Kasy prayed the List of Gratitude as she and her mother left the high gate circling the compound and walked the sidewalk to the clinic. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful day. Thank you, Lord, for my life on Earth. Thank you for my sight, my smell, my ears, my skin, to witness your Creation. It hadn’t been but a few years since He had seen fit to reset the world. The compound sat on Turkey Mountain, where the inhabitants could see the overgrown mess where Tulsa used to be, know that other American cities had had a similar fate, thank God for sparing their flock, and thank Him for punishing them.

They turned at the broken stoplight that swung and spun on its wire. On the left side of the road where the park used to be was an encampment—all snapping blue tarps, smoke. Blanket-wrapped huddled masses queued for soup at a stand near the road. The wind shifted. A moment later, the odor smothered them: unwashed armpit, crotch, ass, and burning garbage and leaking propane. Kasy and her mom stepped into the road to go round the tents rippling in the breeze. Further on, someone lay in the road with a filthy pink blanket over them. Their feet were bare. Further on, a man chopped at the air with a metal spatula and yelled at the empty sky. Each shout gouted cloud-breath into the frigid air.

Thank you, Lord, for leading us out of there. Thank you for leading us to our Shepherd, Robert. Thank you for a roof, for beans, squash, and bread, for hot water at the lift of a handle.

Kasy stopped her silent prayer to look over the line, in case her aunt was there. Her mother put her hand on her cheek and gently nudged her face forward again. Her mother’s expression was sorrow overlaid with determination. It felt like a betrayal of her mom to search for her aunt. Besides, her aunt had chosen to no longer be her aunt when they parted ways. Kasy looked away. They had to focus on those who wanted to be saved.

The clinic was in the strip mall tucked between the pizza parlor and the DMV. A message had been slashed with deep red paint over its mirrored doors: The Shepherds are Wolves that Learned How to Use a Crook. Like you would know, Kasy thought. He welcomed me and Mom into the fold after the Summer of Storms and gave us food, shelter, community, and purpose, when so many people had lost theirs, and never regained it. She prayed God would open their mind, by a transformative event or by crushing open their skull.

The clinic looked like a DMV, a place to process people, rather than a sacred place. The “take a number” ticket machine by the door was empty. So were the eyes of the receptionist. A massive picture of downtown Tulsa pre-Summer of Storms with domino-like buildings colonized a wall. There were women older than her mother, with snowy hair. There were women her mother’s age, with gray-streaked hair. The group Kasy herself belonged to—with people who      could be called women, but her Shepherd called them “on the cusp”—was the largest. One of them had brought a girl, a child, who sang softly to herself and drew stars on her arm with a blue marker. The scent of synthetic blueberry fought the stale, bad-breath smell of the clinic air.

Now, that girl is clearly not a woman, nor almost one, Kasy thought. Perhaps she’s special.

The receptionist slid a clipboard under her window, and Kasy’s mom wrote Kasy’s full name, flock number, and more. The little girl sat on the floor and doodled and sang, and the mother sat in a chair and ran her daughter’s hair through her fingers. The mother was Kasy’s age and her throat was unblemished: a small woman with a flat mouth and luscious seal-brown hair. She wore jeans and a nice pine-colored polyester blouse too thin for the weather, and a ratty parka too heavy for the weather. The little girl wore pink pajamas with purple cuffs.

No Ascension robe, Kasy thought. And she brought her daughter to the procedure. Her flock had pecked at her mother for doing the same, but that’s how it was when circumstances demanded it. Since joining the flock, Kasy had mucked stables, baked bread, scrubbed floors, beat rugs, wrung laundry, and raised chickens from egg to oven. She had calluses so thick she could grip a smoking skillet without potholders. When her mom had the procedure and then a fever from it, Kasy swabbed the surgical wound, lifted soup to her lips, wiped the shit, piss, pus, blood and did her mom’s work too. She watched the little ones and taught the older ones. Soon she and her mother were indispensable to the flock. She let herself feel a little pride in her hard work, her ambition, as a treat. That’s how it should be. Kasy joined the rest of the women in giving the new woman an approving, encouraging smile. God loves initiative.

The digital sign over the door blinked. Selena Cruz.

The girl and her mother rose. The leftover women watched her ponytail switch her shoulders with a kind of hungry softness as she went through the door. Kasy’s mother watched the door and her thumb and finger pinched the beads of her rosary. The beads passed through her fingertips and there was no noise behind the door. Kasy’s muscles clenched.

Then, the little girl screamed.

The women shifted, crossed themselves, and signed, “What a pity.” Kasy’s mother touched the scar on her throat. Kasy’s mind frothed. Her body felt galvanized with the screams. Move! Don’t move! Shut up, shut up, shut up!

Selena’s cries weakened, as if she had heard. They suddenly cut.

Kasy felt something like a pillar fracture within her. Inside her head was a tinny ringing as if her eardrums had burst and a static feeling. Her heartbeat prayed OGodOGodOGodOGodOGod. Maybe she had misheard. The doctor, surely, wouldn’t have taken her. If he Lifted them high, then what would Kasy’s Ascension mean?

It wasn’t that bad of a trade. You’d swear your faith and loyalty and do the procedure. You and Mom would be taken care of, Kasy thought. But you’re an adult, even if you won’t admit it, even if the Shepherd won’t acknowledge it.

Shut up!

Thirty minutes later, the girl, Selena, and her mother emerged wet-eyed. Selena swallowed, winced. Tears slid down her cheeks. The bandage around her throat had a dot of red where, if she were a boy, her Adam’s apple would be. She held a small blue satin box like a ring box, which her mom took from her and put in her purse.

They really did that to her, Kasy thought with an eerie serenity. Her spirit detached and bobbed to a level above her head. It took in the scene of the women and the girl who they had made one of them. The mother hoisted her daughter to her hip and slung her purse over her shoulder. She made no eye contact with anyone, not even the receptionist, as she signed out.

As she passed, making for the door, Kasy leaned over and pinched the woman’s sleeve. The woman started. Kasy whispered, “Soft serve.”

The other women rustled. Kasy didn’t have to see their hands flurrying to know what they were saying. Kasy kept her eyes locked on the mother’s startled eyes, as if willing the memory to transfer telepathically. Icy-sweet numbing swirl from the gas station. The hand signs for soft serve had not been invented yet, and Kasy could not wait for them to be, nor did she expect the woman would know them. She was just guessing, but she didn’t think the woman would know why soft serve mattered. The woman at the gas station would tell them. Kasy would not let the woman and Selena go, unless they understood everything she couldn’t say.

The woman pulled out of Kasy’s pinch and exited the clinic doors. Moments passed where Kasy wondered if she had said enough. Then, her mother slapped her. Its sound seemed to jolt Kasy awake. She had broken the six months of silence before Ascension. Her mom breathed in rapid puffs, and her eyes were ringed with white. She raised her hand again.

The receptionist hit the silver bell and rose behind the glass partition.

“Who spoke?” she signed. “Raise your hand.”

Kasy would have to start the six months of silence over—if the Shepherd would forgive her and allow her another chance. “The devil is unusually loud within you,” he had said after the previous failure. She had screamed for help when a young boy had fallen from a tree and seized on the roots, bleeding from the ears. She had suggested that maybe this time it was a guardian angel. But her Shepherd’s eyes were cold and remote, and his sermon the following day was about gratitude and duty and the sinners begging outside the walls, and he referenced Corinthians 14:34.

Yet God abhorred a liar. She slowly lifted her hand.

As she did, so did everyone else in the waiting room. Her spirit made a great shout.

The receptionist looked round, astonished. Then, with jerky angry hand motions, “I’ll end the appointments for today and send you home to your Shepherds.”

Hands stayed in the air. Eyebrows slanted and furrowed. Who needed hand signs when veins throbbing in their temples could speak more eloquently?

The receptionist threw up her hands and sat back in a huff. Hands lowered back into laps. Kasy’s heart felt too swollen with neighborly love and relief. But she still thought about Selena. She shouldn’t have Ascended at all. Why hadn’t the doctor stopped them?

She soothed herself. It’s done now. They might be able to join a flock based on the strength of their offering. It is what it is.

Immediately Kasy hated herself for that thought, because she always hated it when her mother said it to her. She had hated it after they had to leave their tornado-smashed home in Verdigris for Tulsa. She had hated it after the city cut disaster funding after they got there. She had hated it when her mom got the procedure to get them accepted into the flock. She had forgotten that she had hated it. If Kasy had been a boulder, it is what it is was the river that would wear her down to a pebble before carrying her with it.

The sign over the door blinked: Casy Hernandez.

Kasy was used to her name being misspelled. Today it felt like evidence for the devil. Her mother crossed herself as Kasy stood and went through the door.

The room was small, low-ceilinged, cave-like. There was a chair like the one at the dentist’s, and a young nurse on her knees, wiping the floor. The nurse held up one finger—the first and oldest and most recognizable hand sign—and continued wiping up the fine spray of blood. Her eyes, too, were wet.

Kasy plucked a sanitizer wipe from the tube by the door and knelt. The nurse waved, shaking her head, but Kasy shook her head back. She threw the pinked sanitizer wipe into the trash and beat the dust off her robe. I’m already here. It’s too late.

She eased onto the chair. There was a ghost of warmth on the vinyl. On the counter, the scalpels, slicked with girl-blood. Suddenly she hated that nurse.

She asked aloud, “You’re going to get some fresh scalpels for me, right?”

The nurse blanched. Kasy insisted, “You do use clean ones, right? God may have invented germs, but he also invented soap.” Her voice had gone hoarse after not being used for six months. It was a voice she wouldn’t want to hear in the dark. But how that nurse nodded! Her hand spidered towards the doorknob.

Childishly, Kasy thought, You’d tell on me? But the Shepherd would make her do more than stand with her nose in the corner. She should have been dismissed when she first spoke. Instead the nurse gathered the dirty scalpels and set a tray of fresh ones on the doctor’s cart. She was red.

Kasy lifted her arm to sign, sorry. But when she peeled her arm off the armrest, there was a scent of blueberry. Her forearm was smudged with blue ink.

“For God’s sake.” Her disgust was made dreadful by her voice. The nurse snatched another sanitizer wipe and offered it to Kasy. Her eyes pleaded. Kasy snatched the wipe and rubbed down her forearm and the chair arms. A lemon smell replaced the blueberry. The nurse slipped out of the room.

Kasy imagined the mother adjusting her daughter on her hip outside and walking towards the gas station. It didn’t sell gas anymore—no point—but sold caloric encouragement. Greasy pizza slices, hot dogs, plump, sweaty, brown, rolling alongside dry yellow taquitos. Donuts with translucent glaze. Coffee—not the real stuff, not anymore—but the soft serve was real, cool and soothing and soft. A sweetness sliding down tongue to belly. For whatever change could fit in a child-sized pocket, you could get a spoonful of strawberry or cherry preserves from the lady who ran the register. If you hung around tonguing the swirl’s point sideways, she’d tell you about how ice cream used to come in a thousand flavors, but the most common flavor came from a rare orchid far away. How ice cream now comes plain, and they had to make their own flavors. It was most unbelievable that ice cream could be better, Kasy had thought then. Her mom had last taken her when she was ten, before she had gotten her own procedure.

