Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“Then I’m going with you,” I said.

“He told me I should come alone.” Ani shifted her weight. “He said to remember what Auden said yesterday. About you not coming back.”

“I can go,” Riley said, looking uncomfortable. “Whatever you guys want—”

“I told you, we’re done,” Ani said, slipping past him. “I meant what I said, Lia. Everything’s fine.”

Riley glanced after her. “Doesn’t seem fine.”

“Tell me about it.”

He stepped out of the doorway, tipping his head in the direction Ani had disappeared. “You want to…?”

I shook my head. “You can’t force someone to feel better.”

Riley rubbed the back of his neck. “Then maybe I should get out of here.”

“Wait—Why? What’d I say?”

“Well, you didn’t ask me what I was doing here.”

“Okay… what are you doing here?”

He gave me an embarrassed grin that, for one strange second, made him look like a little kid. “Came to force you to feel better.”

“Exactly how is this supposed to cheer me up?” I asked when the car dumped us out at the Windows of Memory. We’d driven in silence, like the last road trip we’d taken together—and like the last time, Riley knew where we were going, while I was clueless. I wondered if he was trying as hard as I was not to think about the last time, and whether he was having any better luck.

“I thought you said you didn’t need cheering up,” he teased. “I thought nothing was wrong.”

“I didn’t say it was,” I corrected him. “But if I was upset about something, I don’t see how this is supposed to help.”

I’d been to the museum before on class trips. It was the closest dead zone to our school, and unlike most of the dead zones, it wasn’t toxic or radioactive, just uninhabitable. Unless you were a jellyfish.

When you’re ten years old, wandering through an underground aquarium whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the submerged ruins of a drowned city wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon, but there was a reason I’d never been back. It should have been creepy, staring into the blue depths at algae-covered buildings lit by the museum’s underwater floodlights, schools of jellyfish skittering through the wreckage of abandoned cars, but it was hard to get creeped out when you were safely behind reinforced glass, watching Zack Bana pretending to jerk off while the tour guide blathered something about early twenty-first-century traffic patterns.

“You’ll see,” Riley said, steering me away from the main entrance. Most of the museum was below sea level, but visitors entered through a shallow glass dome surrounded by seven glowing crystalline spires. One spire for every ten thousand deaths. A wide plaza stretched around the perimeter, dotted with memorial statues and plaques, wilted flowers and soggy notes cluttering their feet.

The plaza was on a hill overlooking the sea, and a tall barbed-wire fence discouraged anyone who might have ideas about testing the water. We walked along the fence until the museum shrank to doll size and the laughter of the tourists faded into the tide. After nearly a mile, the fence turned at an abrupt right angle. But instead of following it around, Riley took a flying leap and landed midway up the fence, dangling by his hands. His feet scrabbled for purchase, and a moment later, he found toeholds in the chain link. He grinned down at me. “Coming?”

I looked up dubiously at the coils of jagged wire running along the top, wondering if it was electrified.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“You’re joking, right?” I said, then began to climb. I scrambled to the top in seconds—and not that we were racing, but I made it there first. I closed my hand over the tangle of wire lining the edge, letting the barbs dig into my palm. “No pain, no gain,” I said, grinning, and vaulted over the top, letting myself drop the fifteen feet to the ground. My feet slammed into the grass. I let momentum carry me forward into an awkward somersault, feet over head and back to feet again, then stumbled forward and did a full face-plant, arms splayed, mouth in the dirt.

“Graceful,” Riley said, climbing safely down the other side and offering me a hand.

I spat out a mouthful of grass and climbed to my feet.

“You’ve got a little…” Riley gestured at my pants, the front of which were covered in a thick layer of reddish brown dirt.

“So?”

Riley raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t think you were the type, Lia Kahn.”

“What type?”

He shook his head. “Just come on.”

We skidded down the shallow grassy hill and found ourselves at the edge of the ocean. It was strange—in all the times I’d been to the Windows of Memory, I’d never actually been anywhere near the water. It had always looked pretty from atop the hill, the floating scum shimmering in the sunlight. But up close, it just looked like sludge.

Still, there was something about this place. The sky seemed bigger here—staring out at the horizon, it was easy to picture a time before the world was round, when the glassy sea stretched infinitely far and flat. The shore curved around, forming a narrow bay, and soon we were standing almost directly across from the Windows, too far to see anything but the glow of the crystal spires.

“Weird to think there’s a whole city under there,” I said, nodding at the water.

“Yeah.”

“Especially since it feels like—I don’t know. Like we’re at the edge of the world. Like there’s nothing left but us. You know?”

There was a long pause, and I suddenly felt like an idiot for saying anything at all. But then: “Yeah.”

It was something.

We fell into step together, our arms swinging in sync, our faces turned to the ocean, eyes slitted against the wind. It was peaceful, and not the kind of empty quiet that forced unwanted thoughts into my head. This quiet was full—of rustling grass, of wildflowers, their bright blues and purples suggesting fragrant perfumes I could no longer smell. Full of Riley, forging the way, his head bent, his gait rangy and loose, his facial muscles losing a little of their tightness with every step, something relaxed and almost happy creeping across his face.

But then he stopped. “Here’s good.”

“Good for what?”

“I borrowed a bathing suit from one of the other girls,” Riley said. “I hope that’s not weird—I didn’t want to ruin the surprise by—”

“The surprise is we’re swimming?” I asked.

He hesitated, noticing the anger in my voice.

“I don’t swim,” I said.

Everybody knew that.

“But you can,” Riley said.

“Yes.”

“So what’s the problem?” He tossed me a ball of material, a garish red suit that looked like something my grandmother would have worn back before they fixed the ozone. Rolled up in it was a small, slim lightstrip with a square of adhesive on the back. “Stick it on your forehead,” he advised. “It’s good for about an hour of light. We won’t be down longer than that.”

I hadn’t been in the water since that day Auden and I had raced back and forth in the frigid stream, shouting over the thunder of the waterfall. The day I’d been so oblivious that I hadn’t noticed how cold it was, how cold he was, hadn’t noticed anything until he’d drifted away from me… over the edge.

“I don’t swim,” I said again.

“This isn’t the same,” Riley said.

“Same as what?”

“Same as the waterfall.”

“I can see that,” I snapped. “This is sludge.” The waterfall, and the river feeding into it, were man-made, one of the nature preserves erected a couple decades ago to restore and replace the natural habitats killed off by water shortages, temperature change, and smoggy sky as viscous as soup. But there was nothing to be done about the oceans, especially the coastal regions clogged with remnants of drowned cities. The acidic water had killed off most of the fish, leaving behind only roving schools of jellyfish and a thick layer of blue and red algae, stretching toward the horizon. They called it the rise of the slime.