Daylight Come E-Book

Diana McCaulay

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 291

Beschreibung

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling ordeal. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night, all the time under brutal Domin rule. Food is scarce, and people over forty are expendable.Sorrel can take no more and persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for cooler ground high in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals who have found ways of evading feral animals and surviving up there.Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love and the dreadful choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection."Like the best science fiction, Daylight Come isn't just fiction but a warning of a very possible future." Kei Miller"Sadly, nothing in this powerful glimpse of a possible future strains credulity; we could be building precisely this planet. Its readers, I hope, will be moved to take action right now, while we still have time to avert some of the damage. And I hope they will be moved, too, by the gritty evocation of unity across difference that allows effective resistance." Bill McKibben"This driving narrative explores important issues of climate change from a non-European perspective. An important book." Ingrid Persaud

Leseprobe

DIANA MCCAULAY

DAYLIGHT COME

First published in Great Britain in 2020Peepal Tree Press Ltd17 King’s AvenueLeeds LS6 1QSEngland

© 2020 Diana McCaulay

ISBN 9781845234706 (Print)

ISBN 9781845234751 (Epub)

ISBN 9781845234720 (Mobi)

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may bereproduced or transmitted in any formwithout permission

Their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.1 Corinthians 3: 13

“… the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light – close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.”The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wells Wallace

Daylight come and mi waan go home, Day-O (The Banana Boat song), by Irving Burgie

To Adam, Tim, Nick and Brookewhose children will face this kind of worldunless…And to Michael Schwartz (1947-2018)I miss you, Mike

FLIGHT2084

CHAPTER 1 – BANA CITY

“Did you sleep? Tell me you slept.” Bibi was at the bedroom door. The light that crept under doors and through cracks in walls and windows had gone and it was night. Sorrel shook her head, impatient with the question, which began most nights. You couldn’t light-proof a house no matter what you did. You couldn’t light-proof a world. Bibi came into the bedroom and sat on the end of her bed. She touched her daughter’s shaven head, just beginning to grow out. Sorrel pulled away.

“I don’t know how to help you.” Bibi’s voice shook. “You have to sleep.”

“I can’t. I’ve told you,” Sorrel snapped.

“Pills tomorrow, then. The green ones.”

“I don’t want them. They make me feel dooley, like I’m asleep when I’m supposed to be awake, which is the whole problem, right?”

“What about that tea we tried?”

“Grammy’s bush tea? I don’t remember it helping. Just leave me alone, Bibi.”

“You’ll get sick if you don’t sleep.”

Sorrel met her mother’s eyes. “I want to sleep now.”

“It’s time for school.” Bibi held out her hand. “Get up. It’s dark and you have to eat.”

Sorrel ignored the outstretched hand, but she rose to her feet. She was almost her mother’s height now.

“Your hair needs the razor,” Bibi said.

“Razor’s dull.” She ran her hand over her head. She liked her hair to feel prickly, like it was alive and pushing outwards, even if it was dirty most of the time.

Her best friend, Sesame, had told her that old-time white people had washed their thin hair every day, but nobody had hair like that anymore on Bajacu. You could be arrested for having the kind of stubble Bibi was pointing out. You would certainly be judged antisocial and have your water ration reduced.

“Get up, One,” her mother said again as she left the room. Bibi refused to be called Mum or Mom or Mother; they were comrades in arms, she said – a term Sorrel had liked when she was younger, when her mother’s nickname for her was Little One. As she grew older, Bibi shortened it to One.

Sorrel shook off her thoughts. Now that night had fallen, at least they could open a window. At least this house had a window.

