On the Edge of Gone Read online

  At least I’m not blinded by other people’s flashlights every few minutes. It’s quieter, too: it’s three minutes before I hear any sound other than splintering wood, the ache of metal on metal, or the sloshing of water outside. Rushed steps. Displaced rubble. A voice, panting. I stand promptly upright. Over a dozen meters away, a light beam is bouncing on the floor, highlighting rubble for half seconds, swinging away uncontrolled, then back to the floor. The light-dark-light-dark is enough to give me a headache. I point my own flashlight at the runner. Only when he’s close do I recognize him—the bearded guy who tried to pull me out of the car last night. He has a smudge on his cheek. It might be a smear of dirt or a trick of the light—or a bruise from where I hit him.

  “Out!” he screams. “Get out of here!” He doesn’t stop running. A hand held telescope hangs from a strap around his shoulder, thuds against his coat.

  “What do you—”

  “The fire went out! It’s coming!” His voice skips. “Get to the ship!”

  “But I—”

  He passes me, doesn’t even slow down, doesn’t even look funny at how I’m brandishing a crowbar and flashlight like weapons.

  Then, right as I think I’ll be left here, clueless, he shouts a single word that makes me go ice-cold.

  “Tsunami!”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HE KEEPS RUNNING.

  “But—” I say to no one in particular.

  We’re inland. We’re almost twenty kilometers inland. The sea is to our west. And the comet hit so far to our east it—it shouldn’t be able to . . . Impacts of this magnitude cause quakes and eruptions and tsunamis, yes, but not for us, not here. We’re nowhere near a fault line, and the North Sea is too shallow to build tsunamis.

  There can’t be a wave here.

  But there is.

  I snap out of it. I have to go. The airport buildings are unstable enough after the air blast—a wave could knock them down.

  And the airport itself is over four meters below sea level.

  I scramble to run. The crowbar clatters to the floor. I leave the backpack behind. Leap over debris, almost crack an ankle.

  Mom doesn’t know. Neither do Max and Mirjam and the others. This man—if he goes straight for the ship, he’ll completely miss the wing Mom and the others are in. How long do we have? He said the fire had gone out. Mom had talked about a wildfire in the west, at the horizon. If the tsunami has only just snuffed it out, it must still be far away. It’s all fields and farms to our west for several kilometers—the horizon can’t be close. Except, wouldn’t the dust mean the fire had to be close for Mom to see it? Or would the darkness mean you could see any light from afar? And how fast are tsunamis on land? I should know that, should’ve prepared like I did for the wildfires and air blast and debris—

  I run faster. I slip over wet leaves, slam onto my face. Tears fill my eyes, more from shock than anything else. I crawl up. Keep going. Where were the others? Down the stairs, and then—Wait, I don’t recognize these walls, shit, shit, I’m in the wrong hallway. I double back.

  There—finally—the cleaning closet. Max left a bunch of bottles right outside the door. Farther away, a backpack leans against the wall. Max is rummaging through it.

  “Tsunami!” I scream. I’m almost there. “We’ve got to go! Tsunami!”

  Max looks up. “What? No.”

  “It’s coming—someone from the ship upstairs—”

  Max tilts his head. “Moroccan? Beard?”

  “I—yeah—”

  “Captain’s brother.” Max turns and bellows, “We leave! Now!”

  “My mother!”

  “We saw her. She’s in the offices. Go! Run!”

  The others are already jogging out. Fatima and Sanne. Mirjam. The twins. They’re hauling on their backpacks, coming toward Max, but not as fast as they should.

  “What is it?” Mirjam demands.

  “Tsunami,” Max says, already turning to run. “Drop your bags!”

  “Will—will they let—” I can’t get the words out.

  “Denise, if they don’t let you on, I’ll demolish the ship with this very crowbar,” Mirjam says.

  Then we’re running. I go fast—almost slip once, but catch myself on the wall—and I’m shouting for Mom the moment we’re close enough to the offices. “Backpacks! Mom, grab the backpacks! We have to run! There’s a wave!”

  The loot doesn’t matter, but our backpacks are all we have.

