The off-shore team has returned, so that means we know more about the storms. The science is something I don’t understand, but Seunghee and Aiko are invested in it. Haru meets us on the deck, and he is his usual, unflappable self, hair and clothes dishevelled from having pulled off his wetsuit haphazardly. On the other hand, Tara’s grey hair is neatly tied in a bun at the base of her neck, and she smiles at me with tired eyes, the wrinkles around them more prominent now.
“Our saviour has returned!” Haru announces, his eyes glimmering with suppressed mirth. “The one who faced a flood of biblical proportions -“
“Please stop,” Tara sighs, but I can see her smile widen.
“- and saved our lives with her trusty boat!” Haru finishes, before throwing her a salute.
Every person standing in this Tower owes Tara their life. If it wasn’t for her warning, if it wasn’t for her foresight, we would all be dead. We pointedly do not think about those who didn’t believe her. When we join the line that shuffles towards the food counters, there are quick glances tossed towards us, before they look away.
I feel my cheeks flush with the weight of their gazes, and Aiko spots it immediately. He grins, gently bumping me with this shoulder.
“Head up, Mina,” he says. “Let them see the newest member of the Rescue squad.”
“I still freeze up, Aiko,” I tell him, swaying to lean into his space. “Some rescue squad member I make.”
“We never think the best of ourselves,” Tara says serenely, piling the potatoes and peas on her plate. “Others see more clearly, in that case. I think you should rely on your team to tell you what you’re doing right or wrong.”
When we sit down, she frowns behind her glasses. “When I predicted the…disasters, I wished to be wrong,” she murmurs, stabbing her potato with her chopsticks. “I had never wished to be wrong before. And my team did not stand with me then. It made me think that I had made the wrong choice, announcing the news back then.”
I remember the day Tara’s announcement happened. It was also the day I nearly drowned for the second time. In my mind, although the true end was far away, that day marked the beginning of the apocalypse.
It began with a simple summer shower. I could see the moon through the scuttling clouds, but there was something sinister about the pale, narrow beams it sent into my attic. The next day, I woke up to the water lapping at my window, my mattress wet through and through.
“Tara, do you see an end to this?” Seunghee asks, and I snap back to the conversation, hearing echoes of the question I asked Aiko in Seunghee’s words. “Is there anything we can expect?”
Tara rolls a pea across her plate, uncharacteristically silent.
“Tara.” Aiko also sounds serious, for once.
“Remember how I asked you if you could see the moon from the viewing platform?” she asks, and I blink. Tara hates the viewing platform, because all we can see from there is the hazy darkness of land in the distance with no way to reach it. The waves and the wind are too wild to even consider moving closer. It had startled me when she had asked, back when I had first arrived.
“I went up there again last night,” Haru says, his eyes narrowed. “All I saw was the wind blowing the rain nearly horizontal. Explain, Tara. You know we haven’t been able to track the moon since the orbital wobble.”
Seunghee snorts, stabbing her chopsticks into the table. To my fascination, it stands steadily, the tips making a small crack larger now. “What bullshit is this, Tara? The moon’s orbit?”
“The tides shifted because the orbit of the moon shifted,” Tara says abruptly. “The wobble is something that has been documented for years, but this time, we don’t know what’s happening. It shifted drastically, and as a result, we’re facing unnatural rains and weather conditions. So, I asked you all if you could see the moon, because only if we see it, can I even predict what’s going to happen. That’s the only answer I can give you.”
“So you’re just going to let us sit here, unsure of the future, while you try to wait out the weather before doing anything?” Seunghee’s voice rises, and Aiko reaches out to touch her hand.
“Seunghee -”
“No, stop it, Aiko. Stop trying to defend her.” Seunghee is angry, but I understand her. It’s a fear I’ve only ever voiced to myself. I have never even mentioned to Aiko the terror I feel when we lower ourselves into the lashing waves to reach out to a distant bobbing figure. I have never talked to him about the way I feel when a hand slips through my grasp.
Seunghee used to be on the team before I joined. She had to stop when she had her accident, the waves slamming her against the structures that hold the Tower over the water. She was told that she was lucky, because all she lost was her leg.
The people in the water lost their lives.
“Mina?”
Everyone is looking at me. Looking down, I realise that I have snapped my chopsticks in half.
“Mina, what’s wrong?” Aiko asks, reaching over to pull the shards of wood out of my grip.
“I think we deserve to know, Tara,” I say, surprising even myself. I have never before fought with Tara, or tried to question her. To me, if Tara had not been there that day, I would have died in the waters around my house. It’s because of her and Aiko that I lived to swim to the Tower.
But now, I’m scared.
“We’re risking our lives to save people, Tara,” I continue. “And you know just how hard it is for me.” To keep swimming, I don’t add. She knows. “Why am I doing this? When does this end?”
“I really don’t know, Mina,” she says, and for once, Tara sounds frustrated herself. “I’m – I built this damn machine, I doomed you to living while others die. I don’t know what to do next, except keep us alive.”
My brother loved the beach. When we were younger, he would dart ahead of me just to stand in the waves, letting the water sweep over his feet while the wind tousled his hair. For all that we looked alike, we were starkly different. I have hated the water from the first time I lost my footing and the waves dragged me down. Over and under and all the way around – I remember feeling like a rag doll being tossed around as the breath was snatched from my lungs.
The waves swallowed him that night, and I never saw anything of him after. It was meant to be a simple walk on the beach at sunrise. It killed him.
“I was doomed even before you built this machine, Tara,” I tell her, and my voice shakes slightly. “I have been living a borrowed life anyways.”
Aiko’s hand finds mine, but I find no comfort in the warmth. “Mina, I know what you’re thinking,” he says, but I find that I am angry.
I don’t know why. When I declare that I am leaving, no one follows me.
Sreepriya Ramesh 
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