The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  She pulled Charlotte close against her chest with her little head just under her chin and mounded piles of clothes on top of them to keep warm. Charlotte fell asleep right away, but Myrra lay there for hours worrying. The wind howled outside, buffeting the blanket like a violent intruder trying to break into a house.

  The next day, Myrra woke partially submerged in white and blue sand. Her eyes flew open in panic and she looked down to make sure Charlotte wasn’t drowning. All she could see of Charlotte was her right shoulder, her neck, and her head, but the important thing was that she was getting air. Charlotte was still sleeping. Myrra wasn’t surprised; they were exhausted enough that it didn’t matter if they were buried.

  The wind was calm again. Myrra lifted her head to get a better look at the morning, but took care not to rouse Charlotte in the process. Her arm disappeared just below her right shoulder. Most of Myrra’s body was buried, with small outcroppings emerging here and there: an elbow, a shoulder, the curve of her hip. They were islands in a blue sand sea.

  Somewhere underneath the surface, her arm was still cradling Charlotte’s sleeping body. She could feel the sand rustle and move whenever Charlotte took an especially big breath. Myrra rested her head back down on the divot of sand where her face had lain when she’d been asleep, and she waited for Charlotte to wake.

  She wondered if it was possible to count how many grains of sand were in the desert. Maybe it would be like counting sheep. Maybe she could drift back to sleep for a little while. She was still so tired.

  Jake used to try to explain his physics homework to her. He told her once that there were more atoms in the human body than there were stars in the known universe.

  “What do you mean by ‘the known universe’?” she had asked him at the time. Instead of sand, she felt the memory of holding his hand.

  “Well, supposedly the universe is infinite. There aren’t any walls. It just sort of goes on and on in all directions.” They were lying on a hill in Sakura Park, Jake beside her, staring up at the sky as he talked. “So we can’t see it all; we haven’t figured out how to map it all yet.”

  She wondered where Jake was now. Would they keep the grocery store open if the world was ending? People still needed food. Would he and his parents leave for the countryside? It seemed as if the first instinct for a lot of people was to move, was to travel to wherever they were not. She hoped that Jake was safe, for now anyway.

  Her mouth felt dry. Saliva was no longer wet; instead it formed a sort of paste on her tongue. But Charlotte still slept, so Myrra stayed still.

  She could never get a handle on what Jake meant by atoms. He’d tried to explain it a couple of times.

  “Well, they’re the building blocks of all matter,” he’d say. Myrra would understand this academically, but she couldn’t picture it and that frustrated her. It frustrated her, deep down, that she always seemed to know less than everyone else around her.

  Jake would try again. “There are these things called cells. And cells are very, very, very small. So small you can’t see them with the naked eye—you need a microscope. Smaller than that are molecules, and even smaller than that are atoms. And atoms are in everything. They make up everything in the universe.”

  Did that mean there were atoms in the air of an empty room? Were there atoms making up the not-air that filled up outer space? If so, that meant that wherever the hull of the world ripped apart, it wouldn’t be a hole at all; it would still be filled with something.

  Some time later (was it an hour, was it five minutes?) Charlotte stirred, popped open her eyes, and immediately started crying.

  Myrra sat up, lifted Charlotte up above her. The sand shifted and avalanched around them, like some geological cataclysm happening in miniature. Myrra took them both out of the tent and set Charlotte down in front of her in the open air so she could move freely. Then she stood up and dusted herself off. She let Charlotte cry; the girl needed a chance to express herself.

  Myrra felt dirty everywhere; there were grains of sand in the corners of her eyes and her lips, inside her shoes, in between her toes, in the fold of skin under her breasts, around the edges of her nostrils, embedded in the caverns of her ears. Her skin looked a pale dusty blue; Charlotte’s did too. When she bent over and shook out her hair, a blue granular waterfall rained out of it.

  For the second time that morning, Myrra realized how thirsty she was. Then she realized how thirsty Charlotte must be. She found their water bottles buried near the edges of the blanket, still roughly in the place she’d put them last night. The scooter was also half-submerged. The dune had migrated in the night and now covered most of the road.

