The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  “Um,” the agent continued, finally. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but we just got word—Director Barnes was discovered dead an hour ago, on the sidewalk. He was found under a pile of rubble after a building collapsed. A number of New London structures have suffered partial collapse; they were structurally weakened during the quake, and now rioters have been running in and out where they shouldn’t—”

  “Stop,” Tobias interrupted. The agent stammered but fell silent. “That can’t be right—he should be in the office right now.”

  “Director Barnes was actually off duty at the time,” the agent said. His voice was measured; he was worried about getting cut off again. “Near as we can tell, he went out on his own to help with crowd control. We think he followed a group of people into an unstable building, and shortly thereafter the walls and second floor collapsed.”

  This was absurd. Barnes couldn’t die on the same day that Tobias learned the world was ending. Everything was accelerating and spinning out of control as if he were strapped in on a broken carnival ride; he couldn’t get off. He shook his head and tried to concentrate. Barnes was dead. Were there others in the rubble? What was the state of his body? The agent hadn’t said. It didn’t matter. Died in a riot, died pleasantly in his sleep, whether it was a quick surprise or slow and expected, whether it was violent or peaceful, it was wrong, because Barnes had died without Tobias by his side. Tobias had failed him. Barnes had died, and Tobias hadn’t been there.

  There on the sidewalk in Kittimer, with people moaning and crying all around him, Tobias felt his knees collapse under him. He crouched against a wall outside the entrance to the hotel. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Tears coursed down his face. He was now one with the crowd in its collective mourning.

  “Hello? Hello?” The agent was still on the line. Tobias didn’t respond, just listened to the agent’s confused voice through the speaker, unwilling to let the moment pass. He couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  27

  MYRRA

  Myrra sat on the cement floor, still shackled to a shelf, and still feeling the absence of Charlotte, but the pain was a little duller with a book in her hand. At least her mind had someplace else to go.

  She turned the page and relished the matte pulp feel of real paper in her hand, the way the pages faded from white to brown at the edges. It was a totem she could touch and hold and feel the weight of.

  Her mother’s old totem was also back with her, now resting snug in her dress pocket. Myrra was less sure about its return than she was about the book’s. Something about what she’d been through, the knowledge of her—well, everyone’s—impending death, the shock of having Charlotte taken away from her, it had made all her old wounds reopen and bleed afresh. Every time she cried, she was crying about not just one pain but every pain and frustration she’d ever experienced. Myrra took the totem out of her pocket and examined it. Its placid, smiling face was laughing at her. She hated her mother anew. Life had been tough for her; Myrra knew that firsthand. So life was painful, but what else was there to do except fight through it? If her mother had been unable to fight for herself, Myrra thought she could have at least fought for the sake of her daughter, fought to protect her.

  That morning as a child when she woke up and her mother wasn’t there, the factory foreman had still tried to rouse her to work a shift—the littlest children were often tapped to sweep the metal shavings off the floors and do bits of spot cleaning. Instead of going along willingly, she gripped her mother’s pillow, screamed, and kicked at the foreman’s arms, getting more and more violent until finally the man gave up and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Then she stayed in the dorm bed all day and cried so hard she gave herself stomach cramps. She did the same thing the next day, fighting off the foreman again, this time the foreman getting more irate but still unwilling to injure himself handling a little girl.

  On the evening of that second day, another worker passed by the bed and stared down at her. She had just finished a shift on the floor; her tan uniform was covered in iron filings. Her face was covered in the same metallic gray; there was a circle of clean skin around her nose, mouth, and eyes where her goggles and face mask had been. Myrra had cried herself down to a shaky husk; all she could do was look up at the woman from her spot curled up on the bed and sniffle.

  “The foreman’s going to sell you soon if you don’t get out of bed, and it won’t be to anyplace good.”

  Myrra didn’t offer any sort of response, just glared back and got ready to kick if this woman tried to drag her out of her spot the way the foreman had. But the woman didn’t make a move to touch her. Instead she crouched down next to the bed so she was at eye level with Myrra.

  “Today you mourned her,” she said. “Now what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  Then she stood and walked away toward the dorm bathrooms, presumably to rinse the metal off her skin.

  The next week, that same woman shoved Myrra out of a food line in order to get the last piece of bread on the tray. People give and people take. But Myrra absorbed the lesson that her mother had never learned, and with every new chapter of survival in Myrra’s life, there was more resentment for the woman who had seemingly given up.

  But she had hung on to her mother’s deity this long, and she didn’t know why; moving from place to place, always making room for it in a little pocket in the mattress. Maybe one could value an object out of both love and spite; she kept the figure because she missed her mother, and she kept it as a reminder of her mother’s failings.

  Maybe the loss of gravity meant that the end was coming soon. Maybe it was just another hiccup in a long parade of problems the world would experience before it finally gave up and broke apart. But it was not worth it to stay crying on the floor. She would push and kick her way forward until the sky split apart above her. What else was there to do? She tried to think of the next possible solution. Maybe she could escape in transit. The trick would be getting Charlotte and keeping her safe during the escape.

