They’re sick, they’re dying, and they don’t care about The Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales. The plenum of proof is written on all their faces, and in the empty seats, which outnumber the full ones.

“We can try another story next week. Which one would you like?”

They file out like zombies, not saying a word.

Brisbane can’t blame them.

One of them stops and tugs at Brisbane’s sleeve. Myra.

“Cleverness… didn’t mean the same thing back then as it does now,” she says. Then she’s gone.

What a waste. A generation of minds, gone. Brisbane himself has seen the telltale wrinkle of the skin on the inner crease of his elbow. Given time, he’ll be as wizened, as skinny as anyone in the Tehani community. He can’t stop thinking about death, but that’s probably on everyone’s mind.

He packs up his stuff and leaves the school after his children. The sun bears down like it’s trying to purge the land, like some biblical shit. But it won’t work. The poison is here to stay, and it will be here long after government-backed private security forces incinerate the last bodies and remove the topsoil. It’ll be ironic if they choose to load it into a rocket and blast it into space – collision course with the sun, back to sender. Safest bet.

He walks briskly, just short of a run, down to his home. Five years he’s been in Tehani, and this house, built for him by the miners, represents… all the promise. Dashed, as it turns out.

It’s like that ancient song. Brisbane can never leave. The skies are constantly criss-crossed by drones, a complete lack of subtlety on the part of MaxGalactix.

How the Tehani signed a contract like the one they did baffles Brisbane, but him being employed by the Miners Association put him under the umbrella agreement. Which means if he gets contaminated by the products of the processing plant, he has to remain within the Tehani Community, even if this means death. This is couched in the language of harm prevention or spread of contagion blah blah blah, but it’s damage control. It’s the story they’re concerned about, not the health of the nation. Meanwhile, Yan Maxwell is safe in his space station on Mars or wherever it is that he lives these days.

He sips water from a glass he left on the counter and starts to contemplate dinner. A church bell goes off and keeps ringing for longer than Brisbane would have thought necessary to call the faithful to a midweek service. Town hall meeting, then.