The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Even if people bothered to question their surroundings, the mechanics of the ship don’t matter, not when everything is running smoothly. What matters is when the mechanics stop working the way they should. It matters when the world (the ship) breaks down.

  There’s a crack in the side of the ship. The majority of the population does not know that it is there. The crack is growing, too large now to fix or patch. It is irreversible. It may have been an engineering error, something unforeseen when the craft was built 150 years ago. It may have been a collision with a bit of something in the blackness, an asteroid or even something small. A mineral particle the size of a walnut can still cause damage if it hits just the right spot going forty thousand kilometers per hour. The source of the damage doesn’t matter. What matters is that the damage is there.

  As a result of this crack, every person on this ship, this world, will perish. It is worth considering whether even this really matters. Will it make a difference to the red dwarfs and novae and moons if the tiny speck of life gives in and assimilates with the lifelessness around it? Probably not. The universe will swallow up the speck and continue its own expansion, until the eventual moment when it too will collapse.

  3

  MYRRA

  Imogene’s fingers were still bunched around the shawl, and all her energy and tension seemed focused on pulling it tighter around Myrra’s arms. The shawl was becoming a straitjacket. Myrra tried to pull away, but Imogene held on.

  That wasn’t right, what Imogene was saying. That couldn’t be right. Something that catastrophic couldn’t just—

  “No,” she heard herself say. “How can there be no way to fix it? We have a whole world of people here. There has to be someone with a plan—”

  Myrra thought of her tablet, the one that Imogene had smashed, how it lit up, connected you to anyone you wanted to talk to, retrieved any piece of information you asked for. A world that produced technology like that couldn’t just end with no reason.

  “Parliament’s pulled every scientist, physicist, philosopher, and carpenter in to work on the problem. They’ve been at it for a year with no solutions. We’ll reach the deadline soon.”

  This was absurd. There were a million possible solutions.

  “But isn’t there someone we can contact outside—”

  Imogene scoffed. “Where outside? We’ve traveled a long time. There’s no one in any direction for a hundred years.”

  “No,” Myrra said again, louder, a little more forcefully, enough to cause Imogene to rear her head back in surprise. “There’s always something you can do.”

  Myrra finally wrenched herself free, then gasped as Imogene stumbled back—a little too far. As Imogene waved her arms wildly in an attempt to regain her balance, Myrra reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her in just in time.

  “Thank you,” Imogene said, sitting down on the wall to steady herself. “If I’m going to do this, I want it to be on purpose.”

  Myrra still held on to her, a little too tight. She couldn’t feel relief. Too many thoughts were spinning in her head; she needed a way to stop them. Imogene looked down at Myrra’s hand gripping her.

  “Are you thinking of pulling me down, or pushing me off the building?” Imogene asked her, reading Myrra’s thoughts before Myrra even realized she’d been thinking them. “Pushing me won’t fix what you’re feeling,” she added.

  Myrra couldn’t think of anything to say to that. She let go of Imogene and sat down on the terrace floor, gently setting the bundled Charlotte down next to her. Her hands were shaking, so she balled them into fists, and then she closed her eyes and put her head between her knees. Don’t think. Just breathe. Even as she consciously kept her mind empty, she could feel her heart careening against her rib cage. She just had to get her head together.

  No one for a distance of a hundred years. Myrra was always about five seconds away from someone at any given time. The colors of the New London Market blossomed out in her mind, like the pigments of Imogene’s watercolors pooling out over absorbent paper. The New London Market, with its stalls of patterned cloth slung over metal piping, with steam and smoke billowing out from the shouting food vendors, the cacophony of questions, sales, haggles, and bargains, was beloved by Myrra. Working for the Carlyles, she had more freedom than she’d had in the laundry or in factories. But there was still always the invisible leash, and the market was the farthest point on her tether.

