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EARLY TO MID FALL

In the Northern Hemisphere, the leaves had turned. They decorated the trees with their glorious array of red and russet and bronze and gold. From San Francisco to Hurricane Point and beyond, occasional mists drifted in on the morning air, hugging the contours of the parched land, which sucked up the moisture, dampening the golden soil to a dark terra-cotta. The air temperatures, usually at their warmest in September and October, were beginning to dip, but the sea temperatures lagged behind, holding onto the last heat of summer, only slowly, reluctantly giving it up.

The NOAA predicted it would be a bumper year for hurricanes. They advised residents of the US Hurricane Belt to lay in supplies: plywood to board over their windows, bottled water and canned goods, and to confer with vulnerable neighbors, ensuring they too had supplies.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the sea temperatures rose, slavishly following the air, absorbing the heat that pounded from the equatorial sun. The incipient Niño sucked in its fuel. The sea levels dropped in the west, rose in the east. Warm surface water surged eastward along the equator. The growing Niño prepared to go supercharged. The children on the Pacific coast of South America felt it first, as always, playing in the warming water, but it wouldn’t be long before the whole world would feel it too. Then it would bring not innocent pleasure, but devastation. High in the air, two and a half kilometers up, flowed the atmospheric rivers. The Pineapple Express, racing up from Hawaii, began to fatten as water evaporated from the warming ocean. Like a fire hose, the water raced north, toward California.

And the humans, even those living below the fire hoses, remained largely oblivious to the movements of the fates above them. They skirted round one another, some resisting falling in love, some hurtling into it, some just luxuriating in lust; they plotted fifty new ways to enrich themselves; they plotted wars; they plotted murder and the silencing of threats, and they plotted jihad and ancient revenge for the centuries-old sins of the Crusaders. They all played on, getting nearer every day to the intersection point, some aware, some unaware, none wholly conscious of what they would unleash, and where it would leave them.