The Invisible (24 page)

Water is trickling from Affinia East’s lobby now. Hundreds of people have no homes to go back to.

Invisible did this. He must have. This is all part of his bizarre system of punishments for the North Side, now that I’ve ruined his plans for their children. I remember a line from one of his videos:
Leveling the playing field.
This is how he’s going to do it—by leveling the city.

I move away from the two towers and run toward my own, all the while checking the skyline to make sure Fleet Tower is still standing.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Ten, fifteen, eighteen feet. It’s not even half a story, but it’s enough to destroy an entire building. Once the foundations go, so does the whole structure. Cracks crawl up walls. Pipes burst. Wires tangle; electrical innards combust. Buildings begin to smoke. Dust pours from the higher floors. The lower floors flood or buckle.

On the streets below us, people wrapped in blankets and robes race along the sidewalks, the adults all talking frantically on cell phones, making arrangements, getting into cars, driving away to summer homes, weekend homes. Hotels. Helicopters land on some of the structurally sound buildings, taking the wealthier families as far away from here as they are able.

People pack into their cars and drive off. I’ve been home less than an hour and already the traffic is at a near-standstill, cars honking endlessly, on all the streets in the neighborhood. As far as I can see in every direction from the penthouse windows, lines of cars crawl down the choked streets on their way out of town. Most of the residents of Fleet Tower have evacuated. We’ve watched them stream out of the building. Announcements have been blaring through the speakers:
For your own safety, evacuate immediately.
My father made the call. Directed the building manager to sound the alerts. It’s his flagship apartment building.

My mother and I quickly packed three bags for us. They sit by the door, waiting.

And yet, we haven’t budged.

Fleet Tower remains untouched, unsunk for now. And my father refuses to leave.

The only reason I’m still here and not already out there is that I need to know they’re leaving. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe they won’t die up here.

So far eleven buildings in the North Side, two of them just around the corner from Foxglove Court, have sunk.

And yet my father refuses to budge. And my mother is starting to lose what little sanity she may have had. No amount of Vivirax can cure the sense that we’re doomed.

We are on the terrace now, at 6:22
A.M.
All around us, buildings keep sinking. Not a lot, just enough to be ruined. There’s at least one on each block, sometimes two. Not ours, though. Not yet.

My mother plays the latest Invisible transmission again on the laptop, set on the white metal table next to the potted rosebushes. “Watch it, Harris. Really pay attention. This is not going to end just because you refuse to believe it’s happening!” She puts her hands on my father’s shoulders and physically turns him toward the video. I think what she’d really like to do is shake him.

“I don’t want to watch, Leenie. We’ve seen it already. They’re all the same, these
transmissions
.” He says the last word like it’s filthy.

“Too bad.” My mother crosses her arms. She’s come alive; deep in crisis mode might be the place she’s most comfortable. “You can’t strong-arm your way around this, Harris.”

My father looks at me as if I’ll give him permission to escape. I shrug, because what else is there to do but watch, either this or the chaos on the streets far below us. He sits down petulantly in a wrought-iron chair and stares as the static warms the screen. He’s wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. I’ve rarely seen my father look so rumpled and lost. His age is showing. Normally they both look so young. But their regimen of injections has been stalled lately with all the trouble in the city. His cheeks droop. The stubble on his chin is graying. A web of wrinkles around his eyes, on his forehead, deepens more every day. I have the horrible thought that we are about to die here and now, but I push it away. Worst-case scenario, I would grab them both and jump to the next building. I’ve done it before and lived, and I’m sure I could do it again. I’d take my mother across, then my father.

We will stay alive because of what I can do. But what about everyone else?

There have been reports on the news of people jumping from burning buildings. Six people have died already. Surely that number will only grow, unless I figure out what’s happening and put a stop to it.

Static lights up my mother’s laptop screen, and the dispatch begins. It’s all over the Internet, all over the news. Playing as if on an endless loop.

