From the window of my master’s apartment, I could see the whole world. That wasn’t an exaggeration. We were suspended from a constantly groaning cable in a skyscraper that hit the limits of “sky” and started flirting with “space.” 

I didn’t know who the people I worked for were in this new world order, but they were important enough to have nabbed the top floor of the “Spacescraper.” When I looked down, all I could see was water and clouds. The Great Wave was currently submerging this side of the Earth and the few cities left had sealed themselves under domes whose peaks just barely rose above the water. The sparkle from the sun on those peaks was nearly blinding, but I couldn’t stop staring. 

To me, those places looked like freedom, trapped as they were under the heaving angry glory of the ocean. In three days time, I would find out whether that was true or not because in three days time I was going to escape this disgusting, constantly swinging, metal prison. I was going to find a way to get to Earth’s surface–something no one in this godforsaken place had tried to do for eighty years since the day the Earth split open.