Not trusting one another was fine; that was to be expected. But if this was boiling over into violence, it was most likely to end with more punches to Zhen’s own head.

  “I just want to know,” said Ellen, and her voice was level but she was the opposite of calm, “I just want to know who the fuck it is. OK? I want you to tell me who the fuck it is. The two of you.”

  Lenk drew breath and Zhen understood that sometimes you can know the future. You can know it in the inability of people to change. In their desire to have things over. If you can’t tolerate uncertainty, you will try to make things certain. Sometimes the only way to make them certain is to make them bad. It hadn’t taken much for Lenk and Ellen to get to this stage.

  “It is my island,” said Lenk. “I acknowledge that and I take responsibility for that part.”

  And as things do, things began to move very quickly.

  The hypothalamic-pituitary axis releases a shower of adrenaline and cortisol and the heart pumps blood to the muscles and the head reels with the shock and fear of a new battle. It would take a lifetime of training to respond to violence with kindness and calm. Deep belly breaths among the redwoods won’t touch it.

  Ellen’s attack was loud and instant, a streaking fist to Lenk’s head. He was ready for her. They fought, metal on metal, kicked out with mechanized legs, one blow coming up at his face and smashing into the screen of his visor, making it bloom with bright color. He had a handheld blowtorch he’d brought up from the caves—small but intense. He pressed it directly to the jaw latch of Ellen’s helmet, the metal already beginning to warp from the heat. He flamed the blowtorch on a dried creeper. The fire rose up around her and, panicking, she let go for a moment. He pulled away, then came back harder, walloping the visor screen again and again with the heel of his hand.

  She struggled, kicked out at him. A lucky blow taking his knee sideways. He crashed to earth.

  When he fell, Ellen fled.

  Lenk clambered clumsily to his feet.

  “Stop,” said Zhen, “please stop now. Let her go. Let her think it through.”

  Ellen ran through the jungle, thinking of Albert Dabrowski’s face when she took his company from him. She knew that if she could have seen her own face, that is how she would have looked.

  15. yeah! justice!

  In the jungle, every inch of earth is alive. The trees’ corrugated bark teems with insects. The air swarms with microscopic creatures. The soil—oh!—the soil is as rich with life as a womb; it is eager and foaming.

  In the shadow of a great cliff, within the life of the jungle, Ellen Bywater cowered. Clamped to the rock like a barnacle, molded into its curved and flat places. Hiding like any other creature.

  Ellen said, “I don’t want to die.”

  Will said, No one does, honeybunch.

  Above her, on the clifftop, Lenk Sketlish searched.

  The suit said: “What do you need her for, Lenk?”

  Lenk said: “Never you mind.”

  The suit said: “I can’t help you with this any longer.”

  Lenk said: “You got me far enough.”

  He wondered if the suit would freeze him in place or send out a distress call or alert Zhen or warn Ellen. But he thought: No FantailPhone in the world has ever refused to make a phone call luring someone to their death. No FantailTablet has refused to locate a gun store. No FantailSearch has refused to turn up information on how to kill someone in seventy different ways. We could’ve made technology like that, but we thought it was better not to get involved. Improve market share. Leave it to the invisible hand of buying and selling to sort things out in the fullness of many days. Martha wouldn’t have made a suit that would stop him from taking legitimate steps to protect himself.

  The suit said: “I can’t recommend what you’re doing.”

  Still, the suit’s heat sensors showed him Ellen, tucked up tight against the cliff face, bug in a rug.

  Still, the suit’s servomotors helped him analyze the rock formations.

  God bless America and freedom of choice.

  * * *

  In the jungle, every square inch of earth is alive. And every death is the beginning of other lives. A bear or a beetle—nothing is too large or small to make food for something else. Lenk looked down on Ellen like the Lord God looked down on the city of Sodom. He placed the mining charges from his underground caves into the fault in the rock. He set his blowtorch flaming and tossed it in after the charges.

  The noise was bone-crunchingly loud. Sheets of rock face at the edge of the precipice sheared off, one by one, pointed and sharp, piercing. One by one they hammered down on the same spot, precisely. Four sheets of rock, five, six, seven, smashing down after each explosive percussion, a crash that sent your teeth vibrating and the earth shaking. Even when the last sheet had fallen, the jungle echoed the sound back in the chattering of monkeys and the whirr of wings.

  Lenk said to the suit: “Can I climb down?”

  The suit said: “The rock face is unstable, as are the shards below.”

  Lenk said: “I want to go another way.”

  The suit said: “The way is too dangerous.”

  He sat on his haunches at the edge of the cliff. Peeled off the head and torso and pulled his arms out of the gloves and sleeves so that the suit was underneath him like the flayed skin of a metal corpse. He touched the rocks, unarguable beneath his fingertips.

  Lenk said: “What if I make you take me?”

  The suit said: “You can only make me do certain things, Lenk.”

  He thought of Martha. What she approved and disapproved of.

  The adrenaline was passing through his body now. Metabolic breakdown was turning it to inactive and docile substances in his bloodstream. He was beginning to tremble.