  For three seconds that feel like so much longer, there’s nothing. Then Mom blasts out the door, her backpack around her shoulder. Fatima’s flashlight catches on her face. She hasn’t been using. I thank God for that.

  Mom darts into my office and comes out holding my backpack by a strap. I grab it. Max yanks it from my hands, hauls it around one shoulder. We’re running again before I process what he’s doing. How long since I heard about the wave? One minute? Five?

  My breath starts to catch. My lungs burn. I feel like a child, the clumsy way my feet move, the way I gasp for air and almost want to yell for the others to wait up. My fingertips ache with cold: I never put my gloves back on. I push harder. I gain. We focus our flashlights in front of us, a single broad, shaky beam warning us of rubble and metal and casting wild shadows. I think of Iris, wherever she is now, and beg, Please survive this, please survive this.

  “They’ll be—” Mirjam says from the back of the group, gasping. “Lockdown—don’t know if—lockdown.”

  Outside. The wind is like a slap to the face. We run between the two buildings, into the black, until the air shimmers and shudders and—like mist dissipating—the Nassau’s cloaking fades. Within seconds, the ship is fully visible and fully massive. I’m taken aback all over again by how huge it is.

  “No ramp.” Panic hitches in my voice. “There’s no ramp!” My fingers clutch my flashlight so tight the skin is taut and painful, but I don’t let go.

  “Lockdown,” Mirjam says. “I’ll check—” Then she’s gone, running underneath the ship.

  “I was too slow. I got lost.” The air is so cold, my throat hurts. Our tabs start going off with emergency proximity messages now that we’re close enough to the ship to pick up the signals.

  Fatima grabs Sanne and shoves her and Max toward the ship. “Climb up the scaffolding! Up there—there’re doors!” Nothing’s left of the silent girl I met before. Iris would do the same thing: laugh one moment, take charge the next, and never hesitate in between. Fatima spins and points my mother at a different set of ladders. “Take those!”

  Mom breaks into a run.

  “The rest of us. The viewing windows.” Fatima pants. “Get their attention.”

  “Got it.” The twins run toward the nearest window arching at the bottom of the ship.

  Fatima grabs my sleeve and pulls me along. I follow, gulping down cold air, pumping my shaking legs harder. We go around the ship, then underneath. On my far right, in my peripheral vision, I see movement that almost stops my heart—the tsunami.

  But it’s not. Lights skitter across the lot. People are running toward us. They must’ve come from the hangars. They shout, “What’s going on?”

  Fatima shouts back, “Tsunami!” and “Hurry up!”

  We find a broad, curved window, easily two meters overhead. My eyes frantically seek out any kind of movement. There. Three faces huddle around the glass. They must be watching for the water.

  We wave our arms and run to enter their sight. “Here!” we scream at the top of our lungs. They only notice us when we’re close. We shout again, but they gesture at their ears, shake their heads. One of them is Anke, Max’s mother, who showed me around. Her eyes are huge, staring down at us.

  Fatima gestures wildly. “Open!” she shouts, and, “Ramp!”

  They’re still shaking their heads. I remember what Els told me: Lockdown means we can’t get out without the captain’s permission. All the individual door locks are overridden. “Captain!” I hold my thumb and pinky finger to my face in
an old-fashioned phone gesture. My tab is still chirping with the emergency proximity messages. “Call the captain! He can open the doors!”

  The engineers who came running toward us are making the same gestures a couple of windows to our right, or are climbing up ladders to bash on the doors. It won’t be any use until they call Captain Van Zand. In a situation like this, he should be on the bridge or in command central or—or—whatever they call it on board the Nassau. It shouldn’t take so long to reach him.

  I push my knuckles to my lips. Els’s words sing through my skull. Can’t get out. Individual door locks overridden. Captain’s permission.

  In the distance sounds a dull roar.

  I grind my fist against my lips until it hurts. Fatima is still making pleading gestures. Farther off, the others bang on doors that won’t open. The ship looks calm and smooth and safe. Panic burns behind my eyes. I’m going to die so close to escape that I could reach out and touch it.