  The shunting sound of the door’s dead bolt rang out in the empty room, made Myrra jump. The door swung open, and Agent Simpson stood before her, holding Charlotte. It was as if, by thinking of Charlotte, Myrra had summoned her. Why was he bringing her in here? A few scattered hopes and scenarios ran through Myrra’s head, but she waited silently for the explanation before getting too ahead of herself.

  Charlotte fussed and wriggled in Simpson’s grasp, as she had before when he’d brought her in.

  “There’s something wrong with the ship. It’s all over the news. Everyone’s going to die,” Simpson said, keeping an iron grip on the struggling baby.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I thought you might,” he said. He let out a short exhalation that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell. He wasn’t smiling. “Is that why you ran?”

  “Yes.”

  He sounded too calm, too matter-of-fact. It sent surges of worry through Myrra. She had flashes of Imogene holding Charlotte on the edge of the roof deck. She readied herself to talk Simpson down off some similar ledge.

  Instead he fished a key ring out of his pocket and knelt down to unlock Myrra’s handcuffs. Then he handed Charlotte to her.

  “This is not what I want to be doing in the last days of my life,” he said.

  Myrra immediately started crying again, relief flowing through her and gushing out of her. All she could think to say was, “Thank you.”

  Simpson’s eyes were welling up as well. “So maybe I’m not such a bad guy, after all.”

  Myrra could see he needed the reassurance. If he was willing to give her Charlotte, she was more than willing to do him a good turn.

  “You’re a good person. And a good father,” she said. “And you should go home to your kids.”

  “Yeah,” Simpson said, and wiped his running nose with the back of his hand. “Yeah.”

  He stood up and made for the door.

  “Good luck,” she
heard him say, though he didn’t turn back to look at her.

  “You too,” she shouted back to the closing door. Then she turned her attention to Charlotte, nuzzling her face, kissing her hair, smelling the top of her head. She stood up, and her joints seized with pain after being in the same position for so long. Myrra ignored it and ran out the door: she would need to get a bag and as many supplies as she could steal as quickly as possible, and then they needed to leave the city. There were too many people in Kittimer—maybe their fear would manifest in more temple services and more prayer, but Myrra couldn’t take that risk. There was always the chance that people would go the other route and turn violent. Myrra didn’t want to be here when the chaos erupted.

  Everything in Kittimer was chaos, which made it especially hard to find a spare vehicle. But when she did finally find a scooter charging in a back alley, that did make it all that much easier to steal. She packed it full of as much water, diapers, and energy bars as she could carry. The people of Kittimer weren’t rioting, per se: there were no smashed windows, no fights breaking out. There was noise: as Myrra drifted in and out of different buildings seeking supplies, every shop had its screen tuned in to the news, its brightness assaulting Myrra, the chatter on one screen overlapping with the chatter of another in a different room so it sounded as if the newscasters were having some kind of escalating argument.

  Most people were just trying to get out of town, and if they weren’t locked in traffic, they were wandering the streets with vacant looks on their faces, veering one way and then another, as if they were unsure of their direction. Bells clanged at all different pitches from every mosque, temple, church, and cathedral, another noise to join in the argument with the news reports.

  Traffic was gridlocked. Myrra thanked her luck that it was a scooter she’d found to steal. She wove between lanes, around and through honking cars, and sometimes on sidewalks if it felt safe enough. The roads twirled downward around the spires of the mountains, zigzagging on hairpin turns through increasingly steep switchback slopes. Here and there cars smashed into each other in the traffic, but nobody got out and shouted, everyone stayed in their cars and did their best to just keep moving. There was more to worry about now than a dented bumper.

  A flower cart had been overturned on a sidewalk—in an effort to go around an especially wide box truck, Myrra turned the scooter up onto the sidewalk, the front wheel plowing over piles of spilled roses and chrysanthemums, causing petals of yellow, orange, red, and pink to explode into the air around them. Charlotte laughed and reached out to try to catch them, but Myrra had wrapped Charlotte too tightly against her body to allow for much movement. The flowers were beautiful. Charlotte’s laugh was beautiful. The feeling of air on the skin of her wrists, instead of steel cutting in and bruising, was beautiful.

  Where was everybody going? Maybe some sought out family; Myrra thought of Simpson and said a small prayer that he’d get back to his wife and kids. What sort of family did Tobias have? He seemed more adrift. A pedestrian ran in front of her scooter, so close that Myrra nearly hit her, then continued on down an alley, on her way to—somewhere. Maybe some people just wanted to visit one last beautiful place, a place they held dear in their memory. Myrra didn’t know why people’s automatic reaction to an apocalypse was to think they needed to move, needed to leave their current location, wherever that happened to be. She couldn’t judge; it had been the same for her. When she was told that the world was ending, with no single goal to grab on to, Myrra’s first impulse had been to run. And she was running now, again, maybe to get away from the crowds, or maybe just to keep from standing still.

  And where was she headed? Out of instinct she’d stolen a vehicle, but past that she had no real aim. No one was chasing her now; she didn’t even need to leave, but she knew she didn’t want to stay.

