The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Shake it off. Don’t think too hard about the future, just think about the next minute. One foot in front of the other. Myrra deposited Charlotte in her bassinet for now and made her way down the stairs, all the way downstairs, to the kitchen. A knife would be helpful, either for threatening a still-alive Marcus or for— Don’t think about that. She chose a good-size cleaver out of the drawer.

  The light was still on in Marcus’s study. The door looked larger, heavier, than it had before. Myrra let her hand hover over the antique bronze doorknob; she had the illogical sensation that if she touched it, it might bite her. Before she could think further, she grabbed the knob, turned it, and threw the door open with more force than was probably necessary. The study was empty, but the side door was open, the door to Marcus’s adjoining bathroom, and the lights were lit. Myrra heard a distant dripping. Tap. Tap.

  She forced herself to enter the study, forced herself through the side door. Tap. Tap.

  Marcus was submerged in his claw-foot bathtub, lying up to his neck in red water, his face as white as the porcelain. One of his arms jutted out of the bathtub with the wrist facing up, a long gash carved into the inside of his arm. There was a huge pool of blood on the white tile underneath, and what blood was left in his body streamed down in tiny rivulets and dripped slowly off the tips of his fingers. Tap. Tap. His head flopped toward the arm, as though in his last moments he’d watched the blood gushing out of his body.

  Myrra froze for a moment in the doorway. The panic inside her was rising, tightening her throat and filling her brain with a buzz like swarming insects, the panic wanted to erupt, to shake her body, to paralyze her from further action. But she didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on this; she needed to move. What time was it? Four? Five? Myrra tried to calculate the likelihood that someone had already seen Imogene’s body. Which side of the building had she jumped from? The boulevard or a side street? Myrra couldn’t remember. If agents got here, they might assume murder over suicide; she could end up a scapegoat. She’d seen it happen before when things got messy and they wanted to clean up in a hurry. It was always easiest to blame the help.

  No time. Myrra approached Marcus’s body, careful to sidestep the pool of blood. She knelt down near his face and pressed two fingers to his neck, waited. No pulse. His eyes looked hazy and gray, as if a film was starting to form. He really was dead; there was no saving him. She wouldn’t have to feel guilty about taking his hand.

  She adjusted his outstretched arm so that it flopped against the bathtub; his arms weren’t stiff yet, she noticed. He must have died less than an hour ago. He and Imogene really had synchronized things, whether they knew it or not. Myrra wondered why they hadn’t killed themselves together, but then answered her own question when she remembered Imogene’s contemptuous looks over the dinner table and Marcus’s many, many affairs.

  Could she cut off his hand while pinning it sideways against the tub? It would be better if she didn’t have to drag Marcus’s entire corpse out of the bath. She tried once, twice, to get a good angle, switching hands and altering her footing. Finally she had it, standing with her feet planted straddling the pool of blood, bent over, holding his wrist tight with her right hand and the cleaver in her left.

  She took a deep breath and tried to remember what it was like when she was young and working in a butcher shop. The butcher had always cut the meat with very strong, certain strokes. One good chop should do it, if you aim right.

  It will be fine, she reassured herself. Just think of it like osso buco.

  Myrra raised the cleaver behind her in a wide arc and swung it forward, hard and decisively. It hit his wrist at just the right spot, cut through, and clanged harshly against the porcelain on the other side. The blow reverberated and vibrated in her bones, and it hurt to keep a grip; Myrra dropped the cleaver, and at the same time, Marcus’s hand fell away and plopped on the floor.

  A sharp knife, a single stroke. She’d done it. The hand lay a few inches away on the white tile. Myrra didn’t know whether to be relieved or disgusted.

  The safe opened easily enough. Pressing his palm against the sensor, Myrra tried to pretend it wasn’t a real hand at all, that it was some sort of grotesque prop from a movie. It helped that at this point Marcus’s skin felt like rubber.

