Sent electronically, self-deleting, displayed with a polarizing filter so that the screen could not be photographed, printer-locked. The scenario papers were to be read, considered, and then lost forever.

  “Lost?” said Zhen.

  “Remembered,” said Lenk. “You know it could be that in the whole world those papers only exist now in my memory, and Ellen’s.”

  The scenario papers had run through extreme possibilities. Wars. Revolutions. The development of malevolent artificial intelligence. In each case, they detailed strategies by which Medlar, Anvil, and Fantail could remain vibrant and compelling forces with considerable user engagement in the new socioeconomic reality.

  “This will involve,” the paper had said in dry academic tones, “temporarily taking over some of the roles of government. Sequestering resources by force. Protecting facilities and personnel.”

  Elsewhere in the world, perhaps, these protocols were already being enacted.

  “You’re making this sound sinister. Lenk always does that. You know, something like this could really have helped in the Fall of Hong Kong,” said Ellen Bywater.

  Zhen tried to imagine something like that in the Fall of Hong Kong. In the midst of the people sobbing and the military police and the overwhelmed hospitals. Drones with weapons. Might have helped the government or Anvil, wouldn’t have helped her.

  “The plan is that we become a force for stability,” Ellen continued, “until there’s a government again.”

  “The plan is to take over a few countries and you know it,” said Lenk.

  “That’s what you’re talking about,” said Zhen. “That’s what you think is going on here, what you’re afraid of. Out there, the world is ending. And you all have the capacity to take over. One of you is going to come out on top. And you’re willing to fight it out here until only one of you is left.”

  10. a plastic drawer full of tiny green pieces

  “You know,” said Ellen Bywater, “there’s no proof that Zimri is really dead. Have you thought of that?”

  Ellen was rapidly searching through the StowtBoxes, looking for something. Lenk had gone to check the traps. Neither Lenk nor Ellen was willing to be alone with the other.

  “I mean, what we saw seems pretty conclusive,” said Zhen. “What are we looking for?”

  “I want to know what Zimri took. You remember. He was going through the boxes. Taking things. Where’s that sled now, the one he was carrying his stuff away on?”

  That was a good point. Zhen looked around.

  “Maybe the drones took it?”

  “Aha!” Ellen was wild-eyed. If they managed to push her into taking sides here, if they managed to really convince Zhen despite all she’d seen and all she’d learned, that she had to choose between them, would she choose Ellen? The alternative was choosing Lenk Sketlish, which prior to this week Zhen would have said was surely always the worst possible choice.

  “If the drones took it,” said Ellen, “where did they take it and why? OK. I know I didn’t send the swarm for Zimri. You don’t need to believe me, no reason you would, but I know. But say I did send the swarm—why would I take the box too? Wouldn’t I leave the equipment here? Think about it. You saw those same drones in his bunker, you told us. We never saw him die. If those were his drones, they could have made a good show and then lifted him, carried him somewhere else, still on the island, with all that equipment. Do you see?”

  “You think he’s pretending to be dead.”

  “Classic,” said Ellen. “It’s the classic. I was saying to Will—” She stopped herself.

  “I still talk to my mum,” said Zhen. “She died when I was fourteen and I still talk to her. Sometimes I even think she talks back.”

  “Thank you,” said Ellen. “That means something. Yes. Since we got here I’ve been… I’ve thought I saw him sometimes. Just sitting on the grass next to me. I think maybe I’m going nuts. Maybe I have been for a while.”

  “You just miss him,” said Zhen. “And we’re all going to go nuts. I think that’s the expected state when you’re grieving for the whole world. Look,” she said, “all this ‘who’s going to take over,’ I mean, I guess maybe that’s normal too? When the past is all fucking… fire and brimstone… all you have to hold on to is the future. Hoping that things will end up better than they are. That’s why you’re all driving yourselves so crazy over the… you know… wanting to be king of the world. Rivalry and imagining that the others are doing terrible things. It stops you looking back at the ashes.”

