Page 32 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

Chapter 16 Cora, Fortune

Approximately eleven thousand years ago, Cora had been nine years old, and she’d learned very fast that buildings weren’t permanent objects. She’d never been to raft eighteen, and after the night of March 22, she never would. Earthquakes were an everyday thing, and they usually weren’t a big deal in the Berth, because that was the entire point of a floating city. But that quake . . . that quake had made everybody understand that the crater holding the Berth was just a little cup of water balanced on the pudding skin of a planet that hadn’t really thickened up yet.

Power was out everywhere. Everything was broken, or flooded, or both. Some buildings cracked. Some fell. Enough of them came down on raft eighteen that the raft itself couldn’t stay afloat anymore and began pulling down the other rafts around it. The call was made to decouple raft eighteen, which was apparently something somebody in some office could do with the press of a terrible button. Every ferry and cargo ship in the Berth had hauled ass in the middle of the night toward the sinking, creaking wreck of a neighborhood, trying to grab as many breathing bodies as they could.

The phrase grown-ups used a lot in the days after was They did their best.

Nine-year-old Cora had understood that a very bad thing had happened somewhere else, but a tangible grasp of somewhere else is shaky when you’re nine. What she was focused on was how very bad things were in her immediate surroundings. The scene in Heartwise House that night was chaos. All the kids who lived there—especially the littles—were freaked entirely out. The lights wouldn’t stay on. The aunts, uncles, and auntcles were running around trying to fix stuff, find stuff, bandage stuff. Everybody was yelling and crying, grown-ups included. Nobody seemed to know what was going on.

Then other kids started to show up. Literal boatloads of kids, sobbing and dirty, screaming for parents who couldn’t hear them anymore. Except some of them didn’t scream. Some of them were so messed up they didn’t make a sound, and one of them—Peter, his name was—he never talked again. A lot of the new kids were only at Heartwise for a few hours, maybe a few days, until the survivor lists got posted. Once that happened, a stream of relatives—even parents, for a lucky few—came to pick up their kiddos and take them elsewhere.

But some of those kiddos didn’t get picked up. Five stayed at Heartwise. One of them was Twig.

So much of that night was a screaming haze for Cora now, but her memory of meeting Twig was sharp as starlight. Cora had been in her pajamas, standing stock-still in the front hallway, not sure of what she should do. Technically, she was supposed to be sheltering in place in the safe room, in case there were aftershocks, but she was a big kid, and she understood that in an emergency, everybody has to help out. That was what grown-ups always said and did. In an emergency, everybody has to do their part. But Cora didn’t know what her part was, so she just stood there in the hallway, watching the aunts and uncles and auntcles try to deal with what looked like five hundred crying kids (it was thirty-six, she later learned).

As the lights continued to gutter and the kids continued to wail, Aunt Maisie placed a baby in Cora’s arms.

“I need you to look after this one,” Aunt Maisie said. “Can you do that?”

Cora hadn’t had a clue of what to say. She was nine. Nine-year-olds did not take care of babies. That was a grown-up job. But the grown-ups were frantic, and rafts could sink, and buildings could break, and some of those kids had blood on their clothes, and Cora had been woken up by the world shaking so hard she thought it was gonna tear itself apart. Would her raft sink? Would they have to move to a new one? Fortune was a dangerous place, she knew, but the Berth had been built to keep people safe. What was safe now? Was nowhere safe? And why was she holding a baby?

Aunt Maisie crouched down to Cora’s height, tipping her head lamp away in a kinder angle. “I need you to take her somewhere quiet and just hold her, okay? If she starts crying a little, walk around with her. Bounce her up and down gently. If she starts crying a lot, come back to me. But I need to help these other kids right now, and I know you’re responsible enough to do this. I’ll come get her once things settle down. Okay?”

Cora swallowed. Part of her wished she was a little kid right then. She wanted someone to carry her, too. She wanted to be held. She wanted to cry. But she had been deemed not only a Big Kid, but a Responsible Kid, and the rush of that promotion conquered any other want. She looked down at the round, ash-smudged face wreathed in a blanket stamped with the rescue squad logo. Somehow, impossibly, the baby was asleep.

Cora gave Aunt Maisie a solemn nod. Yes. Of course. She would do her part.

Aunt Maisie kissed Cora on the forehead and gave her a head lamp of her own. It was a little big, but Aunt Maisie pulled the elastic band snug. Cora had never felt so important in her entire life.

The movie room was both close by and quiet, and it was a nice place to be, when the lights were on. It was painted like a forest on Earth—the sort of place they might all go to one day, if the colony worked hard enough. She set the baby down on one of the floor cushions, then got to work dragging a bunch of the others into a heap in the corner. The faces of the Earth animals painted on the walls were kind of scary in the dark, even though they weren’t normally scary. With that in mind, Cora chose the corner by the tree full of birds, which was her favorite part of the painting. She loved the Primer movies of motley birds flying through a cloudless sky. She thought that flying looked real fun.

As Cora picked the baby back up, she told herself that obviously, she didn’t think the painted animals looked scary in the dark. She just thought the baby might be scared. She wasn’t scared of paintings. That would’ve been dumb. Cora wasn’t a baby. She was nine.

Cora cuddled up with the baby under a blanket, both of them cradled in the stack of cushions. She held the baby real close and cozy. She used the crook of her arm to support the back of the baby’s head, which she was pretty sure was important to do. She kissed the baby’s forehead like Aunt Maisie had done to her, and she said, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

After a while, Cora fell asleep, too.

A shapeless amount of time later, Aunt Maisie woke her up. The lights had stopped flickering. The crying in the background had lessened. Aunt Maisie told Cora she’d done an amazing job and that she was very, very proud of her. She said that Uncle Jim had made hot chocolate for everybody, if Cora wanted to take a cup back to bed (a fantastic offer, in Cora’s mind; anything other than water in bed was not normally allowed).

Cora handed the baby to Aunt Maisie, and with that, the baby woke up. Suddenly, she wasn’t a cozy little bundle anymore. Suddenly, she was red and mad and screaming.

“Is she okay?” Cora said, startled by the shift. “Did I hurt her?”

“No, sweetie,” Aunt Maisie said, putting the angry baby flat against her shoulder as she led Cora out of the room. “Babies just do this.”

School was canceled the next day. All the kids had to take turns going to the counselors to talk about their feelings, and when Cora was done with that, she was told she could do anything she liked until dinnertime. Cora went to the nursery. Aunt Maisie and Aunt Sarah were talking about something real serious, but they both shut up and smiled when Cora walked in. Grown-ups did that a lot.

“Is the baby okay?” Cora asked.

“She’s doing great,” Aunt Maisie said. She took Cora over to one of the cribs to see.

The baby was, again, asleep.

Cora paused before she asked the question everybody at Heartwise wondered whenever a new kid showed up. “Is somebody gonna come get her?”

“We don’t know,” Aunt Maisie said. “But we’re gonna take good care of her, however long she’s here.”

Cora didn’t know if it was better to get picked up or to stay. She’d been four when she had been brought to Heartwise. As far as she was concerned, this was all there was, and all there was was pretty good. There were movies. There were games. There was hot chocolate, sometimes. But the new kids were really sad and still freaking out, and Cora worried that maybe the baby was, too. “Can I help take care of her?” she asked.