They approached it. The carcass saunk into the sand. Coral tried not to breathe deeply. Flesh draped from the bones of the whale. The bones were arched, soaring like buttresses, things that made up cathedrals—things she had read about in the book.

Bracing his arm over his mouth, Mr. Fall began to pry at the ribs. They were big and strong. They made a cracking sound, like a splitting tree.

New Orleans gagged and fell back.

Other men were dropping. Coral heard someone vomiting into the sand. The smell was so strong it filled her head and chest like a sound, a high ringing. She moved closer to give her feet something to do. She stood in front of the whale and looked into its gaping mouth.

There was something in the whale.

Something deep in its throat.

In one pocket she carried a knife always, and in the other she had a light: a precious flashlight that cast a weak beam. She switched it on and swept it over the whale’s tongue, picked black by the birds.

She saw a mass, opaque and shimmering, wide enough it blocked the whale’s throat. The whale had probably died of it, this blockage. The mass looked lumpy, twined with seaweed and muck, but in the mess, she could make out a water bottle.

It was plastic. Plastic in the animal’s mouth. It sparked in the beam of her flashlight.

Coral stepped into the whale.

CHAPTER 2

Mr. Fall

Autumnus

They were pluckers. Their work was seasonal. They followed the plastic tide. After the floods destroyed the coasts, rewrote the maps with more blue, something was in the water that lapped at Ohio and Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Plastic.

People learned quickly that it was useful. It had to be.

China had stopped accepting electronics and batteries to recycle. Too expensive to process, too much of a waste of electricity and precious clean water. Acid seeped into the earth, and people held on to their computers and phones long past their breaking, knowing there would be no others. The people out in the country became a people of hoarders. They became junk lords. The center of the United States, which many people had not bothered with before, became the great vast orchards of scrap.

Scrappalachia.

The factories had closed to try to stem pollution, all the countries—even the States eventually—moving to ban new polymers. There would be no new water bottles, no takeout containers, no packaging or stereos or ball pits or flip-flops or dashboards or sunglasses or tubs.

But plastic lasted. It could be shredded, melted, pressed into bricks. The bricks could re-build the police stations, the government offices that had been torn down in riots or wiped out in waves. As for everyone else? Their lives were almost entirely junk. Finding and trading, making do, discovering new uses, haggling prices.

Mr. Fall was old enough to remember the water.