  “Yes,” said Ellen. “Yes, I see that. I see that.”

  And for a moment Zhen thought, Thank fuck I’ve gotten through to her and she’s going to sit down and feel sad about the whole world and then we’ll all be doing better.

  Zhen felt the inner wire in her unbend just a little, her tensile steel softened; she imagined sagging to the ground, not realizing how frightened she had been of what might happen here.

  “Oh my God,” said Ellen, and Zhen thought: Yes, this is how it begins. This is how you know you’re grieving. When the whole thing strikes you as absolutely outrageous, when you’re angry with your own mother for fucking letting cancer take her and leaving you, that’s when you know you’re in it.

  “Look at this,” said Ellen. “Six AP28 boards in here. All smashed. Jesus fuck.”

  “I… don’t know what that is.”

  “They’re… they can enable communication with the satellites. And here, this section is smashed too. Fuck him. Fuck him.”

  Ellen tipped the StowtBox over so Zhen could see the delicate parts and the green boards pulverized into dust and fragments.

  “I mean, things could have been destroyed in the crash…”

  “No. I checked these the day we arrived—we all know that at some point we’re going to want to build communication devices, try to reestablish contact. Look at this. If you wanted to set up on some other island, or in a distant part of this island, set up all cozy and snug with us thinking you’re dead and run your empire from there, you’d take one of these and smash the others to bits.”

  Ellen’s speech was racing, high points of color in her cheeks. The idea was growing in her mind as Zhen watched, louder and more insistent with every moment. Zimri had faked his death, he’d done it with his own drones—well, Zhen had seen those precise drones in his own bunker, she knew what Ellen was saying—he’d taken all he needed, he was waiting out there somewhere, he’d steal from them by night and kill them. Listening to her was like watching a mind drown.

  “Just a second,” said Ellen, “just a moment, I haven’t thought this through. This is not the only option.”

  “No,” said Zhen, “it’s quite an extreme option, really. You think he wants it so much he could have faked his own death?”

  “Oh, he wants it that much. But”—Ellen’s expression was sly—“could’ve been Lenk. I didn’t think of that. Didn’t think of that. Lenk could have killed him. Cleared away the sled and stolen the parts to make me think it was Zimri. Have you noticed how much time Lenk spends walking? Where is he going?”

  Zhen was reminded of one of her father’s sisters in Liverpool, who had become convinced that vaccinations were secretly a plot by Bill Gates to mind-control the population of the world. She and her dad had laughed about Auntie Lusi and it had been a closeness between them. With her mother dying, the world upside down, Auntie Lusi’s emails titled “spike protein vaccine poisons brains” had been a bulwark. We in this apartment are not as crazy as that. We have that in common. Even though we’re not OK, we are OK.

  Oh, Zhen thought, this is how I end up allying with Lenk Sketlish.

  11. you’re not going to believe this

  It was true. Lenk Sketlish did go walking a lot. He often set off as soon as the morning chores were complete—saying he was going to “clear his head” or to check traps, or to find places to set new traps. Never quite answering precisely where he was heading, never quite accepting an offer to go with him. Perhaps it was Ellen’s paranoia. Perhaps Ellen’s paranoia had infected her. Still, Zhen watched Lenk leave and wondered and could not stop herself wondering.

  “Suit,” said Zhen, “how quietly can you move?”

  “I have a stealth mode, sport, designed for tracking animals. Shall I engage it now?”

  “Yeah, yeah, do that. We’re following Lenk.”

  The suit lengthened its arms and gently tipped her over onto all fours, as Zhen made a soft “oh” sound. With the longer strengthened arms it was surprisingly comfortable and—yes—stealthy. Weight spread more evenly, easier to creep low to the ground.

  “Do you want me to let Lenk Sketlish know you’d like to talk to him?”

  “No,” said Zhen, “no, that’s not what I want.”

  “OK, gotcha.”

