Ark

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Samantha’s hands were still red from the cold, the skin over her knuckles taut and dry. She had gone that morning to bring supplies to the Naomi, a small fishing vessel off the coast that she had bought with the last of her money, before money lost all meaning.

She had learned the knot to moor the boat months before she got it. A bowline knot, which started with a loop in the rope, the end snaking up and down and through. The world’s most useful knot, the website had said. The internet had disappeared a few weeks later, just before the evacuation.

In the Bible story, Noah had built a boat to survive the flood, to endure. The Naomi would not survive anything. That was not her purpose.

Samantha sat down at her station and breathed warm air on her knuckles.

“I,” Dan said, sitting back from the computer screen, “would really like a smoke.”

Samantha was in the middle of a tissue ID. She stared through the magnifier at the tiny leaves of what seemed to be a clump of peat moss in an attempt to match it to the grid of images on the screen in front of her. Ambuchanania or Sphagnum were the two genera options confronting her. The Sphagnum’s leaves, the screen told her, would have large dead cells alternating with the living ones. She needed to take a sample for the microscope.

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