It has been decided what will be done with me. Because the war against the Dusk took my tongue and legs, robbing me of any ‘potential for mischief’, and because I am of a suitable age, I have been chosen as a keeper to a lighthouse girl, serving a small colony in the Southern Archipelagos.

On the edge of our vision, omnipresent, the dingoes lope around the rim of the camp – lithe, muscular, and hungry. The bushes are filled with the treasures they’ve nabbed and dragged off over the years, detritus from the corporate holidayers that come here in the Spring.

The superhighway was the only road out of the Desert Reclamation Zone, an empty promise that somewhere, further than the eye could see, was some form of civilisation beyond the boredom that encompassed her life.

They usually travelled by evening or night, out of the glaring heat – but Priak said if they woke early they’d reach an oasis where they could resupply away from the midday sun. There’d be other travellers, and they’d be able to play a gig.

Time seemed to slow-down, the seconds stretched behind heartbeats that became less and less frequent. Heat, delicious and delirious, more than I have ever felt, spread from my gut to my fingertips. For the first time in my life I wasn’t shivering. It was like some part of my brain was yawning itself awake, a lumbering beast that basked in sunlight. Blood in its veins, a heart that beat of its own accord.

Most of them are fat, domesticated, curling between your feet as you walk towards the highway. But there are newcomers, the ferals. They congregate on top of a boat in an overgrown yard. They're quick, they're intelligent. Their eyes glint like razors at night, watching you from behind car tyres.

We walk past the soldiers, who have set up sandbags by the wharves. They’re funnelling queues of mostly families – young, wealthy, good-looking parents and their bewildered children – onto the ferries and out to the evacuation carriers in the harbour.

The edge of town was dominated by a wide superhighway intersection. Roadtrains were sliding into slumber in their refuelling stations. A lattice of roadworks closed off the sidewalk, forcing the few pedestrians to scurry like cockroaches over multi-lanes of concrete and bitumen.

Beneath, desert plants grew in clusters, Smokebush, Prickle-Plum and Coralbloom. There must’ve been an underground wellspring here. As Priak said, ‘plants never lie about water.’