The rising

2034

Saharah pressed her small hand against the car window, watching the ocean shimmer beneath the afternoon sun. Four years old and this was her first clear memory, the way the water stretched forever, blue meeting blue at some impossible distance. Her father had driven them here, to what remained of Miami Beach, so she could see it before it disappeared entirely.

"Remember this, Saharah," he said, his voice tight. "Remember when the sea was beautiful."

The beach was narrow now, barely twenty feet of sand between the seawall and the waves. Her mother held her hand as they walked, and Saharah felt the warm water rush over her toes. She laughed, delighted, not understanding why her mother's grip was so tight, why her father kept checking his phone with that worried crease between his eyebrows.

The water tasted like salt when a wave splashed her face. She would remember that taste for the rest of her life.

2041

The military trucks arrived on a Tuesday morning, rolling through Atlanta neighbourhoods with loudspeakers announcing the mandatory evacuation. Hurricane Zara, a Category 6, though officially they still only acknowledged Category 5, had stalled over the Gulf, pulling moisture from waters that now averaged 87 degrees. The storm was three hundred miles wide. The flooding would reach Atlanta within forty-eight hours.

"Take what you can carry," the soldiers said. "One bag per person."

Saharah was eleven. She chose her clothes, her phone, and a small stuffed dolphin from that day at Miami Beach. She left behind her books, her guitar, the journal where she'd written her first poems about the sea.

They marched in lines, thousands of them, heading north on I-75. The highway had been cleared of vehicles, turned into a pedestrian corridor. Soldiers flanked them, rifles visible but not raised. This was order imposed on chaos. This was survival.

The heat was crushing. September in Georgia, and it felt like July used to feel, before the climate broke completely.

By noon, Saharah's water bottle was empty.

"Mama, I'm thirsty."

Her mother shared hers, tipping it to Saharah's lips. Half the bottle, maybe less. Her mother's hand shook.

"That's all we have until the next checkpoint, Saharah."

"When's that?"

Her mother didn't answer.

An old man collapsed ahead of them, his body crumpling like paper. The soldiers pulled him to the side of the highway. Saharah watched as they checked his pulse, shook their heads, kept moving. They didn't have time for the dead. No one did.

Her father took her hand. His palm was slick with sweat.

"Don't look," he said.

But she did. She saw the man's face, slack and grey. She saw the wet stain spreading across his pants. She saw the flies already gathering.

They walked for three days. At night they collapsed in designated rest zones, parking lots, fields, anywhere flat enough for thousands of bodies. The sky stayed grey, heavy with Zara's outer bands. Rain came in sheets, warm as bathwater, and Saharah opened her mouth to it, grateful even as thunder crashed around them like artillery. The lightning turned the world white, then black, then white again. No one slept.

On the second day, a woman went into labour. The soldiers radioed for medical support that never came. The woman screamed for hours. Saharah pressed her hands over her ears but she could still hear it, that animal sound of agony. When the screaming stopped, the soldiers carried the woman away on a stretcher. Saharah never saw what happened to the baby.

On the third day, her father stopped walking.

"I can't," he said, sitting down on the hot asphalt. "I can't anymore."

Her mother knelt beside him. "We're almost there. Just a few more miles."

"You go. Take Saharah."

"No."

"Please."

Saharah watched her parents, not understanding. Her father's face was red, his breathing strange and shallow. Her mother was crying without making any sound.

A soldier approached. "You need to keep moving."

"He needs rest," her mother said.

"There's no rest. You keep moving or you stay here. Those are the options."

Her father stood up. His legs shook but he stood. They kept walking.

2048

The Tennessee Valley Relocation Centre sprawled across what had been farmland outside Knoxville. Rows of prefab housing units, each one housing eight families. Communal kitchens. Communal bathrooms. Communal everything.

Saharah was eighteen now, thin as wire, her childhood softness burned away by years of rationing. The sea level had risen another metre since her last glimpse of the ocean. The Gulf Coast was gone. Florida was an archipelago. The Eastern Seaboard had retreated fifty miles inland, leaving drowned cities as monuments to hubris.

She worked in the camp's vertical farm, tending hydroponic vegetables under LED lights. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. The pay was camp scrip, worth less every month as inflation spiralled. Food shipments from the Midwest had become unreliable as the breadbasket dried up, as the Ogallala Aquifer finally ran dry. Everything they'd been warned about came true with mathematical precision.

Her father had died two years ago, heat stroke during a work detail. Her mother had followed six months later. Pneumonia, officially. Grief, actually. Grief and exhaustion and the slow realisation that the world they'd known was never coming back.

Saharah lived alone now in a corner of a housing unit she shared with seven other families. She had a mattress, a blanket, a plastic crate for her possessions. The stuffed dolphin sat on top, its fur matted and grey.

The scrip ran out three weeks into every month. Always three weeks. The rations were calculated for survival, not comfort, and they assumed you had nothing else wrong with you, no extra needs, no medical issues, no bad luck.

