The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  As his feet hit the last step, he craned his neck around to the hallway behind the stairs. He could just make out Myrra Dal’s wooden door, the entrance to her tiny cell. Did he know her better now? It felt as though he did. At least a part of her.

  9

  NABAT

  Nabat is a city of artificial history. It was built directly into the side of a cliff, with atria, arches, and columns carved into the stone. The city embeds itself deeper and deeper into the rock in a fractal of caves and tunnels. It is built this way because that is the way that ancient cliff dwellers would have built it, but the city itself is not ancient.

  When the ship, the world, first began traveling, people would flock to Nabat. They would run their hands over the carved-out columns, flit through the stone doorways into small lit shops where they would buy tiny glass bottles, leather bags, smithed metal. Wares that looked old but were not. After days of taking in a traditional culture that was not traditional at all, visitors would stay in hotel rooms placed against the cliff face, with balconies and windows sliced out of the stone, providing beautiful views of the tranquil sea below and the mountains far beyond on the horizon.

  As generations cycled and trends changed, however, Nabat eventually fell out of style. The flow of tourism dwindled. Then Palmer came along, causing the sea level to rise drastically, and one of Nabat’s main access points—the beach below—disappeared. Now small handfuls of tourists still visit each year, but only the die-hard fans looking for a history fix or older nostalgic generations who remember visiting Nabat at the height of its influence.

  The people who live in Nabat will mostly be dead by the time the world breaks apart. A series of earthquakes (that is an inaccurate word, but nobody is calling them shipquakes when the ground starts shaking) will occur near the end as the crack in the world widens. One of these earthquakes, of a particularly large magnitude, will cause the cave city of Nabat to collapse in on itself. Parents will order their children to take shelter under doorframes or huddle under tables, but there really is no shelter to be had with destruction of this scale. All structures in the city will collapse. People will either die instantly from the stones falling on their heads, or, worse, end up trapped under rubble and die a more lingering death from dehydration or blood loss.

  So even later, at the very end, while others are exploded out into the dark airlessness of space, the people of Nabat will have already experienced a different kind of darkness, the kind that implodes around them.

  10

  MYRRA

  The sun was high and hot, and Myrra felt dirt scratching her skin, pressed in with sweat under the straps of her knapsack. Myrra had improvised a sling out of one of Imogene’s scarves and tucked Charlotte against the front of her body. Charlotte was fussy, letting out small moans and scratching her cheeks with her stubby little fingers. The skin on her face was pink from sunburn.

  Somehow Charlotte was still in her arms. She’d stood across the street from the hospital, holding her, just outside the reach of Security cameras, fully prepared to stroll over and leave her tucked in blankets next to the door. She waited and watched emergency shuttles come and go, some with patients, some coming in for an engine recharge. She stood and watched the hospital doors for much longer than was prudent. And all that time, she felt Charlotte grow warmer and warmer, tucked in against her chest. And in the end she’d left, still holding Charlotte, swearing all the way.

  And of course, you can’t just take a baby; babies require supplies. Not long after Myrra left New London, Charlotte started to smell. The sour scent of stale urine wafted up from her diaper. Then the smell of shit was added to the mix, and then, like clockwork, Charlotte started to cry again. Myrra knew her well—she wouldn’t be used to getting stuck in a dirty diaper for long periods. Even still, Myrra waited until they were a few hours outside town before stopping at a small roadside market for a pack of diapers and baby food. Charlotte cried the whole way, and Myrra felt her headache worsen, a mixture of noise and dehydration. Even entering the shop was a huge risk; New London was infested with surveillance, she wasn’t sure about its suburbs. She tried to keep her head down the entire time she was in the store, but who knew where cameras could hide. Charlotte was a liability. She needed to leave her behind; apparently just not yet. Maybe she could leave her behind in Nabat and take off for other towns from there. It was still hard to keep track of her own thoughts.