But that’s enough fairytales, said the gas station woman. I’ll introduce you to a good Shepherd. Just come back here when you Ascend. It’s tradition. Ice cream makes everything better.

The nurse returned with a doctor in his dirty white coat.

He said warmly, “Kasy Hernandez, sorry for taking so long. Lean back, lamb. I can’t get at your throat if you’re sitting up.”

Her mind howled the same words her aunt had howled about joining a flock, This isn’t right, nobody sane would make you to do this—

What else can I do? Kasy prayed. She imagined prayer rays beaming out of her body even as she leaned back in the chair. What can I do now? She wanted her mom to hold her hand—no, she wanted her aunt to take her hand and pull her out of the chair and run. She wanted to run back in time and pull the little girl out of the chair, and her mother, and every woman who had lurched away with their voices in satin boxes, and all the women waiting with their ears turned towards the door.

The scalpel had just penetrated her throat when she let out a monstrous scream.

“You’re one of the few whose bodies are compatible with the energy source.” My handler’s hair collected ash, which I imagined to be snow. We stood facing each other, under the shadow of the clocktower, lights taken from a football stadium serving as a proxy for the sun.

“Do you intend to turn me into a bomb?” I asked, slightly amused at how soon we’d come around full circle. Bombs were the reason half the world was buried. They were the reason why I was being held hostage in my own university.

“No.” He removed his hat, his mustache gathering white. I imagined I was shivering, that it was blizzarding out. “To be frank…” He did me the service of at least a partial disclosure. The world was too dead to take much sugar-coating. “Something far worse.”

They were pulling babies from what used to be buildings, what used to be nurseries and neonatal ICUs. The body bags were too large, so they had locals bring out pillow cases to wrap the youngest of the dead in.

They tugged bodies from the rubble, volunteers in night vision goggles, whatever the army had on-hand. I couldn’t help from where I was, in the university that had become a prison. I watched from the feed the military had provided me to instill “nationalistic feelings.” A rescuer had ended up on his knees after extracting a toddler headfirst from crumbled concrete. They were slapping him, screaming at him to get it together, bringing their palms to his cheeks. There were more children buried in the ruins of the homeland, in the ruins of their own houses. And he was one of the few with the physicality and equipment to pull them out.

He lifted himself off the ground, retracted the goggles, and smeared his tears with the hands of others. He was staring forwards, like some smothered statue, caked in ash. And they ruffled his hair, white snowing down from where it collected, and pushed him onto the next victim.

The girl in one of the next dorms, of which there was a surplus because the university had become mostly a ghost town, told me she’d seen footage of the enemy hauling picnic baskets up to lookouts. That they ate their dinner on foldaway chairs and tables, watching the fireworks that bore craters into our country. That rained ash over all of us.

“They’re an evil people.” She said, shaking her head, body resting on her doorframe. “I didn’t know humans could act like this.”

“The enemy is not human.” I said, matter-of-factly, so she did not confuse me with a sympathizer. And she didn’t take it as well as I thought, only sniffled, sucking back tears, and slammed her door shut.

One of the reasons why I was not allowed out of university grounds was because the campus was considered a safehouse. I could watch the destruction unfold around me, knowing it would never penetrate whatever shield my handlers had set up.

Here, the bombs were the only things I could see without aid from night vision goggles. They’d start as orange dots in the horizon that you would say to yourself were stars, then they’d grow until you’d swear you’d discovered the sun again since this winter started. Then that sun would multiply and grow a comet’s tail. Phosphorous. That stuff cooks you from the inside out. Causes organ failure, melts your skin down to your bones, and your bones down to stardust.

I was watching one. The window surrogated the back of my eyes. Two camera obscuras, shrouding most of the world as unseen matter. I could see the telltale dot swelling from the skyline, of a false sun, trailing poison as it ripped through the sky. Though I knew I was safe, that didn’t keep the fear at bay. Deep down, I was beyond terrified. It was the kind of fear that cut like a knife, that turned me cold. That made my breath hitch when I saw the bombs deployed because I thought of the people that would be struck by them, and for a moment, their bodies were an extension of my own, and I could feel my skin smolder and my blood boil. And there was nothing I could do but watch.

When the blast first reached our shore, it came as a ring of sound and wind that would dissipate as it neared the interior of the landmass, then recede and spread back again. Over the course of weeks, the incoming waves of pressure would expand and collapse as aftershocks. Those were the test runs, performed on other countries, nuclear warheads dropped from planes, disintegrating all allies. The enemy really knew how to corner us.

The real blasts, the ones that turned my country into a wasteland, came in this eternal night that was newly blanketed over us. We had no way of seeing it, and if we even could see anything, we had no way of communicating it to anyone.

The enemy started with missiles, then dirty bombs that exploded shrapnel into their blast radius. And then, when we thought they had used the last of them; nuclear weapons. They dropped them on hospitals and churches first. On the places that would cripple our communities. And then, they engaged the military targets. Finally choosing a destination for their fireworks that was not civilian.

I was halfway through my thesis when all of this went down, studying data of stars’ positions in the sky, of changes to their size that may indicate black hole activity or just natural death in the star’s life-cycle. Looking back, such an organic dying process, even if it was that of a star, was something to envy. The enemy had conjured up the most painful ways to kill. Makes being slurped up into yourself as your light dims and kills the planets you once illuminated seem more ideal to nuclear fission. But, to our relief, by the end of the first barrages, we were notified that the enemy had run out of its nuclear weaponry. Or at least, that was what our specialists surmised from intelligence reports.

It would be a while before people had the decency of instantaneous atomization in lieu of the more painful, drawn-out deaths to come.

While I waited to be turned into a warhead, I occupied myself leafing through half-eroded journals. My studies in astrophysics, of the birth and death of stars, was long forgotten, rendered too frivolous for the current winter. My telescope, the largest of others among most universities in the north, was being disassembled and smelted down into another one of the war machines.

The study would haunt me, would possess me like a second spirit. Every equation, every proof, was somehow preserved in the back of my mind, only to resurface at night just when I was at the precipice of sleep. It would torment me. I would think in series of numbers, in formulas; would feel the click of my calculator, as a phantom, beneath my fingers.

I missed the stars. I missed the sun most of all. There was no warmth at the time. Only ash and darkness. And my studies proved exceptionally useless in alleviating this situation. I worked in the theoretical, not the physical. I could map the lifespan of a heavenly body but I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to produce hot water using what remained of lost technology and no sunlight. I’d crouch, with a flashlight between my teeth, and wish I had done something more mechanical with my time in school, that I had both the motor skills and technical expertise to coax the flow of electrons from a grounded state to a more excited one.

I was never successful. I waited, like everyone else in the university, for the army corps of engineers to piece together what they could of the surviving infrastructure. And for the first time since the winter set in, there was light. Enough light for me to scrawl equations onto the empty backs of notebooks, to finish my thesis in vain. Because I didn’t care that the world was going to consume me and spit me out a killer in a matter of months. At the time, I was still human. At the time, I needed to pretend that the world would always see me as such. As someone in the same ranks as those who brought the light back to Americans. Not as the one who extinguished it across the ocean.

American physicians performed surgery on soiled hospital floors, without anesthesia, with fewer doctors than they had last month because they had lost almost half of them in the war so far — the enemy was adamant on calling this barrage on civilians a war — and the screams through the special military-grade transmitted television were enough to make me spit bile.

This would all be my fault in a period of months. Children with their names written on their arms because they would be too shellshocked to remember, their entire families yet to be dug up. Did you know that nearly half of the US population consisted of children right before the big bombs were deployed by the enemy? Children made up a majority of survivors. And of Martyrs. And soon, I would be the one producing skeletons on the other side of the ocean in their remembrance. It would be my turn to power the killing machine.

The enemy kept circling back to the first events that started the war. They cited beheaded children, and butchered civilians, evidence of which could not be produced. And the statements were eventually retracted, but it was too late. The world thought we were inhuman, and that is how they would proceed. With the slaughter of animals. The damage had been done. Our whole country, and its children, were named complicit in a killing conducted by rogue soldiers on foreign soil.

The enemy talked of tearing America down, flattening it completely, and renaming it “equinox” after the nightclub where the insurgents first struck.

The enemy said that terrorists ran our hospitals, so they bombed them. They said that American patriots were cowards, using women and children as human shields. And they just kept bombing until our sky turned black. Until they’d disabled all infrastructure and communications, leaving the country completely dark. No sight, so the world could not see the atrocities they were about to commit. So there would be no one to record the slaughter. That it would be locked in by the current winter, that the ash would do enough to silence. That all those who bore witness would be turned to ash.

By the time the second wave of bombs fell, the world learned that most of the US consisted of pockets of refugee camps, from the ruins of neighboring states, and from Mexico and South America. The world found out that our enemy was bombing the most helpless of civilians, and their children. And when they tried to flee, up to Canada or down to Mexico, the borders were sealed. We were locked in, all of us. In the place where the day and night bled into each other because the enemy had pummeled us so badly with their warheads, that we lost the sun.

They told me to leave no one alive. And I did not. When they disconnected the electrodes from me, millions of fading heartbeats were reverberating through my ears. When they stripped me of the insulating suit and cast me naked into the stabilizing liquid, I could still feel shrapnel rip through one thousand times over, could still feel the roll of ignition liquidize the ground and then make bodies go airborne with the aftershock.

Afterwards, they’d ask me: reporters and angry civilians, who’ve gotten too proud once they’ve seen the light again, why I bombed a hospital. A refugee camp. A food storage facility.

I did not answer them. Weapons don’t have to say anything. I was not scared of public opinion. I was death from above. And they did not feel what I’ve felt; a million bones crushed, bodies charred through-and-through, the kinds of screams that will never die, even in memory.

They asked me why I did not fight my handlers. Why I let them turn me into a human weapon. To that, I said that I was no longer human. I was only a weapon. I was only death. I was their deaths too. That the enemy was not human either, and they would do unto us a-million-fold what I’ve done. And I was the one to provoke them.

They asked why I didn’t cry at the sight of what I’ve done, and I reminded them that I was a weapon. I didn’t cry anymore. The valium pump in my inferior vena cava did not allow me to. The implant at my thalamus made sensation impossible. Couldn’t they remember that I wasn’t human anymore? That they might as well be talking to the tanks or the missiles, or the surviving atom bombs. I could not give them what they wanted. I could not give them remorse. I was responsible for the damage, not the aftermath.

“I can’t feel anything, remember?” I addressed them, casting wetness down my cheeks. And they took photographs of me like that; grainy, black-and-white, from old tech cameras, of the weapon with tears in her eyes.

My handlers took me back in, blared “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as they shoved me into a padlocked door and through the tunnel system under the destruction, to a place where no one would know to look for me. I was the best kind of weapon. Easy to hide, to move. To pass off as anything but.

I screamed and screamed about the enemy, melting into the floor, a slobbering mess of a girl. At least I thought I could still be called that despite everything. I wished I could. I screamed and screamed things I never thought I would even think, but war and death did these things to me, turned me into something I didn’t know ever existed inside me.