  After feeding Charlotte and giving her a few long drinks of water—as slowly as she could, to keep Charlotte from getting sick—Myrra started working to dig out the scooter from under the sand. While she dug, moving scoops of sand away with both hands, she took mental stock of their supplies. They still had plenty of water and food. The desert had to end soon. Or the world had to end. This road seemed less and less like a good idea. She hadn’t understood what this place would be like. She’d only seen it at a distance and heard stories. The desert had seemed calm enough from her spot in the mountains.

  She watched Charlotte, gratefully sipping her water, confused and clutching Myrra’s shirt. Charlotte had no idea what was going on. She couldn’t know why they’d left the penthouse, let alone why they were now covered in sand, wasting away in a desert. But she held on to Myrra. She trusted Myrra.

  Maybe they should have stayed in Kittimer. Maybe they should have stayed in Nabat. Maybe Charlotte should have stayed in New London, left alone in the penthouse, or abandoned by Myrra on some hospital steps.

  Shoulds get you nowhere, she tried to tell herself, though every bone in her body felt heavy. She’d dragged Charlotte this far. And if there was even a chance that Charlotte might get out of this alive, Myrra would survive long enough to take her the rest of the way. She slapped herself in the face, trying to wake up, get focused. She remembered Tobias doing that after she’d hit him in the head. It hadn’t worked well for him.

  Once she’d cleared away most of the sand, she tried to turn over the motor on the scooter. It made a loud ratchety clicking sound but didn’t start. Myrra tried again, turning the key more forcefully. More clicking. Once more. This time there was no sound at all. The battery was completely dead. Myrra wasn’t sure if sand had gotten into the wiring or the motor was just never meant to hold a charge that long, but it didn’t matter. The scooter was useless now, just a big hunk of metal.

  Myrra collapsed in the sand next to this inert thing and sank her dusty face into her dusty hands. She and Charlotte had polished off two water bottles, but she was still thirsty. The energy bars she’d stolen tasted like sawdust, and she had a hard time swallowing them with so little saliva. They’d driven half the day yesterday, and the desert still seemed to go on and on. Charlotte continued crying in the sand a few feet away from her. Myrra started crying too. This had been a stupid decision, yet it was hard to imagine making a different one. The universe was taunting her.

  They would have to continue on foot. She’d done it before, out of New London. She would do it again. Still crying, Myrra rose to her feet and started counting out which supplies she could carry while also carrying Charlotte. What was most important.

  The water, of course. And food. Diapers. The blanket had proven invaluable. Myrra kept a couple of scarves that she could wrap around their faces should another sandstorm kick up, and dumped the rest of their clothes. She kept The World Is Round, rationalizing that it might be useful for future fires, but also knowing it would break her to give up any more of its pages. She tried to toss her mother’s blue figure into the sand but ultimately lowered her arm right before the throw and slipped it back into her pocket.

  She wrapped Charlotte back up around her in the scarf. Charlotte’s tears streaked down her cheeks, cleaning the blue away in stripes down her skin. Myrra kept crying too, they
were crying in conversation. You are crying now, she thought to herself, but what are you going to do after that?

  “I know, I know,” she said to Charlotte, and gently rustled some of the sand out of her hair. “But we’ve got to keep going.”

  Myrra slipped her arms through the straps of her backpack. It was unbearably heavy. Already she could feel grains of sand trapped under the straps, trapped between the fabric and her skin. They would rub her skin raw by the end of the day. So be it.

  Another tremor shook the ground under her feet. Myrra bent her knees to keep her balance. Charlotte cried out in surprise, another loud scream. The dune that had engulfed the scooter collapsed on its side. Within seconds the sand had buried it up to the handlebars. They needed to get away from this part of the road. The shaking of the earth hadn’t fully stopped, but Myrra started walking anyway. The road stayed narrow, but at least there was still a road there.

