New York 2140

Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir is working late in her office. Charlotte Armstrong tells her that two men from the Met Tower co-op have gone missing. Gen lives in the building as well but does not pay much attention to how it operates. Gen suggests she and Charlotte go home to the Met Tower together.

As they walk, Charlotte reveals that she practices immigration and intertidal law. At their building, they take an elevator to the farm on floors 31-35, where the two missing men had lived in a hotello, a room that collapses into a suitcase. Gen tells Vlade, the building supervisor, that she will need the names and files of everyone in the building who works for him.

Franklin Garr pilots the flying boat Jesus Bug to WaterPrice, the hedge fund where he works. He checks the closing markets in Asia and the mid-day markets in Europe.

Franklin is an expert in drowned coastlines, monitoring water levels all over the globe, since sea level has stabilized since the Second Pulse. He is also the creator of the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, which correlates fluctuations in the housing markets to fluctuations in sea level.

Franklin receives an instant message from Xi, a trader friend in Shanghai. Xi says there was a glitch the previous night in the Chinese commodities market (CME).

After work, Franklin goes to Pier 57, a bar where a party is starting. He sees an attractive woman with some of his old acquaintances and watches her for a while. Interested, he joins the group, and his friend Amanda introduces him to the woman—Joanna, a day trader at a firm called Eldorado. Joanna takes Franklin to the bar to get a drink. They talk about the CME glitch from the night before, but neither knows what caused it.

Franklin asks her to join him for dinner that Friday and she agrees. 

One of Vlade’s main jobs is to manage the submerged levels of the building. His apartment is downstairs, and he takes pride in choosing to live in a place that will quickly be underwater if he doesn’t keep the water out.

Inspector Gen visits him shortly after he wakes up. She asks about two men, Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen. He has no information for her but says he will let her know if he learns anything.

Vlade goes out onto the boardwalk for a brief inspection and sees two boys hiding in a boat. He knows them and believes they are harmless. When he asks them what they want, they ask when Amelia Black is due back, and wonder if they can watch her show on his screen. Vlade sends them away, saying that he doesn’t have time today. 

An unnamed man is on a boat, surveying the water. Sea level is fifty-five feet higher than it used to be and has turned most of Manhattan and the Bronx into shallow seas. Sea animals returned to the city when the water levels rose.

The Citizen, who will appear in each part of the novel to discuss a relevant aspect of New York’s history, now talks about New York’s surviving spirit. In the aftermath of the First Pulse, there was a great deal of terror and uncertainty, but New Yorkers pulled together and found ways to rebuild.

Amelia Black’s show is about helping endangered species migrate to habitats better suited to their survival in the face of climate change. As she flies over the Delaware Gap in her ship Assisted Migration, Amelia swings below the airship on rope harness in typically skimpy clothes. While she is hanging two hundred feet below the ship, the pulley that is supposed to bring her back up fails. Her digital autopilot Frans lowers the ship until she can stand in the top of a tree. She describes a squirrel she sees for the audience while Frans lowers the airship enough for her to step inside.

Frans takes the ship over the Atlantic and flies towards New York. On approach, Amanda narrates the sight of Manhattan for her audience. Near the Met Tower, she calls Vlade to tell him she is landing. She descends, enters the building, and takes an elevator to her home on the 40th floor.

Later, in the dining hall, Vlade introduces Amelia to Inspector Gen. Amelia receives a message on her wristpad—an invitation to film a show helping polar bears move to Antarctica, which has not yet completely melted. Amelia knows that the anti-assisted migration group Defenders of the Earth will not like this, but the Defenders already harass her as it is, so she agrees to do the show.

While she is preparing to leave work, Charlotte receives a call from Tanganyika John, the mayor’s assistant. He and three other assistants ask her to help the mayor write a press release justifying immigration quotas for the good of the city’s residents. When Charlotte refuses, Mayor Galina Estaban enters the room. Charlotte refuses her as well. Galina wants to curb the number of outsiders allowed to come to New York because its residents are already packed in too tightly. Charlotte reminds her that this would be illegal and leaves.

On the 30th floor of the Met Tower, Charlotte attends an executive board meeting about the missing men. A woman named Dana proposes no longer allowing anyone to live on the farm floors because there is not much security, and the board passes the motion. The board agrees to let Amelia Baker rent the now vacant apartment of a woman who has died, provided Amanda fulfills her share of co-op duties when she is not away filming. The final item of business concerns an anonymous offer to buy the building for four billion dollars. They adjourn, agreeing to revisit the issue soon. 

Two boys, Roberto and Stefan, take a motorized, inflatable boat to what used to be the south end of Ward Island. They check on their “bell,” pulling something up from the depths by a chain. Roberto says that it looks good and that they should take it to “Mr. Hexter’s site.”

They take the boat to a spot in the South Bronx where Roberto dives down 17 feet using a diving bell, and deploys a metal detector. Roberto sets the metal detector to search for gold. When it begins pinging rapidly, he screams, “We found it!” He marks a spot on the sea floor with a can of red spray paint—he is standing on what used to be a parking lot—and then Stefan pulls him up.

They stow the diving bell beneath a pier and head towards the shallows of East Manhattan. Stefan believes they have found the “HMS Hussar.” They estimate it will be at least ten feet below the surface of the street, so they will need picks and shovels. They run out of battery power at a spot where the current is strong and have to paddle the boat to keep from being swept too far off course. A hydrofoil appears going too fast, and nearly hits them. When the pilot looks out, Stefan recognizes the man as someone who lives at the Met. They make a deal: if he tows them back to the Met, they won’t tell the water police that he was speeding. 