“I’m going to kill them!” My voice ripped through my throat, raw and stinging. And it must have been what the handlers wanted to hear, but too crazed. Too emotion-laden. They wanted something bloodthirsty but mindless. I still had too much of what I was told to leave behind. “I’m going to kill them all!”

Adrenaline rushed cold through me, warping my surroundings. I couldn’t feel properly with all the tubing feeding into my sensory centers, but I could feel something and I hated it. I needed it to stop. I could only be annihilation or human, not something straddling the line between the two. Nothing can survive the split. I was the only living thing that could remain in the divided state, body sectioned off into organ systems, picked apart by sensory nerves. I had switches to kill, sections to excise from my being, another version of me to break off from myself.

There was a memory that hit me, as my hands began to work at my skin, of a woman working for a relief organization, who told reporters that her toddler, who lived on base with her, was beginning to show signs of distress only reserved for the field of military psychiatry. The kid tore her hair out and clawed gashes into her thighs. My condition wasn’t much better than hers; I scratched at my skin, at the instruments going through me, at the monitors and tubing and things holding me back.

I screamed some more, imagining I was digging into the earth’s crust and I was also the planet. It was all so painful; I was destined to rip the earth in two, could fit the world between my teeth. And I bit down, on myself, into the pulp of my palm, drooling red, spittle foaming at the corners of my mouth as I groaned in both surprise and some kind of retaliatory relief.

I woke up with a morphine pump opposite to the valium. I felt like something was constantly drilling the back of my head, rattling my brain. They’ve installed other equipment I couldn’t see, but I knew were there. Some in my brain. Some on my adrenal glands. They were forming the most obedient anthropomorphic weapon. And I had no choice but to become what I had been resisting. I had no choice but to take the world with me.

The enemy let loose from their warships flyers with a colored dot in the center reading: “You are here,” with almost cartoonish imagery of their weaponry surrounding. “You are surrounded.” Sprawled the bottom of the page. “The only way out is south.” So, the masses fled to Texas, where there were more bombs waiting, smothering the ruck in the consequences of collision at a subatomic level. The enemy, as it seemed, had a surviving atomic weapon. And their first target was a helpless crowd of refugees.

As far as the war effort went, the enemy was growing closer to their objective of flattening us. The stretch from California to Montana had been rendered unlivable, with no surviving infrastructure to sustain life. All the inhabitants of Austin, Texas had been vaporized, a level of destruction I was still incapable of. They were still working on ways to make me stronger, to make me deadlier. All of that came to a crescendo when Texas was atomized.

And then the killing stopped, on both ends.

I was told to reserve energy, so they locked me in a healing tank while they braced for any enemy attacks. And they waited, while I floated in the ultraviolet stew, still holding their breaths. When I was released from the tank weeks later, there was yet to be a bombing, a missile strike, or any other form of warfare on the enemy’s end. They were quiet.

My handlers called them a sleeping giant, they were so massive and powerful, that they would just turn the other cheek to our attacks and wait for the right moment to deploy any countermeasures. Our country was in ruin, with only the New England area left with surviving infrastructure. The enemy did not need to do much to deliver a final blow.

As the apparent armistice went on, we counted the dead and saved whoever we could unearth. We waited, with bated breaths, for the earth-shattering we knew would come. We waited for the sky to grow dark again, for the sun to be blotted out by clouds of ash and radioactive waste. But nothing ever came.

The enemy’s major generals were contacted, with a single question in the transmission:

[Is this a ceasefire?]

There was more silence for weeks. And then a reply, as if they were reluctant earlier to share such information:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

No one knew how to respond. Linguists were brought in to decode any possible mistranslations, as if it wasn’t apparent at first what they were trying to say. That their weapon was someone like me. That they had been using living, breathing beings to unleash the atom bomb. That this whole time, it was people who were turning the sky black. Who were locking in a global winter with every blast, with every detonation. There was a human behind it all. One for each pole, for each end of the earth. And we could have split the world between the two of us, could have torn the planet apart if we didn’t show the restraint our supervisors lacked. If we weren’t human, then we would have killed every living thing. We would have committed total slaughter, of an entire race, of an entire world.

The United States military replied, as simply as possible:

[Weapon is willing.] And it was not a lie. Not yet.

I still had the death drive in me. Still had the urge to level the enemy the way they did to us. I did not forget what they had done; my handlers had made it impossible to think of anything but, a neural chip in my hippocampus subliminally looping news feed of the bodies, of the destruction, steady power warping buildings, the slopes of entire cities caving into themselves. I wanted to cut into their warships, to slice the bellies of the enemy’s C-17’s and rain their supplies down the way they did ours, the way they destroyed the food banks when they had winter locked around us.

My thirst for vengeance was not something that could be dissolved so easily.

There was no activity on the enemy’s side, and I had not been forced to destroy anything for months. The military shifted its focus to reconstruction. They re-paved destroyed roads, rebuilt hospitals and housing, reconnected electricity and internet lines. Though contained to the northeast, the remains of America were growing stronger. I was growing stronger too, having been spared from expending myself as a weapon for so long. I began to feel human again.

I took tours with the national guard, greeting people as their savior. As the one who bullied the enemy into their months long silence. The general public didn’t know about the enemy weapon’s reluctance. They did not know we were theorizing that the ceasefire would quit once a suitable replacement was found. Then, the new weapon, with the young verve that all those unexperienced with genocide had, would rain down onto us all that was supposed to hit long ago. We were supposed to be annihilated by now and then built anew, turned into the enemy’s playground; luxury apartments over where the bodies of a family still lay, huddling together in death and decay. And I saw the stars collapsing in on themselves, still saw my work in my head because I could not let that part of me go. I thought for a moment that we must not be so different from the stars, that our life cycles were the same. Grow bright and then destroy yourself. That must have been our destiny this whole time.

My handlers told me that in the instance of enemy retaliation, then my power would be used in one short burst to produce an effective countermeasure, most likely killing me. They told me their thermal physicists believed the energy of it all would boil me from the inside. Then, I would be given a martyr’s burial and swiftly replaced.

I always imagined it would be my neighbor, from the next dorm, that would be my replacement. That she would be forced to give up her body for her country, and for the destruction of what remained of the world. And she and the enemy’s new weapon would circle each other like sharks, never delivering a killing blow. Maybe it’d be because they knew how much it would take to lock the world in a nuclear winter forever. Maybe they knew that their objective was wrong from the start, and that data would be passed onto the weapon’s next host.

Maybe I didn’t want destruction after all. What good would it do if I killed their children too? What would be put into the world other than death? There was no more light for me to create other than the death strobes. It was time I drank my body in and collapsed, sucking in all matter until I was a pinprick on the fabric of space, with enough gravity to tear right through, until everything I’ve destroyed down here on earth became an afterthought. Because there would always be bigger destruction. Because I could always destroy others with myself.

It was night when I transmitted the message. Spending months in the same portion of a military base, with partial free range, gave me a good lay of the land. I was able to memorize logins and passwords, mechanisms for communication, and when the enemy’s scientists were online.

I trailed my machinery with me as I tripped through the control room. I was heavy and so augmented that I had more tubes leaving my body than vessels inside. I was no longer human, by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t even look it anymore.

I sat at a workstation with the same familiar ease as taking a seat on a bus. Like I belonged there. Like there weren’t armed guards who wouldn’t hesitate if they saw me.

I typed in a string of letters and numbers, successfully logging in. By the time I set up the interface, I could already see the soldiers nearing through the glass. I had no time, and so much to say. I wanted to scream at the enemy that they would destroy themselves with us, that we would all destroy the world together and there would be no one left to benefit from it. That they had made me a monster, and I had made them inhuman. But there wasn’t enough time. I only had time to enter a string of four words, no punctuation. I only had one sentence to deter humanity from its own suicide. So, I typed:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

All around her, in the little park next to Merdeka Close, kids were playing in the sun, while the smart set of KL City were jogging, lounging or walking their dogs. The stately, ancient trees spread their leaves over this tiny patch of greenery, doing their best to shut out the traffic noise from nearby South Seas Plaza.

This was the district where all the media production houses of KL City clustered. It was a Sunday, but Yonanna was working. She was a sound engineer, and this thirty-minute lunchbreak was her only time to spend outside the dark and cramped sound-booth where she worked all day, adding tracks to image-builds, ad-campaign spots and viral videos for her boss’s corporate clients. She sighed. She could have eaten her lunch in the employees’ canteen, but she liked being out in the fresh air where she didn’t have to make conversation. And because this neighbourhood was KL City’s very modest tinsel town, sometimes she got to see hot, well-dressed youngsters hurrying through the park on their way to auditions or shoots.

That reminded her: she unlocked her phone and turned on FriendRetriever. On her screen, a golden dog sat up and begged, then curled up with her nose on her paws. The dog would alert Yonanna if anyone she followed on social media should turn up in real life.

She frowned at her doshirak. She’d have to remember to dump the leftovers before she went back inside, or her boss would complain about the smell. As the only foreigner on the team, she had to be extra careful not to break any rules, spoken or unspoken. She took a bite and sighed, hoping he wouldn’t take it into his head to smell her breath and mutter about filthy foreign habits.

It was a lovely February afternoon, and she couldn’t stay mired in her annoyance for very long. The air was still fresh from the winter rains, but the sun was warm on her back. On days like this, she could afford to put aside the nagging voices in her head and tell herself her decision to come here, to the Southeast Asian country of Melayu, was a good one. Even though none of her friends and family approved.

Her phone pinged. Still eating her lunch, she glanced down at it. Friend approaching! The doggy wagged her tail and pointed with a paw. Yonanna squinted against the midday sun. No, it wasn’t an actor, it was that cute boy, Sid somebody, Sid Chakrapani, that’s the guy. He wasn’t anyone to do with the studios, just some student who’d liked her demo tapes on Sharebox and left a few nice comments. He had a sweet smile, and he always smiled whenever he passed. He never spoke, though. Possibly because she was always dressed in her work clothes: baggy slacks and a t-shirt with a peeling logo of a once-popular MMORPG. Or maybe he didn’t talk to sound engineers. Huh, well, there was always a first time. Might as well risk it.

‘Hi,’ she said, as he went past. ‘Hi, Sid.’

To her excited joy he stopped, turned, and tapped his finger on his earbud, no doubt muting whatever cool track he’d been listening to. ‘Hello, Yonanna.’

She gave a little cry. ‘Oh, you have FriendRetriever too! Why didn’t you ever say hi? I mean, it’s for finding your friends in real life, isn’t it? And I’ve seen you around so many times.’

He gave that shy smile again, and his eyes behind his tinted glasses slid away from her. ‘Yes, I… I did want to talk to you, Yonanna, but I’m not very good at reading facial expressions. I wasn’t sure whether you’d mind.’ He seemed to consider this. ‘Sorry, I should have asked.’

She looked up into his face and made a snap decision. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t have any pressing work to do right now. Have you had lunch?’

‘No, I was on my way to visit a friend.’ He hesitated, then went on, ‘I guess they won’t mind if I’m a little late. I’ll text them. What do you have in mind?’

She put the remains of the doshirak in the trash and said, ‘Great, let’s go to the Freedom Cafe in South Seas Plaza. They have a fab lunchtime buffet. My treat, okay?’

