“Yeah, you. She didn’t mind when I got out of the car.” Tobias looked at Myrra, then at Charlotte, then back at Myrra again, unsure of what to do. Myrra laughed again.
“Go pick her up.” She waved a hand at him, shooing him toward Charlotte.
He opened the door to the back seat, bent down, and unstrapped Charlotte from her seat. She stopped crying immediately and raised her arms to him. He lifted her and held her against the side of his torso with her chubby little legs straddling his waist. She relaxed and leaned her head against his shoulder. Tobias stopped moving and just watched her, awestruck at her trust.
“Come over here,” Myrra said. “Take a look at the sky.”
He walked over and stood next to her. The sky did look strange: a little too bright, a little too flat. Not like vast space. More like a wall. Tobias smiled in relief.
“We’re close,” he said.
Myrra laid a reassuring hand on his arm, then combed the sand out of Charlotte’s hair. Tobias like the gesture; it felt familiar, as if Myrra had brushed her hand over his arm before, as if they’d known each other for years rather than weeks.
They packed bags with essentials and abandoned the car. Myrra let Tobias keep Charlotte, surprising herself with how little she minded Tobias holding her. “I have a scarf that I use as a sling when I want my hands free,” she offered, but Tobias refused. Myrra caught his small smile when Charlotte nestled her head deeper into his shoulder, and she understood.
As they walked, the road straightened out and the dunes got smaller. Myrra had imagined that the wall of the horizon would be painted, like the traditional scene paintings displayed in the Carlyles’ entryway. But as they approached the wall, she saw that it was actually a massive glowing projection screen. It made sense—the way the colors of the sky changed and shifted with the time of day, the horizon couldn’t exist as a single flat landscape.
The closer they got, the brighter the screen became, until they were just feet away from the wall and it was a wall of undecipherable light. Even now, as the colors of the sky shifted toward dusk, it was oppressively bright when you stood this close. Myrra squinted, trying to adjust her eyes—so this was the edge of the world, the start of the sky. She’d never felt so small. Even if it was just technology and engineering, it felt as though she were staring into the face of the gods.
“Did they teach you about this in school?” Myrra asked. Her voice came out hushed.
“No,” Tobias replied, also keeping his tone reverently quiet. Charlotte moaned and tried to bury her face in Tobias’s shirt.
Myrra’s eyes were starting to hurt. They needed to focus: a road as long as this didn’t just end in a spot of nowhere against a wall. There had to be something. She tried to make out any discernible shapes through the glare, and—there. A few meters away, there was a large steel door embedded in the screen.
“Over here—” She ran toward it.
The door was heavy, but with the two of them pulling at the handle, it opened. Tobias looked at her with uncertainty. On the other side was a long dark corridor; the walls, ceiling, and floor were entirely made of metal. It reminded Myrra of the machinery in the factory where she and her mother had once worked. It was impossible to see very far inside. Somewhere deep in the blackness, Myrra heard a rhythmic thumping. It hummed in the bones of her chest.
The hall was shadowed and black and wet, with water or hydraulic oil, Myrra couldn’t be sure. Not at all like a place where the rich might escape. “They even die better than we do,” Rachel had said. Whatever this was, it wasn’t better. It seemed less and less likely that there would be anything here that could save Charlotte. Myrra felt the cloud of this knowledge, this suspicion, descend upon her like fog on a mountain. But we are here now, she thought. We are here now, with nowhere else to go. Her thin string of hope was going to snap at any minute, the invisible line that had pulled her along this far. But it wasn’t gone yet. And she had to see this through. She couldn’t die with a maybe.
Myrra felt Tobias’s hand on her shoulder.
“Forward?” he asked.
“Forward,” she replied, putting on a resolute face.
They crossed the threshold of the door, closing it behind them.