  The suit moved like oiled glass, slow and steady, no jerking motions, as if to the rhythm of the breathing wind stirring the small leaves. Never hurrying, never tarrying, never quite losing sight of Lenk, never quite closing in on him. The journey was circuitous, at times seeming to double back. Lenk knew where he was going.

  In the dark mud at the base of a sheer cliff covered in vines, where the earth was continually dampened by trickling water, Lenk stood before a black open mouth: a crack in the side of the mountain. A cave, long and narrow, the entrance barely wide enough for the suit to fit through, the inner parts dark as memory. Lenk pressed his palm against the wall to balance as he shuffled inside.

  Zhen’s instinct was to wait. To see what would happen, not to be inside a narrow, lightless crack with a man known to have violent fits of rage. And yet. She’d stayed outside the mountain once before and ended up sunk deep into a situation she could neither understand nor control. She followed, as silent as she could. Down into the mountain, into the inside of the world.

  Only a few paces in, the darkness became absolute. The stone was around her and she felt the weight of the mountain as if it were pressing on her head. A feeling both unsettling and comforting, something remembered from long ago, the terror of what might be inside this small space with her. This is why we built houses with windows and blinds. This is why we invented glass. This is why we discovered electricity. This is why we split the atom. It’s because this feeling is unbearable.

  The suit recalibrated its sensors and the cave interior was more visible through the visor. The floor of the cave was strewn with rocks and small animal droppings. Several passageways leading out but no sign of Lenk. On the wall in front of her, there were scratches. Had a bear been here, scraping at the wall with claws as long as a man’s hand? But as she looked at them, the scratches seemed purposeful. A small circle within a larger one. Zigzags piled one on top of another.

  “Suit,” said Zhen, “what are those markings made with?”

  The suit said: “Paramagnetic salts.”

  “Huh. Versatile. What do they symbolize?”

  The suit said: “They are a conductive communicator. An aerial written onto the rock.”

  “Hello,” said Lenk Sketlish. “I know you’re there.”

  Zhen jumped. She turned around, but there was no Lenk. He was speaking through the suit’s comms. He could be anywhere.

  “I, um,” she said, “I happened to spot you—”

  “You followed me,” he said.

  “No,” she said, and then after a pause, “Yes.”

  “What are you expecting me to do about that?”

  He sounded dangerous as a tiger. She turned in a slow, wary circle. He must be near; the mountain would block transmissions. She watched for the dull gleam from his suit, for the sudden movement that would show him to her. Both of them calculating futures, both of them waiting for the worst.

  “I was curious and I followed you. I guess you could tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to tell you.”

  There was a route through this labyrinth, a way to navigate even the mind of Lenk Sketlish.

  “Then you’ll have to keep it to yourself literally forever, because you’re sure as shit not going to be telling Ellen Bywater, are you?”

  Lenk Sketlish laughed. A laugh is a shortcut between one person and another.

  Lenk’s suit prowled toward Zhen from a passage to her right. He, too, was moving quietly on all fours. He had been a long way back, deep into the mountain, and Zhen couldn’t deny her curiosity was greater than her fear. This, too, is the pull of the future, the joy of simple wanting-to-know.

  “You want to see something cool?” he said.

  “Always,” she said. And it was true. This is what human beings have going for us over the matchboxes and beads. If we’re alive, if we’re healthy, we want to reach out all the time, we want to trust.

  “Look,” said Lenk, and at the base of the rock wall, he pushed away a mat of debris, of dried plants and soft sand. There in the stone Zhen saw, outlined with a white, bright ring of LED, a single proprietary Fantail data port. She frowned.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  “So it turns out I own it. This is my island,” said Lenk.

  12. the shelter of a cave

  Knowing what Lenk Sketlish was interested in, and understanding his methods, Martha Einkorn had purchased—via the Fantail FutureSafe Foundation—Admiral Huntsy Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Within the bunker, using the landscape’s natural caves, she had built an extra bunker. Just in case.

