by Mike Chen
“Twenty-twenty-five sounded so futuristic when we were kids. But there are no flying cars. My cutting-edge car technology is a navigation system that doesn’t even work. I mean, people have reverted to CDs. Old technology, touchy-feely movies, music with no edge. It’s like we’ve paused as a society.” In the dim light, she grinned to herself, like there was an in-joke that he’d missed.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m more of a sports guy.” The elevator gave a low creak as Rob adjusted his weight on his corner of the floor.
“The only good thing my family ever did for me was introduce me to punk rock. The real pre-pandemic kind, not the weak stuff you get after an apocalypse.”
Rob smirked at the remark. She’d done that as the time wore on, going from professional politeness to adding in various bits of passive-aggressive snark. He couldn’t tell if he found it witty or annoying. Either way, he had to move beyond the polite banter.
He was running against the clock here.
“Hey, look,” Rob said, biting into his lip. “This is going to sound weird.”
“We’re stuck in an elevator in a world where people wear gas masks as fashion statements. So weird is relative. Let’s get over it.”
“Right. Good point. Well, what I mean is, I...” Rob sucked in a breath of stale elevator air. “I have to meet with my daughter’s principal. Something, um, happened. And I’m probably gonna get grilled. So if it’s not too weird, I have to practice what I’m going to say. Especially since I’m gonna be late.”
Krista’s knitting needles stopped clinking. “As in, you’re gonna practice a speech?”
“Kind of. Sort of. Actually, I’m not totally sure.”
Her tone softened and got quiet, in a controlled and focused way that made part of Rob wonder if she was loaded with empathy or if it was a professional trick. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “No. Not really. I’m easy to read, huh? Sunny’s had some behavior...issues lately. And because of that, they have to file a Family Stability Board report. Best case, it’s this hearing that I’m late for. Worst case...” His voice trailed off. His eyes shut, squeezing tight enough to tense his cheeks. “It makes no sense. I’m just trying to protect her from this world and now this. They want to know if we’re ‘socially normal’? Come on.”
“Well, you wanted to practice. So are you? ‘Socially normal’?”
“Sort of? Not really?” Rob rubbed his face with a low groan. “I take her to soccer. We keep to ourselves. Seems safer these days. I mean, the damn Greenwood incident made it all worse. One bad apple, you know?”
“I actually haven’t read too much about Greenwood.”
“Well, it’s scared everyone. Everyone’s on the verge of snapping and they’re worried about whether we have barbecues or visit support groups. I don’t think that explains why Sunny hit someone.”
“Oh. Well, good job raising a little ass-kicker.”
Rob didn’t smile.
“I’m joking,” she said. “Kids fight. It’s what they do. And they lived through the End of the World. Kids are tougher than most people these days.”
“She’s only seven.”
“See, everyone worries too much. Isn’t that part of the problem? Fifty years ago, they gave kids toys made of scrap metal. Kids figure it out. She’s at school, right? It’s not like they forced her to be part of the urban farming teams.”
“She’s had outbursts, but never violent ones. I don’t get it. I teach her that we fix problems. I try to figure her out but it’s like she’s locked away sometimes.”
Krista’s head cocked sideways at the last statement, which Rob didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Still, there was no worst-case scenario here. If she put up a wall or simply didn’t care, it wouldn’t affect anything. But if she was willing to help, well, Rob could use all the help he could get right now. “So I have to convey that at the hearing. That I know Sunny’s troubled about something. I mean, it could be anything in this world, right? A kid is in quarantine between ages two and four, sees—” He stopped himself before giving away too much. What should he say? What could he say? Problem was, she was a stand-in, a practice run for the real thing. The school would be much more inquisitive. He needed to prepare. “Her mom is dead,” he finally said. “That doesn’t help.”
“Listen.” Krista’s tone maintained the politeness from before but somehow the professional shield seemed to tone down, just a hair. “I got into fights at school all the time. Shitty family, stupid parents, the works. Look at me, I’m a perfectly well-adjusted adult. Though I do have one suggestion.”
“A trick from the post-apocalyptic wedding planner’s guide to wrangling flower girls?”
“No. Not quite.” Krista visibly tensed up, and for a moment Rob wasn’t sure if his dumb joke offended her. “But I know what I wanted when I felt like things went to hell as a kid. Try listening to her. Instead of fixing her.”
Rob’s face changed from tense and sharp to softer, sullen edges. “I don’t know how many times Elena told me that. Hard to break some habits.”
“Elena sounds like she was a smart woman.”
“Yeah, she was. She definitely had that part down.” He held up his phone, its screen coming to life briefly with the image of a smiling black-haired girl with bright eyes and round cheeks. “So yeah, can you help me practice?”
Chapter Five
Moira
The outage shut down a several-block radius, and by the time Moira got back to her office building, she saw a few PodStar employees leaving. She followed suit and started the thirty-minute walk across nearly two miles within the city’s designated safe zone, soon crossing into the areas that still had power. And with that, broadcast voices coming from bars, restaurants, newstands, discussing two things over the air: President Hersh’s upcoming speech and the waves made by her father in his search for MoJo.
