On the Edge of Gone Page 2

  Mom drops into the driver’s seat. As the engine revs up, a car passes in the distance, going at twice the speed limit. It’s the first car I’ve seen in hours. We should follow suit—push our car to its limit—it’s the end of the world, why aren’t we moving—

  Mom squeezes my hand. It makes my back stiffen, but I don’t want to waste time by pulling away and making one of us apologize.

  The car slides onto the road. Mom’s driving is improving. When she first deactivated the autodrive to save power, our rides were choppy, but now the engine settles into a hum that reminds me of the purring cats at the Way Station.

  Nothing left to do but wait. I run my fingernails across the hard threads of my seat belt, so finely woven that they never get stuck in my chewed-off nails like the threads of the couch. The world is quiet enough that I even hear the sound my nails make: a soft tzz-tzz, back and forth, like scratching my jeans or the straps of my school backpack. I match the sound to my breathing. We drive like that for several minutes, hearing nothing but the engine and my fingernails.

  I never thought January 29 would be so banal.

  Then we turn a corner, and a woman screams.

  My head snaps right. There—maybe ten meters down the road. She’s all round, dark winter coat, with a shock of white hair sticking up like the frayed wick of a candle. She stands over a motorcycle, gripping the handlebars, yanking it back and forth. She lets out another shout.

  Mom slows the car. My fingers on the seat belt pause in their scratching. There shouldn’t be anyone outside so late. The shouting woman turns toward someone sitting huddled against the building. Suddenly, I recognize the face tucked away in all that hair and coat.

  “Mom, that’s Ms. Maasland. My geography teacher.” I place a finger against the cold window.

  “Do you want me to . . . ?” Mom stops the car before I can answer.

  We’re already late. If anything, we haven’t been driving fast enough, and that makes me realize that if Mom had let me answer, I’d have answered no. I’m almost glad she decided for me.

  I swallow the unspoken word, down and gone.

  Ms. Maasland sees us now. She pulls her hood up over her wick-white hair and jogs toward us.

  I swipe at the car window to buzz it down. The cold wind blowing in makes me squint. Ms. Maasland leans in, red-faced. “Thank you,” she pants, “thank you for stopping. Wait—Denise? Denise Lichtveld?”

  We’re late!

  “Hello, Ms. Maasland,” I say. I haven’t seen her in months. I heard online that Ms. Maasland never returned to school after the comet announcement—the same way I didn’t. What am I expected to say? Particularly now, here? Teachers don’t belong at the end of the world. Teachers belong in school, and school is over with.

  “What’s going on? Can we help?” Mom asks.

  Ms. Maasland nods rapidly. “We have to get to our shelter. The motorcycle is programmed to my wife’s signature, not mine, but she broke her leg coming down the stairs. She can’t ride.”

  I glance at that second shape against the wall. The figure is slim, hunched over.

  No one else is around to help. It’s just the four of us—the ones lucky enough to get shelter for the next few days, and foolish enough to be late for even that.

  “I don’t know how to reset the signature,” Ms. Maasland goes on. “Have you worked with these kinds of bikes? Normally we’d look it up online, but . . .” Her voice thickens. “We weren’t supposed to leave our shelter, but Leyla wanted to make sure our neighbor made it to a bus pickup point. He’s confused a lot. On the way in we found this Russian kid wandering the street, a refugee, and . . . We would’ve still made it back on time, but Leyla was rushing and slipped and—I know you have to hurry. I just don’t know how to get back.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Mom says.

  “We’re late,” I say.

  “We can take a look. One minute.”

  “We’re late,” I say again, pleading.

  “Denise, honey . . .” Mom sends Ms. Maasland an apologetic look I’ve seen before. “Ms. Maasland? Where’s your shelter? Giving you a ride might be faster than getting the bike to work.”

  “Schiphol.” The airport is southwest of here, right below Amsterdam. Our own shelter is southeast and much farther away. “You wouldn’t need to take us all the way in. You could drop us off nearby. From there I could go for help myself . . .”

