DARCIE LITTLE BADGER
DEAR BOTTLE FINDER, Please deliver this letter to CC. They live with our parents on the western shores of New Houston. Our house sits on blue stilts and is surrounded by rose bushes. Mom used to keep them well trimmed and blooming. I hope she still does.
CC—
Sorry. I never meant to disappear.
Thing is, I made a mistake during your birthday party. It happened after lunch, when y’all were playing beach croquet. Remember how bad I was, always hitting the wooden ball too hard and launching it into the water? That embarrassed me so much, I pretended to need a bathroom break and scuttled to the far end of the cove. There, I was alone, except for a couple of gulls fighting over a dead crab. The isolation didn’t make me nervous. Didn’t surprise me, either, since that area is unpleasant, with sharp pebbles outnumbering fine grains of sand. Even though I was wearing shoes, I could feel points digging into the bottoms of my feet.
As I knelt to look for pretty shells between the rocks, I got distracted by an intense flash of light on the ocean, the sun reflecting off something silver bobbing in the shallows. Curious me decided to have a closer look. Nearby, granite boulders, remnants of a pre-collapse sea wall that had been torn apart and scattered by the sea, jutted from the land; some were above the high tide line, and others were halfway submerged in the water. I climbed onto the nearest boulder and jumped from rock to rock till I was several metres away from land, balanced on the peak of a snail-crusted rock that was almost totally underwater. From my lookout point, I recognized the silver object as a small boat. It was shaped like a double-wide canoe with a flat deck. I didn’t see any sign of a human pilot, but there was a hatch on the deck that could have led to an inner area.
It bobbed closer, and its pointed head turned toward me like the needle of a compass. I heard the high-pitched voice of a child call in English, “Hello? Come here!”
I shouted back, “Do you need help?”
“Yes! Please, help me!”
I considered returning to the party and telling everyone about the boat. Remember that mistake I mentioned earlier? Yeah. I decided to handle the situation alone.
From my boulder perch, I leapt onto the flat stern of the boat; it didn’t rock much, as if stabilized by an inner weight or mechanism. The hatch swung outward with a creak when I pulled on its lever. The voice called to me from inside the dark interior, “Help me!”
They sounded so desperate.
The boat was much deeper than I’d expected, as most of its volume was hidden underwater, like an iceberg. Did you learn about those? There used to be ice in the Atlantic.
A ladder led from the hatch to the bottom of the boat, but I didn’t notice it (because canoes—even big ones—should be shallow-bellied) and crawled in headfirst. I fell at least two metres before hitting the hard metal floor with my shoulder. Could have been worse, but the impact smarted like a barbed thorn, and by the time I stopped cursing, the boat was already moving, vibrating with the hum of a quiet motor. I couldn’t see anything. The hatch had slammed shut behind me, and there were no sources of light inside. By swinging my hands side to side, I found the first ladder rung and climbed until I felt the hatch lever. It was locked.
I beat my fists against that metal door and screamed for you, for Mom and Dad, and for all our cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents. I even screamed for your annoying friend Webster, since I knew he liked to swim and might hear my voice. When that didn’t work, I crawled around the boat, searching in the darkness for the child who had called for me. There was no child, although I bumped into a console near the bow. I pressed every button or switch I could feel, at one point even turning something shaped like a steering wheel. Nothing stopped the boat or freed me from my imprisonment.
At that point, there was a crackle of static, the kind emitted by radios. Speakers over my head chided me in the same high-pitched voice that’d lured me aboard. “Stop messing around. If you break the ship, you’ll get stranded and die in the middle of nowhere.”
“I can’t see,” I said. “Let me out of this place!”
“The lights burned out,” she replied, “but shuttle A-3 is otherwise in top shape. Don’t worry. My city is nearby; just sit tight for a couple of hours.”
“What city?” I asked. “Am I being abducted?”
“Absolutely not. You’re being rescued.”
