The wind subsides. The roof is silent.
I explode with laughter.
My friends stare at me. My wound screams in protest as my chest convulses, but I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I stand up and pace the roof, clutching my sides. Tears stream from my eyes, a different flavor than the ones I’m used to, not the bitterness of loss but something piquant and sweet. I hear those distant bells ringing, but it’s not quite a sound; it sits between the senses like this new texture in the wind, this new color in my voice—even the light smells different.
My laughter subsides when my eyes land on Abram’s broken body, but I don’t erase my smile. Because his daughter is smiling too. Sitting by his side with a hand on his upturned palm, small and soft on her father’s scarred leather, she grins through the tears and snot.
“See, Dad?” she says, squeezing his palm. “See what we did?”
M watches the body carefully, his gun at the ready, but Abram remains at peace. No twitching. No groaning. Just rest.
Every choice has a price. We all owe a debt to this world for the things we take from it, right or wrong, cruel or kind. But these laws are soft, these laws are alive, and sometimes a debt is forgiven.
I feel a gentle weariness. I sit with my friends on the edge of the roof and take in the incredible view.
Like New York, the city of Post has been flooded. But this ocean is human. It fills every street, park, and parking lot—enough people to fully repopulate Post and much of the surrounding region. And this ocean is sparkling in the sun. The Gleam passes over it in waves of tiny lights. I can’t see its effects from this distance, so I turn to Addis. His yellow eyes are as wide as his grin. Sprout is squinting her left eye shut like her right is a telescope, hidden so long for the comfort of the world around her, now free to roam whatever strange vistas it sees.
“What’s happening down there?” I ask them.
“This!” Joan giggles, and points to a sunken patch of rot on her arm. A flash of light, and it’s gone.
“Dad, look!” Alex says as his chest flashes with inner illumination. He takes a deep breath and lets it out with a ta-da smile.
Julie grabs my hand. Her face is glowing with a light of its own. “I thought you said we can’t cure the plague.”
A sting in my neck. A sharp, cold rush. I clap my hand to the spot and find that the flesh is smooth. The bite is gone. If the black worms are still there, they’re sealed between the strata of my lives, dried up and buried like fossils of an earlier age.
“We can’t cure it,” I tell Julie. “But we can fight it.”
I kiss her, this person I love, this person who loves me. The wind blows our hair across our faces, hiding us from the world, and though we’re surrounded by our friends, I can almost believe we’re alone in a sun-soaked grove of trees. I barely feel the rumble behind us. I hardly hear the wrenching metal. I don’t bother to look back as the plastic dome and its obsolete flags break through the roof and fall.
WE
THE CITY IS ALMOST QUIET AGAIN.
Gulls call from nearby shorelines. Honeybees drone in the wildflowers that fill the cabs of old convertibles. A few of the Nearly Living still roam the streets, lost on inner pathways, but most have disappeared into the buildings or moved on to the next town, eager to find places to live.
Birds chirp. Insects click. The wind has dropped to a whisper.
The loudest sound by far is the megaphone on the roof of an overturned armored truck, squawking with rising desperation.
The man in the truck shouts dark prophecy to the inhabitants of the stadium. He shouts orders from God to the Nearly Living. He shouts encouragement to his followers, unaware that they dispersed hours ago.
Only two remain. While the others fled into the woods, these two stayed with their pastor. They pried open his truck’s door and tried to help him escape, but he ignored them and continued his sermon. The Holy Fire. The Last Sunset. The inescapable end of everything. Now the youths stand at a distance, waiting for the man to emerge from his ruined vehicle. But he won’t leave his megaphone. He stays inside and keeps shouting.
The young woman squeezes the young man’s hand. They look at each other. Their eyes are filled with uncertainty, with terrifying doubt, but they nod. They turn and walk away.
The pastor is alone. He begins to sense it, but he doesn’t stop. While he shouts about Hell, he thinks about Heaven: a golden ghost town, its sole occupant wandering its silent streets, his bare feet cold and sore on the hard metal, roaming from mansion to mansion and finding them all empty.
He shouts and shouts, but no one is listening. He shouts until his megaphone loses power.
On the other side of the stadium wall, there is a smoldering hole in the earth. First the explosion from below, then the dome from above, crashing into the pit and disappearing in the smoke—even with all the miracles unfolding outside, this kind of action still draws a few onlookers, and a crowd has gathered around the pit.
Somewhere down in the dark, locked in a box and buried under tons of debris, another voice is shouting. This one needs no megaphone, it shouts in thoughts and ideas, but even so, no one is hearing it. The voice has never experienced this before, this shocking lack of an audience, this flat wall of disregard. It doesn’t understand what could have changed; it has always enjoyed a direct line to humanity’s lowest instincts. So it keeps shouting.
The voice shouts and shouts, but people have stopped listening. One by one, they lose interest in the pit. One by one, they walk away.
FOUR
the sky
I know of no philosopher who has been so bold as to say: this is the limit of what man can attain and beyond which he cannot go. We do not know what our nature permits us to be.
WE
NORA PUSHES OPEN THE HATCH that says no roof access and climbs out onto the roof. She understands why it’s not recommended—there are no safety railings and the whole structure sways slightly like the deck of a ship—but she likes it up here. She likes stepping outside the grid of human traffic. She likes being close to the sky. She never feels more free than when she’s on a rooftop.
She also wants some privacy so she can smoke a joint. It’s been a long day in the foster home.
She sits cross-legged next to one of the huge metal eyelets on the corner of the roof and rests an elbow on the support cable that runs through it. She can feel the vibrations of a dozen other buildings in the cable. Footsteps. Music. Even voices. This might just be her imagination, but then again, her senses have seemed strangely acute lately. Yesterday, one of the kids who doesn’t talk gave her a hug, and his heartbeat felt like code. I’m a bad thing, it seemed to tell her. The world doesn’t want me.
“You’re a beautiful thing, L,” she told him, “and we want you to come back as soon as you’re ready.”
Immediately, L began to cry.
Nora lights the joint and inhales. She holds in the smoke, waiting to feel the relief. Living here was already hard when it was just a few dozen orphans with ordinary traumas—nothing more exotic than abuse or abandonment, nothing she hadn’t experienced herself. But since the repopulation, things have gotten more complicated. And all this on top of her actual job as a nurse. Stitching bodies by day, hearts by night…she needs a break.