Miranda

Miranda has made up her mind.

She does not know how long she’s spent in bed. It has felt like an eternity, an eternity parceled out into episodes of crying, episodes of trying to force herself into calmness, episodes of self-pitying abandon in which she drinks a shot or pops a pill and doesn’t feel anything. She must be drunk by now, but she can’t tell. Whatever it is that has happened to her, to everyone, it is not the kind of thing that can be patched up this way. It is bigger, and more frightening.

She doesn’t understand anything. She never did. All of the work she did was useless. Martin never cared about the heteropneums. He only cared about . . . whatever this is, this cataclysm. She remembers, with a jolt of vertigo, the view out the window: the Sphere is flying.

She remembers what Herm said: “It is a grave error, a sin, that we were brought here.” She understands more than ever how Herm felt then. Nothing about any of this feels right or natural or plausible: it is the stuff of a nightmare, or a surreal art film.

She has kept saying to herself, over and over: “I never understood anything.”

And now she is finally fed up with not understanding. She cannot sleep, so she will face the light of morning—which she can now see coming in through the window (that’s why the window is there, Christ, she never understood anything). She will try to understand, if not everything, then at least something.

She is going back to Free Pneumase Usage Room 1.

She opens the door and staggers into the corridor. She can tell her gait is swaying. She doesn’t care. She is a woman on a mission. The corridor moves by her as if by its own volition. She can’t stop now. After all, what does she have left to lose?

Out of the dormitory wing now, into the cul-de-sac. Boltzmen are threading their way into her mind but she is so focused she barely notices. She counts off the doors. Free Pneumase Usage Room 6. Then 5, then 4 . . .

She holds up her ID card, hesitates for a moment, reminds herself that she has nothing to lose, and swipes the card into the reader. The door to Free Pneumase Usage Room 1 opens.

It is still lit up like some sort of disco. Her head turns immediately toward the platform, where Martin and Maria are standing side-by-side still, as though no time has passed. Maria is still glowing in every color imaginable. Bits of her aura seem to have gotten unstuck from her, and float about the room as glowing rainbow motes. Getting a closer look at Maria, now, Miranda sees that she is different: her face bears some never-before-seen expression, and her open eyes are no longer their former brown. Her irises are now a deep violet, and they themselves glow, placing her eyes in fierce contrast with the rest of her face.

“Oh, Miranda,” Martin says, in a voice simultaneously cordial and full of ice.

“hello, miranda,” Maria says, in a voice not quite her own, a voice both small and loud, with a sort of hopeful tremolo. It is like no human voice Miranda has ever heard before.

Miranda stumbles up to the platform, places a foot on it, almost falls over, catches herself, and places the other foot on the platform. She walks toward the pair, one foot after the other foot, unafraid. As she gets close to Maria, she feels something welling up in her breast that she cannot describe.

“What . . .” she slurs, “. . . the fuck . . . is going on?”

Martin smiles. “The Sphere, my vessel, has risen from the sea to do what it was built to do. We are now directly over the New City.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means,” Miranda says.

“It means that Miranda’s reign is finally at an end,” Martin says.

“What?”

Maria has been staring straight forward the whole time, as if not hearing, but suddenly she turns and looks at Miranda with those piercing violet eyes.

“let me handle this,” she says to Martin. And steps forward, all benign sweetness, as if to pacify a misbehaving child . . .

“let’s be [friends], miranda.”

And then all of a sudden oh god oh god the rainbow is everywhere and she sees bugs or spiders or small creatures everywhere at the edge of her vision crawling and teeming and writhing and Maria is touching her shoulder and the touch feels like a million spiders and and and

and then she and Maria are together and they are one, dancing a dance where the lead and follow switch with each step, Maria-Miranda, Miranda-Maria, two names meant to fit into one another, and she sees in a flash a whole life’s worth of memories whirling

and she sees all the things that did not happen, the millions of fragmentary Marias that stood their ground bravely against heteropneum after heteropneum, the verdant sprawl of the summer

she sees Maria standing in the cul-de-sac, and Miranda hugs her and bends down and kisses her on the cheek but she doesn’t remember this because it never happened

and she sees sees sees and she knows Maria sees all of her too

and then the moment is over, the rainbow recedes, and she is standing apart, somehow just a lonely little worm of a soul again, next to the prince and princess of the incomprehensible frontier.

Maria steps back, an expression of dismay and confusion on her face. There is a long pause, or what feels like one. Miranda feels cold and lost and wishes she were in bed, falling like a dropped stone into the empty ocean of sleep.

Maria turns to Martin, and her glowing eyes paint his cheek purple.

“martin, i can’t do this anymore.”

“What?” Martin says blankly. “Is there a problem with the generator?”

“it’s not that. i don’t need it anymore. the reaction is self-sustaining now.

“it’s that i can’t trust you anymore. even though we are [friends]. i have seen you and i have been you, but i do not trust you.”

“What?”

“i’ve seen you, and i’ve seen james and miranda. you are different. the rest of us—we just want to live our lives. we trust what we can touch. you trust your ideas. you’ll sacrifice what’s in front of you, ruin lives, involve thousands of innocent people in your scheme—all for a hypothetical, far over the horizon.”

Miranda stares in awe. My girl.

“Maria, you don’t—you don’t know who she is.” Martin points at Miranda, gestures madly. “She’s a tyrant in this world. You haven’t seen her. You haven’t woken up every day of your life looking forward to the day her reign of terror ends. You don’t know you don’t know you don’t know—”

“i have been her [friend], martin, and all i see is a weary woman, and all i feel is [,,,,].”

“No you don’t you don’t you don’t know she’s a torturer you should see the things she does to children—”

Martin trails off, takes a few steps back, and puts his hands over his face. Miranda is surprised to feel a shock of pity run across her—Martin looks for all the world like a dismayed child, and he is a child, she thinks, he could well be in college, and instead he’s here, wherever here is . . .

“They told me,” Martin says, choking back a sob, “that there wouldn’t be any more strife after they arrived. That we wouldn’t have to . . . fight like this.”

“and that is the problem, martin. you build your schemes on assumptions like that. and the moment one assumption is removed, what is left of the scheme?”

Maria closes her eyes in concentration. Her aura contracts, slimming down to a thin pulsing film outlining her form. She opens her eyes, and they still glow, but they’re duller.

The genial voice of LUDWIG booms from the ceiling, breaking the mood. “Excuse me, but if I may interrupt this singular and remarkable meeting of minds and hearts with crude talk of mere material things, I feel you should all be apprised of the fact that there has been a precipitous downfall in energy collection, like the sudden strike of a famine in a formerly fortunate country, and too few among our crew now remain—”

“Oh just stop all this pretentious nonsense and get to the fucking point, LUDWIG!” Martin bellows.

“The point, my poor dear Martin, is a very sharp and dangerous one: we don’t have enough power to stay aloft.”

Martin turns to Maria in shock. “You mean you’re—you—”

“yes.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing—”

They all lurch. Miranda’s drunken brain swims with vertigo.

The Sphere has begun to fall out of the sky.