  31

  TOBIAS

  He stole a car. It shocked him, how easy it was. He found a particularly vulnerable-looking couple, flashed his badge, bullied them until they gave in, didn’t give them time to think before he took the keys and drove away, out of Kittimer and into the desert. He wasn’t proud of himself—everyone now had an important place to go, everyone had an equal right to the term emergency. In another place, in another time, if Tobias had needed to commandeer a car as a Security agent, it would have been the right thing to do. But none of this was fair. Wherever that couple was going, their journey was equally important to them as his was to him. But he took their car anyway, and he knew, even after all this contemplation, that he would do it again if he needed to. He could picture David smirking at him, giving him an I-told-you-so look. When the chips were down, he was his father’s son.

  There was only one service road leading out of this part of Kittimer. He drove for hours. When he wasn’t thinking about the couple that he’d stranded, he was thinking about the absurdity of what he was doing, that there was only a minimal chance that Myrra Dal had taken this road. He was following this path on a hunch, and he wasn’t sure he was in a stable enough state of mind to be acting on hunches. Despite this, he kept driving.

  The desert terrified him, though not for the normal reasons. There was no water or food and the sandstorms were intense, but he had planned for all that, and Tobias generally wasn’t scared of things so long as they fit a plan. What scared him was the sheer endlessness of it all, dune after dune, the same landscape, the infinite twisting road.

  The desert appeared to go on forever, but it had to stop eventually. And he’d stolen a good car at least: it was small, but it had a full charge and a cyclical engine, so Tobias estimated it would last him a couple of days. And there was good traction on the tires, which was important; the farther he went, the narrower the road became, with hills of sand cutting in closer and closer and obscuring the path. Tobias assumed that there were usually workers to maintain it and to keep the sand from swallowing it up. He also assumed that those workers had heard the news and abandoned their posts.

  He was trying his best not to think of anything except the road in front of him, but he kept picturing Barnes, half-buried by brick on a sidewalk, the legs of the anonymous crowd stepping over his body. He wondered if the bureau would even have the time or energy to give him a memorial. Maybe Tobias should have gone back; maybe he was a terrible person for not going back to take care of Barnes’s affairs. A guilty part of him wondered if he was chasing this ludicrous idea as a way to distract himself, the more inane the plan the better. But Barnes wasn’t there anymore, just his body. He didn’t know what Barnes would have made of his decision; Barnes had never been much for the pomp and circumstance of a funeral, but then again, he had also held courtesy in high esteem. Making arrangements for a loved one was a courtesy, one that Tobias had abandoned. He knew for sure that Barnes would not have approved of him stealing the car. Tobias couldn’t tell anymore if his actions were selfish or just human. Maybe there was no difference.

  He’d been driving through the desert for most of a day when a flash of something along the side of the road nearly blinded him. It was a handlebar poking out of the sand. Tobias got out of the car and dug to excavate it: it was an electric scooter, battery sapped and caked in blue dust. A pile of objects, mostly clothes, lay abandoned next to the tires. He picked up the clothing one article at a time, letting grains of blue fall away as he did so. He held up one item, and his memory surged with recognition: a green dress, something Myrra had worn in Nabat. He hadn’t been so foolish after all—they were here.

  He looked around, almost expecting to see Myrra and Charlotte appear over the nearest hill, but he was alone.

  If they’d lost their scooter, Myrra would have bailed out all nonessential supplies and continued on foot. Tobias walked up the road a few paces, looking for footprints. The wind wiped away most everything out here, but Tobias thought he could see a few divots in the sand that could have been footprints. They were still following the road.

  Tobias took some of the more practical clothing items out of the pile and threw them in the car; he had the space to store them, and if he did find Myrra and Charlotte, they might want them back. If he didn’t find them—the thought came with a pang of loneliness—then at least the clothes would make good fuel for a fire.

  The ground shook again—another small quake, and before his eyes the scooter was half-buried in falling sand once more. Nature swallows everything up.

