Day 2 she ditched the trailer after Bol came back to help her find her family in a yurt inflated around a cylindrical heater. There was a cluster of them for refugee families that had come to live off employees, between the trees to the south of “TempTown”, the original lot of trailers she remembered, tiled six times. They didn’t have any pills ready for her but there was a pharmacy on-site with all kinds of prescriptions, they’d have to talk to the ESOP trust about arranging one, but she slept with her head on Micha’s belly like a kid on birthday mornings when they got to stay under the covers, and the waves were grounded all night. The ESOP trust - another thing Bol was in charge of, apparently - had assigned them the yurt and provided the handheld shortwave radio that looked like a pipe bomb with an iPod shuffle wheel on which they'd called the emergency switchboard. In its rubber grip were lightly embossed the letters “N.A.S.U.”

Despite her field, her research, Polly O’Malley had never heard of the North American Superconductors Union, a militant industrial union that used the unblockable shortwave spectrum to coordinate. The things that happened on these sites didn’t make it into the news, or what was left of the internet, or the academic journals. In a ratty sleeping bag, the same thick plaid wool as Bol’s shirt, she heard eerie noises from the family of arctic foxes she saw in the morning frequenting the garbage heap. Day 3. A second canteen had been set up in the Guest Camp (on the opposite side of TempTown, serving bottomless tanks of pulled pork, baked beans and chickpeas. Day 12. She rarely saw Thomas at lunch; he visited the yurt for dinner a couple of nights a week when he didn’t take overtime or organize with NASU, which was secretive business. She’d once seen his silhouette climbing one of the giant shortwave transmitters in the sunset. Day 24. “You’re getting close to Bol, I’ve heard. He talks about you in the pit.” This surprised her. They talked, but not more than she talked to anyone else yet. Every lunch break and at least once every evening she’d see him sitting on the same stump, on the edge of the woods just between the site and TempTown, gazing between the trunks to the sea. Everyone knew where he was; they left him alone, but she hadn't known that when she started asking questions about how things worked here.

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