On the Edge of Gone Read online

“That engineer was scared. She closed the hatch too early.”

  “I was the one who told her . . .” Fatima shakes her head. “Max, I’m . . .” She hovers there, her weight on her far leg, stuck between leaving and staying. She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  I try to make myself small. Being here feels like an intrusion.

  Max finally looks up. “I don’t wanna do this.”

  “I’ll leave. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Can we just eat?”

  “I’m . . .”

  “It’s OK, I don’t care what you said. It’s OK.” He has one hand buried in his curly hair, as though gripping it, and looks at Fatima with shiny pleading eyes. “I just want us to eat.”

  Fatima looks away again. She breathes deep, hands wrapped around her torso. Then she sits back down.

  Max leans over the table. He pushes her soup closer. “You’re assisting a chemist. Right?”

  “Um . . . yeah.” She licks her lips. “We’re working with the medical and farming teams to figure out what medications to prioritize.”

  Sanne leans in and bumps shoulders. Fatima still looks uneasy, but a smile twitches on her face.

  “Ibuprofen,” Max says. “Ibuprofen is my favorite.”

  “Oh yes, to battle the dreaded ‘I have a bit of a headache.’” Sanne rolls her eyes. “Can I vote for something more essential?”

  Fatima’s smile widens. “The doctors are ranking insulin and narcotics pretty highly.”

  “I’ll take those.”

  As one, they turn to me. “Um, cough syrup,” I say, “the licorice-y kind.”

  Max perks up. “I love that stuff! Can I change my vote?”

  Sanne goes “Seriously?” and Fatima laughs quietly and Max is telling me about the syrup he always uses, and even if I don’t know how to say You OK?, even if I shouldn’t be here, even if I’m not part of this group—

  I want to be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AT NINE THE NEXT MORNING, I KNOCK on the door to Els’s office. I feel strangely calm. Whatever is going on underneath my surface, I’ve managed to drape something around it and iron out the creases, and I feel almost normal.

  I have a spot on the Nassau. I have a week to find Iris.

  Everything else will go from here.

  The door slides open. I start at the hiss it makes—a slight whine at the end.

  “You’re early!” Els has a cup of steaming liquid by her side and looks up from a projection in front of her. I see lines of text, a handful of applications open in the background. It’s hard to make sense of it from this angle.

  “But you said to walk in any time I like.” I linger in the doorway.

  “I meant, earlier than I thought you’d be.”

  I feel instantly embarrassed. Yesterday I practically told her off for assuming I was overly literal, and now look at me.

  “In my experience, if you tell teenagers to pick their own time, they’ll wander in at four p.m. and claim they’re operating on American time. See? This’ll work out fine.”

  “Nine is a normal time to start work.” I take my first step inside her office and look around. On Tuesday, I hadn’t really looked—or if I had, nothing registered. The office is smaller than I expected. Three chairs. A rectangular table with the short end pushed up against one wall, leaving just enough room on the other end to slip past. Empty shelves on the walls. Next to them sits a sort of raised rectangle that looks like it ought to hold a painting.

  “We’ll decorate later,” Els says. “How are you? After yesterday?”

  “All right,” I say, still looking around as though something new will present itself. “Els, I didn’t know Michelle well. But she was very, um, informative. I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m sorry. I should have said that yesterday. I just wasn’t . . .”

  Prepared, I should say, and I forget these things sometimes, but I don’t want to give Els more ammunition to think of me differently.

  “Thank you, but I’m OK. We were only acquaintances. Were you able to check in with your mother?”

  I finally look away from studying the office. “Not yet. She’s back in the airport, on a higher level, where it’s dry. I’m allowed to visit, but I don’t know how to when outside is like . . . this.”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  I didn’t ask. I hold my tongue, though.

  “Actually, I’ll need to explain a few things first. Sit down. How’s your tab’s battery?”

