Now you can’t help yourself. You start crying, and it’s embarrassing, how you’re powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you’re still cradling her.
“I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.”
Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you’re surprised to see the reverend is also crying.
“I carried her out and handed her off. I never found out what happened to her. I’ll never know what happened to her.”
A soft smile folds into Andrade’s cheeks and the deep lines of his face catch his tears. He puts a hand on your shoulder.
“Despite all the mumbo jumbo I just talked, remember, brother, you are alive. You are alive, and as long as your lungs draw breath, you have love in you. And you have hope. No man or woman is beyond love or hope—I firmly believe that in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Every last person is worthy and capable of redemption. People might think that’s soft-headed, but it’s actually realistic. It’s the only belief I’d gladly die for. It’s never too late to begin again. You proved that to that little girl.”
He laughs heartily. In the winter, the sunset seems to change every day. This one descends like a hazel shroud, shadows gathering like the dark traces of a storm in its becoming.
He pats you on the shoulder. “Let’s go get a sandwich, Keeper. I’m hungry.”
You trace your footsteps back over the field, boots crunching in the snow through the descent of night, which looks like a pool of mercury spilling across the heavens.
Book V 
THE LONG WAY HOME
The New Yorker
A YEAR OF WONDERS
On the Unraveling of 2036. How Close Are We to the Brink?
By Moniza Farooki
October 27, 2036
There are years that simply rock the world, when events collide to produce unrest and dislocation on scales outside the imagination of those living at the time. Nineteen fourteen, 1968, and 2020 all come to mind. In 2036, two years of the highest food prices since World War II triggered famines in nine countries, the worst downturn since Covid-19, and at least three documented genocides. The planet is awash in civil wars, failed states, low-grade insurgencies, mass migration, and frightening xenophobic politics. Before 2036, the Nigerian civil war and the breakdown of the Arabian Peninsula had nearly obliterated those nations and inundated their neighbors with millions of refugees desperate to escape the bloodshed. The Chinese government continued its onslaught against its own growing internal revolt. Jakarta suffered the worst cholera outbreak of the twenty-first century after Typhoon Bini caused the wholesale collapse of seawalls. After decades of crack-up, the shards of the European Union appeared to be reuniting, born again in the image of Norwegian prime minister and convicted mass murderer Anders Breivik, whose government, fueled by a resurgent oil and gas economy and a mastery of social VR disinformation, has spread its venomous ideology across the continent. Hanging over all of this has been a US presidential race, which arrived like an ominous comet, with a reviled authoritarian president being belittled and homophobically denigrated by a wild-eyed former actor turned theocratic fascist. Little did we know the self-reinforcing crises of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF 2036, VR ENTERTAINER AND REPUBLICAN presidential candidate The Pastor held a rally at the North Charleston Coliseum & Performing Arts Center in South Carolina in which he declared, “This president will bring our economy roaring back to life with the earth’s bounty of gas, oil, and coal. He will feed the hungry and clothe the poor. He will enforce Christian will on America and American will everywhere else, and he will do so with the ultimate weapons if God calls upon him to.” It would be his first reference to the use of America’s nuclear arsenal but not his last. As he stormed through the primary, laying waste to perennial also-rans such as Senator Marco Rubio and establishment props like Congressman Warren Hamby (who would soon kiss his ring, literally, when selected as his running mate), The Pastor mentioned atomic weapons 211 times. His Slapdish worlde now implies that he is the Second Coming, and that Revelation will begin to play out when he is allowed access to the nuclear football. “Jesus came to John wielding a sword, and great storms and heat and fire descended, and those with doubt suffered like no humans had ever suffered before. For I am the Power,” he screamed, “who will deliver oil from the ground, life to the unborn, security for our borders, and the justice of an awesome God!” His supporters thundered their approval, writhed on the ground, spoke in tongues, and held signs proclaiming him not The Pastor but the Christ. He won the South Carolina primary by twenty-five points.
ON MARCH 5, AS THE PASTOR SECURED AN INSURMOUNTABLE delegate lead, Los Angelenos took shelter. For Californians, the Big One has always referred to the fury locked within the San Andreas Fault, but after the Los Angeles megafire it got reappropriated, even as the fire set the city on a rebuilding spree that would have made an Egyptian pharaoh blush. Yet, another Big One lay in wait. Atmospheric rivers have lashed and drowned California for generations, rainstorms of immense power that can drop millions of gallons of water in the span of a day. Scientists called the worst-case scenario ARkSTORM, a nine-hundred-year flood event that could overwhelm the state’s aging flood control infrastructure. Climate change made this biblical event that much more likely.
“We knew this El Niño year was particularly dangerous because the equatorial Pacific hit record-breaking temperatures,” said former NOAA chief Dr. Jane Tufariello. “It’s intensifying the drought devastating Asia and fueling unrest in China, but it’s also juicing the atmospheric rivers. We saw ARkSTORM coming, but that’s different from being able to do something about it.”
Mary Randall once called Tufariello “the best scientist in the government.” She has served presidents of both parties and may have the broadest institutional understanding of the climate crisis in the world. “I’m not shook by much,” she said. “But when I saw this coming, I was scared.”
The behemoth storm came whipsawing out of the Pacific, strafing Southern California before bouncing back briefly to make full landfall just south of the Bay Area. The rest we know.
In the course of two weeks, the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta transformed into an expanding lake of destruction, overwhelming a suboptimal system of levees and canals. Three million people living in the Sacramento Valley were given as little as thirty minutes to gather belongings and flee. When a levee breaks it sounds like an explosion that never ends, and what flows forth arrives with the violence of a tsunami. Hundreds died in their cars and homes, while floodwaters swallowed escape routes and left millions stranded without access to electricity, food, or drinking water. For hundreds of miles in every direction, corpses would be found in attics or floating miles downriver. Sacramento was underwater. One could look to the horizon and no longer see the Central Valley, just this new cold inland sea.