Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends’ corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men’s chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite.
Julie Bastet Grigio has reasons to sleep darkly. Her life has seen little light. She is twelve years old but has a woman’s weathered poise. Her abyss-blue eyes have a piercing focus that some adults find unsettling. Her mother ties her hair in a ponytail but Julie pulls it out, letting it fall into a loose mess of yellow and gold. She has fired a gun into a human head. She has watched a pile of bodies set alight. She has starved and thirsted, stolen food and given it away, and glimpsed the meaning of life by watching it end over and over. But she has just turned twelve. She likes horses. She has never kissed a boy.
What city is this? When did it die? And which of the endless selection of disasters killed it? If print news hadn’t vanished years ago, Nora could find a paper blowing in the street and read the bold headlines declaring the end. Now she’s left to wonder. Was it something quick and clean? Earthquakes, showers of space debris, freak tornados and rising tides? Or was it one of the threats that linger? Radiation. Viruses. People.
She knows that knowing wouldn’t change anything. Death will introduce itself in its own time, and when she has shaken its hand and heard its offer, she will try her best to bargain with it.
“Can I go swimming?” Addis pleads.
“We don’t know what’s in there. It could be dangerous.”
“It’s the ocean!”
“Yeah, but not really.”
They are standing onspa a new coastline. The ocean has grown tired of living on the beach and has moved to the city. Gentle waves lap against telephone poles. Pink and green anemones compete for real estate on parking meters. A barnacled BMW rocks lazily in the shifting tides.
“Pleeease?” Addis begs.
“You can wade in it. But only to your knees.”
Addis whoops and starts pulling off his muddy, shredded Nikes.
“Keep your shoes on. There’s probably all kinds of nasty stuff in there.”
“But it’s the ocean!”
“Shoes on.”
He surrenders, rolls his jeans over his knees, and sloshes into the waves. Nora watches him long enough to decide he won’t drown or be eaten by urban sharks, then pulls the filter out of her pack and kneels at the water’s edge to fill her jug. She remembers a photo of her grandmother doing the same in some filthy Ethiopian river, and how it always made her glad she was born in America. She smiles darkly.
It took only eight feet to drown every port in the world. New York is a bayou. New Orleans is a reef. Whatever city this is, it’s lucky to be sitting on a hill—the ocean has claimed only a few blocks. While her brother splashes and squeals, Nora scans the waterline for any trace of actual beach, some little patch of sand on the last remaining high ground. She remembers the feeling of sweaty toes digging into cool mud. She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn’t moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand.
When she looks back at him he’s in up to his neck, swimming.
“Addis Horace Greene!” she hisses. “Out, right now!”
“Brr!” he squeals as he dog-paddles past the post office, through soggy clusters of letters floating like lily pads. “It’s cold!”
• • •
Nora is grateful that it’s summer. The late-July heat is unpleasant but it won’t kill them. They can sleep in doorways or alleyways or in the middle of the street with nothing more than their tattered blanket to keep the dew off. She wonders how long her parents debated their decision. If they might have waited a few months for the weather to warm. She would like to believe in this tiny kindness, but she finds it hard.
“Do we have anything left to eat?” Addis asks, shivering in his wet jeans. “Even some crumbs?”
Nora digs through her backpack reflexively, but no miracle has taken place. No fishes or loaves have appeared. It contains the same flashlight, blanket, filter, and bottle it always has, nothing more. Not counting the Oreos, Addis’s last meal was two days ago. Nora can’t remember when hers was.
She turns in a circle, examining the surrounding city. All the grocery stores are long since gutted. She found their last few morsels in the kitchen of a homeless shelter—five Oreos and half a can of peanuts—but that was an unlikely windfall. Actual restaurants are the lowest of low-hanging fruit and were probably stripped bare on this city’s first day of anarchy. But something on the horizon catches her eye. She bunches her lips into a determined scowl.
“Come on,” she says, grabbing her brother’s hand.
They wriggle through a tangle of rebar from a bombed-out McDonalds, climb over a rusty mountain of stacked cars, and there it is, rising in the distant haze: a wansnt hazehite Eiffel Tower with a flying saucer on top.
“What’s that?” Addis asks.
“It’s the Space Needle. I guess we’re in Seattle.”
“What’s the Space Needle?”
“It’s like…I don’t know. A tourist thing.”
“What’s that round thing on the top? A space ship?”
“I think it’s a restaurant.”