“Guata, Ses, you should definitely be a writer.” They giggled at the forbidden curse word and their outstretched fingers touched.

“I think the rich people just left and there are no tribals,” Sorrel said. “They would have died in the heat or the storms, or the ferals got them, or they starved to death.”

“People always find a way. I heard the Toplanders are in that old army camp. You’ve seen it on SATMAP.”

“Foolishness. The Domins would definitely find them if they were at Cibao camp.”

“They have slaves. All women. And there’s a terrible man up there.”

“Just stop, Ses. Monster stories.”

She had not seen Sesame in person for more than a year and she missed her, if not her fantasies.

Now she heard the noise of working people going home after a night of work, some on foot, some on skateboards. She liked to watch the young workers who had enough balance and strength to skateboard. She could hear them jumping over the cracks and buckled asphalt in the road and she thought of the Tribal girl that Sesame told her about, fighting like a feral, running, then still being caught.

Could there be people, maybe even young people, living together in the mountains, outside Domin control? There were caves in the mountains, so shelter was possible, and there were simple ways to condense water – every school child had to do basic survival training. But what was there to eat in the mountains? Would it really be so much cooler? What would they take with them? What path would they follow? Every night they would have to find somewhere shaded. This was all foolishness. That Tribal girl. The Domins would have staked her out on the Burning Rock Plain – no witnesses, no questions asked – and left her there to sizzle up and die. The whole idea of the mountains was too dangerous. She turned her thoughts to Bibi’s return and what they might eat. The rock she sat on still held some of the day’s heat.

She loved rocks. Her clearest childhood memory was of a shallow hole she had scraped out under a rock when she’d been about six, living somewhere else. She had been able to crawl inside the hole and lie on her side, knees to chest, the rock almost touching her shoulders. The darkness under the boulder was different from the night outside. The earth had cradled her, and the rock had been like a low sky.