  There was the usual inside: boxes of Imogene’s more expensive jewelry, ID cards, credit cards, and account cards. She took the IDs, but Myrra left the jewelry alone; even if she had time to pawn it, there were probably tracking chips embedded in the most valuable pieces. Likewise, she left most of the credit cards and account cards alone; agents would be watching those accounts soon. She was looking for one card in particular.

  There were benefits to being ignored; when Marcus was working, he often forgot that Myrra was in the room. Over time she had seen things when Marcus thought she wasn’t looking. Like most people at his level, Marcus had not made all his money legitimately. Moreover, when it came to taxes, Marcus had followed in the footsteps of his wealthy predecessors and hidden copious sums in undisclosed accounts. Where there was an account, there was bound to be an account card—very few people worked in cash nowadays.

  There was a slim black wallet in the back of the safe, containing only a few stray key cards from old hotels and one account card in the mix—the only one she’d seen without Marcus’s name on it. There was just the name of a vague-sounding corporation that Myrra had never heard of. Certainly not one of Marcus’s public companies. This was it.

  There was no time to spare, but Myrra had a nagging feeling; she couldn’t leave yet. What Imogene had told her, what she’d just witnessed, the entire thing felt absurd. Especially absurd was the idea that she might believe Imogene. This was an extreme situation; she couldn’t trust her own mind, and she certainly couldn’t take Imogene’s word. If this was true, there would be evidence of it in Marcus’s office. Not just stolen glances at structural reports, as she’d seen before, but real proof.

  Marcus’s tablet was left out on his desk, unlocked, as though he wanted the information inside to escape. A blue light on the corner of the screen pulsed, indicating sleep mode. Myrra brushed her fingers across it, as though she were gently waking a child. The screen lit up, displaying his latest messages, and Myrra scanned the subject lines: in between the multitude of advertisements, political punditry, and Financial Times newsletters, there was a group mail chain that seemed relevant. Myrra recognized several of the names in the message stream: Liu. Swardson. Kerchek. Mallory. Novak. Three were scientists, two were in Parliament; she’d taken their coats and served them tea. Mallory had grabbed her ass once while she was serving drinks at a fundraising reception.

  She swept across the screen with her fingers, scrolling through their dialogue, going back over a year. The early messages had a professional and polite tone: one of the scientists, Dr. Liu, kept referring to “our hull problem”; lots of conjecture as to whether this was really a long-term issue. A few months later, references to fatalities with workers in the outer hull—Myrra hadn’t even conceived that there would be a workforce in the hull of the ship. From there it looked as if the group had started taking the problem more seriously.

  Then came the many projected solutions, posited by the scientists and discussed by the politicians. Everything was still professional and orderly; different ideas for fixing the hull were labeled and rigorously tested: Solution 1, Solution 1a, Solution 2, Solution 3, Solution 3a (with reverse flux), Solution 12, 13, and so on. Nothing had worked.

  The conversations between the men got shorter, and the tone got darker. There was a brief discussion of informing the public, an idea that was unanimously quashed for fear of widespread panic. Talk turned to plans for death.

  Some of the messages had attachments. Myrra clicked on one: exterior drone shots of the tear in the hull, which looked more like the torn fabric of an overcoat than layers of supposedly impenetrable metal. Another attachment showed blueprints of the ship. The world. She couldn’t think of what to c
all it. Her brain switched back and forth, as it did when she wasn’t quite sure of the pronunciation of a word.

  The blueprint showed a distant exterior view; Myrra had never seen what the outside of the world looked like. It wasn’t at all how she’d pictured it; the world was a cylinder. It looked like a tin can, like one of the cans of diced tomatoes Myrra kept in the kitchen. She looked closer. On the interior, one flat circle showed topography: rivers, mountains, cities, and seas. The other flat circle was the sky. Two rods were attached to the outside of the cylinder, halfway up the curved sides, halfway between the ground and the sky. These rods (labeled axles, Myrra noticed—they must spin) extended and attached themselves to a wide, thin, C-shaped piece of metal. Large billowing shapes were attached to the sides of the C—the diagram labeled them “solar sails.” Myrra had seen pictures and paintings of sailboats before. This was like no sailboat she’d ever seen.

