In spite of everything, the heat is relentless. I move slowly to limit the flow of sweat. I may be walking for hours and some dehydration is inevitable, but too much exertion and I will not survive the morning. There is no wind today, at least. No wind for the first time in weeks. I can take the parasol with me. I can keep my face out of the fire.

The rocky mountainside beside me dances in the heat. Gravel and dust in ochres and browns, dead trees and bushes in black. I try to keep my eyes on the road beneath me, the bleached grey tar the same as it was in my childhood. I imagine the mountains as they were, then. Greens and golds and pinks. Fynbos stretched right up into the rocky crags. Bright clumps of geometric protea flowers. Impossibly intricate silver leaves. Seasonal streams chattered over the rocks and baboons barked their warning to the echoes. There were birds overhead. Lizards and rock hyraxes and hikers.

There are still lizards, I think. And snakes, though who knows what the snakes eat. Other snakes, I suppose. We have pumped out a Mesozoic atmosphere, unfit for mammals with heat trapped in our blood.

We have returned the world to the reptiles.

I must drive the bus to the city this afternoon, to fetch a child. And so, for now, I must find enough people to fill it. The rules against single-occupancy vehicles are strict, or at least, I impose a strict rule on myself because I find the maths of yearly carbon allowances overwhelming. Engine efficiency, distance travelled, number of passengers, forgotten late nights reading in bed with the lights on. Too many variables. It’s better just to play it safe, never risk getting close to the limit. In some countries, I believe, motorised travel is barely restricted, because the vehicles are electric and the grid is powered by wind and sun. But our grid was coal-fired and so it was shut down on the Day of Judgement. We run on generators here, and our bus burns a single person’s yearly allowance in a trip or two. I know there will be young people in our care who are keeping track.

There are about a hundred homes in the village near our orphanage, scattered in dusty, barren yards as if dropped haphazardly from the sky. I stop at the first house – a squat, yellow bungalow with shuttered windows and an open front door. I knock on the metal door frame. A young man comes to greet me. Shirtless, sweaty. His lean muscles glisten. The fabric of his blue shorts is damp where it meets his skin. ‘Good morning, Sir,’ I say. I lower my eyes. ‘I came to ask if anyone here would like a lift to the city.’

He looks me up and down. He takes a bite of a crisp, green apple. Juice runs over his lightly stubbled chin. Where did he find an apple? He wipes his mouth, then his forehead. ‘Maybe. Let me know once you have ten others,’ he says.

‘I will do, Sir. And how many will you be if you decide to come?’

He tilts his head back. Looks down his nose at me. ‘There are no pathogens here,’ he hisses.

I feel my cheeks flush, though I wish they wouldn’t. I’m only thirty-four, only four years too old to be allowed in leadership. Do I look older than that? I’m not a pathogen, I want to shout, but he hasn’t directly accused me of anything, and what do I call myself, anyway? They haven’t come up with a name for my generation. The Ones Who Knew What Was Coming And Didn’t Do Anything To Stop It?

‘Right, Sir, so just the one, then.’

There’s a smirk on his face, now. He’s enjoying his power.

‘Do you want to know what happened to them?’ he says. It’s rhetorical, of course. I can’t disrespect my youngers. I want to know whatever he wants to tell me.

‘Of course, Sir.’

‘Burned alive,’ he says. Smiling, satisfied.

My mouth is dry. I never get used to this. I wish I could lick the droplet of apple juice he missed on his chin. I wish he would offer me some water. I wish I could stand beneath a cold shower and never leave it. Let it soak and cool my skin. Maybe I’d open my mouth and let the cool water pour in, fill me up and drown me. Burning alive is one of the worst. Prescribed for only the most heinous offenders. His parents must have worked for an oil company or a plastics manufacturer or—-

‘They were coal miners,’ he says, and I think I might be sick. These measures were put in place to stop the powerful, the custodians of the Earth who neglected their duties. Mine owners, lobbyists, boards of the energy utility – fine, but don’t burn the lowly mineworkers.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I say.

He narrows his eyes at me. ‘You’re dismissed.’

The second home I try is smaller than the first. A matchbox house, sky blue with peeling paint and a large section of roof missing. The dry yard is divided up into squares, each square divided up into rows of ridges. A few poles are left standing in the dirt, perhaps from a time when they supported tomatoes or grape vines. A trellis arch above the front door, webbed together by twisting, dead wood. An elderly woman comes to greet me. Her face is lined, soft with kindness, the same ochre colour as the sand and rock outside. ‘Come in,’ she says, and she takes me to her little living room. A threadbare armchair. A lumpy, olive green sofa. She shakes a little as she moves, but she is lithe, energetic.

‘It’s lovely to see an old person,’ I say, when she hands me a glass of lukewarm water.

She winks at me. ‘I escaped the retribution,’ she tells me, ‘because I’m untainted.’

