Category: Fiction

S.L. Harris

The boy in his Sunday clothes stared at the pelicans scattered blackly on the shore like slick and globous stones, right where the monster had left them. He remembered them flying in great lines above the oil rigs at dawn, dropping singly into the ocean like Saint Peter in his doubt and then floating fishful and satisfied, as though everything had been resolved.

That was before the monster.

The oil rigs were quiet now, and it was rare to see even a single pelican, and the fishermen who still went out in desperation from time to time caught things that were not good to eat. The beaches here, then there, were covered in the traces of the monster’s forays: dead fish in their thousands and sands coated bubbling black. Even people had disappeared into the shining ooze, but no one from Mikey’s town, at least no one anyone talked about.

So they all stayed and prayed and shut their eyes and said the monster would go some other place, until it came, and then they said that it wouldn’t strike the same place twice so soon. And now when they saw that it had, they would say something else. Mikey clambered down the rocks and drew near to one of the pelicans. A creature from another, nighted universe, a photonegative world. The eye, steely blue and stark against the tarred feathers, stared up at him. He knelt and put his head close to its face to see. The bird suddenly shuddered and Mikey jumped back, surprised and terrified in his hopes.

He saw then that many of them were breathing, some trying to move, some even standing, trying in vain to extend their sticky, heavy wings. He thought of Ezekiel and the field of bones, the stirring, groaning army of the dead, one of those Bible stories that haunted his nightmares. Like the flood, rising and carrying the bad people away, and he knew he wasn’t one of the good ones. Like Leviathan, God’s laugh at doubters—and he knew he was a doubter—or Jonah’s whale, God’s punishment for the disobedient—and he knew he was one of them, too. Like the monster, creeping along dark waters, coming to shore by night, swallowing more and more of the world and of everything they lived by.

Mikey thought of the pelicans flying. He thought that if they were not to fly again that it might kill him, as sure as the monster might—as sure as the monster would. He stared for a minute at the dying bird beside him. Then he ran home, half an old documentary in mind, snuck quietly in the back so as not to disturb the Bible study, and returned to the beach with a bucket and a couple of towels and the big bottle of dish soap. He drew near to his first bird. As he reached out, the beak snapped up suddenly and scratched his arm. He jumped back, tears in his eyes. But then he bit his lip and went to the bird again. It seemed this effort had exhausted the bird, and Mikey ignored the little trickle of blood on his arm as he gently rubbed the oily remnants of the monster’s touch away. Once he pressed his face to the bird’s bad-smelling down and felt the trembling heart, and he didn’t have a word for it but home.

All day he was at them. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, really, and he paid for it with more cuts and scratches and a few near misses at his eyes. But slowly he got the hang of it. He held their bills shut, and if he gripped them just so, they stayed still as statues as he worked the oil out of them. Most of them were too tired to fight their salvation.

In his memory of the documentary, they came out clean and fresh and recovered in some special room, and then, somehow, the film cut to a shot of them flying like nothing had ever happened. That wasn’t what happened with his birds. Despite his best efforts, patches of the oily black stuff still clung to them. When he released them, they often just flopped back down on the beach. Sometimes they managed to stand and ruffle up their half-cleaned feathers. None flew.

It was afternoon, his towels black and soaked, his arms and coat and slacks a ruin of oil and mud and scratches. His eyes stung where he had tried to wipe away sweat and tears. And then he saw it. Maybe it was that first one. He wasn’t sure. But its wings beat and it made a halfhearted little turkey flap across the beach. Some big stone in his heart went with it, and he found himself yelling for sheer joy Oh Jesus yes.

“Michael!” His mother’s voice, anger, shock, shame, and the big stone crashed right back down.

“Oh sweet God have mercy,” she screamed across the beach, in a voice that had in it no mercy at all. She did not run to him, but only stood, her face pale, and as he approached, dragging the towels, she turned her head and called back, “Abe, what are we going to do with him?” He felt his jaw going tight and hard, and out of the corner of his eye, he watched his pelican flop down onto the beach again and lay sprawled there, one wing out.

“How could you,” she said, as he came near her. “Ah! My towels! What’ll we do with you, what’ll we do with you, I just don’t know . . . .”

A titan shame settled across his shoulders. But a little Satanic voice in him said that they were only towels, only clothes, that the birds had to fly again and they would have died and maybe they still would die, but at least he tried, and he started to say it aloud when Dad came snarling out of the house. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he snarled. “What are you doing, down here, ruining your good clothes like that? You got a brain, don’t you?” And then, “What if that thing had gotten you?”

He thought he would try to explain, that the monster would get them all, that if it had gotten the birds, it would get all of them no matter how tight they locked their doors and shut their eyes, and that the birds had to fly again, they had to, but he couldn’t explain, and he yelled, “I hate you! I hate you!” He threw the towels down and felt all the hot tears coming that he couldn’t control, and he hated that too.

Mama shook her head and sighed heavily. “Michael, no.” And Dad at the same time, “Quit crying. What were you thinking?”

And what are you, what are you thinking, what kind of thing are you, banged around his ears and his head like a gong as he followed them home and as he pulled his clothes off and threw them into the steel bucket his mother had put on the porch and went shivering, shamed and almost naked into the house.

When he came down his mother was waiting.

“Your father went out for more soap so we can do the dishes tonight. And I want you to kneel down and ask God to forgive you.”

“For what,” he mumbled.

He could see rage bubbling under the skin of her neck, the vein of her forehead.

“Your fourth and fifth commandments, for starters. Say them.”

He glared at her.

“Say them.”

He mumbled honor father mother Sabbath holy.

“Kneel down.”

He got down on his knees, white rage in his chest, thinking of the pelicans flying, and then all of a sudden his heart sinking and the rage turning in on himself, blazing hatred at the monster he was. The stupid, disobedient kid he was. What kind of thing, what kind of person goes down to where the monster made its kills? What kind of person goes in his Sunday clothes and plays with dying birds? Tears again, hating the tears too, hating himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

His mother knelt down next to him and took his head in her hands. He felt it again, the home feeling, and he tried to think how the one could be right and the other wrong.

“Think, next time,” she said. “Think.”

“I’ll be good,” he said quietly. “I’ll be good, I just . . . .”

“What are you doing?” came his father’s voice. “He doesn’t need any of that. He needs to learn consequences. Up. Up to your room. And you’ll stay there through dinner. Cost of those clothes means you’re out a meal tonight, and that’s getting off easy.”

The white rage came back, but then the desire to be good, the feel of his mother’s hands around his head settled over him, and he nodded and walked slowly up to his room. He felt dirty inside, wrung out like a rag, angry and tired, the feeling that nothing would be clean again.

The vision of the dead and dying pelicans would not let him go. He saw their oil-spotted feathers. He saw them flying in popcorn ceiling of the room, and thought in his parents’ voices disaster, disaster. You’re a disaster. This is a disaster.

He heard them eating their dinner downstairs, sometimes their voices rising over what to do with him. He thought now, while they are busy, now, I will sneak down and finish the work. But the Satan voice put courage in him. I am not wrong, said the voice. They have to fly, and if they don’t it will be the monster killing us all.

“I’m going back out,” he announced as he came downstairs into the kitchen with an armful of bath towels.

Dad froze with his food halfway to his mouth.

“You go out that door, you aren’t coming back in tonight.”

His mother said, “Abe.”

“I mean it. Up to you, Michael. Up to your room or this isn’t your home tonight.”

“Abe, the monster,” said his mother. They were talking as though he wasn’t there. He opened the screen door to the porch and picked up the bucket and the dish soap, and stood there watching them decide his fate.

“Thing won’t come back. Was just here. It rolls around the Gulf,” he grunted. “Anyway, what’s he going to do, sit there and let it eat him? Boy’s got no more brains than that he deserves it.”

Mikey was thinking why is he doing this, he hates me, and I hate him, and I will stay out all night, and if it eats me maybe it should, and then you’ll go to Hell because you killed me. But under that another thought persisted, that he had to get to the pelicans, that there were so many of them, and that maybe some of them might fly, and that would be the one good thing he could do.

He slammed the door behind him, spilling suds from his bucket. He heard it lock behind him, and his mother’s voice raised saying, “Oh, sweet Lord, help us.”

The black beach was peaceful as the grave. The moon gone skinnydipping in the dark waters lit the oily lumps that were the birds.

Mikey went to work. He was rougher than he meant to be, and he kept telling them, “It’s for your own good,” as they pecked and clawed and flapped at him. But once he had them in the hold, they were quiet, and as the night went on, both he and the birds grew calmer. It was hard to see, but it seemed like the monster’s oilstuff was coming out better.

Little by little, as the moon got smaller and higher, the brown and bedraggled bird-shadows on the beach began to outnumber the slick black ones. Alright, he said. Alright, something. But still the birds did not fly. They stood, like dumb things, like shocked things, like things that did not know what they even were anymore.

But he kept at the work. The towels he had taken were soaked and black again. He took his shirt off and used it, and then his pants, and then tried his best to rinse the towels in the waters of the Gulf.

The moon was climbing down exhausted; his skin now was stained and cut and his arms beyond exhausted. Barely able to hold the beaks and bodies of even these exhausted, dying things. He collapsed at last, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But when he sobbing got up and began walking along the beach like a night orderly in a field hospital, he realized that he had finished. Every bird that lived—and there was one dead one for every two he’d gotten to in time—had been cleaned.

Not cleaned completely. All of them bore the marks of the monster and the water and his own crude handling. Feathers askew and smears of black. But touched, at least, by someone trying to help, pulled free at least a little from the thing that was killing him.

He found himself sobbing, with exhaustion and relief and despair all at once. They were all just there, not a one of them flying. Some were starting to walk. That was something. But they had to fly. If they wouldn’t fly this was all for nothing. The monster would come back. No one would say it, no one would believe it, but of course it would come back.

