Cibola Burn

Chapter Thirty: Elvi

The storm front came, seeming slow at first—a tall purple-black churn higher than skyscrapers with only the slightest stirrings in the warm air to show that it was real—and then between one breath and the next, hit with the violence of a blow. Air and water and mud jetted through the windows, archways, and holes in the ruin like the stream from a firehose. It did not simply roar; it deafened. Elvi curled with her back against the wall of the ruin, her arms wrapped around her knees, and endured. The walls shuddered against her spine, vibrating with the hurricane gusts.

Across from her, Michaela had her hands over her ears, her mouth open in a shriek that Elvi couldn’t hear. She had thought the rain would be cold, but it wasn’t. The slurry that soaked up on the ruin’s floor was warm and salty, and somehow that was worse. She laced her fingers together, squeezing until her knuckles ached. The mud-thick water filled the air until the spray made it hard to breathe. Someone lurched through the archway to her left, but she could no more make out who than stop the catastrophe by willing it. She felt certain that the ruins would fail, the more-than-ancient walls snap apart, and she and all the rest of them would be thrown into the storm, crushed or drowned or both. All she could think of was being in the heavy shuttle, the confusion and the panic when it was going down, the trauma of the impact. This felt the same, but it went on and on and on until she found herself almost missing the sudden impact of the crash. That, at least, had ended.

She knew that it was daytime, but the only lights were the cold white of the emergency lights and the near-constant barrage of lightning that caught people’s faces like a strobe. A young man, his face set and stony like an image of suffering and endurance. A child no more than eight years old, his head buried in his mother’s shoulder. Wei and Murtry in uniform, standing as close as lovers and shouting into each other’s ears in the effort to be heard, their faces flushed red. The vast shifts of barometric pressure were invisible, but she felt them in the sense of overwhelming illness, of wrongness, that washed through her body. She couldn’t tell if the shaking came from the walls of the storm-battered ruins, more little earthquakes, or her own overloaded nervous system.

At some point, her perception of time changed. She couldn’t say if the storm had been hours or days or minutes. It was like the half-awareness of trauma, the doomed patience of being assaulted and knowing the only thing that would end it was the mercy of the attacker. Now and then, she would feel herself rising to some fuller consciousness, and will herself back into the stupor. Shock. Maybe she was going into shock. Her awareness seemed to blink in and out. She was curled against Fayez, both her hands squeezing at his elbow, and didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. The dark slurry of mud was ankle high all through the ruins, brown and green. She was covered in it. They were all covered in it.

When this is over, I’m going to go back to my hut, take a long bath, and sleep for a week, she thought. She knew it was ridiculous. Her hut would no more have withstood this than a match could stay lit underwater, but she still thought it and some part of her believed it was true. A blinding-bright flash and crackling detonation came almost simultaneously. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and endured.

The first change she noticed was a baby screaming. It was an exhausted sound. She shifted, her shirt and pants soaked and cold and adhering to her skin with the muck. She craned her neck, trying to find where the grating noise was coming from. She felt the thought shifting at the base of her skull before she knew what it was, a surreal lag between the realization and being conscious of it. She could hear a baby crying. She could hear something—anything—that wasn’t the malice and venom of the storm. She tried to stand up, and her legs buckled under her. Kneeling in the muck, she gathered herself, squared her shoulders, and tried again. The rain slanted in through the windows of the ruin, but only at about twenty degrees. It still fell in buckets out of a black sky. The wind gusted and pushed and howled. In any other context, it would have been the teeth of a gale. Here and now, it meant the worst was over.

“Doctor Okoye?”

Murtry’s face was lit from below, the emergency lantern hung over his shoulder. His expression was the same polite smile over sober, focused attention. Her battered mind wondered whether there was anything that could shake the man’s soul, and thought perhaps there wasn’t. She wanted to be reassured by his predictability, but her body wasn’t able to feel comfort. Not now.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” he said, his hand on her shoulder.

She nodded, and when he started to step away, she clutched at him. “How long?”

“The front hit a little over sixteen hours ago,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and turned back to the window and the rain. The lightning still played among the clouds and lanced down to the ground, but not so often now. The flashes showed her a transformed landscape. Rivers flowed where yesterday had been desert hardpan. The flowers, or what she thought of as flowers, were churned into nothing. Not even sticks remained. She couldn’t imagine how the mimic lizards could have survived. Or the birdlike animals she’d thought of as rock sparrows. She’d meant to go to the wash east of First Landing and collect samples of the pink lichen that clung in the shadows there. She wouldn’t get to now.

The sense of loss was like a weight on her throat. She had glimpsed an ecosystem unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, a web of life that had grown up apart from anything she had known. She and her workgroups had been the only people ever to walk in that garden. And now it was gone.

