“I expect I can think of some way to… make this worth your time.” Martha gave a small, slow smile. Zhen licked her bottom lip. OK.

  Even going through the approved questions, something was happening between them onstage. Zhen tried a little joke and Martha added to it, expanded upon it. Martha leaned forward in her chair. Zhen moved a little closer. She could smell Martha’s perfume—something musky; it smelled of sex. If they hadn’t been onstage, Zhen might have thought they were on a date. Martha’s voice—clear, low, mellifluous—was almost hypnotic. Zhen was listening to her speak but thinking constantly of how it would be to undo her jumpsuit, to touch that dimpled skin, to put her mouth to that soft neck and trace a line with her lips down to her breasts.

  “So,” Zhen asked directly from the prompter, “I think you have examples of how Fantail has helped people during weather emergencies?”

  “Sure,” said Martha. “The great benefit of Fantail is: a lot of people have Fantail.”

  Zhen laughed. A bit too hard, she thought. A bit too long.

  “That’s a great point,” said Zhen, thinking anything, anything to keep this rapport building.

  “So during the hurricane season in Haiti, we brought in emergency cell towers on drones, giving instant free access to Fantail. People used it to find each other, to tell people where to find fresh drinking water and safe buildings above the flood line.”

  “Amazing,” said Zhen, knowing in the back of her mind that someone in the small audience would already be posting about how fucking dark it was that they’d enabled communication but only through their own platform, but it didn’t matter; no one would ever see this interview. “You’re really trying to make a difference.”

  “We are, actually. We have a responsibility to use what we have to try to help. You know”—Martha leaned forward—“that series you made from Niger about water scarcity and violence, the gangs taking over? FantailSharing technologies would really make sense as an intervention there.”

  “You’ve seen my stuff from Niger?”

  “It’s brilliant reporting. I bet everyone in this audience has watched it.”

  Heat rose in Zhen’s cheeks. This was probably her least-watched series; it had been critically well received but just didn’t do the numbers. Her audience wanted an exciting apocalypse and information about how they, in particular, would survive it and not the downer reality of human beings dying of thirst only three hundred miles from a catastrophic flood.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “You made it real for me in a way I’d never seen before. You were in the Fall of Hong Kong, right? You know what it’s like to be there for real. It shows.”

  There was a flashing in the corner of Zhen’s eye. The prompter wanted her to move on to the next real question. Fine.

  “And how can Fantail technology help?”

  Martha said: “A million ways. I grew up on the land, and the kind of emergency communications Fantail is rolling out now would have made a huge difference to me when I was living on fifteen thousand green acres in Oregon.”

  Zhen startled out of her sexual reverie. Fifteen thousand green acres. That precise phrasing. Zhen had a memory for the apocalypse and its related plans and aficionados.

  “Just a second,” said Zhen. “Did you…” She looked at the audience. Several of them had already wandered off to listen to the panel across the hall chaired by a young Black woman with bright pink hair and a miniature robot on her palm. “I’m just thinking. A property that large. Oregon. I have to ask. Did you grow up an Enochite?”

  This was not on the list of prescribed questions. But it wasn’t on the list of forbidden questions.

  Martha Einkorn blinked. Stumbled. Composed herself. They had both been lulled by the hum of sex between them, drowsy like bees in smoke. Zhen had asked a question she shouldn’t have asked and Martha answered the question she shouldn’t have answered.

  “Yes,” said Martha Einkorn. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of there. It’s a matter of public record. I was only a child then. My father was Enoch.”

  From the bored spectators there was a sudden fascinated buzz. Zhen guessed maybe a third of them might have heard of the Enochites. They were famous among fanatical survivalists, gun enthusiasts, and religious extremists, a cautionary tale among people who were obsessively paranoid about government overreach. Not the kind of apocalypse amateur who would come to a weak sauce event like “Fantail as a Survival Tool.” But Zhen saw lips mouthing subvocalizations to search engines embedded in their clothing, touching their smart torcs. Connecting to the great communal brain.

  “Wow,” said Zhen. “So what was that like?”