Franklin is the man who nearly hit Roberto and Stefan. He tows them back to the Met. After that, he prepares for his date with Jojo (Joanne’s nickname) Bernal. He picks her up and flies her to a buoy on Governors Island to grill steaks on the boat. Over dinner, they talk about the CME glitch again. There is a legend that during a glitch like this, someone could momentarily hack into the system and immediately siphon off massive amounts of money before disappearing forever. Jojo asks Franklin if he would do it if he had the chance, and he says no—he enjoys the game of trading too much to cheat. They have sex and Franklin realizes that he is scared by how much he likes Jojo. 

Mutt and Jeff wake up in a small room. From the sounds of water and the movement of the room, they believe they are in an underwater shipping container in the river. They can tell they have been drugged and don’t remember how they got there. 

The Citizen gives a brief history of Madison Square, as well as the architectural history of the Met Tower and the Flatiron building. 

Gen wakes in her apartment and looks at various mementos on her walls: most are cards from her now-deceased parents. She meets Charlotte downstairs in the dining hall. Gen’s assistant has learned that the two missing men, Ralph Muttchopf and Jeffrey Rosen, worked as “quants” in finance, doing coding and system design. Rosen used to work for the Senate Finance Committee and recused himself during an investigation of insider trading because one of his cousins had been the head of one of the firms involved.

Charlotte reveals that her ex-husband is Larry Jackman, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. She wonders if he might have any insight into Rosen. Charlotte tells Gen that the Met’s board gave Rosen and Muttchopf temporary permits to live there in exchange for help analyzing the building’s languishing reserve fund. Gen believes that there is a connection between the mysterious offer to buy the building and the disappearance of the two men. 

Vlade gets an alert that there is flooding in the sub-basement. No one is allowed to live on the sub-basement floor because it is the most susceptible to quick changes in the water level. He finds a leak in room B201, but the hole looks manmade. There is another leak in another room, but this one looks more like a natural crack. Vlade decides to put on his wetsuit and check the outside of the building. As he swims and studies the building underwater, he finds a crack on the outside of the building matching the one inside. He believes that someone is sabotaging the building and calls Charlotte to tell her.

Amelia is flying in Assisted Migration as Frans lowers them to the location of the polar bears. A net airlifts the drugged bears into the craft. A week later, tropical storm Harold rocks Assisted Migration back and forth mercilessly. Amelia thinks the bears tossing themselves against the walls of their pen are causing extra turbulence on top of the storm. When she goes to the bears’ pen, she sees blood on the wall. As she grabs a tranquilizer gun and opens their door, three bloody polar bears escape past her into the ship.

Stefan and Robert visit their friend, an old man named Mr. Hexter, who lives in Chelsea, a crumbling neighborhood where nearly every building has been condemned. Mr. Hexter has more books than anyone else they know; the boys cannot read. They think they have found the HMS Hussar, which sank in 1780 after hitting a rock with over four million dollars in gold coins aboard, earmarked to pay British soldiers.

While they are talking, Mr. Hexter’s room lurches to the side, knocking over his stacks of books. Chelsea is in an area called the “intertidal,” which Vlade calls the “death zone” (113). They make it outside and see that buildings all over the street are beginning to tilt. The boys decide to take Mr. Hexter to the Met Tower with them. 

Jojo and Franklin talk through a chatbox on their computers. Housing prices are fluctuating due to the damage in Chelsea. Ironically, the climate disasters, which have been devastating for the world, have been a boon for real estate investors: “the worst catastrophe in human history, equivalent or greater to the twentieth century’s wars in their devastation, [is] actually good for capitalism” (118).

After the First Pulse, the intertidal zone was declared public land, belonging to the “unorganized public” (119), but the specificity and legality of the term is still vague and ambiguous. The algorithm of Franklin’s proprietary index—The Intertidal Property Pricing Index, or IPPI—determines the worth of intertidal assets, even though they are theoretically not owned by anyone, allowing people to figure out “Were you in debt if you owned an asset stuck on a strand no one can own, or were you rich?” (120).

For six months, Franklin has been watching the intertidal housing situation, knowing that this particular housing bubble is about to pop. He is heavily leveraged in the properties, but as long as he sells his share of these assets before the bubble pops, he will make a great deal of money.

Franklin picks Jojo up. As they travel to a restaurant, he receives a message: the Chelsea tower collapse has killed hundreds of people. The tower is on their way, so they drive by to survey the damage. The entire neighborhood is wrecked. On their way out of Chelsea, they pass the two boys that Franklin nearly ran over earlier, who are holding an old man between them. They shout for help and Franklin stops the boat, although he knows he would have left them if Jojo had not been there.

They deliver the boys and Mr. Hexter to the Met Tower, where the super, Vlade, will try to find temporary housing for the old man. Jojo’s mood changes, though Franklin doesn’t know why. She decides to go to her apartment in the nearby Flatiron building, change clothes, and then come back. When Jojo returns, she and Franklin join Charlotte, Vlade, and the boys in the Met dining hall to eat. Charlotte proposes temporarily housing Mr. Hexter in the hotello abandoned by Mutt and Jeff. Mr. Hexter is distraught that the maps he used to triangulate the possible location of the HMS Hussar are still in his tower. They must be retrieved.

Franklin offers to take Mr. Hexter up to the correct floor, and Jojo says she is leaving because she’s tired. Franklin doesn’t understand what has upset her.