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them speaking into the air or with the characteristically absent expression of Angel users. Patrick imagined they were lobbyists and bureaucrats and staffers of all stripes, maybe even congress-men and senators. Patrick had a sense of the vast resources being poured into this place, that the city was the focus of huge energies and determination, a new refuge for the spirit of America and a base for the recovery to come. The President herself was in Denver. If you weren’t safe here, then where?
    A brace of helicopters swept low overhead with a great clatter of noise. Holle squealed and jumped, excited.
     
     
     
    Holle was enchanted by the State Capitol, an eighteen-story structure with Greek columns and rotunda and golden dome, gleaming in the watery morning sunlight. She skipped up the Capitol’s stone steps, counting them until she got to the eighteenth. Here the step was engraved, and she read with painstaking care: “ ‘One mile above sea level.’ Is that right, Dad?”
    “That’s so, sweets. One mile up, right here.”
    A gruff voice broke in. “Well, a mile less six hundred feet or so. They ought to make that plaque dynamic. Hey, George, we should get AxysCorp to pitch for the business . . .” A burly man, short, aged maybe mid-fifties, was coming down the steps toward them. His gray-flecked hair was shaved short to the scalp, and his fleshy nose and double chin were bright with sweat. His accent was British, London or Essex maybe. He was trailed by a couple of other men, one tall, composed, black, the other shorter, agitated. “Patrick Groundwater, you old dog. Good to see you again.” He stuck out a hand. “Nathan Lammockson.”

5
    H olle stood in the middle of the circle of the four men, peering up.
    Nathan introduced his companions. “George Camden, one of my senior guys in AxysCorp.” Camden, black, was slim, confident, apparently competent; he returned Patrick’s gaze. He wore a coverall in AxysCorp blue, with the corporation’s famous logo, the Earth cradled in a cupped hand, emblazoned on his chest. Like Patrick’s own Alice, he stayed silent and stood back, watchful.
    “And Jerzy Glemp.”
    Glemp, tubby, his greasy black hair speckled with gray, and with heavy old-fashioned spectacles perched on a thin nose, was nervous, intense, his palm damp. He wore a stuffy-looking suit. “Mr. Groundwater. I am pleased to meet you.” His accent was heavy, east European or Russian. When he smiled his jowls crumpled, stubbly. “I learned your name through Nathan. How you were one of those who expressed concern at the reaction of the 2018 IPCC in New York.”
    2018, when maverick oceanographer Thandie Jones had presented her conclusions on the state of the world to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be met by what struck Patrick as unjustified skepticism by the scientists, and then denial and evasion by their political masters in the months and years that followed. “Yes, I was there—that’s where we first met, right, Nathan?”
    Nathan grinned and clapped Patrick’s shoulder. “After the session I made sure I got him locked into LaRei there and then. Hell, I could see right off that here was a man with resources and vision—the kind of man who sees through the bullshit and false hope and thinks about the long term, and deals with it. And I was right, wasn’t I, Patrick? It was after that meeting that you started buying up all that land on the Plains, and what a smart move that was. And that’s what I intend to come out of today—what we all intend. A fresh new direction.”
    “So you’re based in Peru now?”
    “Yeah. You’d think I’d be used to the sun.” He wiped sweat from his fleshy brow. “I should have glopped up. Some days you almost miss the rain. But it rains like Manchester even up in the Andes.”
    Jerzy Glemp said, “Mr. Groundwater, you’re originally Scottish, aren’t you?”
    “Is my accent still so strong?” But Glemp would know all about him from