  Martha was silent. Zhen let it sit. This is one of the tricks of interviewing. Don’t fill the silence.

  “Oh,” Martha said at last, “the Enochites weren’t everything you hear. I learned some good values there. If you haven’t heard of them, we were a survivalist group raising children in Oregon and waiting for the end of the Babble. The Babble being this world.” She gestured around the hotel concourse, the signs and lists of workshops and panels for the day, the coffee and pretzel stands, the tangles of people carrying tote bags branded with ShoutRadioFlare and Foxhole Emergency Ammo. “The Babble is the complicated place full of signs where we all live. Enoch believed it would and should come to an end.”

  “And that was your dad.”

  “Look, we kids learned a lot of great skills. Hunting, fishing, setting traps, growing and gathering our own food, sleeping outdoors. I sometimes say I grew up about as close to a hunter-gatherer as anybody can in the US. Well, outside of the First Nations and Native communities we did all that genocide on, of course.”

  On smart torcs and visor wedges, thinscreens and wrist displays, almost everyone in the audience was internet searching—presumably for Enochites. At this whole event now, Zhen was the person who knew the least about Enochites. She dredged her memory. The Enochites were a divisive subject among survivalists, almost a myth. They had been—for a few years in the mid-2020s—a big deal. A new Judaism-based Genesis-inflected American religion that flared up and died away rapidly. Their leader, Enoch, had big ideas about the organization of the world, although Zhen couldn’t now precisely remember any of them. They’d lived on an enormous rural compound in Oregon, and Enoch had been unusual in the right wing at that time for accepting the reality of climate change, for interpreting it as a sign of God’s will. He believed that God would use the weather, like in the flood, to separate the righteous from the sinners. There was a sub-board dedicated to them on Name The Day, but Zhen had never looked at it; they were basically gone now. At the end… there had been a tragedy, something about a fire, and then there had been financial stuff and… wait.

  “New York City, the subway,” said Zhen, something bubbling up from the back of her mind. “Didn’t Enoch go mental on the subway? Didn’t he threaten people and steal their wallets?”

  Martha Einkorn sat back in her chair.

  “Is that how people remember that now? Jesus.”

  She passed a hand over her face.

  “He didn’t steal wallets. He had a vision, OK? Enoch—he was born Ralph Zimmerman. My dad. He had a vision on a subway train. People thought they were using money, but the money was using them. He grabbed people’s wallets and pocketbooks and stamped on them. To save people.”

  “He sounds frightening and unpredictable,” said Zhen.

  Martha shook her head. “No one follows anyone if they’re not right about something.”

  “So what was your dad right about?”

  Martha chewed her lip. There was the air of a date about this still, the permission to ask forbidden questions and the deliberate creation of intimacy. Zhen had the feeling Martha was calculating something.

  “OK. Enoch used to say, ‘The city is a marked environment.’ Like a marked deck of cards. Fixed so we can read it easily. Filled with symbols. Paving slabs are for walking on—blacktop is for cars.” She pointed around the hall to the cup sign over the café, the signs for the restrooms. “Symbols for food, drink, empty your bladder. And look, the real world’s not like that. The world doesn’t exist for our convenience; it doesn’t talk in our language. The wilderness doesn’t have symbolic drawings to tell you where to find food or where it’s safe to take a piss. Where you find a sign in the real world, it’s a sign made by the thing itself: deer tracks are made by deer hooves. Do you see? It’s done something weird to us to live in this human-made, human-centric space all the time. It’s made us more selfish, but also more anxious, and more depressed because we think everything’s about us. I think Enoch was right about that.”

  “And yet you still left.”

  “You know, he was right about some things, but he was also angry and sometimes violent and he refused to educate us properly. You can’t do what he did without control and eventually abuse. You can’t hold the whole world at bay with a couple hundred minds. You just can’t. To do what he wanted to do, you’d have to remake the whole world.”

