Most of the people were native to this part of India. Some helped each other and traded what they had. Some took pity on the northern refugees, but others wanted us gone. Growing food was difficult. All plant life struggled. Only the hardiest of vegetables survived, and, for the most part, they were small. The only animal life anywhere near Bangalore were pigeons and rats. But a rat made a good meal. And we carried on. For what reason, I couldn’t say, but my remaining family kept on going.

  Jahi would always say the disease was horrific. He said the disease spread like wildfire in the last couple years of the war. It was this that actually ended the war. There weren’t enough people left to fight. If anyone caught it, they were dead within a couple of weeks. It essentially ate your insides. Most died in excruciating pain. Some of the lucky ones were killed by merciful family members. Those that survived the disease had to contend with other types of sickness brought about by contaminated food and water, the toxic air or radiation. People seemed to die faster than they could be replaced. Most people saw no point in having children. One survivor from Jaipur decided to venture back north. We’d been told by the last survivors to head south, that up there was now a toxic wasteland.

  The day after Jahi returned from gathering our supplies, the weather turned foul. Jahi decided not to go and get the other bags he’d hidden. It was stormy with rain that blew down from the north and carried toxic fumes. We got this every now and then. Sometimes it didn’t stop for days. We covered up our rain barrel with a tarp and stayed on the third floor of our new home and waited for the poison rain to end.

  Randhir slept while Jahi told me stories. I loved his stories, even though most of them were sad. Sometimes he became particularly prophetic.

  “Better days will come, Aashi. Nature is resilient and restorative. All the beauty and life that once thrived will come again. I’m sure of it.”

  “Is that why you carry on each day?”

  He looked at me confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you continue to live despite all that has happened, all you have seen and lost?” I asked.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he responded, grabbing my hand. “All you’ve ever known is this world. The world of before is but a figment of your imagination gathered through stories and the pictures from the books you love so much. Which one of us has lost more? I consider myself blessed to have been alive to know what the world is capable of being. I carry on because I believe that there’s a reason for everything. You can call it the will of the gods, or fate. Things may seem bleak, but a better future is possible. I may not live to see it, but I believe it to be true and so should you.”

  I wanted his optimism and faith. I just couldn’t understand why, if there were gods, they would allow us to survive in spite of all our sins. Why would the gods create a species that destroyed the very home they created for them? Yes, we’d created wonders and were capable of great things, but our imperfections outweighed the good.

  Jahi turned to lie down and nap. The rain had let up a little, so I decided to explore. I grabbed our tools and broke the lock on a door that we hadn’t opened yet. It led to another set of stairs, which I followed up to a flat roof. If we could find the materials, it would be possible to build a garden up here, safe from other people.

  I looked out across the ruined core of the city. Most of the taller buildings had fallen over already or looked like they would any day now. Dead trees outnumbered the live ones. The dominant colour was grey. The river and lakes around the city were lifeless with dark, soupy waters that reeked of decay — a persistent smell that penetrated every corner of the city.

  I started back down but stopped when I heard voices and footsteps coming up the stairs. I hurried to wake my cousins. Jahi grabbed a blunt metal pipe, and Randhir picked up a hammer we kept with our tools. They told me to stand behind them against the wall. I grabbed a piece of concrete that had broken off a nearby pillar.

  Five men soon appeared at the top of the stairs. Two of them were armed with knives. The others had objects similar to what Jahi and Randhir held. Each of them was filthy, with torn clothing, missing teeth, visible scars and frail-looking bodies. Jahi told them to take the food and supplies and go. They continued to stare at us. Jahi tried in English.

  They moved to circle the three of us, two of them grabbing our bags. One of the men with the knives kept staring and pointing at our supplies. He was the dirtiest and largest of the five and had a mean face. Jahi moved in front and kept motioning for them to leave. The largest man lunged with the knife. Jahi dodged and hit him squarely across the head with the pipe, and the man collapsed. Jahi grabbed the knife and sprang back up as the others moved in to attack.

  I curled into a ball and hid my face. I could hear metal hitting metal, shuffling feet and groans. Then a horrific scream that I thought was Randhir. I got up, with the concrete chunk in my hand, but it wasn’t Randhir. Jahi had just stabbed the large, mean-faced man through the chest, and he fell to the ground. Another man hit Jahi in the back of the head, knocking him down, and Randhir had one on top of him. I rushed forward, and with all my might, hit the man in the back of the head with the chunk of concrete. He collapsed with a moan. Randhir was bleeding from his shoulder and a gash on his forehead. He rose slowly and picked up a knife with his good hand, but I saw movement just behind him. I screamed, but too late. Randhir was stabbed through the back with a wooden stake. I grabbed a wrench from our tools, darted forward and swung the wrench with all my strength. The man who had stabbed Randhir keeled over but not before hitting me so hard in the gut that I collapsed, unable to breathe. Someone grabbed my hair from behind and dragged me up with a knife at my throat. Across from me, Jahi was badly wounded and was stumbling, trying to fight off two of them, and Randhir was trying to get up, grabbing at their legs. One of them kicked him in the face.

