Please, she said. I have a reason.
Megan said, I don’t have the maingate code. I never had it. Then she looked past Li and something loosened in her face. She turned to the open gate and ran.
Li looked up. The sky was yellow. A smell like a fresh-lit match. Her body went slack. Brain screaming at her to turn and look, so she would know which way to run. A thin savage howl. The air was full of tussock and sand, and a grey wave was swarming in from the west, unspooling across the sky until it was the only thing.
She hauled herself up and stumbled for the sleepbox. Slammed the door behind her. It was bolted to the concrete pad, it wouldn’t give straight away. The howling intensified outside and beneath it a roar like engines. There was crashing, clanging, metal ripping. Things started to slam into the walls. The whole container was shuddering. She needed to get under a cot, cover herself. Oh God, had Matti lived long enough to die like this?
Something moved in the corner. It was Trish, on her knees, trying to stay upright. Her mouth was moving but the words were lost.
Li stumbled towards her. Get down, she yelled.
Trish shouted, We’re in God’s hands now.
Li felt rage fork through her. At this woman who believed all this, any of it, was the work of something with love in its heart.
There was a sudden pressure in her head. Her ears popped. The sleepbox groaned and the howler was right on them, in her brain and her teeth and her bones. Trish’s mouth opened wide and she reached out for Li, but Li turned away and lost herself in the roar.
A wrenching scream of metal. The container flipped.
Can you hear my pencil?
They were lying down together in the tent, under the sleeping bags. Afternoon. Rain falling on the plastic, makecamp gone to mud outside. Li’s eyes were closed, her head resting on her jacket.
Can you? Mum? Hear it?
Yeah. I can hear it.
Can you hear my letters?
No. Well, hang on. Li listened, tried to. Did you just make a round one?
An ‘O’! You could hear it!
They were quiet for a little while, pleased. Matti’s pencil scratched. A relief dump had cleared customs and the Kids’ Tent had been handing out exercise books and pens but the pens had run out.
What are you writing?
I’m writing my happy memories, Matti said. I’ve already written two. Do you want me to read you one?
Yeah, go on.
Matti turned back a page. I was six when I started playing schools. Hello class! She glanced up. That bit’s a picture. My name was Ms Twinkle. Great work, Amalia K! That’s a picture too.
Huh, Li said, I remember Amalia K.
She was one of my cardboard kids.
Remember when you folded all the kids up and packed them away?
Matti nodded. I was getting a bit too old.
What’s the other one?
Oh, that’s when we went camping with Robbie, and you and Dad made us a flying fox.
You were really little then.
Yeah, I was only about five.
Are you going to write any that aren’t so long ago?
Matti closed the book and wriggled closer to Li, rolled onto her back. I think when I’m nine I’ll do one about me and Shayla and Sulaman getting these books.
You could write that one now though.
Nah. It has to be a memory. Not something that just happened. Matti reached up and tugged at Li’s hair, thinking. Five or six is good.
Rich was calling her name in the dark, through the crush, through the other voices calling names. She struggled out from between two mattresses, working to extract her bent leg in the crutch. The back of her head hurt but she could stand. How long had she been unconscious?
She called back to Rich and heard his answering shout. A little light came in through the vents and by that light she felt her way to the door, wading through bedding and dismembered cot frames. Among them, lying face up, Trish.
Li got down and cleared the wreckage from her. A metal shaft wouldn’t come free and it was only when Trish’s body started to lift with it that she realised it had broken off inside her. She let go and felt for a pulse she knew couldn’t be there. There was a hard pain in her own chest. They shall come to no harm but shall be lifted. She held Trish’s wrecked face and wondered if she was the last person who would remember her.
Rich was banging on the wall, yelling her name. She didn’t know what to tell her, only that she wasn’t waiting anymore.
I have a daughter, she said.
The door was jammed, the frame bent out of shape. She called back to Rich and they worked on getting it open together.
When she came out into the freezing air, he hugged her. Said, I knew this place couldn’t kill you.
There was a gash on the side of his face but he said it wasn’t serious. She looked over his shoulder at the still, broken aftermath. Where there had been a network of fenced compounds, now there was a plain of torn-up metal and wire and canvas. The sleepbox had landed on a link fence. Other fences had been flattened or ripped up whole and thrown down somewhere else. Fence poles stuck up out of the ground like spears. Rubbish bloomed everywhere. People moved through the wreckage, but not many of them.
Up ahead, the complex was its own disaster zone – the buildings collapsed in on themselves or fanned out across the plain in pieces. She saw the shell of a helicopter, nose crushed in, blades drooping down like they’d melted.
Li was still staring at all that when Rich took her by the shoulders and turned her around. Look, he said.
The dump was gone, its mountains levelled and scattered. They were standing in a broad channel between two waves. To the
