Gravity is Heartless

by Sarah Lahey

  Quinn dives into the casket and tugs on the purse, but the latch is stuck. It won’t budge. She tries to unwrap the strap from Ada’s wrist, but it’s wrapped in knots and she’s making it worse. Lever it, she thinks, prise it open with something . . . but what?

  Teeth. She leans into the casket, grips the latch with her canines, and squeezes. It springs open, revealing a watertight sachet that she grabs and quickly slips into her pocket. She closes the purse, composes herself, and steps away from the casket.

  ***

  They make it back to Quinn’s cell without incident.

  “You were very good,” Quinn says, impressed by Geller’s bravado. “Weren’t you scared?”

  “No, ’tis my ting. My super power. Got Urbach-Wiethe disease when I was eight. Developed lesions all over me brain, ruined te amygdala regions in both ’emispheres. Now I can’t process fear.”

  “You never get scared?”

  “No. I also ’ave a bias t’wards trustin’ strangers. So you’re not speshal.”

  Quinn confesses her super power: “I have Raynaud’s syndrome. I don’t get hot. Not like other people, anyway.”

  “Cool. Literally.”

  Quinn opens the sachet. Inside is a piece of parchment torn from a notebook; scrawled across it is a black zigzag line.

  “Tat’s it? One squiggly line. Looks like a worm.”

  Lise has distinctive handwriting: she scrawls like a maniac, making large, loopy words and sums across the page, editing as she goes, crossing out figures and writing new ones over the top. Her handwriting is generally illegible. But she always uses an automatic pencil and recycled parchment. Quinn knows this is her mark.

  “’Tis a W. W for wild, or wave. No, ’tis water, W for water. Or war. W for war.”

  Quinn turns the note around, then she turns it around again, and again; from all directions, it looks like a zigzag worm.

  “It’ll come ta ya later—during sex, or when you’re tinkin’ about sometin’ completely unrelated. Tat’s how it works. But Ada, she must ’ave been a good friend. Loved your moter very much ta swap Bands, risk ’er life. Either tat or she was a bad friend, an’ a tief at tat.”

  Just as she finishes saying this, warning bells ring, amber lights flash in the corridor, and there’s movement outside Quinn’s cell; the blurred image of guards responding. Shit, we’ve been caught. She shoves the note into her mouth and swallows it.

  “We’re movin’,” says Geller. “A new location, means a new disaster. Wait ’ere.”

  Might have overreacted.

  ***

  Geller returns twenty minutes later. “Tsunami, South Africa, east coast, near Durban,” she says. “I’ve organized a drone, but you’re not ’eadin’ ’ome. There’s a containment island close by. It’ll drop ya tere. In a few days you’ll be picked up by ’exad. You can’t stay ’ere. You’re not safe, you need ta git off tis vessel.”

  Containment island? “I’m going to prison?”

  “Okay, stay ’ere ten. Or, I’ll tell ya what, let’s swap places. I’ll go sit on te lovely white sand. You stay ’ere an’ slowly turn white.”

  “Sand’s gone, most islands are . . .”

  Geller glares, and it’s unpleasant.

  “A tropical paradise,” Quinn says weakly. “Can’t wait.”

  “Good.”

  They make their way into the skylift. When the coast is clear, Geller takes Quinn’s hand and pulls her onto the landing deck and into bright sunshine. It’s blinding, but there’s no time to adjust; a circular, single seat drone hovers impatiently, tapping it legs up and down on the deck. As they approach, the propellers ease and the hatch falls open.

  Quinn climbs up and straps herself in. Geller double-checks the harness, then leans forward and kisses Quinn gently on cheek. Then the drone ascends.

  Twelve

  They’re dodo birds.

  THE FLIGHT TAKES HALF the morning. It’s a hypnotic journey—deep blue water below, hazy blue sky around her, and the very straight horizon line in the distance. She travels northeast and eventually descends over a small atoll in the Indian Ocean. There, the drone drops her onto the roof of a disused shipping container.

  It doesn’t fly way; it is not headed back to Prismatic. Instead, it slowly falls apart, disassembling itself into a care pack: food, basic medical supplies, and a drinking filter for seawater. The rotors are edible wafers and the cockpit is made from a starchy carbohydrate substance.

