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mapped paths onto the exposed roofs of the lower-level containers, little squares of tape placed end to end like dominoes: green for east, yellow for west. So you know where you’re going, if you’re going anywhere.
    Not knowing what else to do, I stayed.
    So the question now is fairly simple. If you put aside Lena’s project, put aside the questions of its value and its feasibility, if you bracket the question of what I’ll find on shore. The rain has stopped, and life is returning to the hills, so shore must be survivable. And knowing that, the question is easy to ask: Do I leave, or do I stay? Go out into a world whose shape I no longer recognize, without even the thought of a person who might be looking for me? Or stay on the edge of the corpse of a city that I still don’t like, with the people who are trying to raise its ghost?
    If Felix has taught me one thing, it’s that I have never been good at making choices.
    When you have a hard decision , Mama said, close your eyes and count to five. Then say the word out loud. Your heart knows what it wants, if you stop ignoring it. You just have to listen .
    Four
    Once, only once, I tried to go back.
    I had a reason, maybe, but not one I could articulate. We were six weeks into Lena’s project at that point, and hadn’t exchanged so much as a breeze, a whisper of leaves in the gutter, the faintest whiff of coffee. I didn’t think I was going to find anything, exactly. Maybe I was trying to convince myself that there was nothing to find.
    We didn’t have gasoline for the container ship’s lifeboat, but there was a small canoe-like contraption that Mahesh had put together early on, when they were shuttling equipment from Oakland to the ship. It would hardly have been seaworthy a year ago. But now, the bay lying flat as a mirror, it was exactly what I needed.
    I set off early in the morning with a few water filtration packets and a bag of chips for company. Left a note tucked in my sleeping bag for Lena, if she came looking for me, just to tell her I wasn’t gone for good. But I didn’t tell her where I was going, either.
    And then I rowed. And rowed. And rowed.
    Each splash of the oars echoed. I remember how vivid that sound seemed, out there on the flat water, under the flat unbroken sky. I had thought about going straight across the bay, along the east span of the bridge and then across the empty water where the west span used to be, landing over what had been the twenty-something piers. But the clearness was tempting, and I found myself wondering. Wondering and turning the boat north.
    Under the bridge, around Treasure Island, and I turned west again. And there, between the tips of the peninsulas — on my left, traces of steel and concrete, and on the right, leafless trees toppled like a giant’s stack of driftwood — there was nothing but sky. A sky that seemed too big for itself, too solid blue for too many miles, almost threatening to collapse. The towers were gone, the cables and the six-lane span of road vanished without a trace. Even the concrete that had anchored it to the shore. All of it underwater, being steadily rusted away.
    I waited just long enough to rest my aching arms, and then I turned back.
    I rowed west of Treasure Island and Yerba Buena this time. Closer to the city’s shore line, which even now was losing sheets of rock and mud to the silent and steadily encroaching water. There was a scraping sound as the bottom of my boat connected with an object beneath the surface, and I looked over the side to see the outline of something vast and rust-black. Huge, and magnified by the water, and my brain ran to sea-serpents and dragons, the monsters you find off the edge of a map.
    It was so close to the surface. I wasn’t thinking, not quite. I pushed my sleeve up past my elbow, balanced the oars across each other in front of me on the prow, and then I reached for the fragment of bridge.
    The water felt intensely cold, like dry ice, or putting a