On the Edge of Gone Read online

  Iris hasn’t been here. Not since the wave, anyway. I breathe deep and push the door fully open.

  It’s almost anticlimactic.

  I can’t be shocked that this is my home, because it isn’t. It might as well be a stranger’s. It’s like the offices at the airport: all the furniture is swept to one side, broken and wet.

  “OK,” I say after a few seconds. “The safe should be . . .”

  It was blown into the closet door and is still stuck in the cracked wood. Nordin walks past me and yanks the door open farther. The wood groans, then releases its grip on the safe, letting it drop sideways to the floor.

  “The combination?” Nordin crouches by the safe. I recite the combination as I take in the flat, one jerk of my flashlight at a time. The wall between the living room and hallway is cracked. The outside wall of the kitchen got blown out, letting us see the building opposite. Our couch is upside down and wedged in the kitchen entrance. I don’t know where the dining table or bookcase went. A microwave lies in one corner, but it’s not ours. I stare at it and almost wonder if I got the wrong apartment after all.

  The safe clicks open.

  “Is everything intact?” I ask.

  “Looks like it. Wow, you stuffed this full, didn’t you?”

  The safe contains the same things we carried in our backpacks, but multiplied: more food, more water filters, more clothes and soap and medicine. But it also has a book on feline anatomy I wanted to keep safe, and a single bottle of vodka—plastic instead of glass, so that it wouldn’t break.

  For bartering with, Iris said.

  For disinfecting, I said.

  Mom said nothing, but we knew what she thought.

  Nordin passes the bottle to Samira. Something soft falls out of the safe. A plastic ziplock bag. He holds it up, revealing clumpy white powder and a single letter drawn on the bag.

  “K,” he says.

  “Wait.” Samira turns to me. “That stand for ‘ketamine’?”

  How are they seeing me now? Bijlmer girl, safeguarding her drugs alongside her food? I shouldn’t care what they think. They might’ve saved me from the water, but first they knocked me into it. Still, I say, “It’s not mine. It’s my mother’s.” I glance up through my eyelashes. “She’s white. For the record.”

  My voice takes on a harder edge, knowing exactly what they must’ve pictured, but the words feel like an odd kind of betrayal. Enough people try to either erase or exalt half my family that I shouldn’t be doing the same.

  “I wasn’t . . .” Samira holds her hands up defensively. “I don’t care what or if you or your mother use. But we found a partially collapsed shelter. People are hurt bad. Ketamine can help with the pain. They used to use it in hospitals.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You mean I can have it?”

  “I meant . . .” I hesitate. I meant I didn’t want to use it for my arm. I can get something at the Nassau—something that isn’t ketamine. “You want it?”

  Mom would hate me if I gave it away. She’d go on that same rant she always does—drugs are unfairly demonized, she’s coping the best way she can, she’s an adult in charge of her own life . . .

  “Let’s look at your arm first.”

  I sit on the safe, letting Samira tear open my sweater with a pocketknife. A hole—smaller than I thought—sits square in the middle of my arm. It’s dark red, ragged.

  The next few minutes pass in a haze. The vodka bottle is too sturdy to squeeze, so Nordin pours the vodka into an empty water bottle, pierces a hole in the cap, and passes it to Samira.

  “This will hurt,” she says. “You might faint.”

  I try to think of a way out, back to the ship, but I can’t.

  Nordin holds me steady. Samira squirts the alcohol at the wound. And she’s right: I faint.

  The next fifteen minutes, I fade in and out. Samira wraps clean cloth around the wound and improvises a sling. Then she asks if she can use a scarf of mine from the safe. She wraps it around her hair in a makeshift hijab—she must have lost hers in the water.

  Every jolt of my arm makes me see stars, but once it’s snug against my torso, I feel almost human again. It still hurts; I’m just no longer aggravating it as bad.

  “You won’t be able to use it for a while,” Samira says. “The rod went straight through your muscle. I should give you a shot of antibiotic, but . . .”

