by Lydia Millet
Not yet.
I sat there pathetically for what felt like a long time until finally there was nothing to do but get up, so I opened the tent flap and wandered out into camp.
It was a bustle of activity.
I wandered through the people, who were striding back and forth smartly, all seeming to have tasks, all knowing what they were doing. I alone was lost, meandering slowly among those fast and purposeful humans with no particular goal, just looking around, taking it in—and at the same time, in my flatness, feeling pretty indifferent to everything.
They buzzed past me, some pushing wheelbarrows, some carrying loops of cable or other equipment. I kept being impressed by their industriousness, and I realized as I watched that I hadn’t been around momentum much in my life. It was as if my parents and Sam and I had waited in rooms for years. We’d just waited out our lives in a bunch of rooms, not doing much except watching—watching the news on face, watching commercials, watching tutorials, occasionally gaming or chatting, but mostly watching. We’d sat in some rooms and watched some screens.
And now here were people doing something. Doing a lot of things.
As though their actions mattered.
Plus they were all new people, which normally is exciting to me—realmeets with strangers, or people who used to be strangers and now might possibly be friends. But this time, as I considered in a stunned, background kind of way how wasted my life must have been up to then, I was a solid wall of misery. No joy rose in me to greet the sight of them.
One or two glanced in my direction as I stumbled through them, but no one stopped to say anything and I had a strong feeling of being an intruder.
I hoped the rushing around wasn’t because of Sam and me—that we alone hadn’t caused all this and disrupted them. But I was afraid it was. There was the blown-up lava tube, after all, and the fact that one of their own people was trapped with Sam, in the grips of corp guys like the man-mountain Rory. I wondered if any of the people around here hated me. They had a right to: they didn’t even know me, but now they were in danger because of me and my family.
For the first time it occurred to me to wonder why they’d bothered. They didn’t even know us, yet they’d taken risks for us—risks that, now that I thought about it, didn’t make sense unless there was something we had for them. Something more than just the will to live—something other people didn’t have to offer them.
My ribs hurt, and my head and elbow. Everything throbbed all over.
Some of the people, I saw then, were pushing trees around. I swear—they had these potted trees in giant planters with wheels on the bottoms of them. I mean these were big trees, not little saplings or anything, they had to weigh thousands of kilos. And groups of boys and men and the occasional woman were pushing them from out of the forest around us into the clearing, rolling them on their platforms.
I looked up and saw the trees were blocking us, from up above. I stood staring up. It was like they were filling in the clearing where the tents and the Quonset and the other shacks were with these portable trees. The trees had broad canopies, they were all tall with slender trunks compared to the wide vegetation on top of them. That had to make them relatively light—easier to move for how much cover they gave. I was pleased that I saw it clearly. They were camouflage trees.
“In case of flyovers,” came a voice.
I looked down and there was Xing.
I was almost as relieved to see her as I had been the night before, when she was standing under the faint light at the end of the tunnel. I’d almost forgotten she was there, what with feeling so abject about my family. My flatness didn’t exactly lift at the sight of her, but I felt a bit less lost—slightly more rooted in the ground beneath me.
Unlike the giant potted trees.
She was dressed in camo, like me, only she had a jacket on too, an army-green thing with a lot of pockets. She smiled at me. “How’re you feeling?”
“Not great,” I said weakly.
“If you mean the depression, don’t worry,” she explained. “It’s withdrawal from the pills we had you on. Sucks, coming off them. But it’ll get better. You’ll see.”
That was a relief. But it was hard to believe, the way I felt. Like nothing would ever get better.
“All this …” I said. “Is it our fault? Did we do this?”
She stepped up close, slung an arm around my shoulders, and squeezed gently. “Don’t worry. They were prepared. They have good defense strategies. We’ve moved to Plan B, that’s all.”
“Plan B,” I repeated.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a little food into you. And water. Water’s important here. Living outdoors, you have to remember to drink.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly I was practically aching with thirst.
She led me through all the moving people, through the trees they were wheeling around and arranging. We got to a little structure with a roof over it and a pipe; she turned a handle on that pipe and water poured out of its tap into a bucket. There were cups on a small shelf in the structure, little cups of some light metal, and she filled one for me and handed it over. I drank the whole thing in a quick bunch of long gulps, despite the absence of fruit flavor we’ve always had in our water, which I only realized after I swallowed. At home they put in fruit smells and flavors on a certain schedule as a code, to let us know the water was okay to drink. It meant the corporates were all in sync on keeping waterborne bugs out of the supply. Here, I thought, no one was testing it at all, or more like, we were testing it—drinking it right out of the ground!
That’s where it came from, she told me. Right out of the ground.
Drinking that water was like licking mud.
And yet here I was, doing it.
And even though I could taste something in it that I thought must be the metal of the cup—it reminded me of the taste of blood, that iron tinge—it was still the most thirst-quenching water I’ve ever had.
“If you want to get clean,” she told me, “you can do that too, as long as you make it superquick. I’ll show you.”
