For more than an hour, the familiar reaches of grass and waterways slipped by the truck’s window. Kya identified marsh wrens and egrets, comforted by the sameness, like she hadn’t left home but brought it with her. Then abruptly, at a line drawn across the earth, the marsh meadows ended, and dusty ground—hacked raw, fenced into squares, and furrowed into rows—spread before them. Fields of paraplegic snags stood in felled forests. Poles, strung with wires, trudged toward the horizon. Of course, she knew coastal marsh didn’t cover the globe, but she’d never been beyond it. What had people done
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