The one he’d cleaned first was just about where it had landed when his mother arrived. He thought, this one. It can do it.

He went close to it and shouted. It blinked at him. He ran toward it, and it raised itself and hopped away. “G’on,” he said. “Fly, will you.”

It waddled along the beach and he ran after it, but it would not fly, not really. When he drew close it would do its little turkeyflap at an angle to get away from him, hit the ground again, then moved clumsily away as he chased it across the stones. He felt like an idiot, in his underwear, chasing the bird around the beach.

“You stay here it’s going to get you,” he said. “Stupid bird.” The bird regarded him.

He yelled, “G’on! G’on!” but the bird just looked at him. At last, with a roar of rage he circled around behind the bird and began chasing it toward the dark water. “G’on!” he yelled. The pelican wobbled its way toward the sea. A fierce smile fell over Mikey’s face and he charged.

The bird ran down to the water line and the boy rushed after him, and the bird looked for a minute as though it would just walk into the water unconcerned, but all of a sudden, as its feet touched the water, its wings spread, and it flew. Not the jerky turkey squall that it had done, but flying, real flying, the graceful thing that Mikey remembered. It took off and was out into the dark night, a weightless shadow in the moon.

The boy crashed into the edge of the water himself and fell down heedless of the stones on his naked belly, relishing the sting of saltwater on the many cuts the birds had gifted him, laughing and laughing and laughing, yelling “G’on! G’on! G’on then!” The pelican traced a line and was gone, and as the boy threw his head back he saw more of them taking wing, as if they’d just been waiting for the one to show them, and he laughed and laughed and laughed, feeling that rock in his gut being lifted and tossed a hundred miles away.

Then the monster came.

It slid shiny black and silent over and out of the water like an enormous puppy being born, like the thing after. It seemed slow and fast at once, like a gentle wave getting ready to cover the world. The boy gasped and got to his knees, staring stupidly for a second, then tried to scramble up on the beach. Gently, without any effort, the monster took him, and he fell.

It swept over him greedily, coating him in an instant like a second skin. Mikey gave a choking gasp and then it was over his face and the moon went out. He struggled with his hands and pulled it away from his mouth long enough to take another breath, then felt it slide over his mouth again. He felt it moving into his mouth, coating the insides of his cheeks. When he tried to scream, he choked and gagged in his dark caul, and he felt the monster oily and slick working its way down into his throat.

Then there was a sudden searing pain on his forehead, and the lights came back on. Everything was confused. He felt something cut his cheek, and then he could breathe. He felt hundreds of darts stabbing him, hundreds of tweezers pulling at has skin, and finally he could see what was happening.

The pelicans were all around him, stabbing at the monster, pulling it away from his flesh. Hair and arms and legs were all agony as they did it, but they were making him free. He managed to stand and started to struggle painfully up the beach. The monster was trying to follow, but the pelicans harried it, drove at it, and when it reached up to grab them, they flew.

They flew.

The sight of it gave Mikey’s quivering legs new strength. He charged away from the water and gained the high place above the beach. He turned and watched the pelicans in their relentless assault. Some of them were too slow, and the monster dragged them under. But there were many, and they seemed wholly unafraid, and though the monster was huge, it did not seem to want to push past the throng of assailants.

He was covered in patches of black, sticky film, but the stuff on him was dead, no longer moving across his body. He dropped and vomited. When he looked up, the pelicans were still at it. More of them were being dragged under and he yelled “No! No! G’on! G’on! Get out of there!” And at last, the remaining pelicans took to the air, and the monster slid back with the waves into the night waters.

He sat shivering and shocked, watching the line of birds winging its way into the night sky, and then he fell down.

He woke with a flashlight bright in his eyes, and the hands and arms of his father and mother around him, anxious voices and tears, tears even from his father, and I’m sorry even from his mother, and everything so strange and warm as they wrapped him in a towel and carried him gently home through the unlocked door and the hot bath.

As they hovered over him and washed his hair and body as though he were a little child he didn’t know what he thought. Only maybe that he was glad they had come. Only maybe that they didn’t want him to hurt after all. Only maybe that he had done a good thing, and they had been wrong. Only maybe that there was something between them now, thin and impenetrable as the oil slick on his skin had been, that there was another home for him now, and it wasn’t here. Only, maybe, the thought of flying, light as anything, over the dark and haunted waters, into some other world.

E.M. Linden

April was the first to go. April had always brought the snowmelt, soft rains, herbs gathered in armfuls from the alpine meadows. But that year, there were no rains, no herbs; the streets stayed slick with dirty ice. March dragged on, but couldn’t bridge the gap. It stuttered out fifteen days late, halfway through the hollow April left. Then came fifteen days of emptiness.

You see, my daughter, I’m trying to tell you what happened, like I promised. About all the ways we betrayed you, before you were even born.

You have to understand that even then, we thought April would return. We didn’t know that this was just the start. That we’d lose every month. And month by month, we’d lose everything.

 

People have always named their children wishfully. Once, they named them after virtues they wanted them to manifest: Patience, Faith, Charity.

And Hope.

Like everyone else, your father and I were warned about the future. We can’t plead ignorance. We brought you into the world anyway; an act of hope, or selfishness.

Hope was easy in May. But June never blossomed. We lost wild strawberries and nectarines. The meadows were parched, and the year was full of wounds that could not be pinched together.

By then we were frightened, but August arrived like August always did. We told ourselves we were overreacting. That it was temporary. Anyway, we did not need April and June, even if we missed them. We could get by with mead-coloured Augusts and Mays.

 

None of this was unexpected. The bird-women and the weather-watchers warned us, just as they had about the songbirds and glaciers.

But we still had seasons. Heartache winter; blink-and you’ll-miss-it spring. We had hope; we didn’t need to listen.

 

Hope is for cowards.

 

People have always named their children after what’s missing: a much-loved relative; names from a lost language or homeland. We named our children for the world we wanted them to inherit. We named them after what we’d lost, to remember. We gave them the names of the months we loved best: the neighbour’s twins named May and April; your cousin, July.

Your grandparents’ generation named their children Lark and Vetch, Minnow and Atoll, Eel and Cedar. Specific words, like single raindrops heralding the storm. But we are in the downpour now; the small names are drowned out. We have too many to choose from. We are overwhelmed with loss. Lake, Bird, Forest, Autumn, River, Rain. Our children’s names encompass half the world.

 

Really, the names are all the same. Every single one of them means, come back.

October was lean. That year in your grandmother’s kitchen, we scraped up only enough flour for a single loaf of harvest-bread. We left it plain: no currant-eyed fieldmice, no glossy, braided sheaves of wheat. We had always made the bread to feed our ancestors, but not that year. We short-changed our ghosts and spared our salt.

The ghosts mumbled inanities and blocked the chimney. Your grandmother had me running around with the broom, beating the rug and shaking them out of the curtains. After three days, we ate the bread ourselves.

By then, you see, we needed bread.

 

That was the last October. I think we knew it even at the time. The ghosts incoherent, dim as rain. A mean harvest. April drowned; October starved to death.

 

I can no longer tell you what the lesser-known months were called. There was one that smelt of woodsmoke. One that raised snowdrops. One that unfurled like clean laundry on a breezy day.

 

March was a shock. We’d always taken March for granted. Blustery, mutable; nobody’s favourite. We didn’t realise how much we’d miss its potential for change.

Without March to brace it, Spring lost its shape. It couldn’t withstand the hammer-blow heat, the floods and fires. A quarter of the year yawned empty.

 

Months were always messy. Better suited to honouring forgotten gods and emperors than keeping score of the year. But they weren’t easily replaced, either. You couldn’t just make up a month and demand that the world take notice. Not now. Not even when I was young. Too much potential was exhausted already. Too much was squandered.

 

We did try. In our village, halfway up the mountain, we named new months and seasons: the First Snows, the Time When Magpies Fly in Pairs, the Days of Swifts Returning, and the Forty Storms.

Nothing stuck.

You see the problem. These artifice months relied on things that could not endure. Snow, and certain birds.

 

We dreaded you asking about what happened to the world. We hoped, maybe, you’d never mention it. All this—what to us seems like such a glaring lack, a silence, a loss so resounding it changed everything—this is normal for you.

But as soon as you were old enough, you asked.

Your first question was what your name meant. That was hard enough to answer.

 

When a thing vanishes, its name becomes defunct. What does whale mean now? Or albatross? Just fabulist syllables. What use for honey-bee and dragonfly?

And yet we named you Autumn.

 

August and December were survivors. Extremes. August was bitter cold in the South, bloated with heat in the North, edges spreading like softened wax past the first and the thirty-first days. December was pinned by bright sharp things. Nails through a board. Icicles, windchimes, sunlight glinting off glass.

August and December clung on stubbornly, while the rest of the year collapsed around them.

 

But eventually, December bled out, and even August thinned to nothing.

 

After August, there was only one season. Its name was unintelligible and burnt the tongue. It meant something like summer, interrupted by storms. Nobody spoke it. Nobody wanted to evoke it, to call it any closer. As if it wasn’t too late; as if it hadn’t already been invited in.

 

These are our seasons now: The Heat. The Dry. The Devastations, in whatever form they take. Fire, wind, flood. This is the rhythm of the years.

Nothing is left of leaf-glow, of harvest and frost and rain. Autumn has lost its meaning. Two syllables are all that’s left. Two syllables, and you.

We named you after the world we hoped you’d have.

 

Another word for Autumn: Fall.

Used in an example sentence: Everything is falling.

Or this one: Everything has already fallen.

Still, we are working. We have learned there are different types of hope. There was the hope we used to have: hope that we would not have to act. That things weren’t as bad as all that. That we didn’t need to change everything.

