I didn’t want to move. If I moved, even a finger, I might find out what parts of me had been broken or punctured or hacked off, and I didn’t want to do that because right now I was feeling okay, if a tad confused. I scrambled to place myself. I was lying, it seemed, in a pool of cool, gently lapping water, covered in wreckage. A caged blue emergency light flashed on, flashed off. Out of the corner of my eye I could see, not an inch from my head, a generator that had at one time been stored under the ping-pong table. From somewhere nearby came the sound of drizzling water—a sprinkler maybe, or a crack in the hull.
“Hans?”
This was Piroska’s voice—tinny and distant. I’d forgotten all about her. I’d forgotten about everyone. For however long, it had been just me, my mind, floating in the shell of my body. Now there was someone else to worry about.
“Hans? Are you okay?”
I pulled myself out of that swaddling bath and raised myself onto my elbows. And now I saw the room. It looked like it had been thrown into a blender: everything battered and scattered and fucked. Straight ahead, P was in the exact posture I was in—raised up on her elbows—staring back at me with a look of horror on her face. Her green dress was soaked through with blood and sprinkler water, and a screwdriver had skewered her shoulder.
“What happened?” she said.
It took me a while to formulate a reply—up to now I’d been all sensation, no thought. “I think. I think we’ve. I think we’ve capsized.”
“No,” she said, “what happened to you?”
Slowly, she lifted a hand to her ear, indicating for me to do the same. But when I did, all I felt was nubs of jagged cartilage and a warm, tacky liquid. Not at all what I was expecting to feel.
“Oh, crap,” I said. “Not again.”
I groped around in the water beside me for something that might resemble my ear, but it was too dark in there and there was too much chaos.
“What do I do?” Piroska said weakly. “How do I help you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s no big deal. They’ll just grow me a new one in Pharmacy.” Being brave, being nonchalant, because clearly Piroska was falling to bits. And who could blame her? She had issues with severed body parts. Behind my brave face, though, I was just as freaked out as she was; in all my years of trademarking, I’d never capsized before.
A warning klaxon—signalling desperation, signalling last resort—screamed through the barge so loudly it made my teeth clatter. Then, through staticky speakers, Clausen’s voice.
“Oka yev erybo dy, theb arge h asbeen hit. Ma keyo urway to theemer gen cy e xits inan ord er lyfa shion. Ab and onsh ip. Rep eat. Ab and onsh ip. Th ere’s b een so mesort of exp lo sion.”
“What did he say?” Piroska asked, still oblivious to the screwdriver jutting from her clavicle.
“Not sure. Something about an explosion. I think he said to abandon ship.”
This last bit lit a whole series of fuses in my brain. Explosion triggered bomb. Bomb, of course, triggered shell. This in turn set off turtle, which set off hopper.
Sigrid.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
Piroska immediately sensed what I was thinking; probably she’d been thinking the same thing. She looked at me, eyes searching, mouth agape. “She’s trapped,” she said.
I hauled myself off of the floor and slowly—from the spasm that shot through my leg, it looked like my right knee had blown, too—hobbled through the sodden trash. Piroska was right behind me. Together we picked our way past overturned generators and piles of battered equipment until we hit the wall of pipes. Capsized as we were, the vent that led to the hopper was now up near the ceiling. We used the pipes as a ladder, climbing, slipping, climbing again, until we reached the vent. Inside the tunnel, we crawled under ruptured pipes, dodged geysers of trademarked water, slipping and falling and gashing our arms and legs. Behind me, I could hear Piroska groaning from the effort. And I was groaning too—from the pain, from the fear, from the certainty that all certainty had been flushed from my life.
The hopper room was dark when we got there—dark and quiet and smelling, weirdly, of barbecued steak. The contents of the hopper had spilled out so that the room was filled with waist-deep water. One blue emergency light, submerged in the water, strobed weakly, pointlessly.
“That smell,” Piroska said. She coughed, then gagged, then turned away, and in a moment I heard her vomit splatter across the tunnel floor.