‘Only if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

‘No trouble at all. I picked up the wrong lunchbox this morning and I was just sitting here cursing myself. You’re the perfect excuse for me to get a proper meal.’

They fell into step, strolling along the brick-lined path. ‘So you’re a sound engineer?’ he asked, as they sidestepped a baby in her carriage. The baby cooed, grabbing at the spots of light that filtered through the leaves.

‘Yeah. I do backing tracks at work, and sound effects for video games on my own time, just to make a little extra. But what I really want is to make my own music.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I have friends who play in a band. The Collapsineers. You’ve heard of them?’

‘Heard of them! They’re big stars!’ She looked at him. ‘You know people in Climate Town?’

He smiled. ‘I live there. I’m a huge fan of Bian Nguyen. The band is the voice of Climate Town. They’re our ambassadors.’

‘Oh, I love Bian! You know her? Is it true she’s from New Orleans?’

‘Yes, I’ve sat in on their rehearsals ever since I was a baby. It’s great fun. Bian once asked me what I thought she looked like and I said, “you’re a music volcano.” She laughed like a mountain shaking.’

Yonanna laughed too. Then she grew serious. ‘But if you live in Climate Town, that means you’re a… a…’

‘Climate refugee? Yeah, second generation, actually. My folks are from Bangladesh. They lost their homes when the Ramdhun Climate Defense Fund took over the Sunderbans in 2016. They got shunted from camp to camp, until Climate Town was set up in 2018 and they were selected to be part of it. I was born there in 2020, so I never saw our homeland.’

‘Oh. That sucks.’ She did the math. ‘So you’re eighteen years old? And still in school?’

‘Yes, I am,’ he smiled. ‘In Climate Town we can learn as long as we want. It’s not like regular school where everyone has to graduate at 15.’

‘That’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it? Nowadays everyone rushes through school so they can get a job and pay bills as soon as possible.’

He nodded seriously. ‘Yu Li Wei, she’s our principal, she says it’s because school was broken even in the old times, and no one fixed it. So we learn in a very different way in Climate Town. Most of our teachers are volunteers, and they have regular jobs. They teach us academic stuff, but also about how they work.’ He smiled at her. ‘You could take classes in sound engineering, if you wanted.’

‘Oooh, I couldn’t. I’m no good at talking to people.’ They paused to let a pair of dogs chase a frisbee across the path. The older dog caught the frisbee, then the puppy who was following grabbed it and there was a brief tug of war until the older dog indulgently let go and the puppy ran back with the frisbee, tail wagging furiously. Sid chuckled. Yonanna sighed. ‘My boss says we should learn on the job. That way we can be independent and productive members of society.’ She tapped her chest. ‘No student debt for moi. Under the old ways, I’d still be a prisoner in my father’s house. This is way better.’

‘There’s no student debt in Climate Town. Everyone teaches what they know to anyone who wants to learn.’

‘And you have some high-powered scientists living there, right?’

‘Yes. Cherie Lahiri Wilson, our coordinator, is a former professor from Singapore University. Bian used to be Cherie’s scholar, and she still does climate science when she’s not busy with the band. Bian designed all our foodgardens.’

‘What about you, Sid? What do you want to do when you’re done with learning?’

‘Oh, I’m already doing it. I work with the scientists to make new tech and test it out in the field.’ He pointed ahead. ‘Hey, is that a popup food fest? Does it look good?’

‘It sure does!’ They’d turned a corner and come out onto the side of the park that faced South Seas Plaza. In a small space marked ‘vendor parking’, a group of people had pulled up their vans and were selling various popular local items, cooked fresh on tiny braziers. ‘Oooh, I love street food,’ said Yonanna. ‘You game?’

‘Oh yeah. They have fried rice noodles and coconut curry, I can smell it,’ he said eagerly. ‘Shall we?’

Soon they each had a steaming plate of bihun, with a few sticks of lok-lok kababs on the side. ‘I want apom balik for afters,’ she said, pointing to the crispy white fritters filled with palm syrup and crushed nuts. ‘How about you?’

‘Sure, if I have room. What would you like to drink?’ He paused. ‘They have durian shakes.’

‘Mmm, too heavy. Just longan juice for me.’

She sat and watched over their food as he went to get the drinks. She noted how slow and gentle his gestures were. They spoke of a maturity beyond his years. She wondered what had taught him to take it slow like that. Trauma, no doubt. Climate refugees all lived hard lives, or at least, so she’d heard. She’d never really met one till now, and she had lots of questions. All she knew was that Climate Town had started as a UN-mandated township on the fringes of KL City, designed and run by the scientists who’d created a model of how to convert the world’s cities into sustainable green spaces, but no investors had bought into that vision. Since then, Climate Town had taken in climies from all the island nations of the South Pacific, Asia and the world. Their website had charming little drawings and stories of how their people had lost their homes to landslides and tsunamis and all the many climate fails that were simply routine these days. Charming, but childish.

Her boss often said Climate Town was just a hyped-up slum, a place where liberals spent their guilt-money to promote bullshit green solutions, but her flatmate thought that Climate Town was far too good for the climies and should be turned into a housing estate for middle class homeowners. Yonanna was less inclined to hate them, but she did feel a little jealous of how the climies were able to have cool stuff essentially for free. It made every kid in corporate employment, herself included, look a little foolish.

She was dying to ask Sid about his life in Climate Town, but she didn’t want to seem too pushy on a… first date? Was that what this was? She had to set her thoughts aside as he came back bearing two glasses. He placed them on the bench very carefully, as if they were precious jewels. Then he sat down beside her, she handed him his plate, and a happy silence ensued as they concentrated on putting away the food. Finally she sighed and sat back, replete.

‘What’s it like in Climate Town?’

‘It’s great. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.’

‘Really? Because the world’s supposed to feel sorry for you, which it does with a very bad grace.’

‘What’s to feel sorry for?’

‘You lost everything to climate fails, didn’t you? But people don’t like being reminded of how they’ve fucked up the planet.’ She sighed. ‘Every damn month, I have to do the sound for yet another campaign by Ramdhun Image Builds telling the world that Climate Town sucks. It’s like they’re obsessed.’

‘Oh, that’s because of Rik Nehra, the guy in charge of Ramdhun’s image management. His wife Lila Bintam left him in 2019 and came to Climate Town. She teaches in the school, and her daughter Bilqis is a trauma counsellor to the kids. He didn’t take it well.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

‘Ancient history,’ he smiled. ‘Bilqis was six when she left Singapore, and now she’s twenty-five. Everyone’s forgotten the story.’

‘Tell me something, Sid. When Singapore was destroyed by the Wave of 2023, it was big news, but when Mumbai sank in August 2032, the story was dead by September. Now it’s 2038, and pretty much every week a suburb or two falls into the hungry sea in every coastal city of the world. It barely even makes it to social media feeds.’ She spread her hands to the sunlight. ‘Why don’t people care more?’

‘I care.’

‘You’re a climie, Sid. I meant ordinary people.’

‘Everyone’s a climie, Yonanna. Everyone’s suffering. It’s just that you’re not allowed to grieve or complain unless you lose everything. Sometimes, not even then.’

Yonanna watched him out of the corner of her eye. He wasn’t good-looking in a filmstar kind of way, but he had a softness and charm that were very natural. Painfully shy, too, judging by the tinted glasses. He had barely looked at her the whole time. Once again she wished she hadn’t just grabbed the first clothes that had jumped out of her closet that morning, and that she had anything that wasn’t bleached to an indeterminate grey. Oh well, too late to worry about that now.

Sid finished eating. ‘Give me your plate, I’ll throw it in the trash,’ he said, and winced. She looked at him with concern. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, sorry, we don’t trash our disposables in Climate Town. They’re all made of rice paper, and we feed them to the dogs. Throwing stuff away feels kind of wrong to a climie.’

‘Whaaat! You have dogs roaming around where you eat? Ugh, that’s so unsanitary.’

‘Is it?’ He smiled, stacked her empty plate on his and chucked them both solemnly into a trash can. She gave him a thumb’s up, and he did it back to her. As she watched him walk to the apom balik stand and get two servings for them, she realised what it was about him that didn’t add up.

‘Sid,’ she said as he came and sat back down, ‘You were looking at that kid with the balloons as you were walking to the stall. I was scared you’d bump into something. Why don’t you look where you’re going?’

‘Oh,’ he said, taken aback. ‘I can’t see.’

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean, you can’t see? I saw you step round that baby on the path, and then you stopped for those dogs.’

He smiled. ‘That’s the research project I’m working on. There’s a doctor in Climate Town, Dr Harry Alaka’i, and he’s making a system to help me get around and live normally. I test it every day when I come to Merdeka Close. I was born blind.’

‘What? You’re blind? No way!’ She goggled at him. ‘I had absolutely no idea!’

‘That’s the point,’ he said with a beautiful smile.

‘But… why aren’t you working with Ramtech? A product like that would be worth millions.’

‘That’s not the climie way. Dr Harry is going to give the system to people for free when we’ve perfected it. It’s called Nai’a, which means “dolphin”, because it uses sonar to detect how far and what size objects are around me. There’s also a pair of cameras in the arms of my glasses, and an onboard AI that speaks into my earbuds in Dr Harry’s voice. It tells me what’s in front of me, wall or door or gate or person. Nai’a can also access my social media feed and tell me which of my friends is close by. That’s how I recognised you.’

‘Wow, Sid, that’s amazing.’

He nodded. ‘Let me show you. Do you mind if I give you this earbud?’ He took it out and wiped it on his shirt. ‘Sorry, it’s kind of… warm.’

‘That’s okay.’ She put it in her ear. Sid pushed his glasses up his nose and said, ‘Now I’m going to look at my plate of apom balik.’ A kindly male voice said in her ear, ‘Fritter dead centre, crushed peanuts on top, sugar syrup from nine to twelve.’ He turned and looked at her, and the voice in her ear said, ‘Yonanna Kim, forty centimetres to the right. Mouth open.’

She shut it. ‘So that’s what you meant when you said you weren’t good at reading faces!’

‘Sorry, um, the on-the-go word-portraits aren’t very flattering, but they do their job,’ he said a little diffidently. ‘Like when you spoke to me, I turned and looked at you, and it said, ‘Yonanna Kim, dyed hair, glasses, baggy clothes, eating Korean shrimp pancakes,’ and then I turned it off because you were talking.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

‘For what? The fashion comments? I’m used to it, my boss rags me all the time, but… this is so cool!’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Why would I mind? I’m not some shrinking schoolgirl, and I really should have put more thought into what to wear today.’

‘I think…’ He actually blushed. ‘I was going to say I think you’re beautiful, but that would be… presumptuous.’

She grinned, and the voice in her ear said, ‘Yonanna Kim, smiling…’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and pressed the other earbud with a finger. ‘Now I’ve left just the sonar on. Move your hand towards me and listen to the beeps.’

She did. The soft clicks got closer together as her hand approached his head, then receded as she moved it away. ‘I can hear where you are,’ he said softly, ‘but I don’t know that it’s your hand. For that I need Dr Harry’s AI to tell me.’

