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up in back? She must have been cold. Honor imagined cool breezes way up in the July sky. What a beautiful word. She wished the impossible: that her parents could name the baby July.

FIVE
    THE AFTERNOON THEY WENT TO HELIX’S HOUSE, HONOR’S family took the bus high up the slope of the volcano. Helix had the loveliest house Honor had ever seen. The outside was white, and the roof was tiled with blue-green tiles like the scales of a dragon. When Helix’s mother opened the door, Honor felt the breeze of cooling units. She could see right through the living room to a white courtyard blooming lavender and pale pink with flowering trees. There was the tiled sprinkler pool shining in the center of the courtyard.
    All afternoon she and Helix played in the sprinkler pool. The water was knee-deep and the fountain in the center pelted them with droplets. Helix’s parents, the Thompsons, sat with Honor’s parents in chairs outside and sipped drinks in little glasses. As usual, the grown-ups talked about the weather and the Corporation and the New Five-Year Plan for extending Enclosure into the Tranquil Sea.
    When Honor and Helix got hungry, they wrapped themselves in big white towels and padded into the kitchen. Helix opened the refrigerator and Honor saw apples and oranges and packages of cheese and every kind of juice, even blueberry juice. When Helix opened the cupboard, there were chocolate cookies and date bars and dried apricots and pretzels and animal crackers. Helix took a fistful of animal crackers for himself and a fistful for Honor.
    “Are you High Level?” she asked Helix.
    “Yup,” said Helix with his mouth full. “My parents are members of the Corporation.”
    “Oh,” said Honor. Her parents were not members of the Corporation. There were never animal crackers at her house.
    “My father is working in Future Planning,” Helix boasted. “He’s designing future weather in the Tranquil Sea. And my mother—”
    “It’s starting to rain,” interrupted Honor.
    The two of them looked through the kitchen window. The sky was dark. Leaves and napkins whipped around in the wind outside. The adults raced inside with their drinks.
    “They weren’t predicting a storm,” Honor’s mother said.
    “They’re usually very good here. Usually you get at least a day’s warning,” said Mr. Thompson. “But every once in a while . . .”
    “Yes, every once in a while the weather is Unpredictable,” said Will.
    The windows in the airy house began to rattle. Honor felt a prickle of fear.
    Mrs. Thompson reassured them, “We have a safe room.”
    “I wish we did,” Pamela said.
    “Wouldn’t make much of a difference,” Will pointed out. “We’re too close to the shore.”
    “Why don’t you all follow me.” Mr. Thompson opened a door in the living room and showed them a stairway. “It’s just a few steps down.”
    Then the lights went out.
    In the dim light of the windows, they descended the stairs into a dark room. Mrs. Thompson fumbled and found a flashlight, which she turned on. Then Honor saw that the room was lined with shelves, and on the shelves were neatly stacked boxes of crackers and cookies and cans of tuna fish and vegetables and juice. There was a whole shelf full of flashlights and packages of batteries. There were shelves of games and puzzles. Lower shelves held rolled-up sleeping bags and even pillows. Through an open door, Honor saw that the safe room had its own bathroom with a toilet and a bathtub and stacks of white towels.
    “You have everything,” whispered Honor, and her parents and the Thompsons laughed.
    “I’ve even got my old fiddle down here,” said Mr. Thompson.
    “Will you play for us?” asked Pamela.
    “If I had my harmonica, I’d play with you,” said Will. “The Postal Service got that when we moved here.”
    “Won’t you play us a song?” Pamela asked again.
    “Oh, I can’t play for you,” said Mr. Thompson. “I’m so out of practice. I haven’t played in