  Quinn climbs down to the beach and filters some seawater. She breaks the cockpit into pieces, mixes one with the water, and drinks the thick soup it turns into. Then she sits and stares out at the water.

  ***

  She eats the entire drone in two days, then realizes it was supposed to last longer; she gets nothing else to eat until day four, when a gull drone arrives with food parcels and clothes.

  On her tenth day of living on the atoll, inside the shipping container, she receives her second supply drop and a separate communication dispatch outlining her charges; 1,962 counts of capital murder, first degree. Apparently there’s evidence of premeditation and deliberate planning.

  This news pisses her off. She descends into a cycle of bitterness and anger—stomping around the island, kicking rocks, and throwing handfuls of sand at the sea birds.

  This cycle continues for several days, until she realizes that loneliness feeds her obsessive thoughts and reason needs company; bereft of that, she has become a broiling, neurotic, emotional wreck. Fuck it, it’s not my problem—the truth will come out. Stoically, she breathes in and out and lets it go.

  Her shipping container home is three by eight meters, a standard size and enough space for a single person to live in—tight, but adequate. There’s a separate bathing zone outside and a food prep in the far right corner. She has furniture: a bed with a honeycomb mattress (this is where she’s stowed her diamond for safekeeping), and a table and two chairs, unfortunately made from compressed cardboard, a popular building material in the 2020s and ’30s (it hasn’t weathered well, being so close to the water’ the paper layers are shredding). There’s a good-size window and a sliding glass door with a view of the ocean. Gazing at the ocean occupies a great deal of her time—watching the swell rise and fall, staring at the horizon line, waiting for the sun to set, then watching it rise again. Matt would be so proud.

  There’s no Tech; she’s living the Humanist Dream. Tasks are manual: she closes the cupboard doors herself, gets up and walks across the room to switch on the water heater to make tea. She hasn’t manually switched on an electronic device for a decade. A stretchable, waterproof, gold-coded tattoo behind her right ear is supposed to channel her thoughts into electrical signals that power minor appliances, but it seems the device is impaired.

  After a few days of manually switching on the water heater, it became automatic. Illumination, of all things, proved more complex. The setup is kinetic: a weight-drawn bag of sand drops to the ground generating half a watt of electricity, enough to power a small LED lamp. The cycle takes forty minutes and must be constantly reset.

  If she could have one more thing, she’d ask for another pillow. There is only one pillow and she’s a two-pillow person: one for her head and one to cover her feet, to keep them warm.

  She has new clothes; the drone delivered a shift dress and matching shorts in a pale taupe color, a tone favored by many of the small birds on the atoll, so she blends nicely with the natives. Her clothes are made from a pineapple fiber called Piña. She knows this because it says so on the label, 100 percent Piña. It’s a lovely fiber, soft and smooth, it doesn’t crush, and it dries in no time. Unfortunately, she has no shoes. The soles of her feet are in a terrible state, cut and grazed, her toes stubbed and bruised from kicking rocks.

  She has named the significant areas around the atoll: Rocky Beach, Bird Point, Crab-Pool Coast, and the Cove—the site of her shipping container home. A large section of the island is made of solid, hardcore plastic: PET, polyester, HDPE, PV, PP, P
S with BPA and BPS. The entire northwest corner, over ten square kilometers, is covered with the stuff. Bonding polymers were released into the ocean in the 2020s and, like a magnet, they drew the plastic together, hardening it into a solid mass. This effectively eliminated small particles from seawater, but this pile was never recovered.

  She’s not completely alone on the atoll; there are many types of birds, and Quinn spends many hours watching them. She studies them so carefully, she can tell them apart. She realizes they are unique, all individuals with distinct personalities. Some are busy and never stop foraging; some are contemplative and sit and watch the sky or the tides; some are bossy, chasing other birds away. Some are passive, some aggressive; some are taupe, others are pure white or solid black. At the end of the day, they are all birds, with wings and two legs, and Quinn decides that it’s better to be a bird than a human.

