When I was little, my parents died trying to reach Lady Luck. My brother Maynard says the journey was hard back then. These days, it’s easier for people to worship at her feet.
What she demands as sacrifice isn’t so straightforward.
“There’s nothing for him in this town.” Maynard’s voice is bitter as he watches Clay skip off to school on his ninth birthday. My nephew is a sweet boy, all shining hazel eyes under a thatch of curly dark hair that reminds us of his late mother. She died when Lady Luck frowned on her, but nobody mentions that. It’s just one of those things.
A few days ago, I tried to show Clay how I wanted to streamline the house’s microfiltration system, but Maynard told me to cut that shit out. Clay is destined for greater things. In two months, the boy will enter the education lottery and then he might be able to get out of here.
“It’s not fair,” Maynard continues. “Getting that bitch Luck to smile ain’t easy for people like me. Not these days.”
My brother lapses into a stony silence. I’m loath to break it. I turn my eyes without moving my head, checking on Gran. She’s blessedly asleep.
Maynard picks up one of my stray models I meant to put away. Wires twist intricately through a pair of oversized buttons, each one representing airflow—the beginnings of an idea I have, if I ever get to design it. Maynard’s broad thumb crushes the delicate thing. Wires bend beyond recognition as he continues to ruminate.
“Clay needs an extra boost,” he declares. “Something to get him through that lottery and into the City, where he’ll have more chances.”
Under the table where my brother can’t see, I let my hands and toes fidget. “A visit to Lady Luck?” I whisper.
“Damn straight.” Maynard bares yellowed teeth in a kind of smile. “We’ll leave in three days.”
We?
Maynard reveals more of his teeth as he preempts my next question. “You’re coming with me, Cassie. Gran, too.”
“What about Clay?” I ask.
“He’ll stay in town. It isn’t a problem finding someone to look after him for a month.”
Once my brother makes a decision, nothing sways him. Fear of the unknown rivets me to the hard plastic chair. But a shiver of excitement lurks underneath.
I’ve always wanted to leave town. There’s nothing for me here, either.
The hours tick down to our departure. I can’t shake my unease. I’ve mapped out our journey a dozen times, tracing the way past other towns all the way to the ocean. Lady Luck lives at the edge of the water, near enough the City to constantly watch over its unmoving houses, high walls, and thick gates.
To get to her, we’ll have to pass perilously near Tilt Town.
Tilter streets are crooked gashes across steep hills, nothing like the neat layout of normal towns. Instead of balancing on treads and wheels, their dwellings cling to the soil any which way they can, because the earth often shifts underneath Tilt Town.
That’s how the place got its name. The inhabitants must constantly be ready to readjust the slant of their living quarters, to recut stilts and shore up bedrooms and kitchens so they can sleep and eat without rolling sideways.
Maynard says the Tilters don’t worship Lady Luck hard enough, even though they practically live at her feet, and that’s why none of them are successful. When I misbehaved as a kid—which was often—he’d threaten to send me there. Now, even though I’m long past the days of overt meltdowns, the thought of Tilt Town makes me shiver.
Across the room, near the driver’s capsule, Gran moans from her recliner. I’m glad for an excuse to fold the map. The house sways slightly on its treads as I fetch a precious measure of water. Maynard says it doesn’t matter at this point if Gran ingests microplastics, so he forbade me to use the house’s inbuilt filtering system for her. Instead, I take out one of my homemade contraptions, decanting a small amount into Gran’s favorite cup. Her lips press against worn enamel. She can barely manage to drink by herself these days.
I wish Gran and I could stay behind with Clay, but Maynard is right. Nobody here would take us in.
I hold Gran’s bony hand and explain our upcoming journey. With her, I always presume competence. I taught Clay to do the same, even though Gran is mostly listless, gazing out the window into our yard, where we manage to cultivate a crop of hardy vegetables.
But when I tell Gran we’re going to see Lady Luck to help Clay get out of here, her filmy blue eyes clear and harden.
“No, Cassie,” she tells me. “No.”
