Hanneke was deeply, madly in love, and she knew it wouldn’t last. Only eight more months, twelve at most. She blinked her magnification on and zoomed in on her partner.

Sun-burned, sea-weathered, handsome Gerben, her Gerben was strolling down the tideline, crows taking to the air at every step, cawing their protest.

Every flood brought in treasure, all the precious stuff the sea had stolen from the drowned cities. Her lover knelt down to pick a tarred bottle from the kelp, then rose holding a string of glittering fishhooks. Ordinary diamonds. Worthless.

The harsh sunlight made his face into a marvelous woodcut: glowing skin and inky shadows, his nose a proud hook. Hanneke stood motionless like a sea heron at a tide pool, savoring the moment, burning it in her permanent memory.

Something gleamed at her feet. She pushed the strands of seaweed aside but it was only a herring. It looked quite fresh, the scales silver, but it might be decades old. The sea had become such a deadly brew of chemicals and polymers that the strangest things instantly fossilized, wrapped in strands of plastic. Take all those crow feathers blowing around. They would normally decompose in a year, but the moment the tide touched them they became imperishable.

Beachcombing was a rather romantic and most dangerous profession, a job for Youngsters: no steady and prudent Parent would touch it with a six-foot pole. For now, Hanneke and Gerben meshed like two perfect cogs, two fearless daredevils. All too soon they would start to bicker. The Change would turn them into fiercely protective Parents, nest makers. As Truthsayer Joachim had told them: “You’re dream partners now and will become the worst of Parents if you don’t break up in time.” As a Youngster, Hanneke considered a baby about as attractive as a naked mole rat. Next year she would probably be pregnant with her first and ecstatic about it.

Gerben waved, came running.

“What is it?” Hanneke asked. “Another preserved gull feather?”

“No such luck. This is almost as good.” He opened his hand. On the palm lay a barnacle-encrusted smartphone. The rare earths in the circuits alone would keep them in water and food for a month. “But what makes it a real find. . . .” He placed his thumb on the screen and it lit up.

“Hello,” a tiny voice piped up, “I am Siri mark three-eight-seven. How can I help you?”

The talking antique made them almost overstay their welcome. The flood came suddenly rushing in, turning from a distant silvery line into a foam topped wall. It moved way too fast: another part of the English coast must have slid into the waves, raising a tsunami.

Hanneke saw the last apartment building go down and now only the three church towers of Old Amersfoort were left standing.

They ran across the mudflats, the Dyke a distant wall.

“Hurry up!” Gerben’s boots instantly grew into ten foot stilts. Those wouldn’t save him from the violence of the tidal wave, but they might just outrun the racing water.

“Extend!” Hanneke ordered her boots, but a warning flashed across her retina. Some arcane technobabble, pulsating and alarmingly red.

“Let’s go, love,” Gerben urged her on.

“They aren’t working!” In the distance she could hear the wave, like the muted roar of a colony of sea lions.

Gerben didn’t even curse. He just bowed down, grabbed her arm, and hoisted her on his shoulders. “Hold on.”

“Drop me, you crow-brain! We will both drown!”

“I’d rather drown with you than leave you behind.”

Hanneke didn’t object. She embraced him, feeling his strong body move against hers. Behind them the tsunami rushed in: a wall of thundering water.

“You won’t survive,” Siri suddenly said in her head. “Probability 97 percent. Now, I don’t fancy spending another fifty years on the bottom of the sea . . .”

“So?” Hanneke felt a darkening of her spirit, a fatal drop in her life force. The last Siris had been infallible AIs, in the decade before the programs had learned to lie.

“You may order me to save your life. Even if you two aren’t my true owners.”

“Do it!” She didn’t ask for the price. Beggars can’t be choosers.

A pause, then: “The truthsayers state that they can lift you out before the wave hits.”

A gray drone dropped from the sky, dangled a rope. It was made of braided gecko-string, a hundred times as sticky as a spiderweb.  It curled around them, adhering to their beachcomber’s suits, their bare arms. A sickening lurch and then they rose.

Not a heartbeat too soon: the waters thundered past, with the tips of Gerben’s stilts trailing through the foam.

The Dyke expanded, rose, until it seemed to touch the sky. According to the ever unreliable Allnet, the Dyke had been built long ago to stop the rising water and the onslaught of hurricanes, but Hanneke suspected it had more to do with keeping the outer-dykers on the seaside, away from the inland paradise of Earth’s true rulers.