‘I didn’t know we had untainted in our village,’ I say, ‘We’re so close to the city!’ I didn’t think we had untainted in the country. Further north, in the jungles of central Africa, perhaps. On remote islands and inaccessible valleys and the arctic. There, an indigenous way of life can survive. A connection to nature; a wholeness. But the colonialists had been thorough, here. Capitalism’s tentacles spread into every nook and crevice in the land, turning people into labour, Eden into resources.

‘You can see something all around you and still not think it’s right,’ she says. ‘We are not robots. We can think for ourselves.’

‘But how could you prove it?’

She gives me a warm, wide smile. She’s missing a few teeth.

‘They could see how I lived. Subsistence farming, growing what I needed in the little yard in front. But there were testimonies, too – from my children and grandchildren. They found it funny how I never lusted after the things that advertisers wanted me to lust after. Or what was the other kind? The people who were advertisers?’

‘Influencers?’

‘That’s the one. My son would say things to me like ‘Don’t you think that car’s beautiful?’ or ‘Don’t you want to take a flight somewhere before you die?’ and I would always reply, ‘happiness comes from within, my boy.’’

I finish my glass of water. ‘Useful to have kids for those kinds of testimonies,’ I say, ‘so long as you have only two or less.’

She laughs. ‘I was lucky like that. I didn’t plan it. I was too busy to have more children. That reminds me – you came about the orphanage.’

I shift in my seat. I pour myself another glass of water from the jug on the table. It is warm on my tongue. It will not quench my insatiable thirst. The air burns on my skin. ‘Not really,’ I say, ‘I just came to ask if you would like a trip into town this afternoon.’

‘But you work at the orphanage. That’s why you’re going?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those poor children.’

Her expression is impossible to read. Pity, of course, and sadness, but this could all be a trap. You hear stories about these informants all the time. The kind of people you’d least expect to be informants. Old women, for example, working as fronts for the young people.

‘We take good care of them,’ I say.

‘But don’t you think the whole thing’s barbaric?’

My heart races. I look out of the window at the burnt, barren mountains. How wonderful it would feel to agree with her. A relief, to acknowledge the madness all around me, to stop the madness getting in. Perhaps it’s too late. I can’t tell what’s right or wrong anymore. It is barbaric to kill people for having more than two children, surely. But the planet can’t sustain us and they should have known better. Is this the only path left? I know what the young people would say: There were other paths available to us. There were many other paths we could have taken. We chose not to take them. This is all that’s left.

‘Ours is not to question the young,’ I say.

The old woman clicks her tongue in irritation and leans back in her armchair. ‘There are no young people present. You can see that.’ But I can’t see behind the sofa. I have no idea who is waiting in the next room or listening in on this conversation from a control room somewhere. The young have eyes and ears everywhere.

‘We are all Children of Gaia,’ I say, and she sighs and rolls her eyes at me.

‘We are all Children of Gaia,’ she repeats.

She escorts me to her front door. ‘Be kind to those orphans,’ she says to me. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much space left for that, anymore.’ She hands me my parasol and squeezes my shoulder. ‘I won’t be joining your little trip into town,’ she says, ‘but good luck.’

We are set to leave for the city at sunset. I have filled the bus with villagers and staffers. A motley crew, mostly my age or older. Tattered clothes. Dust-streaked faces. They line the rows behind me in silence and stare out the windows at the long, face-brick dormitories of the orphanage, almost beautiful in the fading red light. We must wait for the enforcer to make his way through the bus and capture everyone’s identity on his tablet, before we can go. The enforcer is short, very thin, sickly almost, but he is young enough to be leadership in our district and so his power is absolute.

He stops at a woman in the second row with a baby on her lap. ‘You,’ he says, and she looks down at his feet. ‘Yes, Sir,’ she says. Her voice is very small. The baby starts to niggle and cry. She thumps her knee up and down to soothe it. Distracted, frightened.

‘Do you know what my tablet is telling me?’ he says.

The woman starts to cry. The person sitting next to her takes her hand.

‘Please, Sir,’ she says. ‘Please. I think I have enough. If I miscalculated, it was a mistake. It was an honest mistake.’

The enforcer laughs. He pats her on her head. ‘Yes yes, shhh. You can go to the city. But then you reach your emissions cap. If you want to come back, you will need to wait until next year.’

The woman wipes her eyes. ‘That’s fine, Sir. I’m not coming back.’

He shakes his head and laughs. ‘What have you been doing this year to reach your limit so soon? Do you think you are more important than the rest of us? Do you think you deserve more?’

‘No, Sir.’

The enforcer exits the bus and I start the ignition. A loathsome sound, that filthy engine. Burning, burning while everything around us burns. I pull out onto the main road. The wind has come up again. The bus rocks with each gust from the southeast. Sand and dirt and little bits of trash blow across the road in thick clouds that make it difficult to see. Plastic bottles, from the time of recklessness, and sheetmetal from the shacks that line the road. A piece of sheetmetal smacks into an old woman and knocks her, face-first, into the gravel. She struggles to get up as the wind howls around her. There are young people nearby, but they pretend not to see her. I turn left onto the freeway and accelerate through the dust.