  They’d walked for a day and a half, stopping only to sleep. As time passed the buildings got smaller and less densely packed, shifting from suburbs to smaller towns and finally to open fields with occasional houses dotting the horizon. Never in her life had Myrra felt so much space around her.

  The transit map hadn’t given a good sense of distance, so she just had to keep walking and hope that they stumbled on Nabat soon. Myrra kept close to the ferry canals to keep track of their direction, but every time a boat neared she hid behind the ridge. They couldn’t risk being seen. Agents must be looking for her by now.

  Imogene’s warning flashed in her mind: she had two months of life left to live. Maybe. Imogene had also said the ship could break apart at any time, if things were jostled wrong. On instinct Myrra looked up at the sky to see if it was tearing apart, if a great big hole would open up above her. Who knew if the crack would come from the sky? Myrra checked the ground under her feet, suddenly certain it would break apart and swallow her up. She wondered what would reach her first, Security or the end of the world.

  On the shore next to the canal, Myrra noticed clusters of dead fish rotting in the sun. As she stared, another one flopped out of the water onto the sand, its eyes looking surprised, mouth agape and gills straining. Last week, this would have struck her as strange behavior, but she wouldn’t have thought about it too hard. Now all nature was ominous—the course of the fish, flight paths of birds, the wind, the weather, everything felt off. Myrra rushed down toward the shore, grabbed the fish by the fin, and flung it back into the water.

  She should have a plan. This was one of the great hypothetical questions in life: What would you do if the world were ending tomorrow? What did people usually say? Myrra rifled through common answers in her head. Often people tried to fix past regrets: If I only had one day to live, I’d call my sister and tell her I’m sorry, I’d finally spend all that money I’ve been saving, I’d tell Jenny I love her… that kind of thing. Myrra couldn’t think of any regrets. To regret your actions, you had to have been allowed to act. Regret required choice. Or maybe it was that her whole life was one big regret.

  In an emergency people seek out their families. Myrra thought of her mother. She might still be alive, she might be confined somewhere. That was a long shot. Or maybe she’d escaped. Even more improbable. Maybe she’d done the same thing Myrra was doing now, taking the back roads, hiding from the authorities. That almost seemed sadder, as Myrra thought about it. If her mother had escaped, why had she not taken Myrra along? Why hadn’t she tried to find her? Thinking about it put her at odds with her own mind—she wanted desperately to have a reason to run toward something, not just away from something else. But Myrra also saw the futility of it: her mother was most likely dead, and if she wasn’t, she was too broken to want her.

  Ahead the canal dipped underground into a tunnel, leaving Myrra at a loss. A narrow dirt road continued where it left off, following what she hoped was the same general direction. It wasn’t long before Myrra understood why the water had changed course. The path fell away, revealing a series of white stone cliffs in its wake, which curved around a massive sea. Myrra had never seen so much water. It didn’t even look like water from up here—from her vantage point, the waves texturing the surface looked like crinkles in aluminum foil. She didn’t know water could look like that, had only ever seen it in a glass or a washtub or the ponds in Sakura Park. It felt like a solid, silvery thing. A cool salt breeze wafted up to meet her, making tendrils of hair dance around her face. Myrra suddenly felt very, very small.

  There
was a staircase in front of her leading down the cliff face. From her vantage point, she could see a webwork of staircases etched along the cliffs, interlocking like lines in a fishing net. Off in the distance, halfway down, she could make out a large hole in the rock—a cave? Most of the staircases seemed to lead there. It was impossible to tell the exact size from up here, but it had to be huge. She took another look along the cliffs. She couldn’t see another road, not even a hiking trail. Nowhere to go but down.

  There was no railing and the drop was perilously long, but somehow the path still felt solid. Everything felt sturdy—each stone step proceeded ahead of the previous one like a soldier on a march, each with smoothly sanded surfaces and precise right angles. There were landings farther down, with windows and doorways etched directly into the rock, some bordered with ornately carved moldings and embossed with gold and silver metalwork. Some of the inhabitants had flung open the iron casements of their windows, and clean linen curtains billowed out with the sea winds, caressing Myrra’s face as she walked by. Charlotte tried to catch the corners of the curtains as they danced in the air.

