You had a fever once, when you were younger. It may have been River Fever. It may have been something else. It can be difficult to tell sometimes, particularly during the wet season. Whatever it was, it hit you hard. I remember looking at you in your sleeping basket—you couldn’t have been older than three—stretched out and limp, your skin grey, beads of sweat pooling at the edge of your upper lip. Even then you were beautiful, your eyes closed and searching beneath their lids. More beautiful than usual, if that’s possible.

On the third day of the sickness, when your fever spiked, I told your mother to get some rest and I sat with you through the night. I told you stories to keep myself awake and although your eyes were shut, I could see that you heard me, that you wanted me to keep going. So I did, telling you the stories that my grandmother told me, the old Hudi stories that sustained us through the darkness of the first generations—and long before that—stories of Abraham and Moses, Adam and Eve, the Sacrifice, the Exodus, the Fall.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because when I woke the room felt different. The rains had stopped and you were sitting up, looking out into the night. I couldn’t see what you were staring at, but I smelled its musky scent and instinctively, I must have known. I took a few careful steps toward the window and when I saw it, I stopped cold. Pacing back and forth in the small garden below your room was a full grown tiger. It didn’t seem to notice me at first, but after some time, it raised its majestic head, looked me straight in the eye and loped off into the night.

Soon after the tiger left, you went back to sleep and when you woke the next morning the fever had broken. You didn’t say anything about what happened. I don’t know if you even remembered. But I could tell that it had affected you, that something in you had changed. There were a deepness to your gaze that hadn’t been there before. And that morning, while you were eating your porridge, you started asking questions about the Old World.

“Grandma,” you said, looking up at me, your cheeks still flush from the fever, “tell me what it was like, before the Flood.” You asked me this as if I had been there myself, which of course I hadn’t. But I didn’t have the heart to correct you. Besides, I knew the stories well enough. My grandmother had told them to me alongside the old Hudi stories, just as her grandmother told them to her. Thus, the tales had been passed, hand to hand, on back through the generations.

That morning, instead of David and Devorah, I told you everything I knew about the Old World, about the flying machines and the mechanical carriages, the automated restaurants, the magic picture boxes, and the invisible web of information that made it all possible. But, as much as you asked, I wouldn’t tell you how it ended. I didn’t say anything about the wars or the destruction, the endless storms and fires. I didn’t even mention the Flood, because you were too young and because I knew that it would bring up questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. I didn’t tell you any of this, but I could see in the lines of your face that you already knew. Maybe not the specific details, for how could you? But you knew that something terrible had happened, that it must have been something horrible, to wipe all that clean from the surface of the planet.