Love after the End Read online

  A’tugwewinu frowned. What strange people, she thought.

  “Not so long ago, some people rose to power, and they realized that if they destroyed the objects, no one would be able to learn any thing, and they could hold all the power. So, they did just that, and all those people without their objects forgot all their stories.” A’tugwewinu was even more confused.

  “Around the same time this happened, our people noticed markings appearing on our bodies. These markings were commonly found on the objects that the people in power had destroyed.”

  “What does that mean, Kokomis?” A’tugwewinu asked, alarmed.

  “We’re not quite sure, but the spirits have told me that our way of sharing stories can’t stay within our people anymore; it’s time to share this way of learning with others. Just as we have adapted a supernatural way of learning, we are therefore meant to adapt to a supernatural way of sharing.”

  DAYS WENT BY, person by person, the young ones departed into different directions, pledging to share the stories with anyone who would listen.

  Finally, there but remained A’tugwewinu and Bèl. She peered into the eyes like onyx.

  “I was hoping you would give me the honour of the mark, as I would also like to pledge myself to this role,” Bèl asked.

  A’tugwewinu nodded. With a practised hand, she deftly carved the marks into Bèl’s skin above their left pectoral.

  “I am no longer the last of the Andwànikàdjigan,” she whispered.

  Hand grasping hand, she marched on into the unknown world, ready for this new awakening of the people.

  Off into the distance, she spied the shadow of Kokomis, raising his hand in reverent salute. She nodded toward the spirit as he turned and vanished.

  ANDWÀNIKÀDJIGAN LEXICON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story has been a way for me to research the Indigenous languages of my people, the Algonquin or Anishinaabe and the Mi’kmaq or L’nu. As I am not a fluent speaker, the Anishinaabe and L’nu words used in this book would not have been possible without the help from the Algonquin Way Online Dictionary from the Algonquin people of Pikwakanagan First Nation and the online Mi’kmaq Dictionary from the Mi’kmaq people of Listuguj. Chi miigwetch and we’lalin for these incredible online resources. There are also words in Plains Cree, for which I would like to thank Jerry Saddleback, fluent Cree speaker and knowledge keeper who shared îhkwewak/îhkwew with me. This story also used words in French. I apologize if my research and my use of these words has been in any way oppressive or misrepresented.

  ALGONQUIN/ANISHINAABEMOWIN

  andwànikàdjigan (uhn-dwah-nih-kah-djih-guhn): record; to set down in writing or the like, as for the purpose of preserving evidence

  oshis (ah-shis): grandchild

  kokomis (koo-kuh-miss): grandmother

  PLAINS CREE

  îhkwewak (ih-kwey-wuk) plural; îhkwew (ih-kwey-wo) singular: two spirit, all-gendered person

  MI’KMAQ/L’NU

  a’tugwewinu (ah-doo-gway-wee-noo): storyteller

  FRENCH

  bèl (bell): beautiful

  STORY FOR A BOTTLE

  DARCIE LITTLE BADGER

  DEAR BOTTLE FINDER, Please deliver this letter to CC. They live with our parents on the western shores of New Houston. Our house sits on blue stilts and is surrounded by rose bushes. Mom used to keep them well trimmed and blooming. I hope she still does.

  CC—

  Sorry. I never meant to disappear.

  Thing is, I made a mistake during your birthday party. It happened after lunch, when y’all were playing beach croquet. Remember how bad I was, always hitting the wooden ball too hard and launching it into the water? That embarrassed me so much, I pretended to need a bathroom break and scuttled to the far end of the cove. There, I was alone, except for a couple of gulls fighting over a dead crab. The isolation didn’t make me nervous. Didn’t surprise me, either, since that area is unpleasant, with sharp pebbles outnumbering fine grains of sand. Even though I was wearing shoes, I could feel points digging into the bottoms of my feet.