  Myrra tried to concoct an errand every week that would require the journey, though it didn’t always fly with Imogene. The market was twenty blocks from the penthouse. Take a right out of the tall glass lobby door, then walk down Capital Boulevard for five blocks, make a left on Revenue Street and walk among the slick steel skyscrapers for another five blocks. Cut the diagonal through Sakura Park, with its lovely twisting pink trees in the springtime and its steadfast stone bridge over the canal. Then the long tangle of King Street in Chinatown, where the heady smells of yeasty boiling dumplings, steaming vegetables, and roasting meat would start to swirl around your head and cloud your nostrils. Finally, at the end of King Street, just near the border of the Turkish district, the narrow path would widen and expand like a folding paper fan into the wide steps of the plaza and into New London Market.

  This was Myrra’s world, a world that was ending. It struck Myrra like a clap on the ear exactly how small a scope it was. A heat pressed behind her eyes, and she felt the sting of her own cowardice and complacency. How stupid she was.

  It took her roughly half an hour to walk to the market. What did one hundred years of space look like?

  Myrra inhaled the damp morning air and straightened up, looking above her at Imogene. She was sitting facing out now, with her nightgown carefully smoothed underneath her. Myrra laid a hand lightly on Charlotte sleeping next to her, feeling her tiny chest rise and fall.

  “Are you all right?” Imogene asked from her perch.

  “No,” Myrra replied with a little growl. She could smell Imogene’s hibiscus perfume wafting down. Of course Imogene had put on perfume.

  “When did you learn about this, this crack?” Myrra asked. Crack made it sound so insignificant, like a broken mirror or a chipped mug. It was hard to believe Imogene when they were using words like crack.

  “Marcus told me six months ago. Even then, he was sure they’d find some way to fix it,” Imogene replied. “Idiot.

  “Marcus is probably downstairs killing himself right now,” she tossed off. “We agreed to do it tonight.” The calm with which she said it made the words all the more chilling. Myrra couldn’t think of a way to respond. How would a man like Marcus kill himself? Don’t—don’t think of that. Myrra fixed her eyes on Charlotte, on her hand on Charlotte’s chest. Repeated to herself, Charlotte is safe. Charlotte is safe. If nothing else, there’s that.

  They sat in silence for a minute or two, Myrra couldn’t tell how long. Eventually, if only because she had the urge to move again, Myrra stood and leaned her elbows against the wall, looking out on the panoramic skyline. Imogene looked at her suspiciously, and when it became clear that Myrra wasn’t going to try to pull her down, she followed Myrra’s gaze, staring out at the buildings and the gray-blue light at the horizon. New London was a beautiful city, and this was one of the best views you could get. Beautiful and monstrous. Myrra pictured the black silhouettes of buildings, the towers and spires, as black bejeweled teeth winking in the mouth of a monster.

  “I think it’s wrong to call it a sky if it’s made with paint, metal, and lights. It’s not the same thing,” Imogene said out of nowhere.

  “What does it matter, if we’ve never known any different? This is what sky is to us,” Myrra contradicted. “I don’t go in on nostalgia for something I’ve never even experienced. Everyone holds up the old world as this amazing thing, but you were born here, same as me. Our mothers were born here. What could we possibly know about it?”

  This was a suspicious sort of freedom, talking with Imogene like this. Myrra caug
ht herself glancing sideways every time she spoke, to check if she’d crossed a line. Imogene just shrugged.

  “I suppose you’re right, but there’s nothing wrong in dreaming about the other kind of sky.”

  “I never thought about it,” Myrra said with all honesty. She hadn’t the space or time to spend philosophizing about real versus manufactured. Too many other worries took priority.

  She had to get a handle on this situation. Worst-case scenario: What do I do if Imogene is right? Myrra balked at the idea, then rallied again. It was important to anticipate the worst so you’d be ready for it. In Myrra’s experience, the worst happened more often than not. So: What’s to be done if the world is ending? It might not be, she thought, to comfort herself. But just in case.

  “If I believe you—” she started. Imogene looked at her and rolled her eyes at the if. “Then how long do we have before the world breaks apart?”

  “Marcus told me it would be about two months. But it depends—if the wrong gas pocket hits us, it could happen tomorrow.”

