They have a cookhouse, and some violet porta-biolets over in one corner, and some solar they’re fixing up. There’s no shortage of parts for just about everything back in the pleebs, though you have to look out for falling buildings.

Their vegetable garden is in behind: they don’t have a lot of stuff planted yet. “We get pig attacks,” he says. “They dig under the fence. We shot one of them, so maybe the others got the point. Zeb says they’re superpigs, because they’re spliced with human brain tissue.”

“Zeb?” I say. “Is Zeb alive?” I feel dizzy all of a sudden. All of these dead people, coming alive again – it’s overwhelming.

“Sure,” says Croze. “Are you all right?” He puts his arm around me, to keep me from falling down.

Ren and Crozier have wandered off behind the cobb house. No harm, thinks Toby. Young love, no doubt. She’s telling Ivory Bill about the third man – the dead one. Blanco. He listens carefully. “Plague?” he asks. An infected bullet wound, she says. She doesn’t add the Poppy and the Death Angels.

While they’re talking, another woman comes around from behind the house. “Hey, Toby,” she says. It’s Rebecca. Older, less plump, but still Rebecca. Solid. She takes hold of Toby’s shoulders. “You’re too thin, sweetheart,” she says. “Never mind. We’ve got bacon. Fatten you up for sure.”

Bacon is not a concept that Toby can grasp right now. “Rebecca,” she says. She wants to add, “Why are you alive?” but this is – increasingly – a meaningless question. Why are any of them alive? So she merely says, “Wonderful.”

“Zeb said you’d make it. He always said that. Hey. Gimme a smile!”

Toby doesn’t like the past tense. It has a deathbed smell. “When did he say it?” she asks.

“Heck, he says it most days. Now come on in the kitchen, eat something. Tell me where you’ve been.”

Zeb’s alive then, thinks Toby. Now that it’s true she feels she’s always known it. She also doubts it – it won’t really be true until she sees him. Touches him.

They have coffee – dandelion roots, roasted, Rebecca says proudly – and some baked burdock root with herbs, and a slice of – could it be cold pork? “Those pigs are a nuisance,” says Rebecca. “Too smart by half.” She eyes Toby challengingly. “Needs must when the devil drives,” she says. “Anyways, at least we know what’s in it – not like at SecretBurgers.”

“It’s delicious,” Toby says truthfully.

After their snack, Toby hands over the three remaining Mo’Hair legs, not that fresh but Rebecca says they’ll be fine for stock. Then they plunge right into history. Toby runs through her time in the AnooYoo Spa, and tells about the arrival of Ren; Rebecca describes her fake identity selling life insurance in gated communities out west while planting MaddAddam’s inventive bioforms, and how she got the last bullet train east – a risk, lot of folks coughing but she wore a nose cone and gloves – and then holed up in the Wellness Clinic, along with Zeb and Katuro. “In our old meeting room, remember?” she says. “Our Ararat supplies were still there.”

“And Katuro?” says Toby.

“Doing fine. Had a germ of some kind, but not the bad one; he’s over it now. He’s off with Zeb and Shackleton, and Black Rhino. They’re looking for Adam One and the rest of them. Zeb says if anyone could get through, they could.”

“Really? There’s a chance?” says Toby. Did he look for me? she wants to ask. Probably not. He’d have thought she’d do fine on her own. And she had, hadn’t she?

“We’ve been listening on the windup shortwave, 24/7, and sending too. Couple of days ago we finally got an answer,” says Rebecca.

“It was him?” Toby’s prepared to believe anything now. “Adam One?”

“We just heard the one voice. All it said was, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’“

“Let’s hope,” says Toby. And she does hope; or she tries to.

There’s the barking of dogs outside, and a confusion of shouting. “Shit. Dog attack,” says Rebecca. “Bring that gun.”

The MaddAddams with sprayguns are already at the fence. Big dogs and small ones, maybe fifteen, bounding towards them wagging their tails. The spraygunners begin shooting. Before Toby can fire, seven of the dogs are dead and the rest have run away.

“Watson-Crick splices,” says Ivory Bill. “They’re not really dogs, they only look like it. They’ll tear out your throat. Used them in prison moats and such – you couldn’t hack them, not like an alarm system code – but they got loose during the Flood.”

“Are they breeding?” says Toby. Will they have to fight off wave after wave of these non-dogs, or are they few in number?

“Lord knows,” says Ivory Bill.

Lotis Blue and White Sedge go out to make sure the dogs are dead. Then Tamaraw and Swift Fox and Rebecca and Toby join them, and they skin and butcher, with the spraygunners standing guard in case the other dogs come back. Toby’s hands remember how to do this from long ago. The smell is the same too. A childhood smell.

The dog skins are laid aside, the meat’s cut up and put into a pot. Toby feels a little sick. But she also feels hungry.

I ask Croze if I should be helping to skin the dogs, but Croze says there’s enough people doing it and I look tired, so why don’t I lie down on his bed, inside the cobb house? The room is cool and smells the cobb-house way I remember, so I feel safe. Croze’s bed is just a platform, but it has a silver Mo’Hair fleece on it with a sheet, and Croze says, Sleep tight and then goes away, and I take off my AnooYoo top and pants because it’s getting too hot, and the Mo’Hair is soft and silky, and I go to sleep.

When the afternoon thunderstorm wakes me up, Croze is curled around behind me, and I can tell he’s worried and sad; so I turn around and then we’re hugging each other, and he wants to have sex. But all of a sudden I don’t want to have sex without loving the person, and I haven’t really loved anybody in that way since Jimmy; certainly not at Scales, where it was just acting, with other people’s kinky scripts.

Also there’s a dark place in me, like ink spilled into my brain – I can’t think about sex, in that place. It has brambles in it, and something about Amanda, and I don’t want to be there. So I say, “Not yet.” And even though Croze used to be kind of crude he seems to understand, so we just hold on to each other and talk.

He’s full of plans. They’ll build this, they’ll build that; they’ll get rid of the pigs, or else tame them. After the two Painballers are dead – he personally will take care of that – he’ll take me, and Amanda and Shackie too, and we’ll all go down to the beach and do some fishing. As for the MaddAddam group – Bill and Sedge and Tamaraw and Rhino, all them – they’re really smart, so they’ll have the communications going in no time.

“Who are we going to communicate with?” I ask, and Croze says there must be others out there. Then he tells me about the MaddAddams – how they were working with Zeb, but then the CorpSeCorps tracked them down through a MaddAddam codenamed Crake, and they ended up as brain slaves in a place called the Paradice Project dome. It was a choice between that and being spraygunned, so they took the jobs. Then when the Flood came and the guards vanished, they deactivated the security and walked out, but that wasn’t too hard for them because they’re all brainiacs.

He’s told me some of this before, but he hasn’t said Paradice Project or Crake. “Just a minute,” I say. “That’s what they were working on inside the dome? Immortality?”