It wasn’t as dark as it had initially looked. Once they were away from the blinding light of the horizon wall, Tobias could start to make out his surroundings. The dim hallway became clearer: pipes and valves overhead, metal grating under their feet. Lamps with metal shades swung from naked wires attached to the ceiling. Compared to the light they had just seen, these gave out only the barest pinpricks of illumination. This must be the inside of the hull.
Charlotte let out a high-pitched scream, then giggled when she heard her own voice bounce off the metal walls. He wished she wouldn’t; they didn’t know who was around to hear. “Shhhh…” Tobias whispered, bouncing her in his arms.
There was a distant sound reverberating through the pipes as they walked—Tobias listened and tried to make it out. At first it sounded to him like a heartbeat, and a sudden panicked thought ran through him, that they had entered through the mouth of some beast and were now traveling through his innards, hearing his blood pulse, while they waited to be digested.
“It’s music,” Myrra said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts. Music? He listened closer. The heartbeat turned into a bass line. Tobias was reminded of electronica clubs in New London, speakers thumping out bass beats so hard they shook the floor. He’d had to sit through one too many deafening nights like that in training, when Barnes had assigned him to shadow the Narcotics Division.
At one point Tobias tripped over something soft. He looked down: it was a leg. Peering closer, he realized it was a young man leaned against the wall. A girl about his age lay beside him, her arms entwined around his shoulders. Both were pale, with dirt and oil smeared on their skins; their clothes might at one time have had defining color but were now a faded gray-brown. They were so still, it was hard to tell if they were dead or sleeping. Tobias crouched down and pulled an empty bottle out of the girl’s hand. The bottle looked as if it had once contained cleaning solvent. That would put someone to sleep, he thought. He looked closer. It was shallow, but they were breathing.
“Tobias?” he heard Myrra whisper somewhere ahead of him. He stood and jogged to catch up.
The hallway ended with another metal door, this one with a tiny porthole window. Myrra was craning her neck up to get a look—she wasn’t quite tall enough. Tobias peered through, over her head, but couldn’t make out more than some railings and pipes.
“Forward,” he said, and they heaved the door open with its large metal handle. The music instantly got louder, blaring out of some unseen speakers, bouncing off the metal walls.
“Look…” Myrra tugged on his sleeve and pointed above them. Scaffolding and metal staircases rose and unfolded above them, flight after flight, level after level, into a distance that was too high to see and too vast to comprehend. Everything was lit with the same metal lamps, casting harsh blue industrial light that threw shadows onto every surface. At the levels nearest to them, Tobias could make out the lines of the stairs and stair rails and grated walkways, but the farther they rose, the more each piece just tangled into an indiscernible thicket of lines and darkness. Now that he was properly taking in his surroundings, Tobias noticed that there was near-infinite space to their right and their left as well. The distance from the door they had just walked through to the metal wall in front of them looked to be about ten meters, but the distances above them and to either side swept on forever. It made the skyscrapers of New London look like a child’s building blocks by comparison.
There were people clustered in groups here and there, sprawled out on the floor and on the walkways above them. The stench of sweat and medicinal alcohol filled the air. They moved forward, looking for signs or any sort of guidepost that could tell them where they were. They walked past stairs and railings, ducking under beams and wiring. Tobias looked up throu
gh a grate directly above them only to see a man and woman, naked and emaciated, fucking and grunting in the open air. Myrra grabbed his hand and hurried them forward.
Once they were clear, Myrra stopped and looked at Charlotte, as if checking to make sure she was still there. Her eyes had that wild animal look again, same as in Nabat. Tobias handed Charlotte to her, hoping that would help. She clutched Charlotte and looked at Tobias gratefully. He wished he could hug her, but knew better than to try.
This place felt like the dorms in her worst moments, it felt like factory machinery, it felt like every claustrophobic place where Myrra had been stowed, all her life, in between bouts of working. She could feel cold sweat pouring off her skin. She looked over at Tobias: he looked scared too. Somehow that helped; it wasn’t just she who felt crazy here. It wasn’t just her own paranoia seeping in. Charlotte clutched at her side and sucked on the fabric of her dress—she didn’t like it here either.
