When Thomas O’Malley moved out to the mine at Whabouchi, his ten-year-younger sister Polly vaguely knew lithium was in phones and everything else, but her main association with it was the little pills by her bedside that kept her thoughts under control. She almost indulged the fantasy, or nightmare, that he was going out to mine it for her personally, because she had blown up at a teacher too many times or almost thrown herself off the docks. She had to be grateful in either scenario; the pills made her feel shaky like a foal, but that was better than shaking apart. When they flew out to drop him off, though, her panic rose almost to that metallic hum; it felt like they were banishing him to some prison colony, even compared to Happy Valley/Goose Bay. They stayed the night - she couldn’t sleep - in unoccupied bunks of the trailer, the kind her school had for half its classes. You walked from one to the next across undifferentiated white stretches of sand, with staggered lines of trees to one side of you. There was nothing between the trees, no room for the faeries of family lore. You could see between them from the trailer lot, through narrow cracks like keyholes, all the way out to the water.

She used her grades to get out of Labrador as soon as she turned 18 and got a U of T economics degree, which wasn’t worth that much after the world economy collapsed. At least, not if you were the kind of economist she was, theoretical and idealistic, with lots of ethical scruples, the kind who would have gone been siloed into an NGO writing ceremoniously ignorable reports about sustainable development to governments; every petty startup warlord operating a SovCorp out of a refugee camp was desperate for their own in-house supply chain coordinator, but that wasn’t her. Her family, by the time they were able to get through to the municipal emergency switchboard for people whose phone service had been cut, had taken Thomas up on his standing offer and escaped the hurricane wreckage. Whabouchi, they enthused, had become a sizeable town, bigger than Happy Valley/Goose Bay had been when she lived there. There were trailer caravans heading up the Route du Nord every day. She got on one at Trois-Rivières with a bunch of Montreal hipsters who would laugh hotboxed hot air whenever she tried to talk about anything, passed one working phone back and forth between each other, wanted to start a shroom farm.

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