  I started crying. They threw me against the wall. I hit my head hard and fell to the ground feeling dazed. With my blurred vision, I could see one of them grab Jahi, who was barely conscious now. I saw Jahi’s face quickly change — he grimaced and let out a gasp. One of them had stabbed him in the back of the neck. Life drained from his eyes. I struggled to get up, but my head was spinning and someone kicked me in the side.

  Randhir was trying to grab my hand, and as I struggled to reach for his, I was kicked again. Randhir tried to mumble something to me, but they kicked his face as they stabbed him in the back repeatedly. All fight and strength withered out of me and I sobbed, wanting to die too.

  The men laughed. They grabbed Randhir’s and Jahi’s bodies and dragged them across the room. The man nearest me punched me in the face and I slowly lost consciousness. The last thing I saw was two bodies being thrown down the stairwell.

  Seven

  Ontario

  My alarm buzzed, indicating the start of a new workweek. I reluctantly got out of bed and went about my morning routine.

  Shower. Check.

  Oatmeal with some berries. Check.

  Dressed in the standard dark-blue pants, light-blue collared shirt, black shoes. Check.

  Out the door at 7:45 a.m. for the short walk to the tram. My housing complex looked more or less the same as all the others around. Every building between ten to fifteen stories in different shades of blues and purples. Some had round balconies, others square. Between the blocks were parks, gardens, picnic areas and stores for basic goods. At the top of the buildings were solar panels and small wind turbines. The main thoroughfares had the shiny silver trams. They moved about the zone, conveying people to the Hub, the centre of all activity in Zone 4. This was where I lived, in the city now called Ontario — based on what was once known as Toronto.

  I waited for the next tram at the stop closest to my apartment. My annoying neighbour, Tyra, was there with another woman from our building, whose name I had forgotten.

  “Morning, Kelowna!” Tyra said, waving at me with her usual cheerful and high-pitched voice. She was short and slender with dark skin. She was always so bubbly, gabbing away about some irrelevant event at the Hub. I smiled at them both, nodding my head in their direction.

  I was born in 2050, five years after the war ended. My parents had named me after a city in Western Canada that was no longer there.

  “What did you do this weekend, Christie?” Tyra asked her red-headed friend.

  Christie. Right, that’s her name.

  “Well, Saturday there was a bocce tournament at the Hub in the afternoon. Jordan was there again. We went out for drinks with a couple of people after. And guess what?”

  “What?” Tyra asked, giddy with excitement.

  “Jordan invited me back to his place. It was amazing. We spent all Sunday together, too. We’re talking about getting genetic testing to see if we’re a match.”

  “Yay! I’m so happy for you,” Tyra said, bouncing on her little feet.

  The Civic Administrators controlled everything. Every resident was assigned to a specific transect within a specific zone. Goods were rationed. People needed to undergo testing and get licensed to have children. We were taught to be grateful for what we had. That Ontario and its sister city, Michigan, where Chicago used to be, were bastions of prosperity and peace. According to the Civic Administrators, the rest of the world was uninhabitable or in complete chaos.

  “So, when do you think you’ll be able to get the testing done?” Tyra asked Christie.

  “We’re going to put the request in today and hopefully get the permit to go to Zone 2 within the next month.”

  As Christie was hoping for her invasive medical procedure, the tram pulled up to the stop. All the seats were already taken, but there was plenty of standing room. Everyone was wearing similar varieties of blue or purple pants and shirts. Some had patterns or black accents on their shirts, but most were plain. If it weren’t for the trees and gardens, the only colours in the zone would have been blue and purple.

  I headed to a car away from Tyra and Christie and gazed out at the forest ravine on the periphery, which served as the separator between Zone 3 and 4. The taller red or orange buildings of Zone 3 were visible over the trees.

  Beside me, two grey-haired men were discussing the remembrance ceremonies scheduled for next week.

  “It’s been just over thirty years since the end of the war,” the pudgier and balder of the two men said.

  “Those days were hard. So many people lost. So much devastation. We thought we were prosperous and safe before the war, but things are way better now. We’ve built a truly sustainable future,” the other man said.

  They nodded at each other and continued their reminiscing. I put my earbuds in and turned on some sappy music. I was an only child and my parents rarely spoke about the war. All I knew was they had both fought in it. They did talk about the climate chaos, though. We were also taught about it in school. The climate chaos was a slow and complicated process, and it was still ongoing in many parts of the world. Essentially, sea levels rose faster than scientists had been predicting; much, much faster. Vast coastal regions that were once home to millions became covered by metres of water. Entire cities, states, countries vanished. Storms grew in intensity. Parts of the world had years of drought or became constant flood zones. Millions of people became climate refugees. Resources became scarce and conflicts spread globally. Diseases devastated Asia, making their way to other parts of the world. The Americas fared a little better, but the war eventually spread across the Pacific, and the American Southwest was quarantined. By 2045, most of the fighting in the Americas had stopped. Around that time, the Civic Administrators began building what would become the cities of Ontario and Michigan. Life under the Civic Administrators was all I knew.