  Not all of the ship is smooth. My eyes lock on to a line running around the bottom of the ship. It stretches as far as I can see, a sort of edge or crease marring the bowl. It’s like the lowermost part isn’t even attached to the rest of the ship.

  I drop my fist and let out a cry. Because the other thing Els said was this: The only way out is through the emergency shuttles.

  I yank at Fatima’s sleeve and point. “Is that an escape shuttle?”

  “Yeah, I—Yes!”

  “It’s not part of the lockdown!”

  Fatima swirls to face the engineers. “We can get in through the shuttle. Call the others. Get them down there!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FATIMA AND I ARE GESTURING AT THE people inside the ship again. Anke jumps up, shouts something, and runs.

  So do we. Run. Stumble. I see Sanne doing the same from the corner of my eye. Mom’s hair tangles in the wind, her hood dropped and forgotten. The twins leap across the asphalt.

  And then I just focus on the escape shuttle. By the time I reach it, people are crowding around the hatch at the very bottom, and I stop, panting. My throat hurts. Blackness blots my vision.

  And the rush in the distance grows stronger.

  Something clicks. The hatch pops open.

  “Hurry!” Anke shouts.

  The twins are the first ones in, lifted up until they get hold of the ladder inside. They climb up and out of sight. An engineer follows, then Fatima. She has Sanne by the hand, drags her in. Then, somehow, I’m right underneath the open hatch. Mom lifts me. My hands and feet seek out the rungs automatically, and strong arms drag me farther up and inside. I’m still panting. I scramble away on hands and knees to give the others room to enter. The floor is uneven and sloped. I have to support myself on a ledge to keep from sliding back down.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and let the rest wash over me, voices, stumbling—

  “I hear it!” someone screeches. In the split second of silence after that, I hear it, too. It’s no longer a dull roar. It’s no longer dull at all.

  “Everyone here?” one of the engineers shouts. I hear the sound of buttons being pushed. Pricks of light in the ground flicker on.

  “Here!” I say automatically, like I’m at school.

  Mom follows. So do the twins. Several engineers. Max.

  “We’re here!” Fatima calls.

  Rustling. A grunt of exertion. A clang. The roar outside is acutely gone.

  “It’s shut.”

  My thighs strain from holding up my weight. I open my eyes to slits and look around. The shuttle is nothing like the rest of the ship. The ground is curved like a bowl. The seats are fixed to the ceiling. It’s all straps and knobs everywhere, a big control panel taking up an entire wall facing the chairs. Another hatch sits above us, this one rectangular. The barrier hangs open, revealing a black, empty space that none of the shuttle’s faint lights reach. The part of the shuttle we’re in is cramped with bodies, leaning against walls like I am or balancing precariously on the sloped floor.

  “Well,” Max starts, probably seeing me look around, “it’s an escape shuttle, isn’t it? Once detached, it wouldn’t have the artificial gravity of the main ship, so . . .”

  “Not now, Max,” Fatima says.

  “I don’t—” he starts. “Mirjam. Where’s Mirjam?”

  The shuttle goes quiet.

  “Mirjam was with you?” Anke says. “She said she’d be working in—she—” She spins, looks at the engineers with wide eyes, as though she’ll find her daughter hiding in their midst. “Mirjam!”

  I look around. There’s Sanne and Fatima and Max and the twins, and Mom and those engineers, and . . . There’s no Mirjam.

  “We have to—”

  Anke doesn’t get a chance to finish.

  The water hits.

  The shuttle shakes. We’re thrown off our feet. For a second, I think, That wasn’t so bad—then it shakes a second time. My head knocks into one of the engineers’. Someone screams. We tumble into one another.

  “My wrist,” an engineer hisses. “I think my wrist snapped.”

  We slowly climb back up, searching for stability. There’s still a tremor in the floor, an unsteadiness. I cling to Anke’s words from the other day: the ship is built to resist meteoroids. It can handle this, too.

  I can hear water rushing by the metal walls like a train thundering past. I imagine it all around us. We’re in an underwater tunnel in an aquarium. We’re at the bottom of the ocean. I mutter something about We’re late, we’re late, we’re late and I don’t know why. Every now and then, there’s another shake, like something big hits us. After two minutes, the shuttle jerks hard enough to knock us down again.

