The Map of Stars, page 27
“Shhh!” said Tess, lowering her voice to a whisper. “The building is still there in Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it’s been abandoned for years. And it’s probably surrounded by Slant’s goons at this point.”
“Brunos,” said Theo.
“And Guildmen,” Tess said.
“And monsters,” Jaime said.
They went quiet. In that silence, they agreed. They wouldn’t stop until they had the answers they wanted, the ones they needed, no matter who—or what—they had to face.
Tess took the doll and stuffed it back in her bag. “Who wants to chip in for a cab?”
The young cabdriver with the pale skin and the backward baseball cap was happy to take them to Brooklyn. He was also happy to ask a million questions and offer a million opinions:
“So, are you kids related?”
“What’s your dad do for a living?”
“You ever take one of those DNA tests? I’m a mutt—twenty-three percent Irish, fourteen percent Swedish, thirty-two percent German, nine percent Italian, and three percent unknown. What do think the unknown part is?”
“Your mom is okay with you being out so late by yourselves?”
“How old are you?”
“Why’s your cat so big?”
“I really can’t stay hydrated unless I drink pickle juice.”
“You shouldn’t feed your cat so much.”
“The government is always watching, always listening. They watch us through our phones and listen through our microwaves.”
“I’m guessing I’m part alien, that’s what it is.”
“I hope you wear sunscreen when you’re out in the sun. I don’t care how brown your skin is, you can still burn.”
“My nephew is five months old today. His head is gigantic. Like a pumpkin on a tadpole. I don’t know why babies’ heads are so big. It feels wrong.”
Luckily, all they had to do was say “Huh,” or “Hmmm,” and the man kept chattering on. As he talked, Jaime watched the city go by—the cobbled streets, the buildings, the solar lamps—all a blur. What would this all look like if the Morningstarrs hadn’t built it? What would someone else’s vision be? He thought about Samuel Deerfoot and his people. What could they have dreamed up had this land not been taken from them?
Finally, they arrived in Red Hook. It was so late it was early, and so early it was late, an hour at which even the most determined night owls put their heads under their wings and went to sleep. Exquisite Engines, the ancient and rundown former Morningstarr lab, loomed in the strange gloom, reflecting eerily off the water of the Henry Street Basin.
At the corner of Clinton and Bryant, the cabbie said, “Are you sure this is where you want to be dropped off? Doesn’t look like there’s much around here.”
Tess counted out the fare plus a tip. It was all the money they had. “Thank you!”
“Sure,” said the cabbie. “Remember what I said about the microwaves.” He drove off, leaving them in almost total darkness.
Jaime used the flashlight on his phone to light the way. They walked past some other buildings toward the sound of the water—gulp, gulp, gulp. Then they were standing on the edge of the shore, looking out over the Henry Street Basin to the lab on the other side. Though the building had a brand-new “Slant Properties” sign on it as well as “No Trespassing” and “Alarms Will Sound” and “Guard Patrols” and “Beware of Dog” signs, the building had seen better days. Better decades. The once-white exterior was blackened as if by a fire, and whole staircases sagged into the water.
“How are we going to get across?” Tess asked.
“We could walk all the way around,” Theo suggested.
“That will take forever. We can borrow that,” Jaime said, pointing to a rowboat tied up against a nearby dock.
The rowboat was in almost as bad shape as the Morningstarr lab. Paint peeled off it, and it stank of fish.
“Seems real safe,” said Theo. But he didn’t argue. Nine jumped into the boat first. As carefully as they could, they got into the boat one at a time. Jaime untied the boat from the dock and Tess and Theo used the oars to push off.
“I hope there are no—” Tess began.
“If you are about to complain about sharks, do not complain about sharks,” Theo said. “Just keep rowing.”
“This is going to take forever, too,” said Tess. “I wish we could have borrowed a boat with a motor.”
Ono popped from Jaime’s pocket. “Kings! Kings!”
“What is it?”
“Kiiiiiings,” buzzed Ono. His propeller whirred.
“You want to be our motor?”
“KINGS.”
“Are you sure?”
Ono beeped and buzzed, annoyed.
“Okay, okay, I was just asking.” Jaime pulled Ono out of his pocket and leaned over the back of the boat. “Not too fast, though. I don’t want to end up in the river again.”
Ono burbled. Jaime gently lowered the robot into the water. Ono started up his propeller and the boat lurched forward. They zigged and zagged until they got the hang of it. They motored across the water, which went from midnight blue to black in the shadow of the lab.
They tied the boat to the only thing they could find: one of the warped and disintegrating staircases dangling off the building. Tess gave Theo the messenger bag and carefully pulled herself up the stairs and onto the ground. Theo tossed the bag back to her and she helped him out of the boat. Jaime got Ono out of the water.