The house on Buttercup Avenue was the most comfortable house she could remember. They had moved often when Sorrel was a child, always looking for a place in shadow, away from the sea, rivers or ravines, preferably a house angled to catch the fluky breezes that sometimes rolled off the foothills. Bibi had a knack for assessing the comfort of an empty house. Sometimes people paid her in skynuts to do it. This house had a roof of a slightly slanted concrete slab, the law after the hurricane season of ’63 – an easy law to enforce, because after two Category Fives hit the island that year, there were no houses with other kinds of roofs left standing. The miners had sent their machines into the hills and dug down the white limestone. They scooped up the sand from rivers, and the cement factories ran day and night. The houses built after ’63 had underground cisterns to catch rainwater, though virtually useless now. The best houses had a solid impermeable membrane on the slab roof, complicated drainage systems, a ledge to hold in the turflife, and succulents planted from end to end. The houses looked like cartoon characters with square faces, blank eyes and thorny hair; Sorrel liked the intricate shapes of the succulents and the way they needed no care. Up on the roofs, these plants either lived or died. A thick bank of succulents could lower the temperature in a house by one degree. To stop people stealing them, you had to apply for a permit to own a ladder. Very few were granted.

Sorrel went into the kitchen and opened one of the makeshift shutters. Bibi had replaced the original glass windows. The house gave a little gasp, as if pressure had built up inside during the day. She waited to feel cooler air on her face, but nothing was moving outside. She gazed out, hoping to see the moon or stars, but it was too cloudy. There were always thin clouds now, which was good, because without them there would be no rain, ever, and the rays of the sun would be even more deadly, but she still sometimes wished she could see a clear sky. She fastened the window half open. If only she could sleep. Everybody else slept in the day – what was wrong with her?

Her mother sat at the kitchen table, her shoulders slumped. Sorrel saw the small hump on her spine that indicated her age, and she felt a flutter of fear in her chest.

Although Bibi had only been a child at the time of the Convergence, all the mid-century anger at the people who had ignored the signs of the coming crisis were directed – even now – at anyone over forty. Sorrel’s Grammy had been beaten in the street more than once simply because she was of that time. People always need someone to blame, Grammy had said, blood trickling down her jawline.

“Stop daydreaming,” Bibi said, holding out a cup of aloe tea and a bar of alganola. Sorrel loathed the bars, convinced you could taste the jellyfish in them. She joined Bibi at the table and booted up their PlAK.

“Don’t get crumbs on the keyboard,” Bibi said, rising to her feet. “See you later, One. Try to nap at breaktime.”

Sorrel grunted, avoiding her mother’s tired eyes and the furrow between her eyebrows. They were lucky; her mother had an in-person job at the tech centre, fixing the few old-time computers left. She was jealous of her mother’s contact with people. It was that job that had gifted them the PlAK, by far their most valuable possession, with its access to websites, chat rooms and satellite feeds.

Today was payday. Maybe Bibi would be paid in skynuts. They were better than foodcards and were a good source of protein. The skynut trees had been brought to Bajacu by some long extinct migratory bird, and they had flourished, while every other type of tree thinned out and died.

She rubbed her eyes. She had a Math test today. She had turned fourteen two days ago and had made herself a birthday promise: one day, she would find a place where it was possible to sleep in the dark and go outside all day when it was light.

CHAPTER 2 – BANA CITY

At 0400 hours, school finished. Sorrel rose and stretched. Her legs felt numb and the house closed in around her. Her mother would be back from work in an hour. She checked the water tank in the corner of the kitchen – about halfway down. Two more nights before water was delivered. Their house had a cistern from the old days, but the water truck’s pipe couldn’t reach it. The tank filter was dirty, and she should clean it, but it was hard to clean anything without using precious water. She replaced the cover. Maybe tomorrow. At least school was over and she could go online and talk to Sesame.

“A Tribal girl was captured by the Domins. Last week. She was scavenging near the mountains near where the Toplanders live,” Sesame wrote, the words coming up like bubbles on the PlAK’s screen.

“Everyone scavenges,” tapped Sorrel, using a string of emojis to show her disdain. “She could have been any Bana girl!”

“It was how she was dressed. Strong. Muscles in her legs. I heard she fought off the Domins like a feral; killed one and ran. No Lowlander could do that. They caught her, though.”

“You’re just bored.”

“Yeah. Aren’t you?”

