The dark winds roiled the water, so tranquil a moment ago, but now frothing with wrath. Shirley pushed herself above the water and gasped. But another wave, sneakier, got her from under; it lunged forward like a whip and flicked around her midriff. 

She didn’t recognize the sea anymore. 

First Saturday of the month. She had slipped out of her quarters like usual.

The window on their floor overlooked the midnight zone of the ocean. It wasn’t entirely an abyss out there. There were always glimmers of schools of jellyfish or of fireworms who lived up to their titles of “sea centipedes”. If one looked carefully, the water had a shape as well. When creatures or a disturbance cut through the open expanse, the currents barreled outwards, swerved, and immediately rammed back to the marauder. 

Shirley had adjusted her snorkel and flippers. She had checked that she’d had one oxygen tank and one filled with natural gas. Then, she had used the maintenance workers’ shaft to get into the water. Like a jet, she had streaked past over a thousand meters and burst through the surface. 

Her love for swimming, however, was limited to the usual ocean—mysterious but vapid. Sure, there was always a drizzle, but this downpour morphed the ocean into something else entirely. 

The churlish clouds unleashed great nasty sobs, as if craving to drown out the last remnant of civilization. 

Her first concern was the leakage on Floor 85, just three floors beneath her and her Ma’s residence. This storm would undoubtedly breach the newly-installed filler wood. The undried epoxy would melt, and turbid seawater would flood the entire floor in a matter of minutes. And although airlocks separated floor from floor, it was common knowledge that the flooring was ransacked by the sticky air and the termites that managed to burrow their ways into the Tower’s crevices.

Colossal waves, each higher than the previous one, were dedicated to pommel her to the bottom of the ocean. Shirley paddled faster and with her scrawny body, tried to keep her head above the water. She might as well try to hold back an army. 

Shirley saw the big roller. 

Before she had the chance to marvel at its majesty, every limb and every organ of hers imploded.

***

She heard a swelling rev, a subdued set of voices, and a defibrillator’s buildup then release. She saw a white flag on the top of the mast shredded by the Punisher’s breaths. She felt a cold finger, Death’s touch, over her neck every ten seconds. 

She felt the vessel stabilize to equilibrium. She saw a white sky, a familiar sight from the previous times she’d sneaked out to swim. She heard a cheering crowd.

“Hang on, girl.” The cold finger released from her skin again. “We’re almost there.”

***

There was a passionate altercation, produced by sets of low but vehement voices.

“The girl is awake now.” Someone shrewdly noted her writhing arms, futilely struggling against being cuffed to the hospital bed.

Shirley hadn’t expected to be in a meeting room. 

Her bed was on one end of the boat-shaped conference table while the men in dark-green uniforms stretched out along the two sides. Every single one of them feared the backs of the chairs. Wrinkles were not allowed to exist on their outfits. 

“Answer our questions honestly, girl. Don’t even imagine that you can lie to us,” the man adjacent to her said. 

Shirley wouldn’t dare, so she nodded.

“What is your floor?”

“82,” she answered.

“What is your ethnicity?”

“Chinese.” She worried immediately that they’d be unable to authenticate her due to the lack of documents in the database.

“Girl, are any of your direct family not a stowaway in this tower?”

Pinned under his vehement gaze, she shook her head. All of them scribbled something down. 

“Excuse me”—Shirley found it intimidating to hold onto her nerve— “But can I ask a question?”

Her interrogator turned to the others for confirmation and granted the request.

“How did I end up here?”

Shirley has only heard about expeditionary forces from smugglers who worked through the Tower’s lower floors’ grapevine. 

These courageous young men and women were the hopes of civilization. Their mission was to find land outside of man’s current residence, for no one was under the delusion that the Tower would last forever. 

A storm like this one could flood up to thirty floors, Shirley thought glumly.

Yet no matter how well-trained these geniuses were, none of them ever made it back from their expeditions. They were the heroes lost at sea, and after a while, people stopped putting their hopes in them. So, when one team made a U-turn for Shirley, those from Floor 30 (sea level) and above went amok. 

To avoid unnecessary rumors, the captain took her straight to Floor 4—the expeditioners’ compound—and then up to Floor 3—the Tower’s central command, where she was deemed a lost cause.

The raging storm wasn’t the only reason why they couldn’t send her home. For safety’s sake, there were no passages open between the upper floors and the lower ones. 

To make matters more complicated, Shirley’s mother never registered her into the Tower’s file system. Therefore, they couldn’t even notify her of her daughter’s survival, nor could they explain to the public that it was a nameless girl and not land that the expeditionary force discovered.

At the meeting, some had considered sending her back to the ocean. 

“But—”

“You don’t get a say in this.” They had muted her easily.

Finally, the captain of the expedition intervened. “Let the girl stay; otherwise, we would've returned for nothing.”

“Really?” One of the elders had challenged. “You seem to suggest that you’d accomplish something of value in your expedition.”

“We would’ve.” The captain had said without flinching. 