Maynard is dismissive of Gran’s reaction. “She loved Clay and wanted the best for him,” he snaps. “We’re leaving tomorrow, come hell or high water.”
I don’t push, because now that Clay is old enough to be more independent, Maynard gets stressed out by me still living with him. Gran and I, we’re a lot. That’s what he says when he’s fed up.
Maynard is a pillar of the community, a deputy police chief, so his word carries weight around here. But that isn’t enough to guarantee Clay a spot in the City.
Lady Luck must smile on my nephew for that.
In the living room, all my magazines are stacked in order. My precious parts are laid out in perfect lines, ready to be packed for our journey. A graphite filter sits next to a hunk of solar panel I salvaged from the town dump. I have screws, wires, nets, bits of metal, and a box of tools. I make sure to pack everything safely away before Maynard comes in. He hates it when I mess around trying to invent stuff, because then I have less time to clean and look after Gran.
But later, after I’ve read Clay a bedtime story and tucked him in, Maynard pulls me aside. “Do one more check of the house, Cassie. Make sure the engine and treads are good so we’re ready to roll tomorrow.”
I can’t help but smile. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t trust my mechanical know-how. Maybe Lady Luck will smile upon me, too.
The morning of our departure dawns hot and bright, a reminder that fire season starts soon. Five years ago, everyone had to drive their houses to the town’s auxiliary parking lot and hunker down to avoid a nearby blaze. That’s the furthest I’ve ever traveled.
Until today.
I make a bet with Clay, wagering that he’ll grow at least half a centimeter while we’re gone. If he doesn’t, he’ll give me his best marble. If he does, I’ll craft him a new toy.
He asks for an airplane, lips turning up in that amazing little smile of his. We rush to measure him against the doorframe once more, and then he heads to school, waving three times at the gate—once for each extra hug I gave him this morning.
I watch him until he’s out of sight.
Maynard makes me pick the vegetables from our garden, even though it’s too early. Half of them are severely underripe, but he says better us getting them than someone else. Then Maynard starts up the house’s engine and we roll out toward the town’s front gate.
I hang out a side window, a kind of freedom blowing through my hair. Even before Gran needed fulltime care, I didn’t get out and about much. I was always the weird girl, the annoyance at the edges who broke the social rules over and over until it was better for me to stay out of sight, out of mind.
Sometimes it feels like I’m not really part of the community anymore, but maybe that’s unavoidable in a town where people prize individualism above all.
Old Ulrich who guards the gates gives me a look I’m used to, somewhere between pity and contempt. His gaze flickers over Gran in her recliner. I watch uneasily as Ulrich’s lips twist.
“May it be enough.” Ulrich nods at Maynard and turns his gaze toward the distance again, watching for interlopers who might try to infiltrate the town, or steal our vegetables, or whatever interlopers do.
The gate shuts behind us, and we’re truly on our way.
We drive west, watched with suspicion by the Ulrich-equivalents at each semi-identical town gate. On day four, we stop to repair one of the house’s treads. Then our sewage filtration system breaks down, but with a little fiddling, I rig up a fix that’ll hold us for the journey.
After two weeks of travel, the towns dwindle until we are surrounded by sere hills whose tan flanks guide us downward until we spot the ocean in the distance. I have never seen so much water in one place, except in pictures. But although the silvery-blue streak on the horizon is alluring, my eyes are drawn toward the jagged skyline of Tilt Town. At night, the town glows with a hellish flame from the pit on its outskirts, the depths burning endlessly. At school, we learned that’s because of an unholy combination of natural gasses and whatever the Tilters throw down there. My classmate Paisley said they threw in babies, and the teacher didn’t correct her.
“Aren’t you happy I didn’t ship your ass to the Tilters when you used to have all those tantrums over stupid crap like food textures and the wrong socks?” Maynard gestures to the wheel. “Take a shift. I need to stretch my legs.”
As I sit, Maynard slams the reinforced door behind him. Because of his job, he got extra security features for his house, so the driver’s capsule is wholly secure, like a commercial airplane’s cockpit of old. Or a panic room.
Later that afternoon, I feed Gran from her favorite cup, but she turns her head at every spoonful. My worry turns into fear. She’s growing weaker.