The other kind is the hope that action is still possible. That is the painful hope you brought us, from which there is no hiding. It’s in your gaze, your questions. It can be elusive, confronting; it requires that we do a stocktake of our losses and the mistakes that led us here. It is hard work.

In some ways, it is like being a parent.

We want to bring the months back. The seasons. Can we do it? Nothing will ever be the same. So much is lost. But we are wrong about so many things. We underestimate nature all the time. Maybe life is more resilient than we’d thought.

We still imagine for you a world in which the word Autumn means something.

E. L. Mellor

As Blue Speck scuttled through the forest, Keddi leaped over roots and rocks to follow. Fungus, she thought, when the scrabbler halted near a tree with broad leaves and turned over the greenish earth faster than a shovel. The creature stepped aside to reveal a trove of pink whorls, which she lifted out, leaving behind a few tendrils to grow into a new cluster. Together they pushed the earth back into the hole before stopping to divide the spoils.

She’d once asked her father why people didn’t behave as fairly as the scrabblers. A flash of anger had passed over his face before he answered through a clenched jaw, “We can’t afford to be generous—the settlement wouldn’t survive. Anyway, they don’t have a moral code, just the instincts of a communal species.”

When Blue Speck slid the clumps into two equal piles, she wondered how her father could be so sure, as he hadn’t gotten within thirty meters of a living scrabbler since he was sixteen. Keddi stowed half the fungus in her rucksack and carried the rest to the place where the scrabblers gathered at the end of the day. After leaving it on a pile of foraged food, she exchanged a dip and raise of the head with Blue Speck and the others before walking away.

The late day sun shone painfully bright on the cleared ring around the settlement. She pressed her hand to the lockplate to unlatch a door in the wooden stockade, then shut it behind her and took her sack to the food lab.

Dane was sorting fruit and fungus at the intake table. “You’re last in—I hope you closed the gate.”

“Yes, ‘Papa’,” she answered, emptying her haul into a bin. He’d often forgotten when they were younger, and her reminders had kept him out of trouble more than once.

“It won’t be funny if the scrabblers attack while we’re asleep.”

“You do remember they’re diurnal?”

Dane sneered. “Go ahead, be a smartass. It’s not as if you have any adult responsibilities.”

“Everyone knows they’ll never come within thirty meters of the enclosure.”

He flushed an ugly red, and Keddi walked away before he could recover enough to reply. She’d had enough of being treated like a toddler by someone six months younger, not that lashing back made her feel better for more than a moment.

After changing clothes in her sleep space, she came out to find her mother had returned to the family’s rooms. “You’re going to have to do it sometime, Keddi. You can’t stay a child forever, and the settlement needs your skills.”

“I’ll work anywhere the supervisors assign me.”

“A knife through the central eye, that’s all it takes,” her mother continued, repeating what she’d said hundreds of times that year, “then drag the carcass back to the enclosure. It feels horrible—I won’t lie to you—but it’s over in an instant. And you’ll be an adult afterwards.”

She knew the litany by heart: she’d turned eighteen five months earlier, people were beginning to blame her parents, everyone had to obey the rules, her younger brother might one day follow her poor example . . . .

Keddi’s family sat with those who still had children under sixteen, while she ate by herself, shunned by the young adults. The settlement’s biologist was the only other person sitting alone, just as she always did. Three of Keddi’s friends huddled together at the end of one table, not quite belonging anywhere themselves yet. A few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, the supervisors had asked her not to sit or talk with them anymore.

Stab Blue Speck or stay a child in the eyes of the settlement—it made no sense. The scrabblers never threatened anyone, and without the food they helped the children find, the settlement would fail.

By what twisted logic did people consider it perfectly safe for children as young as six to wander the forest with the scrabblers for several hours every day, while the gate to the enclosure had to remain shut at all times to keep those same scrabblers from getting in and hurting the settlers in some unspecified way? The three-meter wall and palmprint locks struck Keddi as equally ridiculous. Scrabblers could be kept out with a barrier half as a high and a latch designed for human hands.

“What would they do to us?” she’d asked a supervisor once, when Dane had been punished for forgetting to close the gate.

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Keddi still didn’t, although she now knew that “when you’re older” had always really meant “once you’ve killed a scrabbler.”

How did anyone live with that?

The next morning, Keddi palmed the screen in her family’s small gathering room to call up a few documents she hadn’t read among those she was allowed to access. Several hours later, she’d learned nothing that mattered. What she really wanted were logs from the early days of the settlement, but she was locked out until recognized as an adult.

She headed for the forest as soon as the midday meal was over. The first goldfruit would be ripening in an enormous patch she and Blue Speck had found at an hour’s walk from the enclosure. The large berries contained so little copper they didn’t have to be processed, and everyone welcomed fresh fruit, since they couldn’t spare much room for it in the hydroponic sheds. Well before she reached the bushes, Blue Speck scuttled to her side. Keddi had begun to suspect scrabblers located humans and told them apart by scent, and she wondered if that was why none would come within thirty meters of a human who’d killed one. The biologist’s closed face had discouraged her from asking about it.

With Blue Speck’s help in shaking the low branches to dislodge ripened fruit, she filled two sacks and walked back to the glade. A few scrabblers clustered around one somewhat younger than Blue Speck. It was very small and had never foraged well or paired with any of the settlement’s children, but now it seemed to have grown even weaker, resting on its belly rather than its legs. Keddi wished there were something she could do. As she prepared to empty one of the sacks, an adult began clicking and scuttled to a spot near the frail one, so she walked over and waited. When it remained still, she poured some berries onto the ground, and Blue Speck pushed them toward the sick scrabbler.

As she carried her share to the settlement, she met the three other tweeners not far from the forest’s edge. They’d once done everything together, along with Dane and several others who’d already become adults.

“We’ve been wanting to talk to you,” said Frelin. “We hope you can find a way not to . . . .” Nel and Sorvi nodded.

“I don’t want to kill Fuzzi,” Sorvi blurted, as he blushed and ducked his head. “Stupid name.”

“Blue Speck’s not much better.”

“Or Shovel Foot,” added Nel.

“At least they’re based on something real.”

“Six-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to name anything,” said Frelin with a laugh. “Spot Leg? It’s like the names we called our plushies. Someone should make us wait until we have sense enough to do it properly.”

For a moment, being together was almost like it had always been, except for what none of them could ignore. Keddi still felt sick when she remembered her sixteenth birthday. “But people hardly ever mention the scrabblers, unless they’re punishing someone for not closing the gate—or when we turn sixteen. They act like we should be able to do this as easily as giving up our plushies. What’s the point of it?”

“We’ve talked about that a lot,” said Sorvi, “since you started holding out.”

“It doesn’t make sense. All the anthro files I’ve read describe people on other worlds taking care of species who help them or transport them or provide food. I wish I knew how this started. But I can’t see the logs until . . . .” Keddi shrugged.

Sorvi looked at Frelin. “Can you worm your way in?”

“No. There are things I can get to that I’m not technically allowed to see, but not handprint-protected docs. Someone really doesn’t want us to read them.”

“Dane,” said Nel.

They turned toward Frelin. “You must have noticed the way he stares at you. He has access now,” said Sorvi.

“And he’s always been a little absent-minded,” added Keddi. “You could probably get his help without making him suspicious.”

Frelin pressed her lips together. “I’m better at getting what I want from computers and equipment printers than from people. Also, using him that way feels wrong.”

“For Spot Leg?” asked Sorvi.

Nel smiled. “And the rest of us?”

The moments after breakfast had become the bleakest of Keddi’s day, as everyone else headed off to classrooms or work areas. With nowhere to go, no place she belonged, she sat until the hall emptied.

When she left, Frelin was waiting outside. She slipped a thin chip into Keddi’s palm. “The logs.”

“You did it! How?”

“Invited Dane to our rooms last night to show me some home planet vids he’s been going on about and got his palm on the screen.” Her mouth twitched. “He forgot to clear it, of course, so when he left, I accessed the docs, copied them to the chip, and erased any traces. I didn’t have a chance to l—”

“Frelin!” Her father strode across the quadrangle. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the processing shed?”

“Papa—”

“Go to your rotation.” As Frelin walked away, he said to Keddi, “I’m reporting this to the supervisors. We can’t have you corrupting the others.”

“I’m not—”

“Frelin will be eighteen in a few weeks and still hasn’t . . . . Stay away from her until you’re willing to act like an adult.” He spoke quietly, but his face darkened to purple before he stalked off.

What under the canopy was this about? Her parents’ shame, other adults’ anger—all because she wouldn’t kill her friend? She raced back to her family’s rooms. When she slid the chip into a port, an index of docs stretching back to the settlement’s earliest days filled the screen. Her glance at entries from the most recent years showed announcements of births, deaths, or work assignments next to reports on hydroponic yields and experiments in processing more of the copper out of native fungi, with occasional notes that the perimeter wall had been extended to accommodate another hydroponic shed or a new quadrangle of living space as the settlement grew. Keddi took a deep breath and opened the log with the oldest date, hoping to find something more than bare notes.

An hour later she sat back in her chair, feeling almost as shocked as if Blue Speck had stood up on two legs and explained the construction of a hydroponic tank. All her life she’d been taught that her great-great-grandparents had come in search of freedom, bravely overcoming challenges to build a precarious life on a new planet, but the journals told a different story: It was a forced resettlement. The earliest entries rang with outrage that scientists and skilled technicians would be transported to a penal colony like street thieves merely for speaking out against those in power.

Before she could read more, the door clicked. She blanked the screen as her father walked in. “Hi, Papa. Did you forget something?”

“Keddi, the supervisors want to talk to you.”

“I figured. I’ll stay after the evening meal.”

