“Their houses fall on them?” Sophia guessed.
Alyona shook her head. The rock she leaned against pressed into her skull. “Just listen. After five minutes, the quake stops. It feels like forever to them. The babies keep crying but the people are so happy. They crawl toward each other to hug. Maybe some sidewalks split, some wires snapped, but they made it—they lived. They’re lying there holding each other and then, through the holes where their windows used to be, they see this shadow.”
Sophia was unblinking.
“It’s a wave. Twice as high as their houses.”
“Over Zavoyko?” said Sophia. “That’s not possible. It’s too high.”
“Past Zavoyko, I told you. This earthquake was that powerful. People felt it in Hawaii. People way off in Australia were asking their friends, ‘Did you bump into me?’ because something was making them rock on their feet. That’s how strong the quake was.”
Her sister didn’t say anything.
“It shook the whole ocean,” Alyona said. “It sent up a wave two hundred meters high. And it just…” She held her hand out in front of them, lined it up with the flat water of the bay, and swept it across the horizon.
The air brushed cold on their bare arms. Somewhere nearby, birds were calling.
“What happened to them?” Sophia finally asked.
“No one knows. Everyone in the city was too distracted by the quake. Even in Zavoyko, they didn’t notice how the sky had gotten darker; they were busy sweeping up, checking in on their next-door neighbors, making repairs. When ocean water came down their streets, they just figured some pipes had burst uphill. But later, when the electricity came back on, somebody realized there were no lights coming from the edge of the cliff. The place where that town had been was empty.”
The ripples in the bay made a quiet rhythm behind her words. Shh, shh. Shh, shh.
“They went to look and found nothing. No people, no buildings, no traffic lights, no roads. No trees. No grass. It looked like the moon.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Washed away. The wave picked them up right where they lay, like this.” She propped herself on one elbow and gripped Sophia’s shoulder, its bones shifting under her palm. “That’s how tight the water was around their bodies. It locked them up inside their houses. It lifted the whole town and took it out to the Pacific. No one ever saw a sign of them again.”
In the shadow of the hill, Sophia’s face was dark. Her lips were parted to show the ridged bottoms of her front teeth. Alyona liked, every so often, to bring her sister to a place where she looked blank with fear.
“That’s not true,” Sophia said.
“Yes, it is. I heard it at school.”
The water, opaque in the afternoon light, was keeping its pace. It looked silver. The rocks Sophia had been standing on appeared and disappeared.
“Can we go home?” Sophia asked.
“It’s early.”
“Still.”
“Did I scare you?”
“No.”
In the center of the bay, a trawler pushed south, heading for whatever waited out there—Chukotka, Alaska, Japan. The sisters had never left the Kamchatka Peninsula. One day, their mother said, they would visit Moscow, but that was a nine-hour flight away, a whole continent’s distance, and would require them to cross above the mountains and seas and fault lines that isolated Kamchatka. They had never known a big earthquake, but their mother told them what one was like. She described how 1997 felt in their apartment: the kitchen light swinging high enough on its cord to smash against the ceiling, the cabinet doors swinging so jars of preserves could dance out, the eggy smell of leaking gas that made her head ache. On the street afterward, their mother said, she saw cars ground into one another and the asphalt opened up.
Looking for this spot to sit, the sisters had walked far enough along the base of the hill to leave almost all signs of civilization behind. Only the ship, and the occasional pieces of litter—two-liter beer bottles dragging their labels, peeled-back can tops that once covered oiled herring, soggy cardboard cake circles—floating by. If a quake hit now, there would be no doorway for the two of them to stand in. Boulders would fall from the wall above. And then a wave would bear their bodies away.
Alyona got up. “All right, come on,” she said.
Sophia slipped back into her sandals. Her pants were still scrunched up to the knees. Together, they climbed over the biggest rocks and back toward the city center. Alyona slapped mosquitoes out of their way. Though they had eaten lunch at home before coming here, she was getting hungry again. “You’re growing,” their mother had said, mixed caution and surprise, when Alyona took a second fish patty at dinner earlier in the week. But she wasn’t getting any taller; she remained one of the smallest girls in her class, stuck in a child’s body, a container around a limitless appetite.
Between the gull calls came the sounds of people shouting and occasional car horns. Wet gravel rolled under the sisters’ feet. Hopping up on a knee-high boulder, Alyona saw their path curve ahead. Soon the stony wall at their side would descend. They would emerge onto a rock beach that was busy on one end with food vendors, blocked off at the other with a ship repair yard, and teeming with the summer’s crowds. Once the two of them got there, they could turn away from the bay to look onto the beaten grass of the city’s main pedestrian square. Past that, and the lines of traffic, were a statue of Lenin, a sign for Gazprom, and a broad government building topped with flags. Alyona and Sophia would be standing in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s heart, and seeing on either side the swing of the city’s hills, its long ribs. A volcano’s blue top beyond.
A bus from the center would take them home. Television and summer soup and their mother’s best tales of work. She would ask them what they had done that day—“Hey, don’t tell Mama what I told you,” Alyona said. “About the town.”
At her back, Sophia said, “Why not?”
“Just don’t.” Alyona would not be responsible for whatever nightmares Sophia did or did not have.
“If it’s true, why can’t I ask her?”
Alyona forced air out her nose. She climbed down, wound her way around a few heaps of stone, and stopped.
Two meters away was the man she had seen walking along the water before. He sat on the path with his legs stuck out straight. His back was hunched. From a distance, he had looked like a grown-up, but now that she saw him better, he was more of an overgrown teenager: swollen cheeks, sun-bleached eyebrows, yellow hair that stuck up in back like the quills of a hedgehog.
He raised his chin to her. “Hello.”