She struggled sideways. She couldn’t hear anything. When she looked at the sky, she saw white papers fall upward in the air, half-charred. There were no sirens and no screaming. Someone was sobbing a distance away from her. There were three loud explosions.

  Zhen pushed herself upright. She still couldn’t hear properly. Her father was next to her, coughing, a long scrape on his head but otherwise OK. She looked around. All along the road were people fallen, coughing, covered in white heavy dust. Around them showers of papers were falling to earth.

  Later, she and her father would say to each other, You see, we were lucky after all—if they’d been ten minutes earlier, if they hadn’t stopped for egg waffles, they would have been in their apartment block when it exploded.

  Officially, after a long investigation, the PRC-approved Hong Kong government concluded that the apartment building had been destroyed by a gas leak which caused an explosion. The utilities company was fined and censured, several people were fired. Unofficially it was reported on the internet and by foreign media that an apartment in the block had been used as a nerve center by protestors for nearly two years. That it would be trivially easy to make a small drone attack on a gas line look like a gas explosion. Officially, PRC troops hadn’t entered the city until the government of Hong Kong admitted that it had lost control and called for their help because of the escalating violence. Unofficially, it was well understood that the PRC had lost patience. If you needed a breakdown in law and order to justify sending troops in, well then it was possible to provoke such a breakdown.

  We all live in history. Lai Zhen and her father were part of a history they could not fully perceive at that time, let alone control.

  * * *

  All their possessions were gone, of course. All their papers, their passports, their documents. They had a perfect right to the British National (Overseas) passports, but it took more than three years for everything to be untangled. Three years first in a shelter in Hong Kong and then in a British offshore refugee center waiting for appointments and information.

  Lai Zhen continued her studies in the refugee center. A charity—and two teachers from the British-style school in Hong Kong who had seen her exceptional promise—sent her the books and thumb drives with video lectures on them. It took enough energy to blot out almost everything else, and she knew that if she didn’t continue studying, her father would die. Not metaphorically. By this point he was only held together by hope and belief in her. They were held together by needing each other.

  She read the Iliad—about a battle no one had chosen and no one wanted. And the Odyssey, about the longest journey home, and the great burden of misery in just keeping going. In Homer’s Iliad, she found at last some words that comforted her. It was a passage after all the exciting battles that had seen such loss. After the great hero of Troy, Hektor, had slain Patroklos of the Greeks. After Achilles, Patroklos’s lover, had torn through the Trojans to reach Hektor, had slaughtered him; after Achilles had dragged Hektor’s body behind his chariot around and around the walls of Troy.

  After all these things in the still of night, Hektor’s father, Priam, came to the Greek camp in the dead of night, walked through the tents of his enemies, and, finding Achilles, knelt before the man who had slain his son and kissed the hand that had killed him and begged Achilles for Hektor’s body. At this point, what could one expect? Magnanimity from Achilles, perhaps. Murderous rage would be in character. Instead Achilles told Priam to get up, to sit near him, to take wine and food.

  Achilles said: “At the doors of the gods there are two urns. One is filled with evil fortune and one is filled with good fortune. Zeus digs his hands into the urns and scatters fortune on us. On some people, good and evil fortunes fall. And on some, only evil fortunes.”

  This passage was the only thing that gave Zhen relief. She thought of it often, until she could almost see the fortunes raining down on her. It hadn’t all been bad fortune for her. Thirty-eight people had died in the building, and she and her father had both survived. The winds would change—because winds always change—and blow some new fortune her way.

  Much later in her life, Lai Zhen had made a video called “How to Survive the Psychological Effects of an Apocalyptic Event” and 1.6 million people had watched it. It wasn’t one of her most popular ones.