“From what? My sibling’s birthday party? Take me home right now.”
“Why do you want to return to that? Humans aren’t animals. You’re meant for more than survival. You can be a vessel for millennia of culture: art, literature, science, leisure, hobbies, and joy.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” I said, “but when it comes to culture and joy, I’m good. Can I talk to an adult now? Please?”
“You are.” The voice of my captor dropped in pitch, no longer a cutesy toddler-shrill.
That’s when I screamed.
Hours later—just two hours, according to my captor, but it felt like a lot more—the hull encasing me shuddered once and then the motor shut off. With a click, the exit hatch popped open. The dim yellow light that spilled into my prison was artificial. When I climbed the ladder and peeked outside, I saw six gray walls and no sky—I was in some kind of landing bay. A glass-encased security camera overhead swiveled until its robotic eye looked down on my upturned face. There were no other signs of movement except for the gentle rocking. Everything swayed side to side. That’s how I knew that the little canoe had taken me to a bigger ship: a city floating in the gulf.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Anyone here?”
The voice responded from hidden speakers in every wall; I felt like I was drowning in her frequency. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re never alone anymore. What’s your name?”
I lied because true names don’t belong in the mouth of danger.
“Mona Lisa. What’s yours?”
“Olivia. Can you say Olivia?”
“Olivia.”
“No. Not Olivia. It’s Olivia. Your accent is so weird.”
Her accent was the weird one. She spoke like an old-timey person from the twenty-second century. I didn’t talk back, though. At that moment, my only goal was escape. Unfortunately, it seemed like Olivia had complete control over the floating city. She unlocked a door that connected the landing bay to a white corridor. The walls were covered with continuous, thin, transparent screens. They resembled the touch-sensitive digital screen Instructor Lee used in math class. His screens were just a half-metre wide, though, big enough to show us what an isosceles triangle looks like but not large enough to swallow us whole. Olivia directed me through a series of corridors and doorways. Dim yellow ceiling lights lit the path and went dark the moment I passed by them. She gushed about the perks of the floating city: VR game rooms, saunas, movies projected on vast screens, and hundreds of cabins filled with the personal treasures of “the founders of New America.”
“Did you say ‘New America’?” I asked. “No way. When was this city launched?”
“Two hundred and three years ago,” she said. “You missed our bicentennial.”
That’s when I understood: I’d been stolen away by a shuttle to the remnants of a doomsday city.
I learned about doomsday cities from friends, not in history class. To celebrate the first day of summer, Morgan, Jessie, Pete, and I were telling scary stories around a campfire, and Jessie went, “Hey, wanna hear something creepy?” You know that guy. He’ll stretch the truth like taffy for attention. Guess that’s why I used to assume doomsday cities were fake.
Well, a broken clock is right twice a day, and life is sometimes so weird, it doesn’t need to be embellished by Jessie.
The story goes: centuries ago, people were more likely to prepare for the end of the world than attempt to save it. A group of rich folks decided to build floating cities and live in the middle of the ocean, far away from the land’s troubles. Two cities were launched into the Atlantic. One sank and killed everyone on board. The other city—New America—disappeared.
Some claim that New America is still out there, hiding, dying. A few people remain alive, but their numbers aren’t great enough to keep the city running. Others say that the city itself—which was equipped with advanced AI—is lonely.
“What happened to everyone?” I asked Olivia. “Are they all dead?” Two hundred years had passed, but the founders could have had descendants or been medical immortals, those old-timey people who invested fortunes in anti-aging therapies and tech.
“I’m still here,” Olivia said.
“Where? All I’ve heard is your voice.”
“The control centre.” She was quiet for a couple of minutes—that was a long period of time for Olivia. “I’m the ship, Mona Lisa, which means I’m more intelligent than a human.”
Under different circumstances, I might have laughed. Yeah, AI used to be different before the collapse, mimicking sentience so well, people would converse with their own phones. But Olivia had a personality. That meant the ship was more complex than any tech I’d known.