  She didn’t want to believe Imogene. “If the world breaks apart” was almost too big to comprehend. But then the next thoughts hit: I’m never going to marry Jake. Hahn is never going to get that bar. And I am never going to grow old.

  Then she started thinking of all the ways she might get out of New London while avoiding surveillance cameras. Her expression must have darkened, or maybe Imogene was just following a similar thought pattern, because the next thing Imogene said was, “There’s a safe embedded in Marcus’s bookshelf, behind the Mark Twains.”

  “I know.”

  Imogene let out a surprised laugh.

  “Yes, you would.” She paused. “You know how to access it?”

  “Palm scan.” Myrra smiled. It was a good distraction, seeing the shock on her face.

  Imogene smiled back, but it was a sad smile. “Do what you have to do,” she said.

  A plan was already whirring into motion. She’d knock Marcus out if he was still alive, or, if it was as Imogene thought and he was already dead, she’d have to take his hand.

  Down at Myrra’s feet, Charlotte whimpered. The cold must finally be getting through her blankets. Myrra bent down and picked her up, tucking her halfway inside her robe. Charlotte wriggled around a little, but eventually her face relaxed and her eyelids stopped twitching. Myrra looked up and saw Imogene watching her daughter with a look of bone-deep grief. It surprised Myrra. This was the most care Imogene had shown Charlotte in the total of her young life. At the very end, she proved herself to be a mother after all.

  Imogene reached out and touched Charlotte’s cheek. “Will you take care of Charlotte?”

  It was a harsh reminder that soon Myrra and Charlotte would be alone on the terrace, that there would be an empty spot on top of the wall where Imogene had once stood. Myrra pushed away the thought.

  “Of course,” she said, and meant it. She could feel Charlotte’s breath against her skin.

  Imogene leaned closer to Myrra, inspecting her face. Myrra could see the ivory powder of Imogene’s foundation clinging to the soft downy hairs on the sides of her cheeks. What must she see in my face, when she looks this close?

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. It was hard to tell whether she meant that she was sorry for the way she’d treated Myrra all these years or for telling her it was all ending. In a rare positive moment, Myrra decided to think the best of her and assumed she was sorry for all of it.

  Myrra could feel the warmth radiating off Imogene’s skin. Imogene leaned closer to her face, impossibly close, and kissed her.

  Then she pulled back, stood, and kicked her body out past the wall and into the stillness of the air.

  It felt to Myrra as though Imogene’s body hovered there in front of her for an unbearable length of time, so long that she worried something had happened to the gravity. Her nightgown and stray wisps of hair pooled out around her body as though in water. Her skirts hovered up around her shoulders and Myrra saw her pale nakedness, her immaculate vulnerable flesh. Imogene had her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth open wide enough to swallow the world.

  Then the moment passed, and Imogene dropped like a sickened, ungraceful lump. Myrra leaned over to watch her descend, so far down that she couldn’t see or hear the body’s impact when it finally struck the sidewalk.

  4

  MYRRA

  Myrra’s life contained a multitude of tangent universes, now all collapsed to nothingness like matter in a black hole.

  When Myrra was five, she was first employed in a bakery. Every night she would kick up clouds of flour and sugar with her microfiber broom, then watch the clouds dissipate while she mopped. For Myrra, this was a temporary situation. Her mother would be coming for her once she was out of the hospital, and she would be granted release from her contract. Together they’d find a cozy room somewhere, with flowered curtains and maybe a dog.

  When Myrra was eight, her contract was sold to a butcher shop. She was still cleaning, but instead of sugar, her skin was now coated with the smell of fat and blood. It clung to her like grease to an oven. She didn’t know where her mother had gone, but she no longer expected her return. Now she pictured a woman coming upon her one day in the street, a woman with long silk skirts, shiny shoes, and a kind face. She would be rich, would have an important job where she traveled, a diplomat or an entertainer. This woman would have a need in her eyes that would match the need in Myrra’s, would buy her contract and adopt her, and together they would hop around the world. The rest of her life would be spent comparing the softness of hotel pillows.

