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distance, gasping each time a new chunk of earth got gobbled by the furious Surge.
     
    For years the cliffs had stayed where they were. But now they were hollow. Broken. And the world was collapsing.
    Zee kept squealing till her lungs got choked. Then she was coughing. And when she weren’t coughing she was begging me to go faster. As if I weren’t thumping at the engine, fast as it would go.
    Hard to see now. Dust filling the darkness. I could feel the road stodgy beneath the wheels. Dirt any deeper and we’d have been swimming in it.
    Swimming.
    I thought about that watery death, clawing its way closer. And I knew swimming wouldn’t help you, but not having the option still made it so much worse. I could almost feel the water in my lungs already, my chest tightening, just as it had all those years before. My limbs useless. Everything squeezing shut.
    I stared straight ahead, tried to blink the fear out of me. But then Zee cried my name like I’d pinched her.
    “What?”
    “I think it’s stopping,” she called. I strained my ears to listen above the sound of the wagon. Was that it? Silence?
    I stomped at the accelerator. Far from convinced.
    But another few minutes and the dust began clearing, and what was left of the road had stayed where it was. I wound my window down, stuck my face out in the night.
    The Surge felt far away. In the distance.
    But then the ground began ripping apart right in front of us. A huge gash, breaking open the road and getting wider. As if the world had grown so weary it was tearing itself to pieces, slicing its brittle remains into shreds.

For a moment the wagon was airborne, the whole night grimy and blind as we arced through it. Then our front wheels hit dirt again and the car plowed to a halt.
    Behind us the cliffs exploded into the water, and the spray shot upward until all we could see was dust and ocean and every little thing dissolving into sky. But we were still there. Hanging on. Our front end was buried in sand but the bulk of the wagon hung out over the ocean. Just dangling there. A thousand feet high.
    Zee was huddled on the dashboard, her eyes shiny, blinking at me. And I realized she was waiting on me to do something. Anything.
    Could have just crawled out the windows. Run west right then. But there’s nowhere in the world you can get on foot, so I clicked at the ignition.
    The engine stayed dead.
    I glanced down at the Surge and thought it had calmed a little, as if the earth had soothed the water, diluted the waves. But back out past the breakers, I’d never seen it so big, the arc of the whirlpools stretched so wide. And beyond them, at the wobbling far corner of theworld, I could see red streaks as the sun refused to quit. Here it came again, that scorching ball of heat.
    I coaxed the engine back on the sixteenth try, like getting a fire going on wet plastic. The wagon eased forward, digging into the sand, but the back end was too heavy and we sank again. Stalled.
    I stared back at all my shit. The tools and supplies.
    “Hold on,” I whispered, shoving Zee tighter on the dashboard. And then the wagon bent and rocked as I wriggled toward the hatch at the far end.
    It was so dark. Dusty. And I was sweating, slippery and afraid. Everything quiet now but for the sound of the water twisting and foaming below us, the wagon creaking, the rear end dipping lower with every inch I slid.
    The hatch was sticky, weighted with sand and rocks, and I had to pry at it, jamming it free. But then the wagon squeaked and shifted. And it started to pitch real low.
    I was staring straight down at the bulging waves and Zee was screaming. Everything was moving. Boxes sliding past me, piling up against me.
    I got the hatch wide with my whole body shaking and I shoved out the scrap and the nails. LEDs. Sheets of steel. I watched it all plummet through the first rays of dawn, disappear into the water raging white.
    I had one hand clasped inside the wagon and my eyes stuck on the Surge. But the