30Grey fingers of cloud extended across the sky hiding the rise of the moon and distorting the last of the sun’s rays. Night would come early because of them. The heat of the day, trapped between earth and cloud, oppressed most of those living without benefit of air-conditioner—and the dead didn’t care.
Neither did Moriah. She liked the heat, lying on her back in Dorothy Parden’s garden, arms and legs flung out, soaking it in. Dorothy’s window-unit cooler clanked a steady beat of tepid air into the house and dripped a staccato of water onto a rock slab below. Moriah liked Dorothy’s garden too. Bushrock shelves fitted with succulents and groundcover runners, loamy beds of vegetables, a whole corner taken over by broad pumpkin leaves and sun-yellow flowers, the whole surrounded by house, fe