Yes, Sorrel thought, I’m bored, but she was tired of Sesame’s stories and signed off, sending SEW to her friend, their code for Sudden Ending Warning. She would sit outside for the remaining hour of darkness.

She opened the kitchen door and walked onto the hard dirt, which her grandmother had called “the garden” until the day she died. The light from the kitchen fell into the yard. She sat in her favourite spot on a large, smooth rock in the shadow of the house. Her Grammy had once told her why the rock was there – their house on Buttercup Avenue was on the Sabana Plain, laid down in geologic time by the Ama River, which had brought the big rocks with it. You could still see them around Bana – some had been coated white long ago and still had flecks of paint in their grooves and indentations. The Ama River had broken its banks the year of the Category Fives and killed an uncounted number of people who had been living too close. Now the sea was even nearer to the Ama River and soon there could be a huge body of brackish water cutting right through the city. Too much water and too little water, at the same time. Lowlanders were always thirsty.

But outside in the dark, she couldn’t stop hearing Sesame’s story-teller voice.

“They call themselves Toplanders,” she had said. “Rich people who went up to the mountains. After the tunnels in Bana collapsed.”

“Ridiculous,” Sorrel had scoffed.

They were still able to visit each other then, although they could travel only at dawn or dusk. They would often lie head to head on the cool tile floor at Sesame’s house, arms outstretched, pretending to be starfish.

“The hurricanes would have killed them, Ses. What would they eat?”

“I read they grow food.”

“What kind of crops would survive the rain bombs, the dust storms? It’s foolishness.”

“Rich people can do a lot.”

“They can’t do miracles. And what about the ferals? They don’t have them in the mountains?”

“I didn’t see anything about ferals.”

“These are just stories. What d’you have to eat?”

“Usual.”

“I’m so sick of alganola.”

“Yeh, me too. It’s why I like to think about people living in the mountains growing food.”

“Why didn’t other people join them up there, then? No way that could be kept secret from the Domins.”

“There are others up there too – different to the Toplanders. They’re like the Tainos – that’s what I heard.”

“The who?”

“Tainos! You were never any good at history. They’re the people who lived here before everybody else. Tribals, they’re called now.”

“Guata, Ses, you should definitely be a writer.” They giggled at the forbidden curse word and their outstretched fingers touched.

“I think the rich people just left and there are no tribals,” Sorrel said. “They would have died in the heat or the storms, or the ferals got them, or they starved to death.”

“People always find a way. I heard the Toplanders are in that old army camp. You’ve seen it on SATMAP.”

“Foolishness. The Domins would definitely find them if they were at Cibao camp.”

“They have slaves. All women. And there’s a terrible man up there.”

“Just stop, Ses. Monster stories.”

She had not seen Sesame in person for more than a year and she missed her, if not her fantasies.

Now she heard the noise of working people going home after a night of work, some on foot, some on skateboards. She liked to watch the young workers who had enough balance and strength to skateboard. She could hear them jumping over the cracks and buckled asphalt in the road and she thought of the Tribal girl that Sesame told her about, fighting like a feral, running, then still being caught.

Could there be people, maybe even young people, living together in the mountains, outside Domin control? There were caves in the mountains, so shelter was possible, and there were simple ways to condense water – every school child had to do basic survival training. But what was there to eat in the mountains? Would it really be so much cooler? What would they take with them? What path would they follow? Every night they would have to find somewhere shaded. This was all foolishness. That Tribal girl. The Domins would have staked her out on the Burning Rock Plain – no witnesses, no questions asked – and left her there to sizzle up and die. The whole idea of the mountains was too dangerous. She turned her thoughts to Bibi’s return and what they might eat. The rock she sat on still held some of the day’s heat.

She loved rocks. Her clearest childhood memory was of a shallow hole she had scraped out under a rock when she’d been about six, living somewhere else. She had been able to crawl inside the hole and lie on her side, knees to chest, the rock almost touching her shoulders. The darkness under the boulder was different from the night outside. The earth had cradled her, and the rock had been like a low sky.

