On the Edge of Gone Read online

  The bizarreness of those words makes me stop walking. Max seizes on to my hesitation. “Grab a coat,” he says, gesturing at a pile draped over a nearby crate. Then he indicates something on his face. “You’ll need a filter and eye drops against the dust.” He has a mouth cap on, a half-bubble going from midway up his nose to midway down his chin, so transparent I hadn’t even noticed it. Each of the others has one, too.

  “Raiding the airport? Is that even allowed?”

  “Have you seen the state it’s in? No one cares.” Crowbar Girl is white, with dark tousled hair that barely reaches her chin. She’s short and young—fourteen, maybe?—but the way she wields that crowbar makes me think twice about arguing with her.

  “We’ve been cooped up for too long.” Max hops from foot to foot to illustrate. It’s more physical activity than everything I’ve seen him do put together. “And the airport is too big to have been emptied out completely.”

  “People seem careful about keeping the ship secret. They just . . . let you leave?” I say.

  “As long as we don’t draw attention. Besides, we’d only be sabotaging ourselves if other survivors found out.”

  “Can we go?” Crowbar Girl says.

  “You wanted to help, right?” Max steps toward the coat pile, looking hopeful.

  I’m playing catch-up with everything he said. After today—after what just happened with Mom—my head feels crowded. “I can’t. Now. I mean, not now. Thank you.”

  I walk on. Their voices grow fainter. I don’t turn to look. Instead, I go straight for Mom’s car, pressing a hand against the cool glass of the passenger door. With my other hand, I squeeze the keychain. Lights inside the car flicker on. The locks pop open. I slip inside, yank the door shut.

  Immediately, the noise of the loading bay is muted. I sigh in relief and let my head rest back, not caring it’ll smush my hair flat.

  Two minutes I sit in the passenger seat. Just breathing.

  When my heart finally calms, I turn the keys over in my hand. At sixteen, I’m old enough to take driving classes. Dad even offered to pay for lessons. There was just no need. I can—could—get everywhere I needed to using my bike and public transport. And after the announcement, we had other priorities.

  The roads are empty now, though. From here to the shelter would practically be a straight line. No traffic rules to take into account, no enraged drivers, no sloppy cyclists.

  Maybe no road, either, I tell myself, but I still climb into the driver’s seat. The keys lie in my palm. I go over the steps in my head. The autodrive isn’t an option; I’m lucky there’s enough power left to even react to the unlock signal. I’ll need to start the engine manually. Enter the key, and . . . and what? I squish back to study the pedals. They’re not marked. The buttons on the steering wheel and handles are, but I only recognize half the symbols.

  I drop the keys in my lap and grip the wheel with clammy hands. I stare out the windshield. I imagine dark, open skies, the car spinning out of control on a broken road.

  I’m pretty sure I’ve had nightmares about this.

  End of the world, I remind myself. Do what’s necessary. Don’t back out now.

  A shape on my left taps the glass. Mom. She leans in. “You’re in my seat.”

  Her eyes look the same as before.

  Still, I scoot back into the passenger seat. I reach for the keys—they slipped onto the driver’s seat as I maneuvered away—but Mom’s already opened the door and snatched them up.

  She settles in and looks at the steering wheel for a moment. “So . . .” She trails off, then brightens. “The lockdown is over! Honey, if you want to look for Iris, we can.”

  “We should wait,” I mumble. I’m rocking back and forth, I realize suddenly. I try not to do that in front of others. The handful of times I’ve done it at school, people side-eyed me and laughed, and whenever I’ve done it at home, Mom looked at me the way visitors look at clumsy newborn kittens in the shelter, all mollified and pitying.

  “But we have to look for Iris.” She touches my leg. “Honey? Something wrong?”

  I don’t know why she followed me. Normally, when it’s just her and Iris and me at home—meaning just Mom and me, since Iris spent most of her time out the door—Mom will simply take ketamine and spend an hour or two staring ahead with glassy eyes, mumbling things I don’t understand and don’t want to.