  As I knelt to look for pretty shells between the rocks, I got distracted by an intense flash of light on the ocean, the sun reflecting off something silver bobbing in the shallows. Curious me decided to have a closer look. Nearby, granite boulders, remnants of a pre-collapse sea wall that had been torn apart and scattered by the sea, jutted from the land; some were above the high tide line, and others were halfway submerged in the water. I climbed onto the nearest boulder and jumped from rock to rock till I was several metres away from land, balanced on the peak of a snail-crusted rock that was almost totally underwater. From my lookout point, I recognized the silver object as a small boat. It was shaped like a double-wide canoe with a flat deck. I didn’t see any sign of a human pilot, but there was a hatch on the deck that could have led to an inner area.

  It bobbed closer, and its pointed head turned toward me like the needle of a compass. I heard the high-pitched voice of a child call in English, “Hello? Come here!”

  I shouted back, “Do you need help?”

  “Yes! Please, help me!”

  I considered returning to the party and telling everyone about the boat. Remember that mistake I mentioned earlier? Yeah. I decided to handle the situation alone.

  From my boulder perch, I leapt onto the flat stern of the boat; it didn’t rock much, as if stabilized by an inner weight or mechanism. The hatch swung outward with a creak when I pulled on its lever. The voice called to me from inside the dark interior, “Help me!”

  They sounded so desperate.

  The boat was much deeper than I’d expected, as most of its volume was hidden underwater, like an iceberg. Did you learn about those? There used to be ice in the Atlantic.

  A ladder led from the hatch to the bottom of the boat, but I didn’t notice it (because canoes—even big ones—should be shallow-bellied) and crawled in headfirst. I fell at least two metres before hitting the hard metal floor with my shoulder. Could have been worse, but the impact smarted like a barbed thorn, and by the time I stopped cursing, the boat was already moving, vibrating with the hum of a quiet motor. I couldn’t see anything. The hatch had slammed shut behind me, and there were no sources of light inside. By swinging my hands side to side, I found the first ladder rung and climbed until I felt the hatch lever. It was locked.

  I beat my fists against that metal door and screamed for you, for Mom and Dad, and for all our cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents. I even screamed for your annoying friend Webster, since I knew he liked to swim and might hear my voice. When that didn’t work, I crawled around the boat, searching in the darkness for the child who had called for me. There was no child, although I bumped into a console near the bow. I pressed every button or switch I could feel, at one point even turning something shaped like a steering wheel. Nothing stopped the boat or freed me from my imprisonment.

  At that point, there was a crackle of static, the kind emitted by radios. Speakers over my head chided me in the same high-pitched voice that’d lured me aboard. “Stop messing around. If you break the ship, you’ll get stranded and die in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I can’t see,” I said. “Let me out of this place!”

  “The lights burned out,” she replied, “but shuttle A-3 is otherwise in top shape. Don’t worry. My city is nearby; just sit tight for a couple of hours.”

  “What city?” I asked. “Am I being abducted?”

  “Absolutely not. You’re being rescued.”

  “From what? My sibling’s birthday party? Take me home right now.”

  “Why do you want to return to that? Humans aren’t animals. You’re meant for more than survival. You can be a vessel for millennia of culture: art, literature, science, leisure, hobbies, and joy.”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” I said, “but when it comes to culture and joy, I’m good. Can I talk to an adult now? Please?”

  “You are.” The voice of my captor dropped in pitch, no lon
ger a cutesy toddler-shrill.

  That’s when I screamed.

  Hours later—just two hours, according to my captor, but it felt like a lot more—the hull encasing me shuddered once and then the motor shut off. With a click, the exit hatch popped open. The dim yellow light that spilled into my prison was artificial. When I climbed the ladder and peeked outside, I saw six gray walls and no sky—I was in some kind of landing bay. A glass-encased security camera overhead swiveled until its robotic eye looked down on my upturned face. There were no other signs of movement except for the gentle rocking. Everything swayed side to side. That’s how I knew that the little canoe had taken me to a bigger ship: a city floating in the gulf.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Anyone here?”

  The voice responded from hidden speakers in every wall; I felt like I was drowning in her frequency. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re never alone anymore. What’s your name?”

  I lied because true names don’t belong in the mouth of danger.

