Lucy doesn’t pay much attention to what’s being said, although she gleans the gist of it: extreme circumstances but we need to be prepared, because global warming and projected sea level rise, so highway maintenance into the future. Someone—Lucy doesn’t notice who—mentions a bridge, but they’re howled down by what seems like everyone, for a reason Lucy doesn’t quite catch. Her mind is preoccupied with the fact that she’s sandwiched between Jem and Harry.

Is it her mind, though? Or is it her body? Its physical awareness—that deeper, but then also somehow shallower, level of consciousness that hijacks the hairs on your arms, the sweat glands in your armpits and groin—that kicks into action even when your mind is elsewhere. Because her mind is elsewhere. It’s with the octopuses, who have, it seems to Lucy, been waiting millennia for this moment. Who are one step ahead of everyone. Jem’s dad, Scott, had said that it was Darwinian. That it was some ancient impulse. But perhaps it’s divining intelligence. Octopus intuition. Perhaps they can read the light cast by the stars as it trickles, winking through the water, and know that the tides will rise then rise some more—have been waiting aeons for humans to clog the atmosphere and sink the neck. Turn it back into a narrows.

‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Jem murmurs into Lucy’s ear, drawing her out of her reverie. Apparently, the meeting’s over. Harry brushes against her arm as he stands. Lucy isn’t sure if it’s the contact that’s coloured him red like that or if it’s because the hall is so stuffy with recycled air. On his other side is Flo. She’s chatting to a woman Lucy recognises but doesn’t know the name of.

‘Yeah?’ Lucy asks.

‘I mean, they basically said that the tide and swell were a perfect storm, but it was nothing, and they have no plan for the future except to wait and see. It’s just like after all those fires in Victoria last summer, when the PM said that we still don’t know if it was global warming because there’s inconclusive proof or some shit, so we shouldn’t make hasty decisions about energy production, which will affect the economy. Instead, the council’ll make everyone cut the trees down on their properties to “minimise risk”, as if that’s not one of the things that’s contributing to the problem in the first place. Pack of morons, the lot of them.’

As he’s speaking, everyone begins filing outside. The school chairs are being kicked out of their rows and the room becomes a sea of plastic debris.

In front of her, Harry’s like a wall, blocking her view of the exit and the icy currents she knows are curling in through the open door because she can taste fresh water on the air—it had rained, earlier. It’s been a record-breaking week, apparently. And it’s already a record-breaking August, even though they’re only halfway through.