THE WATER WILL COME The radio didn’t need to tell Parmesh Singh that. Pretty fucking obvious. The low-relief, sandy barrier islands were more or less already swallowed up, and there was so little protection from king tides that the water simply invaded whole neighborhoods. His parents had refused to sell in the ’20s when the writing was on the wall, and now all the motel could do was house the charity cases FEMA dropped on them and hope to dodge bankruptcy for a few more years. His dad blamed illegal immigrants and drug dealers.
23.6 MM PER YEAR Or .93 inches, said NPR. Scientists disagreed on how much faster the water might rise. According to the Tulane scientist being interviewed, the problem was that no human had ever seen an ice cap collapse before, let alone studied the dynamics that determined how quickly it raised sea levels. Insurers seemed to believe one thing while the real estate industry believed the diametric opposite and still scrambled to sell seaside properties, from Cape Cod to Houston, before entire continents of ice could melt into the oceans.
In the nearly four years since South Carolina, Shane watched Lali grow up. She stretched out, developed buds of breasts, learned how to read very well, and spoke a bit of Spanish for a while before a few girls at school overheard her and began the torment. She was smart but odd. She hated anything other kids liked and spent most of her time painting in her Slapdish worlde. Shane, of course, knew her password and kept tabs. Lali had built hillsides, a prairie, and weather that changed each time you entered. In this quixotic worlde, there were ruins to explore, most of which had incongruent medieval and colonial architecture. A family of pterodactyls would buzz the sky, and there was a strange black-purple pit in the middle of a church with no roof. It had what looked like teeth on the edges of its fleshy chasm, and when Shane peered into it, there was water or mucus below.
Lali was a solemn kid, so unlike Shane at that age when she’d made friends easily and, like her father, gabbed with anyone. She ached for Lali to find friends, but she kept talking about how she wanted to be homeschooled in the VR set. It was even more disturbing when she argued with her daughter about all the insects and plants tipping into extinction, year by year. Shane felt it was part of her duty to focus Lali’s attention on what would be gone by the time she was grown. But Lali said she didn’t care.
“How can you not care?” Shane begged her.
“It doesn’t matter. We have the other worlds now. They’re better anyway.”
It was such an obvious and unsparing thing for a child of her generation to say. How could her own daughter be such a dystopian cliché? Then again, what kind of mother had she been? She’d never taken Lali camping, the girl refused to hike for more than twenty minutes, and teaching her about songbirds, soil, or the savanna elicited eyerolls so dramatic it made Shane want to slap her.
Of course, as Lali grew, Allen’s youngest son, Perry, who never did manage to move out of his parents’ house, remained the same age. He lay there in her nightmares wheezing through a lung filling with blood. She and Allen sometimes talked about what happened. He didn’t haunt her so much as they had dream-arguments about why she’d done it.
6Degrees was supposed to start its new campaign in the fall of ’35, but a month before, Shane had mailed three postcards with pictures of San Diego—their signal that they needed to abort. Greetings from Tinkerbell, she’d written. This meant her source was telling her the op was in danger, which held off Quinn and the others for a while. A year of frustrated messaging followed. They kept asking what exactly her woman at the JTTF knew, and Shane kept feeding them bullshit. Just trying to delay.
By September, she was driving to check the mailbox in Tonganoxie almost every other day. Then she got a message from Quinn: the lottery ad featuring the small Asian girl, grinning and missing a front tooth as her mom scratched away at a potential fortune. They all had their photographic tags so the recipient would know who the piece of steganography was coming from. Shane sat down with her edition of The Stand and began to decode, only to quickly realize that the letters were coming out in a nonsense jumble. She sat for a long time trying to figure out if this was a bluff check or something had gone wrong with the communication, until, abruptly, it dawned on her: This message was meant for a different keystone. Which meant it wasn’t intended for her. Which meant the others were talking behind her back. Which likely meant they knew she was lying. She decided to confront the situation head on. She wrote to Quinn to tell her she’d sent this message to the wrong person. She asked what the keystone book was.
I can’t give you that information, Quinn wrote back. After decoding, Shane drove home and pondered. She watched Vic Love, The Pastor, and Tracy Aamanzaihou spar on a debate stage in Nevada while Lali did her math homework. Then Shane went to her desk, penned her message, and printed out the flyer right then.
Give me the keystone or I burn you all. Don’t fucking forget who I am.
In twenty years, she’d never been impulsive like this, and when she dropped the flyer into the USPS box that night, she knew the threat was irrevocable. She felt the claustrophobia of too many secrets and not enough allies. But she had to know what they’d said. Not knowing made the dreams with Perry so much worse. A week went by before she got Quinn’s reply: Willa Cather. My Ántonia. We should talk.
She went straight to the KU bookstore, found a copy, and decoded the flyer right there. She sat and stared at it for a long time.
Shane is out. Keep her dark. Same schedule. Central organizing goes through me now.
She didn’t have much choice after that. She told them they had to meet, the original 6Degrees. Minus Allen, of course. She chose the Gulf Coast city she remembered as a child because it was as anonymous as anywhere else these days. And obviously, she chose a public place.
The restaurant was perched on the edge of a bayou with nothing but dead cypress trees on the approach. Built in a time when developers figured the American shore would retain the solidity of a grade-school-classroom map, it was an upscale place she’d chosen on a whim, just far enough away from her motel so they wouldn’t happen upon where she was staying. They’d argued bitterly over shattering twenty years of protocol.
She found Quinn on the restaurant’s outdoor deck, overlooking the stewing Gulf. They hugged, and despite everything their embrace was tender. “Good to see you, sister.”
QUINN Thought Shane looked just awful. Old and overweight. She’d built this moment up in her mind for months, and here was the woman she’d so feared, a harried mother on the verge of collapse. Maybe they should have been feeding her even more money through Archie’s system. Maybe they shouldn’t have left a waitress spinning her wheels in a collapsing economy, which was probably what was fueling her shortsighted discontent. She was relieved that Shane at least didn’t have the kid with her, although at this point, there was nothing you could put past her. Shane had been unraveling ever since Allen.
“You too,” said Quinn. They took a seat. “So should we start with apologies?” Quinn asked her. “Because I can if you can.”
Shane swallowed. “Of course. I am sorry.”