Saharah had bad luck.

She got sick in March, some kind of intestinal infection that left her unable to work for a week. No work meant no scrip. No scrip meant no food. She spent five days in her corner, dizzy with hunger, watching the other families eat their rations and carefully not look at her.

On the sixth day, a guard named Torres stopped by her corner.

"Heard you've been out sick," he said.

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

"That's tough. Real tough." He looked at her for a long moment. "You know, I could help you out. Get you some extra rations. Medicine, maybe."

She knew what he meant. She'd heard the other women talking in whispers, late at night when they thought everyone was asleep.

"What do you want?" she asked.

He smiled. "I think you know."

She thought about the hollow ache in her stomach, the weakness in her limbs, the way her vision had started to blur at the edges.

"Okay," she said.

The first time, she left her body. That's what it felt like. She floated somewhere near the ceiling of Torres's quarters, watching this thing happen to someone else, someone who looked like her but wasn't her, couldn't be her. When it was over, he gave her a week's worth of rations and a bottle of antibiotics.

She went back to her corner and ate half the rations in one sitting, her stomach cramping with the sudden abundance. Then she threw up in the communal bathroom, retching until there was nothing left.

She stared at herself in the cracked mirror. Same face. Same eyes. But something had changed. Something had broken or maybe just bent, reshaped itself to fit this new world.

She went back to work the next day.

Torres came by every week after that. Sometimes he brought food. Sometimes medicine. Sometimes just scrip. She stopped floating away. She stopped feeling much of anything. It was just another kind of work, another kind of survival.

At night, she climbed to the roof of her housing unit and looked south, towards where the ocean was. She couldn't see it from here—she was still two hundred miles inland—but she could feel it. In the humidity that never broke. In the storms that came with increasing fury. In the news reports of new evacuations, new camps, new lines of refugees marching north.

The sea was coming. It was always coming.

2055

In July, the temperature hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Saharah was twenty-five and looked forty. She'd survived two cholera outbreaks, one riot, and countless nights of hunger. She'd learnt to fight for her rations, to sleep with one eye open, to trust no one completely.

The heat wave lasted three weeks. The power grid failed on the fourth day. The cooling centres went dark. People died in their sleep, their bodies simply giving up. The camp had protocols for heat emergencies, but protocols meant nothing when the infrastructure collapsed.

Saharah survived by going underground, into the maintenance tunnels beneath the hydroponic farm. It was cooler there, maybe ninety degrees instead of 135. She brought water, food she'd saved, a torch. She stayed for five days, listening to the rumble of trucks hauling bodies away.

When she emerged, the camp had changed. Half the population was gone. Some dead, some fled. The soldiers were fewer now, their uniforms dirty, their eyes hollow. The government was retreating to the Canadian border, to the northern territories where it was still possible to live. The centre couldn't hold.

Torres was gone. Most of the guards were gone. The system that had exploited her had collapsed, and she felt nothing about it. No relief. No satisfaction. Just the same hollow numbness she'd felt for years.

She packed what little she had, some clothes, a water bottle, a knife she'd traded for. She left the dolphin behind. It belonged to a different person, a different world.

She walked north because there was nowhere else to go.

2071

The march through the drowned South took two years.

Saharah moved with a loose group of survivors, the composition changing constantly as people died or split off or simply disappeared. They followed old highways, now cracked and overgrown. The South was emptying out, becoming uninhabitable. Temperatures regularly exceeded 120 degrees. The humidity made breathing feel like drowning.

They passed through what had been Chattanooga, water up to their waists, moving through streets that had become canals. Fish swam through living rooms. Snakes coiled in trees. The sea had reached Tennessee, pushing inland through the river systems, turning the landscape into a vast delta.

Saharah tried to remember that day on Miami Beach, tried to recall the beauty of it, but the memory was corrupted now. The sea wasn't beautiful. The sea was a monster, patient and inexorable, swallowing everything.

They ate what they could find. Snakes, mostly. Rats when they were lucky. Sometimes nothing for days. A woman named Running Bear taught her which insects were safe to eat, which plants wouldn't kill you. Running Bear had been a botanist before, in the world that was. Now she was just another refugee, her knowledge worth only slightly more than ignorance.

"You ever think about before?" Running Bear asked one night as they huddled under a highway overpass, rain hammering the concrete above them.

"No," Saharah lied.

"I do. All the time. I had a garden. Roses. Can you imagine? I spent hours worrying about aphids." Running Bear laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "Aphids."

"What happened to your family?"

"Dead. Yours?"

"Dead."

They sat in silence, listening to the rain. In the morning, Running Bear was gone. Saharah never saw her again.

The group reached Kentucky after eighteen months. They'd started with over a hundred people. Twelve remained.

The Kentucky camp was worse than Tennessee had been. Overcrowded, undersupplied, violent. Warlords controlled sections of it, demanding tribute for protection. The soldiers who remained were indistinguishable from the warlords. Everyone had guns. Everyone was desperate.

