After a while in the car, Patricia suffocated, but she couldn’t crack a window or Ernesto would grow weeds again. Taylor had fallen asleep with headphones on, behind the driver’s seat. Dorothea was telling a story about a woman who built a house in the middle of a never-ending landslide, and her story made their car go 300 miles per hour. Kawashima was busy driving. The only one Patricia could talk to was Ernesto, who kept almost touching her, in between pointing out all the things that had changed in the forty years since he’d been outside.

“… and most days the house rocked like a boat,” Dorothea said to Kawashima from the front seat. “You don’t need a porch swing if you live on a bottomless landslide.”

Maybe all of this suffering was Patricia’s fault. Two years after Diantha had led that assault in Siberia, the Pipe and Passage had suffered an accident. The borehole had started gushing methane into the atmosphere, a near-invisible geyser, and the satellite images were everywhere on the internet for a few years. Global temperatures had spiked soon after. Maybe if they’d succeeded in stopping the project, none of this would have happened. Or maybe Patricia’s EMP had dealt the people in Siberia just enough of a setback that they’d cut some corners to get back on schedule—and there would have been no accident if Patricia hadn’t disrupted things. Maybe Patricia killed her parents.

If she could explain that theory to Laurence, he would laugh at her. He’d have some reasonable explanation for how she could not possibly blame herself, at least not any more than everyone else on Earth. Laurence would spout facts about methane clathrates and the inevitability of those planetary farts getting released. He would point out the fault lay with Lamar Tucker and his crew, who decided to drill for methane in the first place. He would say something random and weird, to snap her out of it.

Whereas if she shared her theory with Ernesto or the others, they would just tell her blaming herself for the world’s problems was pure Aggrandizement. But her actions in Siberia had been pure Aggrandizement, too. She tried talking to Ernesto about her sense that we had broken nature—nature was a delicate balance, and we, people generally, had messed it up.

Ernesto’s response: “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”