“It was how she was dressed. Strong. Muscles in her legs. I heard she fought off the Domins like a feral; killed one and ran. No Lowlander could do that. They caught her, though.”

“You’re just bored.”

“Yeah. Aren’t you?”

Yes, Sorrel thought, I’m bored, but she was tired of Sesame’s stories and signed off, sending SEW to her friend, their code for Sudden Ending Warning. She would sit outside for the remaining hour of darkness.

She opened the kitchen door and walked onto the hard dirt, which her grandmother had called “the garden” until the day she died. The light from the kitchen fell into the yard. She sat in her favourite spot on a large, smooth rock in the shadow of the house. Her Grammy had once told her why the rock was there – their house on Buttercup Avenue was on the Sabana Plain, laid down in geologic time by the Ama River, which had brought the big rocks with it. You could still see them around Bana – some had been coated white long ago and still had flecks of paint in their grooves and indentations. The Ama River had broken its banks the year of the Category Fives and killed an uncounted number of people who had been living too close. Now the sea was even nearer to the Ama River and soon there could be a huge body of brackish water cutting right through the city. Too much water and too little water, at the same time. Lowlanders were always thirsty.

But outside in the dark, she couldn’t stop hearing Sesame’s story-teller voice.

“They call themselves Toplanders,” she had said. “Rich people who went up to the mountains. After the tunnels in Bana collapsed.”

“Ridiculous,” Sorrel had scoffed.

They were still able to visit each other then, although they could travel only at dawn or dusk. They would often lie head to head on the cool tile floor at Sesame’s house, arms outstretched, pretending to be starfish.

“The hurricanes would have killed them, Ses. What would they eat?”

“I read they grow food.”

“What kind of crops would survive the rain bombs, the dust storms? It’s foolishness.”

“Rich people can do a lot.”

“They can’t do miracles. And what about the ferals? They don’t have them in the mountains?”

“I didn’t see anything about ferals.”

“These are just stories. What d’you have to eat?”

“Usual.”

“I’m so sick of alganola.”

“Yeh, me too. It’s why I like to think about people living in the mountains growing food.”

“Why didn’t other people join them up there, then? No way that could be kept secret from the Domins.”

“There are others up there too – different to the Toplanders. They’re like the Tainos – that’s what I heard.”

“The who?”

“Tainos! You were never any good at history. They’re the people who lived here before everybody else. Tribals, they’re called now.”