Once, she had dared to go to it in the day. She had dressed in her oldest clothes and, though feeling guilty, had climbed into the bath and soaked herself. She did not remember anything about getting there except the lacerating light. Her clothes began to dry immediately. In her scramble to crawl out, her cheek had brushed the rock’s rough surface and she’d cried out and jerked away. When her mother saw the blister, Sorrel had confessed that she had been outside and Bibi had confined her to her room with just alganola and water, no PlAK. She still had that scar.

The sky was lightening in the east and the air seemed to contract, like the singeing of her skin against the red-hot rock so many years ago. Sorrel felt short of breath. A sheen of sweat spread over her exposed skin. She wanted to shed her clothes. Once the sun was in the sky, human sweat would dry between one breath and the next. Skin would crack like the salt flats near the Burning Rock Plain. People without efficient sweat glands never lived past childhood.

Where was her mother? Bibi was never late. Maybe she had gone to the seawall for provisions: dried and salted jellyfish, algaoil for the bars that were their main source of food; maybe some of the mussels which now clung to every surface in the sea and smelled faintly of paint.

Sorrel hoped for a sea-egg. They carpeted the seafloor but were too deep for a casual wader and were harvested by licensed divers. There was a black market, of course, and her mother knew all the sellers. She wished for a fresh one, still smelling of the sea. They would crack it and fry it, add salt, and eat it at the kitchen table.

The sound of skateboards had stopped. The footsteps she could hear sounded too rapid. People out there were running. No one ran anymore; it wasted energy. She thought again of the Tribal girl running, being caught and dying on the Burning Rock Plain. Sorrel walked to the gate and looked down the road.

People were travelling through the gloom in groups: men and women carrying children. A few old people. Some hauled small carts; others were laden with overstuffed backpacks. She heard the clip clop of a mule or horse – a rare sound. Those people out there had very little time before the sun came up and they would face dawn danger.

Bibi had told her once that there had been dawn bunkers in case you were trapped outside at sunrise, but they had been built in the wrong places and the rising sea had claimed them.

“Sorrel!” It was her mother’s voice. She strained to separate Bibi from the groups of hurrying people. “Why’re you outside?”

“I came to look for you. You’re late. What’s happening? Why’s everyone on the move?” She could see her mother’s face now, drawn with worry, glistening with sweat. The half-moon circles under her eyes were deeper and fear flashed in her eyes.

“Inside,” Bibi said, looking over her shoulder.

“Those people are going to be caught outside.”

“Maybe,” Bibi answered. “Maybe. They might find an empty house.”

Sorrel noticed her mother’s weariness and pushed away the anger that lived high in her chest. “Let’s eat, Bibi. Then you can go to bed.”

“There’s no time,” Bibi said. “We have to get ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“Inside,” Bibi said again.

The heat had settled over the house. They sat at the small kitchen table, breathing shallowly.

“We’re ordered to leave,” Bibi said. “They say this hurricane season will bring a storm surge along Buttercup Avenue. They’re posting the evacuation orders tonight.”

“Good,” Sorrel said, surprising herself.

“Good?” Bibi pointed at the open window and raised her voice. “You want to struggle to find a new place? To have to fight for it, maybe?”

“Did you hear anything about the Domins catching a Tribal girl? In the last day or two?”

“What?”

“A Tribal girl. Someone who lives – lived – in the mountains?”

“There are always stories like that, One.”

“They could be true.”

She faced her mother. We’re so weak, Sorrel thought. She’s so weak. “You have Level 3 access. Are there Tribals in the mountains?”

“You know I can’t talk about that.”

“You’d say no, if it wasn’t true. Bibi, I want to leave Bana. I want to find other people. Young people like me. I don’t want to spend my life with you in this dead city.”