  She said: You’ll need to keep busy

  She said: Focus on your own survival, look forward, not back

  She said: Even if you don’t feel OK, you will be OK one day

  She said: For a long time, it will feel unreal; you will be unable to accept your situation

  She said: Don’t blame yourself. Fortune tumbles down onto us like scraps of paper in the wind. Joyful fortune and miserable fortune. You can as little choose your own luck as choose which raindrop falls on your head.

  All of this was true and yet it was not enough. Another thing you could do was to figure out why exactly the building you lived in had been targeted by the PRC and follow carefully the evidence that the dissidents’ communications hadn’t been as secure as they’d thought:

  In exchange for access to the valuable Chinese markets, Medlar had agreed to allow the PRC to monitor certain location data on the new Medlar Torcs.

  Working on their mission to “bring people together,” Fantail had allowed certain governments, including China, to read certain FantailPal artificial intelligence requests deemed to relate to terrorist organizations.

  Zimri Nommik hadn’t even had to be asked—Anvil wanted stability and prosperity, and neither of those were achieved by splinter groups blowing up storefronts. Obviously AnvilChat would comply with all local laws.

  So here she was. On an island with them. At the end of the world. Lai Zhen tipped her face to the sky and wondered what kind of weird-ass mixed fortune had fallen square in the center of her head.

  6. the particular bargains

  In the waters of a clear, cold river east of the camp, Lenk Sketlish was swimming, naked. Working his body against the gentle onrush of the river toward the ocean. Zhen sat on the rocks at the riverbank, her suit leaning back on its arms next to her. The river bristled with pinpoints of light, Lenk’s body sinuous and strong. He’d invited her for a swim, and when he’d taken off all his clothes, Zhen had felt very strongly that a skinny-dip with the founder and CEO of Fantail was not going to make this month feel less weird for her.

  “Suit,” she said, “do you know how to build a raft? Or like, a boat?”

  The suit had already shown her the built-in mini buzz saws in its gauntlets. The heat-bonding micro-blades. The laser sights for pinpoint accuracy in construction projects. She had been on the island for nearly five weeks. The suit had shown her what work needed to be done and she’d added in some tricks of her own, different ways of doing things. They cut creeper and set it to dry on a wooden platform to make a serviceable and tough rope. Zhen showed Lenk how to bend wires carefully into fishhooks and set fishing poles in the still bend of the river where the spike-toothed carp rose. They picked fruit off three of the trees the suits told them were safe to eat from, and in the embers of the fire, they baked the pink-fleshed long apples with the thousands of tiny seeds inside and ate them hot from the ash. At the camp, she had helped Ellen and Zimri with some construction—securing the sleeping platform, reinforcing the stockade against wild animals.

  “Yes,” said the suit, “I know how to do those things.”

  “OK so, what type of vessel would you recommend for the ocean here?”

  “The seas here are rough with unstable tidal conditions since oceanic warming. There is little chance of survival on open water in a homebuilt raft.”

  Obstructionist.

  “OK, but we could try, couldn’t we? Maybe use pieces of the wrecked fuselage of the plane?”

  “I don’t know how to construct a raft like that.”

  She thought she could figure it out if she had to. She remembered Marius telling his students that a bead tumbling around in a matchbox could never come up with a new possibility, only a remix of the old ones. She missed him suddenly with a fierce pang, and told herself sternly in her own mind: Remember, you will never see him again.

  Lenk pressed his hands onto the rock and lifted himself out of the water. He was long, lean, and muscular. He was not unattractive. Alright, he was attractive. She’d admired men in the abstract and occasionally in the specific but never enough to actually want to date one. Lenk was also known as a volatile charmer, a man who got what he wanted through a mixture of fierce intelligence, aggression, and charisma, deployed in whatever proportions would work. She thought of Martha, dealing with this man year after year, decade after decade. No wonder she’d been so fucking suspicious and cagey. He sat next to her on the rock, naked and unembarrassed.

  “So you slept with Martha, right? How was it?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “It’s an end-of-the-world question. Martha’s in a bunker somewhere. We’re here. Probably neither of us will see her again. Why not tell me?”

