Bridge Whitedeer transluced her ocs and sighed. It’s been a good day, she thought, gazing out her window over the darkening waters of what once had been the south edge of downtown Seattle. Most of the buildings south of Pioneer Square still stood, rising like drowned ghosts from the sea. Some of them still had occupants who traveled to the shore at high tide in battered old dinghies or cobbled-together rafts, or simply waited until the tide went out to wade to higher ground. At night, you could see their dim lights flickering in the windows. Other buildings were in serious danger of falling, undermined by the rising water, which had flooded the Seattle underground. Many of the older brick structures were clearly crumbling. They said that Smith Tower would likely go within the next few years. The skyscrapers further north stood, as yet untouched, on a rising shoreline. Seattle, protected by the sound and the Olympic peninsula from the worst effects of the rising ocean, fared much better than other cities such as San Francisco, where the strong tides pushed constantly at the western hillsides, pulling the old structures, and the hills themselves, into the sea.
 
     Bridge was born about the time the scientists began to grow seriously alarmed about the melting ice. But it would take centuries, they said, for the sea to rise enough to engulf our cities. Their models were based on incomplete knowledge, denial, and political cowardice. When the Greenland Ice Shelf began to collapse in earnest, only a few cities had adequately prepared, and the country was in perpetual war, and deep depression brought on by the oil crash. The sea rose three meters between the time Bridge began high school, and the time she would have graduated in ‘21. Since then, it had risen another twelve meters, fed by the total disintegration of Antarctica’s ice shelves.
 
     Bridge, a thin wisp of a woman, pushed her short, black hair back from her eyes, and considered her reflection in the window. Absent-mindedly she teased the mods which were installed, like tiny embedded jewels, behind her right ear. She looked nothing like her alter ego, Claire Deluna. Or maybe we should say Claire looked nothing like Bridge. Claire was someone Bridge imagined more attractive, with her cute red hair, and breasts you could actually see. A girl with more moxie and flair than her real life puppet master. More suitable as a private eye. Bridge could never be an investigator in real life. Who would possibly take her seriously? And yet, Claire was the best. Mr. Bigshot, himself, had told her so.
 
     She looked out the window for a time, watching the lights and listening. The drumming had begun, its tribal rhythm calling out from the homeless enclaves, and the drowned buildings, as it had every night since the beginning of summer. It seemed more insistent now, as the weather grew wet and inhospitable. There was something indescribably comforting in it.
 
     Finally, Bridge crossed the floor to her tiny refrigerator, grabbed a sandwich she had half-eaten for lunch. She sat at her little kitchen table and took a bite. Then she put her head down on the table and fell asleep.