“They want to see you now.”

Her stomach clenched. Supervisors never interrupted the workday to deal with minor matters. Could Dane have realized he’d given Frelin access? She wished she could remove the chip and hide it.

“They’re waiting in the hall,” he said, as she sat. His face softened a little. “I’ll go with you.”

They crossed the sunlit quadrangle in silence. When they reached the hall door, her father put his hands on her shoulders. “Your mother and I just want you to do the right thing. We’re concerned about you.”

They approached the table at the end of the room. Frelin and her father waited in chairs nearby, while Keddi’s mother rushed in a few moments later. With her parents on either side, she faced the supervisors.

“Anil tells us he caught you speaking with Frelin this morning in direct contradiction of our order that you have no contact with her and the other tweeners. Is this true?” asked one of the men.

“Yes.”

Frelin jumped up. “It was my fault. I waited for her and—”

“Sit down.” He turned back to Keddi. “So you don’t deny it.”

“No.”

The woman bit her lip before she spoke. “This is a step we don’t wish to take, but your actions have left us little choice. Unless you’re willing to do what everyone else has done, we can no longer allow you to remain in the settlement. You may join your family and friends for the midday meal, but afterwards you will leave the enclosure and may not return until you bring proof you’re prepared to take on adult responsibilities.”

Her parents and Frelin talked over each other in protest. Even Frelin’s father looked shocked. When the supervisors silenced the others, he spoke up. “Look, I’m concerned about Keddi’s influence on my daughter, but there must be some sanction short of banishment.”

The oldest supervisor stood. He spoke slowly, and Keddi noticed his irises were ringed with the red-brown tinge of copper poisoning. “This is entirely under Keddi’s control. It’s her choice not to live by the settlement’s rules, her choice whether she stays in the forest or returns to take her place as an adult.”

“May I be excused from the rest of the morning shift,” asked her mother, “to help Keddi pack bedding and supplies?”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “We can’t allow resources to be taken from the community. She may wear a set of foraging clothes, but everything else stays in the enclosure—except her belt knife, of course.”

Of course.

“We expect you to return to your work for the rest of the morning. You’ll see your daughter at midday, and, if she cares about you and the settlement, we’ll celebrate her choice to become an adult tomorrow evening.”

Her parents stayed silent as they walked out, anger and sorrow plain on their faces. Why did her refusal to kill a scrabbler distress everyone so much?

Once she returned to her family’s quarters, she raced through as many logs as she could, scanning for clues during the few hours she had left. In a coerced exchange for renouncing all property and future claims on their homeworld, her ancestors had been dropped fully kitted out for settlement. They found good air, a mild climate, but tests of soil and water showed high levels of copper. By the end of the second year, it was clear none of their seeds would grow in the earth of the new world—and the only potentially edible native sources of protein were the copper-rich fungi.

“A slow death sentence” wrote one engineer who set up water filters along with a system to catch rain for drinking and for the hydroponic tanks. When the five-year packs of rations ran out and hydroponics still couldn’t supply enough food, names and death dates began to appear in the official log. A last journal entry from one settler ended, “They must have known. No choice now but starvation or organ failure.” After a long gap in entries, an engineer wrote, “We’ve done it—the copper in the latest protein extract is minimal. With Min’s chelation regimen and the expansion of the hydroponic sheds, we just might make it.” A year later the official log recorded the first births.

Most settlers spent hours searching the forest for fungi to supply enough protein for the settlement. One entry told of the day a large foraging party ended up surrounded by twenty or more forest crabs. It looked like an ambush, so they panicked and attacked the animals with their utility knives, slaughtering almost all of them.

The embedded image showed a dead scrabbler with green oozing from its central eye.

Keddi breathed as if she’d been running; the warning bell for the midday meal made her jump. Not yet, she thought, but slipped the chip into a pocket and grabbed her knife.

Her family and friends all sat with her, silent as if at a funeral meal. After those under sixteen were dismissed to change for foraging or relieve those who watched the smallest children so they could eat, the woman supervisor spoke.

“Because Keddi has as yet refused to do what she must, we’ve made a difficult decision: she will leave the enclosure until she chooses to become an adult. Moreover, we can no longer permit anyone else to remain who is not an adult as of their eighteenth birthday.”

Frelin’s father winced.

“We don’t like having to take such harsh measures, but the continued survival of our settlement requires that all of us follow the rules.” She looked at Keddi. “I wish you well and hope to see you return tomorrow so we can celebrate your adulthood.”

Her parents blinked back tears as they hugged her, and she wondered what they’d say to her brother, who wouldn’t be sixteen for several months. Or what the supervisors would tell the other children about her disappearance. When she said goodbye to her friends, Frelin whispered, “See you in a few weeks.”

Keddi walked out, palmed the gate lock, and crossed the clearing without looking back. She wandered the forest until Blue Speck joined her. They dug up a few clusters of fungus and dropped them at the gathering glade, where two adult scrabblers huddled on either side of the one who was ill. Later in the afternoon they hiked to the goldfruit bushes. Lacking rucksack and bags, she tied up her jacket to catch berries as she and Blue Speck shook them off the branches. The ailing scrabbler didn’t even raise its head when they went back. She poured a small pile of berries onto the ground and pushed them toward it. When it opened its mouth but made no other move, Keddi sat down and lifted its head as gently as she could, then gave it a berry, which it swallowed weakly. The others remained silent, heads up. She fed the scrabbler as many berries as it had strength to eat.

When she finished, Blue Speck pushed a large chunk of fungus toward her. Keddi smiled as she dipped her head and slid the piece back. She ate goldfruit to quench her thirst, since she didn’t want to drink the copper-laced water from a stream that ran by the clearing. As the greenish light under the trees faded to grey, more scrabblers scuttled in and added to the small pile of food the settlement’s children had left before Keddi and Blue Speck arrived.

Scrabblers soon filled the space, some eating fungus from the pile. Keddi supposed the others had gotten enough while foraging. None took goldfruit, and a few clicked loudly at any juveniles who approached the berries. It looked as though they were being left for her and the ill scrabbler. She managed to get a few more berries into its mouth, then ate some herself. When the light went, she lay down, still somewhat thirsty and hungry, knowing she would only feel worse the next day. Blue Speck settled next to her, and she found herself ringed by scrabblers. She folded her jacket under her head and slept.

She awoke with a dry throat. As the day brightened to green under the canopy, scrabblers began to move about the small clearing and disappear between the trees, while juveniles ate the remaining fungus before leaving to forage. A few adults stood near the ill scrabbler, but none touched the goldfruit. Thirsty as Keddi was, she first fed the scrabbler, who ate fewer berries than the evening before. She finished the rest before heading into the forest with Blue Speck.

By midday they’d dug up as much fungus as Blue Speck could eat or Keddi could haul. Not long after they returned to the glade, a pair of juveniles appeared, one dripping blue from its mouth. For a moment she feared it might be injured, but it moved carefully over to the sick one and dropped a mouthful of bruised berries in front of it. Blue Speck and the other adults raised their heads in approval, then looked at her. She got two berries in before it stopped chewing. An adult nudged the remaining fruit toward her. Nagging thirst tempted her to ignore the copper in it, but she lowered her head, and the juvenile who brought them finished what remained.

While she rested with the scrabblers, she wondered how much water she could drink from the stream without doing permanent damage to her liver and decided to gather goldfruit instead. Dehydration made the distance seem longer, and Blue Speck slowed so she could keep up. When she saw a gleam of gold ahead, she ran to eat berries as fast as her parched throat could swallow them. So many had ripened that they managed to collect most of a jacketful more. When they returned to the glade, Keddi found her friends waiting at its edge.

“It’s late. Shouldn’t you have gone back by now?”

“Have some water,” said Frelin, offering her bottle, still almost full.

Keddi drank all of it in a few swallows; nothing had ever tasted better.

“Here’s mine,” said Nel. “We brought gifts.”

“Nel and Sorvi staged a daring raid on the supply sheds.”

“Not that daring,” said Sorvi, “not when someone walks away without closing the door.”

“Maybe the biologist is beginning to slip. Has anyone noticed her eyes lately?” Nel took two large filter bottles and a bundle of filters out of her rucksack. “Lucky for us the open shed had everything we wanted.”

“If the supervisors caught you—” Keddi began.

“And lucky for us Frelin’s father wanted to lecture her before we foraged, so we happened to be hanging about the quad with our bags.” Sorvi pulled out a worn rucksack, two boxes of chelation tablets, and a few stacks of protein cakes. “These should last for a bit. And keep my water bottle. I’ll say I must have dropped it, very careless of me.”

Frelin handed Keddi a blanket.

“Is this from your bed?”

“You can share it with me after my birthday.”

Once they left, she filled the tops of the filter bottles from the stream and had a protein cake with the rest of Sorvi’s water. The sick scrabbler took only one berry, so she sat with its head in her lap while she ate goldfruit, feeling much stronger. She pushed some berries toward Blue Speck and her friends’ scrabblers, who’d settled around her along with a few hopeful-looking juveniles.

At full dark, Keddi wrapped herself in Frelin’s blanket and lay down to sleep, feeling safe and warm. Why didn’t the settlement keep the hydroponics in the sunlit field but shelter under the trees? It would be cooler in the growing season and more protected during the winter rains.

The next day, the ill scrabbler opened its mouth a little but didn’t seem able to eat even a single berry. She had no idea what else to do for it, so she foraged with Blue Speck and tried again at midday. At the end of the afternoon, when it couldn’t swallow any of the fresh goldfruit, she trickled drops of water from her bottle into its mouth. Again that night the scrabblers surrounded her and huddled close to the frail one.

