Although she regarded the historical websites as no more than a collection of myths to distract everyone from the present, she loved to read them and always started there when she browsed: clear water in rivers and streams, stored in reservoirs then sent to kitchens and bathroom through pipes. No limits on how much a person could use. Meat eaten every day; pigs and chickens raised in buildings, eggs a boring breakfast food. Felines and canines were “pets” living with their owners. It was at least a year since Sorrel had last eaten a starving baby feline, caught by her mother on the way home from work. Parks and museums and churches; films and plays and concerts. Cars everywhere, people flying in airplanes – airplanes! – to visit family abroad. It was even harder to imagine that people used to fly to their island to lie under the sun on a sandy strip of land they called a beach.

And the hair sites: women with hair that fell to their chins, their shoulders, even to their waists – hair long enough to make into all manner of designs: plaits and corn rows and bumps and locks and weaves and buns and French braids; hair that women washed every week, not once, but twice each time, using conditioners and potions, which had to be rinsed out with drinkable water. Sorrel loved the styles called Afros, which were like halos – when hair was part of a woman’s beauty.

She’d wonder which countries were the luckiest, out there, behind their closed borders. Was it easier in the places with winter? Some were icebound most of the year and could grow no food, but they had more water. Was it better to be inland? Here there was the relentless swell of the sea, ever closer, ever higher.

Heat radiated off the walls and she pulled the desk to the centre of the room. Time to get down to business. She logged into Level 3 and went to SATMAP to get a bird’s eye view of the island, knowing the images were between four and six months old. Only Level 1 would guarantee a realtime view. She was sure she could break into that, but it was too dangerous to try while they were still under Domin surveillance in the city. But still, there was the encroaching sea, the battered Sabana Plain on the south shore, the mountains rising to the north. She could see the roofs of the old hotels and the tower at Caicu Airport, now half underwater, with large mats of seaweed clustered around its sides. That kind of seaweed was toxic. Every year a few starving people were seduced by the easy harvest and died, their fingers, toes and lips turning black.