“Look,” I whisper. “We’re nearly to the ocean. In a few hours, we’ll see Lady Luck.”
Gran raises one bony hand in a weak signal, index finger extended. Maybe she’s trying to sign Go, but her hand splays, and falls, and it turns into more of a No.
We arrive near sunset. Lady Luck towers above us, easily ten times as tall as Maynard. She stands knee-deep in ocean water, the tide lapping at her pearlescent marble skirts. One hand is upraised, as if to offer consecration. The other holds the leash of a giant stone dog, green-hued and brindled with salt. Lady Luck’s thin lips press together, neither smiling nor frowning.
Yet.
I take a few careful steps onto the beach, searching the tideline for washed-up sacrifice. Maynard crunches past, leaving hard, deep footprints in the sand. He has a recent photograph of Clay, the one in which he’s grinning so hard we can see two lost teeth. Maynard stops at the water’s edge.
“See the dog?” he asks. “He and Luck always go hand in hand. He’s called Hard Work. Kind of like you.”
He laughs. I don’t. I have a bad feeling in my stomach, and it isn’t because I’ve been trying to eat the unripe vegetables from our garden.
“Maynard, what are you going to sacrifice?”
My brother kicks off his boots, rolls up his trousers, wades into the water. I want to do the same, to feel the luxury of liquid lapping around my toes, but I’m afraid of Maynard’s stance, and especially of the vicious buck knife he’s produced.
But I still trust him, don’t I?
“Go inside, Cassie. Get Gran ready to move.”
Habit makes me obey immediately. But halfway up the beach, I turn for a second look.
Maynard was the one who convinced Clay’s mother to keep the baby inside her until full-term, even though pregnancy was killing her. It was a necessary sacrifice, Maynard said. Lady Luck smiled on Clay and took his mother in exchange. But surely Maynard doesn’t mean to offer himself to the statue.
I pick up my pace. I rush indoors to shift Gran into her wheeled mobility chair. But she kicks, rocking perilously side to side, and I’m afraid she’ll fall over—so I wedge her into the driver’s capsule between the heavy door and the wall, where she’s safest.
Then I crack open the window and watch Maynard wade up to Lady Luck, to the tiny altar of her skirt.
“Here, have it all!” he shouts, and with movements I don’t understand, he cuts the air nearby with a knife. A multi-colored aura hovers around the outline of his body, as if hesitating to leave.
“Take my dreams!” Maynard demands. “Take my ambitions!”
The aura coalesces and streams toward Lady Luck—a wonder of a moment, even if it isn’t mine to experience. It reaches her marble in a riot of color and settles effervescently into her skirt folds before glowing upward.
When the light reaches her face, Maynard holds up the photo of Clay, and Lady Luck’s stern lips lift into a smile focused at the boy.
I should be happy. This could be enough extra luck for Clay to get into the City. But I think, maybe once your own ambitions are all tied up in other folks, the only thing left to do is enforce them.
And Maynard doesn’t look satisfied.
Sound carries near water, so I hear Maynard mutter, “Forgive me for what I’m about to do.”
I realize, with a cold bolt of certainty, why the townsfolk averted their gazes as we rolled out of town. Why Ulrich pitied me at the gates. Maynard won’t stop at giving up his own dreams and ambitions.
He’ll sacrifice me and Gran, too.
I slam the capsule door shut. Jam my foot onto the pedal. We move at a crawl at first, but it’s enough to soothe Gran’s restlessness. She signs go. Go. Go.
Maynard’s after us, sprinting up the beach, sunset glinting orange off his drawn knife.
I activate the fireproof panels. They creep slowly downward, shooting the house’s fuel economy to hell. But we’re already in hell, so what does it matter?
The weight of Maynard’s body hitting the porch makes the house bounce on its treads. A warning light flashes on the dashboard as one of the panels halts.
My brother wrenches open the unlocked back door with a colossal bang.
He’s already bellowing threats, storming his way to the driving area, fists bashing against metal. He’s thwarted, furious, dangerous. A kind of fury stirs within me, too, something I haven’t been allowed for years. I want the best for Clay. But not at the expense of my own dreams—or Gran’s life.