One mile high, the Dyke was encrusted with an immense shantytown: bubbles of metallic glass or foamed titanium, windmills and gardens with melons and spiky cactus trees.

The lowest part belonged to the Youngsters: beachcombers, tinkerers, artists, performers, . . . The people who lived. All right, there was also plenty of dying, but that just added spice to life. “Only the boring survive to become Parents,” ran the Youngsters’ credo.

So, low down the portholes sported a foot thickness of diamond glass. On the walls, cultivated banks of bread clams competed with constructs of tide treasure. Human-shaped robot remains hung crucified on bleached tree trunks. Ancient car wrecks, parts of ships, and buildings rose up in rusty totem poles. The smaller totem poles had been constructed by the muskrats that dug their warrens in the Dyke. To dismantle them would earn you a sea-snake in your boots or a poison arrow in your eye. After the dendritic plague, the humans were no longer the only intelligent species on Earth.

Higher up the Dyke was the domain of the Parents. Those streets were much cleaner and organized, with blooming sea-thistles in earthenware pots. Behind the windows colorful paper lanterns shone, indicating how many children that particular family was blessed with. Blue for trying, green for the first daughter or son, yellow for the next five, red for up to fifteen, and the much envied purple for even more.

In highest levels of city, the Elders lived in their stained-glass pavilions until the genetically programmed cut-off age of a hundred and twenty. They had done their duty and most of them were hooked up to VR-Heavens where they experienced a million years in just an hour. Others collected obscure relics, or were busy with outlandish projects spanning decades.

The Dyke stretched farther than the eye could see, north- and southwards, all the way from Stavanger to Gibraltar.

The drone set Hanneke and Gerben down on a ledge of varnished kelp-wood. Brother Joachim, the truthsayer who was their usual buyer, sent it away with a wave of his hand. He was a tall man, his body as spare as a hunting dog, dressed in bright white robes. The breeze played with the folds, but no shadows appeared on the smart-cloth. The truth should always be clear, without a taint of doubt.

“Youngsters Hanneke and Gerben, I wish you a clean future.”

Hanneke gave the traditional response. “And the truth is the only path to there.”

The brother extended his hand, raised an eyebrow.

“So sorry,” Siri said. “But I was the price for your rescue.”

“I might have known.” Still, what use was a smartphone to a drowned girl? Nonetheless, Hanneke felt a pang. We never get to keep anything nice.

“Did you find some more treasure? Like that gull feather last month? You only sold us the tip and the cut looked new.”

Seagulls had been extinct for generations, driven out by the more versatile crows, Hanneke knew.

“We cut it in two,” she confessed. Lying to a truthsayer was bad form and the order was their best client. Truthsayers never lied. With the Allnet sprouting fantasies and fake news by the microsecond, truth had become a precious commodity. The word of a truthsayer was as immovable as a clump of neutronium, any fact rock solid.

“Well, I seek a true answer now: what did you do with the rest of the feather?”

Gerben looked at Hanneke, who shrugged. He can know. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t telling where we found it.

“We sold it to Svendsen Artifacts,” she said. “One of our regular buyers. Why?”

Brother Joachim just smiled: “It is impractical for this humble person to enumerate the myriad of reasons that would be required to answer that question.”

It was the standard truthsayer’s answer for: “I’m not going to tell you.” Debating a truthsayer was like arguing with a tame crow: you would end up with a dry throat and nothing to show for it but a load of guano.

Brother Joachim raised his hand. “We would be interested in procuring all partly preserved or whole feathers, if you have them, now or in the future.”

“We will keep that in mind,” Gerben said. “I wish you a clean future, Brother.”

“And truth is the only path to there.”

They took the moving staircase all the way down to Scrounge, the district of the beachcombers, almost at the foot of the Dyke.

“What was that all about?” Gerben said, when they walked along Jutterstraat with the hundreds of stalls hawking anything from fossil shark teeth to still glowing everlamps from stranded oil tankers. Rats peered from their holes, clutching tiny crossbows. Some had their own tiny tables where they bartered their dug-up Dyke treasure with the humans.

“It means that feather was worth a lot more than we thought. We should have asked Svendsen twice as much. Or cut it up in more pieces.”

“Next time we will, love. Cheer up, life is too short to sulk!”

“Aye, aye, captain. But it’s still a shame . . .”

“Next time, sweet. The tide will provide. It always does.” He pursed his lips so she kissed him. He tasted of silt and the smell of kelp still lingered in his beard.

“I can’t help wondering what Svendsen did with his half of the feather,” Hanneke mused.