Most of my passengers will visit relatives in the city. A few have come along to try find supplies that we cannot get out here in the mountains. And I will bring another child into our care. A child whose parents were locked up and starved to death, to make a point. A point that still needs to be made, the young people tell us, because there are still people who haven’t changed their ways.

The darkness gathers in the valleys around me. Cool, black, absolute. A mercy extended to us by the shadow of the Earth. The mountains turn black and then the sky, slowly, imperceptibly, as the scorching sun moves to burn over the Americas. The only headlights on this freeway come from my own vehicle. The only lights in the villages nearby, candles or dim solar-powered bulbs, impossible to see from any distance.

I think about the Day of Judgement, when the grid went down and the pre-industrial darkness returned. Young saboteurs in the power plants. A coordinated attack throughout the country, throughout the world. The President was murdered in his sleep that night – by his own children. The presidents of so many countries were killed that night, along with the directors and executives of every company that hadn’t become carbon neutral by the deadline. I think about the warning that the Children of Gaia gave us all, five years before that date. When they set the deadline in that video that went viral because most people thought it was a joke. I can still see their leader, Linnea, in my mind’s eye, fifteen years old at the time, only two years younger than me. She was pale and sombre. Her hair was dirty, stringy, mousy brown. Dark clothes. Her voice quivered as she spoke, shaking with nervousness and rage.

‘You have exactly five years,’ she said, ‘because that’s how long we all have. We didn’t set this deadline. You did. You tore down our forests and poisoned our air and our water and shrugged off the collapse. It’ll be our problem, you said. The young shall inherit the mess. But this isn’t a mess. It can’t be fixed with recycling campaigns and green holiday safaris. It’s a mass suicide, and we won’t stand by and let it happen. You have five years to change. We will be watching. The Children of Gaia are everywhere. We are in every home, on every street. We are watching to see what you do.’

My mother showed me the video on her phone. She thought the faux-terrorist aesthetic was funny. Harsh lighting, bare walls, heavy shadows. She thought the way Linnea took herself so seriously was funny.  ‘Teenagers should be worried about boyfriends and bitchy classmates,’ she said.

‘Well no, Mom, I think this is actually pretty serious.’

‘You’re not a Child of Gaia, are you?’ she said, eyes wide with mock panic. ‘In my own home!’

We laughed, then, and she ordered us chicken salads to be delivered for lunch. They arrived in their standard plastic take-out bowls and she winked at me to seal the joke and cement our camaraderie. Linnea had said we shouldn’t eat meat. We shouldn’t use plastic. Shouldn’t fly or get food delivered or buy clothes before the ones we were wearing fell apart. We shouldn’t do any of the things that seemed so normal to us, then. I remember looking at that chicken breast in its plastic bowl and thinking how unremarkable it looked. How utterly lacking in planet-destroying drama. This whole thing is overblown, I remember thinking. This can’t possibly make a difference.

We pull up to the orphan transfer centre on the outskirts of the city. The building is in darkness. The whole city is in darkness. There are fires burning in some of the shacks nearby and their dull orange glow illuminates the sandstorm around us. Sparks shoot past the windscreen in the howling gale. I step out into the street and take care not to step on any decomposing bodies. They could be sleeping, I tell myself. It’s best not to look too closely.

There are no young people to greet me at the gate. No leaders or enforcers to check my security clearance. The building seems to be abandoned. Its shutters slam furiously against the walls in the wind. Many of the windows are broken. There’s a child sitting on the front steps, hugging her knees against her chest. The main door is locked and bolted behind her.

‘Are you the newly orphaned?’ I say.

She looks up at me and nods.

‘May they rest in peace.’

I offer her my hand and she looks at it without moving. ‘I’m here to take you away from the city,’ I say. ‘Away from the city’ is what we are supposed to call it. Not reeducation or cleansing, not brainwashing. I shake my head. I mustn’t think like this. It was the age of recklessness that brainwashed us. It was modernity. ‘You’ll like it there,’ I say. There’s maybe even some truth in that. It’s certainly better than this.

Her eyes are wide and frightened. She will not take my hand.

‘I’m sorry they did that to your parents,’ I say. I look over my shoulder and into the dark windows beside her. There are no young people to hear me. ‘The sentencing is too harsh. They didn’t deserve to die like that.’

‘I’m an only child,’ she says after a pause. Her voice is soft. I can barely hear her over the wind. ‘It wasn’t a sentence. My parents followed the rules.’

She hugs her knees tighter into her chest. ‘No one needs to starve us. Look around you. There’s nothing for anyone to eat.’

I must have the wrong child. I look to see if there is an enforcer anywhere. I look back towards the bus. None of the passengers have moved. They watch me from the illuminated cabin. Shadows staring out into the darkness and dust.

‘Are there crops where you live?’ the child says.

I think about the barren trenches in the untainted, old woman’s front yard. I think about the sweet, crisp apple in the hand of the leader who turned me away.

‘There are, if you follow the rules,’ I say.

She does not bother to respond. She knows as well as I do: The rules came too late.