  When they finally reached it, the main cave turned out to be even larger than she’d imagined, going too far back for Myrra to comprehend its full size. A row of towering columns stood sentry along the threshold of the cave, carved directly into the stone, linking the ceiling to the floor. The columns were elaborately carved with leaves and geometric knots at the cornices and pedestals. They weren’t as tall as Atlas Tower, but they were high enough to still leave Myrra feeling insignificant. High above, in an arched cornice between the two center pillars, a sign was etched into the white stone with the words “Nabat Welcomes You.”

  Behind the columns Myrra discovered a network of tunnels and grottoes burrowing deeper and deeper into the rock past the grandiose entrance. Iron chandeliers hung down from the stone ceilings all the way back into the farthest nooks, illuminating multiple levels of shops and stairs stacking upward along the cave walls, vertical scrolls of etched stone doorways, shop fronts and signs describing wares for sale. No cameras visible, at least none that she could see. A proper out-of-the-way town.

  A flurry of people ascended and descended the stairs and traversed ledges inside, gripping handrails and staring ahead as if such extraordinary architecture were normal. Larger crowds converged on the cavern floor, which formed a sort of town square—determined mothers tugging their children behind them by one hand, harried businessmen pressing phones to their cheeks, workers rolling food carts, battalions of teenagers giggling, delivery boys running or pedaling on bikes with bulging white plastic sacks attached to their backs, and a few elderly men and women walking at a more careful pace, all weaving among each other. Not as many as she encountered in New London, but it was still a familiar dance.

  A few meters off, Myrra spotted a simple block bench rising up from the stone floor. She collapsed and shrugged off her knapsack, feeling a buoyancy in her body as she did so. She sat on the bench for hours with Charlotte on her lap, trying not to think about agents or death or the end of the world. Instead she watched the swirling tidal patterns of people mingling and going about their day, content to be outside it.

  Myrra tried to get a sense of her location, visualizing a map in her head, where New London was compared to where she was now, trying to picture Nabat and the water and the mountains beyond it, the canals and the train lines. The world might be easier to traverse if she could see it clearly from an overhead vantage point, like the borders laid out on Marcus’s antique maps. She remembered them furled out on his dark wood desk with spherical glass paperweights, giant marbles, delicately holding down the corners. Marcus playing the professor, full to the brim with ego.

  “These here are the continental borders,” he said, and traced his finger down a jagged line of thick, solid black. Myrra’s finger lightly tracked the thinner dotted lines, much more common on the map, and much harder to follow.

  “Those are the borders for countries,” he said, following her finger with his own.

  “What’s the difference?” Myrra asked, and Marcus grunted and fumbled with one of the paperweights before responding.

  “Well, it’s a bit complicated, all tangled up with politics,” he said, “but they’re sort of different regions within the continents. Like how New London has different neighborhoods.”

  She could tell by Marcus’s tone of voice that he was glossing over the full definition, that maybe this was something he’d memorized out of a book. He didn’t have any more context than she did, but he preferred the simplicity of being right to a longer explanation.

  “You see, this here is Turkey, where this rug comes from. And now in New London, we have a Turkish district.” He pointed to a pinkish shape with the same twitchy border lines, next to the larger blue blob that was the sea.

  Myrra remembered looking down at the interlocking twirls in the rug beneath her feet. She had witnessed Marcus haggling for it in person, assisting him in the basement of a smoke shop. The broker spun him tales about the rug’s old-world authenticity, its origins in a region called Anatolia, and the spices and perfumes woven into its fibers. Myrra didn’t tell him that she’d seen the man before, by the back door of a local factory, seen rugs like that being woven with imitation wool through the dusty windows of the warehouse. It was still a fine piece of work.