“No doubt sold it to some collector higher up the Dyke.”

Hanneke automatically looked up. The Dyke dominated the sky, the city a sea of jeweled lights in the setting sun. This was their home. She loved it, but this time it couldn’t console her.

“What is so fascinating up there?” Gerben asked, following her gaze.

Hanneke balled her fists. “It all seems so pointless, suddenly. Soon we’ll be slaves of our kids and then we’ll become Elders. What kind of life is that? Collecting stuff from the drowned past? Not seeking treasure and having adventures, just hoarding it. Like pack rats or magpies!”

And the worst is that there won’t be any “we.” Truthsayers are never wrong. According to Joachim, I will have children with Achmed, and Gerben will marry that stupid Wendy girl. Like she will make him happy!

The thought stung like sea water in an open wound, and Gerben seemed to sense her mood. He threw his arm around Hanneke’s knobby shoulders. “We’ll ascend all the way to the land of the Elders, my love. Together. They can’t force us apart.”

They can, and they will, unless we stay Youngsters forever. But everyone says we will change. Survival-programming to produce as many offspring as possible in this monstrous empty world. Suddenly Achmed will smell irresistible, the very pheromonic aroma of lust and devotion. My body and brain will tell me he is my true love.

The woman waiting in front of their door was clearly an Elder. Her skin seemed as smooth as soapstone, her face so symmetric she looked like another species altogether.

In a way she was. Elders didn’t have the bravura and reckless energy of the Youngsters, nor the maniac urge of the Parents to make and raise children. She had moved beyond human.

“Business,” whispered Hanneke. “I’m sure of it.”

“Everything with you is business,” Gerben said, from the corner of his mouth.

“Not everything.” She squeezed his hand, then stroked his cheek, just to let him know he was wrong.

Maybe the Elder woman didn’t approve of such blatant Youngster behavior, but it was impossible to tell. Her face stayed an unreadable mask, deep in the uncanny valley.

“I am Full Academician Krupina,” she introduced herself. “Professor of Historical Cryptozoology of the Lysenko Institute.”

“Pina? How many children is that in Russian?” Hanneke asked. Parents put the number of children behind their name. One day she would be Hanneketwo, and maybe all the way up to Hanneketwenty. Elders kept their Parent name, as a badge of honor, to show they had done their duty to society.

“No, Krupina is my family name. In my youth, you got your surname from your parents. Not this modern foolishness.”

Even Hanneke’s great-grandparents had used number-names. A family name was something from way back, history so unreliable it was nothing but myth.

If this woman was speaking the truth she was truly ancient. Maybe old enough to have seen the world behind the Dyke, before it was closed off forever. Or maybe she was just untruthing, fake fancying like the Allnet.

According to the Allnet, the world behind the Dyke was an idyllic paradise with calm lakes and glorious cities. The next day the Allnet told you it was a devastated wasteland, or a strange crystalline AI-world.

“What can we do for you, Elder Krupina?” Gerben asked.

From her mantle, the woman took out half of the white feather Hanneke and Gerben had sold to Svendsen Artifacts, missing tip and all.

“I want you to bring me to the place where you found this feather. Exactly the same place.”

Hanneke and Gerben looked at each other.

Business! they mouthed silently.

At low tide, the waters retreated all the way to the lost coast cities, leaving mud lands in its wake. You could walk the whole distance on stilts—although it would take you days—or use a delta wing.

Both had their disadvantages. A hurricane would tear your wing to tatters, pelt you with hailstones the size of stork eggs. Tsunamis and lesser flood waves were also frequent. The stilts could lift you over the waves of a normal seven meter tide, but not above those incoming water hills. Hanneke and Gerben had once chanced it, stilt-walking all the way to the old coast, but that had been reckless verging on suicidal.

Hanneke folded her arms, lifted her chin. “We’ll bring you there, but you’ll have to provide transport. Hire us a mud-walker, a transport drone, eh? And we get half of everything we find.”

“Done.”

“My skimmer,” Krupina said. ‘“Solid Tsarist tech. Fusion driven.” She smiled. “I could put it into orbit or tunnel through a hurricane.”

The skimmer looked archaic, Hanneke thought, an ungainly iron turtle from the Age of Waste when the tar-sands were still fat and oozing.

“Welcome aboard, Full Academician Krupina and guests,” a friendly and instantly familiar voice said, when they sat down in the leather acceleration chairs. “Where do you want to go?”

Another Siri! How impossibly wealthy is this woman?

“The girl will tell you. She seems to be in charge.”

