On the Edge of Gone Page 24

  I pick up the speed. The engine hums, then hums higher, then stutters—once, twice—and I hastily dial it back down. I’d forgotten: the scooter did the same thing yesterday. I’ll need to tell the engineers.

  For now, I keep going at an easier pace. Back at the ship, we checked the precise direction to aim for so as to end up in the right area. If I sidetrack even slightly, I could shoot right past it.

  It turns out we overlooked a helpful detail.

  One moment, the world is silent. I’m close enough that I think I should start keeping an eye out for that pyramid shape of the shelters. I fish my flashlight from my bag.

  The next moment, my wrist buzzes. I jerk up so hard, I almost fling the flashlight away.

  Another buzz. And again.

  “Emergency proximity message,” my tab chirps. “Please contact emergency services. Please assist only when safely possible. Emergency proximity message. Please contact emergency services. Please assist only when safely possible. Abuse of emergency broadcast messaging is a crime. If you suspect abuse, please mute and contact . . .”

  I mute the warning signal. It keeps buzzing as other messages roll in. A second later, it starts again—“Emergency proximity message”—and I mute it another time.

  I have twenty-seven unread proximity messages. The past days, I’ve received others—two or three—when I came too near a floating body, their tabs still active when they themselves weren’t. This time, it’s not only one tab broadcasting a signal to whoever comes near. It’s a whole group. The two emergency messages are at the top of the projection, outlined in a throbbing red line. I flick through them and the others.

  Coordinates. We’re trapped; send help.

  An address. A description of the area and the shelter.

  We’re running out of food.

  Over five hundred people are trapped. A hundred and forty-one children. Thirty-nine of us are in bad shape.

  We have forty-eight people requiring immediate medical assistance.

  Fifty-one people requiring immediate medical assistance.

  Forty-five people requiring . . .

  PLEASE SEND IMMEDIATE HELP TO THESE COORDINATES.

  My eyes are glued to my tab dashboard. My breath comes shallow.

  I think I’ve found the right place.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I DON’T NEED GPS TO FIND THE SHELTER NOW, or even the descriptions in those messages. I simply tell my tab to find the source of the emergency messages and it points me in the right direction. I navigate around a collapsing house, a cluster of trees, and I don’t know if it’s relief or fear I feel when the scooter’s lightstrips reveal a telltale pyramid shape.

  It’s orange, practically fluorescent, and I think, Like the black box in an airplane, easy to detect. The pyramid is smaller than I’d expected—of course; most of it must be underwater—while the tip is blunter, like it got hacked down to form a small platform. It’s cleaner than I thought, too. Nothing outside is clean anymore—it’s all muddy, filth-streaked, and where the water hasn’t gotten to it, the dirt in the air has—but here the dust is only a thin coating. They must clean it to keep the orange vibrant.

  I steer the scooter closer. A wave knocks me off course, but I recover swiftly. There’s something shiny on top of the pyramid, right where the platform meets one of those angled walls. It glints in the headlights. When I’m two meters away, I realize what I’m looking at. Tape pins down a rectangular black strip. An unwound tab. They’ve attached it as high as possible, so its signal will reach farther.

  I received multiple signals, though. Some tabs in the shelter itself must still be working. They must’ve lowered at least some of the shielding that protected them from the electromagnetic pulse in order for those signals to break through.

  Which means they’ll receive my reply, too.

  I fire up my projection again. After a few moments of thought, I type, NOT RESCUE SERVICES. SORRY. I’m outside shelter. NOT asking for supplies. Can we talk?

  I wait. The messages I saw were from days ago. Those tabs’ batteries might last, but that doesn’t mean their owners—

  Clangs from inside the pyramid. They’re alive. Something in my chests unknots.

  A knock. A muffled voice: “Keep your distance!”

  A moment later, the pyramid’s top seems to break open: a hatch of about one square meter is flung out and slams down on its hinges until it hangs horizontally half a meter above the water. I give the scooter’s handlebars a slight squeeze to push forward.