  We shouldn’t do either. We’ve spent months knowing we’d have to harden ourselves, do what’s necessary to survive, and here Mom is, wondering if she can offer a ride or try to start their bike. When she’s clean, she wants to feel valued, like she used to. That’s another thing Iris taught me. Mom will try, and keep trying.

  Twenty-four minutes.

  “There’s a shelter in Schiphol?” Mom says. “I had no idea.”

  I look past Ms. Maasland a second time. Her wife—Leyla—is sitting up straighter, gripping her leg with both hands.

  I know we’re not supposed to leave them. I know I’m not supposed to say no when people need help. I don’t know what we are supposed to do, though.

  “I had no idea,” I say. Mom’s words are sticking in my mind and forcing their way out. “I had no idea.” I say it at a mutter, as if that way Mom and Ms. Maasland won’t hear me and won’t think I’m broken. I don’t want to be broken Denise. I want to be urgent Denise, Denise with a mission, Denise who will get us to the shelter before impact because Mom can’t be trusted to. The words slip out a third time: “I had no idea.”

  Mom gives me a smile. “Denise. Honey. We can’t leave your teacher like this. Maybe we can take her with us to our shelter?”

  “But they’re not on the list.” Our shelter may not even accept us now that we’re so late, let alone others.

  “They won’t turn away people with nowhere else to go.”

  “Of course they will!” They have that list for a reason.

  The only way to help is to give them a ride to their own shelter—Schiphol is much closer—but where would that leave Mom and me?

  A thought nags at me. “Ms. Maasland, is your shelter at Schiphol an official one? Or might they take us in?”

  The temporary shelters the government organized have rules. But I’ve read about other shelters organized by rich citizens and companies pooling their resources. Some claim they want to help those who slip between the cracks; mostly, I think they want to help those with skills that will be needed later on, because they’re deluded enough to think there will be a later on.

  Ms. Maasland hesitates. The wind whips brittle white strands across her face. “We’re not supposed to bring anyone. But I—Shit!”

  I jerk back. I’ve never seen Ms. Maasland get mad, let alone curse.

  “Sorry. It’s just . . . All right. I’ll try to get you in. I’ll vouch for you.”

  I squint like her face will explain why she’s reacting this way—could she get in trouble for bringing us?—and the word try makes me wary. She never actually answered the question. I repeat, “Is it an official shelter?”

  “No, it’s not.” Ms. Maasland’s eyes search out mine. I focus on the lock of hair curled up against her cheek. “If you get us there, you’ll be saving our lives. I’ll make them take you in. I promise.”

  I hate the thought of abandoning the shelter—our shelter, with a list that has our names, and where Iris might be waiting—but Schiphol is closer by far and the clock tells us we have twenty minutes.

  We’ll find Iris afterward. We need to survive first.

  It feels wrong. But I still say, “Mom?”

  “Let’s get your wife into the car,” she tells Ms. Maasland.

  Mom takes us to the airport grounds. I’m scratching the seat belt and looking out the window, craning my neck as though I’d be able to see the comet coming—not that I’d have time to do anything if I did.

  The thought doesn’t set me at ease.

  “Left,” Ms. Maasland instructs from the backseat. “Again. There—g
o through the gate.”

  The gate is cut open. A thick chain lies on the ground.

  “I’ve always wanted to go into the employees-only areas,” Mom muses, and swerves her car past a parking lot. I tell myself not to look at the clock, because it won’t matter at this point. Then I do it anyway.

  “Mom.” It’s the first thing I’ve said since we left for the airport. My voice is almost a whimper. We have three minutes left. Three minutes before these streets we’re driving on are destroyed. Three minutes before the world goes dark for a year or longer.

  “We’re almost there, Denise,” Ms. Maasland says. “I should warn you . . . our shelter . . . it’s not a regular shelter.”

  “Any sturdy building is safer than our home,” I say, recalling the warnings we’ve been given. Our apartment building wasn’t built to withstand natural disasters. Few were. The Netherlands has no hurricanes, no volcanoes, not even any earthquakes since we stopped extracting natural gas, and any floods are caused by heavy rain or a damaged river dike, easily contained.