  She may have taken ketamine now, just a bit, but usually when she’s like this it’s because of Ecstasy or alcohol or both. She only does that when she’s partying—which means there are other people around, which means she has better things to do than come after me when I flee into my room. The most she’ll do is knock and tell me to let her know if I want something, and probably feel proud of what a thoughtful mother she is.

  I don’t like seeing her in either state, but at least there’s always been a rhyme, a rhythm. Now even that is gone.

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” I say.

  “Honey, you’re all wound up. Talk to me. Honey. Do you want to look for Iris?”

  “Stop using that word.”

  “What?” Her jaw hangs open.

  “Honey. You use the word too often.”

  “Are you angry? Look at me.”

  I snort and don’t respond. I should leave the car.

  “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on, honey?”

  I want to scream at her. Is she that dumb? Is she pretending? Why won’t she stop touching me? “I don’t—I don’t like when you’re like this.” The words come out like a squirm.

  Mom smiles a broad, vague smile. “I’m fine.”

  I fumble for the car handle.

  “Denise. Are you leaving? Why? We were going to look for Iris. You said you wanted to.” The hand on my thigh grips tighter.

  “Later,” I plead. “Not when you’re like this. It’s not safe.”

  “I’m just . . . being social, honey.” She smiles again. “I had such a great time at that table. These people are so smart. We were talking about—”

  “This ship is like its own life?” I snap. “That doesn’t even make sense. It’s dumb and you’re embarrassing yourself.” That’s not the issue, or close to it, but I keep going because it’s something to say. “Everyone thought you were pathetic. Don’t you see that?”

  Mom gapes. I want to claw that look off her face.

  “They didn’t!” she says. “We were talking. Honey, people are . . . I know this is complicated for you . . . The way they were laughing, that wasn’t bad laughing. It was good laughing.”

  “I wasn’t even talking about laughing.” I wipe my eyes to catch any tears. I won’t cry in front of her. I need to be strong, and angry, and fierce. “You’re high. People notice that. I notice that.”

  “Nobody . . . maybe Matthijs, but nobody notices. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Sometimes adults just want to relax. And I thought, you see, I thought that maybe if I talked to people, if they liked me, they’d let us stay. Don’t you love being here? I love being here. Everyone is so smart. This ship is like . . . it’s like its own life. Do you understand what I mean? Its own life.”

  She stares at me with glassy eyes.

  I’ve run out of things to say.

  “There.” She pets my leg. “Everything’s OK. We’re going to find your brother.”

  “Sister,” I say.

  “Sister. Yeah. Sis-ter.” Mom picks up the keys. I sit there, motionless, watching her mash the wrong key into the ignition.

  The keys slip from her hand. She doesn’t reach for them. Instead, her eyes are fixated on the windshield. A familiar face is headed toward us—Anke. She’s staring right back at Mom.

  I realize what she’s looking at. What I should’ve noticed sooner.

  Mom’s hair is wet. It clings to her skull and gleams in the tinny car light. Like she got out of a shower, gave her hair a cursory rub, then left it to dry.

  She showered.

  I know what Anke’s here to do.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I AM NOT PROUD OF WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

  It’s like my brain overheats. This single thought jams the cogs and screams so loudly, I don’t hear anything else. No other thought, no objection from Anke, no hushing from Mom.

  I sit in the car, and I beg: I promise to work. I tell Anke about spending hours helping today, about cleaning goo, about unloading dishes. And then I scream: I say they promised us until tomorrow, that they’re murdering us, murdering us. I say it’s Mom’s fault, I never drank a drop and never took a bite. That I had a chance here, that they should kick her out and let me stay if that’s what it takes.

  Mom gasps at that. I see it, don’t register it.

  My brain gets hotter. There are tears on my face. My skin burns. Workers peek at the car to see what’s going on but keep moving, busy little bees with jobs and a future.