In the grey light of early morning, Keddi opened her eyes to find all the scrabblers on their feet, heads raised and still, looking toward the small one. She lifted its head to her lap, held a goldfruit berry near its mouth, but it didn’t move. Blue Speck walked a few steps nearer and stood very close on her left, while Spot Leg came up on her right.

A few of the scrabblers began clicking at each other, and Shovel Foot scuttled off into the forest with the younger one who’d brought the berries—she recognized it by the blue stains lingering around its mouth. Except for some of the juveniles eating the remains of the last day’s foraging, the scrabblers stood almost perfectly still until the other two returned and dropped blue berries within reach of her hand. An older scrabbler began nudging her belt knife.

Shovel Foot tried to push a berry against the dead one’s carapace, leaving a faint mark, so Keddi picked one up and touched it to the same place. Every adult raised its head and looked at her. She crushed it against the spot, but when she tried to smear the color further, they clicked and lowered their heads, only raising them again once she dropped the berry. Was this a death ritual, like those she’d read about in the anthro files on other cultures?

The closest adult nudged her knife more insistently, so she drew it from the sheath. Now what? It then moved its face toward the dead scrabbler’s third eye, and every head went up.

What did they want? She looked over at Blue Speck and noticed the spot in the same place where they’d had her mark the dead one. “No,” she said aloud, “You can’t mean—” She moved her knife over its third eye. Every head stayed raised, even when she lowered the point to within a centimeter of it.

Tears ran down her face. Blue Speck and some of the others huddled close to her, as they’d done to comfort the dying scrabbler. She hesitated—it seemed so wrong. Spot Leg nudged her knife arm, and the others raised their heads.

Her mother had told the truth—even with the scrabbler already dead, it felt horrible, the hole leaking a little greenish liquid after she pulled out the blade. She dropped the knife, put her arms across her still-living friend, and sobbed.

After a while she felt something cool and solid against her leg. Fuzzi had nudged the water bottle towards her, so she drank a little to calm herself. She packed the rucksack and left it at the edge of the glade to retrieve later, then knelt by the dead scrabbler and grabbed its front legs. Heads lifted and stayed raised as she began to drag the scrabbler toward the settlement. Blue Speck, her friends’ pals, and some of the juveniles scuttled along with her until she came almost to the edge of the clearing, where they stopped and lifted their heads as she went on.

Her palm still unlocked the gate, as if the supervisors had expected her return. She towed the scrabbler across the main quadrangle and through an archway to a smaller quad surrounded by workshops. Frelin’s father came out of the engineering building and called to her, keeping his distance, “Welcome back, Keddi! I’ll get your parents and send Frelin for your friends.”

Leaving the body within a few meters of the bio lab’s door, she walked away from it and waited. Her parents arrived first and hugged her hard, then the supervisors clapped her on the shoulder, joined by Frelin’s father and others who worked nearby. Someone handed her water. As she escaped the cluster of people congratulating her, she saw her friends staring in horror.

When Nel glanced over at the scrabbler, her expression became a puzzled frown, and she nudged the others. A supervisor was saying something about the celebration that evening, but Keddi saw the biologist look at the body and wondered if anything would give her away. Her friends walked toward it.

“Give me a hand with this,” said the biologist to the tweeners. The adults hung back.

Keddi ran over. “I’ll help!” She lifted the body with the others and carried it inside. After they hoisted it to a table, the three looked confused. They knew it wasn’t Blue Speck.

“I want to stay for the dissection.”

The biologist gave her a hard look. “It’s fine with me, if it’s all right with the supervisors.”

Her friends followed her out and walked away. The woman replied, “If you wish to observe the . . . procedure, go ahead. Then you can go to the kitchen to get some breakfast and rest for today. We’ll talk briefly after the midday meal about any preferences you’d like taken into account so we can announce your first assignment at the celebration this evening.”

When she returned to the lab, she found the biologist laying out instruments. “Are you sure about this, Keddi?”

She nodded, and the woman gave the slightest of smiles.

“You’re allowed to call me Esti now that you’re an adult.” Then she turned her attention to the scrabbler, examining it for several minutes without saying a word. Keddi felt uneasy when she kept returning to the central eye.

“You didn’t kill this scrabbler. It was dead before you stabbed it.”

She went numb all over. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and she sought desperately for a way to persuade the biologist not to tell the supervisors. As she explained what had happened, how the scrabblers had urged her to do it, the woman’s face seemed to contort with rage, making Keddi’s heart race even faster, until she noticed tears pouring down her cheeks.

“Good for you!” Esti sobbed. Several minutes passed before she could speak. “I’m sorry,” she said as she wiped her eyes. “You mean they realized what you needed? They’re even more intelligent than I suspected.”

“But . . . .” The floor seemed suddenly to feel less solid under Keddi’s feet. “Are you saying you’re . . . glad . . . I didn’t kill a scrabbler?”

“I’ve been hoping ever since—” She broke off and wiped her eyes. “The supervisors sent me from the enclosure a few months after my eighteenth birthday because I refused, as you did. My friends filched supplies for me, and I held out for weeks, but I never had enough to drink or eat, and I feared copper poisoning so much, I did what I had to so I could come back. The whole time in the forest, I kept thinking, if only I could find a scrabbler already dead . . . .” She looked away. “I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to Digger.”

“You left that shed open for Nel and Sorvi, didn’t you?”

“Nel doesn’t miss much—I’ve had an eye on her to train as my assistant—and I thought she’d notice.”

Keddi’s head spun. Everyone else had seemed so distressed at her holding out that it had never occurred to her any of the adults might be pulling for her. “But . . . why?”

“It will make more sense after you’ve had a chance to read the history of the settlement.”

She decided to trust the woman, who surprised her by laughing at her admission that she already knew some of it.

“Clever of Frelin. How far did you get?”

“Up to when they first killed the scrabblers.”

“After a few more groups encountered ‘forest crabs’ and killed them, the settlers stopped seeing them, so they assumed any remaining had left the area. More births meant they needed more food, so they started sending out groups of children to search—eventually without their parents, once they were old enough to be trusted not to lose their way or eat what they gathered before it was processed.”

“It puzzled everyone that they brought back so much more food—especially fungus—than the adults had ever found, and it took a while before someone realized the scrabblers the children talked about weren’t imaginary friends. When the settlers finally made the connection to the forest crabs, they sent some parents out with the groups—to ‘protect’ them.” Esti shook her head slowly. “In the end, the need for protein forced the settlement to let the children go by themselves so the scrabblers would help them.”

“But that doesn’t explain why we’re supposed to kill one to become an adult. Wouldn’t it make more sense to help them and let them keep helping us?”

“Keddi, our ancestors found themselves trapped on a toxic planet, enraged at how they’d been treated, grieving for friends and family they’d never see again. By the time they encountered the scrabblers, the threat of starvation or copper poisoning had left them so desperate they slaughtered them in a panic. A decade later, and probably feeling guilty about what they’d done, they had no choice but to let these same creatures help their children find food. But once they grew up, the first generation born here began to talk about moving the settlement into the woods and living among the scrabblers.”

“So . . . they feared losing their children along with everything else, since the scrabblers wouldn’t come near them?”

“They couldn’t bear to risk another loss, so they decided to make their children kill scrabblers as they came of age, to keep them in the enclosure. Some held out for a while and were banished. Hunger and thirst, loneliness and fear brought them back, as they have in every generation since.” Esti wiped away a few more tears.

Keddi almost couldn’t see straight at the stupidity of it all. “Why hasn’t anyone stopped this?”

“Because almost everyone who kills a scrabbler justifies it in order to make it hurt less. And those of us who can’t come to terms . . . .” Esti winced. “We end up outsiders, with little influence.”

“And I will, too, won’t I, because I haven’t . . . Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“I’ve thought about that. It’s why I’ve been hoping a holdout would have the luck you did—though you may not feel so lucky in a few years.”

“Why not?”

“Think about who you might partner with. Keddi, can you imagine living with someone who has killed a scrabbler and expects your children to do the same? Your secret will create a wall between you and almost every other adult.”

Keddi thought about having to hide the knowledge from her parents, her friends, her partner, maybe even her own children someday, and saw lonely years ahead of her, but the image of Blue Speck still foraging rather than dead on the table shone through it all. “If that’s what it takes so a scrabbler doesn’t die for me.”

“I think we can arrange matters so you’re not completely alone right from the beginning—and keep Frelin from being banished. What does her scrabbler look like?”

“It has brown spots on its front legs.”

“Good—brown pigment’s easy enough. I’m assuming there’s berry juice on this one because yours has a blue patch? It should come off with alcohol.” Esti smiled.

“So Frelin pretends to kill this one again? Won’t people be suspicious that she did it immediately after me? And brings back the same carcass?”

“They won’t notice it’s the same one. You saw how everyone hung back; they don’t like being reminded of what they did. And when holdouts finally cave, their friends often give in soon after, so it’s exactly what people are hoping will happen.” She paused. “I don’t think we can risk using the same one for Nel or Sorvi, but they have a little more time.”

“How will we get it back to the woods without anyone knowing?”

“What sort of work did you want to do?”

“Hydroponics, but—”

“Good. Tell the supervisors that, but also that you’d like to be trained as my assistant. No one wants this work, so they’ll jump at the chance to assign you here part of the time. I can send you to the forest early tomorrow to get samples for me. Everyone will assume I’m just glad not to have to go myself anymore.” She looked away and spoke more softly. “Which is partly true.”

Keddi remembered the question she’d been wanting to ask. “How is it the scrabblers all know who’s killed one of them?”

“Scent, I think. The ‘third eye’ is an olfactory organ—their sense of smell is what lets them find fungus so much more easily than we can—but I suspect it may also have the ability to duplicate scents, and that’s partly how they teach their young what’s safe to eat. Although they tolerate copper well, there are likely plants poisonous to them and diseases they can get, and they may learn to avoid anything unusual they smell near the scent of a dead scrabbler. Dragging the body back to the enclosure leaves a trail of both the scrabbler’s and the person’s scent.”