Human minds rarely did well in solitary confinement. What about human-like ship minds?
I stopped walking at a fork in the corridor. “Go right,” Olivia said.
I hesitated because my internal compass screamed: you’ve been here before.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“What did I just tell you, Mona Lisa? Obviously I’m sure.”
I wanted to trust myself—there’s a reason why Mom always makes me her navigator when we travel. But I’ve never had to navigate through a monotonous web of ship corridors. Why would Olivia send me in circles? At the time, I had no answer for that question.
So I continued walking.
In between directions, Olivia described the city rules. “If a door is locked, I want it locked to keep you safe. Our high-voltage security system doesn’t know the difference between a Mona Lisa and an intruder. Got it?”
“Intruders? So we aren’t the only two here?”
“I never said that. There are pirates on the sea and my deck cameras might malfunction. Which reminds me: you aren’t allowed to go outside. That’s also for your own safety. Stay in your bedroom between sundown and sun-up. Morning and afternoon are for chores and you can study after supper.”
I asked, “What will I eat?” I’d been too frightened and vaguely nauseous on the shuttle to notice my empty belly, but hunger made every step feel like two.
“There’s plenty of food,” she promised.
“And water?” I asked.
“Of course.” She laughed at me. “The founders didn’t build a whole city without considering basic human necessities.”
“Then why aren’t they here anymore?”
For the second time that day, she did not answer my question. Instead, Olivia tersely said, “Up those stairs.”
I soon entered a corridor that had evenly spaced doors along one wall. They were numbered from 2-01 to 2-15 with brass plates. Olivia said, “Yours is lucky seven!” And then, when I opened door 2-07, she added, “Welcome home.”
My cabin had three rooms (bedroom, lounge, and bathroom) and was larger than our house. It resembled a history museum or time capsule. The furniture, a long brown sofa, metal coffee table, four-poster bed, and several cabinets, were fixed to the faux wood floor (I could tell it was faux because the grain patterns on the planks repeated over and over again, lacking the originality of a real sliced tree). The walls in the bedroom and lounge were bright white and coated with the same kind of screen I’d noticed in the hall. The bedroom closet was packed with musty dresses and narrow slippers. Cabinets contained empty glass bottles and a variety of little gadgets like binoculars and a music box filled with gold chains. I only peeked at that stuff, since it most likely belonged to a dead person and I felt like an intruder in a grave.
“Olivia, who used to live here?” I asked, but she was not in a mood to chat, and the door had locked behind me.
That’s when it really sunk in that I was trapped in an artifact with a cruel streak. I ran to the nearest porthole and pressed my face against the cool glass. Didn’t see any land. Just calm black water and a cloudy night sky. I wrestled the porthole open, ignoring its squeaking hinges, which were like nails on a chalkboard, and leaned out as far as I could (up to my shoulders; honestly, CC, if the window had been wider, I might have leapt into the Atlantic in a hopeless attempt to swim home, ’cause that’s how fox-in-a-snare desperate I felt). I stood like that and stared at the vague horizon until the ocean wind twisted my hair into a waist-length knot of salty tangles.
Do you remember when Grandpa taught us how to build a fire with dry wood, the sun, and a magnifying glass? He made us promise that, unless it was absolutely necessary, we’d only light fires in stone pits on the beach where there’d always be enough water to drench the embers after we finished. Then, he told us about the year he witnessed the south burn. We were all taking a break from weeding his garden. You and me sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree and flicking ants off our toes, while Grandpa lounged on his hammock. As he rocked slowly side to side, he said, “I woke up in the middle of the night because my throat stung like I’d gargled a cup of wasps. My lungs ached worse. They were starving for a breath of air. I barely managed a puff on my inhaler. I went to the window and opened it, thinking that fresh air would help me breathe, but the stink of smoke just increased. There was no escape from it. The whole horizon was burning.
