Any Farmers who survived the initial flooding, perhaps by climbing to the highest tiers of their enclosures, were dying as I watched. The Ross Sea drew the islands down in great upwellings of violet-colored froth. Geysers of water erupted from severed transit tunnels and ports. Cliffs of salt-encrusted granite heaved up dripping from the poisonous sea, then turned and settled beneath it forever, leaving oily residue and the tangled branches of dead forests.

I stood there for most of an hour, too shocked even to weep.

Chapter Twenty-Four. Turk’s Story

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SANDRA AND BOSE

Bose took her past the place where Orrin had once rented a room. It was a five-story walk-up in a part of town you drove through with your doors locked: windows like eyes shut against the sullen indifference of the heat-stricken street, a doorway littered with broken syringes. Up in one of those rooms, Sandra thought, in the long afternoons before the night shift began, Orrin must have patiently filled his notebooks, page by page, day after day. “You think he came back here?”

“No,” Bose said. “But I don’t know how well Orrin knows the rest of the city. He has forty dollars in his pocket and I doubt he ever hailed a cab in his life. He’s taking transit and he might have decided to stick to the route he knows.”

“Route to where?”

“To the Findley warehouse,” Bose said.

*   *   *

So they followed the bus routes Orrin once would have taken to work, hot streets clotted with traffic under a sky dark with thunderheads. The afternoon light was fading by the time Bose turned off into a neighborhood of single-story industrial buildings set back in lifeless yellow lawns. The buildings housed small manufacturers and regional distributors, none of which seemed especially prosperous.

Bose parked in the lot of a corner gas station with a coffee-and-doughnut shop attached to it. Sandra said, “Are we close to the warehouse?”

“Close enough.”

Bose suggested coffee. The restaurant, if she could dignify it with that name, held a dozen small tables, all vacant. The windowsills were dusty and the green linoleum was peeling where the floor met the walls, but at least the place was air-conditioned. “Better get something to eat,” Bose said. “We might be here a while.” She ended up carrying a muffin and coffee to a corner table. From this angle she could see the street, the long row of anonymous buildings on the far side, the threatening sky. Was one of these buildings the Findley warehouse?

Bose shook his head: “The Findley warehouse is around the corner and a couple of long blocks down, but the nearest bus stop is just across the street—see it?”

A rusty transit sign bolted to a light standard, a concrete bench tagged with ancient graffiti. “Yes.”

“If Orrin comes by bus, that’s where he’ll get off.”

“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him?”