She smiled with sad eyes. “You’ll be the first to have the chance to find out more.”

At dawn the next morning, Keddi hauled the dead scrabbler a little way into the forest and daubed brown on its forelegs. Blue Speck, Spot Leg, and a few of the others appeared through the trees and watched her. Frelin’s father had looked so pleased when Keddi pulled her aside at the feast, it seemed Esti was right in thinking no one would suspect.

“Frelin will be here soon. Stay for her, all right?”

She dipped and raised her head to them, then walked back toward the enclosure with Blue Speck scuttling at her side. Sorvi and Nel would know they’d have help, and her brother, too, once he turned sixteen. They could hold out. The scrabblers might even lead them to other dead bodies now they understood the need. If the plan worked as she hoped, Dane would be the last of the settlement to have killed a scrabbler. She felt pity for him and everyone else on the wrong side of the secret.

Blue Speck turned back when Keddi reached the edge of the clearing. Even the slanting rays of morning felt too hot and bright after the cool green light under the trees. They should leave the hydroponics and solar arrays in the open, she thought, but rebuild the rest of the settlement a little way into the woods. She knew that could only happen after most adults hadn’t killed a scrabbler, so probably not until her own children were grown.

As she palmed the lock on the gate, for the first time she thought it strange they still called where they lived a settlement. Perhaps one day they’d see this world as home.

Íde Hennessy

“Dramatic Exit?” the man in the gray suit asks, pointing to the stingray leather menu as I shake a cocktail longer than necessary, fingers numb from frost fuzzing up the steel. Turquoise light ripples across his face from the water above us, the sun a lazy disco ball far above the dome.

Behind him, Onda watches us from her floor-to-ceiling saltwater tank in the center of the room, her sideways pupils narrowed. Neon circles light the nanoglass column as she presses her suckers to hidden pads, sculpting eerie soundwaves. What I wouldn’t give for a cheesy pop song.

I strain the drink into a coupe, its stem a crystal tentacle. The scent of vanilla poached from endangered orchids wafts from the glass. Nothing synthetic here at Brine & Dine, the second most exclusive restaurant under the sea.

I gesture towards Onda and lean forward as if I’m telling the man a secret, rather than something I tell all the men in expensive suits. “When an octopus wants to escape a predator, it can distract them by releasing a puff of ink resembling itself . . . a shadow of misdirection.”

He watches closely as I squirt a dropper into the glass, suspending a blue-black cloud inside it. We used to use octopus’ ink, but my manager Fernando decided squid ink was prettier—so I no longer feel the need to mouth “sorry” to Onda when I prep this drink, as if she may be offended by it.

The scent of fish lingers in the air for a moment. Nobody cares what the cocktails taste like here, only how many critically threatened or otherwise taboo ingredients we can squeeze into each one. Octopus and squid are especially popular after being declared sentient almost everywhere but international waters.

I put the coupe on my coworker Miguel’s waiting tray, while he points at an imaginary watch on his wrist. If he’s going to show up an hour late for his shift and make snide remarks about my trailer park past, he can surely wait an extra minute. Most people see my cochlear buds and assume I can’t understand them if they whisper, but I can pick up the faintest mutter of contempt from across this cavernous room.

The droning music in the bar is broken up by sax-like squeals as Miguel sashays past Onda’s tank. Miguel hisses at her, and she swells her arms into an eight-point star, billowing in sulky silence before returning to her song. Bumps shimmer across her copper skin like angry fairy lights.

“What are you doing after work?” Gray Suit asks the gap between the buttons on my blouse.

“Janitorial service. No such thing as after work in this economy.” I smile sweetly, but I can’t stop myself from adding, “If there was, I’d find the most remote desert on the surface, with nothing but tumbleweeds for company.”

“No such thing as remote places either,” he says, failing to take a hint. “Below the ocean’s as remote as you can get, with ten billion people up there—so smile, gorgeous.” He raises his seahorse infused martini to me and I wipe down the bar, ignoring the command.

Fernando beckons to me from the other end of the bar. “Maya, a moment?”

Something resembling a tuba note blasts from the speakers as I skulk my way to the far ice well. I can feel Onda watching me again as she plucks through dissonant synth tones. “Oh, shut up,” I mumble in her direction. “I’ve got my own problems, Onda.”

Fernando shakes his head at me. “What the Hell has gotten into you today? This isn’t your honkytonk dive back home—get your shit together and be nice.”

I take a deep breath, but before I can tell him how much I hate his pompous mustache, shouts erupt from the dining area.

Miguel is crouched on the floor, picking up his tray, and two women are standing up at a table, yelling at each other across it.

“I saw the look you gave him,” one of them is shouting over the avant-garde static and bleeps from the speakers. “You think I don’t notice?”

“Oh, get over it!” The other one slams a fist on the table. “I’ve had enough with your constant insecurities, and your loud chewing.”

“You know what?” Miguel swipes the rest of their dishes onto the floor. “I’ve had enough of both of you.”

The shorter woman takes a swing at Miguel, and he blocks it with his drink tray. I look to Fernando for guidance, but he’s busy tugging his shirt off as if it’s been strangling him.

Gray Suit’s barstool is empty. He’s now pacing back and forth, shuddering strangely and shouting into his phone, “I’m gonna do what I want—from now on, I’m the hero of my own goddamn story!”

Near the restroom door, two men are circling each other. One spits on the floor.

I don’t know why, but I feel like running. Not running to or from anything—I wish I could run up the walls of the dome and scream until I’m hoarse. My knuckles are white on the edge of the bar and my teeth are grinding in rhythm with the bass notes thumping from the speakers.

The bass notes. Onda swishes gracefully around her tank, turning multiple knobs at a time with coiled arms. Watching our reactions.

“Fernando!” I find him huddled shirtless behind the host station, tearing up credit card receipts. “What’s the frequency range of these speakers?”

He blinks up at me, looking insulted. “No expense was spared. These are custom.”

More shouts from the dining area, where a tangle of multiple bodies has formed on the floor. A deep, minor chord rumbles through the room and vibrates my stomach.

I rip out my hearing aids.

Fernando’s mouth is moving, Miguel is pushing tables over, and bowls of shark fin soup are crashing to the floor, but the whole world is silent.

I know I should help them. I should find the volume control for the sound system and turn it down—but I just stand there, watching Onda dance as the room grows oddly dark.

The thing is, I have always been a traitor.

Until now, I’ve been a traitor to what I know is right—it’s hard not to be, in this world. I’ve seen Onda’s suffering, her loneliness. I know what it’s like to feel trapped, separated from your own kind.

To feel with all your soul that where you are is wrong.

Gray Suit shakes my arm and points up at the ceiling. Swirls of black ink are forming above us in the water, blocking out the sun. Ripples of white glitter through the dark like stars, and then they all blink out.

Fernando puts his hands to his ears and doubles over. Miguel and the brawling guests detangle into fetal positions, clutching their heads. On the bar in front of me, a pint glass shatters silently.

A crack is etching itself into the dome, branching out like a bleached piece of coral where Onda’s tank meets the ceiling.

No expense spared, my ass.

Onda jets to the top of her tank, the hero of her own story, a whirl of arms twisting into a bullet.

Mário Coelho

Alone on a lonely beach, Júlia watched the Atlantic Ocean spit out the world’s richest man.

Júlia knew who the man was even before the sea placed the body at her feet. She knelt before him and stared into his empty orbits and sought the corals. She saw none.

“Of course,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

Now our work begins, she imagined the corals telling her, in their language of loss, the blanched dreams they shared with her every night.

She pulled the body into the sand and took a picture and shared it on her socials. She tagged the media.

“Josiah Burke is dead. This is his body,” she wrote. With a shaking finger, she added, “This is a good thing.” Only a few minutes later did she call the authorities.

The snoopers arrived before the media. The media arrived before the police. Blue sirens swam through a flash flood of phone cameras.

Before Josiah Burke washed ashore on the coast of Portugal, he set out to sea for a bit of peace and quiet. He sailed on his smallest, least luxurious superyacht, the Jaundiced Outlook. A cultured name for a cultured man. A cultured man alone at sea.

“I would feel more comfortable if you took shelter inside, Mr. Burke,” Captain Natua said to the multi-billionaire at the prow.

Dark clouds gathered over the dark waters. Sailors busied in preparation for the coming storm. Rain fell like a promise.

“What kind of car do you drive, captain?” Burke asked.

“A Honda Civic.”

“Gasoline? Diesel?”

“Gasoline.”

“That’s going to get very expensive for you, very soon.”

Natua said nothing. Burke was a pleasant enough man, but Natua hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the meandering, condescending way he spoke to those he saw as inferior. And Burke saw everyone as inferior. It was so natural to him he wasn’t even aware. It wasn’t even malicious.

“What do you make of the reefs?” Burke continued.

“I’m not a marine biologist, sir,” Natua replied. Just about missed it, he thought. He had dropped out of his Biology degree on his fourth year. He had been unable to cope with the dead things in the water. The dives between extinctions.

“I’m not asking for your scientific opinion. I’m asking if you’re happy with what’s happening. A lot of people seem to be.”

A lot of poor people, Natua imagined he meant.

“It’s going to cause a lot of trouble,” Natua said.

Burke didn’t catch his purposeful ambiguity: “You’re goddamn right it will. Like it or not, the world needs fossil fuels. Let’s see how people react when their AC stops working, when gas becomes too expensive, when your electricity bill goes through the roof . . . .” He sighed. “I’m sorry, captain.”

“That’s okay.”

