“I’m here.” She clutches the bar beside her seat. Her eyes are wide, but she looks unhurt.
I breathe a sigh of relief and right myself. “Sorry, so. Sorry,” I mutter to the man in front of me, whose back I slammed into.
“Ava?” Miyole slips her hand into mine. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” I go up on tiptoe to look. My back prickles with sweat.
“It’s a washout,” the man I fell into says. He points up to the ceiling. “Any minute now, they’ll call it. Listen.”
The speakers sound a soft bong, and a woman’s soothing voice fills the car. “Attention, we are currently experiencing flooding in the line—”
A collective groan goes up among the passengers.
“Remain calm and stay in your seats until a transit authority officer comes to escort you to the nearest station.”
Near the front of the car, someone has forced open a door and people are jumping, one by one, across the small gap between the track and a walkway. The crowd nudges forward, pushing us along with it.
“Aren’t we supposed to wait?” I ask the man in front of us.
He shrugs. “You wait if you want. I have to make it downtown by three.”
I glance back at Miyole, worry building in the pit of my stomach. If we leave this train, how will we find our way to the other one that’s supposed to take us to my modrie?
But we don’t truly have a choice. I try to press myself against the row of seats, stay out of the way, but everyone is pushing. There’s nowhere to go but out the door, into the steaming afternoon heat. The man in front of us jumps, lands with a heavy clang on the metal walkway, and then turns and holds out a hand to help us across. Miyole takes it and springs over the gap. He reaches back for me. I know I should take his hand, know he’s only doing me a kindness, but his hands are so large, with soft skin and perfectly rounded fingernails. I can’t let him touch me. I leap across on my own and land with an awkward wobble.
All up and down the tracks, people pile out of the train cars, into the burning sun. Most of them choose the walkway, but a few climb up onto the lev train’s back and skirt the shuffling crowd altogether. Below us, a muddy trickle starts to fill the bottom of the magnetized pit.
“Do you think . . . ,” I look down at Miyole and stop. Even though her hand is in mine, she isn’t with me. Her eyes stare unfixed at something I can’t see, and her mouth turns down in a way I’ve come to know means she’s sunk deep in her own thoughts.
By the time we make it back to the nearest station, the sun is past its peak and my shirt is plastered to my skin. The backs of my eyes burn. Everything comes to me muffled, the way the world sounded with my ears beneath the water in the desalination pool. This silvery city seamed with green, the constant roar of ships passing overhead, the bright colors and burning sun . . . none of it seems real. My head swims.
I drag us to the nearest smartboard and wait behind the other passengers lined up to use it. When my turn comes, I squint at the lines twisted around one another like wires. One of them flashes blue. OUT OF SERVICE. What was the one we were aiming for again? One-oh-five? I scan the board, but there are so many different numbers and words and lines. I finally find one-oh-five, but now twenty-four won’t take us to it, and I could maybe figure out if another might, but I don’t know the name of the tiny station we’ve wound up at or which of the trains will be coming through.
“Miyole?” I say hesitantly.
“Jaldi karo!” The woman behind me huffs. “Hurry up, please.”
“Sorry, so.” I can see the way everyone is looking at me. It’s the same look I’m sure I had when the kitchen girls forgot to add protein powder to the bread meal or something dull headed like that.
I pull Miyole back through the crowd and sink down on a bench beneath a tree in the middle of the platform. I’ll check again when they’ve all cleared away, when I have more time to trace the lines. I try to swallow, but my throat is dry.
“Are you thirsty?” I ask Miyole. If I am, she must be too. Maybe more so, since she probably swallowed saltwater in the storm.
She nods.
I push myself to my feet again and scan the platform. Most of the other passengers have their own bottles of water clipped to their belts or the bags they wear over their shoulders.
“Please, so.” I stop a woman wearing darkened glasses and carrying a slick black bag. “Do you know where we could get water?”
“There’s a store inside.” She waves over her shoulder at the small building behind us selling tickets and cold juice. “You can buy some there.”
“Buy?” I frown. In the Gyre, everyone shared their water. If we were on our way back from the market and got thirsty, all we had to do was ask, and one of Perpétue’s neighbors would give us a drink. It was always warm and flat from boiling, but it was never something we worried over.
“We don’t need it cold or special or anything,” I tell the woman. “Just regular water.”
She raises her eyebrows and pulls off her glasses to give me a withering stare. “No such thing as free water, kid,” she says, and stalks away.
Her words hit me like a cold slap, and anger flares in my chest, sudden and ice hot. I grip the haft of Perpétue’s knife. I’m going to swing at her. I’m going to run her down and shove her face in the trickle of dirty water skimming the bottom of the trainway. I’m going to cut the strap of that shiny bag of hers and run off with the full bottle hanging from it.
Then the memory of the red-haired woman and the tea washes back over me. Perpétue comforting me in the ship’s hold. Perpétue on the ship’s ladder. Perpétue lost in the storm. All the fight goes out of me.
I let go of the knife. The sun is high overhead and there are no shadows. Sweat rolls down my back. The crowd still mills around the smartboard maps, but a few people have taken a raised footbridge over to a different platform, where a train waits with wide-open doors.
I grab Miyole’s hand. “Come on.”
I expect her to ask where we’re going, but she follows me mutely across the bridge. I don’t even glance up at the name of the next station gliding above our heads as we wedge in next to the window. It doesn’t matter where it’s going, as long as it’s away from here, away from that horrible woman and all that water held out of our reach. Besides, it’s cooler in the train cars than out on the platforms. We won’t notice our thirst as much.
The city closes in around us as we pick up speed. The buildings creep nearer to the trainway and then rise and rise so we can’t see their tops from inside the car. Hand-painted signs on the sides of buildings give way to smartboards and windows playing enormous images of smooth-skinned women with teeth as tall as Miyole. Every now and again, a break in the buildings lets in a blinding flash of sunlight.
We slow to pass through a crowded section of the city. People pack the broad avenue outside the window, most of them on foot, but some on horses. And then in the flow of bobbing heads, I spot a broad, gray animal face with great flapping ears. My mother started to see things when the virus took her. She would reach out, even when there was nothing there. Am I getting sick the same way? I close my eyes tight and open them again. The animal is still there. Its back rises level with our train car, and it holds its long, armlike nose in an elegant curl.