  Turkey had dotted borders too, and thicker black borders against the blue paper sea. The thicker black lines worked better to keep the water out, Myrra imagined. Maybe in the old world there were walls built there.

  The town of Nabat felt a lot like New London’s Turkish district. The same smell of spices, meat, and smoke came wafting out of metal food carts, and the same tiled patterns adorned the floors of the shops. And there were rugs everywhere, with twisting designs that would have made Marcus rush for his wallet.

  Even if they died tomorrow, Myrra still needed a place to sleep tonight. The best hotel in town, she learned, was a few stories down, nearer to the foot of the cliffs and the sea. The Nabat Rafia Hotel had a relatively small entrance, but inside, the ceilings of the lobby bloomed and bowed upward multiple stories, cathedral-like, enough so that Myrra’s every footfall echoed on the marble floor. Happy to be indoors, Charlotte let out a shrill squeal that rang out across the arches. Myrra usually loved Charlotte’s laugh, but right now it just made her head pound.

  As one of the few hotels in Nabat, it was considerably grand. Myrra worried briefly about surveillance, but as she looked up over the arches and stone walls, she couldn’t spot any cameras. She’d just have to hope that there weren’t any other sensors she couldn’t see.

  “Do you have any vacancies?” she asked as she approached the counter.

  “Of course. Most of the hotel, in fact,” the concierge replied. He was a bored-looking young man with dark hair, olive skin, and sullen, half-closed eyes. The name embossed on his gold name tag, pinned crookedly on the breast of his blazer, was Sem. Sem slouched in a red leather chair behind the reservation counter, so Myrra had to crane her neck over the top to see him.

  She must have given him a surprised look, because he explained—“Most tourism dried up about thirty years ago, once construction finished up on Palmer.” At the mention of Palmer, Sem the concierge gestured out the window next to the counter, down to the bottom of the cliff. Myrra looked out and down, following his gesture, but all she could see was the flat metallic pan of the sea glistening against the sun.

  A few well-traveled valets had spun her stories of Palmer, the glamorous underwater city. She’d only half believed them—men are prone to exaggeration when they’re trying to impress. But now she looked down at the sea, full of curiosity. All she really knew about it was that whenever Imogene had returned from Palmer, she was always dewy and pink-faced from some sort of spa treatment, and Marcus always looked a little sheepish, having lost a small fortune at a gambling table. She almost wished she’d risked it and gone to Palmer after all, just to see it from the insid
e. That would be a place to see before you died.

  “Suddenly people were more interested in casinos and less interested in cliffside hiking. There was no competing, really. Palmer’s on a whole other level.” Sem sounded simultaneously bitter and wistful.

  Charlotte made a fussing noise. Myrra crooked a finger in front of her face, and Charlotte hooked a tiny hand around it, dragging Myrra’s finger into her mouth and sucking on it. Exhausted as she was, Myrra couldn’t help smiling a little.

  “I think it’s beautiful here,” Myrra said. The concierge gave her a dubious look.

  “It’s fine, I guess. I wanted to try and get a job at a resort down in Palmer, or even New London, but Dad says he needs me here. Like there’s really a whole lot to do.” He slouched farther and rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t bother with New London. It’s not worth the trouble.” Even as she said it, Myrra understood the irony of her opinion. Everyone wanted to be where they weren’t.

  “Maybe. I still want to see it, though. There’s not a whole lot to do in Nabat, if you’re from here,” the concierge explained. “I’ve been saving up to move out there for a while.”

  He was saving up his money for nothing. She pictured their bodies frozen solid in the cold of space. She pictured no air. Don’t think about that. Any day now. Don’t think about that.

  “Hey, are you OK?”

  In a mirror reaction to her own imagination, Myrra had stopped breathing. She shook the images to the back of her brain and tried to swallow down the bile rising in her throat.

  “Yes. Sorry, yes. My mind wandered.” Myrra smiled at Sem. She had the sudden impulse to tell him, to shout the truth in his face. But in this case the truth was an impossible thing to believe.