“We lost our house to the wildfire that night, but others lost much more. Do you know how the disaster started? Some guy popping fireworks in his yard after seven years of drought. You kids be better than that.”
After that story, I had nightmares about opaque air that hardened like concrete in my lungs. I dreamt that the edge of the world was burning and nothing but ashes remained in the fire’s wake. I’d wake up sweating through my quilt, wishing that Grandpa never taught us how to start a fire because nobody should have that kind of destructive power.
But you? You loved starting fires. That’s the year we visited the cove every week so you could watch twigs burn. Then, Grandpa taught us how to use a flint to make sparks, and you built fires at night for warmth and to cook our food when we camped on the beach. I used to consider your fixation dangerous. I was wrong. You must have lit hundreds of fires on the cove. Thousands! And you never ever forgot to drench their embers with water.
That first night on the ship, I stayed awake for hours, searching for a light on the horizon. A light from your campfire. A beacon for your lost sister. I thought about you and everyone else on that cove. How you’d notice I was missing and search the beach for miles.
I never saw a light, but I knew it was somewhere and that knowledge stoked my hope.
It still does.
I didn’t get any sleep that night. Not for lack of trying. The floating city was so large and steady, I barely felt the ocean undulate beneath my back, but it was still difficult to relax. I haven’t had my own room since before you were born, and even then, Mom, Dad, and the grandparents were just a shout away.
The first morning on New America, the ocean resembled a smooth grey mirror that reflected nothing. Olivia’s voice chirped, “Wake up! I hope that you slept well.” At least she hadn’t watched me not sleep all night.
“I didn’t,” I said, blearily gazing at the wall. It wasn’t like Olivia had a face I could address. In those first few days, it was a struggle to carry on conversations with a disembodied voice. “Please take me home, or I’ll die from insomnia. I miss my family too much. Isn’t it your job to keep me alive?”
“Time will cure that troublesome homesickness,” she said, still chipper—her tone offended me more than the content of her words. “Eat your breakfast.”
Olivia had left a plate heaped with smoked fish and cherry tomatoes outside my cabin door. The true significance of that discovery didn’t sink in until later. Although it seemed weird that the ship could prepare and deliver a plate of food without any help, I was more concerned with the origin of the food. “Where does this come from?” I asked, wondering if she had to visit land to collect rations.
“A garden without dirt,” she said. “The founders modelled it after space station greenhouses.”
From that day onward, I spent eight hours a day doing two types of work: ship maintenance and gardening in the vast greenhouse of New America. Olivia actually believed that one prisoner could keep an entire city running. With every light fixture I replaced, another three burned out. I guessed the floating city was impressive in its prime. Lit up by wall-to-wall digital screens, powered by hundreds of machines that used the wind, sun, and waves to generate energy. But Olivia had inactivated the screens to conserve energy, since half the generators were busted.
She needed that energy for her eyes, which followed my every movement, and her voice. It was difficult to know when Olivia would speak. Sometimes, I could work for hours without hearing a peep. Other times, she rambled about the drama and lives of the founders.
During my first week tending the greenhouse, as I clipped red romaine leaves from mature lettuce plants, Olivia asked, “Have you gardened before?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“You have a green thumb.”
I looked at my hands; as expected, neither of my thumbs were green.
“It’s an idiom, Mona Lisa!” she said, laughing, as if I should know some obscure old phrase. “You’re good with plants.”
I didn’t tell her about our grandparents’ endemic garden and the springs and summers we spent weeding, planting, and tending plants under Grandpa’s watchful eye. Remember how he’d lounge in his hammock and holler out questions? “How much water did you use today? More than yesterday? See any thrips? That many? Might need to do something about those leaf suckers!” He said it was important to observe the ways of a garden ’cause although plants might not be able to talk, they show us what they need. In the greenhouse, I counted the number of cherry tomatoes on each vine, noted the carrots, onions, and potatoes that had sprouted, and kept track of every seed I collected or planted.
It became clear that something was wrong.