The former should have been a big deal, especially with the reports of a flu outbreak in south Florida. But Moira couldn’t focus on anything but her own past. Step after step, block after block; it didn’t matter how tough she’d become living overland or how buried her identity was in this new world. The mere mention of her father’s name, hearing a radio clip of him talking about how this was “a family affair,” and Moira’s body may have been walking in PASD-ridden San Francisco but her mind lived in London, almost a decade ago.
She was nearly seventeen at the time, sitting in the back of a limo through London’s ceaseless traffic and smattering rain, a Coke in one hand and notes in the other. This was her first press conference, and though her dad taught her what to say, how to act, and—the most important point—how to smile, practice didn’t match the real thing. The mere idea of cameras following her around, her image and words living forever in the internet age, turned her stomach inside out. For nearly her entire life up to that point, every moment was devoted to hitting a higher pitch, sustaining a note longer, or hitting dance cues with greater precision. She could do that. Her father told her she was born to do it, so much so that she’d been pulled out of school to attend a performance academy.
But in this limo, despite sitting next to her manager Chris, the very thought of discussing the debut single that had taken the UK by storm made her unable to take a sip from the cold soda can. “It will be fine,” Chris said in his cigarette-beaten gravelly voice. He offered her some gum, his own admitted way for dealing with anxiety. She declined, and instead replayed her practiced answers in her head. He went on, “Listen, I know some of the journalists who will be there. I reminded them that this is your first presser and gave them some easy questions to use. You’ll be in and out in fifteen minutes, I promise.”
“I don’t get why we’re not just doing this on the phone like the other media requests.”
“Maybe they wanted to see you in person. Your dad said he arranged it himself.
”
Nerves amplified with each step in her heeled boots, and though she moved carefully through the arena’s loading doors to the small press area, her legs remained wobbly.
“I’ll be right here. Just look at me if you get stuck, I’ll mouth the answers to you.” Chris smiled, his bright eyes and crooked teeth showing a confidence that she didn’t feel in herself.
“Even with the gum?”
“Talking and chewing gum is one of my top skills. Oh,” he said, looking down at the glowing phone in his hand. “It’s your dad. Good timing. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared down the hallway, then someone with a headset motioned her through a curtain to a folding table. She sat by herself, the spot next to her with CHRIS GORMAN displayed in front of an empty chair. “Hi?” she finally said when the silence became unbearable. “I, um, not sure if we should be waiting for my manager. I’m kind of new to this.”
Steel folding chairs squeaked as the half-dozen or so reporters adjusted, their faces hidden by the bright lights overhead. She tapped her fingers and drank from the free water bottle in front of her, and in between, she kept glancing over her shoulder at the curtain, waiting for someone to swoop in. If not for rescue, at least to tell her what to do.
Some time passed. She wasn’t sure how much, though it felt like several days. Finally, she turned to the microphone.
Smile, she told herself. The MoJo smile, the one that she’d been practicing for years. Remember, the eyes say as much as the mouth. She pictured herself in the mirror, turning it off and on like a switch as she did daily. In the face of murmurs and silhouetted heads in front of her, the smile was all she could rely on. “I guess we should just do this? Do you lot ask questions now?”
One woman spoke up right away. “MoJo, given the inherent sexual overtones of your music video, do you feel you’re appropriate for young girls?”
That wasn’t part of the rehearsed questions.
“I’m...well, I, uh, hope everyone can enjoy the music. And the videos. It’s, um, good fun, very artfully directed.”
Even before her last word got out, someone else fired off a question. “How do you respond to allegations that you’re not really singing on your album?”
“What?”
“Are you really singing on your album?”
“I...uh...what? Well, that’s just not true. I’ve been singing my whole life.” She took a drink of water, mostly because nothing else made sense in that moment. “I...where did you hear that?”
“What about the rumors that you refused to perform with Claudia Merrit?”
“What rumors? I don’t even know where that comes from.”
By now, her cheeks were a bright red, and she could sense the layer of sweat forming across her forehead—and it wasn’t from the bright lights surrounding the podium. She wiped at it, though in doing so, her makeup smeared, the blue star drawn around her eye now smudged into a blur.
“Supposedly you’re at odds with your father and that’s why he’s not here. Can you comment on that?”
“What? No! I mean...he’s at some business meeting and my manager—”
Chris returned, moving in fast-forward, a dour frown matching deep creases on his face. “Excuse me,” he said, pushing his way to the podium. He gave her a look and mouthed the words I’m sorry before turning back to face the press. “MoJo is running late for a previously scheduled event and doesn’t want to disappoint anyone. So unfortunately, we’ll have to end questions here. Follow-up questions can be sent to our publicity team and we’ll try to answer them accordingly. Thank you.” He put his arm around her, and as soon as they broke past the back curtain, tears flooded from her eyes. He tried to usher her forward, but she had to stop and sit, head in hands. Whatever makeup remained was now completely gone, a mess of ocean blue, silver, and glitter smeared across her fingers.