Bibi reached out a hand to her. Sorrel ignored it. “I know this is hard for you –”

“Hard? It’s impossible. I don’t want to live like…like a bat or an owl or a worm. We’re all just circling around.” Sorrel took a deep breath and stood. The heat was making her dizzy. “You don’t have to come,” she shouted. “You go look for another house. You keep going to work until they think you’re too old and then they’ll cut your water ration, they’ll take back the PlAK; maybe even your foodcards will be stopped. One day you’ll go outside to find food and the Squad will get you. Or the ferals. Or you won’t make it back before the sun comes up and you’ll roast like a pig on an old-time barbecue and the good people of Bana will walk past your corpse. Remember that body we saw before the shaving law, that day at the waterfront? Remember how the cartmen threw her on the sea? And how she crumbled and floated away like ashes?”

“Why’re you bringing that up?”

“Because as long as we stay here, that’s what’s coming for us!”

Bibi went over to the bucket in the corner and took out the rag. She slopped the scummy water on her face and neck and then held it out to her daughter. Sorrel took it.

“You’re forty-five, Bibi; I’m fourteen. Maybe there are Tribals in the mountains and we can join them.”

“Even if there are, the Domins will arrest us before we’ve gone five kilometres. Or the ferals…” Her mother’s voice trailed off and silence fell between them. The rag was warm in Sorrel’s hand. Already it was nearly dry.

“What about your father?” Bibi said, avoiding Sorrel’s eyes.

“What about him? He’s in prison.”

“I’ve been to see him. Maybe you can go one day.”

“He’s never getting out. You need to face that.”

You can’t trade off my life for his, she wanted to say but swallowed the words.

Silence fell between them. “Look what I brought.” Bibi said, reaching into her bag. She held a sea-egg with clipped spines. “You get the frying pan. After we eat, we’ll sleep. When it’s dark, we’ll talk some more and decide what to do. I can’t think in the day.”

“I wanted an egg,” Sorrel said, softly.

“You always want an egg.”

CHAPTER 3 – BANA CITY

She turned on the PlAK. It was 1100 hours and her mother still slept. Sorrel had only managed a restless two hours. She dressed in a sports bra and shorts, but didn’t clean her teeth, because she wanted to keep the taste of the sea-egg in her mouth. The daytime heat was still not at its height. People used to think that they couldn’t bear it any hotter, until they found they could.

She looked for Sesame on Neurality but her friend was not online. Once she and her mother left Buttercup Avenue that night, Sorrel knew she would probably never see her again or even speak to her. They would never see her father, either.

She went to the collage of unconnected and unverifiable information held by surviving websites and servers which could crash at any moment. An alert about breached seafloor cables flashed up. There had been new arrests of people who had tried to tap into the cables.

Bibi had Level 3 information clearance, because it was her job to make sure machines accessed only the permitted level of the owner. Sorrel had hacked into her mother’s portal a year ago which could have got them both arrested. Only Sesame knew just what level Sorrel could access. It was safer that Bibi didn’t know.

Although she regarded the historical websites as no more than a collection of myths to distract everyone from the present, she loved to read them and always started there when she browsed: clear water in rivers and streams, stored in reservoirs then sent to kitchens and bathroom through pipes. No limits on how much a person could use. Meat eaten every day; pigs and chickens raised in buildings, eggs a boring breakfast food. Felines and canines were “pets” living with their owners. It was at least a year since Sorrel had last eaten a starving baby feline, caught by her mother on the way home from work. Parks and museums and churches; films and plays and concerts. Cars everywhere, people flying in airplanes – airplanes! – to visit family abroad. It was even harder to imagine that people used to fly to their island to lie under the sun on a sandy strip of land they called a beach.

And the hair sites: women with hair that fell to their chins, their shoulders, even to their waists – hair long enough to make into all manner of designs: plaits and corn rows and bumps and locks and weaves and buns and French braids; hair that women washed every week, not once, but twice each time, using conditioners and potions, which had to be rinsed out with drinkable water. Sorrel loved the styles called Afros, which were like halos – when hair was part of a woman’s beauty.

She’d wonder which countries were the luckiest, out there, behind their closed borders. Was it easier in the places with winter? Some were icebound most of the year and could grow no food, but they had more water. Was it better to be inland? Here there was the relentless swell of the sea, ever closer, ever higher.

