I dreamed of Ah-ma last night.

She was frying eggs in her kitchen with a splash of soy sauce at the end, bubbling to almost burnt. I remember the condo’s layout: the half wall separating the kitchen from plastic-covered dining chairs and rows of Dutch irises sprouting by the window.

“Tell me a story,” I said, and in the dream it didn’t matter that I spoke little Mandarin and she, limited English. “Something hopeful, where people solve problems. Where they make things better.”

She told me the legend of the archer who shot down nine of the ten suns when they appeared in the sky all at once. With his skill, he saved the earth from burning.

If only it were that easy.

The lab is busy these days. California has been rapidly electrifying since the Clean Energy Bill passed, and with the state mandate to shut down all conventional power plants, everyone needs batteries—which means everyone needs lithium, which is not as plentiful as it once was. My job is to expand the lithium supply to make sure renewable technologies remain accessible for all.

That’s what I tell people, anyway. Maya’s friends, our neighbors, my parents. It sounds more noble than the everyday reality of pushing buttons and plotting data.

I sit at the bench closest to the sink, farthest from the window, a row of water samples in Nalgene bottles in front of me neatly labeled with tape and Sharpie. Today I’m prepping samples from the Salar de Atacama in the high desert of northern Chile. It’s a desolate place according to the Environmental Impact Report—one of the driest deserts in the world, shrouded in the rain shadow of the Andes. Much of the mineral-rich underground brine has already been drained to extract the lithium; now, Litio Nacional de Chile is considering new methods of extraction to access other parts of the aquifer.

I feed the sample into the mass spectrometer in the back corner of the room. It’s a bulky thing and my most frequent cause of headaches, but today it’s cooperating. By the time I leave the lab, the results from the first run are coming out. The lithium isn’t the most concentrated or the purest, but good enough to be viable for production. As for the age: old, the isotopes say. This is fossil water.

Ah-ma died when I was five. My mom told me she died of heart failure. Later, when I found out the truth, she called it a broken heart. An empty childhood she never healed from.

Ah-ma grew up in a mining town called Jinguashi, Gold Melon Stone, that supplied the Japanese Empire with gold and copper. Her much older brother was an important figure at the mine but a neglectful guardian, leaving her at the mercy of a cruel stepsister like the start of some Cinderella story—except that there was no palace ball or prince to run away to, only Taipei and my grandpa, a humble entrepreneur from a farming family. Later, she and Ah-gong and their kids moved across the ocean to another gold mountain. They didn’t come to California for the gold itself as my dad’s side did a century earlier, but for the wealth built on that gold: education and life opportunities for the next generation.

That gold, which brought settlers, death, and displacement to the peoples who were here before.

I get home just as Maya’s finishing up dinner.

“Traffic okay?” she asks.

“Could be worse.”

We’ve been making an effort to eat together; otherwise, it’s easy to be swept up in our respective work, me at the lab and her with endless meetings. She’s on the people side of things, rallying grassroots support for climate legislation. The Clean Energy Bill was her first big win, and she’s been on fire ever since.

After dinner, I wash the pans while she loads the dishwasher. As I’m wiping down the table, she comes up behind me and slides a hand around my hip to my waist, hooking her chin over my shoulder.

I laugh, leaning into her. “Someone’s in a mood.”

“It’s been a while,” she says with the kind of smile that drew me to her in the first place. “What do you say?”

I turn and kiss her instead.

One wall of our room is covered in posters. I gaze over them as I sprawl across the bed with Maya dozing on my chest. They tell our story within the greater story of the world.

The one in the center is the oldest and most weathered: Mni Wiconi, Water Is Life. Maya and I met protecting water in solidarity with the Sioux from the Dakota Access Pipeline, a black snake bringing chaos to their people. We were young then, with fewer scars to temper our passion but not enough boldness in other ways to be more than comrades. Above the poster is the flyer from the climate march where we met again a few years later, and to each side are signs for subsequent Earth Days, rallies for housing and health care, campaigns for a green, clean, renewable future.

The newest poster is a vision of that future. The illustration is full of color, with lush greenery and people of all shapes and shades, pride flags decorating the buildings. Workers in hard hats install solar panels on apartments; wind turbines spin on the hills in the background. All the cars and buses have lightning symbols, and a microgrid connects the neighborhood buildings to a large battery.

I stare at the battery, picturing the old brine sitting in the lab. “Do you ever think about where all this comes from?” I wonder aloud. “Like, materially.”

Maya shifts sleepily. “Mm?”

“The solar panels,” I say. “The batteries.”

