‘Fuck, what happened to haggling! How about twelve?’ He knew he had some change in his pockets.

The Korean grinned. ‘Thirteen fifty. Final price.’

‘Fucking rapists,’ the Rhino grumbled, holding out the greasy dollars and mining his pockets for change. He found a couple of local two-dollar coins. They looked like tiny gold dubloons. ‘ Kamsahamnida, compadre.’

The shopkeeper blinked. ‘Cheonmaneyo, American.’

*

The Korean had been generous, adding a couple of extra wings to the Rhino’s order. He was still licking the thick, tangy sauce from his fingers when he arrived back at his boat, at the Gonzales Road Marina. Like so much of the city, the marina was a recent addition, a temporary floating dock, not much more sophisticated than the jerry-rigged Mulberry harbours they’d used after the D-Day landings. Except that this one had lasted three years rather than just a few weeks, in spite of Darwin’s spectacular tropical storms. It had grown, unregulated and unplanned, over the mouth of a wide inlet that ran north from Frances Bay towards an older, more established canal development.

An almost incoherent system of locks supposedly allowed boat owners further up the river to negotiate passage out into Darwin Harbour, but the arrangements were so arbitrary that most of those with the money had long ago berthed their vessels elsewhere, while those without had simply given up. Rhino had never seen the locks open, and a couple of supposedly mobile stalls that had set up shop on one of them, selling dry goods and small marine supplies to the boats tied up at Gonzales Road, had taken on a very permanent appearance. As he squinted into the glare, he noticed for the first time that a dredge had pulled up on the marsh flats across Frances Bay, on the edge of the small national park over there. Perhaps the mooted extension of the crowded marina across and into the park was going to happen after all.

The floating walkways undulated beneath his deck shoes as he stumbled home, the latter being a small cabin cruiser he’d liberated from the ghost town of Winchester Bay, a couple of hours south of Seattle. He and Jules had salvaged the boat upon hitting the West Coast after a two month cross-country hell drive. Piloted it across the Pacific with no intention of ever making the return voyage. Not after New York.

He nodded to a couple of his neighbours, other Americans mostly, although there was also a small community of displaced Mexicans at Gonzales Road, refugees resourceful enough to have bought, fought or simply sailed their way out of the post-Wave collapse and into the safe haven of Sydney. His immediate neighbours, the Gueros, had owned a sizeable fishing company in Mexico before the Disappearance, and had come north after escaping to Sydney, hoping to break into the industry here. The fact that they were his neighbours spoke poorly of their success.