  A woman climbs out the open hatch. She’s lit from below and behind, the outlines of a messy knot of hair framed like a halo. Goggles hide her eyes.

  “You’re a teenager,” she says. “Jesus.”

  “Um—”

  “Dirty air’s coming in. Get inside. You can tie your scooter around those.” She gestures at metallic loops lining the pyramid.

  Aside from Samira, Nordin, Iris, and that family we found, I’ve not encountered a single live soul outside. I still don’t want to leave my scooter unprotected. Ignoring the woman’s urgency, I flip up the scooter’s seat and pull out the external lock, winding it through the nearest loop, then attaching it to the scooter, as though chaining up a bike. I slip the key into an inside pocket of my coat. The engine key follows.

  Carefully, I climb onto the base of the hatch. The woman guides me up. I’ve braced myself for her touch, so I don’t yank away until I’m sure I’m stable. I glance down at the opening. The same yellow bulbs that lit the woman from below illuminate the chute downward—first, a platform barely big enough for three people to stand on, then a narrower chute, with rungs set into the wall like a ladder. The woman jumps onto the platform, waits for me to join her, then yanks at a pulley system. The hatch clangs shut again.

  She pants from exertion. She pulls off her goggles, the elastic band twisting her hair even more. She wiggles her mouth filter until it pops loose. “You all right?”

  I take a moment to study her. She’s East Asian, a little shorter than I am. Her face is gaunt but clean, aside from the light dusting of dirt from these few moments of outside air. I wouldn’t have been able to tell if not for the cleaner areas outlined around her mouth and eyes.

  I expected shelter survivors to look like what I’ve seen on TV—like zombie movies or the people in the comet refugee camps that cropped up all over after the announcement. Dirty, battered, wearing ragged clothes. But there’s no reason it should be that way. They’re not like Mom, squatting in a wreck of an airport, or like Samira and Nordin, outside all day. They have soap and clothes. They can filter the water from outside as long as they have enough power for the filters and desalinators.

  All they miss is food, sunlight, and space.

  “You from another shelter? Or?” Her voice echoes. I look down the chute as though I can see the sound bouncing downward.

  That’s what saves me from immediately answering no—I’m distracted. By the time I snap back to attention, I realize I shouldn’t make the same mistake I did with Samira and Nordin. “Yes,” I lie. “A shelter by Amsterdam.”

  “How’s the situation? You seem to be in all right shape.”

  It feels surreal, talking like this in a space roughly the size of my closet at home. We can stand upright, but only barely. Dad would’ve had to stoop. And if I take just one step to the right, I’ll be tumbling down that chute into the shelter proper.

  “It’s. Same as here, I guess.” I swallow.

  “Are you here to trade? Or? What’ve you got in that backpack?” The woman eyes the hatch. “We can use that scooter, you know. We have a lot of people to send east. We’ve got power banks if you—”

  “No. I need my scooter. I’m not here to trade. No.” Again, all my rehearsed words fail me. I scramble for words. How did I plan to start, again? I was—should I just ask for the baby right away? Ask how they’re doing here? Does politeness even matter now?

  “We’ll talk downstairs.” The woman claps my shoulder. I
flinch. “Let me take that backpack. With that arm, you’ll have a hard enough time climbing down as is.”

  I hesitate.

  “You’ll get it back.” Her voice sounds mocking. “Relax.”

  I don’t meet her eyes as I hand over my backpack. She slings it on. I’m not making the best first impression. I should just ask about the baby and go back to the safety of the Nassau, but if I mess this up, Anke will go straight to the captain, and Iris and I will end up sleeping on soggy airport couches, watching the Nassau lift off. We won’t be any better off than the people in here, and—how am I even supposed to walk inside and ask for a damn baby, and—

  Iris would know exactly what to say. The only reason it’s me here is because I have a better shot of getting past the guards on my way back.

  “You go first.” The woman gestures at the chute. It can’t be more than a few meters down.