So I asked Olivia whether I could borrow a notebook and pencils.
“There aren’t any left,” she said. “Once you’ve fixed generator three, I’ll give you a personal tablet.”
I didn’t need all the functions of a tablet. I just wanted written verification that my mind could still keep track of a garden. The numbers weren’t adding up. There’d be twenty tomatoes on one vine in the afternoon and just eighteen tomatoes on the same vine the next morning. But when I asked Olivia, “Are you sure we’re alone?” she just laughed and went, “Don’t be silly. You’re the only girl on New America, Mona Lisa.”
“Food is going missing,” I said. “Somebody else is eating the vegetables at night.”
“No,” she said. “You’re confused. You miscounted. Humans make mistakes.”
“Not this time,” I said. I’d been so careful.
“When you fix generator three,” she promised, “and your tablet is fully charged, I’ll send you all twelve hours of video from last night. Nobody was in the greenhouse. Will that make you feel better, Mona Lisa?”
My sense of reality teetered like a ship on rough waters. “No,” I told her. “Never mind.”
You know how Grandma always says, “Old folks live in their memories”? In that respect, I felt a lot like an old woman at sea. Every night, after Olivia locked me in my cabin, I sat at the window and remembered. Do you remember those board games we always played in the middle of the night, when Mom and Dad thought we were sleeping? We’d hide the wooden checkerboard under my pillow and the bag of stone pieces under yours. Then, after the night went quiet, you’d set up the game. That was always your job, ’cause your hands were steadier than mine, all the better to place twenty-four stone chips on a hard surface without waking the house. I’d provide the light source, holding my book lamp over the board. Half the challenge of midnight checkers was holding still for forty minutes, since quick movements sent tremors through our old spring mattress and scattered the checker pieces.
C, those games were so much fun, but the memories haunt me in the worst way. You always lost gracefully. Just shrugged and said, “Maybe next time.” I’d feign dignity, like a gracious winner, but that was all an act. Did you ever wonder why, right when you started winning anything, my luck went through the roof? It was all too easy to steal or switch game pieces in the dimness, especially since you trusted me. I’m a board game cheater, a self-centred, dishonest cheater, and I deserve to play with rabbit dung instead of game pieces for the rest of my life. Now, all those wonderful memories are poisoned by my dishonesty. I’m so sorry, CC. You deserved those victories and the chance to feel good about yourself. You deserved to celebrate your fourteenth birthday properly. If I make it home, I promise to make amends.
Fortunately, I carry more good than bad memories. Remember how often people mistook us for twins when we were young? We’d pretend to be hero twins every time we did good deeds, like delivering water to an Elder, cataloguing the seeds and vegetables in the garden, or cleaning rubbish off the beach. Then, I had a growth spurt, and people stopped asking, “Are you twins?” Losing that visual shorthand of our tight relationship bothered us so much, we decided to try and build a time machine so I could jump forward two years and let you catch up to my age.
I didn’t used to reminisce this much, since I was occupied with life in real time. But here’s the thing: living ain’t enjoyable without you, our family, and our friends. I even missed the goat-whispering woman who gave us fresh eggs when we fed her chickens. I wanted to go home, and the closest thing I had to home on that city were memories.
Throughout the chores, routines, and chatter, I never stopped thinking about escape, but it wasn’t until week three that my planning became desperate. I guess the salted fish came from a dwindling stock because one morning, after I’d brushed my teeth and dressed in a loose white jumpsuit from the bedroom closet, Olivia said, “You shouldn’t wear white today, Mona Lisa. It’ll get stained. Find something dark. Go on.”
I swapped the white jumpsuit for a long black dress. When she saw my choice, Olivia said, “How apt. A mourning dress.”
She guided me to part of the ship I’d never visited before; it was a metallic octagonal room with silver tables protruding from two of the eight walls. There were hatches and red-stained drains and gutters embedded in the floor. The air smelled like salt and death.