  When Myrra was twelve, she worked in a laundry. It was harder to remember her mother’s face, but she knew she’d inherited her curly black hair. The damp heat of the washing machines caused it to coarsen and frizz. An assembly line of workers crowded the laundry space and slept on top of each other in adjoining dorms at night. Everything smelled of sweat. The next time her contract was sold, she figured, she would be able to calm her hair down, comb it out, maybe swipe a lipstick from somewhere. Then she would catch the eye of some boy, preferably a tall one with really, really blue eyes. Chest bursting with love, he would buy her contract and free her. Maybe they’d get married later, when they were older.

  When Myrra was thirteen, Marcus and Imogene bought her contract, and Myrra saw real wealth for the first time. Imogene looked especially young then. She was the most beautiful woman Myrra had ever seen. Myrra beamed with thoughts of her and Imogene becoming friends, of traveling with the family on important parliamentary errands, becoming an indispensable aide in the government. One day she would save a particularly wealthy committee member from scandal, and out of gratitude they would release Myrra from her contract.

  When Myrra was sixteen, she dreamed of blackmailing her way out of servitude. If she just kept her ears open long enough, one day Marcus would mistakenly let a secret drop out of his mouth, something salacious, and Myrra could threaten to sell it to the press. Humbled and ashamed, Marcus would make the arrangements to terminate her contract and would pay her a tidy sum, enough to buy a little house somewhere far away, preferably near water.

  When Myrra was nineteen, she briefly considered poisoning Imogene and Marcus, running away with the cash and the jewelry, and living the colorful vagabond life of an outlaw.

  When Myrra was twenty-three, she met Jake when he took her order at the grocery counter. He was not especially tall, and he did not have blue eyes. In fact, he wasn’t very interesting at all, and mainly talked about food supply deficits. But Myrra could tell that he was aching to prove himself to someone. She could work with that.

  Once, among all these other possibilities, when Myrra was in a mood of particular bitter anger, she had fantasized about total destruction: ground and sky being rent to pieces, the entire population screaming and collapsing, and then nothingness.

  Myrra felt her life flashing before her as she stared at the empty spot on the terrace wall. She imagined Imogene’s body sm
ashing to the ground, then forced the image out of her head. Nothing good would come of that. Trying to keep her mind blank, she turned and slowly walked back through the master bedroom. She thought vaguely that she needed to act, to do something, but it was hard to focus.

  This might be shock, she thought, and recognized in a detached sort of way that this kind of detachment wasn’t a good sign. She kept Charlotte tucked inside her robes and wandered over to the espresso maker that Imogene kept on the shelf near her vanity. Coffee. Coffee might help. At the very least it would warm her up. There was something about shock and cold, something Myrra remembered an EMT telling her once when there was an accident at the laundry. Something about blood flow, she couldn’t remember, but she thought she remembered that it was a good idea to keep moving. She walked in circles around the room while she waited for the tiny white cup to fill with coffee.

  One double espresso later, Myrra was starting to feel more like herself. She was still walking in circles, but now she felt her feet on the ground and could recognize her arms connected to her body. It came to her again: she needed to act now. Imogene’s body would be discovered soon, if it hadn’t been already.

  She needed to leave. Her old survival instincts sprang into action. Walking into Imogene’s gigantic closet, she grabbed the largest bag she could find that was still a backpack. She’d have to be able to walk with their belongings; public transit would be out of the question. With her employers dead—was Marcus dead?—Security agents would be looking for her if she disappeared. With the free hand that wasn’t holding Charlotte, Myrra filled the backpack with all the warm, practical clothes in Imogene’s closet. Imogene was taller than she, but they were roughly the same size. She’d hit the kitchen too, before she left. But money. Money would be most important.

  Myrra sighed. This was going to be the hard part. She had to access the safe, and for that she had to find Marcus. Which in all likelihood would mean finding a dead body.