Marlow stayed in the park until it was empty and nearly dark, and she still didn’t know what she felt about her eggs. But she figured out something else: she was finished taking direction.
So she sneaked out and found the bus while Honey slept in the next room, while Ellis slept uptown. She didn’t know how their deal turned out, and surprised herself by not really caring. The farther she got from Honey’s apartment, the smaller they seemed in her mind.
The bus took her to a train. The train took her out of New York, under the river and through a nameless stretch of New Jersey, all graffiti-chalked cliffs and buildings with the glass punched out of them. She wore Honey’s silver wig, even though it was the middle of the night, and she was glad that she did when she looked to her right and saw, somewhere around the middle of the state, a hologram billboard for the hunt. There was a photo of her that must have been the one the girl at the Archive took. There was an update saying that the grand prize had been tripled. The bright ad played between two notices on wanted criminals, as if whoever programmed these things had been smart enough to see there was no difference.
Marlow rode to the place where the tracks dried up, disappearing into a weedy endcap station marked Absecon. Then she started walking. She traced the route—south and east from New York, toward what people called “the Shore”—from the little paper map the guy Honey knew had given her. She didn’t need the map for long. The formidable concrete horseshoe that wrapped around Atlantis was everywhere, impossible to miss. The basin of the U-shaped wall wrapped around Atlantis on land, sealing it off from the rest of the state. The wall’s long sides extended hundreds of yards into the ocean, maritime borders slicing right through the waves. A smattering of buoys bobbed between the ends of the U. Just beyond them, small, mint-colored boats drifted. ATLANTIS COAST GUARD was painted on their sides.
The towers inside the wall were clustered together, the ancient logos at their tops mostly cracked or fallen away. Marlow glanced at the people around her. It was easy to tell who also meant to sneak over the border. Their faces were carefully neutral, their eyes firmly on the ground. Their paces were prim and measured, engineered to deflect all attention. Marlow fell into step next to a couple, quick for their age. They looked to be eightysomething and were fusing into one set of looks, both of them wide-hipped with brown skin and thick white hair. When the man nodded at Marlow, she noticed the front of his cap. Bars of every color and, in yellow stitching, KOREA II. Together but not, Marlow and the couple aimed themselves at the border wall’s right side, where it curved and stretched out into the sea.
Ventnor, the last town before the wall, was a strange mix of vacation kitsch and border-town glumness. The concrete hotels on Marlow’s right were streaked with rust. Bright beach towels hung from their balconies. On her left were tiny booths with flimsy plastic pulled over their wares for the night. She got closer to one of the booths and peered inside, squinting into the light of the bare security bulb. There were shot glasses and Christmas-tree ornaments painted with this still-new American border, the sand and the sea and the wall rising over them, casting a long, dour shadow. There were T-shirts that said, in artless printing, TELL MY GIRL DON’T BOTHER MESSAGING—GONE TO ATLANTIS. There were ballpoint pens filled with water. Inside them, a tiny guard with a rifle and neon-yellow sunglasses floated back and forth. Marlow whirled around suddenly, spooked by the suggestion. But the only uniformed man for miles seemed to be concentrating hard on not seeing her. When their eyes met at random, he turned and took several steps in the other direction.
The wall was a block away when Marlow and the couple she was following found themselves in the dark. Marlow looked up to see the illumidrone that had been bouncing over her head, lighting her path, idling a hundred feet up. When she took another step toward the wall, it thrust forward once, then fell back as if it had struck something. It turned and flew away, back inland. Marlow stood there, letting her eyes adjust to the miserly gleam