On the Edge of Gone Page 8

Max clicks off the flashlight, leaving a lightstrip wrapped around his arm as the only illumination. We’re close enough not to need the extra strength and focus of the flashlight. “Check out our loot.” He lowers one shoulder and slides his backpack around; it’s so full, I’m surprised he ever managed to zip it closed.

  I’m still at the table, an entire room between us. Does he expect me to cross it? I hunt for something to say, but Sanne beats me to it.

  “What’re you doing?” She cranes her neck to look at me. She’s like a little sprite—wide round eyes, pointy chin, this narrow button nose. Her frown is the only thing that doesn’t fit the picture.

  “I was reading.”

  “Out here?”

  My mind races. “It’s quieter.”

  A tilt of her head. “What’re you reading?”

  “Cats. I was reading about cats.”

  “Why?” Where my words come out overly enunciated, Sanne’s are clipped, quiet, as though she wants to keep her talking to a minimum.

  “You don’t like cats?” Max nudges her with his backpack, except it’s so full and she’s so tiny, it makes her stumble. She glares at him, but I can practically see her fighting to mask the smile tugging at her lips. Max grins back, not masking it in the slightest. It brightens his face like a Christmas tree. He’s cute like that—more in a puppy-dog sort of way than a making-out sort of way, but cute enough to make me wonder if anything is going on between him and Sanne. She might be older than she looks. Even if not, some guys in my class dated girls her age.

  Every now and then thoughts like that hit me, and I have to almost physically shake them off. It’s just so . . . automatic. Thoughts about boys, about cats, about asking Mom what’s for dinner, about wondering what time Iris will be home.

  Normal thoughts. Even if the world isn’t normal anymore.

  Max didn’t get that memo. He hops onto the table I’m standing at. He’s not even half a meter away, his gloved fingers curling over the edge of the table, oddly lit in the glow of his lightstrip. The comet hit only yesterday, yet this seems natural to him, the same way his sister, Mirjam, had talked about starting up a soccer team. Maybe they’re the kind of people who either fit in anywhere or make a good show of it.

  It’ll be easier for them, anyway. They get to leave this place.

  “So . . . ,” he says, seemingly at a loss for words. “Cats?”

  “What’s in there?” My eyes are on his backpack, which is good, because then maybe Max and Sanne won’t notice the way they suddenly sting with tears. “There isn’t any food left in the airport. There can’t be.”

  “Really.” Sanne makes a sound I can’t identify.

  “Oh, there’s not.” Max nudges his backpack with an outstretched foot. “We’ve mostly got paper, pens—so people won’t have to worry about batteries, you know? We got plastics to repurpose for the three-D printer, a box of sweaters from a security company, books about topics we might not have databases on . . .”

  I’m slowly calming myself, pushing the tears away. It’s like an afternoon at school: telling myself Not now and Later and sitting stoically until the bell rings, then ducking into the bathroom until I can breathe.

  “No books about cats,” Sanne says.

  “I don’t think we’d have grabbed those anyway,” Max says, all seriousness. “Unless you want us to? Denise? What were you reading?”

  “A stored article about Savannah cats.” Neither of them responds. “I used to work at an animal shelter. We had this Savannah cat last summer. Not a proper purebred, of course, but still unusual looking. It was so sleek, with huge ears”—I hold up a fist to show the size of the cat’s head, then form a V shape with two fingers of my other hand to imitate the cat’s ear—“and, I don’t know, I was interested. I dislike breeding, but it results in gorgeous cats sometimes. It’s interesting to read these discussions.”

  I tell myself, Quiet, that’s enough, he’s not interested, they never are, and check for the signs, like Iris taught me. Is he trying to say something? Is he looking elsewhere? It’s hard to tell in this lighting.

  I should stop talking, either way. I gave up on cats after that day at the Way Station months ago—I should never even have saved these files to my tab. Then I realize I’m already talking again. “You see, the original Savannahs were mixes of servals and Siamese cats. They introduced other breeds like Bengals or Egyptian Maus or ocicats, but they’ve mostly simply been breeding Savannah cats together since establishing the breed standards. Now there are people who want to start from scratch with servals and other cat breeds, though, and establish a different hybrid with really different desired traits—I mean, like I said, I’m against breeding, there are so many great cats already out there, and I really don’t like that they’re involving wild animals—but it’s interesting.”