  I put it on the table and let the dashboard projection flare up. Over the next few minutes, Els helps me link it to the ship’s system and shows me around the public information stored there. One feature is a map of the ship, which I play around with for a minute, twisting it and zooming in, looking at the interior balconies from all angles. I see the rest of the Nassau for the first time, too: layers of vertical farms running around the edges of the ship; jogging lanes; med bays; fish and insect farms; a big empty space Els tells me will be a memorial and eventual museum for future generations; and all the compartments at the bottom, from the water-filtering system to the thermoplastic processing for the 3-D printers.

  “This is the storage bay that flooded.” Els reaches into my projection and lights the room up green. She shifts her finger. Another area lights up. “This is the hallway and two adjacent rooms. They’re still underwater. We were lucky, if you’ll believe it: the wave reached high enough to submerge nearly half the ship, but now that the water has settled, it doesn’t reach above the emergency shuttle. Most of the damage is above water level, which will help with repairs. Anyway . . . ” She crumples the map into nothing. Two swift finger movements later, a block of text shows up. “The ship’s announcements. We have level-one announcements, which act as emergency announcements, going out to each connected tab; level-two announcements, which appear instantly to anyone accessing the system; and level-three announcements, which need to be manually accessed. I want you to update these announcements for us. Here, I’ll show you the back end . . .”

  I focus closely on her movements. Working on the Nassau’s back end reminds me of managing a website, like I did for the Way Station; there are enough similarities that I mentally link them, labeling each action with its closest equivalent, and after a few minutes of Els running through the options, I nod. “Got it, I think. Where’s the raw announcement text to add?”

  “I was going to do it together,” Els says.

  I raise my hand and let it hover inside the projection, pointing my finger at the options without selecting them. “I press here, then drag the text like this . . . ?”

  “Like I said,” Els says, beaming. “You’ll do just fine.”

  Only when I finally pull up the announcement texts do I realize what Els was getting at earlier, about how this related to reaching the airport. One announcement is almost verbatim what she told me about the damage to the ship. It has a better estimate of the ship’s new launch date—next Friday, a week and a day from now—and stresses that any new information will be shared straightaway.

  The second announcement, however, details how repairs will proceed after the ship’s partial submersion. Some of the thrusters have to be pulled in and cleaned to prevent the salt water from damaging the interior; the exterior repairs will depend on a combination of floating platforms, divers, and water scooters.

  “Water scooters?” I look up.

  “They won’t be allowed to waste power or fuel just to taxi you to the airport.”

  I frown. Anke did mention that until the Nassau launches and can generate new energy, we’re dependent on what we have stored, but I’d hoped such a short trip wouldn’t be a problem.

  “If they’re going to the airport anyway, though, I’m sure you can tag along.”

  “What if I supply my own fuel or battery? Could I borrow one of the scooters?”

  “To reach the airport?”

  “To reach the city.” I don’t specify that by “city,” I mean Gorinchem rather than Amsterdam. �
�To find my sister.”

  “We only have three scooters. We’ll need them all for repairs.”

  I chew my lower lip. This may solve the Mom problem. The Iris problem . . . remains a work in progress.

  “Are you ready with the announcements?”

  “Almost.” I refocus my attention on the third and final announcement. This one borders on curt: it repeats the list of deceased and missing passengers, and confirms that their loss may mean admitting new passengers. However, given the various barrels of supplies that were swept away—all of them containing food and seeds—any decisions will be put on hold until management has a clearer idea of how many passengers they can support now. While the first two announcements were detailed and friendly, this one ends on For the time being, do not inquire about new admissions.

  I select the line and flick it toward Els’s projection. “Does that mean I can’t put my mother and Iris on the waiting list?”

  “That should be fine.” She swipes away the text. “But between the others on that list and the supplies we lost . . . don’t expect too much.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TO MY SURPRISE, THEY’VE PUT OUT THE ramp. Several meters beneath the loading bay, it vanishes into murky seawater. Ship lights dot the water with unsettling yellow pools of light. The sun should be up by now, but the sky looks no different from last night.