She mumbles something else incoherent. I laugh quietly and run my fingers through her hair.

We’re getting there. Our apartment complex has rooftop solar connected to the grid, which itself is a mix of renewables and natural gas, the latter not for long. A few neighborhoods nearby are piloting battery hubs. And Maya and I—we’re getting there, too. It’s hard, sometimes, when you both care about the same thing, but that’s what brought us together: dreaming of a better future.

The mass spec starts acting up. It happens every so often with such a complicated machine, but it’s particularly unfortunate in the middle of a measurement campaign.

I spend the next few days troubleshooting, the most glamorous part of the job. The salt from the brine seems to be sticking to the metal interior, interfering with measurements of lithium and other minerals. I clean the delicate internal pieces, heat the instrument to release contaminants.

I stay late. I miss dinner.

On Friday, Maya and I listen to the news over breakfast. A measured voice announces the weather: seasonal highs and lows, no late springtime rain in the forecast to save us from the drought. “Golden state, golden lawns,” they encourage, as they do every time water is scarce. Our apartment building still has a big green one that we have no say over.

The newscaster moves on to escalating conflict over cobalt, then right-wing backlash to the new socialist government in Chile. “The nationalized mining industry that forms the backbone of the economy faces opposition not just from neoliberal holdovers but also from rural Indigenous communities citing international protections,” they say.

“Will that affect you?” Maya asks. “That’s where your samples come from, right?”

“Some of them. We get local contracts, too, from the Salton Sea and Arizona.” I consider the possibilities. “Might slow things down, but it’d take something big to really throw us off.”

As I pack my lunch to go, the astronomy segment reminds us that the solar cycle is at a peak this year. They’ve been talking for months about how amazing the aurora will be.

“We could go up north to see it,” Maya suggests.

“What happened to your gripes about the electric plane industry sponsoring this propaganda?” I say, but I’m teasing; I want to see the northern lights with her.

As it turns out, we might not need to go anywhere. A soundbite from a heliophysicist informs us of an incoming solar storm forecast to hit the atmosphere in the next twenty-four hours. Besides lighting up the sky, it could disrupt power grids and satellites—though not individual devices like my car.

“Stay safe if you’re out late,” Maya says.

I kiss her cheek on my way out the door. “What’s one more natural disaster?”

I finally get the machine back up and running, but at this point I’m behind on delivering results. I fuel up with snacks and breakroom tea as my coworkers empty out of the lab.

As the evening goes on, a silent vibration fills the air that I’m not sure I’m sensing or imagining. It could be the solar storm or my own tiredness. I stretch and keep going, determined to get back on track.

My vision blurs between one sample and the next. I blink, trying to focus on the water. The reflection of the overhead lights dances across its surface in the plastic bottle, shifting, glowing, overflowing until I squeeze my eyes shut against the light.

When I open my eyes, I’m in a different lab: the mass spec is gone, and instead, microscopes line the lab benches. A sign on the wall says Laboratorio Comunitario del Salar de Atacama. Maybe I should be freaking out, but I’m not; the lab, any lab, is a second home.

I turn and see a woman peering into a microscope at the bench behind me. Her hair is long and black, her skin a warm brown against a khaki uniform.

I approach her slowly so as not to startle her. “What are you looking at?”

“The same thing you were,” she says, pulling back from the eyepiece.

“Lithium brine?”

“You could call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“My grandparents’ home.” She stands, smiling at my confusion. “Let me introduce you to them.”

We walk outside into an open landscape, wide and flat and dusty brown with mountains on either side. The dry air soaks moisture from my skin and lungs as we walk to a shallow lagoon. Stiff grasses grow along its edge, and as flamingos take flight from the center, a group of teenagers in the same khaki polos excitedly count their number.

“Here.” She plucks off a bit of the crust at the bottom of the lagoon. It’s pinkish brown and crumbles into little calcified pebbles in my hand. While I turn it over, she squats down to squish some of the mat between her fingers underwater until little bubbles decorate the surface. “See? Oxygen.”

I recognize what I’m looking at. The Environmental Impact Report calls them stromatolites, modern versions of the earliest oxygen-producing life on Earth.

“So this is where lithium comes from,” I remark.

She looks disappointed. “This is where the Lickan Antay people come from.”

“Right,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know,” she says generously, turning back to the stromatolites. “These are our grandparents. Our ancestors.”

“I’ll remember,” I promise.

As we walk farther into the basin, the sparse shrubs that surround the lake give way to scraggly brown crust tipped white with salt. Slowly, we approach a thick black pipe as wide as half my height running along the ground like a giant black snake.

