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I. The Drift
The world ended on a Tuesday.
All the way across the Pacific Ocean, Trespasser made landfall in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Golden Gate Bridge crumbled like a gingerbread construct under the tender mercies of a jaded teen with a new lighter.
Mako had been at school when it happened. It had been an unremarkable day of classes filled with simple maths and recitations from the book of age appropriate poetry that her homeroom teacher had picked out. Her mother had been at the school gates to pick her up at the end of the day and they had walked home together hand in hand.
It had been so painfully ordinary that looking back Mako barely remembers it at all. Maybe it was her age that had kept her from reading too much into the furtive way her parents changed the news channel whenever she walked into room that week. No one could have known what was going to happen, but it could not have been more obvious that whatever was happening, it was a big deal.
*
They chase the RABIT.
*
Mako is sitting in a hospital chair. It’s not as uncomfortable as she remembers. Her feet can touch the ground this time. When she looks up, the woman in the bed doesn’t have a red wig and a nose piercing, instead she’s wearing a fuzzy pink hat with a pompom that Tamsin would have hated because it would have clashed with her hair.
Raleigh is much younger than she remembers. He looks about ten, curled up in the curve of his mother’s arm as she lay between those white, white sheets.
“Tell me a story,” he whispers. His voice drifts to her through the hum of the AC and over the tinny voices of the daytime TV playing in the far corner.
Mako leans in closer because his mother’s voice is even softer as she lets out a little laugh and turns her unseeing eyes out towards the room at large, never quite meeting Raleigh’s gaze even as she raises her hand to run her fingers through his hair. “Well, one day, there was a handsome prince who was trapped in a tower.”
“Mom! That’s not how it goes! Rapunzel was a girl.”
“Well, that’s how it goes when I’m telling the story,” his mother says with a smile. Raleigh giggles, and she continues, “Do you want to hear my version or not?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“As I was saying,” and here his mother pauses to ruffle his hair playfully, “The prince was trapped in a tower, and he had to be very brave to find a way out.”
*
She’s boarding the train with her father. He’s holding her hand as they cross the station. The floor is a whirling pattern of tiles, sparkling in the afternoon light, dazzling her as she passes. It’s strangely clean, in a way that reminds her of the sterility of a hospital room.
He’s taking her somewhere.
“Where are we going?”
“Dinner, we’re going to dinner.”
Suddenly the floor under her is no longer the tiles of a train station but the tiles in her dining room. Her mother is putting down dishes on the table, setting bowls of rice down with three sets of chopsticks neatly aligned on bamboo mats.
“Where were you?”
“We were on our way home,” her father explains as he says a quick thanks and begins to eat.
Her mother turns her steady and assessing gaze to Mako. “Where were you two, Mako?”
“We were going to the beach.”
*
Mako is standing at the foot of Tamsin’s bed. She’s holding up a book of knock-knock jokes and methodically trying each one on Tamsin, who patiently answers ‘Who is it?’ to every solemn ‘knock knock’ that Mako reads aloud.
Raleigh is sitting in an almost uncomfortable chair in the corner of this private hospital room in London. The British Isles float on the Atlantic Ocean.
“Knock knock, it’s Yukon.”
“Yukon who?”
Mako looks up at Tamsin after she says “Yukon say that again!” and Tamsin gives a dry little chuckle. ‘Orange you glad to see me’ didn’t have quite the same effect. Mako resolves to find better knock knock jokes.
She takes in Tamsin, tired and worn out from treatment earlier in the day, surrounded by a kind of manic energy that manages to mask the bags under her eyes, the gauntness of her face, at least at first glance. Her nose ring looks enormous, but Mako can’t imagine her without it. She would look incomplete.
“Mako,” Tamsin says as she pats an empty space on the bed, and there is so much empty space, but Mako doesn’t hesitate to climb up and lean into Tamsin’s side when she holds out her arm, “you’re a great kid and I’m really proud of you and I love you. Do you know how much I love you?”
“How much?”
“Go to the window, look outside, and tell me what you see.”
Mako climbs down from the bed and passes Raleigh, who has started to walk around the room, touching the walls, changing the TV channels. She goes to the window and pulls back the curtains. The view is breathtaking. The hospital room is unbelievably high. The ground below looks surreal, so far out of the sight, so far out of mind. The garden two patients are being wheeled through looks like it was done in miniature, the people milling through it resembling nothing more than ants. Mako looks up and all she sees is the full, unexplored openness of the ocean. The horizon is a blue blur at the edge of the water, the sun’s light glittering across the surface of slow waves pushing east, east, forever east.
“I see the ocean.”
“What is it like?”
“Infinite.”
“And that’s how much I love you.”
Mako turns back towards the bed, and her father is sitting there, leaning against the pillows to stay upright, his smile small but clear and full of emotion.
II. The Rift
Raleigh was intimately familiar with ghosts, with jaegers, and with Lady Danger.
He was miles below the ocean surface, drowning, and all he could taste was fresh, sweet seawater, the kind of pungent taste that hid in tender stalks of new seaweed. Gravity was heavier here, closer to the center of the Earth, and the water was warmer.
The escape pod felt miles away but Raleigh stumbled toward it, determined to at least give it the good ol’ college try.
