Mrs. Thompson collected the wrappers and boxes and empty cans from the safe room and brought them upstairs to recycle. Together the two families looked out at what was left of the courtyard. The white walls of the house were cracked. All the windows were blown out, and the courtyard was full of shattered glass. The Thompsons’ flowering trees were gone, drowned in the sprinkler pool. Beyond the house, the lush green neighborhood was almost bare; scarcely a leaf remained on the trees or other plants.
The Thompsons asked Honor’s parents to stay, but Will and Pamela were anxious to get home and see what had happened there. Mrs. Thompson asked if they wanted to leave Honor while they went to check.
“No, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Honor’s mother.
“I don’t know if the buses are running,” Honor’s father pointed out. “It might be hard for us to get her back.”
Slowly, the three of them made their way down a road now choked with mud and branches. Orderlies were clearing away piles of twisted metal, shattered glass. Rain fell softly as the family waited for their bus home. “We should put buckets out to collect the rain,” Honor’s father told Pamela. “I don’t know if we’ll have running water.”
“Then we should have stayed with Daniel and Clara,” Honor’s mother said.
“No, we might need to make repairs,” said Will.
“If the house is still above water,” Pamela said.
SIX
“IT’S STILL HERE!” HONOR SHOUTED.
The town house was still there, barely. Water coursed down the terraced hillside, and the lower town houses were submerged in soupy muck. Palm trees lay flat, with their fronds splayed out on the ground. Shattered glass and bits of furniture littered the hillside. Honor saw the leg of a baby doll in the mud.
The Greenspoons were lucky. Their row of houses stood intact. The roofs had not blown off. All the walls were standing. Some of the neighbors had lost their front doors, but the Greenspoons’ door was still shut tight. When Will opened the door, a small rivulet of water rushed out, but the water was only ankle deep on the first floor.
All around them the neighbors were dragging rugs out of their houses. They draped the sopping rugs over metal fences in hopes that they would dry when it stopped drizzling. They carried wet pillows from their houses and wrung them out. There was no electricity. The garbage orderlies had not come, and flies were gathering at the community garbage bins. First the flies were ordinary and black, then bigger flies came, heavy flies the size of bees. And finally strange flies with iridescent eyes swarmed the garbage. Their eyes glowed green and blue and red. The stench of spoiling food filled the air. Rats feasted, tugging and clawing, fighting over scraps. The neighborhood watchtower had fallen, and orderlies were busy building it up again. Without the Watcher, the neighborhood felt wild and lost. A dog swam in the empty lot where Honor used to play with the neighborhood girls. School was closed.
Honor and her parents took brooms and pushed water out the front and back door. They mopped their soaking tiled floor.
“You see, it’s a good thing we never got a carpet,” Will pointed out.
“Neighborhood Watch,” announced Mr. Pratt at the door. Mr. Pratt was wearing rubber boots and a rubber raincoat too. He held his flashlight as usual, even though it was broad daylight. “Everyone accounted for?”
“Yes, sir,” said Will.
“We didn’t see you in the shelter,” said Mr. Pratt.
“We were visiting friends on the hillside,” said Pamela, “and we couldn’t get home.”
“We’ll need names, times, dates.” Mr. Pratt took a white form out of his raincoat pocket. “And you’ll initial here”—he pointed to a line on the form—“and here”—he pointed to another place. “And you’ll sign here.”
“All that just for the night?”
“Yes, unless you want an unexcused absence,” said Mr. Pratt. He added, “Three of our neighbors have returned to the earth.”
“Shh.” Pamela stuck her mop in a bucket and drew closer to Honor.
“Five are still missing,” Mr. Pratt said. “We are volunteering this afternoon to search.”
“Is there still a chance?” Will asked.
“We’d like to find the bodies,” said Mr. Pratt bluntly. “No one wants a watery grave.”
A watery grave. Honor couldn’t stop thinking about those words. If water swept you off, then you were no place. If water sucked you under, then how could anyone ever find you? The ocean would erase your name.
At night Honor listened to the wind and couldn’t sleep. The wind sounded different now that all the trees were down. The wind howled, no longer rustling gently in the palms.
After three days, school opened again. Big striped tents stood as temporary classrooms on the Upper Field. For many weeks Honor went to school in a tent. Orderlies were working night and day to repair the school buildings.
“There is something I must tell you,” Mrs. Whyte announced to the class the first day back. “During the storm there was a great deal of damage. Our pianos were flooded.”
Honor could not help smiling at this. She did not like playing the piano in music class. She would get distracted and forget to count, so that when all the girls were playing together, she came in at the wrong time and stuck out.
“Miss Blessing has ordered new pianos for us,” said Mrs. Whyte, glaring at Honor. “We will have extra music time when they arrive. There is something else I must tell you. Something we must all Accept.”
The girls bowed their heads and tried to look accepting, as they had been taught.
“The storm smashed our aquarium. Our octopus is gone, but he is probably Safe. He is a tree octopus from the forest and he can breathe outside the water. However, I am sorry to tell you that all of our beautiful classroom fish have returned to the earth.”
The girls gasped. Helena and Harriet V. began to cry. They were still sniffling when the class lined up to go outside for archery.