  The flocks of gulls that inhabit the beach know her; she sits amongst them and they don’t fly away. Sometimes she chases the bossy gulls or stands one-legged with them while the tide rolls back and forth. When they take off, she jumps up and runs along the sand, flapping her arms like wings, until they’re all gone and she’s left alone on the sand. Then she runs again, just for the sheer joy of it. She hasn’t done that since she was a girl—run for joy.

  One species in particular catches her attention—a flightless fowl about a meter tall. It resembles a small, fat ostrich but has tiny, useless wings, black plumes, a fluffy tail, and a slender, green-grey beak that hooks under at the tip. It’s a strange, but also familiar, species; she’s seen it before in books, books and documentaries—they’re dodo birds. They were extinct for centuries and have now been resurrected through gene sequencing.

  This flock is doing well. Many females are breading, sitting on grey eggs in ground nests scattered through the scrubby bush land that lines the foreshore. They’re not shy birds, and they waddle right up to her, even the baby ones. She has a favorite, a female who’s not nesting, so they hang out together. Quinn has named her Jane, after Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist.

  Every afternoon, after her second nap, Quinn walks back and forth along the beach, collecting the foam and plastic litter washed in by swell. Some days there are hundreds of white foam balls, the size of baby peas, and the sand resembles a pile of snow. But it’s not snow. It’s petroleum-derived polystyrene. Non-biodegradable, it will last forever. She thinks one day she’ll find a whole cup—an entire polystyrene cup.

  Painstakingly, she collects and buries the litter in the sand dunes behind the Cove each day. This is a pointless activity, totally pointless, and she knows it—one strong onshore wind and the dune will dissolve—but she continues to do it.

  To mark the passage of time, her final task for the day is to make a cairn. The northern end of the beach, a place she calls Rocky Beach, is littered with boulders and pebbles, perfect for small stone erections. Her first attempts were simple structures: five or six stones stacked randomly, one on top of the other. Now, after four weeks alone on the atoll, she’s mastered the art of cairn building. Each day, she creates increasingly complex arrangements, grouping similarly shaped stones together—all the triangles, all the squares, all the circles. In the coming days, she’s hoping to master the arch.

  Her creative bent doesn’t only include rock sculptures; she’s also started drawing. The walls of her shipping container home are covered in sketches. Her left hand has talent—she just hands it a chalky rock, and it gets straight to work. It has sketched a map of the world, with details of her home, in Hobart, and where she thinks the atoll is located: southeast of South Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It has also drawn a detailed picture of the Cove and her little shipping container home on the hill, with Jane and her sitting together on the front landing.

  After five weeks alone on the atoll, music comes to Quinn. It comes as she walks along the beach, so she starts to dance on the sand. Then she dances in the ocean with the water splashing around her calves. She dances on the hard roof of her shipping container; she dances on Rocky Beach while she collects rocks and catches up on her cairn building. In the afternoon, she climbs to the island’s highest point and dances on the ledge overlooking the ocean. When she gets home, she dances with the dodos on her front landing.

  For an entire week, she dances: rock and roll, jive, swing, ballroom, samba, the Macarena—she can’t stop. She dances on her bed; she dances on her table. She dances while she eats. The music is inside her head; all the tunes, new and old, all the lyrics that she’s never been good at recalling, are coming back to her, at least in part, enough to fill her head and keep her moving. She’s making up for all the years and decades she’s spent not dancing.

  Thirteen

  Are you a prisoner, Like me?

  TODAY IS THE FIFTEENTH of November, and it’s Quinn’s birthday. Today she enters a new decade—she’s no longer twenty-nine. Element 29 on the periodic table is copper, so last year was her year of copper. Copper is a soft and malleable metal; it possesses excellent thermal conductivity and is resistant to corrosion. It begins life warm and rich, red or orange, and then the atmosphere gets to it and it loses electrons, slowly tarnishing and turning green. She sees the similarities; her year started bright and optimistic, and then she was betrayed and now it’s shit.