  The diagram was unsettling to see, it made it difficult to trust the ground under her feet. She suddenly felt as though she could feel the world spinning, end over end, and the feeling made her nauseous. Logically, she realized that the entire piece of machinery (no longer a world in her eyes, but machinery) must be massive, but it looked so delicate, the axles thinner than filament, the solar sails lighter than silk. How had they ever made it this far?

  One last label pointed to a tiny squiggle drawn on the side of the cylinder, so small it was possible to think it was simply an error in the pixelation. The text on the label simply read: “Hull Breach.” It’s real, Myrra thought.

  Downstairs, in another room, Myrra heard one of Marcus’s antique clocks chime. It was five a.m. She needed to leave.

  5

  NEW LONDON

  When the city of New London was conceived, it was meant to be a bit of everything to everyone in the old world. The British won the right to name it in a lottery draw, though other countries heavily contested the results. The word colonizers was bandied about, but the decision stuck.

  One by one, cities from all regions of the old world added features to this new metropolis, as if stitching increasingly incongruous patterns into a quilt. The Chinese commissioned brilliant jade gates to serve as portals to all major entrances of the city, teeming with carvings of curled clouds and tigers and trees and flowers, accented with Cambodian rubies and Peruvian silver. Kenya donated the majority of its wildlife preserves to a zoo of unprecedented size; the menagerie also contained pandas, penguins, narwhals, jaguars, capybaras, koalas, and myriad other animals, too many to name. Turkey insisted on a market bazaar full of snaking lanes and stairs and stalls, originally filled with Turkish spices and Turkish textiles; however, over time jars of Vegemite and kimchi popped up on the shelves next to the more traditional spices. Stars of David and Diné Spider Woman Crosses were woven into the wool of the Turkish carpets. Sweden and Norway envisioned the new city as an architectural apex, with sleek metal buildings rising to great heights, whose clean lines and vistas would inspire calm and efficiency. Korea cared less about its aesthetics and more about the technology that would run the city, outfitting the Nordic architecture with proactive computer systems to anticipate every need, from the running of the trains to the requests of the customers at tiny coffee kiosks. Food, too, became an amalgam of different regions and different tastes; Ethiopian stew swirled in dark mole sauces, dal found its way into Creole jambalaya, Nepalese momo could be deep-fried in a Kentucky buttermilk batter, and pizza could still have pepperoni, but could also be topped with cassava, plantains, or pickled herring.

  Even the streets began to embody the spirit of this collaboration (some would say argument): instead of a grid, New London’s network of streets could best be described as forming a tense knot, as if a large circle of people had each grabbed a strand from an especially tangled ball of string and all pulled outward at once. This went on and on, with different cultures adding different flavors and blocks and layers onto the already immense city, until it was the largest populated area on the new ship. Each country added its dreams to this new city, hoping to re-create its own vision of home. The result of the mix was something entirely new and not familiar to anyone at all.

  The crack in the world, the rift that is growing, is nearest to New London. Though the death of the population will happen relatively quickly, New London will be the first to see the destruction. In three months’ time, the wide expanse that people think of as the sky will break open. There will be an ear-piercing crack, then a deafening whoosh as air rushes past the people and trains and towers, upward into this new violent tear in the sky. Then the people themselves will rise and be sucked away from what they thought was solid ground. Vehicles, dumpsters, animals, and smaller structures not affixed to the pavement will also be suctioned out of the rift with horrible force.

  The population will then become debris drifting in the dark, dead within fifteen seconds once they’re blown out into the blackness of space. Their positions and expressions will be fixed in their last moments, like those of the citizens of Pompeii. Some people will be frozen with outstretched arms, reaching for a handhold to keep them attached to the ground, or maybe reaching for a loved one, a last warm touch from a fellow living being. Others will have screams permanently etched on their faces, that last look of panic and fight from the moment they saw the imposing vastness that awaited them. Still others will see that same formidable darkness, and, upon their reaching it and having the breath sucked from their lungs, their expressions will be frozen not in a moment of terror but in one of wonder.

