He’s not sure it fits.
June 21, 2031, First Day of Summer
The bodies are all broken.
Stuck in the ice, all the color drained from their skin. Once they saw the water coming, they tried to make it back to shore, but the waves were too fast. Too frigid, crests crystallizing as they arced through the air, trapping people in the glacial swell.
Ummi said they took a foolish risk, rushing toward the last supply boat, trying to get to it before it capsized and the grain was ruined anyway. “That kind of courage gets you killed,” she warned me. She didn’t add “sooner.” Gets you killed sooner.
But they took the risk for us. And now they’re like dead trees, limbs bent at nightmarish angles, breaking against the waves. And we are slowly starving. They lost their lives for nothing. Like so many others. Like all of us will.
The few who were still in the shallows made it back, toes and fingers blackened by frostbite, but alive. Or at least not yet dead.
But the others—the dumb, brave ones, the ones who were more athletic and rushed the ships—first the slushy depths grabbed them, slowed their movements through the viscous waters. Then came the waves. Relentless. One after the other, crashing over the ship and onto their stuck bodies. Not the normal waves we used to see in the dazzling, ferocious thunderstorms, which crashed against the rocks at three or four meters. No. These were monstrous. Tidal waves. In a lake too wide to see across. Perhaps this great landlocked sea is landlocked no more. Maybe those last lingering appendages of land that connected us to other states, other countries, are ash now; maybe that’s why the ocean rushed in. But there is no way for us to know. All we know now is what we can see, and our vision ends at the horizon. I’m too terrified to look any farther.
I pray that their eyes froze shut before they saw the wave that would kill them. But I’m too old now for fairy tales. Nearly an adult in this age that ended childhood.
I know they faced the horror of their death, eyes wide open.
I saw it all from our fortified tower.
I wonder if it will be the same for me and Ummi and sweet little Zayna. I can’t bear to think about Zayna, whose only real memories will be this, the after, and not the before, messed-up as it was.
Inshallah, may our end be fast and gentle, like falling into a dream. Because this world we’re living in is the nightmare.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 1 Saal 3027
The bodies are all broken.
And they are everywhere. Frozen in ice, half-buried, stop-motion hands in the air, lips blue, eyes open. They must have faced the end totally aware. Frost creeping up their immovable bodies but the synapses of their brains still firing. Still screaming.
Abba—whom I only call Salar while on mission (yes, it is strange to call my father “Commander”)—says the bombs fell and the clouds rose high into the atmosphere, hundreds of saal ago. Or longer. And here they all still are. Planted like the carcasses, like trees in a lake, limbs shattered by a storm, on this frozen dead planet. Preserved like fossils for us to find. Like a warning to show us how easy it is for a planet to fall.
On approach, the planet was beautiful, quiet, the blanket of snow and ice beginning to recede back to its poles, quietly revealing brown dirt, even tender buds of green dotting the landscape, waiting like a breath held in secret ready to exhale.
July 4, 2031
There are no fireworks today. No celebrations of our independence. People gathered briefly on the first terrace, where the swimming pool reeks of composting food and human waste. We pretend not to notice. Pretending helps. Long ago we salvaged and filtered what water we could. Not to drink—too much of a risk, since we couldn’t be sure what direction the wind had shifted the fallout—but for cleaning and washing and failed attempts at indoor gardening. That was a few months ago, when people still had hope in their eyes. And yet there must be echoes of faith and optimism, because the families left in the tower all came down to sit in a corner, consoled by the cold rays of the sun—at least the sun shone today—to trade stories. To reminisce. All of us, save the very youngest, like Zayna, know that nostalgia is dangerous. It keeps you looking backward at what you’ve lost and how things used to be, when we have to keep our eyes forward to try to make it another day.
Supplies are getting scarce. Ummi won’t tell me exactly how little is left; I know she is still trying to shield me from horrors. So she can feel like she’s doing her job as a mother. Her face betrays her, but I pretend not to notice. It’s a small gift I can give her.
Later I will climb the stairs of the tower again, as high as I can go without worry, twenty floors, to the apartment I have claimed as my own hideaway. All the families—the ones who stayed, the ones who were either too scared or too realistic to hope that traveling south would be a salvation, everyone who remained—live below the fifth floor. It’s safer and, honestly, it doesn’t make sense to try to make a home any higher. The higher you go, the more dead bodies you have to see on the lake. No one ventures to the shore anymore; we’re too scared of ghosts.
Is it strange that even with so few of us left in this once-teeming city, I need to be alone sometimes? I mean, we are so alone. No phones. No TV. Soon after the bombs, someone was clever enough to break into the Museum of Broadcast Communications to steal an old-fashioned radio, the kind that has a crank. The kind that doesn’t need batteries or electricity. That’s how we knew there were others who survived—that’s why some people tried their luck on the open road, heading south. There was a voice on the radio, and some people decided to trust it.
I’m glad we didn’t go. At least here, we salvaged part of our lives. There are people. This is home. And if Papa-ji is out there somewhere, this is where he would come to find us. But it’s been six months, and if he could’ve found food and weapons and if he could have survived the unbearably cold nights in the open air, he would have been here by now, even walking all the way from the East Coast.
Maybe that’s why I need to be alone. So I can believe. I have to believe. Magical thinking is the only thing that gets me out of bed.
Tonight I will walk back into this apartment that I’ve taken for myself—one that faces the lake and the pier—and close my eyes and pretend that there are bombs bursting in air in glittery pinks and blues, reds and greens, lighting up the night sky, to fill our eyes with wonder. Sentimentality can kill you. But we are all dying anyway. I still have my imagination. I still have a bare flicker of hope. And this is a small gift I can give to myself.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 2 Saal 3027
We have set up camp in the fields near the immense metallic bean that reflects our faces and the jagged broken towers they built into the sky. Abba said this was a place of gathering, perhaps worship—that its higher elevation and the wide stone platform on which it was mounted indicated reverence. That the sinuous low bridge that leads from these fields, snaking its way toward the shore, was meant for the masses and that the curlicued and bent-metal exoskeleton structure, which spans a distance nearly as large as our ship, would have been a place where music was heard, a place for the smiles and laughter of a people who did not realize how near their end was.