  Someone else shows up. A bearded man. Anke whispers to him, and he tries to drag me from the car, his hands like manacles. I scream at the top of my lungs, flail, catch him in the face. Anke and Mom intervene. They end up letting me stay in the car, and they give me water, and they let me calm down until I’m hunched up, shuddering, and my voice is too dead to keep yelling.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  They guide me to the cabin to dress properly and pack. They give us mouth filters against the dust. They ask us to lean our heads back and widen our eyes for protective drops.

  And Mom and I leave, just the same.

  I don’t look back as I leave the Nassau, as if not acknowledging Mom will make her fade away. With the cold wind searing my cheeks, I can almost believe it might—like I stepped into a different world when I stepped onto the ramp, and Mom is kilometers away.

  The truth is, she’s right behind me. She’s maneuvering the car out of the bay.

  I decided to walk. I have my flashlight tight in my hand, but I don’t need it yet. The ramp and the area around the ship are lit up so people can work even in the dark of the impact dust blotting out the sky. And it is dark. Away from the ship’s immediate surroundings, it’s black as anything. I can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins.

  It’s the first time I’ve let myself look outside since the impact. I freeze on the ramp. I clutch the flashlight tighter. The wind tears a curl of hair from where I’d tucked it under my scarf and hood.

  When we arrived yesterday afternoon, the asphalt of the lot was so smooth, it would’ve damn near made me purr if I were biking across it. Now the ground looks like something out of a news report after an earthquake in Turkey, a hurricane in the United States, a tsunami in the Philippines. Scattered across the asphalt is a ragged carpet of leaves and stones and puddles of black mud. Ripped-loose branches gnarl and twist. A lamppost lies flat, snapped at the base. Flecks of broken glass glimmer like water. The lot itself wears dents like pockmarked skin.

  I hear the car behind me.

  That gets me moving again.

  Shaky-legged, I walk farther down the ramp. Farther still. The car headlights light up the ground before me when we leave the safety of the ship’s illumination. I click on the flashlight. The air is so thick with dust, it’s like sweeping the light beam through a cloud of smoke, but the air I’m breathing is the opposite—thin, like barely enough oxygen is getting through the filter. At least the material is molded to my face so perfectly that I don’t even feel it, aside from the initial prickle of energy that repels the dust. I once wore an old-fashioned filter for a school drill and it made me want to claw my face off.

  At least I’ll breathe clean air when I die out here.

  I banish the thought. I aim my flashlight up, but it doesn’t stretch far enough. There should be office buildings and control towers in the distance, but all I see is the vague silhouette of what must be a nearby concourse. It looks jagged. When I blink, it’s gone, and it might as well have been my imagination.

  People have cleared the area near the ship, but the farther away I get, the more I feel leaves gliding underfoot, glass crunching and stabbing the soles of my boots. Sometimes my toes slip into a spiderweb crater where I expected even ground. The flashlight draws twitchy shadows from every pebble. Behind me, the car crunches rubble under its wheels.

  And it’s so dark.

  I feel like I’m walking the plank. Like this illuminated stretch of asphalt will inevitably open up into a black sea.

  It doesn’t.

  The car comes to a shuddering stop under an overhang. When I raise my flashlight, I see it’s the only part of the overhang that’s still intact. The rest has crumbled. A crack runs through one wall. Dried mud from the day’s dirt-heavy rain streaks its surface.

  Mom slides down the car window. “Are you sure you don’t want to look for . . .”

  If she says my sister’s name, I might scream. We could have been out there right now if Mom hadn’t screwed up. We’d be on the road with a place to go and a place to return to.

  But she’s right. We could still go now. Mom’s not OK yet, but she’s better than she was. And I don’t know what else to do. “I . . . OK. Try to . . . be alert. For when you drive. Dangerous. The roads.”

  The words aren’t coming. But Mom smiles and nods, and I slide into the passenger seat. I take the seat belt: tzz, tzz, tzz.

  We drive.

  We fail.

