The beach, now extending hundreds of meters from the resort doorway, shone white with crushed fish bones. Their desiccated bodies plated the bone sand like scaled armor. The sharp jaws and jagged ribs of wrecked yachts poked out of the slick mud.

As everything dried, baked under the desert sun, the toxins that had stripped that water to glass clarity concentrated in the remaining sea, so that at high noon the water was the color of a sunset and a chalky residue clung to anything that had been wet.

When the wind blew, that powdered bone carried the poisons right between our teeth, into the corners of our eyes. It flavored the back of our throats like a bitter pill. If you squinted and held your nose, it was paradise.

We turned to the beach looking for whatever might be left of our lives—or anything we might use to forge new ones. We ran past the old shoreline out onto the mud flat that had once been seabed and across the rainbow eye stones that had watched as our world fell apart.

The new shoreline rose and fell as if the earth beneath it rocked. It carved out twisting inlets and hidden lagoons. We followed it, hiking the topography of old seafloor, near the hills where the stones betrayed an ancient high-water mark that promised a future of nothing but sea. We came to a stretch of choppy shallow water surrounding the battered hull of a ship. It was larger than the yachts of rich musicians that had dotted the water before the flood. It had a round hull and two tall masts that trailed tattered sails like funnel webs. A third mast lay beside it, half-buried in sand. The wood was crusted with an armor of sprawling arthropods.

Alden waded out into the water toward the wreck. He crawled around the hull in search of gold and silver, but instead we found bodies—staring up out of the water, eyes like a thousand polished stones.

I stepped lightly into the water. I was scared to see my brother splashing, leaving a foaming wake that disturbed the surface. He bent and dragged his fingers through the rocks, looking for coins. I nervously filled my sundress pockets with pretty stones, my own small treasures. I paced the shallows and sat in the stones and twisted my hair, tasting that new chemical tang that hung suspended in the still air on the back of my tongue.

The way the water nudged the bodies, they looked as if they slept, and might wake and grab my ankle. Small brown birds with feathers as fine as hair bobbed their heads in the water and nibbled at the corners of their mouths.

Alden pulled his hands from the water, cupping them below his face and smiling for the first time since the flood. His fingers—wrinkled and stinking from the water—clutched a gold and pearl crucifix.