Saharah found work in the medical tent, such as it was. No real medicine, no equipment, just people dying of diseases that had been eradicated a century ago. Typhoid. Dysentery. Measles. She cleaned wounds with boiled brown water, held hands as people died.

The sea level had risen three metres since her birth. The maps were redrawn constantly. The coasts were gone. The river valleys were flooded. The Great Lakes had expanded, swallowing cities. Chicago was Venice, then Atlantis.

She was forty-one and felt ancient. Her hair was grey. Her teeth were loose from malnutrition. Her lungs were scarred from breathing smoke, the fires came every summer now, massive conflagrations that burnt for months, turning the sky orange, the sun a dull red coin.

She left the camp when the food ran out completely. Just walked away one morning, heading north with nothing but the clothes on her back and the knife in her belt.

She didn't know where she was going. Just north. Always north.

2087

Saharah found herself in what had been Ohio, though borders meant nothing now. The government had collapsed completely. There were warlords, petty kingdoms, zones of control that shifted like the weather.

She survived by scavenging through the ruins of drowned towns, pulling copper wire from walls, finding tinned goods in attics that had become ground floors. She traded what she found for food, for water, for safe passage through territories controlled by men with guns.

The world had become mediaeval, brutal, short.

She travelled alone now. Companionship was a liability. People would kill you for your shoes, for a tin of beans, for nothing at all. She slept in trees when she could, in abandoned cars, in culverts. She kept moving.

The sea level had risen four metres. The ocean had pushed up the Mississippi valley, turning it into a vast inland sea. The Appalachians were islands now, their peaks jutting from the water like broken teeth. The coasts were memories, stories told by old people like her, though there weren't many old people left.

She was fifty-seven. She'd outlived almost everyone she'd known from before.

One day she came across a settlement, twenty or thirty people living in what had been a shopping centre, now half-submerged. They had a garden on the roof, rainwater collection, some semblance of order. They let her stay for three days, fed her watery soup, asked her questions about the outside.

"Is it true about the Rockies?" a young man asked. He couldn't have been more than twenty. "That the rich people are up there? That it's like paradise?"

"I've heard that," Saharah said.

"You ever try to get there?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She looked at him, this boy who still had hope in his eyes, who still thought there might be something better somewhere else.

"Because they'd kill you before you got within a hundred miles," she said. "The military protects them. Drones, automated guns, minefields. You can't get there. Nobody can."

The hope died in his eyes. She felt nothing about it.

She left the next morning.

The jet stream had collapsed years ago, and now storms came from impossible directions with impossible fury. The temperature swung wildly scorching heat that killed in hours, followed by freak ice storms as the climate system spasmed and convulsed. Nothing was predictable.

Saharah kept walking north until she reached Lake Erie.

The lake had merged with the ocean, saltwater pushing inland through the drowned river systems. The sea had reached the Great Lakes. The sea had won.

She found a shack made of scavenged materials on what had been the shore, now just another piece of the endless waterline. No one lived there. She moved in.

She was too tired to move anymore. Too tired to care.

2094

She was sixty-four and starving.

There was no food. The fish were gone, poisoned by the warming water, by the pollution, by the toxic algae blooms that turned the sea green and made the air smell like rot. The birds were gone. The insects were gone. Everything was gone.

She'd eaten the last of her supplies, a handful of dried beans three days ago.

Today she'd found nothing.

She sat on a piece of concrete that had once been part of a building, watching the water lap at the shore. It was higher today than yesterday. It was always higher.

Her body was failing. She could feel it shutting down, system by system. Her vision blurred at the edges. Her hands shook. Her heart beat irregularly, skipping and stuttering. She was cold despite the heat, her body no longer able to regulate its temperature.

The sky was yellow with smoke from fires burning somewhere to the west. The air was thick, hard to breathe. Her chest rattled with every inhalation, a wet sound that reminded her of her mother's last days.

She thought about that day on Miami Beach, sixty years ago. The blue water. The warm sand. Her father's hand on her shoulder, heavy and reassuring. Her mother's laugh, bright and unselfconscious. The taste of salt on her lips.

The water had been beautiful once.

She tried to remember her father's face but couldn't quite grasp it. The details had worn away, leaving only an impression. Kindness. Worry. Love.

Her mother was easier. She'd looked like Saharah, or Saharah had looked like her. The same eyes. The same stubborn chin. The same hands.

Saharah looked at her own hands now, skeletal and scarred, the skin hanging loose. These weren't her mother's hands. These were a stranger's hands.

She watched as a wave rolled in, higher than the last, reaching for the concrete she sat on. The sea was still rising. It would never stop rising. It would swallow everything eventually—the ruins of cities, the bones of billions, the memory of what had been.

Another wave. Closer now.

The water touched her feet.

It was warm, like bathwater, like tears.

Her heart stuttered, paused, beat once more.

The water rose around her, patient and inexorable.

Saharah's heart beat its last, and she let the sea take her home.