  “Oh,” Sanne says. “It is?”

  My lips tighten. “Something wrong?”

  I’m a head taller, but Sanne only raises her eyebrows. That’s what I look at. Her eyebrows. It probably makes my glare less effective. She’s so damn unimpressed. She’s, what, two years younger than I am? Three? But somehow she’s got every bit the same effect on me as my classmates used to. A snide comment here, a muffled laugh there, paired with those sly looks and—

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” Sanne says. “And certainly nothing’s wrong with you. There’s so little wrong with you that you can spend your time reading about cats.” Her voice is even. Perhaps she’s so quiet not because she has nothing to say but because she stores up the words. She goes on. “Must be nice. Cats. Were there pictures with the articles? I hope so. Otherwise—ha!—otherwise, that’d just be embarrassing, wasting your time and the ship’s energy on articles that don’t even have decent pictures, while the rest of us make ourselves useful.”

  Her eyebrows drop back to their normal position.

  Her words take too long to sink in, and no answer is coming.

  “Um.” Max blinks rapidly. “Sanne, um—”

  “Sorry, Max.” Sanne doesn’t stop staring at me. “Did you want to hit on her some more?”

  “Screw you,” I say, too late to have any real impact. My voice is thick. I push away from the table before I’m expected to say anything else and shove past Sanne, not at all by accident.

  Max calls after me. I ignore him. He’ll find me alone if he’s really . . . what? Sorry? Why would he be? He was probably just feigning interest to hit on me, like Sanne said. Of course she was right about that.

  She was right about everything else she said, too.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I BARELY NOTICE WHEN I STEP OUTSIDE: it’s just as dark and cold as inside. The ship must be only a few hundred meters away, a cloaked pool of light in the distance, and my first instinct is to head toward it.

  Then I remember: I can’t.

  A gust of wind steals my breath. I want to go back to the Nassau. Screw Sanne. Screw Mom. Screw Max, too. I just want to forget about them all, return to the ship oblivious and safe, and never go outside again.

  I want to find Iris and then I want us to leave, so much that it startles me every time the thought creeps up. It’s what I’ve wanted since the announcement in July. They mentioned ships in the same breath as they mentioned attempts to divert the comet. I think they wanted to cut off panic before it had a chance to spark. We have options, they swore. We don’t want to abandon a single soul.

  They’d been designing generation ships since long before the announcement, of course: NASA found habitable twin planets over a decade ago. Oxygen, temperature, gravity, pressure, water, magnetic field. Everything came back positive. They’d planned crewed missions on and off, alternately held back by lack of funding, and spurred on by more and more bad news about climate change and waning natural resources.

  Then they saw the comet. Funding rolled in. Suddenly, climate change no longer mattered. Instead, there were predictions of the ozone layer going, of dust and debris blocking the sun, and disaster piling on top
of disaster worldwide. Earth would take years or decades to be remotely habitable again, generations to recover fully. And how many people would survive to see that happen?

  I don’t want to be in a basement shelter the rest of my life, hiding from the surface; I want to be on that surface even less. I want a bed and three meals a day and to keep my life like it was. I want to go. I want a future. A ship seemed the only way out—just never a realistic one.

  But now there’s the Nassau, vines and shoddy bistro seats and all, and I’m paralyzed at the thought of standing atop this rubble to watch the ship escape into the stars. I’ve watched too many others leave already.

  A breath shudders through me.

  “Denise!”

  My head snaps away from the hidden ship. A small pool of light bounces toward me not far to my right. Mom’s flashlight. She comes at me in a half-jog. “There you are,” she calls, relieved.

  “I left a message.”

  “Oh! I didn’t even think to check.”

  The beams of our flashlights meet in an almond shape on the ground. I click mine off.

  “What were you doing?” she asks.