  Several people standing at the edges of the event or sitting in the audience were filming the exchange on their phones or wrist screens. Though Zhen didn’t know it yet, a short clip was already bouncing from account to account on Fantail, on MedlarConnect, on AnvilChat. In the clip, Zhen says: “Didn’t Enoch go mental on the subway?” In the great interconnected human mind, certain connections were being made and certain people were becoming angry, and certain platforms were motivated to drive engagement. But all Zhen knew in that moment was that Martha Einkorn smelled of musk and promise, that she liked her, she wanted to know her better, and something was blooming between them.

  At the end of the event, Martha shook Zhen’s hand and pulled her in for a quick embrace. She muttered: “I get finished at 9 p.m.” When Zhen opened her hand she found she was holding a hotel room key, black with a gilt edge. Zhen felt the key with her thumb: it felt like a kiss, it felt like falling, it felt like an expert finger parting her labia.

  You’re done for now, thought Zhen as she walked from the event in a sexual daze. You’re absolutely done for.

  5. a soft, glittering mound of crystals

  AUGR said: “It looks like you might be in trouble, Lai Zhen. Would you like help? Yes/No.”

  Zhen thought for a fraction of a second and then pressed yes.

  The sounds in the tunnel were louder. The slap-drag of the woman pulling herself up the conduit toward Zhen. She thought: No one knows I’m here. And then: It could be months before anyone knows I’m dead. And then: I could die here without ever figuring out what’s going on. And that was the worst of all.

  On the screen on Zhen’s wrist, an image popped up. It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. It was a green line drawing of her—jeans, hoodie, and Survival Expo T-shirt, crouched behind the refrigeration unit. The hardened plastic knife in the sheath at her ankle was highlighted. A moving line of dots led from it to one of the coiled pipes.

  Underneath the image, words scrolled across the screen:

  Cut the pipe here. Work as quickly as possible. Protect your hands with your sleeves. Direct the pipe away from you. When the pipe is severed, point it toward your assailant.

  Zhen wanted to laugh. This was nothing. It couldn’t be anything. Fucking Enochites? Death threats online never turned into anything real—that was a rule. Death threats were easy these days, they were currency. She’d told the UK police about them and they’d said she should be careful, but there had been nothing specific or credible; any fucker with a laptop and a love of the lulz could issue a death threat. Zhen had gone through them with Marius and he thought at least 90 percent of the threats were “some stupid boy loves to frighten women when his penis sore from too much fap.” But she hadn’t been careful, had she? Her talk at the Seasons Time Mall had been announced in their press release. Shit.

  Zhen looked at the green line drawing on the screen and reviewed her options:

  Do nothing and die.

  Try to attack her with the knife and pretty much definitely die.

  Do what the app told her. And then probably also die.

  They’d be at close range. That was good—a gun had less advantage over a knife at close range. If she cut the pipe, she could still attack the woman with the knife. So try a combination of two and three?

  She fumbled for the short, fat hose, about the width of two of her fingers. Underneath the insulated metal outer sheath, the tube was soft plastic and very cold. She dug the knife into the soft plastic. From the hole, snow began to trickle.

  AUGR started to speak into Zhen’s earpod, which was attached to the helix of her ear. It spoke in the familiar calm tones of system announcements: affectless and mild. It said: “Seasons Time Mall uses a new refrigerant made of paramagnetic salts in a liquid solvent. The refrigerant falling between your fingers now will freeze human muscle and skin on contact and extract moisture from your flesh. Don’t let it touch any part of your body you want to keep.”

  Zhen held the top of the tube at an angle, and after covering her thumb and forefinger with the ribbed sleeve of her hoodie, she pinched it away from her body. Why hadn’t she brought gloves? She had a surgical kit with medical-grade gloves on the dresser next to her bed in the hotel. She’d almost put it into her pack that morning but thought the needles might get picked up by the scanners. Human bloody error, gets you every time.

  She kept sawing at the soft plastic. She was three-quarters of the way through. She pinched the tube tightly, but a small amount of the stuff still trickled out. It wasn’t really snow but a soft mound of crystals—large like snowflakes but harder, more brilliant, glittering. The stuff flowed like slushy water, but it wasn’t wet. It was very, very dry.

