It was, of course, trivially easy to ask the drones to find Lenk Sketlish in real time and follow him. In the imaginary jungle, Martha padded forward softly, finding that she was holding her breath as if he were an exotic and dangerous animal, easy to startle and hard to escape. There was no scent to the jungle but there was sound—the birds, screeching, startled from one tree to the next; the thrum and tap of the busy lives in every tree trunk. For many long moments Martha Einkorn was too mesmerized to remember, quite, why she had come here.

  And there he was. Lenk Sketlish, long and less lean than he’d once been. He had developed a mildly rounded belly, the sign of peaceful living and a body taking on a little extra just to be sure. He was wearing the legs of his survival suit like goatskins, the top part bent back with its arms extended to the ground to form a second set of legs behind him for stability. He looked like a strange god, a mechanical centaur, reaching into the tree for a ripe, brown, bruised fruit, turning it in his hand and tasting it.

  Martha smiled to see him. If she could have chosen any end for Enoch, this would have been it. Thinking this, she knew in her heart why she had stayed away for so long. She had been afraid that she might have seen Enoch’s fate here—the smoke, the ash, the burning, falling and rising from and into the sky. But Lenk was happy. Healthy and free, like any creature released into the wild after a long confinement.

  She followed him through his paradise. It was the season for certain kinds of nuts and he’d tied large oilcloths between the trees, the more easily to gather them as they fell—chasing off the squirrels and rodents who were after his harvest. He looked younger as he worked, in a sense younger even than when she’d met him. There are some of us, she thought, who always wanted and needed to be Fox; people who sought the new without pause, who could only be satisfied with a life of constant movement. Do we drive relentlessly toward the future because we don’t wander the world anymore? She wanted to say this to him, to ask: “Do you know how happy you are and how well this suits you?” And so she was startled when he said, suddenly: “Yes.”

  “Yes,” said Lenk Sketlish. “Yes, a good harvest. Not bad at all. What do you think?”

  And the suit, the second head dangling close to the ground, said: “Pretty good, sport, get those stored away nicely.”

  Lenk said: “How many people do you think we could feed from the harvest this year?”

  The suit said: “From what you’ve gathered? Thirty or forty people easily.”

  “If they come this winter then, there’ll be plenty to feed them?”

  “Oh yes,” said the suit. “If they come this winter, they’ll eat very well.”

  Lenk nodded and Martha wanted to say: “Who do you think is coming?”

  But she knew who he thought was coming. There had been an apocalypse and he was prepared to wait. In his belief, someone would be coming at some point. People would arrive here and he would be able to show them his stores and they would tell him that he was brave and brilliant. That was what he’d been waiting for all his life.

  She followed him farther. Down to the south and the east, following the line of the river. He had laid strands of rippled vine-rope in the shallows, and the dark skeins were pocked with a kind of white-shelled clam, orange flesh just visible within. He hauled up some of the ropes and gathered only as many as he needed—fifteen, enough for supper—and then turned to walk back to his autumn camp through the dark woods.

  Martha walked alongside him, falling into step with his easy loping pace.

  She said, aloud: “You are good at this. You always knew you would be.”

  Lenk looked to his right, and for a moment she felt he was bashful, turning from the compliment. And then he took a step to the right and vanished.

  Martha stopped still. The jungle continued to move around her, green and gold, russet and auburn. The birds clattered from tree to tree. The nuts fell like bright raindrops. No Lenk.

  “Reload,” she said. “Fantail, reload the simulation.”

  The world flickered around her and returned. No Lenk.

  “Fantail,” she said, “where is Lenk Sketlish?”

  “Lenk Sketlish is not on the map,” said the assistant in warm, friendly female tones.

  “He was just on the map a moment ago,” said Martha. “Where is Lenk Sketlish?”

  “I don’t have that information. I’m sorry.”

  He’d turned to the right. He’d walked a pace to the right. Martha turned to the right. She walked a pace to the right. There was a tiny ripple in the world. The trees continued to sway in the gentle wind above. A spider processed steadily up the corrugated bark.

  “Fantail,” said Martha, “which version of Admiral Huntsy Island am I in?”

  “You are viewing the public archive of Admiral Huntsy last updated three days, six hours, and twenty-two minutes ago.”

  “But a moment ago I was in the secure version of Admiral Huntsy Island.”

  Fantail did not understand her. She had to flip her visor up and manually force a reload. Still nothing. The pace to the left took her back into the secure version. The pace to the right took her into the publicly available version of the island.

  Suddenly, a way along the path in front of her, Lenk Sketlish reappeared. He had taken a short detour into the woods to her right and vanished into an invisible section of the island. Now he was back, whistling as he horse-strolled toward his camp with a sack full of ripe nuts clacking on his shoulder.