They were tearing through the sky like an ancient jet fighter. The Dyke retreated, turned into a dark line. Beyond, the unknown interior glowed with a dozen shades of green: emerald, dull verdigris, viridian. An immense river meandered through a patchwork of fields. Hanneke blinked and now the whole country turned hazy, streamers of dull mist and the outline of monstrous ruins.

“Shit,” she muttered. “It is still lies. Even from above.”

She turned to Krupina. “What exactly lies beyond the Dyke?”

“Sorry. I am not allowed to tell.”

Utrecht passed below, overgrown with reed and salt-loving willows. A dozen villages appeared on the shore of a lake. Hanneke blinked her lenses on, zoomed in.

The houses were raised on stilts or sat on pontoons. That is all very well, but how do they survive tsunamis? Geese waddled around in pens, birds the size of ostriches.

A red light suddenly flooded the cabin, followed by an emphatic ping!

“We are under attack, ma’am. Unguided projectile weapons,” Siri sang out. “Should I return fire?”

The Academician snorted. “A waste of ammunition. Those savages can’t hurt us.”

Utrecht disappeared behind them.

“What exactly is cryptozoology?” Gerben asked. “And what has it to do with our gull feather?”

The face of Academician Krupina lit up and for the first time her smile seemed fully human.

“It is the science of hidden animals. Sometimes we think a snake or even a small monkey extinct, but then, suddenly, one is discovered in a patch of wilderness. In the past we needed a breeding pair but now DNA is enough. DNA and an animal that is a close relative to birth it. That way we brought the mammoths back. Woolly rhinoceroses roam the Russian tundra.”

“The gulls,” Hanneke said. “But there are no gulls left in the whole world. Brother Joachim told us. No birds to lay their eggs even if you have their DNA.” She frowned. What had the truthsayer said? Yes, the crows drove them off, took their place. Like we pushed the Neanderthals into extinction.

“The feather, my dear girl, that feather was quite recent. Not preserved. I can tell you now, without prying truthsayers around. Three months old at most. So there must be at least some gulls left, even if only a single breeding pair. All I need is a fertilized egg or a living seagull. Cloning is easy.” She nodded. “Give me the chick and the bird will surely become a Russian patriot. Fighting for our glorious motherland.”

Hanneke frowned. “A patriot? A bird a good citizen?”

“Oh, according to the rumors, the seagulls that survived the Extinction were quite smart. As intelligent as chimpanzees.” She folded her hands, nodded. “We won’t make the same mistake as the Australians, losing their country to those uplifted rabbits. No, our gulls will be disciplined and ideologically sound, taught the right reverence for the Eternal Ivan and the Church.”

Finally the harbor of Rotterdam appeared, still filled with capsized tankers and abandoned factories. Most of it was below sea level now but the outlines remained visible, like Nazca tracings in the blue. Orcas patrolled those waters. It was once said that they would save a drowning swimmer and let him ride on their backs. Now, they would gladly pull him under and dismember him. The plague had made them intelligent and taught them cruelty.

“Turn to the left,” Hanneke said. “We found the feather in Den Haag. In the center.”

There had been more feathers. A dozen, at least, but they hadn’t realized how precious they were. They thought the feathers were from storks or albino crows.

The old dunes of Scheveningen and Kijkduin had become a row of islands, with salty marshland behind them. The Roman legionaries must have seen much the same landscape.

“Siri? Do you see the bell-tower there?”

“Do you think they nest in the tower?” Krupina asked.

“Perhaps. We found the feather one street over. The Grote Marktstraat the old maps called it.”

Siri circled the church tower.

“Scan it,” the Academician ordered.

“Nothing,” Siri almost immediately said. “No trace of birds.”

Sand covered the ancient main road. The low tide line meandered across the Grote Marktstraat, leaving mussels, crab shields, and still wet garlands of brown seaweed.

Something is wrong. Hanneke looked around from the entrance of the skimmer. Such silence. So eerie. Nothing is hopping around among that bounty of fresh seafood. And then she had it. There are no crows! Not a single one. Strange, crows are everywhere.

“I have found them,” Siri announced. “Heaps of guano mixed with white feathers.” A close up view of the street below appeared. “There is some kind of opening in the sidewalk. An anomaly because it should have been filled with water. It must close up when the flood arrives.”

“Any details?”

“Let me search the archives. Yes, this was the entrance of the old Underground. The Spui stop, it was called. My scan indicates that all other exits have collapsed.”

“Or been closed off deliberately,” the Academician said.

