Relief zones

Emergency cooling shelters are mandatory for survival in a Category 2 zone. What that means on the ground is a sheet held up by two people, a steel urn of water, a battery fan, and whoever is nearest.

The zones were a policy once. After the 2055 flooding, coastal evacuation produced relief camps that were militarised within a year, on the reasoning that a desperate population is a security question before it is a humanitarian one.

What survives of that policy in 2075 is the habit: neighbours who know where the urn is kept, and which hour of the afternoon kills people.

This is the argument the book keeps making in different clothes. Climate resilience is a tea stall, a post office, and strangers who turn up. Nobody in this picture has been given a designation, and everybody in it knows what they are doing.