Island of the Sun by Matthew J. Kirby Page A

Trade Center. Some UN offices. The whole world in a city, taking in the poor and huddled masses.”
    â€œAre you worried about the G.E.T. finding us there?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWait until you see it. Then you’ll know.”

CHAPTER
5
    F OR HOURS THEY FLEW OVER A LANDSCAPE OF SEGMENTED shades of green, a verdant geometry of sustenance, field after field, every spare piece of land given over to growing food for much of the Western Hemisphere. Small towns here and there interrupted the pattern with large processing facilities, while trucks plied the highway seams between the tracts of cropland, kicking up tiny wisps of dust.
    The mountains they crossed were fairly low and restful, except for a brown, vague plateau on the horizon ahead of them that swelled high into the sky.
    â€œWhat is that?” Eleanor asked Luke. “A mountain?”
    â€œThat’s Mexico City,” Luke said. “Or rather, the airabove it. That’s pollution you’re seeing.”
    Eleanor looked again, and as they descended and drew nearer, she saw that he was right. The plateau she’d glimpsed lost some of its substance and became an oppressive cloud that smothered the ground beneath it. Their plane entered into its miasma, which dimmed the sun, and then they reached the first tattered edges of the city. If it could be called that.
    Miles and miles of brown tents massed below them in a haphazard grid and spread away almost as far as she could see. The landscape was choked with debris and smoke and people and a few lonely and desperate-looking trees, completely crowding the ground between their plane and the hazy city skyline that was still an impossible distance away. The tents must have numbered in the millions, along with other structures of scrap wood and corrugated sheet metal, each one giving shelter to who knew how many refugees. None of the news broadcasts she’d seen had shown this. This was the “wonderful situation” Watkins had mentioned?
    â€œIt’s something, isn’t it?” Luke said. “Poor folks.”
    Her mouth was open, but she was speechless, her words tripped up in terrible awe. “I . . . it’s . . .” She swallowed, almost as though she could taste the ash and oil of the polluted air coating her mouth and throat. “I had no idea.”
    â€œMost people don’t until they get here,” Luke said. “In the beginning, Mexico was ready for it. The immigration. They invited it, even. But the ice kept coming, and so did the refugees, and now you have this—this place.”
    Eleanor pressed her fingers to her closed eyes and shook her head. “It’s awful.”
    â€œNow you see why I wasn’t worried about the G.E.T. finding us here,” Luke said. “Six different airports and landing strips, not counting military. The chaos of the refugees. Finding us would be like finding a single hair in a human landfill.”
    As bad as it was for refugees in the government housing back in Phoenix, like Eleanor’s friends Jenna and Claire, at least they lived in actual buildings. “It’s so much worse than the Ice Castles,” Eleanor said. “But Mexico is always sending aid to the US. I thought they had money.”
    â€œOh, they do,” Luke said. “You’ll see soon enough.”
    They flew over a few more miles of tent city, and then Eleanor noted a boundary approaching them, a clear demarcation between the refugee squalor and something resembling a more normal city. When they reached this edge, she realized it was actually a wall, tall and towered and razor lined, crewed by uniformed soldiers carrying guns, with the desperate refugees onone side and a very different situation on the other, though the cloud lurked over both.
    Here, the trees multiplied and gathered in lush canopies between and through neighborhoods of large houses with multiangled roofs, terraces, and even