This young Aryan genius had then reasoned that due to Shirley’s newly-gained notoriety, there would be public outrage if they threw her back into the ocean in the middle of an unprecedented tempest. When asked the alternative, he had calmly offered Shirley a position as an expeditioner. 

“Under one condition.” The chair of the meeting finally gave in. “As soon as this storm gentle, your team leaves immediately with her on the boat.”

“Yessiree.” The captain was proud of his obnoxious persona.

***

“So this is Floor 3.”

The captain, dubbed “Crawley’s boy” at the meeting, ignored Shirley.

“It’s more spacious than I imagined.” She scanned the open plaza and tried again. Silence. “Why—” 

His scoff clamped her shut.

After they crossed an entire storage of aircrafts, artillery and armors of various materials and sizes, she was appalled. Everything she knew about the Tower—overpopulation on every floor, dwindling supplies and the top-down approach to renovate the Tower—crumbled.

“So they lied to us.” 

Her companion was still non-responsive. His eyes reminded her of the frenzied sea that roped her into submission, but his composure was a tranquil mirror. 

“And of course you are okay with it.”

She stopped following him through the wide lanes that could’ve fit five people across and the vacant lots that could’ve housed a dozen families. In the slums on Floor 82, shoulders rubbed shoulders, feet stomped on each other, and people died from stampedes. 

“You can either come with me, or you are welcome to jump back into the ocean.” His voice sounded deeper than his age.

“Then show me the nearest window.” Shirley countered with spite.

He chuckled, this time far more coldly. “With the number of people that are suicidal or wanting to bring this tower down, they’d never give us the luxury.”

“Pity.” Shirley didn’t budge.

He extended out his hand. “Lyric.”

“Lyric for what?”

“That’s my name.” His smile raked over her rags and bandages. “What’s yours?”

“Shui-ling, Shirley.” She didn’t know why she told him her Chinese name.

“The water spirit, huh?” He grinned wider at her agape mouth. “We had freedom to learn whatever language we desire in preparation for life after we leave the Tower.”

“Just because you are culturally educated doesn’t mean I’m going with you.”

He found no faults with that. “They told you that the Tower gets narrower on the top like a pyramid, didn’t they?”

Shirley nodded, biting back her tears.

“They claimed that the top floors are above sea level and thus safer to work on, which is why they never bothered to send you all food or other supplies, correct?”

She made him pause. “Is this a cross examination now, Lyric?” Her face, sundered by raw emotions, was nowhere near presentable.

“No.” At last, a hint of apology graced his dashing features. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll explain why they lied.”

As Shirley was bickering with this pampered boy, her mother, along with an entire squadron of women, were making their daily run around the floor. They’d hunt the walls and the crevices for mold, and once they found some, they’d collect them with their bare hands to be transferred to the floorplanners. Mold was the only source of water, for drinking and farming purposes. Her mother’s palms were constantly bleeding because of the job, though, purplish like rotten berries.

Shirley dragged her feet into motion, thankful that he didn’t comment on her concession.

The weaponry escalated the farther they went. Torpedoes and bulky rockets lined their left and right, and it wasn’t until the shooting range that they saw other human beings. Load. Aim. Blast. 

“So what’s so special about the center of Floor 3?” Back in her world, the secured hub in the middle of Floor 82 was where the floorkeeper distributed scant resources; the queue always started at midnight and ended at noon.

“This is the Architect’s study,” Lyric said.

“The Architect?” The genius mathematician who designed and built the Tower to withhold currents as strong as four meters per second and waves as tall as eighteen meters?

“Not that one.” He knew what she was thinking. “It’s the Architect's apprentice who took over.”

“What’s he like?”

Another surge of amusement flared on his beautiful face in response to her agitation. “See for yourself.”

Shirley never imagined a musty library inside. Blueprint paper peeled off of the curved walls, distorting the intricate art of lines and angles on there. With a sweaty ceiling above and clammy sheets of paper strewn over the table, the room was as damp as Floor 82. She jerked towards Lyric to see him wiping at his forehead. How could it be? They were so far away from the ocean.

The apprentice was working at a long parchment that rolled off his desk. He was almost pressed to the tabletop. Momentarily, he would straighten, redip his pen and add a single stroke. Behind him stood a framed building’s plan on an easel.

“Aren’t you going to introduce her, Lyric?” Upon closer examination, the apprentice’s strawberry blond curls clung to his temples like he had just gone for a swim. 

“Alex, meet Shirley from Floor 82.”

The number visibly arrested Alex from his work. He met her eyes in slow motion. “My friend, I did dare you to bring someone from the bottom to condemn me to my face, didn’t I?”

His friend scoffed; apparently, that was his go-to feedback.

Alex stared at her straight. “Ask me why there aren’t more people on the top floors.”

Shirley was too taken aback by his candid request to fulfill it.

Fortunately, he considered silence a confirmation, prompting him to justify the Tower’s design. “Babel’s Tower had always been straight up and down, but basic architectural tenets dictate that skyscrapers must sustain less weight at their tops. My mentor, the Architect, agonized much before demanding that every floor hold ten percent less occupants than the level below.”

