoulder joints screamed in pain at the movement, but she could move. Nothing seemed to be broken. She nodded at Tobias, then looked back at Charlotte.

  “Is she OK?” she asked Simpson. “Did she fall?”

  Simpson regarded Charlotte with a frown, looking more like a concerned father than a Security agent. “She’s all right. I kept hold of her the whole time.”

  “Thank you,” Myrra said. Simpson turned his head to look at her, surprised.

  Simpson adjusted Charlotte to the side of his hip, just as Myrra would have done. Charlotte continued to wriggle and thrash, but he held firm. He offered his free arm to Tobias, who took it and slowly wrenched his body up. He moved like a man of eighty rather than a young man in his prime. Maybe he was injured in the earthquake, Myrra thought. Then again, there was also the injury he’d sustained from his run-in with her. She couldn’t help but be proud of that.

  “Can
I hold Charlotte?” she asked, even though she knew the answer. “She’s upset.”

  Simpson and Tobias looked down at her.

  “Maybe later,” Simpson said. Strangely, he sounded sincere. Everyone was thrown off their usual rhythms now.

  Simpson turned back to Tobias as though Myrra were no longer in the room. He looked wary, as if he was still waiting for another knockout blow to come. “We need to call in to headquarters—they’ll have news.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tobias said. He turned his head slowly toward Myrra as he spoke. He had a peculiar look on his face. He wasn’t quite calm, but he did seem as if he was trying to put puzzle pieces together as he stared at her face. It wasn’t a look of calm, she realized. It was a look of recognition.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes what?” Simpson asked. Tobias didn’t respond to him, but as he gathered the scattered objects back into his bag, he approached Myrra with the book and the small figure, both still wrapped in their plastic sheaths. He didn’t say anything to her, just handed the objects over in silence. Simpson, in a haze of confusion and trauma, disregarded the gesture entirely and pulled Tobias toward the door. Tobias never took his eyes off Myrra, even when the last visible crack in the doorway was just a sliver of his face.

  Now you believe me, she thought.

  26

  TOBIAS

  Simpson kept staring at walls. It was good he had the baby to hold, otherwise it seemed to Tobias that Simpson’s body might abandon gravity again, and he would just float out the window and up through the sky.

  Tobias stood in Simpson’s hotel room next to the minibar and waited for the travel-size espresso machine to finish its slow drip-drip of liquid into Tobias’s waiting cup. They weren’t able to get through to headquarters. All the lines were tied up, and no amount of Security clout could untie them right now. They had to wait.