Truth was, Natua indeed was happy, when the news showed the first footage of an oil platform getting overrun by corals. More than happy. He was gleeful almost to the point of mania at the first omen of this beautiful revanchism, this strange phenomenon of oil platforms ‘getting sick with corals’, as one publication had called it.

Sick. As if the inert could get sick with life. Corals making homes in the undersea portions of rigs, making wombs of umbilical connections, sputtering out and out and out, lining pumps, loosening drills, leaning over railings as if to say to other corals undersea, “Look, I breathe, I breathe, I breathe.”

Burke shook his head at the darkening horizon. “They shouldn’t be happy. Because I’m not going to hurt. They are. My life will go on, as it always has. I won’t feel it on my skin. Those people will.”

It was a surprisingly sober thing to hear from the world’s richest man, oil baron and tech bro all in one, but Natua couldn’t help but linger on two simple words: ‘Those people’. Always that separation from others. As if being rich had transformed Burke into something nonhuman. As if he had so much money he didn’t need to eat, shit, love, cum, cry, and dream anymore.

‘Those people’, meaning Natua, and his husband, and their daughters, and these sailors here, braving the wrath of a scorned sea so a butcher in a suit could have some respite from the reporters, the jokes, the jokes on the fucking internet. Pity the world’s richest man. He’s not as loved as he wants to be.

“A storm is brewing,” Burke said, in some mocking accent he probably thought sounded nautical. “What a weird expression. Brewing a storm. Like it’s something a person could make.”

“It is something a person can make,” Natua pointed out, before he could stop himself. We’re brewing them more and more, month after month, he thought. Brewing storms and spilling them all over the shop.

Burke tilted his head. He smiled. “Hm. I guess you’re right.”

He sounded almost proud.

A wave loomed on the horizon. A shadow from sea to sky. Burke faced it, tall and straight, as if he could rise above it.

Júlia had met Vicente at 1.5 degrees of warming, ten years before the corals. They fell in love the way tired people do, slowly and carefully. Vicente had come to Portugal as a teenager, a climate refugee from Cape Verde. He had studied English and German at uni and become a translator, and was now freshly unemployed by LLMs. Júlia was a biochemist researching plastic-eating enzymes. It was going nowhere.

The first time they saw each other, they were both wearing ski masks. They belonged to the same underground activist group, which didn’t embrace the term ‘ecoterrorists’, but didn’t much mind that the media branded them as that either.

The first time they spoke was while monkey wrenching the same golf cart, in a golf course in Coimbra that had been built during a nationwide drought. A ‘hi’ and a ‘hi’, which made them both laugh, while Júlia broke the steering wheel and Vicente slashed the tyres.

The first time Júlia cried in front of Vicente was years later, when the evening news showed images of yet another hurricane in Cape Verde. Drone footage of a thin man wading through chest-high water, looking for his son in a lake of floating bodies.

“How aren’t you angry?” Júlia asked. She didn’t mean it as an accusation, but by then it was easy for Vicente to see it as such. The years had mellowed him, while Júlia had only grown angrier. “It’s your home.”

Vicente pulled her close, as if Júlia was the one who needed support. “I don’t know. I guess I’m too used to it.”

Júlia pulled back. “You can’t be. You can’t ever get used to it. That’s how they win.”

That’s how they win, making you numb. Distilling tragedy in small doses. Filtering it through the liminal light of phone screens. Scroll past burned forests, scroll past record inequality, scroll past floating dead bodies, scroll past the slow corruption of your life, of all life, a planet in perpetual torture, birds thirsting mid-air, toppling in their millions under the trails of private jets.

Scroll past it all. Scroll because there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you want to do, because you’re too tired and overworked and overwhelmed and what does it matter, anyway? What can you do? What can you hope for? You already lost.

(You could have had a good life. You could have worked so much less. You could have ridden electric trams in forested cities. You could have walked in the shade of canopies, birds flying from home to home above your head. You could have breathed clean air. You could have had time, so much time to do what you love, be with who you love, become who you wanted to be.)

Vicente smiled at her, in the half-gloom. “We haven’t lost, Júlia. Not yet. There’s still hope.”

Júlia shivered. It suddenly terrified her how much she loved him, this man who could stand on a sinking ship and say, “I do love a good swim.”

They couldn’t do this to him. She couldn’t bear that they would do this to him.

But he wasn’t wrong. There was hope. Only Júlia did not believe hope and wrath were antithetical. In fact, to her, hope was premised on the idea of fighting back.

Maybe that was why the corals had chosen her, years later.

The first among many.

When you’re rich enough, wealth stops having a practical effect. Your life doesn’t change in any meaningful way between a million and a hundred million in the bank. Life becomes an arcade game. Increase the high score. All about the numbers. The lords of money loved numbers.

These are numbers: In 2017, before the earth achieved 1.5 degrees of warming, fires burned 520 000 hectares of forest in Portugal, nearly 60% of the total burned area in the EU for that year.

These are numbers: 66 people died in total. 47 of those burned to death inside their cars, in a little stretch of road between two little towns nobody ever thought about.

60 km away, a seventeen-year-old Júlia sat at an outdoor café with her friends. In silence, they watched the skies burn to copper. Flakes of ashes landed on her coffee.

(That’s what had radicalised her. Not the numbers—people don’t comprehend numbers—the vision of ash flakes in a coffee, under a sky of rust. And yet she didn’t see herself as a radical. There is nothing radical about human survival. Nor is there anything radical about believing in the worth of the nonhuman.)

These too are numbers: uncountable plants immobile as the flames laced up their stalks. Uncountable little critters cowering in holes in the dirt. Badgers, boars, waterfowls, foxes. Uncountable, unnamed, unmourned.

They are homeless in this world. This world is for people. This world is for people who are good at accruing numbers. Animals can’t count. Animals don’t count.

“Corals release their eggs in perfect synchronicity,” a small, bespectacled scientist was saying on the news. “This occurs due to a confluence of multiple factors, like sea temperature, and even the phases of the moon.”

“But this is different, isn’t it?” the elegant reporter asked him.

“Yes it is. Very different. We don’t know how this species of corals spawned all at the same time, all over the globe. We don’t even know how they survive above the surface. And we definitely don’t know why they’re targeting fossil-fuel infrastructure.”

“Let’s talk about Josiah Burke.”

“Why? It’s been a month. He’s dead. He doesn’t matter.”

The words hung in the air like sacrilege. But the reporter was good. She didn’t miss a beat:

“But some are saying this is because of him. Before his death, the corals only seemed to target oil platforms. Experts are saying this was likely a behaviour of adaptation, because oil rigs make for good artificial reefs. However, the fact that Josiah Burke was the only victim of the storm that hit the Jaundiced Outlook . . . .”

The scientist sighed. “I’m tired of that conspiracy. No, I don’t believe Captain Natua, or any of the sailors, was responsible for the death of Josiah Burke.”

“That’s not what I want to talk about. Although, one of the sailors was found to have been infected with coral polyps . . . .”

“You want the other conspiracy, then.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it’s bioterrorism. First, the corals targeted only offshore oil platforms. Then, after the death of Josiah Burke, they began to spread to the infrastructure of other high-emission industries, even those unrelated to fossil fuels, even those far inland. Like logging stations in the Amazon.”

“What do you think? Do you think these are biochemical attacks by ecoterrorist groups?”

The scientist shrugged. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“It’s certainly more plausible than sentient corals targeting high-emission industries.”

“Sure.”

Finding a dead end in the scientist’s small smile, the reporter changed the subject: “Let’s talk about the economy.”

The scientist laughed. “Of course. Let’s.”

“The IMF has warned of an impending economic crisis, the kind we haven’t seen since The Great Depression. Exxon and Shell are pressuring governments to intervene. Shell estimates that the damages to the fossil fuel industry as a whole are already in the orders—”

“It’s marvellous, isn’t it?”

“Pardon?”

The scientist was all teeth. “It’s marvellous. It’s magical.”

After he got home, the scientist tucked his kids in bed, climbed into the shower, and marvelled at the colours surfacing on the polyps under his skin. They had appeared the night after Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke. Zooxanthellae swimming alongside his red cells.

“We’ll only be here a while,” he imagined them saying. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Stay as long as you want,” he said, smiling as the water fell on him, warm as tropical rain.

The lords of money reacted to their losses the way they always do, by transferring them onto the little people and expecting them to bear it with resignation. They predicted that, at best, there would be a lot of complaining online. Maybe a couple protests here and there. A tiny handout from the odd government.

This was more or less what began to happen. Until Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke’s corpse, green-hued and sea-buffeted at her feet.

‘This is a good thing.’

The picture was quickly censored. Júlia’s profile was deleted. During the following days, she received many visits from government suits. They carried questions. They somehow sounded both insistent and uninterested. They left cordially and dissatisfied.

She received many visits from company suits, too. They carried demands and promises. Just keep quiet, just do nothing, they said, with so many words and polite smiles. When they try to make you a face of a movement, do nothing, and we will allow you to win this game we are forcing you to play. We will eliminate all quotidian worries. Rent, health, work. Where do you want to work? We can arrange it. You can help people. It will be fulfilling.

To her silence, they pulled out documents. Intimidation written in legalise. We can make sure you never work again. You will lose the game. We will eliminate peace and silence.

It was strange that this faceless force could not see that she was beautifully unimportant. Even if she wanted to, there was nothing she could do. Like coral spawning, the sentiment spread everywhere all at once. The world’s richest man was dead.

It was a good thing.

The day after the death of Josiah Burke, fifteen more oil platforms were reconquered by corals. The week after, Cargill had to cease most of its logging operations in the Amazon after their fleets of trucks sputtered to a stop. Corals were found in the gas tanks. The lords of money counter-attacked with austerity. But this time, the little people fought back. Protests grew like forest fires. The names of fossil-fuel lobbyists were circulated online. Their safe anonymity crumbled. Their homes were vandalised. On the streets, crowds encircled them like injured, but eager predators.