  Even the thought of saying I’d been reading heats my cheeks with embarrassment. Mom wouldn’t judge me like Sanne did. She’d say, Oh, that’s nice, honey. I’m glad you got to take a break. That might be worse. I shouldn’t get to take breaks while people on the ship work day and night to get it repaired, and while people outside of the ship—meaning us—are working simply to survive.

  She runs her thumb over my cheek. It comes back black. “All that dirt out here can’t be good, honey.”

  I’d barely noticed. A layer of fine dust coats my gloves and clothes, like the dirt that accumulated on our school’s courtyard by the highway.

  The sound of footsteps makes us turn. Max exits the building and kicks aside an abandoned chain that must’ve once locked the door. “Sanne doesn’t know when—”

  “Hello?” Mom steps forward, half shielding me.

  “This is Max. He’s Anke’s son.” I sound stilted. “And this is my mother.”

  “Heyyy,” Max drawls. He sounds dazed, although that may just be his natural state. He turns to me. “If you need quiet spots on the ship to read, I can show you some. You don’t have to freeze out here.”

  Mom responds with a wan smile before I can answer. “Thank you. We’re no longer on the ship. And I think Denise needs to sleep. It’s been a long day.”

  I’m not five.

  “No longer on—?” Max’s eyes grow massive. “That’s why you’re out here? You got kicked out?”

  “Afraid so. If you want to put in a good word for us . . . ?” Mom says hopefully.

  “Yeah! Yeah, I mean, I will. What happened? Where are you staying?”

  “It was a misunderstanding. That’s all. We’re staying in our car.” Mom gestures, although the world behind her is pitch-dark.

  Max gives us a weird look but says, “There are hotels farther up—some rooms may be intact. Ish. If you want to stay nearby, I can take you to some offices with couches to sleep on. No windows, so no glass or wind. It’ll be colder and dustier than the car, I guess, but you can at least stretch out.”

  “We do have thermal blankets.” Mom looks at me—makes a big show of it, too, not just glancing over her shoulder, but stepping back, turning, making eye contact. “Denise, honey. What do you want?”

  I grind out the words: “Yeah. I think—yeah.” Distance from Mom’s half snores would help in getting sleep.

  A couple of minutes later we’ve grabbed our backpacks and we’re following Max through the airport buildings. Sanne has already returned to the Nassau, thankfully.

  It helps having the other two in front of me. Means I have to pay less attention to where I’m going. I only have to watch out for spikes of glass and slippery mud, tune out the giant shadows chaotically stretching and shifting across the wall, and listen to Mom and Max talk. Mom’s come down by now, or close to it. She’s still talking about him putting in a good word for us. She’s not subtle, either. Max turns back occasionally to talk to me. I keep trying to find something to say, prepare the words, but when I look up they fall apart on my tongue.

  After a while, Max hangs back, leaving enough space between us and Mom to talk at a hush. “Sorry about Sanne. She didn’t know you spent the day helping. She’ll back off. She’s . . . struggling with some things.”

  “I’m not mad” is all I say. I look up briefly to show I mean it. A long crack runs through the wall behind him. Occasionally, we’ve had to go around rubble where the ceiling fell through. I don’t know why he’s been so nice when we only met today. He may just be flirting, like Sanne said. I’m familiar enough with flirting—boys like how I look, even if they don’t much like the rest of me—but I hadn’t realized he was doing it. He may flirt differently from boys at Iris’s festivals. Or maybe he’s simply bad at it.

  “You sure?” Max says. “You’re kinda quiet.”

  “It’s nothing.” My half glance at Mom betrays me.

  “Ohhh,” he whispers.

  Soon Max announces, “Best couches in the house.” The door creaks open, echoing through the dead quiet of the hall. The lock has been forced. Someone left a scribble on the frame with a thick marker. “The offices on this side of the hall have the same kind of couches. Do you need anything? Can I help?”

  We thank him and say goodbye, and while Mom lingers to talk to him about God-knows-what, I step into the next office and click on my flashlight. Like Max said, the couch is long enough to stretch out on. There aren’t any windows, so the air blast didn’t push everything to one side of the room, either. I thump down, remove my gloves, and bend over my backpack. Mom packed it while I got cleaned up in a communal bathroom, and she did it all wrong, just as I expected. She didn’t even fold my pillowcase correctly. The top, where my head goes, should be folded face in, not out, so it won’t rub on anything and get all dirty.