  I try to recall the muscles in the upper arm. Early summer, I was learning cat anatomy and wanted to see how it compared to human anatomy. I learned every bone in the body (except those small ones in our hands and feet) and the biggest muscles, too.

  Most of that knowledge has faded. There are no longer cats for me to learn about. Still, I remember studying the arm—translucent muscles cording around bone, labels lighting up with every tap. “Triceps. Right?”

  “Triceps. Yeah. You’re lucky it didn’t hit the bone or arteries.”

  I need to get back to the ship, I think for the umpteenth time. They’ll clean the wound out better than Samira can and give me the necessary shots. But even if my raft hadn’t floated off, there’s no way I could paddle with my arm like this.

  I purse my lips. I see only one way out. “Where did you—” I start.

  At the same time, Nordin asks, “How did you survive?”

  We fall silent. Nordin laughs, but stifles it when he sees I don’t join him.

  “I mean,” he says, “you’re not in a shelter. Were you outside for the blast?”

  I tap my thigh with my good hand, which is warmly gloved again. I stick as close to the truth as possible: Mom and I were late for the shelter, but we found a sturdy building to hide in, and we’ve been hanging around since then.

  “How have you been getting food? Because we’re—we’re hungry.” His last words rise in pitch.

  “We packed beforehand. You can have some of the food in that safe, if you want.”

  Samira’s eyes grow wide. “You’re sure?”

  “She said she’s sure.” Nordin pauses. “You did, right?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just—we haven’t eaten in, what? Twenty hours?”

  “Eat,” I insist.

  They practically throw themselves on the crispbread, and they debate over the canned chicken sausages—eat now or trade with a shelter?—until they see they’re halal, after which they pry the can open in two seconds flat.

  “You don’t need anything?” Nordin asks.

  “Not now.” Maybe I should’ve saved that food for Mom, but I’d offered it without thinking. “How did you two survive, then? Where did you get the scooters from?” I ask, hoping I sound casual.

  “We were in a shelter.” Samira bites off a slick piece of sausage and practically moans. “After the flood, we left on a raft to find help at other shelters. And find Nordin’s parents.”

  “And the scooters?”

  “Nordin’s brother is with the police. He mentioned they never got around to clearing out some storage units near Centraal Station. They were well shielded, too, against terrorist attacks, so it resisted the EMP. The wave damaged it, though. We broke in and found the scooters, as well as emergency kits and some diving gear.”

  “Any other scooters?”

  “Three in total.”

  So there’s one left? “Can I—” I start, but she’s already shaking her head.

  “We found Nordin’s parents’ shelter up in Amsterdam-Noord. They’re stuck in there. One woman took the third scooter and said she’d find help on . . . I want to say ‘on land.’ That’s messed up.” Her lips twist into a smile. “No help yet.”

  “We can’t exactly evacuate hundreds—thousands? tens of thousands?—of people on two scooters,” Nordin adds. “We’re going back and forth between shelters for now. We keep them updated and help trade.”

  “But we need to forage our own food.” Samira doesn’t sound thrilled with the arrangement. “The shelters will trade with us sometimes, or let us use their kitchens.”

 
As they talk, I bring up that mental map again: the Netherlands, no dikes, no dunes, everything below sea level flooded. Where’s the new shoreline? Gorinchem itself is right around sea level, but I have no idea what that means for Iris’s shelter. It may be just like the shelters here must be: pyramid exits barely breaching the surface, more trap than shelter.

  They’ll run out of food. The shelters were never meant to last.

  “I need a scooter.”

  “No clue where to find others,” Nordin says. “We’ll give you a ride to your mother, though. It’s the least we can do.”

  “I need a scooter,” I insist. “It’s not just to get back to my mother. I need to find my sister.”

  “We only have these two,” Samira says.

  “Can’t we trade? You can have more food—and that ketamine you wanted.” I try to stay calmer than I did with Michelle. It’s hard to get worked up when all I want is to lie down and sleep, anyway. My every muscle feels twice as heavy and twice as stiff as normal.