  She stopped the scooter and idled at the corner, realizing that the street to her left looked familiar. She had walked down that sidewalk with Charlotte, on the way back from buying bread. It dawned on her: without meaning to (or maybe she had, in some part of her brain), she had directed them back to the hostel. It was only a few blocks away from this corner.

  Myrra laughed to herself. It wasn’t a bad idea to stop back in; there could be more food there worth taking, and some of her clothes and luggage had been left behind in the room. She turned the scooter left, weaving around a throng of people sitting down in the middle of the street, obsessively praying, and through the cars that honked around them.

  Inside the hostel it was dark. Had someone cut the power?

  “Ah! Ah!” Charlotte shouted out suddenly in the dark space, eager to hear an echo.

  “Shhh…” Myrra said, smoothing her hair and kissing the warm skin of her forehead. It wouldn’t do to make too much noise.

  Myrra dragged the scooter inside with her, wary of leaving it on the street. Someone would do to her what she had done; she felt a brief flash of guilt at her theft, but as soon as it rose up she shoved the feeling away. This was the end of the world. The rules were different.

  They walked into the hostel’s common rooms and rifled through the kitchen cupboards. The food had mostly been picked clean, though Myrra found a half-full bottle of cooking sherry in one of the back corners and shoved it down into the limited space in her bag. Anything alcoholic or flammable was worth taking, though her backpack was getting so full the seams were threatening to burst.

  Someone had ransacked her room as well, though she found some of her clothes on the floor. They must not have been the right size, Myrra thought. She struggled to stuff what she could into the side pocket of her pack.

  “Did you escape, or did they let you out?”

  Myrra rose up, full of adrenaline. Rachel was standing in the doorway.

  She looked a little worse for the wear. A bruise bloomed across her cheek where Myrra had kicked her; long streaks of scabs made their way across her face and neck from Myrra’s nails. Rachel didn’t make a move to come in.

  “They let me go.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you,” Rachel said in a strange lofty way. It almost sounded as if she was joking. It definitely sounded as if she was drunk. Myrra remembered there had been a lot of wine bottles in the kitchen last time she’d been here.

  “It doesn’t really matter much if you do or don’t.” Myrra stood with her pack. With the supplies on her back and Charlotte swaddled against her front, it almost balanced out.

  “Look at you, you’re like one of those ants who carries a million times its own…” Rachel let out a derisive laugh and didn’t finish her thought.

  “Right before they arrested you, you told me I was going to die. And here I am—I’m going to die. I don’t know how you knew.”

  The smile slipped off her face. She leaned against the doorjamb with a bitter, exhausted expression that mirrored the darker feelings in Myrra’s own heart.

  Myrra didn’t respond. She truly didn’t think Rachel wanted her to.

  Rachel didn’t feel like a threat anymore. But Myrra still wished she would get out of the doorway so she and Charlotte could leave.

  Leave—to go where? a small voice inside taunted her. She had been running away from plenty, but she had nowhere to run to. Oh, what did it matter? Anywhere they went, she was no better than the people wandering outside. They would run and run in circles till doomsday.

  “In any case, maybe I should thank you,” Rachel said. “Because of all this, I’ve finally left Annie.”

  “You make it sound like I’m causing the world to break apart.”

  “It feels like you are.” Rachel’s eyes hardened on her. Maybe there was still a threat there. Myrra took a reflexive step back.

  “It’s so fucked up, the things you think you have to do. I never had to stay. I should have left ages ago. Or maybe I should have just shoved Annie off a roof, like you did.”

  Myrra didn’t refute the implied accusation. There is no refuting drunken logic.

  “What have you
done with Annie?” she asked. Annie might have been a terrible employer in earlier days, Myrra didn’t know. It still seemed cruel to kill her now, when she was mindless and vulnerable.

  Rachel let out another barking laugh at the look of concern on Myrra’s face. “Relax. I’m not you. I sedated her and left her in the room. Her daughter will send someone to fetch her.”

  “You spoke to Annie’s daughter?” Myrra wondered privately of the chances of anyone being able to transport Annie back to New London in all this chaos.

  Rachel shoved herself off the doorjamb, struggling to stand upright. She backed into the hall and wandered in the direction of her own rooms. Myrra was grateful to not be penned in by her any longer, but still kept an eye out as Rachel wandered down the abandoned corridor, a black silhouette against the pink light pouring in through the stained glass.

  Rachel’s silhouette spoke, her voice steeped in sarcasm.

  “Of course. She told me not to worry. Their family knows the right people. They qualify for Escape.”

  “Escape? What escape?” Myrra asked, the word lighting up her mind like a match in a dark room.

  “Who cares? I didn’t ask the specifics. It’s not meant for the likes of you or me. The rich will always be taken care of a little better than the rest of us. They even die better than we do.”

  The silhouette wandered farther down the hall, stumbled over something on the floor, possibly a bottle, and, with all coordination gone, fell down with a great heaviness, the heaviness of giving up. Despite her wariness, there was still enough friendly feeling left in Myrra for her to walk over and check that Rachel was OK.