Everything was too bright and tinged sort of blue-gray, like it was dusk and noon at the same time. She looked up to see where the sun was, but the whole sky was too bright to look at, and it stung her retinas.
This wasn’t the first time Patricia had been dropped in a strange town where she knew no one and had no money and did not speak the language. Even being shoeless and covered with stinking garbage was no great extra challenge—and yet she felt panic steal her breath. She was trapped, there were too many people wherever she went, they were all looking at her, faces looming and bulging, and some of them were trying to talk to her. Just breathing the same air as other humans made her feel like needles were being drilled into her skin. The idea of even touching another person’s skin made her retch—if anybody would even want to touch her, as filthy as she was.
The city—whatever city this was—pressed in on her. People came out of dome-covered wooden doorways, climbed through broken shop windows, rose up out of cars, and descended from high buses, pinning her down. Wherever she looked, faces and hands. Big staring eyes and grasping fingers, mouths gaping and making guttural roaring noises. Awful creatures. Patricia ran.
She kept running, down a main thoroughfare, onto a street, into the path of a speeding trolley that nearly killed her, into a square full of people in casual shirts and cargo pants, through an open-air market, past a shopping center, through the outdoor seating area of a café. The city went on and on. There was no way out. She needed to get out of the city, but she could see no signs.
Pick one direction, pick one direction and run, stay clear of the monsters with their grabby limbs and attempts to communicate, stay free, and get the hell out of this city. Get clear.
She ran, choking, until she came to a pier. The water stretched out, white against the blinding blue air. She didn’t even hesitate—she ran forward, past the groping pink limbs and snapping mouths clustered on the pier. The grotesque creatures barked at her and stared with their stone eyes. She was shriveling in the sun. She would never make it to the water before she melted, or they caught her.
One red-faced ogre swung his hairy arm and nearly snared her, but she ducked and fell and that gave her the momentum to pull herself up, sprint, and throw herself face-first into the ocean.
Patricia surfaced, gasping and wheezing, and looked up into the face of Carmen Edelstein, floating in the water nearby. She splashed around for a second, then got her bearings. She was in the middle of the ocean, and it was freezing. There was no dock, no pier, no city anywhere nearby. Nothing but waves, as far as she could see. And then she smelled something bilious and she got a glimpse of a dark hunched-over shape poking out of the water. Seadonia. It was like she’d just descended from the cloud to the ocean near Seadonia and all the rest had been a hallucination. But she knew it wasn’t that simple.
“So that was the Unraveling,” Patricia said, treading water. The waves went over her face for a moment.
“What did you think?” Carmen didn’t seem to need to paddle to stay afloat.
“It was horrible.” Patricia was still panting. “I wanted to get away from people at any cost. I couldn’t even recognize anyone else as being the same species as me.”
“It’s not unlike colony collapse disorder, but for humans. And yes, it’s horrifying, but it could be the only way to restore some balance and prevent a worse outcome. We’re all hoping it doesn’t come to that.”
“Oh.” Patricia felt frozen, but her body refused to numb. She stared at the defiant fortress of Seadonia, rising into view and then sinking again as the water bopped her up and down. For a moment, she thought she could hear music coming from the rig, a throbbing “whomp whomp whomp.” She thought of colony collapse disorder, the image of the bee staggering in the air, flying away from the hive as if forgetting where it lived, wandering in the endless void between hives until it died alone.
On some level, Patricia could see how inflicting a similar fate on people could be the better option, if the other choice was people destroying themselves and taking all other living things with them. Her mind could see that, but not her insides, her frozen sore guts.
“Yes,” Patricia said. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that.”
“There’s something I need you to do for me,” Carmen said. “And I’m sorry to ask this of you.”
“Okay,” Patricia shivered.
“We need to know what they’re doing in there.” Carmen gestured at Seadonia. “We can’t see inside. The water and steel are barriers, but they’ve also surrounded it with a magnetic field.”
Patricia nodded, waiting to hear how Carmen expected her to get inside Seadonia.