  Not that that stops me from tapping a tattoo against my thigh. I see Samira’s eyes on it, but can’t bring myself to stop.

  “We need to be able to move around, to loot food if nothing else. People left supplies to come back to after the shelters. A lot got swept away. We found cans and jars floating around, sealed packs . . . Dead animals, too.”

  “It’s not looting,” Nordin says. “We do what we need to survive. Right? The king’s words, not mine.”

  “I know the speech.”

  Everyone knows the speech. Do what you must to survive, but with dignity and fellowship. They’re good words, I’m sure, but they were easy for the king to say, knowing he’d be safe in a shelter as big as a city.

  “We can only cover half as much ground with one scooter,” Samira goes on.

  “I’ll come back and help you search. You can keep whatever I find. I’ve been looting the—other places; I know what to look for. You may be able to trade other valuables.”

  Samira and Nordin share a look I can’t penetrate, then step off the rubble we’ve been sitting on. “We have to talk for a minute.”

  The two of them move into the kitchen, ducking under the couch standing upright against the entrance. Once they’re out of sight, I crouch by the safe. I’ve wrung out and rubbed dry my backpack as well as I can. I fill it with food for Mom, fresh clothes, a battery pack, more water filters. After a moment of hesitation—I shouldn’t, I deleted the files, I should toss this in the water and go—I take the feline anatomy book, too. I run my fingers over the edge of the pages. I like the grain, the slight irregularity between bundled pages. My body sways along with the back-and-forth movements of my fingers. It hurts my arm, but I’m too caught to stop.

  “Fine,” Samira says.

  I shove away the book. I shouldn’t be seen holding something this useless when Samira and Nordin are living life one jar of food at a time. It’ll run out. They won’t be able to grow new food. They’ll die.

  And I’m trying to take the one thing that could give them a shot.

  Do what’s necessary, I remind myself.

  The wind from the blown-open kitchen wall tugs at Samira’s clothes. A loose corner of the scarf wrapped around her head flutters against the side of her skull. “We owe you for knocking you into the water. If you’re serious about coming back to help us, then . . .”

  Nordin stands behind her. He’d been good-natured before, smiling, but none of that is left. I stare at his dirty sneakers as my chest tightens with shame.

  “You can have the scooter,” he says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  BY THE TIME THE NASSAU SHIMMERS INTO view, it’s midnight. The engineers are still working: they’re in the same pools of light, on the same water scooters, the same floating platforms. Several turn their heads at the sound of my scooter.

  “Where’d you get that?” one guy says. His face is black with dirt, only the skin under his mouth filter a clear white.

  “I bartered.”

  Half a dozen voices speak up at once: “You talked to other survivors?”

  “You didn’t tell them about the ship, right?”

  “Are you OK, sweetheart?”

  “How are people doing out there?”

  “Is the scooter for us?”

  The questions glide off me easily, I’m so focused on maneuvering myself to the nearest open hatch. Now that I’m close to the ship, my tab is lighting up with new messages, too: Els and Max sent a dozen between the two of them, and Fatima and even Sanne’s names are on the list.

  Only the engineers’ last question makes my head snap up. “No. It’s my scooter.”

  The engineers laugh like they think I’m joking. It’s enough to make me hesitate: I won’t be using the scooter most of the time. There’s no sense in storing it if the engineers need it. The sooner the ship flies, the better.

  I laugh fakely. “You can use it, but I do need it in the afternoons.”

  “But the rest of the time? We’ll leave it charged.”

  “Yes. That’s perfect.” I’d already wondered how to convince them to let me charge it; the scooter lost close to thirty percent of its charge just on the ride from the Bijlmer to here. There’s too much debris in the water to ride in straight, uninterrupted lines—it’s all swoops and evasions and abrupt slowdowns, and that’s not even getting into the currents and wind. “Perfect,” I repeat. I climb off, my steps mechanical, my legs so tired that they’re close to numb. It’s the good kind of tired, pushing away thoughts of Mom and Iris and a flooded city.