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.

She wept quietly, her tears indistinguishable from the rain.

“Well, there’s something I wasn’t expecting,” Holden said. She turned to look at him. The dimness of the ruins rendered him in monochrome. He was a sepia print of James Holden. His hair was plastered back, clinging to his head and the nape of his neck. Mud streaked his shirt.

She was too tired to dissemble. She took his hand in hers and followed his gaze toward the back of the ruins. His hand was solid and warm in hers, and if there was some stiffness and hesitation in it, at least he didn’t flinch away.

Carol Chiwewe and four other squatters were bailing the storm muck out the window with stiff plastic utility panels, streaks of green-brown staining the pale gray. Behind them, twenty or thirty of the squatters from First Landing were clumped in groups, huddled together under blankets. RCE security moved among them with bottles of water and foil-packed emergency rations. Fayez and Lucia were standing together, talking animatedly. Elvi couldn’t make out the words.

“I don’t see it,” she said. “What weren’t you expecting?”

He squeezed her fingers and let go of her hand. Her palm felt colder without his in it.

“Your security people helping the Belters,” he said. “I guess nothing brings people together like a disaster.”

“That’s not true,” Elvi said. “We would always have helped. We came out here planning to help. I don’t know why everyone thinks that we’re so awful. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, and she started weeping in earnest. She felt oddly distanced from her grief, as if she were watching it from the outside, and then Holden put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt the pain. For a time, it washed her away. Flooded her. Three lightning strikes came close by, loud and bright and sudden, the thunder from them rolling away in the distance.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she could say anything. “There’s just been… so much.”

“No, I should apologize,” Holden said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel worse. It’s just…”

“I understand,” she said, reaching for his hand again. Let him laugh at her. Let him turn her away. She didn’t care now. She just wanted to be touched. To be held.

“Hey, Cap,” Amos said, looming up out of the darkness. He had a clear plastic poncho over his shoulders, the hood straining to fit the thick neck. “You going to be all right for a while?”

Holden stepped back, retreating from her. She felt a brief, irrational flash of rage toward the big man for intruding. She bit her lip and scowled up at him. If he noticed, he gave no sign.

“I don’t actually know how to answer that question,” Holden said. “I don’t see any reason I’d die right away. That’s about the best I’ve got.”

“Beats the alternative, anyway,” Amos said. “So that Dahlke family that didn’t make it here before the shit hit the fan? Yeah, some of us are gonna go have a looksee.”

Holden scowled. “You sure that’s a good idea? It’s still pretty bad out there. And this is more water than I’m guessing this place has seen in ever. There’ll be a lot of flooding, and there’s no good way to get help out if something goes south.”

“They had a little girl,” Amos said. The two men exchanged a long look that seemed to carry the weight of some earlier conversation. Elvi felt like a stranger watching two family members communicate in the half-code of long familiarity.

“Be careful,” Holden replied after a long moment.

“That ship may have sailed, but I’ll do what I can.”

Wei walked toward them. She’d taken off her armor, but she still had an automatic rifle strapped to her back. She nodded at Amos. “I’ve got a couple more who want to tag along.”

“Don’t matter to me if it don’t matter to you,” Amos said. Wei nodded. There was a darkness in her eyes that seemed to echo Amos’.

Elvi looked over. A half dozen other people were struggling into the same kind of poncho Amos wore. In the dimness and the wreckage, it was hard to tell which of them were squatters and which were RCE. Even Belters and Earthers were hard to differentiate now. Elvi didn’t know if that was an artifact of the darkness or if some deeper part of her brain was changing her perceptions, making anything human into something like her. Minds could be tricky that way.

Among them, she caught a glimpse of Fayez and her mouth went coppery with sudden fear. “Wait,” she said, hopping across the space. “Fayez, wait. What are you doing?”

“Helping out,” he said. “Also, getting out of this sardine can. I’ve gotten used to having a couple feet of social distance. Just being around all these people stresses me out.”

“You can’t. It’s dangerous out there.”

“I know.”

“You stay here,” she said, grabbing at his poncho and tugging it up, trying to get it back over his head. “I can go.”

“Elvi,” he said. “Elvi! Stop it.”

She had a double handful of plastic sheeting in her fingers. It was already wet.

“Let them go,” she said. “They’re professionals. They can take care of this. We… people like us…”

“We’re past us and them at this point. We’re just people in a bad place,” Fayez said. And then a moment later, “You know what I am, Elvi.”

“No. No, you’re a good man, Fayez.”

He tilted his head. “I meant that I’m a geologist. It’s not like they need me to talk about plate tectonics. What were you thinking?”

