"The other ’mancers spoke first and no one had good news. Even those who reported fewer abnormalities in their readings remained baffled by the lack of rain, the absence of the turtles, the thinning schools of fish, and the withering crops."
"When children in my region completed their schooling, they left to live and work at The Centre. Other children in other regions went to the ships to lay undersea cables. In the poorer regions, they went to work underground in the lithium mines. In some parts of the world, we were told there were Centres located underwater, and even some in outer space. But I couldn’t imagine my people living under the sea or up in the sky. We were people of the land, and our memory was in the soil."
“Excess energy creates sonic storms, as we all know from Órino-rin. But depletion is equally dangerous. Sound pollution, industrial harmonics, and unregulated amplification, these all thin the ambient field. When flare energy strikes a depleted system, it doesn’t heal it. It fractures it, and if left unchecked, it can produce deserts of silence.”
"Technology had improved on most things except housing, poverty, social injustice, the climate, inequality of women and scarcity of water. It did allow for crematorium distillates, units that pulled water, evaporating, condensing, in biological recycling to keep water alive from dead corpses."
"She smiles. It never gets old to her, the act of growing something for the first time. She remembers sprinkling the tiny dry seeds onto moist soil and leaving the planter, a rose-gold tin out in the sun. She wonders what the tin used to be, in its past life, a hundred years ago. What it was first filled with, all the things it’s carried and will carry in the future. For now, it carries fragile life."
'The whispers picked up, then receded, a cascade in the air. You already forgot us. Like every other human. Cut us down, betrayed us, forgot us. Leave what is ours and go. “Peace,” Muta pleaded. “I have not forgotten you.”'
‘"Apologies for disrupting your top twenty countdown.’ The DJ’s smooth, deep voice was more suited to dropping sweet nothings than issuing fake apologies. ‘Our friends at the Zambia Meteorological Centre have sent out an amber warning for an incoming dust storm. All areas of Lusaka are affected. That’s a dust storm, bantu banga. Stay in, stay safe."’
'She pulls a face. “Language and hidden histories matter. It’s from Kora, the tongue of the First People of the Cape, the now extinct Khoe. It means sweet water for all. The First Name for this place.”'
‘“Trees dey talk o,” she would say. “Dem dey talk about bad-bad things wey go happen for future.”’
"Our way of life is no longer sustainable, if we want to survive we have to adjust to the world, adapt and embrace it. For thousands of years humanity has tried to shape the world in its image. We failed and did so much damage to the world in the process. Now, we pay it back."'