Prologue

The breathing exercises aren’t working. For almost an hour now, as the days-long storm bears down outside, Charlie has looped the meditative count in her mind: in 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4.

She’s about to give up on sleep entirely when she’s startled by the percussive sounds of plastic falling. Stained cups and tooth-worn cutlery toppling off crooked, makeshift shelves into the living space next to her single bed. A guttural creak follows, a lifesaving levee irreversibly fracturing somewhere. Then a huge rush of water and the instant, visceral flush of pure adrenaline panic.

Charlie scrambles through the darkness for the emergency sump pump, already too late; its backup battery is fully submerged. Precious seconds wasted — the third-hand pump would never have been a match for the inundation now forcing its way through every unsealed crevice of her one-room flat.

A disaster-worn haz suit hangs from a rusty nail on the wall next to Charlie’s bed, waterproof boots tucked below. She reaches for them, steadies her only chair, climbs on top, and awkwardly pulls them on, making as little contact with the toxic inflow beneath her as possible.

From within the relative safety of the suit, she wades gracelessly through the rushing water and tries in vain to push the front door open into the street. She takes three big laboured steps backwards and charges it with her shoulder. Again. And again. She struggles for breath through the respirator as pain sears along her whole right side, but the door still won’t budge. In the now thigh-deep water, she can’t run at it fast enough to break the seal.

Above her gas hotplate, Charlie eyes a small rectangular window — the only one she has — leading out to the alley. A quick mental calculation tells her that she and the bulky haz suit won’t both fit through, so she reluctantly shimmies out of it, peeling the wet, moulded plastic from her now stinging skin. This leaves her in a dirty T-shirt and cotton shorts, with only waterproof boots to protect her from the onslaught.

She tucks her comm unit and govID into her right boot and hoists her increasingly waterlogged body onto the counter, silently pleading with it to hold her weight. The wooden window frame, swollen with moisture, barely budges as she fumbles to prise it open, nearly losing her balance in the process. Below her, the deluge continues to rise. Finally, after hammering the frame twice with her elbow, the window bursts outward, instantly amplifying the chaos outside.

Charlie pulls her upper body onto the window ledge, turns and heaves her legs through, one by one, swearing as she catches her left thigh on the latch and starts to bleed. She lands hard with a splash in the alley and begins to half-run, half-swim towards her parents’ home a few blocks away.

“Hey, you! Yeah, you! Please, you’ve got to help me!” a young woman yells from across the street. She is crouched on the plywood roof of a flat just like Charlie’s — they’re all the same around here, really — in her underwear, shaking with shock and cold, her arms curled around her stomach. “Please! I’m trapped! I’m going to die up here if you don’t help me, PLEASE!”

Before Charlie can decide her next move, the flimsy roof splits, and the woman releases a sound of blind terror before disappearing into the flat below, where her screaming abruptly stops. Charlie looks on in impotent horror as the whole structure yields and washes away in splintered pieces. She tries to convince herself that she would’ve done something to help the woman, but she knows that is a lie.

Her boots full of water, each step is ever-deeper quicksand. Despite the frigid air, her skin burns hot with the contamination that now saturates every pore, the weeping wound on her leg fighting to be her mind’s singular focus. With the neighbourhood’s limited power knocked out, the night around her feels complete.

At the next corner she finds a man weeping, holding the lifeless body of a child. Between heaving sobs he tries over and over to breathe life into the boy, but even in the darkness Charlie can see that the child is past saving. As she wades on, aware that she has witnessed something much too private, she can hear the man beseeching, “Come on, Kilo. Don’t mess around. We’ve gotta go now, buddy. Please!”

As her parents’ home comes into view, Charlie doubles over with physical exhaustion and nausea, her hands shaking. The screaming she can hear now is her own as she battles her way towards the absence where their front wall used to be.

“Mum! Dad! Hang on, I’m coming,” she shrieks desperately into the night.

Alarms and sirens are ever-present, with surveillance drones lighting up what is left of the street with searchlight beams from above. As one passes overhead and illuminates the flat, she sees the outlines of her parents and feels a wave of relief.

But when she approaches, the sickness returns, an insistent poison seeping out from its source deep in her gut, as the full scene comes into view. Her parents, hand in hand, lying in what is left of their bed. Both of them unnaturally still, bloated and blue.