Heat radiated off the walls and she pulled the desk to the centre of the room. Time to get down to business. She logged into Level 3 and went to SATMAP to get a bird’s eye view of the island, knowing the images were between four and six months old. Only Level 1 would guarantee a realtime view. She was sure she could break into that, but it was too dangerous to try while they were still under Domin surveillance in the city. But still, there was the encroaching sea, the battered Sabana Plain on the south shore, the mountains rising to the north. She could see the roofs of the old hotels and the tower at Caicu Airport, now half underwater, with large mats of seaweed clustered around its sides. That kind of seaweed was toxic. Every year a few starving people were seduced by the easy harvest and died, their fingers, toes and lips turning black.

She moved her fingers over the screen up to the mountains, following the traces of an old road towards what used to be the army camp of Cibao, until it stopped in front of a wall behind which, Sesame said, the rich Toplanders lived.

She leaned back in her chair. If they were going to leave Bana, they had no choice but to go to the mountains. Find a good cave. Maybe they would be able to grow some types of food, even find fruit on trees. And sleep at night.

She started searching for old tracks and paths. The roads would be patrolled by the Domins, using drones or ATVs.

She saw the scars of earthquakes, numerous mudslides and rock falls and vertical cliffs. She zoomed in to a curving line of rocks – some small, some giant-sized, flanked by trees. The trees were bigger near to the rocks. It had to be a dry stream bed. She traced it down to the foothills where it disappeared. Could they find that place from Bana?

“Sorrel?” Bibi came out of her room. “Child, you have to sleep.”

“I’m not a child,” she retorted. “Look at this. It’s an old stream bed. See the line of the rocks?”

Bibi approached and peered over her shoulder. “Could’ve been a stream. So what? There won’t be any water now.”

“We need to go to the mountains.”

“But –”

Sorrel slammed the PlAK shut and burst into tears. Bibi reached out to hug her. Sorrel pushed her away and walked over to the sink. Her head pounded and she was ashamed of crying.

“We have to t-try something,” she stammered. “What do we have to lose?”

“Pretty much everything,” Bibi said. “Like my job, which gives us food. We could be dead within hours of leaving Bana. We could starve. Die of thirst. Be torn apart by ferals. And the Domins…”

“You’re just afraid to try anything.”

“At least we know what this life is like.”

“And it’s guatan awful.”

“Don’t swear.”

Bibi walked over to window, now shut tight against the day. She rested her hands against the shutters, wincing a little at the heat from the wood. Then she turned to face her daughter. “I want to give you a chance of a better life, but what if this is all there is? Surely if it was better in the mountains everyone would be there?”

“Not if everyone is afraid to try. Can’t we at least think about it?”

“If we wait too long, all the good places in Bana will be taken.”

“I’m not staying, Bibi. I’m going.”

“Sorrel…”

“No. I’m done. Are you going to help me find a way out or not?”

“You’re all I have, One. Let’s look together, then.”

Sorrel reopened the PlAK and they sat in front of it. “We need to find a landmark.’

“For what?”

“For where the stream bed ends,” Sorrel said pointing with the cursor.

CHAPTER 4 – BIBI

They called it different things: Change, then Crisis, followed by Emergency. Then they changed it to Disruption, then Disaster. In the end, it didn’t matter. Finally, they – you never knew who “they” were – realised that the worsening climate converged with poverty, geography and history. So now they call it the Convergence.

I was eleven and lived with my parents in the foothills overlooking Bana. Higher elevations were cooler, so we were luckier than others and I believed we deserved it. Every night my mother and father watched good-looking men and women on television report on melting ice, swirling snowstorms, cities swallowed by earthquakes. We saw people washed away by rivers that broke their banks, taking villages with them. We watched whole islands drown.

All this was far away. I thought the news was boring and had nothing to do with us. The decapitated mountains were not ours, nor were the children swept away by raging water.

I remember the sizzling morning I went to Rae Wharf with my mother and saw the fishers leaning against the rum shop, the women facing them with empty baskets, their faces slick with sweat.

