On the island, Zhen banked her fire in the fumeless hearth and roasted a crispy-skinned fish over the red flickering logs. She evidently found a particular kind of grub that lived in the bark of a yellow-leafed tree especially delicious. Martha watched, fascinated, as Zhen popped several grubs out of their hardened, heat-mottled pink membranes and swallowed them. Then Martha felt dirty and turned it off. She was never going to learn what she wanted to know this way.

  Martha listened again to the DaySave of her first meeting with Zhen. To their conversations, to the moment when Zhen said: “I’m so sorry I’m late, it was just… it was just unavoidable.” To herself saying: “I guess you’re going to have to find some way to make it up to me.” How had she dared to talk like that? She’d never been that way, before or since. She wondered whether Zhen had ever listened to it again.

  The question is how much one is prepared to tolerate. The question is how many unintended casualties are too many. The question is whether there might be one good man in Sodom.

  7. just remember that you can

  There was a day when Zhen woke before dawn. The suit, sensing the change in her breath and movement, turned on illuminated panels in the faceplate showing temperature, weather predictions, wind speed, miles walked yesterday. She muttered the command words that turned the visor clear again. She looked out through her own reflection at the dark jungle.

  The moon was so bright that it cast crisp shadows of the canopy overhead onto the jungle floor. The watery smear of the Milky Way was clearly visible. If she were to turn her headlamps on, she’d see a thousand glittering eyes of insects. But she didn’t turn them on. In the distance she heard the whoops and crashes of monkeys. Sometimes when she slept fastened to a branch, those monkeys ran straight over her, taking her prone form for another outgrowth of the jungle.

  In a way, she was. She had just taken the very long way around. She’d never thought she’d feel safe in this jungle. But the jungle was knowable. It was trustworthy in a way that Lenk, Ellen, and Zimri never were. There had been a great storm, but the storm had passed.

  In the three years since Lenk walked away from her, she had learned the affordances of her empire. She had come to recognize the birds that migrate in their season and the fish that rise to shore in their time. She’d noticed that year by year there were more birds and more fish. The suit confirmed that she was right. The air was cleaner. Less plastic and metal debris washing up on the beach. So something had gone well.

  The suit had guided her to stick to the south and east of the island.

  “So I can avoid the others?” Zhen had asked.

  “This part of the island is best,” it had said. “The fishing is best here. There are good places to hunt and to sleep.”

  Sometimes on the horizon she noted something that might have been the dark smoke of a hastily concealed cook fire, before the fume convertor on the StowtBox stove kicked in. Once on a very still day she thought she heard the sound of a musical instrument—something with plucked strings—from a distant shore. But that would be at least twenty-five miles away. It seemed unlikely.

  Still, she took inspiration and asked the suit to help her construct a kind of guitar from carefully sawed and planed wood, strings made from the intestine of one of the largest animals on the island, a kind of antelope. The whole project, from hunting the antelope to constructing a kiln to dry the wood, to varnishing the final instrument, took the best part of a year.

  She had come to know these hundred or so square miles well and yet there was still so much to learn. She had a summer home and a winter home, a spring hunting ground and an autumn foraging place. From her vantage point she could span with her eyes the forests and the rivers, the reddened cliffs and the speckled shore; a place she had made hers by knowing it and caring for it. There was time for everything, but there was always more that could be done.

  It came to her that she could live here for the rest of her natural life if she had to. Eating roots and tubers and small roasted mammals. She could learn and practice new physical skills; she could become a climber, a spear fisher. She could study languages and crafting skills—the suit had courses for every conceivable self-improvement project. She could delve into astronomy, zoology, botany, and earth sciences. Might even make some discoveries, here in this biodiverse wild. The suit had all the music, art, literature, performance she could ever want. It had downloaded tens of millions of pages from key internet sites. Wikipedia. Various how-to sites. History and debate. Even gossip and argument. All the nonsense of her previous life.

  Zhen had read—by this time—all of Name The Day. She’d found OneCorn’s posts. It hadn’t been a hard code to crack who OneCorn was, and she understood why those posts were there. She discussed the ideas of Fox and Rabbit with the suit several times—she’d even instructed it to hive off a separate part of its artificial conversation program to debate these ideas with her.

  This morning, she thought it through all over again. The point of civilization, the idea of cities, the reason for agriculture. All of this. Was there a point in knowing that we used to be Fox, given that now—apart from some small isolated groups, the Taiga dwellers, the North Sentinel Islanders, some people in Nunatsiavut—everyone was Rabbit? Was looking back just always a bad idea, like it was for Edo and for Orpheus? What was the point of berating ourselves for not being hunter-gatherers anymore? For liking symbolic behaviors like music and drawing and movies and games?

  In the stillness of the early dawn, Zhen lifted the visor. There were no more bright green names tracking the caterpillars and the ants and the budding flowers and the slime mold. The world was there. As it is.

  And in that moment there was no need for words. There were no more names for anything. She was there as you are there.

  Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is.

  It is not possible to express this with symbols. All that the symbols can ever be is a flag in the sand pointing at where to dig. You have found the treasure. It is the world as it is.

  Every part of the world pressed in on Zhen as present and as sure as the future had once seemed to her. The sight of crawling things and flying creatures, the sweet scents and the sour ones, the faint taste of cherries on her tongue, the atonal harmonies of the jungle screeches and howls, the intense and beautiful sensation of the suit’s interior softness on her skin, too strong and too real and too present for words.

  All the words went away.

  But the sense that Zhen had in that moment of the whole world around her without names cannot be named. When you try to give it a word, when she thought “flag” and “sand,” she fell out of the world and back into symbols. There is no other way. The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is this brain that divides and sorts and names the world. You should not expect to escape it very often. Just remember that you can.

  Lai Zhen had once made a video about surviving for years in the deep woods and 8.2 million people had watched it. She had said:

  prepare yourself for uncomfortable living

  make sure you have a good tent

  trap and hunt with a crossbow

  people are going to get desperate

  try to appreciate the natural world around you

  But the Lai Zhen who had done those things was gone now.

  She turned a series of visor settings off one by one. She didn’t need to see the names of the creatures and plants anymore. She knew which stems were good to eat and which were bitter, which low leaves signaled a sweet tuber beneath the earth, which grubs would cook well over a fire to a nutty crunch. She knew the birds and the insects, the soft and the hard rocks, the trees whose wood was good to burn and the trees whose wood was good to build. She’d practiced how to hunt and set traps and build a smokery, how to take the lives of a few slower, older animals, in the way that a fox keeps the rabbits fast and clever. She had made fragrant beeswax candles and chalky fired earthenware pots. She knew which muds would bake to a hard but brittle pottery and which would be thick but sturdy. She remembered as another person the girl who had feared that the mud would swallow her whole.

  The suit had taught her as a parent might have taught a child long ago, not to be here as an emergency in case of a disaster, not a place to retreat to out of fear, but as her home. The world as her home, in the way our ancestors were at home in the world once, long ago. It had only taken a global apocalypse, an array of technology, and three years of her life.

  That night she stood on the promontory and watched the sunset across the jungle. Red-and-gold mackerel clouds over the tree canopy, then dim embers in the sky and then utter dark. The wordless world was always there now. She had only to dip into it and quench her thirst.

  There was no future now; time did not point as an arrow, it was a spiral, around the seasons again and again until one day her bones would sink into the earth and her flesh would go to start some other life again. Well. Good.

  8. one last right thing

  In the predawn light, a polymer skiff with a flexible solar sail skimmed the water heading toward Admiral Huntsy Island.

  No boats were permitted and no aircraft flew overhead, but certain beads had been placed into certain matchboxes and there was a short window in which the skiff’s pilot could cross the barrier zone unseen.

  The waters were as clear as the sky, a lucent blue, lit from the inside, dazzling and alive. The great underwater trees grew up toward the light, and between their branches, shoals of tiny silver fish glanced this way and that, seeking and being sought. Neither balanced nor out of balance but constantly in motion toward growth or oblivion.

  The polymer craft beached on the golden shore and the pilot deployed its three anchor-spars deep into the sands. They burrowed through the silt and splayed their grabbing hooks out deep underneath her feet with a series of satisfying low thunks.

  If the pilot were found here, alarms would activate at nearby drone stations. Within eight minutes she would be surrounded by armed flying battle pods with the authority to incapacitate her using electric stunning and remove her bodily from the island. And that would be nothing compared with the almighty fuckup that would happen if Lenk Sketlish spotted her here. However. All of the countermeasures were held at bay for now, for her to try to do one last right thing.

  Martha sat on the sand, her heels dug into the silken grains, to watch the sun come up. All the risk meant nothing if she did not risk this, at the last.

  9. it felt like danger but she knew it wouldn’t kill her

  “Someone’s waiting at the beach,” said the suit.

  “Is it Lenk?” said Zhen. “Has he found me?”

  “No,” said the suit. “Listen, I can’t tell you what to do. But I think you should go down to the beach and see who it is.”

  Zhen remembered the feeling she used to have all the time that there were so many threats in the world and that she would never escape from all of them. That when she ran from the Enochite in the Seasons Time Mall she had had a sense of familiarity and relief, that at last the world matched what she had always expected.

  She thought of running, hiding, waiting, spying, attacking. And she thought: No. This world is my home now. And she walked down to the beach.

  There was a woman sitting looking at the tide, the stranded colors dark blue and bright blue, inky wash layered over shade. The woman was heavyset, her hair just touching her shoulders and—it had been so long since Zhen had seen Martha that she’d forgotten this feeling, a seemingly inexhaustible source of excitement, even after everything. Even with it all, her stupid fucking heart pounded at seeing Martha.