‘Wow. I legit had no clue. I would never in a million years have guessed that you were… impaired, no… special, I mean…’ She stopped in confusion. ‘Well, whatever the climie word is.’

‘You can say “blind”,’ he said kindly. ‘That’s just a word that means my visual handicap is total. Unlike yours. You’re disabled too, it’s just that you don’t think you are because your prosthesis works so well.’

‘My… what?’

‘Your glasses. Dr Harry says all disability is relative. In a good world, it wouldn’t exist, because creative people would automatically get rewarded for making life better for everyone, so disability would be seen as an opportunity, not a problem. His goal is to make a prosthesis for me that works as well as glasses do for people with refraction errors.’

‘I’m… speechless.’ She took a sip of her drink. ‘But now I have a better idea of why Ramdhun hates you.’

‘You do?’

‘Well, your Dr Harry is making something awesomely marketable, but he’s not contributing to any corp’s stock or turnover. Ramdhun HR thinks the Indosphere is bleeding talent out of the money economy and into Climie World, if there is such a thing.’

‘There is,’ said Sid. ‘Putul Ganguly, she’s one of the scientists, she says money and law are what’s wrong with everywhere that isn’t Climie World.’

‘Really? I would have said money and law are the only things keeping us from descending into global madness. Your Dr Harry could be a millionaire by now if he wanted. Why doesn’t he want it?’

‘He’s a millionaire to us. I’d do anything for him. His system has saved my life so many times I’ve lost count.’

They were silent for a bit as Yonanna thought about this. She took the earbud out and handed it back to him.  They finished their dessert, and this time she chucked the plates. ‘I had no clue that Climie World was so different to mine,’ Yonanna said softly. ‘ I just thought you guys were a bunch of losers living the way you do because you can’t afford proper homes and stuff. I mean, Ramdhun talks about you as if you exist to make the rest of us thank our stars we still have jobs.’

‘We have jobs. We work for each other. And we have fun too,’ Sid said mildly. ‘There’s a concert every month. You should come.’

‘It’s invitation only.’

‘That’s right, so I’m inviting you. We’d let everyone come if they’d behave themselves, but we’ve had Ramdhunites turn up and throw water bombs at the stage and stuff, back in theTwenties, so Cherie forbade it.’

‘I’d like that. To go to a Collapsineers concert with you, I mean. And maybe you could come to one of my gigs too, on the rare occasions I get to DJ.’

‘I would, but a concert is still a little too much for the Nai’a system. Fast-moving crowds can be confusing.’

‘Huh, no risk of a crowd at my gigs,’ she muttered. ‘So you never go to big events?’

‘Only if they’re happening in Climate Town.’ He smiled sweetly. ‘There, everybody I bump into just hugs me.’

They started walking again, drinks in hand. Now she could see the little telltale signs, the tiny frown of concentration Sid acquired every time an obstacle loomed on the horizon. She felt herself falling into the rhythm, giving a little pause for him to hear Dr Harry telling him what to do. It was surprisingly calming.

‘How do you travel to the centre of KL City by yourself, Sid? Climate Town is out in the suburbs.’

‘Yeah, but we have a bus terminus right by the gates, so I get on the bus and tell the driver where I want to go. They all know me, and even if they didn’t, Nai’a maps my location and tells me if I take a wrong turn. The drivers always announce my stop, and then it’s just a walk in the park to get to Liv and Jose’s studio.’

‘Liv and Jose? The Jesumanis?’ Her eyes widened. ‘That’s who you were visiting? You know them?’

‘Sure I do. Liv Jesumani does all the Climate Town sponsorship videos, and she teaches video production at the school. She gave me these earbuds. They’re professional quality; journalists and hopper jockeys use them. But I was actually going to meet her cousin Jose. He’s a game developer. We play against each other.’

‘Oh.’ she thought about this. ‘How do you game if you can’t see the screen?’

‘I don’t need to. Two months ago. Jose started getting splitting headaches. He never leaves his flat, and he’s always staring at some screen or other. Dr Harry told him it was eyestrain and he had to shut his screens down for a few hours every day, to get better. But sitting around without gaming drives Jose nuts, so I visit him to play maze games in the dark. You have to hold the controller and figure out how to navigate a maze by how it vibrates in your hand.’ He grinned. ‘Jose hasn’t beaten me yet, but then I’ve had waaay more practice.’

She was silent. Then she stopped, and turned to him. He stopped too, without her having to touch his arm. ‘I legit had no clue you couldn’t see until you told me,’ she said sincerely. ‘If you hadn’t said anything, maybe I wouldn’t have worked it out at all.’

He beamed. ‘When I tell Dr Harry that, he’s going to be so happy.’

‘He should be. This is a fabulous thing he’s invented. Tell me more about it,’ she said inviting him to sit by her on a park bench. ‘What improvements are you working on?’

‘Well, one of the things we want to do is make the AI more sensitive to context, and also make different settings for how much detail to put in the narration. If we can get it to calculate my walking speed and reaction times, it’ll know just how much time it has to warn me before an action item reaches me. Right now sometimes I have to stop and stare into space while the AI tells me how to open a door or get a ticket out of a machine. Or what items are on a menu. People curse at me if I take too long.’

‘People are cruel.’

‘Not their fault. I mean, the whole point of Nai’a is to make it seem like I can see. The cursing is proof that it works.’

‘Or it’s proof that they’re assholes.’

He shook his head. ‘Ableism is an illusion, because if we live long enough, we’ll all have disabilities. A world that’s nice to people with problems is a nicer world for everyone.’

‘That’s true. I once broke my wrist when a stack of speakers fell on me. Getting dressed or bathing was an absolute nightmare, but I didn’t take a single day off work.’

‘Why not?’

‘Hah! And give my boss a chance to fire me? No way. I know I live like a slob on my tiny salary, but it’s by choice, not necessity. I turned my back on my rich family and said I’d make my own way, so there’s no going back for me.’

‘Why did you make that choice, Yonanna?’

She shrugged. ‘I wanted to make my kind of music. I didn’t want to spend my life looking after Daddy’s chain of convenience stores in Seoul. He wanted a son, anyway. He took Pradip Shankar’s Humane Choice vaccine to tip the odds in favour of a boy, but nope, he got me. And I’m not even a real girl.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m a Broken Pot,’ she said. ‘I have male genes, but I look and talk and feel and think like a woman.’

He took a breath, as if he’d suffered a blow. ‘I’ve never understood why people call you that name. It makes no sense.’

‘It’s because we don’t have wombs. We’re “women” who can’t have children, and so the mainstream thinks we’re useless.’ Her face contorted into a shape of hate. ‘Pradip Shankar coined that term. Which was large-hearted of him, considering it was probably his vaccine that broke us in the first place, as well as caused the Ladbubble, the jump in male births in the Twenties. He’s never admitted to any of the crimes I’m certain he’s guilty of. He’s Ramdhun’s pet and he can do no wrong. I thought he’d get lynched back in 2030 when all the newborn boy babies started dying, but he just promised to find a cure and wham! he became a hero.’

‘I know,’ said Sid. ‘Bilal Bintam’s a friend of mine. Out of the one-thousand boys saved by the Shankar Cure in 2030, he’s the only one who’s not a billionaire’s son. And some of the things he’s told me about the Cure… well, it makes you wonder whether dying of the disease would have been a bigger mercy.’

‘Really? Tell me!’

He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Bilal and his family had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when he was discharged last year. They’re not supposed to reveal anything about the Cure. Ramdhun could have them arrested if I tell you.’

‘Okay,’ she bit her lip. ‘Forget I asked. It’s just that any dirt about Pradip Shankar makes me happy. I just know in my bones that he’s the reason I’m broken.’

‘You’re no more broken than I am,’ said Sid, ‘and I’m not.’

‘You don’t understand. I was supposed to be a boy, but by some fluke I turned out like this. I’m a living disappointment to my parents. I’m a girl but I’ve never had a period, I can’t have children, and I have to be screened for testicular cancer every year. I’m a freak.’

‘You’re a person.’ He reached out and gently wrapped a hand around her clenched fist. ‘When you come to Climate Town, would you like to speak to Amiru? She’s our gender counsellor. She’s from Japan, she’s gorgeous, and she’s a male-bodied person with a feminine persona. She really helped me with my anger issues.’

‘Oh,’ she said, then frowned. ‘How do you know she’s gorgeous? Does your AI tell you?’

‘No. The same way that I know you’re beautiful.’ His hand was warm against hers. ‘I feel it.’

‘How?’ she asked helplessly. ‘I have no idea how beauty feels.’

‘Of course you do. Just go into the presence of a beautiful person, and shut your eyes. If they still feel beautiful, they are. Simple.’

She was silent. Then she said, ‘You’re right. And I’m a fool.’

‘No, you’re just angry,’ he smiled into the air. ‘I was, too, because I couldn’t see my beautiful friends. I felt cheated, and then Amiru told me not to be an idiot, because beauty has nothing to do with a person’s looks. It’s their vibe. So I can’t take full credit for that insight.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I guess… that makes sense.’ She wrapped her own hand around his, as his in turn wrapped hers. ‘What’s my vibe, Sid? Tell me honestly.’

‘You want to prove to the world that you’re a person. And you’re succeeding.’

‘I am?’

‘We’re talking, aren’t we? Even though we come from different worlds. That tells me you have the patience to be empathetic.’

‘Or I might just be creepily curious about a blind man who can fool people into thinking he sees.’

‘No, you’ve spent your life having your nose rubbed in the worst interpretation of yourself by people who don’t love you.’

She tried to speak, to come back with some witty repartee, but she couldn’t. ‘Oh god,’ she said. ‘You can’t see me, but I’m crying.’

‘I can feel your hands shaking.’ He stroked her knuckles. ‘Let’s not talk about the sad things for now, Yonanna. The sun feels nice. What should we do next? How much time have you got before you have to go back to work?’

‘It’s already too late for that.’ She grinned ruefully. ‘In any case, I just came in today because my Sundays are boring.’

‘Want to come and check out Climate Town? I can introduce you to all my friends.’

She gasped in delight. ‘Really?’ Then her smile vanished. ‘What about Jose?’

‘Oh, he texted me an hour ago to say he was gonna take a nap. He’ll be fine.’

She took his hand and moved it to her elbow, curling his fingers carefully round her arm, then with her other hand she picked up her bag and jacket. She got to her feet and he followed. They smiled at each other. ‘You just keep a hold of me,’ she said. ‘That way you won’t need Dr Harry talking at you.’

‘Great idea. Hey, that means we can do this.’ And he put one of his earbuds in her ear and tapped his own.

A familiar voice said, ‘Aloha, climies! This is Bian Nguyen and the Collapsineers, and we’re gonna sing “Walking in the Park”! Ah one two three four!’

You’ll never walk alone,
When your hearts are hand in glove.
Come on, come on, come on!
Touch the love to the fuse of love.

You’ll never fear the dark,
Because you carry that spark.
You’ll be walking in the park,
You’ll be walking in the park.

We’d have our time with them
Knowing we’d be safe just past the city limits.
They were unable to leave, and
They knew this.