  I go slow, measured, gripping the rungs so tightly, my hand aches before I’ve even made it a meter down. I cling close to the wall, step down with both feet, then let go of the rung—spend a half second thinking, I’m going to fall I’m going to—before I manage to snatch the next rung and press myself close to the wall again.

  Once I hit the ground safely, I stumble against the wall and sink to my knees.

  “Are you all right down there?” the woman says. She jumps down next to me.

  I breathe deeply. “Just a minute,” I say, strained.

  “You sure?”

  “Just, just a minute.”

  “Is it the—”

  I make a sound in the back of my throat—something between a hum and a moan—before I realize it. I’m too aware of her standing there, her boots a meter from mine. And I’m noticing other sounds, too, muted through the wall: people, voices.

  “I need . . . I’m here to . . . ,” I start.

  “I can get you some water.” Her eyes are dark, though that may just be the lighting. I meet them for a half moment, then I’m back to looking past her at the nuts and bolts holding this chute together. There’s a door behind her. Softer, she says, “Things are worse at your shelter than you’re letting on, aren’t they?”

  I twist my face into something I know I won’t be able to pass off as a smile. How am I supposed to tell her, No, that’s not it, climbing down that ladder one-handed just freaked me the hell out, and I don’t know how to say what I’m supposed to say, you have no idea how lucky I am compared to all of you—

  The not-smile is gone the second it came.

  “I’m Heleen. How long were you out there?”

  I press myself against the wall. The bolts push into my skin, even through the thick fabric of my coat. I push harder. It’s uncomfortable, but a good kind of uncomfortable, and I roll my back against the wall as I gather my thoughts. It might be a full minute before I say, “In my shelter—there’s a woman. She asked me to come here.”

  Heleen crouches in front of me. “Look at me. You sure you’re all right?”

  I talk louder. “She asked me to come here. She asked me to come here.”

  Heleen ducks her head, still trying to meet my eyes.

  I squirm against the wall. “She asked me—” Stop. I said that already. Don’t get stuck. “Her sister is in this shelter. I need to talk to her.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Denise.” I can answer this. It almost comes as a relief.

  “What’s the sister’s name?”

  “Lisa van der Sluis. I have photos on my tab.”

  “That’s all right. We have a manifest. We’ll look, all right? We’ll look for her name together.”

  She’s baby-talking me. “I’m sixteen.”

  “All right . . . ?”

  “I’m sixteen,” I repeat stubbornly. I push up to my feet, immediately missing that pressure of the bolts in my back—a whole line of them, like a spine pressing against my own.

  Heleen watches me warily.

  “Manifest,” I remind her. “Let’s go look.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I’VE IMAGINED WHAT THE SHELTERS MUST look like inside a hundred times: when I imagined Mom and myself there, when I imagined Iris there, when I imagined myself looking for Anke’s niece. I had to, to prepare myself. It’s a piece of advice one of my few genuinely helpful therapists offered: when I’m about to enter an unfamiliar situation, I should envision the possible outcomes beforehand. What would I say if someone tells me X or Y; what will this new school look like; how will I react if there are more people, less space, more noise . . .

  If I have a script, situations won’t catch me off guard as easily. A lot of the time, I forget, or think I don’t need it, but today, I’m prepared.

  The shelter is like Heleen. Some parts, like the gauntness of her cheeks and the exhaustion in her eyes, are what I expected. I knew to expect the smell of sweat, although it’s not as bad I thought it’d be. Maybe my air filter—which I’m still wearing, I only now realize—screens out the worst of it. I knew to expect noise and people and hunger.

  That’s all accurate.

  What surprises me is everything else. This shelter isn’t like a basement—no bulbs on strings, no hard spotlights. Warm white lights run at intervals along the ceiling, and the walls are a clean cream and green, reminding me more of a hospital than anything else. There’s noise, but it’s not screaming. It’s all talk and murmurs and brief bursts of laughter.