  We don’t know where the comet will hit. All that our technology and brightest minds could do was narrow it down. We know this: it’ll hit the Northern Hemisphere. Western Russia, Eastern Europe. Maybe as far south as the Mediterranean region, maybe as far north as Scandinavia.

  It’s fast.

  It’s big.

  And if it hits too close, none of our homes will survive.

  “Any sturdy building,” I repeat. And there are buildings all around us—offices and hangars and the airport building itself, raised glass hallways leading to the gates. I try to see which is Ms. Maasland’s shelter. It must be low to the ground, with no windows and few doors, perhaps underground entirely.

  “About that,” Ms. Maasland says. “It’s not exactly a building, either. It is sturdy, though. Turn the corner here.”

  Mom turns into an empty lot. The shelter must be an underground hangar, like in the movies. We’re at an airport: a hangar would only make sense.

  “The cloaking should fade any minute . . . There,” Ms. Maasland says.

  The air above the empty lot shimmers. Then—then it’s no longer empty. The cloaking falls away like scattering clouds, revealing a shape so big, I have to turn my head to even be able to see it whole.

  My first dumb thought is It’s blocking my view of our shelter.

  “Surprise,” Leyla whispers.

  My fingernails freeze on the seat belt’s tightly woven strands. I take in the sight. For the first time all day, I don’t think of the comet, or Iris, or how much time we have left.

  Our shelter is a generation ship.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “ALL THE SHIPS HAVE LEFT THE PLANET,” I say. “Ms. Maasland, I read it online. All the ships—”

  “The Nassau encountered technical difficulties. We couldn’t leave on time.”

  “We,” I repeat. “You have a place on a ship?”

  “Lottery?” Mom asks.

  “No. Skills. I’m sorry—the ship is full. They can’t let you stay. But they’ll let you in for the impact itself, just like a temporary shelter, I’m sure of it.”

  I fall quiet. I’m too busy studying the ship—the Nassau. I’ve seen projections of other generation ships. This one is smaller, I think, although it’s hard to compare. Seeing the lot the ship is parked on—and parked seems like entirely the wrong word for a ship like this—I suddenly remember a photo Dad sent me months ago. It showed dozens of planes lined up on Schiphol, ready to fly to their final destination, decommissioned after commercial air travel had dropped to near zero. The ships and shelters being constructed had need of the planes’ metal.

  This might be that same lot from the photo. The Nassau takes up all of it, and more besides. Turning my head all the way, I can just about see the ship extend over grass and roads and even what must be a runway.

  The bottom of the ship is a meter or two off the ground at its center, elevated by either legs or scaffolding; around the edges, it’s easily twenty, twenty-five meters tall. I don’t know how high the ship rises at the top.

  “There’s still one bay open,” Ms. Maasland’s wife rasps.

  We drive closer to the ship, practically underneath. I lean forward to keep my eyes on the almost-white metal. The ship is a circular shape as far as I can see, its bottom half like a shallow bowl.

  Windows flash past to the right and above us. I swear I see people inside.

  When I say the ship is big, this is what I mean: I look at the display by the steering wheel, then again when we reach the loading bay Leyla indicated, and we’ve driven more than six hundred meters. The ship must be just as big—maybe bigger—end to end.

  It might be small compared to the other generation ships. Still, for someone like me, who’s never seen anything bigger than a double-decker airplane or a cruise ship in the Rotterdam harbor, it’s enough to make my head spin.

  “Keep going,” Ms. Maasland urges Mom once we’ve reached the ramp. “They’re going on lockdown—they must’ve seen us or they’d have closed it already.”

  Mom drives the car toward the ramp. The ground changes from smooth asphalt to something different, subtly ridged. The car’s hum turns to a growl.

  I give up on scratching the seat belt. Instead, I clutch it tight. The sides cut into my palms.

  The ramp trembles. Then starts moving. I push myself into my seat, hard. It takes a moment to realize what’s happening: they’re lifting the ramp. With us still riding on it. The world twists in my peripheral vision, and I squeeze my eyes shut.