They adhered to their law of fear.
Hell, they were just as afraid of us,
If not more, for
They had faces just like ours
And they couldn’t stand to see
Us like that.

We were despair to them.

We eventually stopped going back
Because we grew up, got married, got
New jobs, had children, but
We thought about what would have happened
If we kept returning.

It made our stoic faces carve foreign expressions.

Some time later, I spotted one outside
Just running along—like a dog
After an invisible car.

I watched this creature with my face
Disappear as I sat in a chair, watching
The valley in the distance catch fire.
It burned until the sky smoldered
Into an ash pit.

The motorboat skids across the water, wings of bubbles and froth skating behind them. Richter looks around him, sees the group which he has been with for the last couple of years. Leon and Jane are reliable, and Richter tolerates their company, which probably borders on friendship. It is more than he could ask for. Sometimes he wonders if they would ever be friends outside of this line of work. They have all come into this contract in financial dire straits for some reason or another, enough to warrant leveraging their lives. This is also a dangerous job, both psychologically and physically. It takes about six months to locate one of these husks and another three months of planning. Only then can they strip the derelict ships with enough confidence and competence to do it right, serving as a reminder all the while how cruel people can be to one another. Yes, Richter thinks, perhaps it’s good to have friends.

The actors do not matter, but during World War II one country developed a deadly strain and infected a large group of sailors (some willing, others not) that masqueraded as a merchant ship. Once docked, they would hug, shake, mate, and infect the population within the forty-eight hours they had, until their hearts literally exploded and erupted fiery blood from their gullet like a burst pipe. It was a virological Trojan Horse. Toss aside the more direct atomic bombs, inflict a pandemic on your enemies. And it worked. And then other countries started doing it. Before long no one was expecting any unsolicited trade coming from international waters. All those Trojan (sea)horses had to turn back or be hit with napalm on the spot. Thus the husks, now aimlessly ricocheting along the aquatic perimeters of a country, knocking about like a drooling child. At first, it was the NGOs that paid to get them removed from the ocean, then it became merchant unions who held the purse, and now, as Richter, Leon, and Jane approach the underside of the Lotus, it is a mix of war profiteers who want the dormant and dead radioactive plants back and pharmaceutical companies that want to manufacture the cure for any dormant strains, still scratching on the human genome like pesky branches against a bedroom window. Richter gave up on morals when they started to name their price.

The Lotus is a metal behemoth, barnacled with rust and ill intent. Richter scales the starboard hull with a levy and then helps Leon and Jane onto the dock. Jane carries the glass container meant to hold the dried, brittle petals of these cancerous plants. Long dormant and no longer infectious to humans, certain invested parties have developed technology to revive their stymies. It is all science hokum that Richter does not know and cares not to learn. They walk along the empty shell of the starboard side. Like all the other ships, it is not built to be empty. The unnatural loftiness of the balconies, the main deck, the interweaving hallways distort space/time. Something is not right about the Lotus, but something never is with these ships.

These Trojan Horses always keep their plants in a special vault with expensive lamps to emulate sunlight. It is as secure as a bank vault, but with steady hands and the aided passage of time to accumulate rust, these vaults only required patience, of which Jane has droves. The ships are all built differently, but these vaults are always in the center, acting as the heart that infected the air of every sailor who charts a map, smokes a cigarette, or eats in the mess hall. Richter stopped wondering what it would be like to envision their days, so benign with endless sea, their bodies disintegrating from the inside out. For those who went willingly, did they consider themselves martyrs?

Leon marks the wall with luminescent blue chalk within the bowels of the Lotus. Every ten minutes he lights a flare that illuminates the dark caverns of the ship with a ruby glaze. The ship rocks on the water. Up… down… up… down. Industrial flashlights illuminate only a cone in front of them, but they are of good quality and did the job. A thin layer of sea water nips at the heels of their boots.

“Here,” Jane says, stopping them, “it’s here.”

She goes to work wordlessly, bringing out her tools to identify weak points in the vault. She scrapes off a cluster of oysters like shingles, pounding away at the barnacles that fuse the cinch and axis of the vault. Her hammering sends sharp metallic arrows through the halls, like a penny being dropped down a mineshaft. Within minutes the door creaks open, falling at first into its hinges and the salty film of water at their feet, and then props against the wall with the combined strength of Richter and Leon. Like clockwork.

Jane sets her industrial flashlight into the corner and rummages into her bag for a vile and a pair of tweezers. Her hands are surgeon’s hands, and at one point she was a doctor at a respected hospital before saving the life of a drug lord, and then ended up being a personal retainer. Such was her trajectory before finding her way here, sloshing through stale water and over barnacles, navigating through ghost ships. It is a simple task: pluck the dried stems of the virulent flower, put them in a container, and deliver it via a series of anonymous exchanges.

The Lotus rocks along the water. A wave pushes against her rusted hull, sending a metallic groan through the darkness.

“It’s not here,” Jane said, unemotive.

“Come again?” Leon says. He flashes his industrial light on the pedestal, cruising a circle of yellow along the remains of the vault as he does so. “It’s not like it could have gone anywhere.”

Richter hears sloshing at the far end of the hall, the sound of what seems like feet going in and out of water. Another metallic thump. He ignores this. It is always unpleasant being in these husks of ships. Thoughts of his part of the fee are the only motivator for stewing in this briny environ, smelling decaying fish and the earthy, slimy smell of long rotted and bloated bodies. Now that Richter thinks of it, they usually saw bodies float in the hallways in these ships, bloated and red, sometimes half eaten by crabs. Sometimes, when the ships are positioned at an angle, the bodies float on top of one another in a cluster of mangled limbs like discarded planks, loose skin still clinging on them like algae. This is probably the case, he thinks, hearing the water slosh outside the vault again.

“Look harder,” Leon says.

“If it’s not here, it’s not here,” Jane argues. Then she turns to them both, a sign that she is done trying to investigate the absence of the virulent flower, “let’s turn back.”

Richter shakes his head, “If we turn back, not only will we not be paid, but our reputation will be at stake. We need to look harder.”

“Perhaps it floated away,” Leon says, “no other explanation.”

Another metallic clang. Eerily calm debris skating through necrotic water. Leon is about to say something else, but Richter holds up a hand, listening not just for the illusion of feet trotting their water like their own, but for the pattern to prove it. It is there, slowly, as if the noise materializes and knows it is being listened to. Richter can make out a pattern, but this is broken by a series of loud clangs and, to his shock, a grunt. He looks to the others to confirm that they hear the sound, but their faces already tell him that he is not going crazy.

“Maybe it was taken already,” Richter says.

“I didn’t see any boats on the radar when we approached,” Leon says.

“Maybe they aren’t on the radar,” Jane adds, securing the empty airtight vile in her backpack.

Richter draws his pistol and the others followed suit. They step out of the vault and move in tandem with one another. Ghastly smells of rotted fish and crabs permeate the cavernous hallways. Richter figures this is what it is like being in a can of tuna fish. They came across a fork, and when they flashed light on either path, there was no difference; only the rhythm of the water at their ankles, a line of crabs scuttering in both directions on the wall, paint marks of algae growing over the unblinking and dead stares of fish. To their left, they hear another grunt amidst a scutter of sloshy steps, and the three of them engage in pursuit down the hall which leads into darker depths into the undercarriage of the Lotus. They have never needed to go into the lower docks of these ships before. It is of no interest to the three of them, and any more minutes spent in this aquatic mausoleum are better spent literally elsewhere. Yet they went in pursuit of their bounty, taking precarious steps down slippery, barnacle-crusted stairs as if their lives depend on it. It does.

Another sound to their right and Richter aims his flashlight down the hall. There, in a kaleidoscope frame of orange rust, silver fish scales, and black oyster shells, a figure stands, pale and nonplussed by the sudden light. It is a male, his skin so taut it looks like it clings to just his bones and nothing more. He wears a suit and button-up shirt that are heavily disheveled and splotched, brown, and green like makeshift camo. Water brushes against bare ankles with skin swollen and cracked, weeping blood over the salt-irritated open wounds like lines of cartography. He has a crab in his hand, its shell punctured with the white meat throbbing both in its exposed body and the man’s fingertips. Clumps of it dribble from his lips.

“Listen,” Richter begins, “we don’t care who you are or who your buyer is. Hand it over.”

“You’ve got it,” Leon says.

The man looks at the three of them, tilts a bald head with strands of silver sprouting like a weed. His eyes are blank, like those of a fish. Slowly, absently, he takes some meat from the feebly snapping crab and shoves it into his mouth, where he proceeds to chew not with his teeth but with his lips.

“Bring us the flower,” Richter says.

“Flower,” the man says, his voice sounding as if dragged through gravel. With gnarled and dry fingers dotted with crab coagulate, he points down the hall, deeper into the threshes. He repeats, “Flower.”

And then he is off down the hall, frantically splashing in the ankle-deep water, necrotic toes dipping into sewage and bacterial orgies. Richter rushes after him, his breathing suddenly labored by the enclosed space. Leon and Jane follow suit, lighting the way with their heavy-duty flashlights, rocking the circles up and down like an erratic buoy. The skeletal man discards the half-eaten crab over a shoulder and Richter smacks it away with the butt of his pistol. He chases the man two lefts, then a right, calling occasionally to the others so they can all help navigate their pursuit.

He turns a corner and stops short. The man is in front of a locked door, the remaining wisps of hair looking like antennas. He looks over his shoulder, sniffs at an oyster which has clung to his suit and knocks on the door.

“Flower,” he says again, his shaking eyes focusing on the sudden light of Leon and Jane’s more powerful bulbs. The corneas are hazy, and his nostrils flare like a curious beast above a mouth of broken glass.

With Leon and Jane at his side, Richter admits to himself that he felt a little better. He keeps his pistol aimed at the man, who waits in front of the door. The iron turnstile in front of the door opens with a powerful start and settles into a creaking rhythm. The door pushes inward and in the shadow another man appears, holding one hand over his eyes and squinting. He too is wearing a suit, but his clothes are less destroyed than the wraith’s. His skin, too, is the color of an elephant’s tusk.

He says half whistling, “Oh, Mr. Jiminy, what have you brought us?”

Richter says, “We’ve come for the flower.”

“Flower,” Mr. Jiminy says. He starts to giggle.

The man lowers his hand, blinks several more times to adjust to the light, and says, “Come in, come in. You’re letting in the stink.”

“You come out,” Leon says.

He appears more cognizant than Mr. Jiminy, acknowledging the three pirates with their lights and weapons. Trash and fish skeletons pushed up against the raised lip of the door.

The man speaks as if they knocked on his front door. “Now is not the time for that. You’ve come for the flower, yes?”

“We have guns,” Richter says, “we aren’t afraid to shoot.”

The man opens the door wider, revealing a maw of eternal black. He stands in front of it, framed by the oval perimeter of the threshold, like a man at the edge of the shore. Mr. Jiminy stares dumbly at them, splashing in the water.

He says, “If you are here for the virulent strain like I think you are, you know that shooting me will release the virus. You’d die before you made it back to wherever you’ve come from. But let me introduce myself. My name is Helmut Werzig, apprentice cartographer for the S.S. Lotus.”

“Apprentice cartographer?” Jane says.

