New York 2140

Mutt and Jeff have been on the bottom of the river for twenty-nine days. Jeff believes that anyone who investigates the glitch that resulted from his hack will find them in the ship: The people who put them there must have left some record. Now that Jeff has tapped into what Mutt calls the “dark pool” (148), someone will always be hunting them. Jeff finds a GPS chip implanted in him that is sending out a signal.

Jeff explains that his white-hat hack was supposed to redirect billions of dollars per hour: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund” (150). His purpose was to alert the SEC to what a more nefarious hacker could do, and to give them more funding. He has also destroyed all tax havens, so now there is nowhere to wire money to avoid paying taxes.

Charlotte likes Franklin, but instantly hates Jojo. She and Jojo talk about the offer to buy the building. Charlotte has to respond to the anonymous buyer but is wary: She knows that if the building sells, it can be reclassified as undrowned, a legal loophole that allows intertidal properties to be added back into the global economy to be privately owned.

A call from Amelia Black interrupts their conversation. Amelia is hiding in the tool closet because polar bears have taken over her airship. While talking to Amelia, Charlotte and Jojo walk to the farm floor to meet Vlade. Franklin suggests that Amelia tell Frans to tilt the airship so that the bears will fall back down the length of the ship, into their pen. Amelia’s call disconnects as the ship begins to tilt.

When Mr. Hexter was young, he witnessed one of the early floods. A massive berm built to keep the water out had broken, and waves swept through the city, knocking down buildings. Millions of people were stranded uptown, which was high enough to avoid being submerged. Downtown was gone.

Amelia opens the tool closet and counts the bears in the pen—one is still loose. The ship is nearly standing on its tail. Amelia fills several large bags with helium from a tank, ties the bags to her belt, takes the tranquilizer gun, leaves the closet, and floats towards the bridge. There, she shoots a confused bear with the tranquilizer gun. When the bear is unconscious, she asks Frans to tilt the ship at an angle that will send the bear sliding back into its pen. Frans succeeds and Amelia narrates her victory to her audience. 

There is a commotion outside Gen’s office door. Three officers subdue a large drug addict and carry the person down the hall. Sergeant Fripp tells her that there has been a bad batch of drugs in Kips Bay, and the problem is getting worse. Gen meets with her assistant Olmstead to discuss the missing men. Gen wonders if they have been kidnapped. She learns that Mutt and Jeff had done freelance work for the hedge fund Alban Albany and for Adirondack, the company under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee when Rosen had recused himself. On the night Mutt and Jeff disappeared, there was a strange event in the CME. The SEC has been slow to respond to queries about what happened.

There is no new information about the offer on the Met Tower. Gen takes Fripp and her lieutenant Claire to a speakeasy called Mezzrow’s to meet with Gen’s underwater informant Ellie. Gen and Ellie are “old friends gone separate ways” (178). Ellie denies that she has anything to do with the bad drugs in Kips Bay. She claims that she does not know who is responsible, and that no one is talking about it. However, there has been increasing pressure for intertidal residents to sell to brokers uptown, and that “Bad things can happen to you if you don’t play the game” (180).

Ellie takes them down a long tunnel to ringside seats to a water sumo match. While they wait for the competitors, Gen tells Ellie to watch out for a security company called Pinscher Pinkerton—they might be the ones pressuring residents to sell.

Gen, a former water sumo champion, is asked to preside over a match between two young women, Ginger and Diane. They stand in a circle of light on the bottom of a pool. To score points, one must push their opponent outside of the circle. Diane wins the match and Gen congratulates her.

Jeff feels weak and sick. He keeps apologizing to Mutt for involving him in the situation. Jeff is unable to eat more than a spoonful of water mixed with syrup from their pancakes. He begins deliriously talking about the Greek Gods, comparing them to capitalist elites who do whatever they must to ensure that the poor remain subservient. Mutt takes a plate and writes a message on it in jam: “My friend is sick. He needs a doctor right now” (189). 

