In her bedroom, she changed out of her damp capris into a dry pair. Still Eunjoo quietly observed. Calliope could feel the girl’s gaze boring into her as she grabbed toothbrushes, pairs of socks, clothes, books from nightstands, hair products, toys, and other trifles, cramming everything into duffel bags and backpacks, then tossing each hulking bundle down the stairs. She couldn’t think straight. She hadn’t eaten in hours, though she had no idea what time it was, and the gray murk emanating from the sky didn’t help. It could have been midnight—it could have been five in the morning. The surrealism of their situation sent her head reeling. How long until sunrise? She didn’t know if the sun still existed, though she knew its disappearance would have meant hers as well. Like the disappearance of all people besides her and Eunjoo in Albuquerque? In New Mexico? Farther than that? How many people were gone? She tried imagining an answer but couldn’t think beyond the immediate. Hunger. The little girl whose hand she held. Calliope had tried the landline, thinking perhaps only her cellphone service was down. No dial tone. She’d tried the television despite electricity outage. It was dead. Same with her laptop. Even the battery was dead. She’d searched the closet for a radio, but couldn’t find one. The car radio played static. In the street she’d screamed for anyone, Eunjoo looking on silently. She’d honked the car horn for a full minute. No one. Nothing. Nothing except her husband’s words scuttling through her memory like wire scratches. If anything happens, take Phoenix and go to your aunt’s.

The climate debate had soured. Superstorms had come like those that had launched millennia of prehistoric ice sheets, no matter what pseudoscientists and politicians had promoted about cyclical warming and cooling. The scientists had been silenced. Calliope’s mother had chimed in: It was fulfillment of prophecy. It was too late to discuss how or why, Andres had said, and Calliope had, for once, agreed. It was time to prepare for the worst: the walls erected, the massacres already enacted, and more planned. The crisis would come to their front door as it had already come to so many others—fires swallowing forests, shootings punctuating every border, Gulf hurricanes demolishing her childhood home stretching inland as far as the Texas desert, floods destroying every coast, squashing shorelines, sweeping children from their mother’s arms, officials invalidating US passports then, in riot gear, kicking in windows, burning down homes, first taking parents and grandparents while children attended school, then quickly, so quickly, murdering whole families in the too-bright light of day.

As a paramedic, Andres couldn’t abandon his post. He’d said if something ever happened, she should take their son to Tía’s hacienda in Silver City, three hundred miles south.

She’d reminded him they weren’t activists or agitators. They were safe.