I steer us uphill. Toward Tilt Town.
“Cassie!” Maynard bawls. “Come out right now!”
Defiance, long dormant, makes me crank the house’s speed to maximum. At the door, Maynard’s fists go ominously quiet. Footsteps creak down the hallway. They return faster than I’d like.
“Cassie,” Maynard says more quietly. “I have an axe. Open up now, or you’ll get hurt.”
When I was Clay’s age, Gran tried to teach me how to tell the difference between bluffing and truth.
“It’s not safe to assume everyone means well,” Gran said back when she could string sentences together coherently. “You’re a vulnerable type, Cassie. You need to be able to sniff out a lie.”
“Lies don’t smell,” I’d told her, and she’d looked up to the ceiling in despair. Then I’d gone back to my books and my inventions, neither of which are in the habit of being sneaky or untruthful.
Still, I didn’t turn out completely naïve.
When I open the capsule door to Maynard, I’m armed with the flare gun he keeps underneath the driver’s seat. Like a lot of things, it’s a relic of a bygone time. But it’ll scorch his face off if I shoot him at close range. Especially since he lied about the axe. He’s only got a hatchet.
“You’re not sacrificing Gran,” I tell him. “Or me.”
My brother scowls, but he backs away, moving to the side to let us pass as we reach the living room. I keep the gun pointed at his face as I bend to grab my box of personal possessions. I take a photo of Clay, too. Maynard sneers as I stow my stuff in the compartment underneath Gran’s mobility chair.
“Your inventions and books won’t keep you alive,” my brother says. “Not in Tilt Town.”
Maybe he’s right. But there are worse fates.
I wheel Gran backward with one hand. Thump her over the threshold, past the slender lines of ink that show Clay’s growth over the years. My throat is tight but my eyes are dry. I keep the flare gun pointed, even when the house begins to move again.
Maynard drives away, abandoning us at the side of the road as night descends.
I wheel Gran upward. There’s nowhere else to go, so we head in the direction of Tilt Town.
This terrifies me, but if I was wrong about my brother, what else could I have been wrong about? Old aspirations stir at the edges of my mind like long-forgotten fever dreams. Maybe I could get a job, a real one—not just cleaning and looking after Clay and Gran.
I used to read job advertisements in the magazines that found their way to us. I’d narrow them down to what a town’s education qualified me for. I wanted to be a research assistant. Anything above that required me to have been lucky enough for a college education. But Maynard told me I shouldn’t apply. People like me talk wrong, act wrong, think wrong. I’d never fit in, so why bother?
The road is steep, and the night is moonless. Far behind, Lady Luck still glimmers with Maynard’s sacrificed dreams. In the hills ahead, the pit casts its orange smolder against distant rooftops. The wheels on Gran’s chair squeak until I have to hum under my breath to balance out the painful sound. There’s no Maynard to scold me for making annoying noises.
But soon, I’m exhausted and dizzy, and Gran is moaning.
I push us onto the road’s shoulder and lift Gran from her chair, making sure her head doesn’t droop forward and block off her windpipe. We sink to the ground and I cradle her to me. She is so weak. Even when I explain what’s going on, she only twirls my hair gently, in a movement that’s somehow both a baby’s questing hand and a mother’s soothing touch.
There’s no point fearing the unknown when death is already in my lap. The chill of the night keeps me from sleeping soundly, but I drop into an occasional doze.
When dawn breaks and I shudder awake for the final time, Gran is dead in my arms, and there’s a group of Tilters staring down at us.
Grief numbs my fear. I cannot speak. All I can do is hold Gran’s cooling hand.
The Tilters don’t look like devils or rapists, like Maynard used to call them. They wear homespun clothes and concerned expressions, and when they help lift Gran’s body into her chair, they’re gentle. We walk slowly into Tilt Town. I keep hold of Gran’s hand, half-expecting it to rise to sign for water, or food, or warmth. It stays still, no matter how I cling.