“Thanks, dude,” he said, drying Ono on his T-shirt. He slipped Ono back into his pocket and held out his hands so that Theo and Tess could haul him up. Once they were on solid ground, Jaime fired up his flashlight again and aimed it at the building. Ivy snaked over the walls. Windows and doors were missing, and plants had taken their places, draped across or sprouting up in the spaces. They stepped over a pricker bush that squatted in the biggest doorway and walked inside. Not much different in here. The vines crept along the ceilings, sticks and dried-up leaves crunched underfoot, echoing in the cavernous space. Maybe there had been walls here once, walls that had separated the space into lobbies and waiting rooms and offices and labs, but all that was left were odd patches of tile marking the floor, stalagmites of plaster and wood jutting upward like shark fins.
“Let’s work fast,” Jaime said. “I don’t want to be here any longer than we have to be. This place freaks me out.”
They set down Tess’s messenger bag and pulled out the doll they’d found in the ark. Reluctantly, Tess pulled the string so that they could listen to its song again, made that much eerier because of their surroundings:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
“When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
“Then the traveler in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark.
He could not see which way to go
If you did not twinkle so.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Exquisite Engines take you far.”
“If I were a power source, where would I be?” said Tess.
Jaime shone a dim light on the peeling walls, the empty shells of Rollers and other machines strewn around the wide expanse of floor like so much junk. He aimed the light at the ceiling, scouring the cobwebbed corners, then back down to the floor again.
“Wait!” Theo said. “Turn it off.”
Jaime did as he asked.
“There,” said Theo. Above them, in the very center of the huge room, was an old light fixture missing every bulb but one, which was now glowing a weak bluish purple. “Solar glass, I bet. It absorbed the light from your phone.”
“Little star, little sun, little spark,” said Jaime. “I bet that’s the power source.”
“How do we get up there?” Tess said. No sooner had she said it than Ono rocketed from Jaime’s pocket, propeller whirring softly.
“Oh no, oh no,” it murmured, as its tiny metal fingers worked at the screws. The whole fixture came away from the ceiling with a thunk! Ono lowered itself to the ground, laying its prize gently at Jaime’s feet.
“Ono, you’re amazing!” said Tess.
“Land of Kings,” Ono burbled. Jaime scooped Ono up and slipped him back into his pocket. Then the three of them knelt on the floor to see the fixture better. A small box was attached on the underside of the fixture. When Jaime shone his light on the box, the etched figure of a lion was visible.
“A Lion battery. The power source. But we’ll have to charge it,” Theo said.
“But all we have to charge it is the phone,” said Tess.
“In a few hours, we’ll have the sun,” said Jaime.
Tess put her bag on the floor and rummaged in it for the schematic and for her tool kit. Jaime unscrewed the box from the light fixture. Following the instructions on the plans, they inserted the battery into the canister. They connected the wires. Then they used the round metal piece covering the doll’s voice box on the back end of the canister.
“We’re done,” said Tess.
It really wasn’t anything to look at, Jaime thought. It didn’t look as if it had the power to change the city or the world. It didn’t look like the key to the greatest treasure known to man, if that’s what it was. It didn’t even look like a Morningstarr Machine. No whimsical shapes, no giggling, no movement.
Nine growled.
Tess stopped. “What is it, girl?”
Nine sniffed, rotated her sensitive ears. Her mrrow was long and low.
“Do you think someone’s in here?” said Theo.
Jaime shone the flashlight around the cavernous interior. “Maybe there are guards? Or dogs?”
“Oh no,” buzzed Ono.
Tess jammed the plans and the tool kit back into her bag. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. She was reaching for the machine when a voice yelled:
“Stop! Do not touch that!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
August 18, 2041
His name was Lee, and he was the big one.
Bigger than Edouard, which had hit Cuba and then barreled up the Florida coast to level Tallahassee in 2026; bigger than Debby, which had erased Georgia’s barrier islands in 2030; bigger than Odette, which hit Galveston in 2039 and killed too many people to count. But Lee wasn’t just bigger. Lee was different. He was the product of not one, not two, but three separate storm systems that had converged in the Caribbean and were only gaining speed. There were no categories for Lee. He was unique.
And he was headed right for them.
Days before, the mayor and the governor had declared a state of emergency and pleaded for people to evacuate. And then they got in their helicopters and evacuated themselves, as did many of the people who could afford to do so. But still, Theresa Biedermann, now thirty-eight years old, stood in the window of their apartment, hammering boards over the window, watching the rain attempt to submerge the cars on the street below as she did. The cars had been abandoned there, their owners opting to hike to the mainland if they had to. The news showed pictures of highways and bridges that looked more like parking lots. The tunnels were already closed, as were the subways. The storm hadn’t even hit yet, but the surge had already swamped FDR Drive, and the wind was already howling, clawing at anything not tied down. Uprooted trees, roof tiles, barbecue grills, umbrellas swirled around the abandoned cars. The sky was bruised green and purple. The rain seemed to be falling sideways. When the sun rose again—whenever that was—it would shine down on nothing.