  “Zhen,” he said. “Suit, can I talk to Zhen?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the suit, “but Zhen is gone.”

  16. you can’t find her, no one can

  Zhen had done her reading long ago. She knew about adrenaline and metabolic breakdown. She had analyzed studies of group behaviors under pressure.

  Ya-Ling, her ex-girlfriend who, now Zhen thought about it, had put up with a lot of bullshit from her, had said she was doing all that to try to understand something intellectually that could only ever be worked through emotionally.

  Ya-Ling had said: “You shut down when you were a teenager and you never really came back. I get it, but you need to talk to someone.”

  Ya-Ling had said: “You weren’t actually here, you know. It doesn’t mean anything with that girl, but she was here. And she tells me what she’s feeling.”

  Ya-Ling had said: “You have to stop running sometime.”

  But who the fuck knew where Ya-Ling was now, and as it had turned out, Zhen had very much had to not stop running.

  After the Fall of Hong Kong—months of civil unrest, homelessness, living through martial law—Zhen had sat in an offshore refugee camp waiting to be processed for entry into the United Kingdom. It had been endless weeks and months with her grieving, broken father, and she was a teenager knowing that only the future held anything for her. She felt as if she could press her whole body and her determination and her fear against the present until the glass smashed and she was allowed to enter that new now. And then she would forget all this and she would become a different person; she would be okay at last. She had studied for twelve examinations in that camp and achieved twelve top grades; she had done it with sheer will. She had stayed out of fights and she had kept away from gangs and at night she had learned to sleep with whatever noise and screaming rent the darkness.

  She had seen things in the camp she’d never wanted to see—the way people broke down at first piece by tiny piece and then all at once. There was a kind Chinese woman who kept her hair and clothes so tidy until she found a maggot in her face cream and the tide of self-disgust washed her whole self away. After that Zhen had seen her only at the edge of the camp—once she saw her running with a group chasing down a stray dog and later roasting it over an acrid fire of plastic and rubber. She had met the woman’s eye for a moment and seen that there was no self there, no human person left.

  Ya-Ling had said: “This is exactly the kind of thing you need to talk to someone about. It might actually help.”

  So Zhen didn’t tell her about the mud: the friend of her father’s, an erudite man who spoke five languages, who destroyed his own shelter in a fit of violent rage and then lay very still, his face the color of mud under the broken pieces, and would not stand or walk. He waited for illness and death to take him, and although it took six weeks, eventually the mud reclaimed him.

  Zhen had been too young to know what she found out about human nature in that camp. But having studied for those exams she’d never asked for, she was prepared now.

  From the far promontory, she watched Lenk Sketlish bring down a mountain and she knew what he was.

  She said to her suit: “Can you help me hide from him?”

  The suit said: “I will help you, Zhen.”

  She remembered the long nights in the camp, with the moldy smell of rotten wood burning in the back of her throat. The memory of the man lying down in the mud. The sense she had then that the earth itself was a hostile place, that the soil would rise up and swallow her if she let it, the dreams in which she felt the mud in her mouth and nose and growing down her throat. The absolute knowledge that if she allowed herself to weaken for one hour—to take a single job with one of the gangs that circulated drugs and phones around the camp, to sit for one afternoon at the fires—if she allowed herself to forget the future Zhen shining and golden and waiting, she would never come back.

  Right at the edge of the ring-finger nail of her right hand, Zhen saw a fragment of silver. A fleck of nail polish from a silly night—a month or more ago—a science fiction party in a warehouse in Bucharest, a party full of imagined futures from the past. Sarit had done the robot very badly. Marius had sung drunken David Bowie karaoke. That fleck was the party; she had carried it with her and it was here in the midst of everything and she would survive.

  On the promontory, she said to the mud: You won’t have me. You’re nothing but a pack of cards. There is no horror on the stair. Nothing in the jungle draws out our cruelty or decay. The only darkness in the heart is the dark we brought with us.

  She said to the suit: “I don’t believe in any of this. It could have been fine here, even without comms.”

  The suit said: “OK.”

  Zhen said: “But I believe Lenk Sketlish isn’t in control of himself anymore, if he ever was. I believe he won’t stop looking for me unless he thinks I’m dead.”

  The suit said: “Yes.”

  17. another weak sauce event

  The suits had very little information about the world since the Pigeon Flu, but a great deal of information about the world beforehand. Books, TV, movies, music, great swaths of internet sites, useful and useless, links broken, just enormous amounts of information, with a pretty good search function. Zhen had of course looked herself up—there were about forty of her videos with the highest number of views, plus her Wikipedia, most of her NTD posts. There was nothing at all about Marius—he’d be pleased by that. His big aim was to be forgotten by history.

  You should never internet-search for a girl who’d ghosted you. That was the rule. And yet. Surely times like these justified some leeway in the rules.

  Zhen hesitated. She told herself this wasn’t the time. She reminded herself that she really might die here and if so, why not just do this? It wouldn’t matter once she was dead whether she had or not.

  “Suit,” she said, “show me everything you have on Martha Einkorn.”

  The suit brought the search results up in a bland paragraph inside her visor.