  The nine o’clock morning air feels nothing like it should. It’s too dark to be anything but the middle of a cloudy, starless night, but too loud to be anything but midday: the high whine of a saw rings through the sky, nagging at my skull. Beyond it, there’s the sound of voices, carrying far, the buzz of water scooters, the rush of wind. Water sloshes violently against the ship.

  Today, Els isn’t expecting me until late in the afternoon—she had too much work and didn’t have time to instruct me—and I plan to make good use of that time. With my hands firmly in my pockets, I walk farther down the ramp. After a minute of placing the sounds and taking in the work going on around the ship, I lift my head. The light ends maybe a dozen meters past the farthest edge of the ship, fading into darkness. Sometimes, there’s a glimmer in that darkness, a half-second reflection. There must be shards of buildings out there. Floating trees, a thousand bloating bodies and more. No ground at all, only this water rising and falling and rippling like breath.

  What I’m seeing is a sea.

  My hands push so hard into my pockets that my coat strains around my shoulders. The dunes are gone, the dikes are broken; the North Sea has flooded in and filled up the downward slope of the ground I’ve always walked on. Wherever the coastline is now, it lies on our east instead of our west, the gaps are filled up, and my city is gone.

  I smell salt and dust and decay. I smell metal. I smell morning.

  Soon enough, none of this will matter, I tell myself. I’ll be gone, too, safe among the stars.

  “Thinking of taking a swim, little Denise?”

  I spin. Matthijs stands behind me in that ship-issued coat I’ve become familiar with. He holds a large, heavy battery in one hand, bending the line of his shoulders, and has a half grin on his face. He looks nothing like the man who used to slouch in our living room in perfectly ironed button-ups.

  “You’re an engineer?”

  “Surprised?”

  “Yes,” I say warily. I step backward.

  “So am I.” He laughs, like he’s said the funniest thing. I’d laugh, too, if it were one of my friends, or Iris’s, rather than one of Mom’s.

  I glance past him. After a second I realize I’m searching for an escape, the way I used to: Can I find an excuse to step past him out of the living room? Can I claim I need to do homework? Is it too late to tag along with Iris rather than be stuck here for hours? I’d need to take an unfamiliar train and a tram and let my tab guide me to her latest party, and there’ll be music and shouting and people, and no, no, I’ll just use the homework excuse, I’ll use noise killers to block their laughter and snorting, I’ll . . .

  “You OK there?” Matthijs asks.

  I straighten. I have a mission. I should focus. “The battery. Is that for the water scooters?”

  “Yeah. Hey, you should be careful out here. Your mother won’t be happy with me if I let you drown.”

  “Right.” I hesitate. “Speaking of my mother, I want to visit her. Do you know if I could borrow a scooter sometime?”

  If he agrees, I’ll have a better chance of borrowing a scooter for a longer period of time. If I start with Can I borrow one to ride seventy kilometers to Gorinchem? I’ll be laughed out of here. A year ago, I would’ve made that exact mistake. Iris would be proud that I know better now, I think fleetingly.

  Matthijs still laughs, though. “You, ride a water scooter? Really?”

  I’m chewing the inside of my cheek but refuse to show that uncertainty. He’s right, it’s weird—it’s weird and it’s not me. It’s the kind of thing Iris would do.

  But Iris isn’t here. It’s the end of the world; I knew I would have to change.

  “Can I?” I ask curtly.

  “Sorry, not happening. They’re far too valuable.”

  I want to convince him—I’ll trade shower rations, I’ll have Mom give you her drugs—but I remember the way Michelle’s face hardened when I tried to do the same to her. We’re done, we’re done, we’re done. I hold my tongue. Once the urge to barter passes, I put together the right words, which come out slow and forced. “OK. Thank you. Can you let me know if someone is going to the airport? I could ride along.”

  “Will do.” Matthijs claps my shoulder and I flinch. After that, he walks on, and I’m out of there faster than I thought was possible.

  I improvise.