At one point a woman shouted at them, sitting up from her spot on a staircase.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Her hair hung in mats from the side of her head. She gaped at them, openmouthed: half her teeth were gone, and the teeth that remained were blackened and rotting away.
“What is this place?” Myrra asked.
“I asked you first,” the woman said. She was slurring her words a little.
“We came in from the desert,” Tobias said. Myrra noticed that he was trying to make his voice sound deeper. “Where are we now?”
“You are in between the inner and outer hull. And this”—she threw her arms out haphazardly—“is our end-of-the-world party!” She let out a cackle that sounded like a motor dying.
“How the heck did you get here from the desert?” she asked.
“We had a car.”
“It still work?”
“No,” Tobias said. “The battery died about a kilometer away from the wall.”
The woman rose up on unsteady knees. Myrra noticed a pipe in her hand, something fashioned out of a bottle cap, tape, and some metal tubing. Something black, oily, and acrid was crumpled in the bowl of the pipe. On reflex, she turned and pulled Charlotte away from the cloud of smoke.
“I’ll tell the boys,” she said. “They might want to go salvage the battery acid.”
“For what?” Myrra asked, then immediately regretted it.
“There’s all sorts of fun things you can make with battery acid,” the woman said, flashing a hollow black-toothed grin. She wandered up the staircase, out of sight.
“Fuck,” Myrra mumbled, stroking Charlotte’s hair. It was as though they’d crossed the threshold into hell.
Myrra remembered the stories from her childhood, talk of workers being thrown into sewers when they were bad, or getting processed into dog food. Myrra thought of Cora, her legs flailing as she squeezed through a window, the sound of tranq darts, the fear and bile that had filled her as a child. And she knew, as suddenly as an electric shock, that this was where Cora had gone.
“Who are all these people?” Tobias asked.
“I’m pretty sure they’re contract workers. Runaways,” Myrra said.
“How can you tell?”
“I just know.”
She absorbed that thought, let it sink in, how her identity had been shaped, how thin the border was between who she was and livestock. She thought of her mother, whose mind had slipped too far, whose hands had lost their grip on that imaginary thread of sanity.
She looked at Tobias. Already a fine layer of grime was accumulating on his cheeks. He had looked so sheepish when he revealed how much he knew about her background. Would he know? Had he known, all along?
“When my mother left…” she started, choosing to say “left” instead of “was taken” because it had always felt like a choice to Myrra, that her mother had walked out on her rather than been dragged, as unfair as that might be. “Before she left, she wasn’t…well. She’d given up, in a sense. Do you know what happened to her?”
It drained her, just to ask the question. It felt like jumping off a building. She hoped she could survive the answer.
Tobias stared past her, into the tangled metal around them, as if trying to work out his own memories.
“Ami Dal got put into a mental hospital on suicide watch,” he said.
This was it, she thought. She steeled herself, picturing how it must have happened, almost in the same ways she’d been picturing her own death most nights, over and over. When it came to her mother’s fate, a million horrible scenarios had run in a maddening cycle through Myrra’s head since childhood. All the ways she could have done it, some outlandish, some mundane. At least here maybe that cycle would stop.
“But eventually, after a number of escape attempts and disturbances, she got labeled a problem patient and was transferred to an alternate facility.”
Myrra snapped back in. That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. “What? Where?”
“I don’t know. The file didn’t say anything more.”
“Escape attempts.” “Disturbances.” That sounded like a woman fighting, not one who had given up, after all. Something, Myrra would probably never know what, had kept her from taking the plunge. There are so many of us tempted to let death in, she thought, imagining Imogene on the terrace wall and remembering herself not too long ago, panicked and gripping the rail of a cliffside balcony. Who knows what small thing did it for her, what keeps us from letting death in. Even now, when death waits at the threshold for the whole world.