  He didn’t have long to wait before finding them. An hour later he rounded his millionth curve and nearly ran over Charlotte crawling across the road. He braked and then sat there for a moment in disbelief, watching Charlotte go. She was getting fast—she’d already reached the opposite side. Tobias looked around. He didn’t see Myrra. Worry budded and bloomed in his brain—she could be buried under falling sand, having collapsed after too little water or too much heat. She wouldn’t normally let Charlotte out of her sight.

  He looked back at Charlotte. She was making a beeline for the nearest hill. Tobias jumped out of the car and scooped her up before she could disturb the sand. The ground shuddered under his feet. The tremors stayed small, but they were getting more and more frequent.

  Charlotte reached her hands out, trying to touch the colorful sand. Tobias adjusted the way he held her, propping her up on his side so she straddled his hip, the way he’d seen parents holding their kids at the train station. It felt all right. Charlotte didn’t seem too upset, or, to be more accurate, she was upset that she hadn’t reached the dune, but she didn’t seem to be uncomfortable with the way he was holding her.

  She furrowed her brow at him in consternation and made a short frustrated noise that sounded like “eh.”

  “I know,” Tobias said back to her. “I’m no fun.”

  Charlotte stuck her lower lip out but didn’t cry. Tobias looked around the dunes again. No sign of Myrra.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked Charlotte, and then he realized his mistake. He knew where her mother was: in a refrigerated morgue drawer back in New London. Or maybe they’d cremated her by now. As with Barnes, he wondered if Imogene Carlyle had received a proper funeral before everything had gone to hell. Probably no one was bothering with funerals now.

  Wait. There was a sound, barely audible, in the distance—someone was crying. It was hard to make out, the wind was picking up again, but the sound came from farther ahead, behind a huge white tower of sand in front of them. Keeping a good hold on Charlotte, he jogged around the bend in the road.

  Myrra was at the foot of the dune, frantically digging, her face streaked with tears. Her pack was on its side a meter away, sand already overtaking it. It looked as if the dune had recently caved in on that side. She was scooping white sand up by the armful, heaving it behind her, sobbing with each breath. She hadn’t noticed Tobias yet.

  “Hey—” Tobias called out to her, trying to shout over the wind. He held Charlotte with one arm, and with the other he waved at Myrra.
He jogged closer. “Hey!” he shouted again.

  Myrra turned and looked at him, and her face collapsed in relief and sadness. “Oh!” she cried out, and she ran toward them. Tobias gave Charlotte to her immediately. Myrra grabbed for her in a rush of panic, like someone grabbing at a life preserver as they were drowning. She clutched at Charlotte until Tobias worried that she would hurt her from squeezing her so hard.

  “I thought—” she said between gasps. “The sand collapsed, and I thought she’d…” She didn’t finish the thought. Another sob rose out of her.

  “She was just around the corner,” Tobias said, gesturing behind him. “Crawling across the road.”

  Myrra sighed and looked up at the sky. Charlotte’s face was nestled in the crook of her neck.

  “I think I’m going crazy out here. Fuck.” She shoved a stray clump of hair out of her face with her spare arm. She looked around in a sort of scattered way, as if she was trying to get her bearings. “She’s gotten so fast—just a few weeks ago, she’d sit wherever I put her—”

  “That’s what I thought, that she’d gotten really fast,” Tobias said, commiserating. He remembered helping Myrra in Nabat, how she’d plonked Charlotte down in the corner of the bathroom and she’d stayed there the whole time. Babies grew fast.

  Myrra looked up at him and blinked as though waking up from a dream, and suddenly she took a few steps back, full of suspicion. She shot a quick look behind her at her pack.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him. She sounded exhausted, that particular brand of exhaustion where only the survival instincts were left. The desert had beaten her up: the skin around her lips was starting to peel, her skin was covered in blue and green dust. She looked delirious.

  He stayed quiet, unsure how to begin.

  “It doesn’t look like you have any backup out here,” she said, going for her pack and pulling out a knife. “I can take you down. I’ve done it before.”