“I can’t believe it,” said Helena.
“Returned to the earth,” said Harriet V.
Honor shook her head at the two of them. “Don’t be ridiculous. Fish come from the water,” she told them. “Fish can’t return to the earth. They go to a watery grave.”
The other girls stared at her in horror. Helena and Harriet V. cried harder.
At the head of the line Mrs. Whyte folded her arms and gazed at Honor. “Are you making light of what we must Accept?” she asked at last.
Honor shook her head.
“No?” demanded Mrs. Whyte.
“No,” said Honor.
After Honor and her class returned to their regular room, they practiced storm drills every week. Mrs. Whyte blew her whistle once to practice for regular storms, and all the children crouched down under their desks. The teacher blew the whistle twice for hurricanes, and the children lined up and hustled to the storm shelter underground. They walked quickly, but they didn’t run, and Mrs. Whyte timed them with her stopwatch. Honor’s class learned the science of lightning, floods, earthquakes, forest fires, and especially tsunamis. On the first day of each month an air raid siren sounded, a wail everyone could hear all over the island. That siren tested the tsunami warning system. If there were a real tsunami, the siren would warn everyone on the island to run for high ground.
Honor’s class watched films of what tsunamis had done to islands in the past. The films were old, but they were terrifying. Palm trees flailed like grass; waves of water rose so high they smashed all the houses before them. Dead bodies lay puffed up on the beaches.
Something changed in Honor when she saw those films. For the first time she began to understand why New Weather was important. For the first time she understood what Earth Mother was up against. If people did not join hands to secure the world against the storms and seas, then there was no hope. If Enclosure failed, then the last islands would go under. Now history and geography began to mean something to Honor. Now, strangely, she had no trouble reciting
from her history text.
“The Flood destroyed the ancient world,” Honor recited to the class. “Where there were continents, only islands are left. Where there were archipelagos, only mountainous islands remain. After the Flood, and the wars that followed, Earth Mother organized the Great Evacuation to the remaining islands in the Tranquil Sea. Then the Earth Mother rose up and spoke. ‘What is freedom? What is choice? Words and only words. We need Safety. We need shelter from the elements. Without shelter all other words are meaningless.’ Earth Mother pledged to Enclose the Polar Seas. She pledged to establish New Weather in the North and reclaim the islands there, one by one. Finally, she pledged to make a new world in the islands of the Tranquil Sea, islands She numbered and named the Colonies.”
Honor stood before the class and recited these words perfectly. Mrs. Whyte beamed at her and applauded. Seeing that, all the girls in their seats clapped their hands as well.
“I’m proud of you,” said Mrs. Whyte.
Honor flushed with happiness.
“Today you’ve come prepared.”
This was true. Honor had studied diligently. But the real reason she recited so well was that the passage was not just words to her. After the storm, she understood her schoolbooks as she had never understood before. She believed them.
When Honor saw films in school, she had nightmares. She dreamed of those dead bodies with white puffy skin and bulging eyes. She dreamed of a wave so tall it rose as high as her own house. She struggled, but she couldn’t run. She couldn’t breathe. There was no escape.
“I don’t want to drown,” she cried to her father in the night.
“You aren’t going to drown,” he said.
“I want to move,” she sobbed.
Her mother held her. “We will. We will,” Pamela said. “We’ll move as soon as we can.”
“There’s a warning system on every watchtower,” her father reassured her. “Sirens would sound and then buses would come and drive us to the mountains.”
Honor gazed out the window into the great black night. “But what if the wave is Unpredictable?”
“Come with me,” Will said. He took her by the hand and led her downstairs in her nightgown.
“No, Will,” Pamela whispered. There was a curfew in the Colonies for Safety Measures. No one was allowed outside past hour eight. “It’s after nine,” she said.
“I don’t care,” he told her.
“She’s too young.”
“She’s ten years old, Pamela.”
“She isn’t ready.” Pamela stood near the door, almost blocking Will.
“She needs to know,” he said.
“Will!”
But he took Honor and brushed right past Pamela into the night.
Honor was afraid. Her father’s mood frightened her. She had never seen him oppose her mother like that. “Where are we going?”
“Shh.” Will rushed her through the unlit gravel lot in front of the town houses and gestured for her to follow him.
Since they’d moved to the island, Honor had never been outside after dark. The night was warm and sticky but mild, as if the sun had stopped to take a breath. The air was gentle on her face and shoulders. She wanted to look everywhere at once—at the stray cats scampering in their path, at the shining stars, the round moon so much brighter than she remembered. She’d heard from the neighbor kids what a bad place the moon was; that was where the worst people went, the crazy ones who didn’t fit. They had to live on the cold dusty moon in the lunatic asylum. “How can the moon be so pretty?” she asked her father. She had never expected it to shine so bright.
“It’s an overlay,” her father said.
“What’s an overlay?”
“A light show,” whispered her father. “The Corporation projects a moon and stars onto the sky above each city. They aren’t natural.”
“They’re perfect,” Honor protested. The stars sparkled. She wanted to touch all seven of them where they shone in a circle around the silver moon. “Can I look at them? Please?”