I’m homeless. No more Gran, no more Clay. I have to recalibrate. But how?
Tilt Town’s steep streets and stationary dwellings prove less threatening than I expect. People eye me curiously from doorsteps, but don’t ask prying questions. There’s no Ulrich equivalent to interrogate me, because there are no gates here.
I still can’t talk, so eventually, people call on someone named Big Joan.
“Come on,” Big Joan says, brooking no argument. She grasps Gran’s chair with hands twice the size of mine, and I follow her broad shoulders toward her residence: a trio of shipping containers loosely welded together. A ramp leads to her living room. Poorly-made pipes run the length of the room, connecting to the bathroom at the far end.
Big Joan pours me half a cup of water through an extremely inefficient filter.
“We get all sorts here, but most of them aren’t dead on arrival,” the woman tells me in a gruff contralto. “I know you’re in shock, but we gotta find a resting place for your loved one. Usually, folks opt to be recycled. Helps crops. Helps others live. Now and then, we get those who wanna be burned or put to the ocean. So, you decide which she would have wanted while I leave you be for a bit.”
Big Joan exits the room. While I think about Gran’s next steps, I reach for the filter. I have to keep my fingers busy. When I was a kid, I used to break things apart one bit at a time, until Gran gave me tools of my own. Then I turned destroying into fixing.
Tears blur my eyes as I lean past Gran to fetch my box of stuff. I need a focus, or I’ll drown in grief. I mend the handle of the portable filter and shore up the gaping left side, where microplastics could leak through. By the time Big Joan returns, I’m wedged under her sink, checking out the house’s rudimentary filtration system, which has major problems.
My fingers explore. My brain calms. Big Joan waits.
“Gran would want to be recycled,” I say when I recover the ability to speak. “She always tried to teach us to help others.”
“What’s your name?” Big Joan asks on the second day.
We sit in front of her living room container, our feet propped in the street. Tilters pass by, and each one nods to us. They don’t keep themselves to themselves here.
I lift my eyes. The town’s arable land lies in the mid distance. Gran’s body will contribute to the crops grown there. I remain silent for a few beats, considering Big Joan’s question. I don’t feel like who I used to be.
“Cass,” I finally say.
An hour ago, I finished my repairs on Big Joan’s house, and now there is no more risk of cross-contamination when the house recycles waste. Previously, she’d had been at high risk of dysentery or cholera. Her filtration system still isn’t perfect, but it’s much safer.
Fixing it kept me busy, but dread settles across my shoulders, weighing me down until I’m surprised the chair I’m perched on doesn’t snap into hundreds of plastic shards. Big Joan told me she often takes in newcomers for a day or two, just until they get on their feet. Now it’s time for her to thank me for my work and send me on my way. To where, I don’t know. I’m too numb to panic. Probably, I’ll find a spot nearby and wait to join Gran. Maynard was right. I have no clue how to live independently.
Then Big Joan speaks, and the chair doesn’t break, and everything in me is suddenly light.
“You’re good at fixing things, and I’m not. I’d like you to stay with me, Cass,” she says. “For as long as you want.”
Living with Big Joan gives me the luxury of my own time and space. The Tilters quickly get into the habit of bringing me City trash, which I occasionally turn into useful treasure.
Water is scarce, but the situation is worse here, because the shortage is exacerbated by position. Any rain the Tilters gets runs swiftly down to the City. I wander between propped-up dwellings and make notes on gradients and groundwater and revel in the fact that people here don’t interrupt my focus by demanding to know what I’m doing, is the house clean, and what’s for supper?
People here constantly rebuild, rejig, reshuffle. In the first month, the ground tilts three times. The movement is somehow both subtle and sudden. One moment, everything is normal. Then, without even seeming to move, the hill slants an extra quarter of a centimeter away from the City—as if the place is weighing down the world, making Tilt Town rise to precarious heights. The pit shifts ever-closer, throwing its light over everything.
At night, from the new balcony I welded to Big Joan’s upper level, I often stare in Lady Luck’s direction. When she glows from recent sacrifice, she lights distant pale walls, lending the City an extra moon’s worth of gentle whiteness. At times like that, her shadow falls across Tilt Town, dampening the constant orange glow of the pit. It’s an uneasy darkness, layered like a series of bloodstains seen only under UV light.