This Siri is connected to something much better than the Allnet, Hanneke realized. Something dealing in facts instead of lies.

“Set us down a hundred meters from the opening,” Krupina said. “We don’t want to alarm our birds.”

Den Haag looked pretty much like any other drowned city they had visited: a few robust ruins, heaps of stone and concrete, shifting dunes, and some hardy vegetation.

There were plenty of feathers on the ground. Hanneke had no idea if they were gull feathers. They looked the same as the previous one, so she put a few handfuls in the self-sealing pockets of her beachcomber suit. Gerben followed her example. There were other collectors than Academician Krupina, especially higher on the Dyke.

Krupina followed them, carrying a bulky stasis container. The telltale pulsed yellow: inside the time flowed some ten thousand times slower.

It was one of those exasperating AI inventions. Asked about the principle, the program had replied: “Sit down and I’ll explain. I hope you have half a million years?”

“Any movement, Siri?” Krupina asked. “Still no signs of life on the scans?”

“Negative. I would surmise the seagulls established their colony underground. I am not sure. The foundations of those smart cities are almost impossible to scan. Too many corrupted datastreams in the conduits still. I am scanning passively and even then my defense programs are edging into overload.”

“Then we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.” She turned to Hanneke and Gerben. “Time to earn your pay, Youngsters! I’ll let you down that hole on a line. You signal me the moment you find any seagulls there. And don’t forget to get me my eggs.”

Gerben looked at the opening in the weathered concrete wall, and Hanneke knew exactly what he was thinking. No doubt there had been glass doors and all kind of signs once, but the centuries, tides, and weather had removed every last trace of a staircase: a death trap. “Can’t you use a drone first?”

“You heard Siri. Corrupted datastreams, full of mutated viruses and hungry malware. Anything artificial will be contaminated in milliseconds. If I let Siri engage, we’ll lose our flight back.”

“We will do it,” Hanneke said, pulling Gerben with her. “We go down, love. Get those eggs, and we will become the richest, most famous beachcombers of the Dyke. Standing here waving our hands won’t help.”

“I knew I could count on you, Hanneke. Siri, a cable.”

The ship fired a thin cable which landed precisely at the feet of the two beachcombers. Self-healing spider silk with a graphene core, Hanneke diagnosed the make. It could carry their weight a thousandfold and would not be cut through by any sharp edges.

She grabbed the cable and attached it to Gerben’s and her own suit. She next lifted the stasis container and handed it to Gerben who snorted, then offered her a big grin. “You only brought me along to carry your things.” It was an old joke between them.

The descent went smoothly. Tightly holding onto Gerben, not really necessary, but nice nonetheless, Hanneke looked around with her enhanced vision. Her lenses only needed the tiniest bit of light, mere photons.

The rough walls were covered with guano. There had definitely been birds in this tunnel, and for a long time, too. The smell almost made her gag until she dialed her olfactory receptors down.

It was at least ten meters to the ground, but finally their feet touched the sand heaps at the bottom. The cable in her hand instantly became smooth, almost frictionless. The message was clear: you’ll only get to climb back with the prize.

She looked around, let her lenses gather the light. They stood in a huge artificial cavern. At one end the tunnel continued. At the other, the ceiling had caved in.

The nests started a mere five meters down the tunnel: clever constructs of seaweed and other materials. And there were eggs laying in those nests. Dozens of them.

But there were far more seagulls. Hundreds of seagulls nestled everywhere in the cave, perched on ledges, peeping from holes in the walls.

Hanneke had looked up images of seagulls, but clearly the Allnet had been fibbing again.

These are so much bigger. A wingspan of at least six feet, beaks like daggers, and cold, calculating eyes.

“We found the eggs,” Gerben whispered into the very low tech intercom woven into the line. “And seagulls.”

“Excellent! Fill the container. I will pull you up when it’s full.”

“I don’t know if they will let us. The birds are huge, and they don’t look friendly.”

“We need those eggs. Mother Russia needs these eggs! Do it, Youngsters, and I will let Siri pull you up.”

Hanneke had a horrible sense of déjà vu. That story her mother had read her at bedtime. “Hand me the lamp and I’ll pull you up,” the false uncle had told Aladdin.

Test it.  “Get us out, before they attack. We will try something different.”

A sigh was audible on the intercom and something fist-sized tumbled down the hole in the ceiling.

Beachcombers liked to display their finds, the things that didn’t sell anyway. It was a boast: Look what I pulled from the waves! But some displays had been more public spirited. Take care: these fake lobsters are smart mines, and that is a gas grenade, and this petrified blob. . . .