Crazy with panic, I pulled a miniature Maglite from the pocket of my coveralls and trained it on the surface of the water. At first I saw nothing. Just the gentle bevelled pool, rocking back and forth with the movements of the barge. Then an object of some sort. A chunk of metal, maybe—or, no. A chunk of shell. A charred remnant of turtle shell. And then another. And then another. And then—
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said.
A waterlogged boot. I moved the Mag-beam to the right. The boot was attached to a leg. Which was attached to a torso. Two legs, a torso, and—yes—two arms. Everything intact, everything looking good. I shifted the Mag-beam further to the right.
“Sigrid?” I said. “Sigrid?”
Now here was a strange thing. I couldn’t find her head. No matter how hard I strained my eyes, I just couldn’t see a head. There was a neck, sort of, but beyond that? Nothing but water, with a pink plastic dahlia floating on top.
“Sigrid,” I heard myself say, “come here.” I reached out an arm to pull her in. “You better get out of there.”
No reaction from Sigrid, but I heard Piroska moan.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” I heard myself say. “The barge is sinking. We have to get out of here.”
Still no response from Sigrid. Not a twitch.
I banged on the wall. I was getting pissed off. “Come on, you lazy bitch.”
“Oh, Hans,” Piroska said.
“What’s wrong with you? You pansy. You wuss.”
“Oh, Hans.”
“Get over here right now. You fuck. You shit.”
Piroska was tugging on my elbows, on my shoulders. She wrapped her arms around my waist and pulled as hard as she could, but I just kept shouting insults at Sigrid. My throat was hot and raw; my eyes were filming over. Every cell in my body was burning. It felt for all the world like Sigrid had been ripped straight out of my flesh, so that all that remained was a huge screaming wound. I was loss—every bit of me was loss. My organs, my brain. My soul was loss. My rank, Løjtnant, my serial number. My name too—Hans Rasmussen. My name was loss.
I should’ve been there. That’s what I kept thinking, over and over, until it wasn’t even thinking anymore, but just meaningless sounds. I should’ve been there. I should’ve been there. Because if I’d been there, maybe I could’ve done something that would have kept Sigrid’s head from being blown off. Or, failing that, I could’ve arranged it so that my own head would be gone now too, and not the thing that it was: a vat full of guilt and self-hatred. But I hadn’t been there. No. I’d been distracted by a pair of Glade-scented breasts. Breasts—to make matters worse— that belonged to a rebirth.
Piroska and I were back among the wreckage of the processing floor. It had been five minutes, maybe, since we’d discovered Sigrid’s body, but already the water had risen to waist height; sitting on top of a filing cabinet, it knocked against the soles of my boots. All I could do was stare—stare at the green steel walls, which, now that the ventilation system had cut out, were slick with lung exhaust; stare at the peanut-butter sandwich that had flown through the air and glued itself to the ceiling.
“Hans, we have to get out of here. We have to hurry.”
All around me I could feel Sigrid’s soul as it flitted through the room, preparing for the long flight to Valhalla. It reminded me that her body, or what was left of it, was floating all by itself in the dark water. It felt criminal somehow to leave it there, all alone. Surely we should just stay here with her, let the lagoon rise around our necks and leak in through ou
r nostrils until all of our sorrows had ended.
“What’s the point?” I said finally.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s the point’? To live.”
“For what? There’s nothing out there.”
I pictured my happy spot, the Level 5 porthole. Its view at this moment would not be the peninsula, not glorious displays of Viking military power, but seaweed and mud and whatever else was at the bottom of this crappy lagoon. Separatist refrigerators. Old TVs. The husks of their weaponized Segways. It was beyond all understanding. When a separatist’s turtle bomb could take down an Enforcement barge, you knew: anything could happen in this world.
“What are you talking about?” Piroska said. “What are you talking about? Do you think Sigrid would want to hear this? Do you think she’d just give up? Do you think she’d just lie there like a little bitch?”
Trying to manipulate me. Trying to get me all worked up, plying me with insults, reverse psychology and jabs at my manhood so that I’d have to stand up and prove her wrong. But I was beyond all that. I was suicidal and serene.
“Your pep talk,” I told her, “won’t work with me.”
