The Back of the Turtle

Mara introduces the young girl Gabriel saved as Mei-ling Chin. Mei-ling’s family and their cousins, the Huangs, were working on an old ship when a storm struck, badly damaging it. As the ship sank, Mei-ling and her family made a break for the shore in a small lifeboat, which broke apart on the Apostles. There, they encountered Gabriel, who saved their lives. They are the ones who have been living in the abandoned houses on the reserve, pilfering items from the town’s grocery stores. After their story is told, Gabriel tries to excuse himself, saying he needs to get back, but Crisp advises him that “ye are already here” (436).

Back at Domidion, Lustig tells Dorian that while the communities living on the edge of the Athabasca River are experiencing heightened mortality rates, “fortunately […] they are Native communities where the mortality rate is already higher than […] white communities” (437). Dorian wants to know how Manisha Khan found out about GreenSweep, and Lustig suggests Gabriel may have sent copies of Domidion’s internal documents to CBC himself. Dorian suggests that they round up all of Domidion’s “sins […] accidents, disasters, gross negligence” and blame them on everyone but Domidion—environmental activists, the Zebras, and so on—to muddy the waters.