She led me into the jungle a little ways, along a path, and I saw a wooden fence and behind it a bag hanging from a tree, a big, long bag.
“You stand on the grill here, see? There’s a basin underneath so the water gets captured and recycled. You pull on this cord, and the water comes out of the showerbag. It’s solar-heated so you don’t freeze. Soap’s there; washcloths and drywipes are there,” and she gestured at a rack a couple of feet back.
She looked down at a nanoface on her wrist.
“I’ll give you three minutes,” she continued. “You can get the smell off, if you scrub hard. But try not to get your bandages wet. We don’t have time for the full tour today, everything is in flux and we can’t get your wardrobe from laundry yet so you’ll have to put on those same clothes. But at least they didn’t go through the waste chute with you.”
“Plus other people won’t have to smell the compost,” I said.
She smiled and left me there, to shrug off the camo clothes and stand under lukewarm water falling out of this bag in the trees. Beneath my feet were bamboo slats covering a hole the water poured into. Or dripped, more like. I have to say that water didn’t pour, it more trickled reluctantly. I felt like someone was splashing me from above or possibly just spitting on me. I tried not to think of spit. Warm rain, I told myself, it falleth like a gentle rain from heaven, though I have no idea where the thought came from.
I had to really scrub to make the dirt come off.
It felt extra weird to be naked outdoors, where anyone might see me if they peeked around the fence or crept out of the jungle behind us. It was like naked-plus. Hypernaked.
But even though it was rushed and furtive, it was still really nice to get the stink of the waste-composting bin off my skin. It made a big difference. And standing there, half-shivering in the open air with light shifting on the leaves around me, I felt like collecting the
moment. Just like I’d tried with the opera singer and the beautiful song she sang, the second after it was done. I closed my eyes and tried to capture it, to keep forevermore. This outside light, the leaves, the water hitting my bare skin. I shivered in it and felt raw and new. I felt I had to be easier to hurt here, like this, than I had ever been in our complex. Anyone could see me, anyone could suddenly appear.
But at the same time I was stronger. I was somehow more.
It’s incredibly hard to collect pieces of time. And yet I can’t help feeling it’s worthwhile—that if I can learn how to do that, I can learn how to do anything.
Before I had time to think or process any more than that—the quick relief of not having that compost stench on me; a few seconds of dappled light in the trees—Xing was calling my name. She was telling me to throw my clothes on and come out, so I dried off in a hurry. We had to be moving on, she said, it was time for us to join in. It was time for me to become part of them.
Well, friend, whatever Plan B was supposed to have been, I will never find out.
Because right after my shower, it turned out we had to move to Plan C.
I was jogging down to Xing on the path from the shower when she looked down at her wristface, and I saw it was blinking a bright green color.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh no. Come on—quickly!”
The blinking green was a silent alarm, I’d learn later. She beckoned for me to follow her and we rushed between the potted trees—where everyone else was rushing too, streaming in the same direction. We happened to have started out pretty near the destination—that big Quonset hut—and so we got a space inside. Xing pulled me through the door into the crowd, which was gathered in front of all their tech.
There was a lot of it; I was surprised. There were whole banks of portable faces, power cells, all that. And on the far wall of the hut, inside, there was a wallscreen. It showed a swirl, a huge, dark-red swirl rotating over a map of the Pacific.
I knew it without needing to have it explained, because I’d seen the image in my tutorial emergency procedure lessons. It was the worst category of storm there is: a Cat Six.
And it was headed for a row of blobs I knew was actually a chain of islands, the bottom one bigger than any of the others—i.e., Hawaii. Us.
The whole place was packed with people, but instead of the noise of nervous whispers or chatter there was a total respectful hush. A woman stood up on a platform at the front—Keahi’s mother, Kate. Two men stood behind her, one of them whispering into a headset.
“We’re in Storm Mode,” she said curtly. “This could be the worst one yet. It has that potential. Word is, most of Samoa’s gone, with one retreat colony surviving on Mt. Silisili. That’s one colony out of twenty. The surge is enormous, hundreds of feet, and wind speed is new tornado force. We need everyone headed to Deep High Station at top speed. Task protocol is Total Evac. We pull together, we do what we have to. We’re capable of it and we won’t fail each other.”
I glanced sideways and saw people nodding, their faces trusting her, and I was glad. I was glad of their confidence. Their confidence was almost leaking into me.
Until I thought of my brother again.
“Check your wristfaces every ten minutes,” said Kate, finishing. “Go.”
People were already moving, surging back out of the Quonset, and we moved with them as the crowd flowed out the door, we didn’t have a choice, and I grabbed Xing’s sleeve. Even though she’s a person with calm expressions as a rule, she looked agitated and strained.
“Xing!” I whispered. “What about Sam?”
“Total Evac means we have to drop all nonessential business,” she replied. “All but the tasks we’ve been assigned. You don’t have any tasks yet because you’re new but I’ve been in planning sessions before this, on face, so I do have some. You need to stay with me, Nat. Without your own face you’re not safe anywhere else. You’ll get one soon but not yet. So that’s your job here. Stay close. I have my tasks, and you have me.”
