By Dawn

This trip is longer than the last one was. Or maybe I forgot how it was before. That was years ago. I thought we’d stay with the Kraft Tribe forever. I should have known someone would take us eventually, the way Fernan and the others took us from the Deltas. As with that journey, I cannot see to tell: shielded in this cart with its high plank walls. To protect us, they say. But to keep us in, too.

We stop frequently, to disperse seismic vibrations. It would defeat our new family’s purpose to hail a quake. Even still, I think we must have left what was once America and passed north into the wilderness. If I could stand on Tally’s shoulders, I could see some of it in the dark. I’d like to get her up so she can see too, but I won’t. She’s turned away from me and I hope she's asleep. I respect her beliefs, but she is my only friend now and she is too weak. I can see it in her eyes and it scares me. She won’t last much longer.

I know because I watched my mother starve to death. She was caught up in the same religious fervor, a late-in-life Gaian convert. She believed continued human survival was unethical. Given everything I’ve seen, stains smeared across mountains by human industry and habitation, and what my mother said about the way the world was, I understand. But I can’t believe it. Is that a moral failing? Even though I’ll probably spend the whole thing as a Finch, captive of one Tribe or the next, I want my chance at life. Is that selfish of me? Was it selfish of me to want Fernan? Or was that just foolish?

Before my mother died she gave me the silver locket. It had been her mother’s and her mother’s before that. As she consciously untethered herself from life, she passed this tether onto me. Fernan is why I still have it now, folded into a scrap of pola-net under my clothes.

I pray they won’t find it on me. When we finally reach our destination - whatever concrete haven this Tribe found intact - they will search us. Pure metals are forbidden, but I don’t believe a piece this small can affect my hormones. A Kraft took the locket when they first brought us in, but Fernan brought it back to me. I remember the way he smiled and then tucked in his chin like he wanted to hide. He always did that when he was nervous. I can’t think about Fernan now.

I pinch the little bundle of fabric near my inner thigh, finding the locket’s edges. The photographs inside are even more precious than the metal itself: printed on real paper. You can still make out two people’s faces in the pictures. I’ve memorized the details. The woman looks severe, helped by the uneven printing that makes her pupils too prominent, and her curly hair is pulled back by a large white bow. What I like about her is that the bow is crooked. The man’s face is harder to make out because the ink melted. He has a large nose, and kind eyes. Hair grows along the side of his face by his ears.

To remember them I have to trace the story back the way my mother told it to me. I run each link in the chain through my head often, to settle my mind.

My grandmother, who I never knew, was Lucia. She and her wife were political activists and they died at Hoover Dam. My mother said that before the Floods, people thought they could still stop it - what Sapians call the Catastrophe and Gaians the Rebalancing (or, the Vengeance). People tried to slow the pollution and mass extinctions they’d caused, but they could not see the Earth was already evolving to eliminate its parasite and predator: humanity.

My grandmother was lucky she did not have to see what came after: earthquakes that swallowed cities, the worldwide breakdown of electrical power and mechanics, and then the heat. The heat that made people’s blood evaporate and the protein in their cells cook like meat. My mother survived because she was a Finch, and so am I. Our blood evaporates at a higher temperature, so I can be outside unprotected, even with the sun out. Not at midday of course, but I can take a few hours after sunrise and before sunset. That’s why I’m here in this wagon, another Sapian clan’s hope for the future.

Lucia’s mother was Becca, and she was a filmmaker. This was before the Crust was toxic. They had all kinds of electricity and fuel and used money to build sets and costumes and imaginary places, just to entertain people. I think it sounds magical. If Geoscientists succeed in finding new magnets, electricity could be regenerated in small quantities. Maybe one day I could watch a movie. I’ve found them before, labeled discs in the landfills, but that’s all they are now without electricity.

Ann is next, Becca’s mother: a healer. People once experienced mental distress from overpopulation and technology, my mother said. They poisoned themselves as they poisoned Gaia. Ann helped ease their suffering. She was wise and gentle, but spent her life married to a cruel man who hurt her and himself. Fernan was not cruel, but I will not get to spend my life with him.

Ann’s mother Mary had a gift. Wherever she was, people would speak to her, share their stories. She followed an ancient religion, Christianity. When she was young, she worked on the first airplanes that flew through the sky. She had to dress a special way and paint her face with makeup and serve people, but she traveled the world.