She let out a panicked, involuntary throat noise and grabbed at my knee, trying to pull me off the cabinet. “Please,” she said, “Please. You don’t know what it’s like.”
Her knees gave way and she dropped into the water.
“You’re all alone, and it’s grey and foggy and cold, and you can’t lie down, and the eagles, the eagles are always circling, waiting for you to fall,” she said.
She sobbed and moaned and clutched at her chest as though she couldn’t get enough air. Snot dripped from her nose and off her chin and onto her soaking wet dress. Her makeup had splattered across her face like she’d been shot with paintballs. But what could I do? It was either what I wanted or what she wanted—and selflessness was stupid in a situation like this. Compassion was stupid. I hung my head and rubbed my temples, hoping the barge would just blow up and I’d be spared the decision.
“Please!” she said.
“Not again!” she said.
“Please!” she said.
“I’m talking to you!”
“Soldier!” she said. “Snap out of it!”
This last got my attention: it didn’t sound right. I looked up.
Hovering in front of me, in the spot where P stood, but an inch to the right and slightly out of phase, like a palimpsest, was Sigrid and her scowling face. Yes, yes, it was her. Same ruddy cheeks, same broken nose. She stared at me in a kind of sarcastic appraisal. I sobbed with relief. She was still with me, at least for a little while.
“What the fuck?” she said. “Crybaby. What’s with the tears?”
“Hello to you too.”
“Yes, yes, hello, salutations, whatever. So tell me, what’s the deal? You’re just going to give up like some pussy-whipped little gearbox?”
“Hey,” I said, perking up considerably, “at least I’m alive. Unlike some of us.”
Sigrid suppressed a smile. “Yeah, well, we can compare dick sizes all day, but all that’s going to get us is drowned. The point is, and the reason I’ve come to see you, you’ve got an opportunity here, an opportunity that some of us don’t have anymore, which is to continue to exist in this so-called mortal realm, and all the possibility that that entails, and you’d be a complete røvhul not to take advantage. But just keep an open mind, okay? There’s shit coming your way you can’t possibly prepare for.”
“But how? I mean, how can I go on? How can I just leave you?”
“Oh, for the love of Mímir! I’m just meat now, babydoll. You’ll get over it. So up off your ass and grab a sidearm and a fucking snorkel or something. Do you hear me, soldier? It’s going to get wet, that I guarantee.”
I wanted to grab her, to lay hands on her one last time, to prove I wasn’t dreaming. To say a proper goodbye to my brave and noble friend. But when I reached out to touch her face, it was Piroska’s cheek I was cupping.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. What the fuck.”
I jumped down, ploughed through the water and debris until I found our emergency lockbox, then flipped it open and pulled out two double-action combat revolvers and several rounds of ammunition. Then I waded over to a sideboard and grabbed two knapsacks. I handed Sigrid’s knapsack to Piroska, and gave her Sigrid’s gun.
“We have enough food for two weeks,” I said, “and enough bullets to kill about three hundred people. We each have a portable filter for trademarked water, an insulated blanket, a sewing kit, and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember. Provided we don’t get shot, and maybe even if we do, we’ll be alive for the next two weeks. Beyond that, well . . .”
“Two weeks sounds good,” Piroska said. “That’s two weeks without the eagles.”
I scanned the room, looking for the door that led out onto the corridor. It was more than halfway up the wall, impossible to get at without some sort of ladder.
“Filing cabinet,” Piroska said, reading my mind.
We went back to the filing cabinet and, throwing our shoulders into it, managed, after considerable thrashing, to prop it against the wall. Next to it, we jammed a metal folding chair, and, on top of that, a plastic mead cooler. Hoisting our gear, we climbed the makeshift staircase and peered out the doorway at what lay beyond.
The corridor was now more of a well-shaft than a walkway, throbbing with blue light and echoing with the voices and frantic footsteps of crew members and thralls in other parts of the barge. Five metres below us: a pool of murky brine, the bodies of four seamen floating in it. Up above: an almost sheer face, with no obvious footholds and no chance of respite. We’d have to claw our way along the slip-free grating that covered the corridor’s floor until we got to the farthest passage, twenty metres straight up.