Seasons pass. I wouldn’t bother to count them if it weren’t for Clay.
By now, he’s twelve. When one of the Tilters manages to acquire premium internet, we crowd around a screen and carve up the time into precious minutes. One day, my curiosity becomes too much, and I make myself join in. My fingers fly over the keyboard. Clay’s name pops up almost immediately.
Maynard’s sacrifice was enough. Lady Luck got Clay a spot at a moderately prestigious City school. I move away from the screen, wracked with relief, with guilt, even with jealousy—but above all, I just miss my nephew.
He would have grown that half a centimeter by now. In my spare time, I craft him the airplane I’d promised. Not a flimsy toy, but a display model fit for the teenager he’ll soon become. Maynard always wanted him to like fighter jets or bombers, but Clay’s most treasured models were of commercial airplanes. When I finish, I carve the name of his favorite airline and flight number—one of the last ever flown—into the metal.
Then I wrap it carefully and Big Joan arranges for it to be delivered to his school in the City.
“Do you think he’ll like it?” I ask her.
“No point wondering,” she says from the kitchen, where she’s fixing up a batch of soup for a communal lunch. “You did as much as you have control over.”
Big Joan has people skills but not a ton of book smarts, and I’m basically the opposite. What we have, I tell her, is a symbiotic relationship, and she always makes sure to acknowledge observations like that with a serious nod before asking me if I’ve remembered to stay hydrated. I’m glad for her skills as I help carry bowls and utensils.
Today, we watch the news. Towns like my old one have begun developing slants of their own. There’s lots of talk about how to brace treads and build stronger gates.
It’s not a disaster yet, the talking heads claim. With enough sacrifice, Lady Luck will smile upon their own. Look at the City, they say. It’s slowly sinking, but they’re coping.
We’ll cope too, right?
Except we don’t.
Even my newest inventions cannot get Tilt Town enough water. It hasn’t rained more than a few drops for months. We’re all going thirsty and unwashed. I’ve done everything possible: maximized the efficiency of each wastewater system, rigged up extra nets to collect fog and dew, and set my solar desalinization stations to work overtime processing oceanwater.
We don’t have enough resources to collect our most-needed resource.
What hurts the most is the way people look at me as if I can fix this. In despair one night, I climb to the top of Big Joan’s roof with my telescope. Colonizing Mars is a ship that’s long since sailed, but watching stars reminds me that the universe is composed of more than just us and the City.
After a long time peering through a homemade telescope, I make out lights that aren’t stars. I frown, adjust lenses, and continue observation. The lights turn out to be small, state-of-the-art drones. They circle far above, a glittering, fine mesh stretching between them.
No wonder we’re not getting any water. The City is stealing our rain before it even reaches us.
We’ll all die if we don’t figure out how to change this.
Big Joan calls a meeting. Everyone in Tilt Town comes.
There’s an energy that flows in most humans, one that seems to be several parts sectarianism mixed with a large dash of magical thinking and a varying dose of self-preservation. When I announce that we’ve reached a tipping point, I expect resource-hoarding to commence and for me to be considered a burden again.
But nobody here is overly interested in maintaining the status quo.
So when I’m done explaining, everyone stays quiet. Even stranger, they look to me for a plan.
“I’ve thought a lot about seesaws,” I tell everyone haltingly, encouraged by the way Big Joan stands at my shoulder. “They’re logical, but they also taught me about human nature. When you’re light, and a heavy kid climbs onto the other side, they might fling you toward the stratosphere. That’s what the City’s doing. Maybe they don’t set out to do it, but it’s happening anyway.”
“Then what do we do?” a person shouts from the crowd, which has swollen to a size I never expected. We’ve gotten more town refugees lately.
“What can we do?” someone else mutters. “They can steal anything they like and call it their due.”
Big Joan steps forward before things get frayed. She thumps a fist against her heart.
“Everyone’s got something in them that helps a community. But they aren’t always given a chance to show it.”