“Oh. Ah. I just…”

“Come on, Professor,” Wei said, tapping Fayez on the arm. “Time to go for a walk.”

“How can I refuse?” Fayez said, gently taking the plastic sheeting out of Elvi’s hands. She stood watching as six of them walked together toward the entrance. Amos, Wei, Fayez, and three of the squatters—no, two squatters and Sudyam—one-use chemical lanterns glowing in their hands. They walked out into the gale. She stood at the window, ignoring the rain that soaked her. Amos and Wei took the lead, their heads down, their ponchos blowing out behind them. The others followed close behind, clustered like ducklings. The night around them was black and violent, and they moved into the downpour, growing fainter with every minute until she couldn’t make them out at all. She stood there a while longer, her mind empty and exhausted.

She found Lucia and Jacek in one of the larger chambers. Two Belters were struggling to place a wide plastic panel over one of the windows to block the rain now that the wind wasn’t so violent that it would simply shatter. A half dozen others were scraping out the muck. They’d already done so much work, Elvi could see pale strips of the ground. Everywhere people were sleeping, curled into and against each other. The sound of the storm was still enough to drown out their moans. Or most of them.

Lucia looked up at her. The woman seemed to have aged a decade, but she managed a smile. Elvi sat down beside her. They were both covered in salt mud, and the muck was starting to reek a little. Putrescence or something like it. All the small life forms living in the planet’s great ocean that had been broken and thrown to the sky, starting to decay. It broke her heart to think of the scale of the death that surrounded them, so she didn’t.

“Can I help you?” Lucia said.

“I came to ask the same thing,” Elvi said. “Tell me what I can do.”

The long, terrible night went on, the rain slackening only slightly. No light came through the clouds. No rainbows promised that the disaster was ended. Elvi moved from one group to another, talking and checking. Some were the squatters, some were RCE. All had the same stunned expressions, the same sense of amazement that they were still alive. The scent of the muck was getting richer and more pungent as whatever organic structures it had held broke down. Elvi hated to imagine how the world would stink when the last of the rains fell and the sun came back to warm the landscape. That was a problem for another time.

She didn’t notice it when she fell asleep. She’d been at the window, looking out in hopes of catching a glimpse of the search party’s return. She remembered very clearly hearing Holden’s voice behind her and a woman replying to him. She’d meant to turn back, find him, ask if she could help. If she could do something to stay in motion, to keep from thinking or feeling for another hour more. But instead she woke up.

For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Her exhaustion-drunk mind tried to make the close quarters into her cabin on the Israel, as if she were still on the journey out to New Terra. As if none of this had ever happened. Then the present reasserted itself.

She was in the corner of a smaller chamber. Eight other people were stretched out on the damp ground around her, heads pillowed by their arms. Someone was snoring, and a body was pressed up against hers. Lightning stuttered in the distance, and she saw the body beside hers was Fayez. The thunder came a long time later, and softly. Then there was only the patter of rain. She touched his shoulder, shaking him gently.

He groaned and shifted, the poncho still on him crackling with the motion. “Well, good morning, Doctor Okoye,” he said. “Imagine meeting you here.”

“Is it?”

“Is it what?”

“A good morning.”

He sighed in the dark. “Honestly, I don’t even think it’s morning.”

“Did you find them?”

“We didn’t find anything.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean we didn’t find anything at all. The huts are gone. First Landing’s gone. The mine pit’s gone or else the landmarks are so different we couldn’t find it. The roads are gone.”

“Oh.”

“You know those pictures you see of a natural disaster where there’s nothing but mud and rubble? Imagine that without the rubble.”

Elvi lay back down. “I’m sorry.”

“If we only lose them, it’ll be a miracle. We managed to get a signal through to the Israel. The atmospheric data make it look like we’ll be going without a sunrise for a good long time. No one said the words ‘nuclear winter,’ but I think it’s safe to say things aren’t going to be business as usual around here for a nice long while. We’ve got the battery power we carried in with us, but no hydroponics. Only as much fresh water as the chemistry deck will pump out. I was hoping that some of the storage buildings might have made it. They were pretty well built, some of them.”

“Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.”

“I admire your psychotic optimism.”

“I’m serious. I mean look at us all. You went out with Amos and Wei and the locals. We’re all here together. Working together. We’re taking care of each other. Maybe this is what it takes to resolve all the violence. There were three sides before. There’s only one side now.”

Fayez sighed. “It’s true. Nothing points out shared humanity like a natural disaster. Or a disaster, anyway. Nothing on this mudball of a planet’s even remotely natural if you ask me.”

“So that’s a good thing,” she said.

“It is,” Fayez agreed. And then a moment later, “I give it five days.”