She grabs a slip of paper, summons the Atlas, and steps inside, a long needle of loneliness running through her. When Father would get excited, that boy still shone through. He had a love affair with photosynthesis. He could talk about moss for an hour. He said that plants carried wisdom humans would never be around long enough to understand.

“Nannup,” she says into the void. “Australia.”

The Earth flies toward her, inverts, the southern hemisphere pivoting as it rushes closer, and she drops from the sky onto a road lined with eucalyptus. Bronze hills bake in the distance; white fencing runs down both sides. A trio of faded banners, strung overhead, reads,

DO YOUR PART

DEFEAT DAY ZERO

YOU CAN DO WITH 10 LITRES A DAY

Corrugated sheds mottled with rust. A few windowless houses. Dead casuarinas baked black by sun. As she approaches what appears to be the center of town, she comes upon a quaint red-sided, white-roofed public hall, shaded by cabbage trees, and the grass turns viridescent, three shades greener than anything else she has passed. Bright begonias spill from flower boxes mounted on railings; everything looks freshly painted. Ten strange and magnificent trees with intensely bright gold-orange flowers shade a lawn in the center of which glimmers a circular pool.

A current of disturbance runs through Konstance again, something not quite right. Where are the people?

“Sybil, take me to a farm near here called Scheria.”

I have no record of a landholding or cattle station nearby with that name.

“Backline Road then, please.”

The road climbs past farms for miles. No cars, no bicycles, no tractors. She passes shadeless fields planted with what might once have been chickpeas, long since burned up by heat. Utility towers stand with the cables snapped and hanging. Bone-dry hedgerows; charred sections of forest; padlocked gates. The road is dusty and the pastures are camel brown. A sign says, For Sale, then another. Then a third.

In hours of searching Backline Road, the only figure she passes is a lone man wearing a coat and what looks like a filtration mask, his forearm braced over his eyes against dust or glare or both. She crouches in front of him. “Hello?” Talking to renderings, to pixels. “Did you know my father?” The man tilts forward as though he is held upright by a headwind. She reaches to steady him and her hands pass right through his chest.

After three days of searching the parched hills around Nannup, trekking up and down Backline Road, in a grove of dry eucalyptus she has already passed three or four times, Konstance finds it: a hand-painted sign wired to a gate.

Σχερία

Behind the gate runs a double row of desiccated gum trees, their trunks peeled white. Weeds rise in tufts on both sides of a single dirt track that leads to a yellow ranch house with honeysuckle on the railing, honeysuckle on the siding—all dead.