“But I can see it’s very painful for you. Everyone talks about their life before—why can’t you? It’s totes unfair! Why did you stay when Rousseau was so unreasonable?”

“Why stay?” She straightened to study me a moment, then let her alarm ease into rueful envy. “Oh, my dear girl. Be glad you don’t remember what we’re all in hiding from.”

Now she’d lost me. “You mean, the weather?”

“That’s only the half of it! No, you can’t imagine what it was like.” Her gaze lifted away, toward the surrounding glass towers and some dark recall of her own. “All the years of disintegration. The paranoia. The raw hatred. The political repression. The rule of tyrants. The death of democracy.” Her low voice hardened to a near growl. She grabbed my arm, her stubby fingers digging into my wrist with a gardener’s strength. “The scramble for high ground. The hoarding of resources. When you’ve lived as long as I have, my dear—after all, I’m the eldest here at Unca Joe—you’ve had the misfortune to have watched too many lovely things be destroyed: relatives, friends, a once-admirable political system, the moral fabric of human society, and finally, our planet!”

“But it’s better now, right? Or it will be!”

She shook my arm as if I wasn’t listening hard enough. The wide brim of her hat knocked my nose. “At least at Unca Joe, I am still a person!”

I stared at her, like she’d slapped my face. Maybe I even looked scared.

She glanced down, saw how tightly she was holding me, and pushed my arm away. “Sorry. I . . . get carried away. It’s still . . .”

I waited, but she didn’t finish. And I couldn’t think of what to say.

She looked away down the rows of vegetables for a long while, then sighed and said softly, “Is this a new idea for you, then? That as bad as things are for us here, we’re better off, that we have more freedom here than we would elsewhere?”

Freedom? Morality? Democracy? My head was spinning. It was one thing to claim, like Jake and Rubio, that the Island was the only place they wanted to be. Another entirely to suggest that it was some sort of last refuge, not from storms or plagues but from the rest of humanity. The old woman was definitely off the rails, but not with some generic madness. She had a cause. Not even Rubio harangued in such broad and grandiose terms. I could see why Rousseau had made her tone it down some, but . . .

“Wouldn’t Rousseau be in favor of that idea?” I ventured. “It speaks well for the dens.”