Thrust: A Novel

Mercifully for her brain flux, Laisvė’s right foot hits solid ground. Against the mud wall, hanging from a wooden rod, is a backpack. Inside the backpack there is food and water and the address of a safe house. Laisvė reaches into the pack and pulls out a miner’s cap with a headlamp, a pair of kneepads, thick work gloves. Do not slow down for any reason. Do not stop. Do not remember anything about what your life has been, since you might have to forget it to have a life at all from this point forward.

She begins her dirt crawl. The tunnel is about a foot wider than her body on the sides and above her; she feels lucky to be a child, not an adult. She thinks briefly of Aster falling to the floor, having a seizure, and she begins to cry, but not in a way that would slow her down. The tears fall but her breathing is steady. She licks the salt of the drops when they reach her lips. They have told each other this story hundreds of times: The story is in her skin. The story says move or be captured or put on a boat and sent away to god knows where, a final fracturing forever.

The pack on her back scrapes the ceiling now and again, and each time it does, she gets a jolt of silver white in her peripheral vision. The sound of her knees and hands is blue and purple and yellow, in bursts in front of her eyes that extend as far ahead of her as she can see. The smell of the dirt floor and walls is a low vibration in her ears, a kind of constant low-noted hum. What she smells is red. A dark, almost black, red. Color in her where fear would be in some other child.

At a bend in the tunnel, its throat opens up some. She scrapes her shoulder and the side of her head near her temple on the wall trying to move too quickly. She knows that soon after this bend she will be able to stand, to run, to run like children do. She can run to the safe house that is the father-daughter plan.

Except she isn’t going to the safe house, and she knows it. Forgive me, father. She will make for the water. The Narrows.

Her crawling is frenzied now. She touches her head and her hand comes away red, but not a lot, not enough to stop her. Her knees ache and the balls of her hands ache and her heart aches, but she sees the color turquoise ahead of her, so she doesn’t stop; she thinks of all the people who have come and gone in the world; she thinks of all the journeys across history of all the people and plants and animals and water. She thinks the most about water, how water cut the shape of land everywhere on this planet, how water took her mother and hid her brother from her, how she must enter the water, how she must find people and things not now but in an otherwhere, how she cannot save her father but she must follow his wail anyway, how water is where she must go because water is without time, and yet water could still swallow them whole.

Feet first, arms at her sides, into the plunge.

Bubbles.

Then calm.

The water is the only place on the planet where her body instantly calms.

“Girl, is that you?” A small wavering voice.

Laisvė turns, her hair swarming around her like seaweed, and sees the box turtle swimming up to her face. Her urgency and fear subside; everything underwater loosens into blur and wet.

“Bertrand?”

“You seem agitated. What’s wrong?”

Laisvė fades into her own underwaterness to calm herself. “I need to be in another time.”

The turtle tilts its little head. “Tell me a story and I’ll tell you how to get to the other time.”

“I know a little about moving through time waters, but this is urgent. I’ve got to make an important trade. I’ll give you one story but that’s it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“There is a water girl who lives in the belly of a whale—”

Bertrand interrupts: “Is the girl you?”

“Who is telling the story?” Laisvė stares through water. Easier to think of herself as a girl from some oceanic fable than live in the endless fear-filled life her father has made for them.

Bertrand pulls his head in a little and treads water where he floats. “I’m listening. How’s the story go?”