  “Mona Lisa. What’s yours?”

  “Olivia. Can you say Olivia?”

  “Olivia.”

  “No. Not Olivia. It’s Olivia. Your accent is so weird.”

  Her accent was the weird one. She spoke like an old-timey person from the twenty-second century. I didn’t talk back, though. At that moment, my only goal was escape. Unfortunately, it seemed like Olivia had complete control over the floating city. She unlocked a door that connected the landing bay to a white corridor. The walls were covered with continuous, thin, transparent screens. They resembled the touch-sensitive digital screen Instructor Lee used in math class. His screens were just a half-metre wide, though, big enough to show us what an isosceles triangle looks like but not large enough to swallow us whole. Olivia directed me through a series of corridors and doorways. Dim yellow ceiling lights lit the path and went dark the moment I passed by them. She gushed about the perks of the floating city: VR game rooms, saunas, movies projected on vast screens, and hundreds of cabins filled with the personal treasures of “the founders of New America.”

  “Did you say ‘New America’?” I asked. “No way. When was this city launched?”

  “Two hundred and three years ago,” she said. “You missed our bicentennial.”

  That’s when I understood: I’d been stolen away by a shuttle to the remnants of a doomsday city.

  I learned about doomsday cities from friends, not in history class. To celebrate the first day of summer, Morgan, Jessie, Pete, and I were telling scary stories around a campfire, and Jessie went, “Hey, wanna hear something creepy?” You know that guy. He’ll stretch the truth like taffy for attention. Guess that’s why I used to assume doomsday cities were fake.

  Well, a broken clock is right twice a day, and life is sometimes so weird, it doesn’t need to be embellished by Jessie.

  The story goes: centuries ago, people were more likely to prepare for the end of the world than attempt to save it. A group of rich folks decided to build floating cities and live in the middle of the ocean, far away from the land’s troubles. Two cities were launched into the Atlantic. One sank and killed everyone on board. The other city—New America—disappeared.

  Some claim that New America is still out there, hiding, dying. A few people remain alive, but their numbers aren’t great enough to keep the city running. Others say that the city itself—which was equipped with advanced AI—is lonely.

  “What happened to everyone?” I asked Olivia. “Are they all dead?” Two hundred years had passed, but the founders could have had descendants or been medical immortals, those old-timey people who invested fortunes in anti-aging therapies and tech.

  “I’m still here,” Olivia said.

  “Where? All I’ve heard is your voice.”

  “The control centre.” She was quiet for a couple of minutes—that was a long period of time for Olivia. “I’m the ship, Mona Lisa, which means I’m more intelligent than a human.”

  Under different circumstances, I might have laughed. Yeah, AI used to be different before the collapse, mimicking sentience so well, people would converse with their own phones. But Olivia had a personality. That meant the ship was more complex than any tech I’d known.

  Human minds rarely did well in solitary confinement. What about human-like ship minds?

  I stopped walking at a fork in the corridor. “Go right,” Olivia said.

  I hesitated because my internal compass screamed: you’ve been here before.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “What did I just tell you, Mona Lisa? Obviously I’m sure.”

  I wanted to trust myself—there’s a reason why Mom always makes me her navigator when we travel. But I’ve never had to navigate through a monotonous web of ship corridors. Why would Olivia send me in circles? At the time, I had no answer for that question.

  So I continued walking.

  In between directions, Olivia described the city rules. “If a door is locked, I want it locked to keep you safe. Our high-voltage security system doesn’t know the difference between a Mona Lisa and an intruder. Got it?”

  “Intruders? So we aren’t the only two here?”

  “I never said that. There are pirates on the sea and my deck cameras might malfunction. Which reminds me: you aren’t allowed to go outside. That’s also for your own safety. Stay in your bedroom between sundown and sun-up. Morning and afternoon are for chores and you can study after supper.”

  I asked, “What will I eat?” I’d been too frightened and vaguely nauseous on the shuttle to notice my empty belly, but hunger made every step feel like two.

  “There’s plenty of food,” she promised.

  “And water?” I asked.

