Even her watch was broken. Sometimes light flitted across its spider-cracked surface, but nothing coherent or intelligible. Just blurs. And her specs hadn’t lasted two minutes. All she had to her name were the clothes that had helped break her fall, and the photos Sunny had given her.
She was going to die here, probably. She had one working hand and one working leg. Every time she tried to sit up, she puked. She searched her vomit for blood, but it was hard to focus. And there wasn’t much light. Just one single fluorescent coil.
This was the way she would have always gone out, she decided. She used to climb those elevator shafts like they were playground equipment. It was a dumb thing to do. Arrogant. She’d thought that just because she’d never had a bad fall that she never would. But now it was her turn. Her number had come up. She’d rolled snake eyes. Aces and eights. There was really no end to the list of appropriate metaphors, except there was no metaphor for falling down an elevator shaft during a terrorist attack and dying alone surrounded by your mom’s old clothes.
She made a nest for herself.
She slept.
Sleeping was good.
It preserved oxygen.
*
She kept pressing the emergency call button. Nothing.
She kicked with her good leg at the walls of the elevator. Miners did that, when they were trapped in a cave-in. They had to read passages from a book on the subject in French class. Germinal. That was the name. At one point the men started eating pieces of leather belt and shoe to feel full. Hwa wondered if it would get that far, with her. She hoped not.
She kept kicking.
*
The light started to die. Whatever source it had been attached to, it was no longer attached. So she had to do the thing she’d been avoiding. Because doing it meant that things were well and truly over. That her days were numbered.
She pulled out the envelope Sunny had given her.
It was hard with one hand. But she pulled down the elastic and out spilled all the old pictures. None of them were very good. The person taking the pictures didn’t really know how to take pictures. Most were blurry. Ill-composed. Taken at things like parties, without much context.
The little girl in them was profoundly plain.
Not cute.
Not magnetic.
Not remarkable.
Not in any way noteworthy.
<<Sun-hwa, 4,>> read one of them.
She’d looked just like Hwa. Like Jung-hwa, Just Hwa, Miss Go, Squirt, the miserable little bitch with the big fucking mouth. The girl without a future. Sunny had looked just like her. Before all the surgeries. Unstained, yes. But still plain. Plain and basic and not very special at all. Certainly not like a girl who would sing in a girl group. Not like a woman anyone would pay attention to, much less pay for.
No wonder Sunny hated her. She’d spent thousands of dollars doing everything she could to avoid seeing that face in the mirror every day, and then it came out of her body anyway. Only worse. Defective. Of course Sunny couldn’t love her.
It wasn’t an apology. But it was an explanation. And that was a damn sight more than she’d offered in the past twenty-three years.
Hwa tucked the pictures back under her collar, against her chest, and closed her eyes.
*
Light.
Cold.
Air.
A crack in the room.
17
Lover
Snow.
Quiet and white and thick. It covered everything. She buried her face in it. Drank. Licked. Nibbled until her teeth sang with pain.
How had she gotten out of the elevator? Maybe she’d blacked out.
She swung her legs through the snow as best she could. Pulled herself along by one snowy railing that remained unbent by the blast. It felt cold and hard and good under her bare hand. She hugged it as she pulled along. Felt it wedge up under her ribs. Let it hold her up. The rail ran up the incline of the jetty and alongside the stairs as they wound up to the low-speed level of the Demasduwit Causeway. Multiple flights of them, all switching back against each other, each surface hung with a long white beard of icicles.
So many.
No boats on this side of the tower. Probably they were all on the other side, the ruined side, putting out fires. (Were there still fires?) Or rescuing people. (Were people still alive? She was still alive. But she did not feel like a person.) This far out the water had a skin of ice on it, and it was accumulating snow. Without the railing, she might have stepped onto it at any time.
“It’s good there’s this railing,” Hwa heard herself say. “Otherwise I’d just walk out on the ice and drown.”
Drowning didn’t seem so bad. She’d heard it was the good way to go. You asphyxiated, and then there was nothing. Layne had asphyxiated. Drowned in her own lungs. That didn’t look like a good death—the bloody pink foam oozing up out of her throat and onto the electric pink of her hair.
He’ll cut you in places you don’t know about, yet. The witch had said that. Under the causeway. In what Hwa had thought was the lowest place she could go.