Werzig grimaces, “Well, only cartographer. I try to be respectful. Come inside. It’s dry. We’ll give you the flower.”

Richter looks to Leon and Jane. He nods, they nod back. He says, “We’re keeping our guns.”

“I would hope so,” Werzig said, “it’s the only logical way. But we intend to be your friend.”

“We?” Jane says.

“We,” Werzig echoes.

Slowly, gingerly, Richter leads the way through the drowned hall. The ship rocks sheepishly, swishing the discarded wrappers and eyeballs from right to left and back again. The motion is more subtle here, being so deep into the ocean. Richter keeps his attention on Werzig, even as he approaches the clattering and giggling Mr. Jiminy, who stinks worse than he looks. Mr. Jiminy, Richter realizes, is simply a frantic but docile creature. It feels like he is passing the gaze of a child.

When the three of them step through the threshold, Werzig situated himself in the gap. “Not you,” he says to Mr. Jiminy.

Werzig shuts the door behind them, fastening it with laborious grunts before setting off into an even speed. Their circles of illumination only show parts of the room, fragments of a greater picture. In their three cycloptic visages, they saw tables, used sets of cards, and cups.

Werzig warns, “I’m turning on the lights now.”

The room blossoms into illumination with a sharp click. They are in a breakroom or a lounge area. Iron tables bolt to the floor along with metal chairs that resist the sway of a boat. Old electronics and amenities like a microwave and refrigerator take up space in the corner kitchenette, emitting an aura of neglect. The sink is bone dry. To the right are magazines and a lounge area. The magazines are crinkly from water bloat and the colors of the covers are faded with the briny water. Outside the steel door, Richter hears Mr. Jiminy padding away into parts unknown, no longer interested, nor seemingly offended, by his exclusion.

A phonograph is playing old-time jazz amidst the undercurrent of creaking metal. The place smells of heavily applied disinfectant, but this only serves to mask the stale, acrid smell of what only reminds Richter of a hospice. Werzig waits for them to repackage their flashlights, unperturbed that their pistols are kept out, before gesturing for them to follow.

Werzig begins, “Half of us believed in our country, the other half were cattle. Only those who went onto the Lotus willingly understood the virulent strain that turned the ship, and by extension their bodies, into a plague-bringing trojan horse. Oh, what pandemonium our sister ships brought to governments, what chaos they brought to the kings who choked on our blood.”

“There are no kings anymore,” Leon says, “not even during your time, either.”

Werzig stops, looks at his hands. “There will always be kings, sir. The world just calls them something different.”

“How are you all still alive? We hadn’t expected anyone to be in this ship,” Jane says.

“You expected to see a drowned prison full of bloated bodies, no?” Werzig says, “I cannot answer why some of us survived. Our medic has befallen an accident in the beginning. Consumed by those whose minds shattered in the first wave. They say all problems in a ship start with the kitchen.”

The three of them exchange glances. Already Richter is losing patience. He pictures Mr. Jiminy hunched over a cluster of crabs and barnacles, his feet entangled in briny seaweed, stupidly staring at the flashing colors with his milky eyes.

Werzig shepherds them through the cabin, which is an interconnected and seemingly preserved series of rooms. Some of the rooms remain as they are: bunks, latrines, rec rooms. The mess hall is a modest room meant to accommodate shifts of sailors, and it is small but contains an array of crabs, oysters, and flayed fish. They are all dead and simply organized, a display of higher cognitive function which gives Richter comfort.

Werzig continues, “Oh, it’s been hard for the past couple of decades. But the strain has done right by us, as we have done right by it. It has kept us young and spritely.”

He rounds a corner into another hallway. Now it is hard to triangulate exactly where they are in the ship, this once thought to be abandoned colossus. Werzig brings them to the heart of the domicile cabin, which is proceeded by the sudden introduction of light laughter and soft chatting, the clicking of lighters and following inhales, exhales. Richter exchanges glances with Jane and Leon. Have they really been surviving all along in this nautical mausoleum?

They pass open doors and in them, Richter feels himself being watched, even though none of the survivors of this strain seem to pay the three of them any mind. They all wear suits and dresses, much like Werzig, and have similar lacerations on the hems and shoulders, perpetual scabs of brine on the threads. Evidence of open sores on their pallid hands. In some rooms they dance and sway to the jazz music, couples embracing and pulling back as their hips swing. It is like a soiree, all contained in a seven-by-seven-foot space. A thin layer of water occupies some of the rooms, most likely from a leak between the walls with the rancid water outside. This seems to bother no one. In another room there sits a couple of people, faces unshaven but eyes focused, flipping through magazines and smoking long cigarettes. Barnacles creep up both the legs of the chair and their legs as if crystallizing both; a fusion of biomaterial.

Werzig brought them to a back room, which is the only locked space in this area. “You desire the flower, yes?”

“Yes,” Richter says.

He starts to open the door. It looks laborious, but the three of them make no effort to help.

“The flower is dead,” Werzig says, “but we are not.”

He opens the door into a small room. The lights are dimmer here, a marigold yellow. A cluster of people, about seven or eight, stand like totems on the floor. This too is waterlogged, although the murky water is void of any other living creatures or trash. They sway with the rhythm of the Lotus. Smears of green and red coagulate on the wall like a cluster of apostrophes and question marks. They stared aimlessly at their feet, shifting occasionally to the walls, twitching and scratching at themselves. Their attire is asynchronous with the likes of Mr. Werzig and the other survivors. Some wore flotation vests and windbreakers. When some of them turn, the light catches the carabiners still attached to their hips.

“What are we looking at?” Leon says.

Werzig answers, “The flower talks to us. It knows that it no longer lives in its base form. You will not be able to retrieve the flower because there is none. Instead, it lives with us, as vessels. For those who have become infected, the flower recognizes our drive to topple these kingdoms in the name of a bigger idea, bigger than ourselves. The flower understands this. The flower understands the need for propagation. In this sense, we are linked, each one of us here.”

“What about Mr. Jiminy?” Richter asks, “Are you linked with him and his madness too?”

“No,” Werzig says, offended, “his kind were slaves and prisoners, rapists and pedophiles. The kind we kept locked up. For us the flower was a gift, for them, these monsters in the old world, it was a penance. The flower rejected them. The virus ate away their minds like maggots, a psychic lobotomy. There is a point when we stopped needing traditional food, but they didn’t. They became ravenous, mindless creatures. Soon, they invaded our dreams, encroaching on the psychic unity the flower had given us. They are a virus within the virus. Hence the closed doors. Steel seems to help sever the connection to Mr. Jiminy and the others.”

“The others? There are more out there?” Leon says.

“It is a big ship, my pirate guests. Although I’m sure you already figured that out.”

“I don’t understand,” Jane says, addressing the swaying figures standing ankle-deep in the runoff, “these people… you keep them in the dark? Locked away? Are they like Mr. Jiminy, crazed, chaotic?”

Werzig shakes his head, “They were the crew that got here first.”

The totems idle stupidly, blank and absent. Their backs are cragged with split wounds. Saltwater drips the curves of their backs. A tangle of seaweed crawled up their arms and legs.

Werzig continues, “The flower wants us to propagate. Its strands have dried up and died because the hosts could not live. But we are stronger. We’ve embraced the flower and in turn, it has given us life. Now, it is time for the flower to leave this ship, just as intended.”

“What did you do to them?” Jane asks.

“We’re seeing if they turn into us, or them.”

Richter starts to back up. Briny water sloshes at his ankles. He raises a pistol to Werzig, alternating between his calm interior to the wraiths standing in the corners of the room. What has befallen their psyches to make them this way? They do not seem psychologically obliterated like the crab-eating wraiths lurking in the halls. They make noises that seem rudimentary, but with acknowledgement. This thought unnerves Richter, who does a quick cost/benefit calculation. He needs the money, as di Jane and Leon, but this… Richter feels as if he walked into a spider’s nest.

One of the wraiths turns, a tendril of drool trailing down its chin. Its eyes are milky, and it is bald. Richter cannot tell of the human that it once was. It looks almost batlike. He wants none of this. To exist in this drowned limbo is a fate worse than death. A barnacle pulses from its clavicle like an open sore. Richter looks onward, seeing now as his eyes adjust to the darkness that some of them are missing limbs, exposed spikes where the bone snapped and never healed over, patchworked by skin grafts of seaweed and fish scales. Mutants, they have all become mutants.

“We’re done here,” Richter says. He steps out of the room, feels the density of the thick water at his feet fall and then hit solid steel. Jane and Leon follow, each with damp pants legs and layers of sweat. The smell of rotting fish permeates throughout.

“Take us with you,” Werzig says, “let us propagate your world. You’d get our DNA. Make that cure you and the last group and the group before them have been trying so hard to find.”

“No,” Richter raises his pistol, “I said we’re done here.”

Werzig furrows his brows. The hallway amplifies his voice, which has taken on a grating tone. The jazz music reduces to a whisper. Around the corner, Richter hears movement in the water, the sloshing of soiree-adorned feet wading through fish guts and smashed oyster shells. The ship rocks as if trying to soothe a baby.

“Do you want to be like the last group? We don’t want to keep populating with whatever scraps of biomass we can get. We are a civilized culture, full of rational people. Don’t you understand what you are denying us?”

“I don’t like this,” Jane says.

Werzig steps out of the dark room and closes the heavy door behind him. The others start to appear in the doorways, standing idle, watching. Some have cigarettes balanced in their fingers, emitting sour odors of burnt seaweed. The group of dancers still hold onto each other, but now they stand like sentinels, ramrod straight, inactive department store mannequins.

Werzig roars, “We are existing on scraps!”

A hand stretches out, bony and pale. Her hand unrolls like spider legs, her wrist moving in short, skeletally stiff bursts as her bracelet rattles like Christmas tinsel.

“Take me,” she says, “I want to see the world again. Please.”

“No, you bitch,” another one says, throwing an old magazine into the water where it bloats and then disintegrates. The man has small razor cuts on his cheeks and chin, hiding underneath an attempt at a kept beard. His teeth have yellowed. “It’s Karl. Karl will survive in the new world longer and you will live through Karl.”

“We are one,” the dancers say in unison, turning their heads in Richter’s direction and then into the room across the hall with frantic, sudden movements; a moth suddenly taking off. Their voices are discordant, a mix of soft tenures of pleasure and groans of pain, “if one of us goes, we all go, and we will leave these old, bloated husks of flesh. We are one. We are one. We are one.”

Werzig says, “No. I found them. I deserve to go.”

“We are one,” the dancers chant.

The woman continues, “We propagate via fluids. Let me go. I am the sanest of us, and the most beautiful. This body still has more use.”

The man smoking the cigarette flicks the cylinder in the water, ignoring the feeble sizzle of smoke. “It has been of much use to us, Hilde, for we do not care about the open sores underneath that dress of yours, the seaweed coming in and out of your holes.”

The woman’s lower lip trembles, a flash of clarity. “Leave me alone, Gunther. I’m only human.” She directs her attention to Richter and the others. “Please. I’m only human. This flower is a rapist. Our bodies are prisons.”

