I had enough time to light a fresh cigarette before my office door told the client to come in. Smoke in the air didn’t make it any easier to oil a cutlass, but it made me look badass. Same with my leather jacket, tailored to fit comfortably over my smartsuit. I projected confidence so brightly that every once in a while I forgot what I hid beneath it. My client entered wearing fine high heels and the calm stability that came from long years in habitat gravity. My most interesting cases were from habbers, because habbers didn’t come my way until they figured out their problem was beyond them.

Everything the sea takes, it gives back in its own way and its own time. That was what Jess’s grandmother believed, what she’d told Jess as they stood in the shadow of the giant red cedar that had washed ashore, its severed roots thicker than Jess’s body. It must have drifted for a thousand years or more to return to them in that moment. So, when the virus takes Jess’s grandmother, Jess steers her little solar-powered boat out past the Channel Islands and gives the body to the sea.

One day when all of humanity is gone and the old Earth rolls through the dark all alone, a day will come when it is chanced upon by some intrepid visitors from another, more respectable planet—a planet whose denizens did not see fit to destroy themselves as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Those visitors will descend upon the steaming hot void and may ask themselves, may ask each other, what happened. They will roam across the deep and, no doubt very soon in their journey, will discover what they will take to be obvious signs of recent habitation.

“I’m going to have to stay a week longer,” was the first thing Laura said. No hellos or how-are-yous, just straight to the point. Silence. Or at least, a silence overlaid onto a landscape of background murmurs. Laura was probably calling from the office.

“Matty, did you hear me? I have to extend my trip.”

Matthew looked down at the dark spot on the front of his shirt. He’d read somewhere that applesauce didn’t stain. “I heard you.”