  We’ve barely cleared the lot before something snaps with such force that I scream and grip the dashboard. There’s too much glass on the road, blown out from the airport and streetlights. It must have cut into a tire.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom says, and I don’t know if it’s for the drugs or the car or Iris or everything else.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WE DECIDE TO TALK THINGS OVER in the morning, when I’ve had time to process and Mom’s had time to come down—although we don’t say either part out loud.

  Mom takes the backseat. I curl up in the passenger seat, but while Mom falls asleep within half an hour, I can’t. Two hours later I’m still wide awake and so simultaneously messed up and angry, I could scream. My hair stands upright with every light snore of Mom’s, this wet rumble on her exhale that gets worse every time I hear it.

  I slip outside, silently close the door, and shuffle across dirt-littered ground. On my far right, engineers are working on the ship, which glows from a hundred lights big and small. The image shimmers like heat over asphalt. We must be right at the edge of the ship’s cloak.

  I click on my flashlight and swing the beam to get an idea of the surrounding terrain. Funny: it’s not even midnight, but it feels like it’s easily four a.m., from the darkness outside to the muffled, distant sounds from the Nassau. There’s that odd feeling of disorientation, too, like—like when you’re trying to find the bathroom in the dark and you’re groping for the doorknob, only to remember that, wait, you moved apartments, the bathroom is on the other side of the hall now, and God, how tired is your brain that it just reset like that?

  I don’t know where I’m going, is what it comes down to, but it feels like I should. I imagine my next move—walking farther away, farther, and then (then I laugh angrily because, Christ, it’s here, it’s finally happened, I’m standing in the pitch-dark by a destroyed airport and the comet has hit and there’s a generation ship in my peripheral vision and Iris is gone), and then I make myself actually take that step, and minutes later I’m inside a building I don’t know.

  I step around rubble. Keep moving. A gust of air tells me the windows are gone. I keep going, eyes on the few cubic meters lit up ahead of me, revealing broken floor tiles and shards of glass. A massive flowerpot has been flung against one wall, the pot broken and the earth scattered. The plant itself is long dead. It’s not the only thing pushed against that wall—most of the glass has accumulated there, and two twisted chairs and a knocked-over table cast shadows double their own size, shadows that tangle and stretch and shudder as I approach. It’s like the room turned onto its side before righting itself again.

  The table
’s two metal Y legs stick in the air, brightly reflecting my flashlight. There’s a dent in the table surface, the wood cracked. Still, when I turn the table back upright, it feels sturdy. It barely even wobbles as I climb on.

  I place both hands by my sides, flat on the table surface, and take a deep breath.

  This is better.

  An hour later, that’s where I’m sitting. Legs slung over the table’s edge. The flashlight off and forgotten by my side. My body swaying back and forth, my tab on my lap and its projection hovering in front of me. It’s almost like I’m back home, forgetting the time until Iris peeks inside or Dad sees me online and tells me to go to sleep . . .

  Voices.

  Within seconds, they’re accompanied by footsteps. The bob and glow of a flashlight turns the corner, and I slide off the table, tab now in my hand, just in time for the flashlight to swoop up at me. I squint and raise my hands. Too late. I’m seeing spots.

  “Oh.” Male voice. “Sorry.”

  The flashlight lowers. As my eyes adjust, I realize who’s approached me. Max and Crowbar Girl from the loading bay. Max is nearly two heads taller than her. They look comical next to each other. They must be returning from the Schiphol raid. They’re warmly clothed, hoods drawn up, hair hidden from the dust just like mine.

  “Where are the others?” I click my tab around my wrist and kill the projection.

  “They went back an hour ago,” Max says. The filter around his mouth reflects a glimmer of light. There’s a narrow line like an imprint or a shadow where it attaches to his skin, subtle enough to be nearly invisible. The difference between the dirt on his cheeks and the clean skin around his mouth is more pronounced. “Did you miss them? Mirjam mentioned wanting to find you.”

  I barely have time to wonder why before he continues.

  “They give up so fast.” Max shakes his head, grins. “Sanne and I win this round, then.”

  “Nice,” Sanne says.