It wasn’t hard to slip through time, and see Yancy out of the corner of his eye, breathing shallowly, functionally brain dead. Things were different, but not so different his fuzzy brain couldn’t make the right connections. This time, Yancy was blinking up at him from the floor of Lady Danger’s cockpit.
“What are you waiting for, Rals?”
“God, don’t call me that,” Raleigh coughed. It felt like the water rushing in was pushing him back, away from the pod, away from the surface.
God, he wanted a reindeer dog. With all the works. Relish. Ketchup. Mustard and onion. The plating on his gloves were scraping off. The hand holds in Lady Danger were slippery and heating up, but Raleigh kept pulling himself forward, scrabbling with his knees to push through the water.
Yancy had done it out of love. He’d taken in their father’s lessons with gusto, loved the world because he had seen the best it had to offer and believed with an optimist’s faith that there was still more good the world could generate if only there were more time, new ideas, and more people to usher in that new light.
And Raleigh? Raleigh had done it because he loved reindeer dogs and smoked salmon and the way Jazz looked on Christmas morning tearing through the wrapping paper of her gifts. He’d been selfish. He’d joined the PPDC because he didn’t want Yancy to go it alone even if there was a rat’s ass chance in hell they were going to become pilots. And when they did become pilots, he kept going because he’d been born in Anchorage and it felt wrong to leave her defenseless.
He squeezed into the pod, barely bothered with checking that the cover was secure before launching himself into the ocean. Yancy was a blurry blob out of the corner of his eye who gave a cheery wave even as his figure faded in the distance.
Raleigh caught a glimpse of her, as he spun over and over and around, pushed by the rough hands of the current towards the rift. She was floating away and in almost all the ways that mattered, she looked like she was sleeping.
There was always so much to miss.
III.The Shift
The plane landed in Eureka without a hitch.
Raleigh paid the pilot and then started making small talk as he pulled their bags out of the belly of the aircraft. Mako watched the way his eyes lit up when the pilot made a joke about the weather and turned away, Max tucked under her arm. She carried him to the edge of the rough landing strip to relieve himself. He huffed when the hood of his coat fell over his eyes and Mako snapped a quick picture on her phone before he managed to shake it off his face with an emphatic wiggle of his butt.
“What’s there to do around here?”
“Let’s head south. See what there is to see.”
The California coast had been ravaged by kaiju attacks. San Francisco and the Greater Bay Area had been leveled, and in the years that followed, Los Angeles and San Diego had faced kaiju as well. Eureka had held on through high water and flash floods, sandwiched between Anchorage and the San Diego shatterdomes, and had survived to see the end of kaiju attacks for the foreseeable future.
There wasn’t much to see driving down Highway 101. Most of the coastal redwoods had died. But the roads were peaceful, a seemingless endless gray spool of thread weaving its way down the length of a land that was longer than it had any right to be. It was expansive, in death, in its destruction, and it brought with it a peace of mind. Their purpose was clear. Their days were their own to spend the way they wanted to.
Most of the food they ate that week came out of packages and hot ‘n ready gas station food carts. They had brought kibble for Max, who had gazed futilely at their 7/11 taquitos and EasyMart microwave burritos with something like longing.
“You know, my parents loved to travel when we were younger.”
“Yeah?”
Raleigh shrugged and took a sip out of his Big Gulp. “They wanted to show us the world, you know, all the good parts. Make us into a global citizens and stuff, plus my mom always jumped on any excuse to go to Paris. She loved that city.”
Mako nodded. She reached out and put her hand on Raleigh’s wrist, guiding his hand that was holding the soda across the span of the dashboard so that she could get a sip of watered down cherry Coke. The drink was just cold enough to be sickly sweet, and it gave a half hearted fizzle on her tongue as she swallowed. “Go on.”
“Right.” Raleigh cleared his throat. “She said it was the city of romance. She said that it had more history than anywhere else, but I think that was just because she never really appreciated Anchorage the way it deserved. I think wherever there were people, there’s bound to be tons of history, things we don’t know happened or have forgotten, but were probably really interesting.”
Mako nodded in agreement and shifted Max onto a more comfortable part of her lap.
“We went to Tokyo for my father’s cancer treatment. We didn’t have any history there before, but now we do.”
They checked into motel north of San Francisco. It was farther inland than Mako had been in a long time, and while they weren’t exactly landlocked, it felt strange knowing that the ocean was not just a city’s distance away, a harbor sitting conveniently at the end of a long bus ride.
Max whined. He missed the ocean. Mako filled his water bowl up from her own bottle and sat on the balcony overlooking the parking lot.
The sky was gray, something almost like coastal fog turned the brilliant afternoon sun into a rusted golden medallion in the sky, forgettable, stripped of its fury. Raleigh sat down next to her after a few minutes of only the sounds of Max drinking loudly to fill the silence.
“Where do you want to go?”
“East.”
“Sacramento?” Raleigh asked.
“No, even further. I want to go somewhere new.”
“And what will you do there?”
That didn’t seem very important in the grand scheme. What couldn’t she do? She had done it all, had it all, lost it, then lost it all again, and now she was newly forged, carried up from the deepest depths. What couldn’t she do if she wanted to?
She shrugged. “We’ll find something,” she said. She reached out and grabbed Raleigh’s hand, lacing her fingers with his. She tugged gently and he turned his head, the corners of his mouth curling up in a slow smile as she kissed him.