  I talk to Max and the woman from the engine room I helped the other day, and I learn two things: I’m not the only one who’s asked about 3-D printing a raft, and Max is a handy friend to have, since he’s the one who convinces the engineer to help me out anyway.

  “I don’t recommend going out,” she says. I never got her name. “It’s too dangerous.”

  But no one stops me as I drag the raft and paddle through the ship. There are no guards, no one telling me about non-existent rules. Passengers can do what they want unless it harms the ship or other passengers. The Nassau doesn’t have the resources to police us. Besides, while going outside is dangerous, in a week none of us will ever have an outside.

  No one wants to take it away from us early.

  Max catches up to me and unlocks the hatch, which opens a meter above water level. Leaving through the loading bays would be easier, but there are too many people, and I don’t want to deal with their questions or warnings.

  “You’re sure that you’re sure?” Max asks yet again. He steps away from the hatch to let me pass.

  Dusty salt wind whips at my face. At least my hair is wrapped safely in a scarf, my coat hood drawn over. “I’m sure.”

  “You should at least wear a wet suit under your clothes.”

  The thought alone makes me itch. A wet suit would prevent hypothermia if I fell in the water, but I tried it on and peeled it off before I even got it up to my waist. The fit was perfect, but the fabric was all wrong and unfamiliar, and I hated the thought of how long it’d take to undress if I needed to.

  Wearing it would be the smart thing to do. I just wouldn’t have been able to take a step without screaming.

  I shake my head to clear the memory. It’s gone, I tell myself. It’s fine. You have a mission.

  “If I sink instantly,” I tell Max, “you’ll be here to help. You can swim, right?”

  “A, B, and C.” He holds up three fingers, referencing his swimming certificates.

  “Perfect. You can rescue me.” I realize I’m flirting. After what happened with his sister only two days ago, it feels wrong. As if to cover it up, I add, “I just have A and B.”

  “Um.” Max’s eyes widen. “Maybe you should reconsid—”

  The splash of the raft hitting the water in
terrupts him. It’s narrow, with upturned edges. The water is rough enough to spill over immediately, but a small seat will keep me dry.

  “Good luck,” Max says.

  The current bumps the raft insistently against the ship. I sit and edge out feetfirst. Max hovers overhead. The raft is unsteady—I almost lose my balance straightaway. I grip the sides with both hands until I feel I have a handle on the way the water pushes at me. I’m already drifting away from the hatch.

  “Here.” Max leans over with the two-sided paddle we printed. “You can still come inside,” he calls. And he has to call now. With every push of the waves, I’m drifting farther away.

  “Thanks!” I call back, experimenting with the paddle. It feels silly knowing that Max—and maybe surrounding engineers—are watching, but it does work. The paddle is lightweight but huge, displacing enough water to push me forward with surprising speed. I haven’t touched one since a school field trip a year and a half ago, but the movements come naturally. My thick gloves are the most awkward part.

  “If I come back inside now,” I shout, looking back to find Max still watching me, “I’ll have looked this silly for nothing.”

  He laughs and holds up his arm to display his tab. “I’d take photos, except, you know, battery.”

  I set course for the airport.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MOM IS IN THE SAME OFFICE AS BEFORE. The waves came through, though, leaving behind scattered pools of water that turned the floors slippery and dangerous, as well as so much filth that I hold my breath as I walk through.

  The couch Mom slept on looks filthy but dry. The ship must’ve given her hyper-absorbent towels. They gave her clean sheets, too, but no pillow. She used her backpack.

  Mom herself is sitting on the ground. She stares ahead vacantly, slouched against the couch.

  I leave behind a bottle of filtered water and all the food in my bag—two cans of mushroom ragout, a hunk of bread I smuggled from breakfast, a bean patty.

  I don’t leave a note.

  My arms are limp from paddling. I know I should return to the Nassau, go to work, and try again tomorrow. Paddling is no way to get to Gorinchem. It’s not even a way to get home.