  With half an hour of careful work, Martha could see quite clearly which portion of the island had been excised from view. She wouldn’t have noticed it if Lenk hadn’t vanished in that way—it had all been quite seamlessly done. If she’d just been wandering, if he’d taken a different path, she would have walked from the public to the secure versions of the island without ever seeing the joins. But now she looked for it, there it was. A one-hundred-square-mile section in the south of the island—about eight miles wide, about twelve miles long—was not updating in real time like the rest of the island. There was the carefully doctored weekly drone footage, of course, set like the rest of the island to scour any hint of human habitation. So the drones were still humming through that section in drowsy masses, recording.

  Martha spoke to the Fantail systems in all the ways she understood. She gave it her keys and codes—the passphrases that unlocked the rest of the island, that let her follow Lenk Sketlish. Fantail accepted the passcodes but did not unlock. She was not a technological expert but she ran the diagnostic functions she understood. Nothing. She chewed her lower lip.

  An hour later in her garden at home, the warblers and the red-winged blackbirds thronged to her bird feeder, each as recognizable as if they had been badged by a branding expert. Martha watched their attentive heads tipping to one side and then another. Looking for the neighborhood cat and for the bright berries in the bush.

  She thought: I have been taken in by the world of symbols. I have mistaken the map for the territory. Me of all people.

  She thought for a while, and then she called Badger.

  “There’s a part of the island that’s not responding properly to my passcodes,” she said. “Do you have any idea what’s going on there?”

  Badger said: “Oh.” And then stopped. Badger was not good with lying.

  Martha said: “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  Badger said: “Listen, I told them at the time that if you asked me directly, I would tell you the truth, OK? So are you asking me directly?”

  Martha said: “I think I am.”

  Badger said: “OK then.”

  4. this was not supposed to happen

  Just after the Tech Plane disappeared, Albert Dabrowski’s phone had rung at 5 a.m. Someone had activated AUGR.

  This was not supposed to happen. He was deep in sleep, had to wring the dreams out of himself like the last drops from a twisted towel. He rolled over in the big bed where Mike was always—these days—not. He reached for his phone, looked at the alert, and said aloud: “Shit.”

  It was a difficult time. Albert had gotten to his yacht and then his beach house in Hawaii without drawing attention to himself. Even with all the technology money could buy, it hadn’t been easy. The plane had gone down a little over seventy-two hours earlier and the news had inevitably reached the press. The windows of silence had expired; Zimri’s assistant and Lenk’s ex-wives and Ellen’s administrative team had been expecting to hear from them. Martha in particular was now supposed to be working to stabilize Fantail at the same time that she was working with rescue coordinators. Selah was playing the terrified, desperate wife—at the same time working through several layers of shell companies to buy up the plummeting stock of Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar. Someone needed to babysit the group on the island, make sure they were in no immediate danger, ensure that the technology wasn’t glitching. That, obviously, was Badger to an extent and in particular Albert, who was the only one under very little scrutiny right now.

  The babysitting had been, thus far, mostly administering some sleeping drugs through the suits, making the machines sound comforting and human, checking that the story the suits were selling them was convincing and seamless. It had gone, roughly, according to plan.

  three billionaires on a remote island convinced that the apocalypse had happened

  three billionaires not in imminent danger, willingly accepting drugs to help them sleep and recover, becoming uncertain about how many days had passed

  three billionaires not currently highly motivated to try to contact the outside world or regain access to it

  world looking for the three billionaires in exactly the wrong place

  Check, check, check, and check.

  And now this. An alert on Albert’s phone saying that an AUGR instance had been activated in… he had to search the internet to find out where Prince Rupert was. Middle of ass-end of nowhere, western coast of Canada. Must be a glitch. Who the hell in the ass-end of nowhere had a copy of the most expensive and secret software currently in existence? Place meant nothing. Send a holding message via AUGR: stand by.

  He checked the permissions. The names and idents passed by the phone to the software and the software to him. This AUGR instance had been reported destroyed by an external team in Bucharest. And here it was being activated again by… Lai Zhen. The woman Martha had been seeing.

  “Oh fuck,” Albert said. “Oh fuck fuck fuck.”

  Badger, when Albert contacted them, agreed.

  “We can’t call Martha with this,” they said.

  “Martha gave it to her.”

  “We know Martha gave it to her, Albert. Lai Zhen is the woman from the footage by the air conditioner. The proof it works. I’ve met her, she’s cool actually. She’s just not supposed to still have it.”

  “Maybe she stole it back without Martha knowing,” said Albert.

  “Maybe Martha let her reactivate it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “I agree with that assessment,” said Badger.

  “You seriously think Martha could have done this on purpose?”

  “Not this this. Maybe she was happy for her to have the protection.”

  “Fuck.”

  Albert and Badger called Selah.

  Selah said: “Fuck. Piss, toss, arse. Martha fell in love with her.”

  “So in love with her that she told her about the plan?” said Badger.

  “She wouldn’t. There is no way she told a journalist about the plan,” said Selah.

  “Love is the mind killer,” said Albert. “Especially early on. I told Mike a bunch of things no one else knew.”

  “What does AUGR think is happening?” said Selah.

  “AUGR only knows what we tell it,” said Badger. “It thinks the world is ending and she’s part of the program. It wants to evacuate her.”