  The tram made its way toward the Hub. All tram lines intersected here. It was a sight to behold. Huge parks were surrounded by open square pavilions with shops, restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. The biggest buildings in the zone circled the Hub. The area was so large that special elevated monorails looped around it to get people from the tram stations at the north or south ends. There were dozens of sports fields, small ponds, running tracks, expansive gardens, heavily wooded areas and massive patios.

  My office building was near the southern tram station and looked like a series of blue geometric cubes stacked at perpendicular angles. It was one of the largest in our zone, about thirty floors. The elevators were on the outside of the building, facing the Hub in tubes of lightly frosted glass, which acted as support pillars for the building’s odd architecture.

  I worked on the fifteenth floor and was always in my cubicle by 8:30 a.m. It was kind of funny to sit all day in a cube within a cube stacked on other cubes, at a computer, going over spreadsheets and numbers. Every floor was a series of cubicles arranged around the centre, which was split into four large glass enclosures, which served as the offices of each team lead. Each floor was divided into four teams. The central offices were raised above the cubicles by a couple of metres to remind us that our team leader was always watching us.

  Gerald sat in the cubicle beside me and arrived shortly after I did.

  “Morning, Kelowna, did you have a good weekend?”

  “Yes, and you?” I asked.

  “Busy, busy, so much going on. Ready for another week of crunching those numbers?”

  “You know it.”

  Gerald and I had worked together for a few years, and I guess he was my closest friend. We used to go running regularly when he lived a block from me. But last year, Gerald got upgraded to a transect closer to the Hub because he was matched. Gerald met his partner through sporting events, and they underwent genetic testing to see if they were compatible. And voila. Within a few weeks, they lived in a couples housing complex, which gave them a larger apartment. And they were trying to have a child. I never told Gerald, but shortly after he got matched, I asked for permission to get genetic testing. While Gerald found who he wanted to be with first and it ended up working out, another common way to get matched was to get tested first, then they’d match you with someone else from your zone. My results were negative, so I never really tried to date anyone. It’s not that I liked being alone, but I didn’t really know how to relate to people.

  That Monday went by like all the others. Before heading home, I decided to stop in at one of the shops in the Hub.

  For shopping and entertainment, we were allowed a certain number of credits a month. I wouldn’t exactly call it shopping, either. There were a surprising number of clothing stores, considering they all sold the same thing. There were also many grocery, hardware and personal products stores, each arrayed differently to present the perception of choice, when in reality they also all sold the same thing. Each store would play a certain type of music or be arranged and designed in a unique way. One of the busiest personal products stores involved a scavenger hunt. Patrons entered into a computer the types of products they were looking for and it gave them clues that led to locations with more clues, forcing them to potentially wander around the store for hours, looking in hidden crevices, in holes, behind gates — each with a puzzle to solve. The layout of the store was changed every night. I’d been there only once, as I found the whole exercise pointless, but people loved it. Some spent most of their weekend there simply looking for items that they might not have been able to get due to lack of credits.

  My favourite stores were the few book and antique stores. We got very few credits for those types of items, which were considered novelties.

  Most of the stores were bursting with people coming and going, but I went to one of my favourite little bookstores. A middle-aged woman with thick-rimmed glasses was behind the counter reading a hardcover book. She looked up at me as I entered.

  “Welcome back,” she said before turning her attention back to her book. I guess she had so few customers that I was considered a regular, popping in a few times a month. The book selection was minimal, but surprisingly, there were a great number of nature, travel and history books. I picked up a few of the nature books and settled on one about the rainforests of Central America. It was full of pictures and descriptions of the different animals and plants there.

  I headed toward the counter.

  “Good choice. It looks so beautiful there,” she said. I put my thumb on the scanner and the display showed the requisite number of novelty credits from my account.

  “Thank you, and have a good night,” I said, exiting the store.

  Beside the bookstore was an antique store with a painting I had been eyeing for a while. This store was filled with decorations for your home from bygone eras. Apartment furnishings nowadays were all practical, with little aesthetic value. This store had intricate vases of varying shapes and sizes. Lamps that looked more like works of art than practical lighting accessories. But the item I had been looking at for a while was a wood-framed painting of a farm beside a fast-flowing river with horses running through a windswept, grassy field. It was an idyllic scene. I had just enough remaining novelty credits to get it. I headed to the counter and performed the customary thumb scan. With my two impulse purchases in hand, I walked toward the tram station. It would be months before I had enough novelty credits for another purchase like that.

  It wasn’t long before the correct tram entered the station and I headed home. I was in my eighth-floor studio apartment by 6:00 p.m.

  My apartment consisted of a bed with drawers underneath, a small table with two chairs, a little white-cupboard kitchen and simple bathroom. The walls were painted a light blue. There was a small closet by the door. The only other furnishing was a chair on my balcony that overlooked the ravine toward Zone 3.

  I changed into my shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes and headed to the trails in the ravine. I popped in my earbuds, which were playing an upbeat, jazzy album. I returned, dripping sweat, as the sun was setting.

  Tyra came prancing in as I waited for the elevator. She waved at me and I could see her lips moving, speaking at me. I removed an earbud.

 

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