The South Florida Offshore Tourism Redevelopment Zone
(FORMERLY MIAMI BEACH)
“Science is not about certainty. It is about deductions, tested and retested, until we are satisfied enough to deduce some more. You can never really know anything for certain.”
Lilly remembered the way her dissertation director looked when he said those words, leaning back in his chair with his neck craned up, eyes staring at the ceiling.
The words came out strained, like he was quickly cobbling them together as he spoke, though he had said the same thing to dozens of other graduate students before, in the same office with the same expression on his face, stretched out in his chair with his neck in the same position.
Still, it was good advice, and Lilly never forgot it.
The loud groaning and cracking sound that startled her out of bed, for example, led her to deduce that a condominium building on the mainland had collapsed.
Some old, abandoned tower that had been rotting in the surf for years.
Hilton-over-the-Beach looked eastward, and guests couldn’t see the ruins on the other side of Biscayne Bay, so Lilly deduced such collapses happened often, the hotel deliberately constructed to obscure the rot.
No alarms went off in her room, and her view toward the ocean showed nothing amiss.
A few cruise liners and megayachts sailed past slowly, and a cargo container floated on the horizon.
Lilly couldn’t be sure that nothing was wrong, but she deduced that everything was still going to plan.
She made a cup of coffee from her room’s machine and leaned against the large window, which stretched from floor to ceiling, and watched the sun rise.
Leaning forward, she tried to peer down to the water below her.
The hotel was built as a cascading series of shrinking floors, each one smaller than the one below, like a wedding cake, so her view of the large steel stilts on which the entire edifice sat was blocked by the floor beneath.
She couldn’t see the stilts entering the water below, which at high tide completely covered Miami Beach and made the hotel look like a large luxury oil derrick from afar.
Lilly checked her phone for messages. There was just one from Roger: 12:00 PM confirmed. Hall B.
It was on then.
Lilly finished her coffee and dressed quickly.
The convention halls would not open for another hour but she could do a slow walk around the promenade and continue her reconnaissance.
She put on her pass and lanyard, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door, then took an elevator up to the convention center.
Even at this early hour there was a buzz among the handful of attendees who milled around the lobby, talking excitedly over breakfast and looking at photos and videos from the previous day’s panels.
A few were already in their cosplay outfits.
Roger suggested they should wear costumes, too, partially as a joke and partially because, as Lilly knew, he really wanted to.
But it was never practical. Too cumbersome.
Lilly kept her outfit simple: sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt that read FOR THE MALICARN!
with an outline of Prion’s profile. Roger thought the shirt was corny and old, but that was why Lilly liked it. It looked authentic.
A complimentary breakfast buffet for hotel guests was laid out, featuring lots of fruit, an omelet station, and several trays of sausages, blintzes, and eggs.
Lilly stuck with her coffee. She still felt ill when she ate rich foods.
Anything with too much sugar or fat made her nauseous.
That had been the case for years, ever since the boat.
When Lilly escaped from the Malicarn, it took two months for her to cross a little less than five hundred miles of open ocean.
Of course that was never the plan. She expected it to take two days, but even the man who sold the boat to her in Funchal had warned her not to head out, that there was no way she could beat the hurricane.
But Lilly was desperate to stay ahead of whoever was almost certainly going to be chasing her, so instead of waiting she overpaid the man for the twelve-foot dinghy, packed it with cans of beans, vegetables, and bottled water she purchased at a nearby market, and took off just before the rains started.
She should have died. She knew that. There wasn’t any sense in it.
She had never navigated a boat larger than a kayak, and the dinghy’s little GPS monitor shorted out as the rains hammered down.
She nearly capsized multiple times, finally lying down on the bottom of the boat, gripping the sides, hoping not to be turned around.
When the storm finally passed, she had no idea how far she had been steered away from her original course, and so simply started heading east, best as she could make it out, which went fine until the boat’s engine began smoking and shut down. Lilly was adrift at sea.
The rationing of the cans and water was easy.
She could space that out well enough to make it a couple of weeks.
What was hard was the counting down, each can a literal marker for how many days she had to live.
Most people didn’t die with so much certainty, but Lilly was able to deduce with extreme precision how much longer she had to live based on the amount of food and water left in the boat.
Deduction, however, was not certainty. And two nights after her last can of corn, with a single water bottle left, Lilly lay down in the boat, flat on her back, and watched the stars above her, bright and glorious in the middle of the dark ocean.
The night had never seemed so full of stars, even in her college astronomy classes where they would hike out into the woods, camp under a clear sky, and stargaze all night.
She knew she was at the very end of whatever life she was going to get to live, and only now could she see the entirety of the universe so clearly.
She thought to herself that she did not want to die alone.
The next morning a Moroccan fishing boat sighted her, pulled her in, and brought her to land. She didn’t have the stomach for rich foods after that.
There was not, she was fortunate to discover upon her return to civilization, any kind of global manhunt for her.
If the Portuguese government knew about the arson at all, they weren’t advertising it, and the studio didn’t seem to have any resources to do much about it.
Lilly was still wary about returning to the United States.
They’d find her eventually. Maybe she wouldn’t go to jail but there were other ways of ruining your life, and a bunch of lawsuits didn’t sound like Lilly’s preferred way to spend the future.
Best to steer away from the European Union as well, in case Portugal decided to follow up about her property destruction.
The UK was still easy enough to get into, however.
Lilly’s bank accounts hadn’t been frozen or anything, and Norman fishermen still took bribes in American money so she could avoid customs. In London, Lilly sublet a flat in an outer suburb and found a job as a cashier at a grocer.
She remained as invisible as possible, abandoning her old social media accounts, emails, everything.
She didn’t have a phone. She never even tried contacting her mother to tell her she was alive.
Lilly didn’t speak of her time in the Malicarn or her dramatic escape—not to coworkers, not to customers, not to anyone.
It was like it never happened. She made no friends, intentionally staying away from pubs and parks and even the lobby of her apartment.
She kept expecting someone from the set to sneak their way to London, to find her and capture her and bring her back, to answer for her destruction of the neuroscanners, her immolation of the lab.
It never happened. Two years after her escape, she saw an article online: “First new Malicarn movie in three years premieres in the United States.” In one publicity photo, Lilly recognized the soft, out-of-focus profile of Glenn, standing in costume behind a row of warriors in a still from the movie. So at least he hadn’t changed at all.
Lilly didn’t go to the theater to see it. Instead she pirated a copy and watched it one night on her computer, lying in bed under the covers, ashamed someone might see her and know that this lonely woman who worked a double shift stocking produce had an interest in a long-running fantasy franchise.
The film was garbage. King Prion is betrayed by the Necromancer and killed by a dragon.
This spurs Glenn, as Gregorian, to seek an audience with the Necromancer.
He returns to the Malicarn and announces that magic is banned forever from the Malicarn, and peace is pronounced throughout the land.
The plot was uneven, the ending drawn out and anticlimactic, with the queen giving birth to a baby girl and then dying, and Glenn was forced to do a lot more acting than ever before.
And though the previous films were professional-looking, The Return of the Necromancer—as it was called—felt sloppy and slapdash.
Lots of digital effects were applied to make the fight scenes more intense.
Gregorian ended the film with a long monologue about peace, which made Lilly laugh, as she could clearly tell Glenn’s heart was not in it.
But it was only a movie. Lilly’s unremarkable life continued.
Every day she went to her job and then back to her apartment and the next day back to her job.
Every few years another Malicarn movie was released and she watched the bootleg and cried under the blankets and then tried not to think about it again.