  Zhen looked at Martha and Martha looked at Zhen. They were older now, and each of them had learned more than she’d imagined three years before. Zhen’s skin was overwhelmed by the possibilities of human touch, and yet it seemed to her that the chasm between her and the touch of another person was too vast ever to be breached again.

  There is a space between one human and another that we long constantly to close. That is what makes our decisions different from the decisions of the matchboxes and beads. We want to connect one to another; we cannot help ourselves. We cannot live all the days of our lives not trusting in another person. We must leap even if we fall. We must.

  Martha said: “It’s really good to see you.”

  Zhen said: “Yeah.”

  Martha said: “I have some things I need to tell you.”

  And Zhen said: “No fucking shit.”

  But still, she listened.

  In that last place on Earth, Martha showed Zhen evidence. What had happened to the world and what she had done. She had a labeled dossier—hard copy in a waterproof file and electronic—the documentation of the entire thing from beginning to end. She took Zhen’s hand in hers and the touch was like a completed circuit joining Zhen again to the human race. That single touch was so overwhelming it was painful.

  Martha showed Zhen the satellite phone and internet connection wired into the skiff. She flipped open a panel on Zhen’s survival suit and connected it to the great world of humans talking. Images flooded through the visor faster than thought. The world still out there, the world the same, the world changed.

  Zhen watched and listened until the sun was high in the sky.

  Then she said: “You did it, then?”

  Martha said: “We did accomplish something. Yes.”

  “But you knew I was here?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Funny,” said Zhen, “because I knew the world hadn’t ended.”

  And she pushed Martha into the sea.

  The ocean was as cold as shadow, and Martha gasped and her head went under and came up. The salt stung her eyes and a cut on the webbing between her finger and thumb. Her hair was thick and stiff with salt, and her body was carried by the water, and as she tried to stand, a wave knocked her down as cold as the first, or colder. She thought suddenly of amniotic fluid and the salt-sweet taste of a woman and of her mother knocked down by a Frito-Lay truck and of what it meant to turn into salt. She tried to stand again and the water knocked her down again and she tried again and went down again. She started to laugh because it felt like danger but she knew it wouldn’t kill her, and that was the funniest thing in the world, as it was funny that to escape from the hurtling waves, she crawled like a baby from the salt toward the sand. And perhaps her laughing was also crying because the taste of salt-sweet water is the first to pass through any of our mouths.

  “What do you mean,” she said, “you fucking knew?”

  10. it’ll all have to be incredibly real

  The streets were shiny and still when Zhen had left the hotel in the black limo. They moved swiftly through the city, north and east, out, open country. An hour outside the city on a quiet road, the car stopped. The screen descended.

  “The protocol is that we wait here,” said the driver. He pulled down his mask. “And we have some things to discuss.”

  The driver was Albert Dabrowski.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m going to level with you. You’ve gotten involved in some very big stuff here. Criminal, financial, kind of a heist situation. You were never supposed to be here. But I’ve been thinking about it and we could use you. If you’re in.”

  He’d told her the plan from the start. How they’d used the artificial prophet AUGR to get the three billionaires onto the plane. How the plane was somewhere no one would ever look for it. And now they were going to try to do something actually decent with those companies.

  “Look, we have a problem now,” said Albert. “We think they have enough communications shit there to actually get in contact with the outside world. Selah figured it out the other night. Using the suits as an energy source. It’d take them a while, but they could do it.”

  “So you want me to go to this island, smash the communications equipment?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “And then…”

  Albert winced and breathed in through his teeth.

  “And then I guess you’ll need to wait there… for a while?”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Look, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to get you off the island and that’s the truth of it. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, how long it’s going to take the companies to stabilize, the world.”

  “Three months?”

  Albert turned his hand palm up and moved it briskly upward a couple of times—the “higher” gesture.

  “Six months?”

  Wincing face. The same gesture again.

  They’d discussed where and how Zhen could find all the technology on the island the billionaires might use for communication. They’d talked about how—if it became necessary—Zhen could act deliberately to split them up, hide them from each other, confuse them. In the end very little of that had been necessary. Zimri Nommik, it turned out, never traveled anywhere without a Pringles can full of his own drone swarm, which he used to carry him away from the others. Ellen Bywater came up with the idea for herself of letting Lenk think he’d destroyed her inside a suit, which—after all the explosions—got up and walked off, putting its own limbs back on. But that was in the future. When Zhen and Albert spoke, they thought these people might need some encouragement to self-destruct.

  “Aren’t you worried I’ll go to the police with all this?” Zhen asked Albert.

  “Are you kidding? You’ve got nothing except a phone you might have rigged up yourself and about fifteen million dollars’ worth of criminal damage to Zimri’s bunker, by the way. If you go to the police, you’ll sound like a lunatic and we’ll prosecute you. But anyway you can’t go to the police. You can’t go anywhere. You’re in my car in the middle of the ass-end of nowhere and your options are: do this, or do a year in a safe house somewhere until we know it’s OK to let you out.”