This time, seeing that white mask with the child’s marks for eyes and mouth fills me with more than just disgust and anger. My hands tingle at the sight of him. I imagine curling my fingers around his neck. The monotone sound of his computer-altered voice is so maddening, I have to walk to the edge of the balcony. I can’t look, I can only listen.

“Your buildings are sparkly and tall, but their foundations are rotten,” he says. “Soon we’ll all be on equal footing. All us fishes together, swimming in the same sea.” He threads his fingers together on the flag-draped desk. The mask moves. Underneath, he is probably smiling.

“He’s destroying the ground underneath. We need to leave now, Harris. Enough denial,” my mother hisses.

There’s a
crack-snap-thunk
across the street, and my father and I leap up and move to the rail of the balcony. My mother is beside me, her hands over her mouth. Eyes wide with horror.

Across the street is a shorter building, another Fleet project. Five years old. The Smithson. Thirty stories. And it’s being sucked into the earth. We watch, horrified, as it sinks several stories, faster than the other ones. A woman’s shrill scream rings out into the street. A minute later, my father stretches out his hand to the right. “It’s on fire.”

“That’s it,” my mother says. “Everyone inside, now.”

The sound of sirens is deafening. I need to get out of here. I need to help. But I have to convince my father to leave here first.

In the sitting room, my mother shuts the sliding glass doors to the terrace and locks them, a final-looking set to her mouth. “No more waiting. We are leaving. Right now.”

“Leenie, I won’t do it. I’ve worked too hard building Bedlam. I can’t abandon my buildings now.” My father crosses his arms, defiant.

“You care more about your buildings than you do about this family. Always have.” My mother’s voice is raised now, shaky with anger. “How will you feel if one of us dies up here?”

“Stop fighting!” I can’t listen to this anymore. “Dad, you need to listen to Mom.”

And then I walk toward the door while they’re still arguing.

By the marble statue of the griffin, there’s a small table with a notepad on it. I scrawl a quick note and impale the paper on the griffin’s claw.

Had to take care of something. Lets’ meet at the office at 4 p.m. Its’ on higher ground.

Love,

A

They’re still fighting on the terrace when I slip out the door.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Even with all the people out on the sidewalks, the sirens, dogs barking out their distress, the cars honking, something about the way the ground feels nags at me. I stop dead in my tracks, ignoring the smell of fire and burnt plastic and charred flesh in the air and trying to focus on the rumbling under my feet. Am I imagining it, or is the sidewalk under my shoes actually sinking too?

I decide to head toward the river. It’s the only way I can think of to measure the movement of the land.

Some corners are so crowded I have to walk in the gutters to get past. Families are huddled under awnings of every building, in the shade, looking anxiously at the cars. Helicopters hired to get people out of here keep landing on rooftops of the intact buildings. And all the while, people lean on their car horns. The North Side is a wall of sound.

I cover my ears, the better to focus on my feet. I think of Madame shouting at us to feel the bounce of the studio floor helping lift us as we worked on our
échappé sautés
. I wonder where she is now, if she got out or if she’s still holed up in her townhouse in the hills, wrapped in a shawl and watching all this out her window.

This morning, Zahra left for her aunt’s house in Eastern Exurbia. I’m sure Will’s family is long gone, probably via private helicopter like most Cathedral families. The people left here are less wealthy. The older people, those with small children, people caught unaware. And the ones who are stubborn, like my father.

My phone buzzes with a text from my mother:
Where are you???

I’m fine.
I write back.
Will meet you at the office in 2 hours.

Will this possibly work to calm her nerves?

Anthem. What is going on? Where are you?

She knows. She doesn’t want to know that she knows, but somewhere inside that Viviraxed, wine-soaked head, she knows who I am.

I needed to help out. Just trust me, I’m safe.

Even though I may not be, soon. Anything could happen out here. But I’ve got to take the risk. I owe it to Jax, to my father, to everyone out here, all these frantic faces, panicked and afraid for their lives.