But Will was in a rush and didn’t answer. He glanced often at the tall watchtower, almost rebuilt. Any day now, Watchers would return to guard the neighborhood.
Will hurried Honor all the way down to the danger zone fenced off near the shore. He lifted a piece of sagging barbed wire so that Honor could climb inside the barriers.
“We’re going in there?” Honor asked, astonished. “But it’s Not Allowed!”
“Come on,” he said.
“We’ll get hurt!” She pointed to the red DANGER signs posted.
“You know I’ll keep you safe,” Will told her. She hesitated. “You still trust me, don’t you?”
She scrambled under the fence and he got down on his hands and knees and crawled after her.
Then she was terrified. She heard the sucking of the sea, the great dark mass of water and the crash of waves. She would have turned and run if her father hadn’t held her. She thought she might be sick. She had sailed over the ocean to the island on a Corporation ship, but on the EMS Serenity, no one was allowed on deck. All the passengers had stayed safe inside. Before that trip she had traveled everywhere with her parents in little boats, but she had not known then what she knew now.
Honor’s bare feet touched scratchy sand. Dry sea grass tickled like insects on her legs. The ocean swelled nearer and nearer. She almost screamed.
“No noise,” Will said.
“I want to go home,” she cried as Will half carried her to the water’s edge.
“Not yet,” her father said.
She closed her eyes and buried her head in his chest. “Look,” he told her. “I want you to look.”
“No,” she pleaded.
“I’m right here.”
“But the waves,” she said. She was trembling with fear. The water was going to swallow her up. Without realizing it, she began to pray. The words came rapidly as she had been taught in school. “Hail Mother, full of grace, the earth is with you, the sea is with you, the storms sink down before you . . . Teach us your ways, Mother, lead us and guide us . . .”
“Stop that!” Honor’s father set her down and shook her hard by the shoulders.
Honor opened her eyes in shock.
“Never pray to her.”
“Don’t you believe in Earth Mother?” Honor asked.
“No, I don’t,” said Will.
“Don’t you believe she’s real?”
“Oh, she’s real, all right,” said Will. “But I don’t worship her. I don’t trust her.”
Honor shrank back. “My teacher says Earth Mother is everywhere.”
“Everywhere we allow her to be,” said Will. “Don’t you see? When you pray to her the Corporation controls you.”
Honor did not see. She shook her head.
“Use your head, Honor. Use your eyes. Do you want Enclosure to Enclose you?”
“I want to be safe.”
“Yes, Earth Mother’s Corporation is counting on that. As long as you want to be safe, they win. They get to decide how many children families have and what those children will be called and where they go to school and what they think. They get to choose where people live and what people buy and wear. They control what people read. They try to control the weather. There are islands out there you can’t see.” Will pointed to the dark water. “Hundreds of islands like this one. Some are populated. Some are experimental islands for farming and for growing food. And some hold Weather Stations. Our regional Weather Station is on Island 364. The computers there run the clocks and the hourly broadcasts. They store all of our security information. Names, ages, job and school selection, possible criminal activities. The Corporation keeps data on all of us. Data on recycling patterns, food supply. The goal is to manage everyone.”
“No—the goal is to manage storms.” Honor was trying to get away from the water. She was pulling with all her might, but her father held her by the wrist.
“The world is big,” he told her. “Weather is co
mplicated. Do you really think the Corporation should control it all? Do you want regulated skies and filtered light? Do you want every day to be the same as the one before?” He pointed at the ocean. “Don’t you see how lovely water is? The Corporation is an overlay like the seven stars and the moon,” he whispered in Honor’s ear. “Enclosure covers the Polar Seas, but she hasn’t covered the Northern Islands yet. Not at all. Why do you think everyone is still living in the Colonies? Why do you think the Corporation retrieved us and brought us here? Because the Northern Islands aren’t ready. They aren’t safe. She’s got these islands the way she wants them. She’s got everyone living under her control, but she hasn’t got the wild places. She hasn’t even got the other side of this island. She hasn’t got the whole world ceiled yet. Not the half of it.”
Together they looked out at the water. The ocean was huge and black in the distance, but up close on the sand the rippling waves looked silvery and clear. The sea was calm. There were no big waves, just little ones.
Will bent down and trailed his hand in the foam. “Touch the water,” he said.
“It’s Unsafe.”
“No,” Will said. “It’s beautiful.” He scooped up wet sand and water and poured it over her hands.
She began to cry. Her father’s ideas were dangerous. To call the wild ocean beautiful was crazy. To say don’t pray to Earth Mother—people who spoke like that got taken. They disappeared and never came back.
“Is this water going to hurt you?” Will asked.
“Let me go home.”
“Is this water going to hurt you?” he demanded.
The warm wet sand felt thick and sticky. She was afraid she couldn’t get it off. She stumbled back toward the fence and stepped on something sharp. She thought it was a stone.
Her father picked up the sharp object as they walked home. He picked up another and another. “These are broken shells,” he said. “You can dig with them, or you can just collect them and take them home.”
They were hurrying back to their house now. With each step, Honor felt a little safer. Her heart began to calm.