Her mother had been a troublesome patient. Tobias’s eyes widened. Something clicked.
Myrra guessed his train of thought.
“She was sent here.”
Even with the proof laid out in front of him, Tobias’s mind went into denial on reflex. No. He’d been told, in training, what happened to escaped contract workers—there was some sort of rehabilitation program they were sent to. All systematic, all objective. Agents tracked down workers who broke contract, took evidence into account, gave them their fair trial.
But. Had he ever seen with his own eyes what happened to workers after their conviction? They just loaded them into transfer vans. He remembered Barnes explaining it to him—it was a separate government department. His heart sank with the realization. He had never thought about it, any of it.
Had Barnes known? Probably not—Barnes took bureaucracy at face value. But not questioning it was just as great a sin as knowing in the first place. He thought back to the beliefs he had learned from Barnes: it wasn’t a fair system, but it was what they had to work with, and they couldn’t change it at this point.
There came another rush of guilt. What did it mean to mourn a man you loved and at the same time be rudely awakened to his flaws? Tobias didn’t know how to hold both those feelings at once. All he knew was that he was drowning in sorrow.
He looked at Myrra and wondered why she tolerated his presence at all. Myrra was stroking Charlotte’s hair with a far-off look. Was her mother alive somewhere here? Maybe his whole purpose in the end would be to reunite them and then go die somewhere alone. Maybe with an act like that he could be absolved.
“They used to tell us such horror stories of what would happen if we ran off,” she said. There was a long silence afterward. Tobias couldn’t tell if there was more to the story.
“I’m so sorry,” he started, and then couldn’t think of what to apologize for first. For his complicity? For handcuffing her? For her entire life? He couldn’t find a way to finish, so his “sorry” just hung in the air, dangling like a loose shoelace.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he asked.
“I’m thinking we need to find whoever’s in charge.” She didn’t look like she hated him.
Tobias shifted gears, jumped into problem-solving mode. If he couldn’t apologize for the problems of the world, he could at least fix the problem at hand.
Tobias looked around at all the levels above them. If this really was the space between the inner
and outer hull, then it was enormous. Unfathomably enormous. Finding any one particular person in this place would be like trying to find a single grain of sand on a beach.
Don’t think of the big picture, he thought. Just like in any other investigation, just take the most logical path, step by step, and the big picture will find you.
“Let’s find the source of this music,” he said, gesturing to the thumping beats reverberating through the pipes and the walls. “Whoever set this up is bound to know something.”
“You’re right.” She stayed where she was, standing tall, holding Charlotte in a secure embrace. But her expression faltered, just a little. Almost imperceptibly, the corners of her mouth turned downward.
“Forward,” he said, and took her hand.
It was harder, almost, to imagine her mother sane. To imagine her continuing and fighting against her circumstances. She’d repeated to herself over and over, as she grew, as she moved from one demeaning job to the next: I will not be like her. I will not give up. There is always a way out. I will fight. I will not be like her. Sadness over her loss had curdled into anger long ago, and she’d built the foundations of her identity on that anger. It had driven her forward. What would drive her now?
Charlotte reached up and tugged on a lock of her hair. There was Charlotte. There was always Charlotte.
She looked around at the endless thicket of metal and shadows surrounding them. The sane part of her brain warned her: There is no escape here. No escape for anyone, no matter how rich or highborn. But the insane part of her still held on—there was still a maybe there. There was still a door that hadn’t yet closed.
She didn’t hold on to the idea because it made any sort of sense. She held on because she needed a reason to keep going. Now, in the absence of anger, this was all she had.
34
IN BETWEEN
It’s hard to know the best way to build a world, just as it’s hard to know the best way to tell a story. One very important question faced the designers of the world the ship: Would they build it to reflect the actual circumstances of its surroundings, or would they keep the world an insulated closed system? To put it another way: Would they build windows?
The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 32