Three Hundred Thousand

In 2150, Élise Vantroyen regulates the water of a Zone built on the polders of the Scheldt delta. One September morning, canal four goes from 0.4 to 3.9 grams of salt per litre. She takes the reading three times, because the procedure says so and not because she doubts it, and she already knows what it means: gate 31 of the barrier will not close again, and the next real storm will come in.

The Council votes to evacuate nine hundred and forty thousand people in forty days. There are four thousand convoy places a day. The rest will walk.

Eleven days later the storm arrives. In the crush at the Kruiningen depot, Élise is separated from her mother and from Jonas, her partner of six years — the allocation officer who signs the departure orders. She leaves again on the trailer of Milo Cavelier, a carrier from the Outside she has known for three days, who cannot read fluently and who picked her up at the side of a road because once, seven years earlier, he did not stop.

Six hundred and sixty-seven kilometres separate them from the Granary, the wheat plain that has voted three hundred thousand places. Fifty-five days of walking. And at the end, a short queue and a long one.