People nod and shuffle at her words. This buys me time to talk about my calculations of force and mass. I arm the crowd with hard numbers, and then I tell them, flat out, the only thing that’ll fix this situation.
“It’s time to kill Lady Luck.”
We march toward the ocean, carrying what we need to topple the phenomenon that killed my parents and saved my nephew. I think of Clay a lot these days. I’m not one for magical thinking, but I choose to believe he got the airplane I sent. That he knows I’m still alive. That I love him.
Lady Luck stands thigh-deep in the water when we arrive, her skirts red with recent sacrifice. As a final act of self-preservation, she smiles upon me, and whispers into my mind that the City wants me, has always wanted me, I’m so smart, I’m so incredibly useful—but I’m done with Lady Luck’s foibles.
I gesture, and the Tilters come forward.
We haul Lady Luck off her pedestal, and the tenuous link between the statue and her dog breaks forever. The canine representation of Hard Work stands alone in the swelling tide as we drag Lady Luck up the steep hill, toward the glowing pit beyond. We’re sending her to hell.
By the time we reach the halfway point, we’re sweating and trembling with exertion. Lady Luck tries to work her magic on the hundreds of Tilters at her ropes. It could be you, she whispers in increasing desperation.
“Statistically improbable!” I take to shouting. A few take up the words, like a rallying cry. Others snap back with their own rejoinders.
“It’s never people like me,” my neighbor bellows, thumping marble with a walking aid.
“It should be all of us!” another person yells.
“No more sacrifice!” Big Joan puts her back into pulling.
The pit’s foul miasma hits us, and our breaths turn shallow. The fires below are fueled by City garbage and natural gasses, not Tilter babies like my classmate once claimed. We heave once more. Marble flashes.
A deep groan shudders through the earth as Lady Luck falls headfirst into orange flames.
Lady Luck is dead, and everything changes.
The land underneath Tilt Town begins to sink, levelling out with the City. Because the Tilters are so used to working as a community, we’re quick to save our dwellings. Big Joan rushes from place to place, only pausing when we see what’s happening to the walls over which Luck once smiled.
They shift, slowly but surely. The City’s foundations were never built on level ground to begin with, so its walls sag quickly to one side. People put their hands atop shoulders of children, pointing, saying: you may never see this again in your lifetime.
I know this is right, and I also know this is wrong. Like a seesaw unweighted, the earth underfoot continues to settle, and my thoughts turn to Clay. My sweet nephew with his quick smile. If I hadn’t had his growth to cherish alongside Gran’s slow deterioration and Maynard’s hard words, how would I have managed to keep my own balance for so long?
One Tilter sets up a projector and begins streaming footage. For the City, the world has flipped sideways. Walls are floors and floors are walls, and the gates stand wide open to the outside for the first time in centuries. I clench my hands into fists as I watch people run for their lives. I lean in close to the screen. Searching. Hoping. A drone camera zooms in on a group of students rushing toward the gates. They’re nearly there when a chunk of masonry smashes into their midst. The frontrunners are unscathed, but one of their fellows is trapped, legs waving, screaming for help. My stomach twists.
A sudden patter of rain cuts through our silence. The City’s drones have fallen, and people turn away from the screened drama, scurrying outside with their mouths open, salt-encrusted faces turned to a new sky as stolen, hoarded water falls in fat drops.
But I stay with the projector. Pause it. Rewind. Back to the falling masonry. Back to one student in particular, whose escape was narrow, almost miraculous.
I see the whites of his eyes underneath dark, curly hair. No bag or other possessions. Only a battered model airplane clutched in one hand.
I watch the brief footage over and over. I study the stoop of his shoulders, the direction of his gaze, the bend of his legs, the quick flex of his arm as he turns to look at his fallen fellow. Will he stay and help, or keep running?
The camera cuts away at the crucial point of Clay’s decision.
I rewind, but Big Joan touches my shoulder before I can hit play again.
“Let’s travel down to the gates together,” she says, “so we can aid whoever makes it out.”
Amazing, Kat!! So great to see this amazing story in print.