Stefan and Roberto visit Mr. Hexter’s apartment and retrieve his maps. It is risky—they could be arrested by the water police who are trying to keep people out of the collapse zone. Vlade has learned that the boys are sleeping in their boat under his dock but pretends not to know. He also allows them to steal food from the dining hall.

The boys resume their plan to excavate the HMS Hussar. But while Roberto is underwater in the diving bell, Stefan sees the rope detach. Roberto does not know he is unmoored, and there is no way to let him know to swim to the surface. Stefan calls Vlade and asks for help, promising to explain the situation once he is there. Roberto only has an hour of oxygen in the diving bell.

Vlade needs Franklin’s boat to save the boys, and Franklin says he’ll come. Vlade is afraid and “remembers the chance to save Marko” (197) 15 years earlier. When they reach Stefan, Vlade puts on his wetsuit and dives. Vlade reaches the bell, tips it, takes Roberto out, and surfaces with him. The boy is freezing, and they work to warm him up. The boys tell Vlade and Franklin about the treasure ship, and Vlade will discuss it with Mr. Hexter. 

The Citizen gives a statistical breakdown of the wealthiest people in the world, and how their position has evolved since the flood. He snarks that by the time of the Second Pulse, “the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the planet’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad” (205). The flood led to a cessation of trade, which in turn created an economic depression. However, the richest people were didn't have to deal with the consequences of the depression: They could simply move or spend exorbitant amounts of money to buy housing that was still undamaged. 

Franklin drops the boys and Vlade off and goes to his office quickly before a date with Jojo. Despite the Chelsea disaster, the IPPI has not dropped more than he would have expected. He and Jojo go to the bar where they met. Franklin confesses that if there is another Great Depression, he is going to lose everything, given how leveraged he is financially. They meet two friends, Amanda and John, and drink together. Franklin is unsure why Jojo is acting distant.

Back on his boat, Jojo tells him that the relationship isn’t working because all he talks about is money. She wants to use money in productive way, as capital that fuels tangible things—to “invest in the real economy, in real work. Making things happen” (219). Still, Jojo doesn’t break up with Franklin when he drops her off. She just wants to slow things down. 

At work, Charlotte is anxious about “an influx of new refugees from New Amsterdam, the Dutch township” (222). The Second Pulse had wiped out millions of people’s digital records, and it can be difficult for people to prove their identity. The Dutch government has ordered its remaining people to travel the world, trying to help others immigrate and reach higher, dryer ground. Today the New Amsterdam township is ferrying in a contingent of Jamaican refugees. Charlotte helps them create their initial refugee documents, one by one.

As she leaves work that evening, people ask her to run for Congress, which she has no interest in. She makes it home in time for the executive board meeting, where she and the others debate selling the building. Charlotte is worried that the offer might not be real, but instead, that it could be a valuation tool. If the board negotiates and barters for more money, that could act as market research for speculators who have no intention of buying the property but want to determine its value for another reason. They decide to investigate further and speak again at the next meeting before answering the offer.

The next morning Charlotte meets with her ex-husband Larry Jackman, who is the chair of the Federal Reserve. Charlotte asks him if he has ever had to regulate any of his old trading partners from Adirondack, including a man named Henry Vinson. Larry left Adirondack after Vinson became CEO. They had been competitive, and Larry had not wanted to stay after not getting the promotion.

They go for a walk and Charlotte tells him that a cousin of Vinson’s is missing.

Vlade visits Mr. Hexter, who is studying his retrieved maps with the boys. When he was 12 years old, in London’s naval archives, Mr. Hexter found an account of attempts to find the HMS Hussar after the war of 1812 and has studied it ever since. Vlade wants to talk with someone named Idelba about the plan to dig through the asphalt down to the ship. He then takes the boys to Coney Island, which is now just a reef covered in ruins. They approach a barge where Idelba, his ex-wife, is working. She was “his partner in disaster and death, his comrade in a nightmare or two” (245).

Idelba’s crew is filling the barge with sand. After sucking sand into the hull with a pipe, they’ll transport it to a coastline and add it to the beach. The boys tell Idelba that they are looking for the Hussar and give her the history of their attempts. Idelba promises to put together some equipment, visit their site, and suck up the earth above the Hussar, giving them access to the ship.

