It really had felt like the ocean was reclaiming the shore. The swell, kicked up by the tight whorl of a low pressure system somewhere near Antarctica, shifted and heaved and looked like the rounded backs of giant grey elephants stomping across the horizon beneath the low-slung clouds. The height of the tide sat the waves so close to the shore it disappeared completely; the waves exploded on the jagged cliffs rather than the beds of rocks that sat staunch, deep below the king tideline, and on the dunes rather than the beach, which no longer existed. The dunes began to dissolve. The marram grass, which usually bound them, was ripped out in clumps and tufts, and the boobiallas were shredded to their roots and then dragged out to sea.

Most shocking, though, the biggest of the waves trickled down the other side of the dunes and then crept across to pool on the black bitumen road in one part of the neck. The pools, augmented by the incessant rain, began to flow towards the tide-bloated bay and then blend with it, and so became inlets of that other shore. The inlets kicked up in spray under the tyres of the cars that sped along the highway and would soon rust if they weren’t hosed off. And the inlets made everyone wonder about the future of the neck, which suddenly seemed so precarious, what with the state of the planet and all. Hence the meeting.

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.