  But her year of copper is over. Element number 30 on the periodic table is zinc. Zinc is bluish-silver, hard and brittle until it’s heated, and then it softens. It can cure the common cold. If you are stung by a deadly jellyfish, zinc can save your life; the jellyfish poison pokes holes in your red blood cells, but zinc stops the potassium from leaking out. During human conception, when a sperm meets an egg, zinc explodes, sending sparks flying. Zinc is not organic, but it is alive. This year she is zinc.

  Last night a dream invaded her sleep. Perfect timing for the end of her twenty-ninth year, it arrived right between copper and zinc. She woke covered in sweat, hands cold and feet frozen.

  In the dream she was completely naked and heavily pregnant, and she was walking through the massive Wilkes Basin in Antarctica. Most of the ground snow had melted and been replaced by glittering salt crystals. Ferns and native grasses grew along the ridgeline of the Basin. The sky was mauve and filled with rainbow clouds, soft pinks and pale blues from horizon to horizon. The baby in her belly was heavy. She was on a mission to get to the other side, to safety, but she knew it was an impossible task and she wouldn’t make it before the labor started.

  The baby was coming, so she sat down on the crystallized valley floor. She was going to give birth in a super saline pool in the middle of the Wilkes Basin.

  Abdominal pains roused her from her dream, and quickly she dismissed its significance. It had to be the product of an internal battle between hormones and gender. She’s female, she’s thirty, her body wants to have a baby, but her conscious mind knows it’s not possible. She has an implant, Conscientious Prevention; she can never conceive. In a world of ten billion people, it was the right thing to do. With three billion children in the world, sixty million of them homeless, abortions are encouraged these days and IVF treatments are illegal, but the population is still growing. So, on her twenty-first birthday, she got an infertility implant. She doesn’t regret it. If she decides she wants children one day she can adopt. But the conflict manifests deep in her subconscious, in Antarctica, in the Wilkes Basin.

  Twenty-nine wasn’t her best year, but it’s over. Today, she’s thirty and things are looking up. Today, there’s a King Tide—a gravitational pull between the sun and the moon. The tide is eight meters higher than its usual swell, and she’s found a spot, a ledge, where the gap between land and water has shrunk to twelve meters. That is still high, but twelve is better than twenty. She intends to jump; the impact might hurt, but it won’t kill her. Water is not her favorite substance and she finds submersion highly unpleasant, but she thinks it’s worth it, to feel the weightlessness of the world.

  The tide peaks at dusk and the night comes slowly
here, so she heads out late in the afternoon, knowing she has plenty of time and she’ll be home before it’s dark. When she reaches the jump ledge, she checks the water for obstructions: it’s clear, deep blue, and calm. Do it fast; don’t think about it. A swift run-up and she’s over the edge, falling through the air—falling towards the water, falling though time and space, falling back to Earth. She closes her eyes, and it’s bliss, pure bliss. She smiles, free at last—then she hits the water with a slap, and a sharp pain shimmies down her side. She skewed the entry. Oh fuck, that hurt.

  After wobbling to the surface, she takes a breath and rolls onto her back. Her shoulder hurts. She can’t lift her arm; it might be dislocated. It hurts to breathe. Not good. Okay, focus, get back to shore. It’s not far, barely a swell. Paddle. Kick. Take it easy, breathe, remember to breathe. Paddle. Kick. Breathe.

  ***

  She opens her eyes. Darkness. Where is she? She’s in bed, in her shipping container home. She doesn’t remember getting into bed. She must have passed out when she returned and fallen asleep. The pain was awful. It was all a blur. But she’s safe now. She’s back in her shipping container home, and she’s safe. But there’s a smell, a strange smell. She pulls back the covers and finds she’s naked; she doesn’t remember taking off her Piña dress. She climbs out of bed to investigate the smell; something cooking on the heat element. She can’t recall doing that, either, turning on the element and preparing food.

  “Hey,” a man’s voice says. “You okay?” There’s a shadow against the wall near the door, a strange silhouette.

  She pulls the wrap from the bed, covers herself. “I know you,” she says.

  “Tig,” he says.

  “Fuck.”

  The brewing pot hisses, then bubbles over. He shuffles forward, attending to the pot, pours green mush into a cup, and hands it to her. She scurries back to the bed. He turns on the kinetic light and pulls up a chair. “You were trying to fly, weren’t you?”