  I hold two corners of the pillowcase, flap it out in the cold office air, and drape it over the far end of the couch. There’s no pillow to hold it in place. It looks wrong.

  I braid my hair and wonder what to do with it from now on. It’ll get dirty and tangled and damaged out here. I’ll need to cut it short. Be practical. I’m just not sure I’ll live long enough for it to matter.

  I pull a vacuum-packed thermal blanket from my bag and keep my coat on. Even so, I’m shivering minutes after lying down, mashing my face into the comfort of my tainted pillowcase and staring at the wall with one eye. The flashlight lights the room from below. The books on one shelf are a chaotic mess. The desk drawers have been emptied out on the floor. I wonder what Max and the others might have found worth saving, and why they wouldn’t leave it for those of us left behind, who need it more.

  I hear footsteps. The barely-there shadow of Mom sways in my doorway.

  As she pads inside to turn off my flashlight, I pretend to sleep, like I always do.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I DO END UP SLEEPING, WHICH SURPRISES ME when I wake up the next day. I rub tear crusts off my face, shudder as my arm is exposed to the cold, and wrap my thermal blanket around me so I can grope for my flashlight.

  I sweep the room with the light, as if hoping to find something other than what I know is there. The room stares back, empty.

  My head is clearer, but I feel every bit as tense as I did last night. With the flashlight clenched between my knees, I dig through my bag for breakfast. Spice bread. A water bottle.

  “You’re up,” Mom says from the doorway.

  I make a noncommittal sound.

  She steps inside and sits at the foot end of my sad imitation of a bed—she learned that much over the years, at least: never sit near the head—and watches me eat.

  “I’m . . . ,” she starts.

  “You’re sorry. I know.” I hunch down, surprised I’ve even said the words. I’m so angry I could hit her, and she doesn’t even realize it.

  “
It’s not like I did it on purpose, Denise. Don’t treat me like a villain.”

  I say nothing.

  “Start thinking about what you want us to do next. We’ll discuss later. I’m going to”—she makes a wild gesture—“explore. I already found bathrooms nearby, though the water’s cut off, of course. And I think there’s a wildfire in the distance. Did you know?”

  I shrug.

  “If you go up a couple of stairs and head west, you can see it flickering at the horizon. It’s blurry and kind of dark—because of all the dust, I guess—but it makes the dust glow, and it’s . . . it’s nice to see some light.”

  “Burning ejecta,” I say. That’s what causes the wildfires.

  Mom smiles wanly. “I’ll go explore further. OK, honey?”

  “OK,” I say, since she may not go if I don’t.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  She leaves.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I tell myself: Not now.

  I can’t break down.

  Instead, I clean my hands and face with a glob of soap from my bag. The suds on my little square towel come back dark as charcoal. I wish I could let my hair spill over my shoulders, but I just wrap it in my scarf anew and eat, though without butter the stale spice bread is dry.

  If I can’t break down, I’ll have to stay busy and think about what’s next. We can try to beg our way into a permanent shelter, or find a temporary one and hook up with survivors once they leave. The temporary shelters have food for only two or three days. Once the immediate danger is over, they’ll release people to fend for themselves.

  Iris comes first, though.

  We can walk southeast. My tab won’t have enough juice to act as a compass and map for so long, but maybe I can somehow connect with Max or Mirjam or even Els and have them sneak it into the ship and charge it.

  (I check the battery status. Then I delete the article I was reading last night, and every related file I’d stored. Do what’s necessary.)

  The more immediate question is: Do we really walk all the way to Gorinchem, or do we walk home and wait for Iris there? It’d be fourteen hours or three hours, respectively, based on the times I looked up, and we can easily double those estimates, given the state of the roads. The bridges might not be intact, either, and we’re guaranteed to need to cross water. By the time we reach the shelter, they might’ve already cleared out. Where would Iris go after that? Would she have working transport to reach Amsterdam?