  “We have to find her,” Max says. He sounds baffled. That’s all: baffled.

  No one answers.

  It’s several minutes before we dare climb out of the shuttle into the Nassau proper. Max’s face is blotchy red. He’s limping. Anke helps him walk. One engineer cut her forehead, while another has a fat lip and cradles her arm.

  Mom’s quiet. Fatima and Sanne clutch at each other, and I can’t tell who’s supporting who.

  “Listen, I . . . ,” an engineer finally says, the one who closed the hatch. “I asked whether everyone was here. I didn’t know . . .”

  Fatima pulls herself free from Sanne and stalks past the group without a word. She turns a corner. Seconds later, I hear her stomping up a set of stairs.

  “‘We’re here!’” the woman says. “That’s what that girl said! I thought I could close it!”

  “She meant herself and me,” Sanne says. “Not everyone.”

  I shake my head. “We couldn’t wait for Mirjam anyway. The water was coming.”

  “You don’t know that!” Anke snarls. “She could’ve been running right at us!”

  “She would’ve shouted. If she was close.” I try to sound reasonable. It’s not fair to blame the woman who closed the hatch. She couldn’t have known. It was dark. It was chaos. If she’d kept the hatch open, we could’ve drowned along with Mirjam.

  I can be reasonable. I can be objective.

  I still know that if it’d been Iris out there, I would’ve kept that hatch open, and I would never, ever have missed her not coming on board in the first place. That woman who saved us—the woman I’m defending—I would’ve knocked her out myself.

  “We have to talk to the captain,” another engineer says.

  Then we’re all quiet, because there’s a window to our left and the world beyond is wet and dark. The water glows: the lights affixed to the Nassau are still lit. All I see is silhouettes and murkiness and no trace of Mirjam.

  Not now, I tell the panic that nibbles at my edges like the water outside the ship. Not now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THEY WERE ALREADY EXPECTING US IN the control room. “The captain’ll meet you in his office,” someone says. “Let me take you there.”

  Something else slams into the ship. A house? Another wave? We stumble, searching for steady footing. We’re led
into an office with a high, narrow window. We’re still below water level. The water sloshes around outside, rushes onward, a dark mess. In the muted glow of the ship, I see trees. Chairs spinning in murky water. Streetlights, wiring and all. Entire walls. Cars. Bikes. Whirls of sand and dirt and plants. Solar panels. Jaggedly broken wood, boards and doors and branches and table legs. Something that looks like a mangled set of window blinds tangled in the crown of a tree.

  A rag-doll body too big to be Mirjam.

  We wait. There aren’t enough chairs, and no one dares sit on the one at the other end of the bolted-down desk in the room’s center, so we remain standing. I’m clutching myself tight, pushing myself onto my tiptoes. Not everyone is here: Max and Anke and some of the engineers have left, and the twins just slipped out, too, needing to tell their father they were all right. That leaves Sanne, the engineer who closed the hatch, Mom, and me.

  Captain Van Zand shows up a minute later. “Mirjam Kuijer was with you?” His voice is raspy. He clears his throat and tries again. “She . . . ?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sanne says.

  “But she’s not . . .”

  Sanne shakes her head, a minuscule movement. “No, sir.”

  Captain Van Zand crosses his office. He sits, stares straight ahead, hands flat on his desk. “You were gathering supplies at the airport?” After Sanne confirms with a nod, he looks at the sole engineer left. “And you?”

  “We found an abandoned plane in a hangar and were stripping it of parts.” The engineer shakes her head. “We were too far away to receive the ship’s proximity messages.”

  Captain Van Zand looks at me and Mom last. “You two got lucky, I take it.”

  “Nothing to do with luck. My daughter saved us.” Mom wraps an arm around my shoulder, pulls me into a half hug. I let out a choked sound, but immediately regret it. I’m still angry, I am—but Mom is also the one who didn’t hesitate for a second when I shouted that the wave was coming, the one who boosted me into the emergency shuttle. I should thank her. Show her that I noticed.