  6

  TOBIAS

  The New London Security Bureau was an office full of the clicking of shoes on cement and the ambient humming of technology. The air-filtration systems assured that every brushed-steel surface was dust-free, every pop-up screen was lined up in the exact same spot on each desk, which were positioned apart from each other at a length of seventy-five centimeters (Tobias had measured). From his spot on the second-floor balcony, Tobias could see down into the atrium where the spread of desks looked like cubes in a great silver grid. He loved it.

  Tobias didn’t dislike disorder per se—he always felt a little misunderstood when his coworkers made fun of the satisfied smile that crossed his lips as he observed a well-ordered chart or a detailed filing system. He had occasional moments of chaos, just like anyone else. He just liked the balance that order gave to chaos—the presence of efficiency and stability made one appreciate chaos more when one came across it in the wild. Like seeing a red fedora in a sea of black bowler hats. Tobias appreciated disarray in short, colorful bursts.

  Tobias crunched into his kimchi-and-tomato sandwich, feeling the vegetal juices burst over his tongue with an acidic tang. He adjusted his seat on the hard stone bench, leaned over to let his elbows rest on his knees, and felt his spine pop. It had been a long shift, midnight to eight. He could hear the percolation of Agent Simpson’s coffee maker in the break room and resisted the urge to go beg for a cup. After his sandwich he would go back to his apartment, crawl into bed, nuzzle himself between the pillows and the wall, and drown himself in sleep under his duvet.

  It was only his second year as a desk tech on the Security Bureau; he was still at a low rung on the ladder, still prone to receiving graveyard shifts. As a rite of passage, the older agents habitually sent him their forms and evidence tallies at the close of a case, endless reams of bureaucracy scrolling across his screen, each with a different stamp and signature required. Tobias took his hazing in good humor and kept his work immaculate. Carr and Davies were retiring soon—there would be spaces to fill.

  Simpson popped his head out from the break room, a cup of coffee in hand. His mustache needed a trim, Tobias noted. Wiry, rebellious hairs were sticking out from his lip at all angles.

  “Hey, Bendel.” He nodded. “You look tired.”

  Simpson had a knack for stating the obvious.

  “I am.”

  Simpson leaned against the doorframe and took a sip, seemingly satisfied with t
he conversation. He craned his neck to peer over the rail and down into the atrium. From above, Tobias could see the frenetic energy that was building among the hive of desks. Workers poured in from the brass double doors of the lobby. Shift change.

  Simpson’s eyes widened for a moment, as though a new thought had just dropped into his head from a higher, divine plane.

  “Hey,” he said, waving his espresso cup in Tobias’s general direction, “Barnes was looking for you.”

  “Barnes? When?” Tobias sat up straighter.

  “I dunno, like a half hour ago… I ran into him down by the desks.” Simpson had produced a croissant, seemingly from nowhere, and was now holding it in his left hand, gesticulating with both pastry and coffee in an attempt to paint the picture.

  Tobias shot up from the bench, brushing the crumbs off his slacks, his hands moving in sharp, jerking motions. What was it about adrenaline? The more tired you were, the more potent it felt. Tobias’s synapses fired off like signal flares.

  “You could’ve mentioned that sooner,” Tobias tossed off as he gathered his bag. He saw Simpson take another languid bite of pastry.

  “Sorry,” he called out as Tobias rushed down the stairs.

  Tobias knocked lightly on the polished wood of Director Barnes’s office door. He let his hand rest on the cool ridged surface a moment. Tobias had an appreciation for fine things, and wood was hard to come by, in abundance only in the homes of the super-rich. As head of the New London Security Bureau, Barnes had an office with a polished wood door and a large wood desk to match. Tobias wouldn’t say that he coveted these objects exactly, but he did linger over them. At eye level on the door, Barnes’s name had been set in gold leaf, the letters outlined neatly in black.