Theresa should have been terrified. But she was numb.
Theodore sat at the kitchen table, their solar cell in front of him. Some years before, they had perfected it, as well as a battery that could store the power almost indefinitely, a battery they called the Lion. It was a triumph. Or should have been. If funding for universities hadn’t been gutted. If the oligarchs hadn’t seen dollar signs when the Arctic melted, if the US hadn’t gone to war for the right to drill where the ice and the bears and the seals used to be. They were still fighting, a dozen countries shooting at one another’s ships, exploding one another’s submarines, setting fire to one another’s drilling platforms. Meanwhile, a trillionaire had decided that this planet was done for and made himself a generation ship to take him and his friends to a new planet. In his last transmission, he talked about finding another place, a better place, for his children and grandchildren and their children, a green place with clean water and enough food for everybody. He said these things right before some of the passengers mutinied, stuffed him in a suit, and ejected him into space. Theresa imagined him bobbing along in the deafening silence, wondering what had gone wrong.
Everything had gone wrong.
She hammered the last board into place. Something thumped against the window and made her jump. Theodore said, “Hail. It will probably smash the windows soon.”
“That’s what the wood is for,” she said. Still, she backed away, joined him at the table. The solar cell wasn’t what he was looking at. He held an envelope with the words TRUST NO ONE on it.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking,” he said.
“About what?”
He tapped the envelope on the table.
“You’re joking,” Theresa said.
Theo glanced up. His hair was normally cropped close to his head to avoid its tendency toward bushiness, but now it looked big and knotted and unkempt. Dark circles were draped under his eyes. “Why not think about it?”
“Because . . .” She trailed off.
“Tess, we’re going to die here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“The probability is high. Maybe the storm won’t smash all the windows, but it will take out the power. The sewers will back up in the storm surge, and disease will follow. Chaos. We have enough food and water to last a few weeks, but what then?”
“We evacuate like we should have!”
“But what if we could fix it?” He fumbled with the envelope in his hands.
“Fix what?”
“Everything that’s wrong.”
“Theodore, you can’t be serious. You can’t.”
“I did some research. There was a physicist. Renée . . . something.” He pawed through the other papers on the table. “She did experiments back in the beginning of the century. She was looking for proof of the mirror universe. I think she found it.”
“What happened to her?”
He didn’t answer.
“Theodore?”
“She died in an accident at her lab.”
“Theodore!”
He pulled the handwritten letter and the schematic from the envelope. Tess knew the letter by heart:
I couldn’t think of who else to turn to, who else to trust, and so it will have to be you. I’m sorry for that. Truly and deeply sorry for the choice you will have to make, both of you so young, as young as—
I’m desperate. And someday, you will be, too.
“We’re not that desperate,” Theresa said.
“Aren’t we?”
“Are you?” she asked. Theo was not a desperate person; he was determined and driven and logical. She was the desperate one.
Was.
“I already built it,” he said.
“You what?”
“I had to. And our battery is ready—it can power it. All we have to do is try it.”
Theresa sat there, stunned at this admission. “It won’t work.”
“Then it won’t matter,” Theodore said.
“We should work on our own research, we should—”
Theodore slammed a hand down on the table. “Nobody cares about our research. They know it works. They’ve known for years. But people don’t know how to change. Or they don’t want to. It’s too hard. And it’s too late.”
“No, no, it’s not too late.”
“If we don’t change, if we don’t try anything different, it will be too late for us.”
“You can’t ask me to do this.”
“I’m not asking. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it alone.”
She sat back in her chair. “You’d . . . leave me?”
“I don’t want to, God knows I don’t want to.” His eyes shimmered with tears. “But . . .”
“You will.”
The wind picked up. A flying piece of debris smacked into the window in the living room with a loud CRACK. The building itself made a strange creaking sound, as if it, too, were crying.
“Everyone we had is gone now,” Theodore said. “Maybe we can’t do anything about that. But we can do something about that.” He jabbed a finger at the greenish sky peeking between the wooden slats.
“It’s more likely that we’ll die trying,” Theresa said, almost laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“No, that’s what we’ve been doing, dying slowly. I’ve packed what we need.”
“Packed? Packed? Do you hear yourself?”
Theodore stood up. “I do. And I know how it sounds. But I don’t care. Are you with me?”
Was she? She’d always been before. To the exclusion of almost everyone else. She had no partner or children. So many friends had moved inland. She had her city and she had her work and she had Theodore. And now she might not have any of them.
Another piece of debris hit the window, shattering it. The wind shrieked and a blast of humid air hit them both. Papers cycloned around the apartment. The computer screen, which had been blaring the news, cut out.
It was madness. But then, the whole world had gone mad. Maybe the only way you face madness is with more madness.
“If we do this, we might have a future,” Theo said.
“In the past?”
“Maybe.”
What had Carl Sagan said? The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
