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He flashed a glance at me. "She's ill, Pierre. We all are."

"But Kat-?"

He sighed. "Cancer. I don't know how advanced it is. There's nothing I can do about it, apart from give her the odd painkiller. And I'm running low on those." He paused, then said, "I'm sorry."

I said, "How long?"

He shook his head. "Maybe a year, two if she's lucky."

I nodded, staring through the darkness at the dim buildings. I wanted to say something, but the words wouldn't come. I changed the subject.

"You think Danny's right about the Med?"

Edvard shrugged. "I honestly don't know." He was silent for a time. "I do recall when there was sea there, Pierre, and magnificent towns and cities. The rich flocked there."

Not for the first time I tried to imagine the vast bodies of water Edvard had described, water that filled areas as vast as deserts, and heaved and rolled ... I shook my head. All I saw was a desert the colour of drinking water, flat and still.

He looked into the heavens as the night sky split with a crack of white light. It was Edvard who'd explained to me why, despite all the storms that raged, we never experienced rainfall: the little rain that did fall evaporated in the superheated lower atmosphere before it reached the earth. I thought of the storms, now, as mocking us with their futile promise.

I stared around at the buildings. "You think we can rebuild? I mean, make things like they were, before?"

Edvard smiled. "I like to think that with time, and hard work ... Like Danny, I'm an optimist. I really think that people, at heart, are good. Call me a fool, if you like, but that's what I think. So ... if we could band together, always assuming there were enough people to feasibly propagate the race ... then perhaps there would be hope."

"But to get back to where things were ... civilized?" I finished.

"That's a big call, Pierre. We've lost so much, so much learning, culture. We've lost so much expertise. So much of what we knew, of what we learned over centuries of scientific investigation and understanding ... all that is gone, and can never be rediscovered. Or if it can, then it'll take centuries ... even assuming the planet isn't too far gone, even assuming that humanity can reform ..." He laughed. "And I mean reform in more than just the figurative sense."

I thought about that for a time, then said, "But with no more oceans, no more seas ..."

He smiled at me. "I live in hope, Pierre. There might be small seas, underground reserves. I heard there are still small seas where the Pacific ocean was—"

"Couldn't we ... ?" I began.

He was smiling.

"What?" I said.

"The Pacific is half a world away,

Pierre. This thing might get us to the Med, if we're lucky. But not the Pacific."

I considered his words, the barren vastness of the world, and the little I knew of it. At last I said, "If we're the last ... I mean, I haven't seen another human for years."

"We aren't alone, Pierre. There are others, small bands. There must be." He was silent a while, and then said, "And anyway, even if life on Earth is doomed..."

After a few seconds I prompted him, "Yes?"

"Well," he said, "there's always Project Phoenix."

He'd told me all about Project Phoenix, the last hope. Forty years ago, when the world governments had known things were bad and getting worse, they pooled resources and constructed a starship, full of 5,000 hopeful citizens, and sent it to the stars.

Towards the east, where the sky was blackest, I made out a dozen faint glimmering points of distant stars. I thought of the starship, still on its journey, or having reached its destination and settled on a new, Earthlike planet.

"What do you think happened to the starship?" I asked.

"I like to think they're sitting up there now, enjoying paradise, and wondering what they left behind on Earth—"

He stopped and looked up into the night sky, then fitted his hand above his eyes to cut out the glare of the magnetic storm. "Je-sus Christ, Pierre." He scrambled to his feet. I joined him, my heart thumping. "What?"

Then, as I scanned the sky, I heard it - the faint drone of a