“Then why lie?” Shirley grimaced just thinking of her mother and everyone else on their floor, groveling morning to night under the belief that the livs they led were mankind’s shared suffering.

“Do you accept it even after I’ve told you the logic behind our population placement?” Alex asked.

The entire Tower, not would, but could collapse if more people were moved up. And, Babel’s Tower’s only objective was to preserve mankind from the acts of God.  

“No.” She blurted.

Fifty years ago, the Great Flood had occurred. Geographically, those closest to Babel’s Tower had flocked inside and occupied the top floors; the latecomers had crammed the bottom floors like ants. But more had kept coming. However, even this god-defying architecture with one hundred floors hadn’t been able to house eight billion people, not to mention the limited timeframe. When the 100th floor had been so full that the people were minced meat, the gate had slowly began to close, which it should had done seconds ago. The moment’s delay had precipitated the turbid invasion that had engulfed the fifteen bottom-most floors. If the rain hadn’t ceased all of a sudden at the time, then more would have been lost.

“It’s clear then why we cannot fan the bitterness of almost half a million people,” he said painfully, as if begging for a divine retribution on him and him only. 

“How many people are there in the Tower? Tell me the truth.”

“Six-hundred-thousand.”

“Noah’s Bloody Ark.” Shirley recalled hearing her mother say that when she had cut her pinkie off from a flint in a piece of mold.

She didn’t imagine that the population from Floor 75 to 85 was basically everyone, and from that point up, people lived with more and more breathing space. If there were less than twenty folks on Floor 3, the two floors above would simply be luxury suites.

Think about the bigger picture, she willed her mind. “But why is it you people at the top and not the others?” Really, the question was: why is her mother at risk of dying from this storm and not the lucky bastards up here?

“Now I’m hearing your doppelgänger, Lyric,” Alex dodged the subject.

However, the named individual was even more unforthcoming. “We’ve finished our purpose in visiting here, now let us go and prepare you for the broadcast.”

“Right,” Shirley snapped back, “because it’s so important to clarify to the handful of people on the top thirty floors that they are still stuck in their uncrowded lodgings.”

“Are you coming or not?”

She had never met such a brilliant, infuriating schemer. “Yes.” Because although she harbored even greater loathing of this invisible stratification, she also knew now that their hands are forced.

***

“You actually look alright now.” Lyric nodded at her bob cut and ill fitting uniform that was the same as his. 

Shirley squirmed in the oversized livery. “You will keep your end of the promise if I do this?”

“I gave my word of honor.” He seemed offended by her trust issues.

They went down to Floor 5 into a news room. The screens in the background bathed the main camera’s full range in an electric blue; even the air teemed with a subtle buzz. All of a sudden, Shirley was back in the ocean, seized by belligerent waves while lightning shattered the sky into pieces. 

“Don’t forget to breathe.” Lyric nudged her.

She inhaled sharply, breaking out of the surface. 

A journalist in a scandalous miniskirt awaited Shirley on one side of the news table. The short walk, though, barely cured Shirley’s sea legs. Thank God she had a script.

***

“You did well.” His impassive face was a mockery to how she’d just lied through her teeth to introduce herself as an expeditioner. No, she wasn’t some illegal resident from a floor that no one cared about; she was one of the Tower’s brightest who almost fell victim to the tempest.

“Now, tell me.” she stared up at him belligerently. “How many floors have flooded?”

Obviously not a lover of proximity, he gestured for her to step back. “If you would’ve given me one more second, I would’ve told you that we are headed for Floor 2, the only place with live footage of the lower floors.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Every moment they stalled at the neverending customs to authorize their entrance to the security room, the waves in the back of her mind crashed louder, pulling at her last defense. Shirley was supposed to apologize for how little she helped out around the floor; she was supposed to show her mother why the ocean attracted her so.

There were a hundred monitors stacked next to and atop each other on the big screen. She saw the glitched out squares on the top and counted them. Twenty. No, that can’t be. She staggered to the dashboard to get a closer look. Yes, she miscounted; it was twenty-two. 

“I’m sorry.” Lyric was one step behind her.

“Screw you!” She pounced on him, clutching his shoulders like a fragile eagle holding on to its prey. “Did you know? Did you know that my home was already underwater when you asked me to give that false statement?”

“No.” He restrained himself from taking offense to her aggression. “The last update I received half an hour ago reported two floors lost, not seven.”

Shirley sank to her knees. Ten-thousand feet below where she was, she felt the complacent sea leisurely devouring its lavish banquet. She felt it toss and turn—retching from the meager flesh over the bones of these beggars—before it surges up again for better kills. She didn’t know how long she stayed there, locked in a struggle with nature, the winner of today. When she looked up again, there were twenty-three gray screens.

“Why” —she took a breath to gather herself— “did you bring me back here?”

“We expeditioners are forbidden to turn back no matter what climate or emergency we encounter,” he said.

“That does not answer my question.” She was glad, however, that he did not look at her with pity.

“I gave the order because…,” that was the first time he stuttered, “you were the first person I met who could swim.”