  “I don’t fancy giving you material about my life for your wank bank?”

  “Fair enough. I’m just saying, we’re going to be here a long time. Probably just you and me for a lot of it. Zimri is sick, his leg’s bad. We’ve used a lot of antibiotics on him already. Even if he recovers, an illness this long will have taken years off him. Ellen’s sixty-seven. There are going to be years, maybe decades, when it’s just us and we’ll end up telling each other everything.”

  “You always think you know what’s going to happen.”

  “So far I always have.”

  He cracked a smile, charming and deadly.

  Lenk said, “Want to know a secret?”

  “Sure?”

  “Something will come for me eventually.”

  “Because you always know what’s going to happen.”

  “Because I change what’s going to happen. I have a tracker, here.” Lenk motioned to a spot just behind his right ear. “Dead man’s switch. I have to tell the system every morning that everything’s OK or it sets off an alert. And then… everything goes all out to find me.”

  “Yeah? Why hasn’t anything come for you already?”

  “That’s how I know we don’t want to get off this island right now,” said Lenk. “My best guess is that the alarm has gone off but my people are too engaged solving other problems to want to go and look for what they’d presume would be my corpse. Not to mention that a lot of them are dead or in a bunker, waiting out the storm.”

  “So why is anything going to come for you?”

  “They’ll have to confirm I’m dead before the system will give them access to… some sensitive materials. At worst, there’ll be drones in a few months, I guess. Yeah, depending on how bad it gets out there, maybe even years. Eventually, something will come.”

  “Is that what the others think too?”

  “Probably. They’ll have systems, I’m sure. Something. There’s no way they’ve told us everything. I haven’t.”

  The river plashed, the surface alive with humming insects. As Zhen watched, the glassy surface bowed outward around the snapping teeth-filled mouth of a fish grabbing at the black-and-violet lacy wings of a dragonfly. Nothing is ever really over.

  “You’re talking to me about it because I’m not a player,” she said.

  Lenk smiled lazily.

  “Whatever you think is coming after this, I’m not going to be part of it. Not in the way the three of you are.”

  “Martha never did pick any idiots,” said Lenk.

  “So?”

  “What?” said Lenk.

  “What is it that you think is going to come after this?”

  Lenk’s eyes were closed to the sun.

  “Well,” he said, “I suspect they each have an army out there, somewhere. And I suspect they have an army because I know I have one. We’re not clean, you know. Of all of us, you’re the cleanest one here. Have you thought about how it was that we ended up on this island?”

  “What do you mean,” Zhen said, “an army?”

  “Well, look,” said Lenk, “we were never supposed to end up here. The survival suits are great, obviously, but this part, the first part where the disease burns itself out among the population and there are a lot of corpses… I was supposed to spend that in luxury, OK? I have a place in Greenland, a place in the Canadian Arctic, a mountain in Wyoming… all well equipped. This… lashing together logs with vines to make sleeping platforms? No, this wasn’t it.”

  “It wasn’t it for them either,” said Zhen, “for Zimri and Ellen.”

  “Right,” said Lenk. “So this is what I mean about an army. I don’t mean people, you understand. Neither of them has told you how the plane crashed, right?”

  Zhen shook her head.

  “OK then.”

  7. eight hours and around four thousand miles from the Action Now! ecological convention

  The cream leather upholstery had been smooth under Lenk’s fingertips and the glass refrigerator was well stocked with glittering bottles. Lenk felt ready in his blood and his bones. The plans were underway. As agreed in the evacuation protocol, the pilot had given false headings to air traffic control as soon as they were out of radar range. Whatever was coming, he was ready for it. A short flight with these two panicking bozos, then his own private plane and Martha and the island and the start of the world to come.