“Okay, I said. “Okay. Fuck. Okay.” I turned to Piroska. “Are you feeling lucky?”
But Piroska’s mind was somewhere else. She opened her mouth as though about to say something, then sighed and bit her bottom lip.
“What’s going on?” I said.
She stared intently at a spot somewhere around my Adam’s apple. “I need to ask you something, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m pretty instinctive sometimes about people and I feel like the question needs to be put out there.”
“What?” I said. “What?”
“When we’ve landed. On the peninsula. When we’ve landed on the peninsula. Umm, which side will we be on?”
Out in the corridor I could hear the other crew members, my brothers and sisters, wailing and shouting and just generally losing their rag. Insults. Outrage. Outright panic. A family still, but a family gone cannibal.
“Wow,” I said. “What a question.”
She grew bolder: “Because I know we could never really talk about this before, for obvious reasons, and I realize we haven’t known each other that long, but I sense an ambivalence, I guess, in you. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but yeah: a lack of commitment, I guess, to the mission here.” She paused meaningfully. “Or maybe I’m projecting.”
The separatists, those hayseeds with their homemade guns and half-assed goat farms, had murdered my best friend and robbed me of my home. Their idealism and independence and blah, blah, blah had destroyed everything I’d known and cared about—had, in the space of a few seconds, wiped away the last twelve years of my life. Not, actually, that I blamed them for that. How could I? We’d trademarked their water and slaughtered their child armies and fucked up their farms—and they’d done what any other right-thinking people would have done: they’d responded in kind. Maybe, well, maybe their actions weren’t as perverse as I’d thought.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” My mind was humming—it was the first time in months or years that I hadn’t been on autopilot. I grabbed Piroska by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. “The separatists. They’ll need some sort of statement, some sort of indication that we’re, you know, cool. So when we get out
there, shoot as many of our own officers as you can. Try to find Clausen; we kill him, we’re rock stars. Just don’t stop shooting, all right? And forget about the lifeboats; when the ammo runs out, we swim. It’s a risk, but what the hell, huh?”
Her eyes were glistening. “What the hell.”
I kissed her for luck, shouldered my knapsack, and, together, we headed for the exit. We’d only just taken our very first steps, though, when the Skanderbörg let out a sickening wail, and we stopped dead.
“What was that?” Piroska said, gripping my arm.
It was an animal sound, of pain, of desolation. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
The truth was, I did know, but there was no way I was going to lay that on Piroska. It was a bad thing to hear, man, very bad—a full-on hull breach. A “Cascading Skrog Failure,” they called it in Nav school. We had thirty seconds, maybe less, before a high-velocity wave train overwhelmed the processing floor; when that happened, we’d be doomed. We’d be lost to the lagoon.
I turned to poor P, smiled in what I hoped was a cheery, untroubled way, and stared into her pretty green eyes. “I love you,” I said, as earnestly as I could. “I realize it’s kind of a weird time to say something like that, but I thought you should know.” I didn’t mean it. I didn’t love her; not yet anyway. I just thought it would be a nice last thing to hear.
“Well, wow,” she said. “I—”
The Skanderbörg lurched. Piroska dropped to the floor and slid away. Then it lurched again, harder, and I dropped—the room’s chattel shifting with me, and on me, and raining down around me. And then, before I could regain my footing, or locate P and lock hands, a surge of freezing seawater enveloped me and I was floating, floating, pushed along by tides too strong to resist. I rose and rushed forward; I fell and raced back. The seawater, swarming with life, choked with motes, pulsed blue, then black, then blue, then black. When it was blue I could see things: a glob of gulfweed swimming by, a crystal unicorn cartwheeling gently through the gloom. When it was black I just dreamed, and wondered, and waited for death. All the stuff in here, all the bullshit stuff of everyday life—the clamps and squeeze tubes, the sidearms and pleasure sprays and cans of Lille Sød Sild— was transformed. The very air! The air had turned into water, and, suspended inside it, these once-familiar objects, now made mysterious, bobbed and drifted and spun.
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