“No more fish,” the men said. “But we have a few sea-eggs.”

My mother responded that we were not that desperate.

Not long after, the crops began failing and the fruit trees stopped bearing. We tried to grow some things in our garden, but they all died. I remember this one pumpkin vine which produced a flower and then a pumpkin. My parents watched it as if they were tending a sick child, then one morning it was gone. Someone too hungry to wait, my father said. After that, the vine withered and died.

The water supply failed in Bana and I went with my father to the Ama River, which still had pools of water. Thousands of people lined its crumbling banks carrying containers. Rich people put pumps in the pools and sucked them dry into tanks in the back of their trucks. I remember we had to walk a long way to find a pool that was not stirred up. I don’t remember the journey back to our car with my water bucket full, but it must have been difficult.

I went to campus school until I was fifteen. I was good at tech support. Halfway through my final year, the power supply could no longer support air conditioning. I never went back.

I remember the cars strewn around Bana after the roads melted, until a storm lifted them and cast them in the sea. They stopped giving hurricanes human names the year of the Cat Fives – that storm was Theta 24. We became trapped in cycles of flood and drought. The pandemic of 2020 had already shut down country borders, but the viruses had found their animal hosts and they sickened us in waves. The animals we let loose to roam and graze the almost barren land mostly starved and died, then shrivelled into ash. A few horses and mules survived and did not become feral. The pigs and dogs that survived banded together in feral packs and began to hunt and feed on us. We tried poison and traps, but they bred too fast.

Then it became too hot to go outside in the day; the dust storms started and the sun began to blind and kill. Our neighbour, Neema, was the first I knew to die – a quiet soft-spoken woman made cantankerous by thirst and hunger. She tried to scratch out her husband’s eyes and he threw her out. All we heard was the bang of the front door and then her screams. No one opened their doors to her. I did not ask my parents why.

I still think of my father and the way he died. He was out all night at the seawall foraging for food. Daylight caught him there. He tried to get into one of the dawn bunkers, which still existed then. The people inside would not open the door. They shouted to him that there was no more room. I never saw his body and I don’t know how the Domins, who brought the news, knew who he was, because there was nothing left. All they gave my mother was his wedding ring. For a long time, I thought about his bones. I didn’t believe the sun could destroy bones, at least not so quickly, and I imagined the gold ring, loose around a finger bone, against the blackened dust. I also thought about the food he might have found, which we did not get. I wondered who would have taken the food and left his ring.

I didn’t witness what the sun could do to people until after Sorrel was born. I was always sorry she saw it, too.

Now, my headstrong daughter, my only child, wants to abandon the safety of the dark. I tell her Tribals don’t exist – they are a myth that the young have created to hang onto hope – but the Toplanders are real. I’ve seen classified reports about the Toplanders and their raids on young Lowlander females to use as slaves. The raiders are led by a cruel, reckless man the reports call The Colonel. There was Essan, a girl Sorrel’s age, who disappeared while she was out searching for food and we knew it was the Domins who’d caught and sold her to the Toplanders. And Amaryllis, snatched from her doorstep in the presence of her parents and never heard from again.

What I know for sure is that in this time of killing heat and hunger, there is no safety anywhere. Every day the sun comes up it will blind or kill us if there is not a roof over our heads. Every day the Domins are on the hunt for young women and the ferals can surround us and tear us apart.

I’m forty-five and the end is coming fast for me. What use am I without my daughter? Maybe the only thing I can give her is a chance to escape this hell. To die with her would be better than to die alone.

CHAPTER 5 – FLIGHT

Two days had passed, and the loudspeakers had begun transmitting evacuation orders, throughout the night. The stream of people on the road had disappeared and Sorrel knew all the best places in Bana would already be taken.

On the SATMAP, they had found traces of an old aqueduct close to the dry stream bed, which they could use as the point to start their journey to the mountains. They’d searched for possible hiding places along the way: big rocks, caves, old-time trees, but knew the images they were looking at were old.