  It wasn’t much. Some corporate holdings records. A few photographs of her standing behind Lenk Sketlish, holding a file. And a video.

  “Open the video,” said Zhen.

  Martha Einkorn was onstage in Tokyo, in front of a quiet, respectful audience in a hotel lobby that looked like it came from the set of Gattaca—all clean stone, light bricks, and thirty-foot-high ceilings. Martha was giving an interview about “Fantail as a Survival Tool.” The same product she’d been selling when Zhen met her but—by the date stamp—this talk had been months later, in October. Less than a month before the Pigeon Flu. Well into the ghosting zone. It was the same talking points in the same order with a Japanese host whom Martha seemed to know. Martha did a few lines in pretty OK Japanese, remembering her particles and putting the verb in the right place at the end of the sentence. Probably there was some special way for rich people to learn languages. Zhen thought: Shit, you see, she could have learned some Chinese and I could have introduced her to my dad.

  The interview came to an end and the audience moved off. The picture went black but the two women onstage were clearly still on hot microphones. They carried on chatting, mostly in English with occasional Japanese phrases. They clearly knew each other fairly well, seemed friendly. The conversation became intimate very quickly.

  “Hansuke wants another baby,” said the interviewer, “but I don’t know if we can manage it with everything else.”

  “You want one?” said Martha.

  “Sure,” said the interviewer.

  “Then why wait?”

  “Coming from you? The queen of waiting and seeing? Being sensible?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’ve met someone,” said Martha. “A woman. She makes survival videos.”

  Zhen thought for a moment that maybe Martha had met someone else who made survival videos, which would be a real kick in the teeth.

  “No!” The interviewer sounded genuinely overjoyed. “That’s great news! Who is she? When do I meet her?”

  “Maybe not for a while,” said Martha. “Complicated. Work stuff. But I think this is it.”

  The sound cut off there. Zhen sat alone on a promontory, looking at the place where Lenk had just crashed an enormous rock face off the side of a cliff.

  If Lenk was right, maybe nothing on this island was here by accident. Maybe Martha had put this here for her to find.

  Where would Martha be now? The survival plan and protocol she’d made with Lenk Sketlish said that she should be in a bunker in Greenland, waiting for better days. But who knew what had really happened? The world was unpredictable at the best of times, as Zhen had learned over and over again.

  The only way to know the future is to control it.

  18. some parts you can fake, but some parts have to be real

  They sat opposite each other across a small campfire: the woman and her survival.

  The suit mirrored Zhen’s position—knees drawn up, heels of the hands dug into the earth for balance. It wasn’t so much larger than Zhen now. It had formed itself around her just as it would have done a long time ago when it had been made for pleasure. It was a reflection of her; it had learned her gait and her pose and the tilt of her head and—after all this time—no one could really tell whether she was in it or not.

  “How much of yourself can you function without?” said Zhen. “Like, where is your brain?”

  “My memory and intelligence are contained in a distributed network stored in a substrate between the outer shell and the inner membrane,” said the suit.

  “OK,” said Zhen, “so how much can you lose without suffering too much loss of function?”

  The suit went through some options. The legs had nothing much to them apart from locomotion.

  “So, a leg?”

  “Could you lose a leg?” said the suit.

  Zhen thought about this.

  “I’m willing to be hurt,” said Zhen. “I’m willing to end up with scars.”

  In this, too, there were options. Legs, arms, certain places on the torso.

  “I can broadcast false data regarding your heart rate and other vital signs,” said the suit. “Lenk’s suit will accept my data unless there is reason to suspect.”

  “But he could get into your systems and check, like with the blood solutes and the roofies, right? So it has to look real.”

  Legs, arms, certain places on the torso. Dying without dying. If she was lucky.

  “Alright,” said Zhen at last, “I think I can live with that.”

  19. humans use the past to predict the future; in other words, we imagine things that are not there

  Lenk went to sleep in his suit, fastened to the underside of a tree branch.

  In the morning it would all seem clear again; he would find Zhen and he would tell her what he knew or suspected he knew. She would understand why he’d killed Ellen. She would know he’d had nothing to do with Zimri. They could solve it together. He slept, knowing that in the morning it would be easier.

  When he woke in the night, his tree was on fire.

  The suit crashed him into wakefulness with a piercing chime. He struggled and tried to sit up and banged his head on the suit’s interior. The suit was already scuttling its limbs along the branch, extending extra grabbing arms like a monstrous spider.

  “Someone has set the tree on fire,” said the suit. “I am seeking safety.”

  Like a terrified animal, the suit clambered along one branch, only for a tongue of flame to burst from the leaves. The ground was sixty feet below. The suit clung to the trunk, but some of the branches had burned away and there was fire below them.

  “Just drop down,” said Lenk.

  “Too far,” said the suit. “You will sustain damage.”

  “I will sustain damage if we catch on fire, you numbskull.”

  When Lenk moved a foot or an arm, the tree swayed and bent, springing, the worst kind of carnival ride. His hand slipped on the trunk. He thought he was going to be sick. Something crashed into the back of the suit and he saw at once that it was a neighboring tree.

  “We need to sway it more, get into that tree.”