Amelia takes two days to calm down after the polar bear incident. She flies to the tip of South Africa and waits for instructions about how to proceed with the bear transport. Next, she flies to the Antarctic Ocean, where she sees a large group of orcas. She flies the bears inland over a stretch of ice plains. Landing, she is stunned by the cold but films several shots of the outdoors. She releases the bears, which immediately head towards a large group of seals, and departs. Each of the bears has been fitted with a camera that will help document its new life.

Nicole calls to tell Amelia that the bears’ camera feeds have gone out after recording what looked like an explosion. Scientists tell Nicole that it may have been a small neutron bomb set off by activists. Nicole tells Amelia to go to the nearest city, and Amelia starts to cry. The next morning, she films a video addressing the “purity” (260) group that most likely detonated the bombs to keep Antarctica untouched. Amelia wants them to die and will transport more bears.

The Citizen describes what the weather in New York is like during each season. 

Gen is attending a ceremony put on by Mayor Galina Esteban for visiting mayors from other cities. Gen and Galina have hated each other ever since Gen caught one of Galina’s favorite aides taking kickbacks from an uptown developer with Galina’s knowledge. Forced to fire the aide, Galina retaliated by questioning NYPD practices and hammering at Gen’s support.

They talk about unsolicited offers and potential sabotage in some of the intertidal properties. Galina professes ignorance. However, Olmstead has recently discovered that Arne Bleich, the owner of Morningside Realty, has links to Galina. When Gen brings up his name, Galina’s expression goes cold and she excuses herself.

At the Met Tower, Gen asks Vlade to show her his employee records. After he agrees, Gen goes to a rooftop event where the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society holds monthly meetings. She speaks with several acquaintances that hold supervisory positions. They are all experiencing building sabotage and missing residents. Afterwards, they take Gen to a dance.

Franklin is annoyed because he has fallen in love with Jojo, but she doesn’t want him. He is worried that Jojo wants to get into “value-added” investing (277), and that she had overinvested emotionally in a cause that requires a dangerous amount of capital. He realizes that to make her like him again, he needs to do the kinds of things she approves of and focus on more than money. He has to make money in a way that means something to Jojo, not as an abstract numbers game.

Franklin pilots his boat around the city, investigating intertidal properties and assessing their condition. He decides to “put a little venture capital where it would serve a social good, thus encouraging Jojo to reconsider me in some fundamental human sense” (279). He looks at Mr. Hexter’s old neighborhood in Chelsea. The buildings continue to sink and tilt, and Franklin wonders if a Third Pulse could be possible. There are people squatting everywhere, hiding like rats. Jojo would like to solve exactly this kind of problem.

Franklin goes to a marina that borders a salt marsh. While he watches the marsh grass swaying in the wind, he has an idea. He visits Hector Ramirez in a tower called the Cloistermunster. Hector has been Franklin’s father figure and mentor ever since Franklin was his intern right out of Harvard Business School. Franklin tells Hector that he wants to use eelgrass and some developing technologies to make houseboats, or floating docks—part of these houses would sit below the water line, providing more housing instead of futilely fighting the rising tide. Hector likes the idea and agrees to invest capital in the project.

Franklin goes to Pier 57 and finds Jojo. When he tells her his idea, she seems to like it, and he is encouraged.

Jeff is awake. Mutt tells him that he has been sick, and that the messages Mutt had written in jam worked: pills have started arriving with their food. Mutt tells Jeff how they met to keep him distracted. They were coworkers at Alban and had together discovered that Vinson was doing something illegal. They quit their jobs before they could be implicated or accused of being complicit. When they left, they learned that other firms were performing the same illegal financial strategies. Mutt believes the only solution to the world’s problems is to have the right President and Congress in power, but Jeff still thinks that they can just alter the laws digitally and overthrow the current system.

Mutt tells Jeff a story about the history of New York and what the land had been like before the pilgrims arrived. Jeff falls asleep.