  We’re horizontal now. We start to pitch forward. Mom makes a surprised sound. Moments later, the ground underneath smooths out and we come to an abrupt stop inside.

  Mom lets out a high, nervous laugh. “That was almost fun. Denise? Are you OK?”

  “Mmm,” I say, not trusting myself to speak yet.

  The ramp closes behind us with a sequence of loud, steady clicks, then makes a hissing sound.

  “We made it.” I hear Leyla shifting in her seat. She groans. “Els . . . I really need . . .”

  “I’m getting help,” Ms. Maasland—Els?—says, and I hear the car door opening, followed by resolute footsteps. Mom follows her out.

  We’re no longer moving, but I’ve still got my eyes screwed shut.

  “Denise?” Leyla says. “Are you all right?”

  “Mmm.”

  Fingers rest on my shoulder. I squirm out of reach. Finally, I know something to say: “Sorry.”

  I edge back into my seat once Leyla withdraws her hand and relax my grip on the seat belt. My thumb runs over the threads, making the same sound as before, like nothing has changed. I open my eyes. I’d known we were no longer moving, but confirming it helps some of the tension drain out.

  “OK,” I say, not sure who I’m saying it to. My fingers hunt for the seat belt release, then I half turn in my seat for the first time. Automatically, I fluff up my hair after squishing my curls against the headrest for so long.

  Leyla is sprawled on the backseat. Bloodstains mar her jeans. Her face is twisted from pain, but she’s pretty in an old-lady sort of way. Turkish, I think. Dark hair with silver strands falls in curls by her face. “You’re sweating,” I say. Her forehead shines. She’s clammy-looking and yellowish-pale. “It’s painful just looking at you.”

  It occurs to me that I’m being rude. I almost flop back into my seat again, because I know what comes next—that frown on people’s faces, having them mentally adjust their image of me—but Leyla either doesn’t mind or hides it well. She barks out a laugh. “It’s painful being me, too.”

  I nod. Then: “It’s time.”

  Leyla doesn’t need me to clarify. “Any minute now. We shouldn’t feel the impact much in here. Just shaking.” She peers through the rear window, where I can see what must have been the ramp, which now forms a ridged wall.

  Slowly, I take in the rest of the area. We’re inside a loading dock: massive crates are stacked in one corner like Lego b
locks, along with layers of barrels bound together with thick straps. I see two—no, three—small cranes parked haphazardly around the area, which is maybe twice the size of my school gym. My gym was always brightly lit, though, while here only a handful of panels in the ceiling offer a watery yellow light. The cranes’ empty hooks cast misshapen shadows across the floor.

  Mom and Ms. Maasland are standing in one corner by a wide, arched door. Their backs are turned to me. They’re talking to a third person, half hidden from my sight by the doorway.

  I climb from the car and start in their direction.

  Ms. Maasland turns when she hears me coming. “Denise, meet Driss van Zand. The Nassau’s captain.” She gestures at the third figure. He’s short, with broad shoulders and a round belly, tan skin, a light scruff on his cheeks. He’s in his fifties, I think. He reminds me of our neighbor, except he looks more annoyed than our neighbor ever did.

  “This is my daughter, Denise,” Mom says.

  Captain Van Zand does that double take I’ve grown used to, glancing back at Mom, then at me, before it clicks. Mom is white as can be, green-eyed and sallow-looking, her hair stringy but straight; I share none of those features. My skin is a warm gold-brown, and my hair is coarse and springy, resting across the width of my shoulders. Mom and I have only our high foreheads in common.

  Iris gets the same looks. She always waits, chin raised, as if daring people to ask rather than use their brain for two seconds. She’ll stand upright, look people in the eye. I try to do that now. We make brief eye contact before I let my gaze drift sideways. “It’s good to meet you, sir.” As an afterthought, I tell him, “My father is Surinamese.”

  I’m not Iris.

  Jogging footsteps sound from the hallway behind Captain Van Zand. A woman dashes past us. She carries a suitcase on a shoulder strap, and one arm drags a floating stretcher behind her.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Ms. Maasland says. She guides the medic to the car. “It’s Leyla’s leg . . .”