  I’d expected a large hall and enough beds to cover the whole floor, like a field hospital you’d see on TV. I don’t see any beds at all. There’s a hallway straight ahead with at least a dozen doors on the sides, and a single open space on my right, maybe the size of a school gym, with long tables and chairs and couches scattered around. There are people occupying every seat, yeah, or sitting cross-legged on the floor or perched on the tables, but there’s no sardine-like crush. You could make your way through with minimal elbowing.

  Not many tab projections. Instead, I see board games, cards, books. A woman stands atop a table, talking loudly. “Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Four hundred and seventy-four years. Gone! Petra. Over two thousand years. Gone! The Taj Mahal. Three hundred and ninety-two years. Gone! Maeshowe. Almost five thousand years. Gone! The Kaaba—” She throws her hands up every time she shouts “Gone!”

  “You can’t know that,” someone says with a despairing tone that indicates it’s not the first time he’s said it. “Besides, what about my neighborhood? The Jordaan is over four centuries old. We have Anne Frank, and the February strikes started on the Noordermarkt . . .”

  “What about the animals?” a boy pipes up. “Rain forests burned down and covered in soot? Poisoned coral reefs?”

  “What about Osdorp?” someone else argues, then looks up at Heleen and me. Others do the same, questions in their eyes. Between my dirty clothes and backpack, it’s obvious I’m from outside. I haven’t even taken down my hood.

  “She’s visiting from another shelter,” Heleen says loudly enough that I flinch at the sound. “We’re exchanging information. She had a hard trip, so she can’t answer your questions right now.”

  A couple of people toss out questions anyway, asking how I got here or where my shelter is. That’s all: questions. No desperate mob coming at me. No one tearing my backpack off Heleen’s shoulders and spilling its contents in a scramble for food. No accusations about why my cheeks are full.

  Still, too many people are looking at me. Curiously, sharply, accusingly, hopefully. At the Nassau, all that attention made me feel like a hero, like someone special instead of someone special, but here, it nauseates me. I stare at my boots.

  “Questions come later,” Heleen says.

  Only the woman on top of the table pays me no mind. “Easter Island! Ubirr!” she goes on. “Pueblo Bonito! Angkor Wat! Manneken Pis!”

  Heleen guides me through the nearest door on our left.

  It’s a small room, with seven or eight sets of bedding scattered about, from stretchers to airbeds to bedrolls. Three men sit on
the sheets with their fingers pulling and pushing at a projection hovering between them. “No, no,” one older man says, “we should save the milk powder for . . .”

  “She’s from another shelter, like we thought,” Heleen announces. She weaves her way through the beds to a cabinet at the back of the room. “She’s only here for information. So don’t mind us.” To me, she adds, “The manifest is on paper. That all right? We’re preserving power.”

  Her voice gets pointed at the end, but none of the three men sitting on the beds seem to notice. They stare up at me.

  “Which shelter? I have friends near Utrecht,” one man says.

  “How did you get here? How are people at your shelter? Can you—we’ve got lots of people in bad shape, maybe if—”

  “Do you have anything to trade?”

  “Gentlemen.” Heleen sounds sharp. “The girl is tired. Imagine if you had to go out there.”

  My head spins. “Paper is fine. Of course.”

  Heleen pulls a stack of paper from the cabinet. “You know,” she says, and her voice is suddenly so gentle that something feels fake about it, “we have a doctor here. If you need someone to talk to . . .”

  “Just a minute,” I mumble, an echo of my words in the chute. I reach behind me and press my thumb into my back, here, and here, imitating the feel of the bolts—

  What am I doing?

  I yank my hand back. They’re staring. “I’m fine. Just—the manifest. Paper is fine.”

  They’re still staring. All of a sudden I realize how I must look to Heleen, and my cheeks scrunch up. What am I doing? I’m bad with new people, with new situations, but I haven’t . . . I’m not normally this . . . I used to be, but I’ve learned a lot since I was a kid, I’m better now, I’m more adjusted, I’m . . .