“No, I found them,” Werzig says, stepping forward, “I am the most democratic, the cleverest. Hilde, you’d die in a gutter, naked and alone. Gunther, you’d get yourself killed in a pub brawl. And Karl, you will die because you will be outsmarted by the nearest con man. No, you fools, no. Me, Helmut Werzig. I will propagate our virus. I am the most hospitable, most amicable. I will eat with the politicians, rub shoulders with the union men and dock workers.”

“You are arrogant is what you are,” Hilde says.

Werzig says, “That’s the human in you talking about the human in me. We are more than that.”

“We are one!” The dancers yell again.

Hilde advances her jangled hand. She brushes a gnarled talon over Leon’s shoulder. “Please. I’m tired of living. This virus needs a new host, a better host. Let it find someone healthier. Please.” Then she blinks again, losing that trembling part of herself. She arches her back, bites her lower lip. “We can go somewhere dark. I know of a comfy place. Come into union with my body. That will solve everything for everybody.”

“We are one!” The dancer’s discordant voices start to break into laughter. They intertwine once more, flitting in the slogged room.

Richter looks down on his feet as they pedal back out of the hallway and the blank stares of Werzig and his companions. He hears Jane’s steady breathing behind him, the scratching of her backpack swaying like a pendulum. There is an absence of space behind the two of them and Richter looks back to find Leon still in the hallway, this drowned mausoleum, being grabbed by the gnarled fingers of the women and now by the starchy sleeves of the Gunther and his nicotine-stained teeth. His body is pushed in several directions, like a doll desired by multiple children. The dancers prance in the adjacent room, kicking up pebbles of salt water from their feet. Someone turned up the jazz music on the phonogram across the hall.

“Help!” Leon screams, “Richter, Jane!”

He falls backward and Werzig’s companions pounce on him as a trumpet solo reaches a crescendo. They drag him along the rusted hallway and Werzig stares above the tumble at Richter and Jane, his eyes unwavering and voracious. He maintains eye contact as he reopens the door to the mutates so the others can throw Leon in, his screams drowned by smooth jazz. He twists, writhing as fingers dig into his cheeks, reaching under his ribs. He fires his pistol into the crowd. The aggressors stop, and Karl looks down at his stomach, examining the bullet hole.

“Now Karl is leaking,” he says, nonplussed by the wound. No blood escapes his body. This realization causes Leon to squirm and begin weeping, his once hardened exterior reduces to madness, the aggressive encroach of the abyss. Karl picks Leon up by his neck, “If your mind doesn’t shatter, then the flower will take you, and Karl will be freed.”

“You popped him,” Gunter says, “now you’ve damned yourself.”

“No, no!” Leon shouts.

He fires again at Karl, who is only pushed back by the force of the blast, like hitting a sack of wheat. Karl grits his teeth and throws Leon into the vault. Glimpses of the half-consumed and stupid sentinels, their dolphin-like skin full of open wounds and seaweed, turn to glance at Leon, half aware of Leon’s intrusion into their cellar.

“Leon,” Jane shouts, “we have to save him!”

“No,” Richter says, “he’s already dead. Werzig said that shooting them will infect us. I’m taking him up on that threat.”

“We can’t leave him, Richter.”

“We can’t save him either.”

Werzig closes the door. The others brush themselves off, scraping off dried seaweed and clinging clams. Hilde’s jewelry rattles on a listless wrist. They straighten themselves and Werzig points with a gnarled finger.

“If they will not take us, we shall take them,” he says.

The others run after the pair, a flurry of dress shirts and bow ties, hems of glittering skirts. Richter and Jane retreat, moving past the cafeteria, bloated feet snapping at their heels. Richter sprints to the entrance and begins to turn the stiff, heavy wheel. His hands struggle to find purchase on the rusted spokes and latches.

“Open it, Richter! They are coming around the hall!”

“It feels so heavy.”

Richter grunts, feels fire ignite in his muscles. How had Werzig been able to open the door with such little effort? Richter is twice his size and more fit.

Jane rushes to him and holds a spoke. Spots of blood dot their hands as the rust cuts into their palms. They pull at the spokes together, heaving in unison. Richter puts his legs against the jamb and uses the leverage to pull his full body weight. In the corner of their eyes, Werzig and the others appear. Richter swears and with a final grunt falls onto his back, the wheel loosening. Jane opens the door revealing the dark void of the hallway outside like a black hole. A hot, salty gust of dead fish, exposed crabs and rotten seaweed sweeps into the lounge.

Werzig and the others crossed the room. Flecks of Leon’s blood coat Hilde and Karl’s fingertips. Jane cocks her pistol and puts it to her head. Her eyes are red with tears.

“Any step forward and I’ll blow my brains out.”

This stops the pursuers. Werzig steps in front of them. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would,” Jane says, nestling the pistol into her temple, “those flowers can’t invade my mind if my brains are on the floor, and I’d rather be dead than live in that cavern like some cattle.”

Werzig frowns, “Or you could just take us with you to mainland. Simple as that.”

Jane does not respond to him. She tells Richter to get up and he does. He watches Gunter and Hilde begin to twitch and tap their feet. Their nostrils start to flare. Hilde puts jangled wrists to her head and begins massaging her scalp.

She says, “Close the door, please. I can feel them outside, taste what they taste. Please. Cut off the link.”

Richter looks to the void. He remembers Werzig suggesting that the likes of Mr. Jiminy and the other people whose minds became shattered would begin to infect them, too. The gaping maw of salt and floating eyeballs is a noxious aura of protection. Slowly, cautiously, Richter and Jane step backwards into the dark hall, back into the bowels of the S.S. Lotus. Werzig appears on the threshold, lips trembling and eyes bulging. He descends into madness before their eyes. Wordlessly, Werzig shuts shut the door behind them, complaining about scraps, and leaves them in darkness. Once the door is fastened, a discordant series of shrieks and wails erupt; sounds of anger and sadness, of hunger. It is monstrous, beastly, full of gargling and like nails against the chalkboard. It makes Richter’s hair stand on end.

“Leon…” Jane said, fishing out her flashlight.

“He’s gone, Jane. Either he’s going to be one of them, or…” he brings out his flashlight, scans the empty hallway with its ankle-deep water and crust of barnacles, “or one of them. He was gone the second they grabbed him.”

They navigate through the darkness, their paths carved by the circular scope of the flashlights, side by side. Their ankles brush against strands of seaweed and half-eaten crabs dissected by withered, scabby hands. Pink coagulates of shredded fish bob along masts of barnacles. Each turn brings them to another corner, each a similar sight. The S.S. Lotus is a dreadnought, but no larger than a typical supply ship. These virulent trojan horses were built to mimic supply ships for this reason. Yet somehow, it seems labyrinthine on the inside, a complex network of twists and turns existing beyond all logic of dimension. Occasionally the ship will bob from a passing wave or would snap with random pinging of metal against metal.

“Here,” Richter says, “I think it’s here.”

Jane nods and they make the turn, swinging their cones of light with them like a lame limb. There, in the scope, stands Mr. Jiminy. A shattered mind, now holding a flailing fish in both hands and biting down on its shimmering scales, flakes and white guts popping from the side of his mouth. His milky eyes stare at them but remain as absent as before, a tongue lopping out from his lower lip.

“Flower,” he says.

White figures, all willowy and in torn cocktail suits, appear in the cones of light behind Mr. Jiminy. They tilt their bald skeletal heads and dropped whatever there are trying to eat. Blocks of barnacles, oyster shells, and twitching crabs fall at their ankles. They stand frozen in the light, blinking stupidly, tendrils of drool lazily dropping from their chins.

“Oh no,” Jane says.

At once Mr. Jiminy and the others start after them with long, stilted legs. The sound of breaking water trails in front of them. Richter and Jane break into a run, turning randomly, each trying to keep the light in front of them and stay with one another. Gargled voices echo metallically in the distance, piercing through the dark. Occasional laughter and giggles sound like broken keys on a piano. They continue to run, splashing through the ichor, crushing whatever runoff settled underneath the ankle-deep water. Wraiths appear in their cones of light, sometimes running at them in a white, stinking flash, sometimes in pursuit down another hall. It appears that their shattered minds cannot comprehend directions, having wandered so aimlessly around these subterranean catacombs for many years. It is the illumination which attracts them. Richter tells Jane to shut off her flashlight.

Now they wade through the darkness, gingerly turning corners once giggles and laughter subside down the hall. One of them occupies the same hall as Richter and Jane. The stink of rotting fish, while unpleasant, is a good indicator of their coming, and one of the wraiths comes so close that the shoulder of his bloated jacket grazes upon Jane’s nose. Richter puts a calloused hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming. Once the wraith passes, they continue their escape, eventually making their way to the familiar corner leading to the stairs. The blue-white glow of Leon’s markings looks like the golden rays of Heaven.

“Go,” Richter whispers.

They reach the foot of the stairs. The door to the middle level of the hip is ajar, having been thrown open in haste after they discovered the vault empty. Richter follows up the rear, watching Jane ascend the steps two at a time. Once he makes sure that Jane was well up the steps, he lifts his legs from the water and feels rubbery hands wrap around his neck.

“Flower.” A voice whispers into his ear. It is gargled, hardly a language.

Richter feels like one of the fishes or crabs in Mr. Jiminy’s grasp. With arms much stronger than the branch-like limbs he possesses, Mr. Jiminy slams Richter into the adjacent walls. Rushes of blood fall from his brow, and saltwater stings the open wound. He feels his throat closing, and Richter fires the gun at Mr. Jiminy, who only stumbles from the impact, unaware of the gunshot.. His gnarled hands are cragged, rubbery, and smell like dead fish. He giggles like a child amused by toy blocks. Jane calls after him.

“No!” Richter says, trying to pry Mr. Jiminy’s hands from his throat and face, “Get out of here!”

Jane stands on the stairs for a second. She locks eyes with Richter and understands. She watches Richter claw at the bottom of the stairs for a second longer, watches his face slam into the metal steps, his open mouth gulping the stale, necrotic salt water, and ascends the rest of the way. Richter fights for purchase, his body scraping against smashed oyster shells and barnacles. He aims his gun, fires two more times into Mr. Jiminy’s torso. Mr. Jiminy recoils, paws at Richter’s throat, and tears out a part of his carotid artery, tossing it aside like a slug. Richter gasps in a final pulse of energy and aims the pistol at Mr. Jiminy’s temple, firing. A flash of light, the smell of gun smoke dominates the salty, rancid air. Mr. Jiminy falls to his side. Richter leans on the steps, a gorge of blood rising into his throat, the sticky warmth of it trailing down his chest. With one hand on the bottom step and another resting on Mr. Jiminy’s dead body, he leans his head on a concave of barnacles crusted upon the wall.

He pictures himself looking at the ship from a bird’s eye view. Deep within the bowels of the S.S. Lotus Leon lay trapped like cattle, a food source for the strange commune of Helmut Werzig and his associates, or whatever they have turned into. He sits now at the bottom of the stairs, drowning not in these damned waterlogged hallways but in his own blood, never to see the shore again. And Jane, by the grace of whatever God may or may not exist, frantically untying their boat and starting the engine with bloodied, shaking fingers, the madness of the S.S. Lotus falling away in her wake.