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  The ocean moved. That changed everything.

  She kept working.

  On her seventeenth birthday, Erin awoke on Lalitha’s bathroom floor, smelling of vomit and feeling as if she’d swallowed a cat.

  Still dizzy, she leaned against Lalitha’s bathtub and turned her phone back on. She ignored her mother’s voice mails but read her texts.

  Claire: I WOKE UP TO A CALL FROM THE PTA PRESIDENT TELLING ME YOU PASSED OUT DRUNK LAST NIGHT.

  Claire: THEN I SAW A VIDEO OF YOU RUNNING AROUND HALF NAKED.

  Claire: WHAT THE HELL?

  Claire: WERE YOU EVEN AT LALITHA’S HOUSE?

  Claire: GET YOUR ASS HOME IMMEDIATELY.

  Claire: WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?

  Still disoriented, Erin sent a single text.

  Erin: I am fine and will head straight home.

  Claire: ENJOY YOUR DRIVE IN THE FIAT. IT’S YOUR LAST ONE.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Saturday morning, Jade arrived in a vintage Honda. As promised, she’d borrowed her cousin’s bike and loaded it next to her own on the back rack.

  “Hop in!”

  Erin said, “I thought we were biking.”

  “We’re driving to the Port Hills first.”

  Erin hadn’t brought a Hokey Pokey container. “You said no windy roads.”

  “Relax. We’re going partway up. No mountains. No real switchbacks.”

  To a girl from the flat Midwest, the Port Hills were mountains. And while they paled in comparison to the Southern Alps, they were plenty big enough to nauseate her during the drive.

  “Under the seat,” Jade said.

  Erin withdrew a punnet—cookies n’ cream—and held it in her lap. “Well, I’m ready.”

  “Sweet as.”

  “You’re always saying that. I get what it means, but where did it come from? Sweet as what? Sweet as pie? Sweet as a peach? There has to be something there.”

  Jade considered that as they drove into hills that were actually mountains. The relatively flat city stretched below them, from the foot of the hills clear out to the ocean. Beyond the ocean were more mountains, where New Zealand curved in on itself. From a distance, Christchurch was picturesque. Gorgeous.

  Near the top of the hill, Jade said, “I think we mean ‘sweet as can be.’ Or ‘big as can be.’ ‘Clever as can be.’”

  “See? Now that makes sense.”

  Jade parked on a residential street. “Here we go.”

  Erin shifted her weight awkwardly while Jade unloaded the bikes and strapped on a huge backpack.

  “Was I supposed to bring something? I didn’t bring anything.”

  “Nope. I’ve got you covered.”

  “Okay.” Sweet as can be.

  Jade adjusted the bike seat and threw Erin a helmet from the back seat of the car. On foot, she led Erin across brown grass that probably belonged to someone’s farm, transferred the bikes over a gate, and double-checked their gear.

  Jade said, “The Port Hills live between Christchurch and Lyttelton, a port city. The view from the top is spectacular. You want to lead?”

  “I hardly know where we’re going.”

  “There’s a path.”

  “I might be slow.”

  “All right then. Holler if you want me to stop.” Jade threw her leg over the bike and clipped her shoes into its pedals. Erin cringed. If Jade crashed, her bike would stay attached all the way down the hill.

  Jade was off, and Erin tried to keep up. Halfway up—or what she believed was halfway up—Erin panted, standing on the pedals so her body weight kept her going. Jade zoomed ahead.

  Holy crap.

  Jade crested the hill and disappeared. There was water over there, but how far down? She probably stopped just on the other side of the crest, right?

  Erin hoped she’d stopped. This was real work. Way harder than a couple miles in a pool. Harder than swimming in the ocean. Erin felt out of shape, and she was in great shape. Then again, she had never biked in the mountains before, let alone up and down them. Swimming and biking must be two different shapes.

  Her thighs screamed as she crested a mini-hill—where Jade hadn’t stopped. Erin couldn’t even coast to follow her. The trail dipped briefly before climbing again.