Her mother, Naomi, taught children in dangerous place called Texas during a time of great poverty. She had moved there to wait for her husband to return from a great war, but he never did. She survived on her wits and impressive parsimony. In her time, women weren’t allowed to be independent. They had to be married to a man to do anything. Power was determined by strange things, like people’s gender or skin color. Now things are simpler. Strength is power. “The strong will inherit the Earth” - Fernan said that was in a book called the Bible. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen a book. Fernan said I’m one of the strong, and I guess he was right, because I’m here and he is dead.

The woman in the locket is Catherine, Naomi’s mother. She traveled alone in a metal ship from Valparaíso to New Jersey. These place names aren’t on any map but I remember them. Catherine married and took a wagon to a scarcely-populated frontier. She and her husband Ivan, the man whose eyes I think kind, grew their own food, built their own home, and made their own clothes. They worked every day, and the Earth was generous. Crops could be planted in fields that blanketed the horizon, so I have heard. There were fewer deadly gases in the atmosphere, and fresh water was plentiful.

It sounds like a good life. Catherine and Ivan knew they were working for something. Harmonious existence, survival for themselves and their posterity. They ensured it. From Catherine to Naomi to Mary to Ann to Becca to Lucia to my mother… to me. A Finch whose genome is over 25% non-human. Whose genetic material will be combined with another Finch, creating Descendants even less human, an accelerated evolution of the species, our only chance left: adapt or die.

I look up at the gap in the roofing, bright stars passing above. The sky looks lighter. Unless this new Tribe plans to die, we must arrive soon. I look over at Tally and see her watching me. I take her hand.

******

Helping Tally out of the wagon, I look around at the place they’ve brought us to. Yellow light edges into the sky and the Sapians guarding us start jogging toward shelter, looking back at us through the goggles that magnify their eyes. I see the edges of a mountain valley, sheer cliffs so tall I have to lean back to see the tops. The trees are big too, and ancient and proud in this eerie half-light. Through them I can see what used to be a dam. Water thunders over the wall that once held it back. The air smells fresh, and sweet. I know that means imminent danger, but I can’t help but close my eyes and inhale.

This Tribe’s shelter is a parking structure. Heavy light-blocking nets wrap the thing like a shroud, but I can still make out the old sign that its builders used to identify themselves: GreyStar Parking. It’s a good guess that we are now the honored guests of the Greystar Tribe.

Once we are on concrete the Sapians relax. They seal the net just as it becomes unbearably hot in the vestibule. They guide us out into the garage, in total darkness. As my eyes adjust, I can see shacks built against the walls on both sides, while the center of the ramped floor is open. The Greystar Sapians indicate we should follow them along this path.

As we walk up to higher levels, I sense people sticking their heads out of their shelters to look. I remember how Fernan led me to headquarters in the Kraft factory. He tried to take my locket, but saw how I looked when he did. He fought to let me have it, stole it back for me after. Later I believed he would be my story, that I could tell my own daughter as I passed the locket on to her.

And now I realize that I was a fool, enchanted by my mother’s stories. I will have no daughters, only Descendants. Catherine, Naomi, Mary, Ann, Becca, Lucia, and my mother are dead. Soon enough I will be too. This metal lump with decaying photographs won’t change that. Why am I so desperate to be a part of humanity, when humanity will soon be extinct? When everything we built and dreamed of and fought for was our own destruction? When we have no choice but to be killer or be killed, to survive or die? Why does it matter how many Ann helped, or what countries Mary visited, what causes Lucia fought for or who Naomi loved?

In front, a guard points out an area barricaded off from the other shelters. There are cots under a large tent, and the kind of mechanical genetic laboratory equipment typical of a Sapian tribe. The guards direct us to cots, patting us down as we pass them in single file. A Greystar woman stops me. She’s thorough, moving slow as she checks my entire person.

“Any pure metals? Natural material? Plants, seeds, nuts, oils?”

I shake my head no. She moves down to my lower body. First my left leg, starting at the inner thigh and working her way down. Then she moves to my right. She stops. I take a slow breath so I won’t jump.

“Huh?”

She’s turned to the side, looking at another guard, motioning her over. “One minute,” she says.

She skims the rest of my leg, completely missing the inner thigh. She looks up at me and smiles. “We’re happy you’re here.”

I can’t believe my luck. I sit down on my new cot and look around at the grey shapes filling in around me. Tally finds a cot near mine and I grin.

“They didn’t take it,” I tell her, and wonder why it matters so much to me.

I look at the ceiling and imagine the wilderness coming to life outside. Its terrible beauty yawning under the sun, while the remnants of humanity huddle in the dark, holding onto memories.