  “So that’s what we’re going to have to do,” said Selah. “She’s part of the AUGR protocol just like I am, just like you are, Badger. She’s going to get evacuated just like we were, right?”

  “But… there isn’t an AUGR protocol.”

  In the middle of this conversation, Albert’s phone pinged. Martha had given him her log-ins to her personal Fantail for the duration of these events—just to help with managing the PR side, to deal with things she’d have no time for. There, on Martha’s account, was a message from Lai Zhen.

  Is this real? I’ve had an AUGR activation.

  “What the fuck do I do with this?” said Albert.

  “We have to use it,” said Selah. “Albert, you’re the only one no one’s watching. You need to get her out of there somehow. Make her think she’s really being evacuated by the program if you have to. This could fuck everything.”

  “Christ, what, like, send her to the island?”

  “Maybe that’s OK,” said Badger. “Maybe it makes it look, like, more real?”

  Albert thought: I have brought this on myself. And actually, fuck you, Martha, you’ve brought this on yourself too. This is what happens when someone gets pulled back into life. Life is fucking messy.

  It’s real, he sent back from Martha’s account. I didn’t know it’d ping you.

  He told Badger and Selah he’d handle it. That he had an idea of what to do. He called the team who looked after the Medlar jet in Honolulu. He needed to leave, immediately.

  5. an extended sabbatical

  At moments like this, Martha tended to become outwardly quite calm. There would be time for screaming later. Right now, there was a bear in the forest.

  “So you’re saying,” she said, “that you sent Zhen to the island?”

  “We’ve kept her safe,” said Badger. “We looked after her. When she needed medicine we did an overnight drop of antibiotics and then sent her to get it as if it was a buried cache of supplies. Literally, it was a UTI, OK, and we fixed it.”

  “You sent her to the island, and you kept it secret from me for three years?”

  Martha had gone to look for Zhen after the Tech Plane Tragedy had died down—of course she had. But more than a year had gone past, and Zhen’s friend Marius had announced via her sites that she was taking “an extended sabbatical” from her online business. Which had made Martha sad in an iron, cold way that she was used to. This was of course what happened. People moved on if you left them long enough. Probably she’d found a new girlfriend. She’d sent Zhen a couple of tentative messages and then left it. Certain kinds of happiness weren’t going to be part of Martha’s life, and while she wasn’t exactly reconciled to it, she was at least used to it. Her feelings now she knew that Zhen hadn’t—in fact—ghosted her right back were complex. A rich text.

  Selah Nommik was opening an Anvil FutureSafe zone on the French, Swiss, and Italian border, joining up several smaller national parks and forming part of the great wildlife travel corridor they were constructing piece by piece across Europe. She was in an eco lodge in Vanoise, the pines sharp swords against the sky behind her.

  “Mate,” said Selah, “she was your Achilles’ heel. You fell in love with her. If you’d known we’d sent her there, you would have closed the whole thing down. We couldn’t risk it.”

  “Were you… planning to let me know? At some point?”

  Selah smiled her wide, disarming smile.

  “We wanted to come up with a plausible exit strategy for her. You know. Give it a few years and then make it seem like she’d come up with a way to get off the island herself.”

  “With the story of what she’d seen there? Come on.”

  “We hadn’t figured it out yet. Seriously, we were actively working on it.”

  Albert Dabrowski was at home when Martha Einkorn banged on his back door and then let herself in, as she’d done all those years ago to haul him back into the world.

  He said: “I’ve heard.”

  “You knew. You fucking knew and you didn’t tell me.”

  Albert said: “This whole situation is fucked up and it’s a fucked-up way to deal with it and I’m sorry but she was just one person.”

  This was what they’d said to themselves when they started. In terms of saving the whole planet, what is the smallest number of people you’d need to get rid of to move the needle? What is the smallest number of lies? Could you take an eraser and just remove three or four people and that would fix everything? It had seemed almost the same thing when they’d talked about it then—three people or four people.

  They had managed to find another CrashJacket, and to piece together another survival suit. Not as perfect as the others—some of the molding was still visible inside from the suit’s previous purpose. They had drugged her and put her into the safest technology they had and dropped her over the island.

  “You know that wasn’t OK, though, right?” said Martha.

  “Yes,” said Albert, “but the world was dying and we didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Let me see her.”

  6. whether there might be one good man in sodom

  In the virtual island, Martha watched Zhen. The world had been dying and they’d saved it and the cost was—what—a few people living in relative luxury in an island paradise? If there had been another fast way to do it, someone else would have found it. Sometimes it really is down to you, a branch, and your fast reflexes.

  Zhen seemed, as far as one could tell, happy enough. As happy as a person could be when they thought the world had ended—which in Zhen’s case was a great deal less happy than in Lenk’s. Zhen muttered to herself as she wandered from place to place. She talked to the suit, and sometimes the suit had been Selah or Badger or Albert talking back to her. So, almost a person. Zhen seemed lonely—that was the truth.