“That wasn’t anything like we practiced,” she finally managed to say.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Chris said, kneeling down in front of her.
Each blink brought her vision steps back from a blurry mess until she was able to lock eyes with him, her breath calming back into a steady pace. “But you know what?” she asked, her voice still cracking but confidence finding its way back in. “I think I handled it.”
Chris’s cigarette-stained teeth flashed in a grin. “You did.”
“I mean, I didn’t fight back. I didn’t melt down. I stayed cool—”
Before she finished, the phone in Chris’s hand came to life. “It’s your dad,” he said, his voice popping with dryness following a heavy sigh.
“Johanna?” Her dad’s voice barked through the phone. “I listened to a stream of the presser.”
“I survived, yeah? Onward and—”
“What the hell was that?”
The air sucked out of the stuffy hallway, taking all noise with it except for her dad’s voice. Except it didn’t sound like the tinny transmission of a phone speaker; suddenly, he was there, standing next to her, glare disintegrating her posture and stealing her poise, his words like a megaphone against her eardrum.
“I’m...” she finally tried to say but the thought had no conclusion. Instead, it was a sound offered up in self-sacrifice, the bait for the stalking animal to launch into attack.
“I’ll tell you what that was. That was someone who forgot every single lesson of PR training. You showed no poise. No confidence. No response. No, you rolled over on your back like a bloody scared mutt.” His voice gathered in momentum and pace, and soon it began a line-by-line assessment of each question, each answer, what she’d said and what she should have said.
By the time it was over, her knees pressed against the concrete floor, her whole body in an uncontrollable shake. Tingling took over her fingertips as they tightly gripped the phone.
“And I know how you should have answered each and every question. Because I wrote them.”
What little air remained managed to help her squeak out the smallest of questions. “You...what?”
“I wrote them as a test for you. Gave them to each reporter with explicit instructions. Do you know how much money I lost doing that? Only to see you fail?” She heard the words but they didn’t make sense. No response formed as she tried to comprehend and process what her father had just admitted, but it didn’t compute, like if gravity suddenly stopped working. “And let me tell you something,” he went on, “your mother was the world’s finest pianist. She lived with that pressure. And the pressure of being an Iranian immigrant in a world of stuffy racists. She never once cracked. Always poised. Always ready to respond with a smile and a smart word. Never giving up a single inch. You think about that. And you think about how you handled today.”
From the corner of her eye, she could see Chris’s head in his hands, as if he heard every word.
Though he probably didn’t need to. Her own response was enough.
“There’s a car waiting for you. You’re going to your hotel for emergency PR training before tonight’s show. Hurry up. The consultant is waiting. But first, one thing I want to ask you.”
Arena staff passed her by without even a sideways glance. Maybe this was normal to them? Did all pop stars have breakdowns in the hallway?
“Yes, Dad.”
“Do you think your mother would be proud of how you did?”
Rather than bark out anything further, the line stayed quiet, only the sound of static and the occasional cough coming through. He wanted an answer. He wanted her to say it, to admit it.
“No.”
“Then do better.” The phone beeped as the line went dead, her father gone without even a parting word.
In that dim hallway, in the bowels of an arena, Moira handed the phone over to Chris, who could only whisper apologies. But it didn’t matter. That moment only confirmed what she’d suspected for most of her life: her father viewed her as an as
set, not a child.
And if he was capable of that then, what could he possibly do after years of searching for his prized possession?
As she walked the remaining block to her apartment, the burst of autumn wind didn’t bother Moira at all. She marched into the apartment she shared with Frank. It was thankfully empty, and she changed quickly into her workout clothes, then went to the bottom drawer of her dresser and pulled the whole thing nearly out of the frame. Her fingers felt to get to the folded hunting knife taped underneath.
The handle fit against her palm in perfect muscle memory, jagged ridges near the hinge remaining from the one time it took a bullet for her while she crept through Cedar Rapids on a mission to scavenge winter clothes.
Her phone chimed with two texts, one from Frank saying he had to work late.
The second was a long reach into her past, from a time before San Francisco, before living a normal life.
It was from Narc.
Narc, who’d led their band of survivors overland while the rest of the country hid, who founded a Reclaimed Territory commune by Sacramento after they’d survived a cross-country trek, who always seemed to know the right thing to say in the face of adversity or a hail of bullets.
Except when she’d told him that she was leaving their commune for a Metro. That had left him speechless, kneeling in farmer gloves and muddy overalls as he’d tried to pull a pesky yam from the ground.
Now he was reaching out.
I saw the news. You want to talk? it read.
The drawer back in place, Moira strode out and the door shut behind her with purpose. She stepped into the hallway, folded knife neatly concealed in hand. No talking right now. In a little bit. First, she needed to run.
It was what she did best.
Chapter Six
Krista
Given Krista’s circumstances, Rob represented very little to gain. With that wedding ring on his finger, he wasn’t getting over his dead wife anytime soon, nor did he exactly come off as the big event type. And she was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be able to help out in the search for MoJo, unless MoJo suddenly became a homebody or a teacher or baseball fan.