A rack of knives hung to my left. All the blades were sharp and clean.
“We passed a school of tuna earlier,” Olivia said. “I felt them with my sonar. Finally! You can eat the meat fresh! Go. Check the trap under the centre hatch.”
In the middle of the room, a dark chute dove straight into the dark ocean. It resembled a well. I pulled a wire cage from the water. As I wrestled my catch into the light, the cage shuddered from the struggles of two muscular fish. Their glinting bodies drenched my face with seawater.
“Wonderful!” Olivia said. “Once they’re tuckered out, I’ll teach you how to bleed them.”
The tuna were gasping. Big gulps that made their gills flare. At that moment, I thought about Grandpa and the night the south burned. I thought about his struggle to breathe, the pain in his lungs, and the people who suffocated in their own homes.
“Please don’t make me kill them,” I said.
Olivia just laughed. “It’s easy. Pretend they’re wiggling squash!”
“No,” I said.
“I insist.”
We went back and forth like that and the more I refused, the louder Olivia’s voice became. At last, she boomed from every speaker in every wall, “You aren’t leaving this room until they’re dead.”
My ears ringing, I took a bleeding knife from the wall. Although the tuna had stopped thrashing, they still gasped for air.
“You’ll thank me during supper,” Olivia said.
One side of the cage could be unfastened and removed. I pinched my finger on a hinge as I opened it. I barely noticed the pain, although the metal cut deep. Olivia started talking, saying something about holding them under the head and belly.
“How much meat is in an average tuna?” I asked. “And how many tuna are in the sea?”
While she was distracted with my questions, I returned the open cage to the water.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Olivia said. “Really.”
“But I did,” I said.
“You did,” she agreed.
Without another word, Olivia locked all the doors in the killing room and turned off the lights. She left me there until I felt like a dying fish, aching for the taste of water.
As I suffered through, I made plans in the darkness.
Eventually, Olivia asked, “Did you learn your lesson, Mona Lisa?” Her voice was subdued, almost meek.
I answered honestly, “Yes.” Then waited in dreadful anticipation for her to force me to kill before I could escape. But instead, there was silence, and I soon wondered whether she’d abandoned me. Would I die in a dark room that smelled of brine and blood? “Olivia?” I asked.
“Are you still there?”
“If survival were easy,” she said, “we wouldn’t be alone in New America.”
The lights flicked on.
“You should be grateful,” she said. “I had nobody to educate me, Mona Lisa. But you have me.”
I could have defied her. Defended all the lessons Grandfather taught me and everything I’d learned from Instructor Lee, our parents, and you, CC. But I didn’t. Because I’d learned my lesson, and things were going to be different.
I don’t know how many days or weeks passed before Olivia trusted me enough to work on the upper deck. A freshwater tank was clogged. “Drain the tank, unscrew the lid, climb inside, check the output, clear the obstruction, and then return below deck,” Olivia said. “Don’t dawdle. There may be pirates.”
“There may be pirates?” I repeated.
“Always!”
She said may be. Which meant she couldn’t see everything.
It was the chance I’d been waiting for.
Inside the city, Olivia delighted in confusing me; she sent me in circles until I didn’t know north from south. That’s why my internal compass complained so often. When I stepped onto the sunny deck, my sense of space returned. I felt like myself again.
The moment my pupils adjusted to daylight, I scanned the deck for a suitable hiding spot, ignoring the large water tank in to my immediate left. Beyond an expanse of metal tables and chairs, there was a shed-shaped structure on the far end of an empty pool. Olivia chirped from the tablet at my hip, “Do you see the cistern?”
I tilted the tablet camera to the ground and pointed at the ocean. “Is it that?”
“Mona Lisa,” she said, “describe that to me. The tank is big and shaped like a ten-foot-tall barrel.”
She really couldn’t see me. Dropping my tablet, I sprinted, leapt over a bent railing and landed with a thunk on top of a metal table.