A chill runs through me as I walk past the courthouse. There are at least a hundred people gathered on the steps, many of them the bandanna-clad protesters who are always camped out at Bankers Alley. They’re banging on the locked doors of the giant old building. They must see it as a safe place to gather for whatever’s coming.

Two blocks away, a line of riot police marches toward the courthouse. The sun glints off their helmets. I shiver at the knowledge of what’s probably about to occur, and I can almost taste the feargas they’ll use to disperse everyone. I do not want to be here when they arrive.

All the while, the ground keeps vibrating underfoot, like it’s alive. I move away from the courthouse and toward the docks, drawn there by nothing more than a bad feeling and the words bumping against my brain—
soon we’ll all swim in the same sea
. He could mean anything, or nothing. I head for the river anyway.

Everywhere, I scan the crowds for his face. As if he’s going to be walking among us. Which is ridiculous. Invisible may be blunt and an attention seeker, but he’s not incautious. I learned that at the scrap metal yard.

Just then the sludge-green mass of the river peeks out in my vision between two buildings. I dart into an alley, jump a low fence, and edge around an old warehouse toward the docks near the Bridge of Sighs, the fetid scent of the Midland hitting me in the face.

However crowded it was a few streets over, down here where there are fewer residential buildings, it’s quiet enough to hear the musical racket of birds in the trees. It’s startlingly loud. I peer up into a nearby elm and find hundreds of circus birds huddled in the inner branches, their neon yellow and blue feathers ruffling as they jump and squawk. It’s like they know something strange is happening.

I move toward the river, and then everything clicks into place. The water is high. Much higher than I’ve ever seen it. It laps up to the very top of the northern retaining wall—another few inches and it will flood, just like North Bedlam used to do thirty years ago, before my father repositioned the land, built it higher with all that landfill underneath. . . .

I stop short. Somehow, Invisible is readjusting things so that the North is returning to its original height. The landfill mass beneath the asphalt and concrete is sinking. The plan is to flood the North again. It must be.

I flash on a memory of a banquet I attended years ago with my parents. They were talking with an investor, a little old man, about the landfill. This was when I was seven or eight.

“All of it, garbage, under our feet.” The old man nodded. “Sturdy, for now.”

“Sturdy for
always
!” My father protested at the time, and the man said he hoped that was the case. At the time, I trusted my father. He built it, and it would stay that way forever. But I was wrong. The old man was right.

Invisible is somehow dissolving the landfill.

I stare down at the water sloshing against the side of the retaining wall, the stench of kerosene in the polluted river sharp as a slap.

I squint into it, suddenly certain I’m sinking slowly along with the earth itself. Then I turn back toward the crowds of the residential streets, and it dawns on me.

Why lower the level of the earth unless you also plan to raise the level of the river?

And how do you raise the level of the river? You break the dam at the reservoir. The dammed-up kidney-shaped lake at the eastern end of the Crime Line is the county water supply, holding all the water Invisible would need to flood the whole North Side and turn it into a wasteland like Lowlands—a place nobody wants to live.

If I’m right about what’s happening, it won’t be long before the dam opens up. And once the floods come—I walk faster now in the direction of the reservoir, into the thickets of people hurrying down the sidewalks, into the wall of noise made by the traffic—once the floods come, the casualties won’t be in the tens or even the hundreds. They’ll be in the thousands.

I hurry through downtown and into the banking district, threading my way through crowds of people hauling cardboard boxes from the office towers, their faces wild and scared. The line of cars snaking through the streets moves so slowly that the honking of horns forms a curtain of sound. A woman in a blue blazer and pajama pants holds an accordion file bursting with paperwork.

“Watch it,” she growls, pulling her folder close against her body.

“Sorry,” I say, and keep walking, jostling shoulders in the crowded sidewalk as I press forward, people all around me pushing and angling to get somewhere. Everyone’s face set with hard, tense determination. The atmosphere is starting to feel dangerous, like people might turn on one another at any moment. I wonder if this is what it felt like back when the riots happened, when I was a baby and just before.