She headed across the clearing, back toward the tent area where I’d slept, and I hurried along beside her.
“But Xing, we’re in between mountains here. We’re not on the beach or anything,” I pestered, trying desperately to understand. “Not like—not like Sam is. I don’t get it, why do we have to move?”
“We don’t ask. They have the scenarios worked out,” said Xing. “That’s number one. My guess is, the size of the tsunami is still a risk to us. We’re not as high here as you’d think. Close to sea level, in parts of the valley. It’s hard to predict the size of the wall of water when it hits. There’s also rainfall flooding even if we’re not swamped. And number two is wind speed. We’re fairly well protected but tornado-grade winds can still get in, they whip up along the lava formations and riverbeds … we have to save our charges. We have to be as safe as we can. My task is eggs. You can help me.”
I followed, I didn’t ask anything more right then, and I did what I was told, but the whole time I was thinking of Sam, in the hotel perched right on the edge of the ocean. I wondered how high those cliff walls were—not more than a hundred feet or so, I guessed, maybe a hundred and fifty where we’d walked down to set the tiny balsa boats on the sea with the candles in them.
I thought of the tsunami footage I’d seen from Indonesia and other places, the footage of when the enormous waves hit, before and during and after. First the water fell back from the beaches, almost seemed to be sucked back—the tide went way, way out and the water looked almost gone. I’d seen old footage of kids playing there, kids playing on a beach with the water receded. Just sucked back so the whole beach looked empty.
And then the huge wall of water approaching.
And the kids, a minute later, just gone.
As if they’d never been.
When Xing said eggs, she meant turtle eggs. We had to lift them out of the artificial sand dunes where they were buried and pack them into lined baskets.
The adult turtles themselves paid no attention to us while being loaded onto carts by burly guys who seemed to know what they were doing. It took four of these guys to move each turtle, though, and they were straining and heaving as they lifted them—some of the turtles were as big as tables.
Xing said the turtles didn’t guard their eggs anyway, they just ignored them—unlike some of the nearly extinct birds the camp also tended, which would come screeching and flapping at your face and even attack with beak and claws if you went near their nests.
But the turtles, Xing explained to me as we loaded up eggs as quickly and carefully as we could, were hands-off parents. In golden days, when there were lots of them, they just left their eggs on beaches and swam away again—hundreds and thousands of miles away, in fact—which was one reason they were easy to drive extinct. Hungry people would come collect the eggs after the turtles swam away, to either eat or sell them.
She was telling me this and I was thinking of Sam. I was thinking of the kids playing on the beach, of the turtles that left their eggs, just trusting to the world that nothing bad would happen to them.
But you couldn’t trust the world.
Not anymore.
I thought of Sam, and how I was all he had now.
And I had left him on the beach.
I wouldn’t be here except for him. I’d be in the resort right now, grieving obediently, taking my pharms and saying my affirmations.
I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
But at the front of my mind was the stark fact that I didn’t know how to get to him. I didn’t have the faintest idea. For all intents and purposes I was lost. I didn’t have my bearings on the island; I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where he was in relation to me. Were they evacuating the hotel? Where to? Did they have a safe place for all those hundreds of contracts and other guests, in case of a tsunami?
I had to ask. I knew there was a storm looming and I had to do what I was told, but I couldn’t let it go. So while we carried th
e baskets out of the camp—walking as carefully as we could but still moving at a pretty good clip, through this path in the jungle that Xing seemed to know better than I thought she would—I started bugging her again with questions I wasn’t supposed to ask.
“Xing, I know what we’re doing is important. I know it’s not in the same—that it’s more than just about one person, like me or Sam or anyone. I do. But he’s my brother and I’m just—I’m so worried. Being right on the beach—when the wave comes—how are they going to save them from the tsunami? The people at the hotel? There are so many! Where will they all go? And how’ll they get there in such a short time?”
She didn’t say anything for a while. She was bustling ahead of me, and there were more people in front of her, carrying metal cases I thought maybe were full of tech, or power equipment, or something. The cases looked heavy.
“My guess,” she finally said softly, and I had to move closer, right up behind her, to hear her better, “is they’re not going anywhere at all.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I had to keep myself from hitting the baskets against the branches sticking in close to us. “What did you say?”
“I’m not a hundred percent certain. But I’m about ninety-nine. Saving lives isn’t what they do at Twilight. Is it?”
“No …” I said hesitantly.
“My guess is there’s a pecking order in emergencies. The choppers and the safe zone likely go to the service managers—the higher up, the more likely they are to get a seat. That’d be my guess. Nat, the resort capacity is something like two thousand. That’s two thousand guests and maybe eight hundred staff. And from what I saw on the helipads, I think the place has a total of three choppers.”
“So what—so you mean …”
Someone said something behind us, barked out an order though I didn’t hear what it was, and we all stood back to let them pass. It was a line of people carrying babies in carriers strapped to their chests and backs. The babies seemed to be sleeping—just sleeping as they were carried.