  “Of course.” She laughed at me. “The founders didn’t build a whole city without considering basic human necessities.”

  “Then why aren’t they here anymore?”

  For the second time that day, she did not answer my question. Instead, Olivia tersely said, “Up those stairs.”

  I soon entered a corridor that had evenly spaced doors along one wall. They were numbered from 2-01 to 2-15 with brass plates. Olivia said, “Yours is lucky seven!” And then, when I opened door 2-07, she added, “Welcome home.”

  My cabin had three rooms (bedroom, lounge, and bathroom) and was larger than our house. It resembled a history museum or time capsule. The furniture, a long brown sofa, metal coffee table, four-poster bed, and several cabinets, were fixed to the faux wood floor (I could tell it was faux because the grain patterns on the planks repeated over and over again, lacking the originality of a real sliced tree). The walls in the bedroom and lounge were bright white and coated with the same kind of screen I’d noticed in the hall. The bedroom closet was packed with musty dresses and narrow slippers. Cabinets contained empty glass bottles and a variety of little gadgets like binoculars and a music box filled with gold chains. I only peeked at that stuff, since it most likely belonged to a dead person and I felt like an intruder in a grave.

  “Olivia, who used to live here?” I asked, but she was not in a mood to chat, and the door had locked behind me.

  That’s when it really sunk in that I was trapped in an artifact with a cruel streak. I ran to the nearest porthole and pressed my face against the cool glass. Didn’t see any land. Just calm black water and a cloudy night sky. I wrestled the porthole open, ignoring its squeaking hinges, which were like nails on a chalkboard, and leaned out as far as I could (up to my shoulders; honestly, CC, if the window had been wider, I might have leapt into the Atlantic in a hopeless attempt to swim home, ’cause that’s how fox-in-a-snare desperate I felt). I stood like that and stared at the vague horizon until the ocean wind twisted my hair into a waist-length knot of salty tangles.

  Do you remember when Grandpa taught us how to build a fire with dry wood, the sun, and a magnifying glass? He made us promise that, unless it was absolutely necessary, we’d only light fires in stone pits on the beach where there’d always be enough water to drench th
e embers after we finished. Then, he told us about the year he witnessed the south burn. We were all taking a break from weeding his garden. You and me sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree and flicking ants off our toes, while Grandpa lounged on his hammock. As he rocked slowly side to side, he said, “I woke up in the middle of the night because my throat stung like I’d gargled a cup of wasps. My lungs ached worse. They were starving for a breath of air. I barely managed a puff on my inhaler. I went to the window and opened it, thinking that fresh air would help me breathe, but the stink of smoke just increased. There was no escape from it. The whole horizon was burning.

  “We lost our house to the wildfire that night, but others lost much more. Do you know how the disaster started? Some guy popping fireworks in his yard after seven years of drought. You kids be better than that.”

  After that story, I had nightmares about opaque air that hardened like concrete in my lungs. I dreamt that the edge of the world was burning and nothing but ashes remained in the fire’s wake. I’d wake up sweating through my quilt, wishing that Grandpa never taught us how to start a fire because nobody should have that kind of destructive power.

  But you? You loved starting fires. That’s the year we visited the cove every week so you could watch twigs burn. Then, Grandpa taught us how to use a flint to make sparks, and you built fires at night for warmth and to cook our food when we camped on the beach. I used to consider your fixation dangerous. I was wrong. You must have lit hundreds of fires on the cove. Thousands! And you never ever forgot to drench their embers with water.

  That first night on the ship, I stayed awake for hours, searching for a light on the horizon. A light from your campfire. A beacon for your lost sister. I thought about you and everyone else on that cove. How you’d notice I was missing and search the beach for miles.

  I never saw a light, but I knew it was somewhere and that knowledge stoked my hope.

  It still does.

  I didn’t get any sleep that night. Not for lack of trying. The floating city was so large and steady, I barely felt the ocean undulate beneath my back, but it was still difficult to relax. I haven’t had my own room since before you were born, and even then, Mom, Dad, and the grandparents were just a shout away.