  In designing it Martha Einkorn had operated on Lenk’s guiding principle that several hundred people should be able to survive and thrive there without leaving for a minimum of three hundred years. None of the others, Lenk explained to Zhen because he really did love to lecture, had thought it through. When the sea level rises, Zimri’s place in Haida Gwaii would be underwater even if Zhen hadn’t blown it up. Ellen’s mountain was in an area of seismic activity. They both thought they were only going to be there for five to ten years at the outside. But Lenk Sketlish thought much more long-term than that.

  It wasn’t a surprise to learn that the FutureSafe wildlife conservation zones had been designed to benefit their owners as much as to protect the natural environments. Zhen—and half the people under forty on the internet—had already presumed this was happening somehow, even if only in access to these precious areas, in monetizing images of them.

  The scale, though, that was a surprise. She walked with Lenk through the corridors tunneled from the rock. Miles of them. The mountain had been drilled into an ant’s nest, a colony. Solid and dark, sleeping places, latrine holes positioned so that the highest tides every day would sluice them clean, stove places with chimneys letting their smoke out high on the cliff face. The start, if you had to start human civilization again.

  Here inside this mountain were no large supplies of canned goods, or guns, or digging machines. What Martha had stocked here—from the eastern reach touching the ocean to the western edge overhanging the forest basin—was anything you could realistically protect or learn to create or to repair as a small, well-educated community over several hundred years. Enochites, Zhen thought, the way they wanted to live. This had been Lenk’s reason for wanting Martha after all.

  There were thousands of arrowheads and instructions on how to make arrowheads, shafts, and bows. Dry stuffed bedding, and diagrams showing which plants to dry and fluff and spin to make more. Clay pots and notes of precisely which mud to use and which wood burned hot enough to fire them. The first 270,000 years of Homo sapiens technical development, preserved against the oncoming tide.

  There was more, of course. One could always hope for more. An explanation of germ theory was carved into the walls in words and pictographs.

  “If we can pass one thing on, this is it, right? Small alive things, too small to see, make you sick. You have to wash to keep them away. That’s a lot of suffering prevented right there.”

  Zhen saw that this was real to Lenk, more real than the current sickness sweeping the world. The future was more real to him than the present.

  There were long rows of plasti-paper books full of more advanced knowledge in each of the twenty most commonly spoken languages on Earth: quantum theory, general relativity, the human genome, the manufacture of an electron microscope.

  “No literature?” said Zhen.

  “Oh, sure, sure, that’s in there. Martha’s a big reader. She says that’s what gets us from one world to the next.”

  There were red plastic books listing what things to scavenge in the outside world, what to look for, what to protect. Row upon row of rather basic laptops, each component individually plasti-sprayed to protect from moisture and rust. At worst, Lenk said proudly, these machines would last seventy years. At best some of them might last out the three hundred years. They contained vast databases, electronic encyclopedias. In twelve different plastic-lined cells around the complex there were enormous seed banks, seeds hardened for a warmer climate. Enough to restart a real civilization.

  “If you had one hundred fifty people here for three hundred years, they could make it,” said Lenk, “and not many of them would have to be really smart. You see? The end of the world wouldn’t be the end of everything.”

  Lenk imagined a new kind of monastery, a self-sustaining organization that could bring knowledge through a dark bottleneck of human history and allow it to flow freely again when the years became favorable. Martha had understood his vision better than anyone alive, and she had made it real.

  For food, his islanders would have options. The easiest would be hunting, fishing, small-scale arable farming—there was plenty of land and the waters teemed with fish. There was even an area of the island suitable for grazing sheep—if they brought them and managed the numbers carefully. But—Lenk was boyish and ebullient as he explained this—the genius part was the algae that grew in specially bored holes and crevasses all over the island.

  “I saw it the day we arrived, but I had to be sure it was the same thing. I know now it is. We found this algae and cultivated it. It’s the answer. It strips out nuclear waste. Poisons. Chemical weapons. Everything currently being made and a few things that haven’t been yet. The algae breaks nutrients to the atomic level and then builds them up again into a pure, beautiful, protein-rich, omega-3-filled, all-around food source.”