  AUGR spoke in her ear again: “Your T-shirt is made of a high-spec survival material. It will protect your respiratory system if you cover your face. Still, when you do it, don’t look directly at her.”

  Zhen had forgotten for a moment to monitor where the woman in the floral dress was, but her screen showed a cross section of the crawl space. The woman was an outline in green, stealthily making her way up the last few dozen feet toward Zhen. Zhen was sawing at the pipe. There, on the screen, was the refrigeration unit between them. The assassin would be almost within arm’s reach if it weren’t for the unit between them.

  Zhen gripped the soft tube and sliced through the last thin piece of plastic. On the screen, the woman stood and took out her gun. Did she have a screen too? Would she have a countermeasure? Too late to worry about that. The woman in the floral dress took a step around the air-conditioning unit. She looked down at Zhen. Zhen pulled her T-shirt over her mouth and nose and pointed the cut end of the soft tubing toward the woman’s face. Zhen turned away. She let go her pincer grip. The snow sprayed out.

  6. demonstrate your game

  The January frost had turned a light drizzle into a thin spiral of white flakes outside the DEMOlition building at nine in the evening, when Lai Zhen touched Martha Einkorn’s gold-edged keycard to the black panel in the glass elevator. The screen read Floor 70. Zhen hadn’t even known there was a seventieth floor of guest rooms in this hotel. The doors closed silently and the hotel lobby fell away. Beneath Zhen’s feet were the stalls and miniature stages of this smaller part of the conference. Even at this point there were still late-night sessions: a fireside chat with a psychologist with brushed blond hair sitting in an armchair talking about survivor guilt. A man in a flannel shirt giving a presentation on how to talk to your kids about survival. Through the sliding wall at the far end of the hall, Zhen could see part of the expo, a forest of stalls and, towering over them, a great fiberglass mountain with snowy peaks advertising some brand of all-weather gear. The mountain was visible from every point in the expo; in the evenings, it was lit from within to simulate a sunset, yellow and pink and gold. As it dwindled, as Zhen rose in the elevator, it felt for a moment that all this was leaving her, not that she was moving at all.

  On the seventieth floor, the doors of the elevator opened not onto a featureless corridor but onto a palace. Bookcases filled with books. A long lacquered dining table. Three leather sofas. A blue tiled floor like a wave washing toward the view out of the window seventy stories up.

  “Fuck me,” said Zhen.

  “God, she’s a bit bloody direct, isn’t she,” said a woman lying on one of the sofas, half-concealed from view. She leaned up on her elbows and looked at Zhen with curiosity, interest, and humor. Zhen thought: Shit, I know who that is.

  “Oh, you’re on time,” said Martha Einkorn. “That’s good. Selah Nommik, meet Lai Zhen. She has an amazing channel about survival: SurlySurvivor. Champagne?”

  Zhen looked at Martha, at her belly-roll outline in her jumpsuit, at the gold nose stud, and thought: I don’t care if it’s one night. I will. I absolutely will. And then she wanted, very badly indeed, not to screw this up.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Selah, taking a flute of champagne.

  Zhen thought: Remember this taste, this is probably the good stuff.

  Selah flicked her eyes between Martha and Zhen, seemed about to say something, and then changed her mind.

  “So you’ve got a channel. About survival. I think I’ve seen it, actually—you did the thing with the scorpion tank?”

  “No, that was ProfessorBlast. I did—”

  “Got it! You did living in a tree for a week.”

  “I did.”

  “My husband loved that one. Incredible. I’m a coder,” said Selah. “Well, I was. I mostly give money away now. So I’m utterly useless in an apocalypse scenario.”

  Were they going to pretend Zhen didn’t know who she was? Who her husband was? She had been a genuinely exceptional hotshot coder; she’d written part of the script for Anvil’s logistics and delivery systems, making them superefficient and reliable. She was married to the richest man on the planet—a man who was relentless in pursuit of efficiency, who had reinvented how haulage, and then delivery and then the world’s infrastructure, worked. But maybe that was what very rich, very famous people liked. If you just pretended you hadn’t read anything about them.