So Hanneke instantly recognized the gas grenade rolling towards them. Good old reliable tech, nothing but a tube filled with some deadly concoction.

She only needs the eggs. She will kill all the seagulls and us.

Two perfect cogs, meshing: Gerben dived for the grenade, Hanneke yanked open the stasis container. The gas grenade flew through the air once more, landed in the container and Hanneke slammed the lid shut.

All in three seconds flat.

One seagull shrieked, over a hundred other gulls answered. The noise was deafening.

We have spooked them. They are going to attack!

The first bird spread her wings and after a little hop, it swooped down from its ledge. Half a second later all the other gulls followed.

They all flew up, to the exit.

So they know quite well what a gas grenade is. Who really attacked them.

It only took a handful of seconds.

A body tumbled down, slammed into the sand. It had been pecked to the bones and was scarcely recognizable as human.

All those huge yellow beaks, each as sharp as a dagger. Hanneke shuddered.

The biggest bird landed in front of them, walked to a nest and tugged it all the way to Hanneke’s feet. He paused, drew the double circle of the truthsayers in the sand with his beak.

The message was unmistakable: Take them to the Dyke. Bring our eggs to the truthsayers.

“Siri?” Hanneke said. “We got the eggs. Pull us up.”

“Right. Only hoist them up when they have the eggs Academician Krupina ordered. You have the eggs.”

Hanneke and Gerben took hold of the cable, tugged.  The moment of truth. Their hand palms instantly adhered and they rose into the daylight.

“We have feathers,” Hanneke declared. “All the feathers you could want.”

“You have something more,” Brother Joachim stated.

“Oh yes, a nest with two eggs. I think you truthsayers want them as much as the academician did.”

“You are right.” A truthsayer never prevaricated, never sparred. Both reactions came too close to untruth, to lies. “Long ago, a biohacker spread a design-drug that promoted dendritic growth in the brains of seagulls. It killed most of the chicks, but some emerged as feathered Einsteins. As did their chicks henceforth. Our rulers tried a dozen methods to eliminate the threat, and sea-crows proved to be the most efficient solution. We thought the gulls destroyed. Until you two found fresh feathers.” He nodded. “The Tsarists see everything as a weapon, every living creature as a potential soldier. We want the gulls for something else.”

“You miss them.” Hanneke corrected herself. “We all miss them.” The black crows at the tideline: that had always felt wrong somehow.

“The shore has never been the same since the gulls disappeared. We humans need their raucous cries, their stupid bickering over a single empty shell, their shapes wheeling in the sky.” He nodded. “We would like to bring them back. It would help to heal the world.”

“I see.” Hanneke handed him the nest she had wrapped in her woolen sweater. “Two eggs. Now, what will you give in exchange?”

“Almost anything.”

She didn’t have to ask Gerben. “We want to stay Youngsters. Remain a team. True loves. Can you stop the Change?”

“Remain a greedy caterpillar?” The truthsayer frowned. “Give up ever turning into a delicate butterfly?” He closed his eyes, no doubt listening to the voices of his brethren, gathering their expertise. “Well, it can be done. Easily, even. But it’ll cost you. A short burn, like a candle lit on both ends. Not the hundred and twenty years other humans get.”

Hanneke suppressed a shiver. To become a fussy Parent or worse, an Elder, passionless, a dogged collector. Never!

“Exactly how long would such a short burn last?” Gerben inquired.

“Sixty years,” Brother Joachim answered. “Perhaps even eighty? A precise answer is impossible.”

Sixty years. Two more lifetimes. It was an eternity. And we would stay young the whole time.

Gerben clutched her hand. His eyes shone. “We will take it.”

Two years later, Joachim walked along the tideline. Gulls wheeled in the sky, sat on the beach posts, surveyed their kingdom. Most of the crows were gone, pushed across the Dyke into the unknown interior.

A gull landed at his feet. It was albatross-sized. Yes, you needed a huge body to support a complex brain.

“How does it go?” the truthsayer asked.

A screech was the answer. It took Joachim two, three seconds to translate it. The language of gulls was highly compressed.

We nestle on the whole Dyke, from Riga to Gibraltar. The crows fear us. The orcas no longer see a floating seagull as legitimate prey.

“Good.” Humankind had barely survived the Sixth Extinction. Many animals had become intelligent when the dendritic hack jumped species: the crows, the muskrats, the rabbits, and the orcas. The humans had become a minority and they needed all the allies they could get.