  Erin stopped long enough to rip off her windbreaker and fleece, then followed for another twenty minutes, catching a glimpse of Jade each time she crested a hill. Eventually, she fell so far behind that she caught only a glance of Jade’s helmet cresting a peak in the distance.

  She didn’t think she’d make it, but when she crested that peak Jade was sitting comfortably on the ground, digging through her backpack.

  “Hi! Have a sit.” Jade was breathing normally.

  Erin lay in the grass near Jade to catch her breath. She was beat. New Zealand was winning. Erin stared at the cloudless blue sky, which went on forever. Maybe because the houses were short, or maybe because she was on a mountain top, the sky felt different. Bigger.

  “We can’t bike down the other side. No way I’d make it back up here.”

  “Bit dramatic, aren’t you?” Jade said. “You’re the fastest girl in the pool!”

  Erin closed her eyes. “I was utterly unprepared for this. You are a beast! Give me a week or two and I’ll be able to keep up.”

  “Right on.” Jade produced three sandwiches and handfuls of chocolates. “Tried pineapple lumps?”

  Erin shook her head.

  “They aren’t really pineapple. It’s like a chocolate fish, but pineapple-y.”

  Erin hadn’t tasted chocolate fish either, but any chocolate sounded appetizing. She bit a pineapple lump in half, but the chocolate coating was waxy, and the filling was … not pineapple.

  Jade noticed her expression. “I’ll have it.” She popped the other half into her mouth and it was gone. “So, this is what I wanted to show you: Lyttelton and its port.”

  Erin had been so preoccupied with catching her breath that she hadn’t soaked in the view. Christchurch and the ocean lay behind them, but before them several mountains harbored a small bay and a busy shipping port.

  “Wow.”

  “So glad you like it. It’s not even one of the most beautiful places on the South Island. You’ll see. Before Christmas, go to Hokitika. There aren’t any shops in Christchurch like it anymore. Find some kiwi stuff to take home.”

  “And Hokitika is beautiful?”

  “Not so you’d notice. It’s an artist town on the Tasman Sea. The beautiful part is Hokitika Gorge.”

  “I dunno, Jade. This is pretty amazing.”

  “It is. But you’ll find better spots. Beaches and mountains, lakes and springs. We’ve got loads of great stuff. You’ll find the places that are for you.”

  They sat in silence for a long while. A container ship entered the port and Erin recalibrated her brain several times: each brightly colored block was the size of a railcar. Or a semitruck’s haul.

  “What do you think is in those containers?” Erin asked.

  “Everything,” Jade said.

  “Everything?”

  “Everything not made in New Zealand. Those containers are the reason we have bell peppers, tomatoes, and other produce that doesn’t grow in winter. So food, for one. And we don’t make a lot of stuff here. So we import a lot: materials, technology, books. Everything.”

  “There’s nowhere like this in Chicago,” Erin said. “I mean, there’s a lake. Lake Michigan is a Great Lake, so it kind of looks like ocean, but it’s surrounded by city. And the beaches are tiny. And fake. And, you know, it’s not actually ocean.”

  “And no port, of course, if it’s in the middle of the country.”

  “Yeah. I hadn’t really thought about ports. I know we have them on the coasts, but that’s all sort of invisible to me.”

  Jade nodded.

  Cranes unloaded shipping containers from another vessel.

  “So, is this what you do for fun?” Erin said.

  “I find a bit of fun doing whatever,
with whoever else likes doing it.”

  It sounded simple, but with college deadlines looming, Erin couldn’t afford to waste time. After applications were in, during those excruciating months of waiting, she’d do whatever she wanted with whoever else liked doing it. Until then, there was too much on the line.

  Erin’s unambitious pal said, “Down to Lyttelton, then?”

  “Jade, I really don’t think I can make it back up.”

  “Tell you what, we’ll ride down to the car and drive to Lyttelton. You lead.”

  _________

  Leading downhill was easier but colder. At the car, she bundled up while Jade loaded the bike rack.

  “Actually, Jade, I’ve kind of seen Lyttelton now.”

  “Yeah, but my mum requested chocolates, so we have to go.”

  Jade drove over the Port Hills and into a roundabout at sea level. Here was Lyttelton up close.