“What was that?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
None of your business, I thought. As I ran, my antique dress flapped in the breeze for the first time in centuries, no doubt. It was exhilarating.
Then, Olivia’s voice surrounded me, crackling from failing speakers throughout the deck. “You’re being stupid! The pirates will eat you! Where did you go?”
That’s when I heard a loud, electrical cracking, the same sound a stun gun makes. A tendril of light singed the air to my right. I had a vivid flashback to my ex’s fifteenth birthday. You weren’t there, but Morgan hung a rabbit-shaped piñata from the mesquite tree in her yard, grabbed a wooden lacrosse stick, put on a blindfold, spun ’round until she staggered, and then swung wildly at the air, trying to split that rabbit open. I’d been standing to Morgan’s right, near enough to catch her if she fell. The first swing had whooshed past my ear, sending a warning breeze across my cheek. I’d shouted, “Morgan, stop!” but all the other partiers were screeching, drowning out my voice. I dodged a second swing and threw myself to the ground. With a thunk, the papier-mâché head went flying, and the rabbit bled candy onto my face.
I prayed that Olivia would be less lucky than Morgan. My pace lengthened into long bounds. I was afraid that if my feet touched the deck, I’d transform into a lightning rod. With a final leap, I threw myself into the shed and slammed its door shut.
The shed, which contained a variety of cleaning implements, was large enough that I did not feel claustrophobic. I heard a couple more ominous stun gun crackles, but Olivia gave up quickly, likely worried about draining the ship’s power.
After enough silence had passed to ease my anxiety, I cracked the door open and observed the water tank with the binoculars I’d carried from my cabin. There had to be another person on the ship, which meant the obstruction would eventually be cleared.
Night came. Behind me, a light sputtered awake, casting eerie shadows down the deck. Under my watch, a slender, pale figure dressed in white emerged from the hatch. Her shaved head was covered by a wire mesh cap, the kind that connects brain impulses to electronic devices. Although her face—long, smooth, white, and without freckles or pimples—could have belonged to a twenty-year-old woman, other parts of her body hinted at a greater age. Her neck was a stack of lovely horizontal creases, like rings in a tree. Once she had drained all the water and climbed inside the tank, I left my hiding spot, crept through the maze of fallen chairs, climbed the ladder on the side of the tank, and slammed the heavy lid shut over her.
That was a satisfying clang.
“Mona Lisa,” Olivia said. I could barely hear her voice through the metal walls. “Why?”
“Somebody was eating my vegetables. Just had to be sure it was you. Take me home now. Real home.”
Silence. And then she told me, in the smallest, saddest tone, “Before I was born, generations had names, but nobody bothered to name mine. We weren’t expected to survive the hell we were born into. I’ve been alive for two hundred and seventeen years. Do you really think I conquered the apocalypse by luck?”
“There was no apocalypse,” I said.
She opened her mouth, as if to speak. I didn’t let her.
“Set a course to home,” I said, “or I’ll burn your city down, Olivia, and there won’t be enough water in the ocean to save New America.”
I wish you’d heard me, CC. I was terrified, but my voice didn’t quake like it does when I give speeches.
That’s when the city began to hum. I heard the familiar chug of engines and felt a breeze against my face. We were moving.
I still wonder what I would have done if Olivia had refused.
For the past seventy-six hours, I’ve been stuck on deck, guarding my former captor. She isn’t allowed to go into the city. Too risky. We might not have food, but there’s plenty of water, and New America will reach land any moment now.
I hope.
The sky is so beautiful tonight. Do you remember how we’d look at the stars, name our own constellations, and invent their stories? My favourites were dog and stick, one always chasing the other. And the swing made of stars. I said we’d fly up there someday, and I’d give you a big push, and you’d swing across the galaxy. I can see them now. All of them.
There’s a pinprick of light on the horizon. A fire burning on a distant beach. Is it yours, CC?
It must be.
Love,
Your Big Twin Sister