The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

Shackleton and Crozier? Toby wrote. With you?

Manner of speaking, Zeb replied. Oates. Katuro, Rebecca. New ones too.

Amanda?

Got out. Higher education. Art. Smart.

He'd pulled up a site: EXTINCTATHON. Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

MaddAddam? Toby wrote on her desk pad. Your group? You're plural? She was elated: Zeb was here, beside her, in the flesh. After she'd thought for so long that she'd never see him again.

I contain multitudes, wrote Zeb. Pick a codename. Life form, extinct.

Dodo, Toby wrote.

Last fifty years, Zeb wrote. Not much time. Pruning team waiting. Ask about aphids.

"There's aphids on the lumiroses," Toby said. She was riffling through the old Gardener lists in her head -- animals, fish, birds, flowers, clams, lizards, recently extinct. Inaccessible Rail, she wrote. That bird had gone ten years ago. Can they hack this site?

"We can take care of that," Zeb said. "Though there's supposed to be a built-In insecticidal deterrent ... I'll take some samples. There's more than one way to skin a cat." No, he wrote. Made our own virtual private networks. Quadrupally encrypted. Sorry about the cat-skinning ref. Here's your number.

He wrote her new codename and a pass number on the pad. Then he typed his own number and code into the log-in space provided. Welcome, Spirit Bear. Do you want to play a general game or do you want to play a Grandmaster? said the screen.

Zeb clicked on Grandmaster. Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.

Watch, he wrote on her pad. He entered a site advertising Mo'Hair transplants, skipped through a pixel gateway on the eye of a magenta-haired sheep, entered the blue percolating stomach of an ad for a HelthWyzer antacid, which led to the avid open mouth of a SecretBurger customer caught in mid-chomp. Then a wide green landscape unfolded -- trees in the distance, a lake in the foreground, a rhino and three lions drinking. A scene from the past.

A line of type unscrolled across it: Welcome to MaddAddam's playroom, Spirit Bear. You have a message.

Deliver message, Zeb clicked.

The liver is evil and must be punished.

I hear you, Red-necked Crake, Zeb typed. All is well.

Then he closed the site and stood up. "Call me if there are any aphid recurrences," he said. "If you'd check our work from time to time and keep me informed, that would be good." He wrote on her pad: The hair's great, babe. Love the slanty eyes. Then he was gone.

Toby gathered up all the desk-pad pages. Luckily she had some matches to burn them with; she'd been hoarding matches for her Ararat, storing them in a container labelled Lemon Meringue Facial.

After Zeb's visit she felt less isolated. She'd log in to Extinctathon at irregular intervals and trace the path to the MaddAddam Grandmaster chatroom. Codenames and messages flitted across the screen: Black Rhino to Spirit Bear: Newbies coming. Ivory Bill to Swift Fox: Fear no weevil. White Sedge and Lotis Blue: Micesplice a ten. Red-necked Crake to MaddAddam: Marshmallow hiways nice one! She had no idea what most of these messages meant, but at least she felt included.

Sometimes there were e-bulletins that appeared to be CorpSeCorps classified information. Many of these were about strange outbreaks of new diseases, or peculiar infestations -- the splice porcubeaver that was attacking the fan belts in cars, the bean weevil that was decimating Happicuppa coffee plantations, the asphalt-eating microbe that was melting highways.

Then the Rarity restaurant chain was obliterated by a series of lethal bombings. She saw the regular news, where these events were blamed on unspecified eco-terrorists; but she also read a detailed analysis on MaddAddam. It was the Wolf Isaiahists who'd done the bombings, they said, because Rarity had introduced a new menu item -- liobam, a sacred animal for the Wolf Isaiahists. MaddAddam had added a P.S.: Warning all God's Gardeners: They'll pin this on you. Go to ground.

Shortly after that, Muffy came to the Spa unexpectedly. She was her usual elegant self; her manner gave nothing away. "Let's walk on the lawn," she said. When they were out in the open and away from any hidden mikes, she whispered, "I'm not here for a treatment. I just needed to tell you that we're going away, I can't say where. Don't worry. It's only urgent on the inside."

"Will you be all right?" Toby asked.

"Time will tell," said Muffy. "Good luck, dear Toby. Dear Tobiatha. Put Light around me."

She and her husband were listed as fatalities in an airship accident a week later. The CorpSeCorps were good at arranging high-class mishaps for highly placed suspects, Zeb had told her -- people whose disappearance without a trace would cause a stir, up there among the Corps anointed.

Toby didn't go near the MaddAddam chatroom for months after that. She waited for the knock on the door, the shattering of glass, the zipzip of a spraygun. But nothing happened. When she finally screwed up the courage to enter MaddAddam again, there was a message for her:

Inaccessible Rail from Spirit Bear: The Garden is destroyed. Adams and Eves gone dark. Watch and wait.

POLLINATION DAY