  It’s the kind of tired that says: I helped. I was useful. I can be useful.

  I stumble inside, message everyone that I’m safe, and find the medical center.

  • • •

  Once my arm is properly cleaned, bandaged, and numbed, I’m ready to collapse into bed, but the sight outside my door stops me in my tracks.

  Sanne, Fatima, and Max are sitting in a circle on the walkway in front of my cabin.

  “Are you OK?” Fatima asks.

  “The hell happened?” Sanne nods at my arm.

  “You were gone forever!” Max scrambles upright. “You got hurt? Oh, shit. What happened—”

  “I fell,” I say. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  “We got your message!” Fatima says. “We had to check on you.”

  Sanne shrugs. “They dragged me along.”

  Fatima bites her lip. “You were gone a long time. You mentioned your sister at dinner yesterday . . . Any sign of her?”

  “No.” I’m swaying on my feet, either from exhaustion or from the painkillers. “Can I shower before we talk?”

  Every part of what comes next feels alien: letting people into my room; instructing them not to sit on my bed; gathering clean clothes; undressing and showering, and slowly, one-handedly, wrapping up my hair to take care of later, after these people eagerly waiting for me have left.

  It’s something Iris would do. Wait for me. Worry about me.

  Once clean, I sit at the foot of my bed. The others are scattered on the desk chairs and sofa seat.

  “From the start,” Max says, his eyes as wide and surprised as ever.

  So that’s what I do. I break off a lot, and skip around, but they ask me enough questions that I think they get a good picture. My descriptions of the buildings, the trees, the bodies leave them quiet for a full minute.

  “It’s easier to ignore from inside the ship, I suppose,” Fatima says.

  Max picks at his nails in a way that reminds me of his mother. “I mean, we knew it was bad, didn’t we?”

  “Not that bad,” Sanne says.

  “We could guess. It says something when people think it’ll be easier to dig whole cities underground, or build fleets of ships and start from scratch on another planet, than to rebuild right here.”

  “You’re tough, facing that destruction.” Sanne nods her approval at me.

  “I don’t feel tough.”

  “No offense, but you do
n’t look it, either.” Fatima stands. “You look like you’re about to pass out. You should sleep. You’ll call us if you need us, right?”

  Within moments, they’ve cleared out. Only Max lingers. His brow furrows as though he’s trying to remember something, or come up with the right words. “You visited your mother. Right? How was she?”

  I think back to her sitting on the ground, her face slack. “Fine. Under the circumstances.”

  “My mother told me what happened Tuesday. Her getting kicked out, that wasn’t just about the shower, was it?” He stands in the doorway, a bright, tired shape against a dark background. Only a few dim lights dot the walkways. The rest of the ship is pitch-dark.

  Anke told him? That snaps me awake. What else did she tell him about that night? About me? And when did she tell him—just today? I can’t tell if he’s treating me any differently. I’m torn between self-consciousness that Max knows, and relief that he does.

  “Is your mother, I don’t know, in withdrawal?”

  “No.”

  An awkward pause. “So you let her take drugs with her?”

  I rub my eyes. “Let her? She’s my mother. I can’t exactly wrestle her into submission.”

  “But you want to get her on board, right? How, if she can’t even stay clean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will she run out of drugs soon, you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does she still take them?” Though his words sound challenging, he looks like he’s genuinely trying to make sense of it. “She had six months to get clean after the announcement. She had to know that she’d run out, that she’d need to be sharp . . .”

  “I don’t know. We don’t have a lot of heart-to-hearts.” I wrap my good arm tightly around myself and stare at the floor. A loose lock of still-wet hair clings to my cheeks. Cool droplets slide down my skin. I think I have goose bumps, but it’s got to be from exhaustion more than cold.

  “If you can’t get her on board, it’s not your fault. She’s made her decisions.”