  A working port from a distance was one thing. Up close, the cranes lifted tons of full containers as if they were toys.

  And the containers were filthy.

  Looking up from the port, rows of colorful old houses lined Lyttelton’s streets. But driving up into town from the port, Erin noticed half the Lyttelton streets were vacant. Enormous craters separated buildings. Children—probably children—had decorated a chain-link fence with paper cups, streamers, and plastic cartons pressed into every hole within arm’s reach. The fence encircled a vacant lot a half-block long.

  Up close, Lyttelton was a little ghetto.

  Jade parked outside a small store standing between two vacant lots filled with construction debris. Or demolition debris? Erin didn’t know.

  Sufficiently creeped out, Erin locked the car doors while Jade ran in for chocolate.

  When she returned, Jade threw a white bag into the backseat and handed Erin a small salted truffle. “All set, then?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Headed back toward the harbor, Jade said, “Oh, SeaGlass is open! Can’t miss that. It’s the greatest café.”

  The “café” was in a metal shipping container, and it wasn’t alone. The shop next door was in a shipping container painted red. Across the road a restaurant filled a double-wide shipping container. Erin had never seen anything like it.

  They walked through an improvised container/plastic door and Jade bellowed, “You’re open!”

  An exuberant bearded guy ran around the counter to hug her. “Just three weeks now.”

  “Mum will be thrilled. We haven’t been over in a month. She probably just missed you.”

  “Stewart’s & Brown is opening in a fortnight. High-Life in October in time for holiday shopping. Tourism is picking up.”

  Erin couldn’t imagine Lyttelton as a tourist destination.

  “Can I have a flat white?” Jade asked.

  “And your friend?”

  “This is Erin. Erin? Alistair. Erin’s doing her O.E. from the States.”

  “Sweet as! Where ’bout?”

  “Chicago. Well, twenty-six miles west of Chicago. Wheaton. It’s quiet and safe. And I’d like a hot chocolate, please.”

  Erin stared out the window as Jade and Alistair chatted about their families. If the Wakefields’ neighborhood was bad, Lyttelton was horrid. Worse than Parma. This was squalor. A beautiful Victorian house stood adjacent to an empty pit.

  The gorgeous scene—gazing down a hill toward blue water and towering green mountains—was lovely, but upon further examination, it was all a façade.

  Alistair left to greet other customers.

  “Gorgeous view, innit?”

  Sometimes it was as if Jade could read her mind.

  “It is.” Erin sipped her hot chocolate. “But what’s up with the shipping containers?”

  “It’s a port.”

  “Right, I get it.” Erin lowered her voice. “But we are sitting in a shipping container.”

  Jade didn’t lower her voice. “Actually, we’re sitting in a café. Alistair!”

  He abandoned other customers when Jade beckoned.

  “Alistair, tell Erin about SeaGlass. The original one.”

  He transformed into a bright-eyed child on Christmas morning.

  “Two floors, and the second was floor-to-ceiling windows. Well, almost. We had two spiral staircases—one for guests, one for staff—and the view was astounding. Three-sixty degrees of our beautiful little town. They used to call Lyttelton the Port of Christchurch, did you know?” His face fell. “I suppose they still do, but it’s not the same. Most of the shops, gone. Half the houses, gone. So many of our best people, gone. Not dead, mostly, but friends and neighbors left and won’t ever come back.”

  Erin had spent most of June staring in the mirror, and Alistair looked worse than she ever had. He was mourning.

  Alistair and Jade stared at the ground, shaking their heads.

  Alistair looked out the door’s plastic window, giving no indication of how he’d gone from a 360-degree view to one tiny plastic window in an artificial door.

  Erin imagined The Nothing sweeping through The Neverending Story. “But what happened?”

  “When SeaGlass came down, we waited years to build a new café. We started small,” Alistair said.

  “But what happened?”

  They glared at her. A trio of shoppers entered, but Erin desperately needed an answer from Alistair before he left.

  “What happened to your cafe and the houses and the shops?”

  Jade stood up. “I’ll show her. You go help them.”