This wasn’t an organised movement with concrete demands. This was chaos, frustration, the abused lashing out. Violence seemed inevitable.

“Violence is necessary,” Júlia said to Vicente, one night, watching on the evening news Molotovs exploding against an SUV.

“Why are you doing this?” Vicente said. Correcting himself: “How are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Don’t play me for a fool, Júlia. I’ve noticed those . . . those things under your skin. And I’ve noticed them in other people, too. Today, the CEO of Exxon was attacked on the street. He’s in critical condition now. Yesterday, you were whispering his name in your sleep.”

There were bags under his eyes and a slur to his speech. While she whispered in her dreams, he was hardly getting any sleep at all. It was not because of the death threats, she sensed, or the resulting, disquieting presence of a cop car outside, for their protection. It was because he thought she was becoming something else. The symbol was overtaking the person.

“The people who attacked him, their leader was like you,” he continued. “The news are saying that . . . there are corals in her body.”

Júlia laughed. “What are you accusing me of? Controlling people with psychic powers?”

Without a word more, Vicente left the room. Júlia could feel she was losing him. But what could she do? Her love for him was endless, but that was all the more reason to fight on. She would rather lose him to a healed world than have him in a diseased future.

Besides, he was wrong. The corals spoke to all who had let them in. She had just been the first to accept them, on that beautiful rainy day under the waters of Albufeira, when she had found a mysterious reef while on a recreational dive.

To the day of her death, it would be the most beautiful thing she would ever see. A fortress of life, schools of fish swimming amid forests of kelp and polyps. When she swam towards it, the corals greeted with an explosion of luminous gametes, like stars whirling in dark space, lighting the way to the shores of a new world.

The lords of money went to war. They took samples of the corals and studied them in high-rise labs with tall windows. They studied ways to murder them. They sent their murderers out to sea. They murdered new and old reefs alike. “Best to be sure,” they meant. “There’s a lot of money at stake here.”

Those who dreamed of the corals shifted in their beds. By now, the dreamers numbered in the hundreds of thousands, all over the world. No one knew how the corals had spread into their bodies.

They are killing us, the corals said to the dreamers, in a dream. Help us.

“How can we help?”

We need only a ride.

Júlia slid out of bed, dreams of dying corals roiling in her head. In the dark, Vicente watched her go. He said nothing.

Júlia got in her small Opel Corsa and drove into the night. She headed out of town. She drove through dark roads. On either side of her, endless eucalyptuses. The lords of money had brought them in a long time ago. Profitable parasites, drying soils and spreading fires. Nothing else lived in there.

Júlia arrived at the refinery of Sines just before dawn. Six other people had arrived before her. Other dreamers. They stood outside the fence, gazing at the labyrinthine structure. Inside, a crowd of security guards. New hires. Men usually amenable to violence, now made timid by the eerie, almost sleepy serenity of the dreamers.

In silence, the dreamers held hands. Their skin began to tingle. Their pores enlarged. Fertilised coral eggs began to emanate from them like pollen. The security guards watched the eggs float over their heads into the refinery.

The cops arrived soon after. They did what the guards could not and took the dreamers away. They locked them in cramped rooms and asked them question after question. They didn’t much seem to care about the answers.

“What’s my crime?” Júlia asked, sitting in handcuffs. “Standing there?”

“I know you,” the cop said. “You’re the woman who shared the picture of Josiah Burke.”

Júlia said nothing.

“Your car was impounded. We’ll let you know when you can come get it.”

“If they can’t charge me for terrorism, they’ll always have illegal parking,” Júlia said, while he uncuffed her.

She took a taxi to the bus station. The driver kept stealing glances at her through the rearview mirror.

“Yes. I’m the woman from the internet,” Júlia said, wearily.

“I don’t go on the internet, miss,” the driver said. “I was just wondering if we could take a detour. You see, there’s a cattle farm not far from here . . . .”

Júlia smiled. The driver smiled back and turned off the meter.

The light of corals flashed under his skin.

All over the world, dreamers headed to the peripheries of coal-fired power stations, petrol-guzzling trucks, hydrofracking rigs. The corals floated out of their bodies. They crawled into crevices in the metal, encumbered hinges and clogged pipes. They preyed on petrochemicals, on pollution. They died as they did it, just to be born again, untiring, undaunted, undefeated.

The eyes never left Júlia, after that day. The eyes in the streets, the eyes in vans with tinted windows, the eyes in her computer, her phone, even her fucking smart fridge. The eyes were just waiting for a glimpse, a confirmation that she was the leader of the movement, a biochemist genius behind weaponised corals.

The eyes distressed her. Not because she was worried for herself, but because Vicente was aware of them too. She could tell he resented her for this. She also knew he would never admit that. Not to her, nor to himself.

She wanted to be out in the streets. She wanted to be more than the face of a faceless movement. She wanted to be more than the patient zero of a beautiful pandemic. The mother of coral dreams.

At night, she shivered with anguish. She couldn’t even ask Vicente for comfort. There was an infinite space between their bodies. He would accept her, if she tried. But she knew he didn’t want her to try.

And then, ever so softly, as her consciousness began to melt, the corals spoke to her.

This will pass, they said. A beautiful tomorrow is waiting for you both.

On the day of his death, Josiah Burke laughed at a gathering storm.

He didn’t know why he was laughing. Or, for that matter, why he was crying.

Natua knocked on his door. Josiah Burke wiped his nose and eyes and straightened his shirt.

“It’s going to hit us directly,” the captain said. Behind him, sailors buzzed about, securing loose objects and turning off electronics and rigging lines.

“What happens now?” Burke asked.

“We can’t outrun it. All we can do is weather it.”

“But how bad is it?”

Natua paused. “It’s a hurricane. A very bad one.”

“Christ, man. Just tell me how worried I should be.”

Natua tightened his mouth. “We should all be worried. Not just you.”

The lords of money had no emotional attachment to oil, or gas, or crypto, or data, or beef. Those were just weapons in their crusade.

Week by week, the corals attacked their revenue, so eventually the lords of money just adapted. They diversified their portfolios and pledged to transition into a greener economy and we’re all in this together.

They walked over a population ravaged by soaring prices, food shortages, stranded in cities with underdeveloped public transportation. But they did it. (What else could they do?) They transitioned into solar, hydro, vegetable proteins. “Fine, you won,” they said. “Now pay us.”

It was better than before.

‘Better’ didn’t cut it anymore. The little people marched on. Overcharging landlords came home to ripped off floorboards, vandalised water lines. There were strikes, by everyone, everywhere. The lords of money tried to bust them, but there were too many. Too many moving bodies. Endless little revolts.

Governments started doing the right thing. Some because they believed in it, most because the alternative was dangerous for them. Working hours were reduced, wages were increased. The victims of technological unemployment, or simply those looking for something meaningful to do, were put to work on humankind’s transition into a green world.

They cleaned beaches. They planted trees. They installed solar panels. They burrowed animal crossings in every little stretch of road. They built railways. They gave freely. Homes and food and time.

Corals began to live in the architecture.

On the day of his death, despite Natua’s insistence that he shelter in his cabin, Josiah Burke went out to see the hurricane. Later, Natua told his husband he thought that must have been how Burke coped with fear. Try to intimidate it, establish dominance, as if the hurricane knew or cared that he was the world’s richest man. As if capital was immortal, unsinkable.

Some of the sailors saw Burke go overboard. They followed procedure, yelling ‘man overboard!’ and pointing at his shape in the water, throwing floating objects after him while the rescuers suited up.

They were all interrogated to exhaustion. But none spoke of what really happened. How Natua was the first to watch Burke fall into the water. How Natua didn’t point. How, for a long time, he just stared at Burke, a tiny figure in the distance, battered by wind and waves.

How he called off the rescue.

They probed Natua, more than anybody else. They scanned each inch of his mind and skin. (They didn’t find a single coral.)

He told the media he had done everything he could. The rescuers had risked their lives to rescue Burke from a sea in storm, but they had been too late.

He told his friends he would never have traded the lives of his crew for a chance at rescuing Burke.

He told his husband, and only his husband, that in the distance, bobbing helpless in the storm, Burke looked like a plastic bottle.

Just trash in the ocean.

Vicente stayed.

“I was wrong,” he said to Júlia, while she worked on their garden, half a year after the death of Josiah Burke. It was a sweltering summer day, the kind Portugal would have to learn how to live with for centuries to come. “I’m sorry, Júlia. I’m so sorry.”

Júlia didn’t look at him. She felt a savage urge to cry. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she began to sob. He hugged her back as she let it all out, the hurt and the anguish and the wrath, floating away like gametes in a mysterious reef, in a lonely shore, in a day not so long ago.

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

He apologised to her so many times. Her tears dried up and she began to laugh and then she led him to the bedroom, and they made love like everything was alright. Maybe everything would be alright.

There were no eyes on her anymore, except for his.

She would wake to a better tomorrow. Then another, then another, then another.

She would begin to live a good life. She would work so much less. She would ride electric trams in verdant streets. There would be trees all over the city. There would be trees everywhere. Wildlife fleeting below shaded canopies. Everything would be slower. She would forget the smell of exhaust pipes. She would see fireflies again. (She hadn’t seen them since she was a child.)

She would have so much time. So much time for gardening, reading, learning Icelandic, which she had never done before because it was just not profitable. She would begin to learn the unprofitable.

She would spend time with Vicente. She would stop thinking of it as “spending”. She would stop thinking so much. She would start sleeping more, better. She would stop dreaming of corals. They would all stop dreaming of corals.

Wouldn’t they?