  In the air, they had hooked up to the plane’s Wi-Fi and tried to find out what could possibly be coming. AUGR indicated that hot spots to avoid on the journey were: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Texas, France. Zimri connected to the many information tentacles of Anvil; Ellen searched Medlar Torc data. Lenk looked at the detailed analytics for posts on Fantail. Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Texas, France. Ordering patterns. Search patterns. Words used in reviews, in emails to vendors, in social media posts, in queries to FantailPal talkbots. Heart rates. Blood solutes. Physical activity. Smiley faces. Frowny faces. A proxy for the thoughts and feelings of the human planet, more or less. Some patterns had started to emerge.

  “Shit,” said Ellen Bywater, pointing at a particular pattern of Medlar Torc bio-data. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Once they knew what they were looking for, it wasn’t too difficult. A set of search terms on FantailLive and there, yes, in the background of certain videos, you could already see what was coming.

  Lenk Sketlish felt the news drain through him like immersion in cold water. He felt extraordinarily calm, peaceful even. If this was the story, then there might have been nothing they could do anyway.

  * * *

  The sound was so loud and so sudden that it seemed to be coming not from outside but from inside them, as if their own hearts had shattered their chests. It was an all-encompassing, terrifying noise. It sounded like the end of days, the Lord’s vengeance.

  Each of them lurched forward in their seats as the nose pointed downward. Their seat belts like metal bars cutting into their torsos, making them retch with sudden gastric acid pushed back up their throats. There was a terrible sound. A wrenching, strained sound, a bang, and then a yawning moan of bolt and screw.

  An automatic voice said: “Please retrieve your CrashJacket from underneath your seat. Unroll it and place it over your head. It will self-secure around your waist. Try to remain calm.”

  Lenk pressed the intercom button on his seat. “What the fuck, what the fuck is happening? Was that an explosion? What’s happened?”

  The pilot said through the intercom: “I don’t know. Malfunction. Could be weapons fired. I didn’t see anything. We need to get away.”

  He sounded terrified.

  Lenk Sketlish, Ellen Bywater, and Zimri Nommik pulled at their seat belts, trying to loosen them, trying to retrieve their CrashJackets from underneath their seats, trying to find the fucking head hole.

  The pilot said: “I think we’re under attack. I’m not sure. I’m releasing countermeasures. Please. I’m going to do what I can but… you have to get ready to jump.”

  This was not an aircraft with offensive capabilities. It was a private plane which, because it was owned by a paranoid man, was equipped with a very limited number of countermeasures.

  Outside, it was night. Two in the morning local time, darkness and a great moon full and fat. Through his window by the moonlight, Lenk saw a cloud of silver metal radar-baffling strips release into the air, like a squid jetting ink to confuse a predator. The darkly glinting pieces reflected the light from the moon, from the plane itself. The plane was diving now. There was no siren; the sound in Lenk’s ears was the sound of his heartbeat. His cold, shaking fingers found the hole in the center of the CrashJacket at last and unrolled it over his head. He fitted the emergency oxygen mask in the center of the CrashJacket over his mouth and nose and tried to breathe normally. He remembered, as if a memory from a distant world, a woman with a nose whistle telling him to breathe from his navel. That had been just after he’d woken up that actual morning. Like breathing normally right now, breathing from the navel was literally impossible.

  The plane banked sharply to the left and the right. There was a sound from the back of the hull. The emergency doors popped open. Time was very fast and very slow.

  Lenk thought of inert submunition dispensers. A very neutral name for a particular kind of missile held to be more ethical because they didn’t scatter explosive material over civilians. Each missile held a small canister of “inert” material under high compression. When it exploded, hundreds of razor-sharp metal loops expanded in a wide sphere centered around the empty space filled with noise. It was the pressure and the speed that made them dangerous—less than one second after they were released, the metal loops would be nothing but debris. No mines left to maim children. No nuclear wasteland. Released into the air, they would mostly describe a parabola and fall harmlessly to Earth, tiny pieces of innocuous wire.