  One last gulp of hot chocolate and Erin was out in the chilly air with Jade. Across the street and a block away, they stopped on a corner in front of yet another crater. The building next to the pit was missing half its staircase.

  Jade jiggled a fence that was clearly marked NO TRESPASSING. Erin suspected she soon would learn New Zealand’s secrets. Jade was a covert wizard. Perhaps only vampires could see the buildings. Or aliens had attacked.

  Erin remained at the crater’s rim as Jade walked downstairs to rock bottom.

  “It was right here. You can sort of imagine the view, if you were two stories up, right? Look up the hills. There were houses for days. Well, not days, but straight up the hill—yellows and reds and blues and whites. Old houses that had been here for generations. And look down.”

  Erin saw the bay, though most of the ships were obscured.

  “It was the best of both worlds. Right here. And just the nicest people in the world serving up whatever you wanted for tea.”

  Erin whispered: “Jade, what happened?”

  “You’re joking, right? The earthquakes? The two quakes that destroyed everything?” Jade climbed out of the pit and led Erin back toward the car. “In September of 2010 and February of 2011, two huge earthquakes shook Christchurch to its core. Half of downtown Lyttelton fell. Thousands of people were rendered homeless. Huge buildings toppled in Christchurch’s CBD, including the cathedral, which was just …. It was our best thing.”

  It sounded like science fiction.

  Jade enumerated the buildings destroyed by those quakes. “There are quakes all the time. That’s why we had a drill first week of term. You get used to quakes, but those two were different. Art museum, gone. Medical center, gone. Cafés and churches and houses, gone, gone, gone.”

  Each new thing was a punch to the gut, and matter-of-fact Jade quieted. She started the car. “A hundred and eighty-five people died.”

  In earthquakes. Right here.

  Five minutes after Jade’s admission that two earthquakes had destroyed half of Christchurch, two minutes after she’d said Erin would get used to it, Jade drove into a tunnel.

  Heavy, unstable mountains in the Ring of Fire, prone to earthquakes. Erin was not particularly interested in getting used to earthquakes yet.

  She could have died right there.

  “Faster? Faster, Jade?”

  Erin wanted to hold her breath but her body had other ideas. By the time they emerged from the tunnel, completely unscathe
d, Erin was practically hyperventilating.

  “All right, Erin?”

  “Fine,” she lied.

  She was desperate for answers. How was Christchurch rebuilding? How was everyone who didn’t die? What was destroyed? And, most importantly, why the hell hadn’t kiwis moved out of the Ring of Fire?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Back at the house, Erin pulled out her phone to discover several missed calls from Claire and a single voice mail:

  Erin, it feels like you’re avoiding me. I’ve just read through our recent texts, and it seems like an awful lot of hanging out and not much work finding your unique factor. Sweetie, I love you. I need you to focus. We’re in the final stretches here. We are so close. Don’t lose sight of our goal.

  After promising Claire via email she was focused intently and her next essay would be amazing, Erin spent hours plummeting into the earthquake rabbit hole. Wikipedia said the September 2010 quake had been powerful and damaging enough to topple hundreds of Christchurch’s buildings.

  A second massively destructive quake in February 2011 was so substantial, seismologists considered the September quake a mere foreshock.

  Every year, New Zealand experienced 15,000 earthquakes, 100 to 150 of which were large enough to be felt.

  That’s one every three days.

  Japan felt 2,000 quakes a year. The United States had maybe 40, mostly on the west coast.

  Turned out New Zealand was nearly the exact size and contained a population comparable to Colorado. Four and a half million people opted to live in the Ring of Fire.

  Erin filtered New Zealand’s quakes by magnitude and absorbed the data: kiwis had felt five earthquakes in Christchurch since Erin’s July arrival.

  She hadn’t felt a thing, including one her first Tuesday in New Zealand.

  She’d traveled to a wrecked Christchurch knowing nothing about its history. Yes, 185 people died, but more than 6,600 others were treated for injuries at hospitals. Immediately after the quakes, kiwis were anxious and scared, but now those emotions had given way to anger. Thousands of downtown buildings must be demolished for safety reasons. People complained about insurance. People begged for retrofitting. Kiwis were irate about inefficiency.