“Water,” she says. “Blood of the earth. Pumped from underground and evaporated for lithium—for your batteries.”

I know how the process works. But I’ve never seen it like this. We follow the pipe through the desert.

“It looks like an oil pipeline,” I observe.

“They called oil black gold,” she says. “They call lithium white gold.”

We reach an evaporation pool, sharp greenish yellow and so wide that I can’t see the far end. Around its sides are powdery white heaps of lithium carbonate: mountains of white gold.

“The water is ancient,” I say, remembering my data. “Guess that fits. Fossil water, fossil fuels.”

“Not so renewable after all, is it?”

Mine lifespans imply a finite resource, but that’s not how the products made from their minerals are painted. I frown, grasping at the last out. “Does draining the water actually harm the ecosystem? Your grandparents?”

She gazes out over the water. “Litio Nacional says that the water in the basin is separated, that they can remove the salty brine without harming the lagoons and living beings—without harming us. But we know it’s connected: the water and our ancestors, the water and ourselves. The water underground and the water in the lagoon. The water in your lab.”

The air shimmers, like I can see water vapor rising from the brine.

“Agua es vida,” she says. “Water is life.”

I tip forward into the pool, the reflected sun swallowing my vision.

Just before I crash, I jolt awake. I’m back in my lab, alone under fluorescent lights. The sample of brine is gone.

The solar storm starts on my drive home.

I keep one eye on the road while the other takes in the faint green glow dancing across the twilight sky. Whatever just happened in the lab has left me vaguely unsettled, and the otherworldly lights only enhance the feeling. Neither of them feels exactly wrong, though, more like a compass recalibrated. When I pull off the freeway the streetlights are out and the buildings are dark as a ghost town. It’s a comfort to find Maya outside watching the show.

“Beautiful,” I breathe. She nods, silently wrapping her arms around me, and together we enjoy the magnificence of the sky, leaving whatever wreckage it causes to tomorrow.

The sun’s activity isn’t a result of anything we’ve done to the earth—raising its temperature and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But the electrical infrastructure we’ve woven into our lives makes us more vulnerable to solar tantrums than we were during the last major event, which took out telegraph lines, or the many before that, before any electrical technology.

We know how to deal with power outages now, after years of fire and freeze in various parts of the country. We unplug appliances before we go to sleep. We have a month’s worth of drinking water and emergency food ready.

This is different, though, I realize when I wake up. It’s not just the power supply that’s out. The satellites are fried, and all digital communication that relies on them is down with them. No news, no online survival resources, no memes. Nothing but our physical surroundings.

“You’d think digital infrastructure would be better protected,” I muse three days in as I spread peanut butter on bread. As usual, these things are a lot less exciting than they sound if you have the resources you need, like we do. “For capitalism’s sake, if not for ours.”

Maya grimaces. “I’m sure they’ll find a way to exploit the disaster.”

“Unless we do first,” I say, grinning. “Money basically doesn’t exist. Think we can get out of rent?”

“We’ll all be charged late fees,” she grumbles.

I’ve found that I take more readily to disruptions like this than she does. She needs somewhere to channel her energy. For me, it’s almost a vacation. I read a book, ride my bike, organize the spices. Ponder what the hell happened that last night in the lab.

“At least we have water,” Maya says drily later, coming out of a cold shower.

“Don’t jinx it,” I warn. “We’re in a drought, you know.”

“True,” Maya says. “Water is life.”

I startle, then nod slowly.

“This is why we gotta get more of those battery hubs up,” Maya says, agitated, as she dries her hair. “Buildings that are off the grid can power themselves and fill in for those without power, like us.”

“That’ll take a lot of lithium,” I say, wary.

“That’s why your job is so important,” Maya says, nodding. “We need it.”

I think of what I saw in the lab before the solar storm. “Do we really?”

“Of course we do,” says Maya. “What if this happened in a heat wave? Do you want a bunch of grandmas to die?”

She doesn’t know, I tell myself: I’ve never told her about Ah-ma. She doesn’t know about broken hearts or salt lake ancestors. I leave anyway.

On the road, my thoughts chase each other in circles.

In some versions of the legend of the sun, the archer becomes a beloved ruler after saving the earth from burning. In other versions, he’s a despot. His wife steals his elixir of immortal life and becomes the moon, either in selfishness or in self-sacrifice.

What tales will our grandchildren’s grandchildren tell of us? Of why the world is the way that it is? Why the salt lakes stand dry? Why, despite all our technology and all our efforts, the earth still bleeds?

I haven’t visited the cemetery in years; I get lost after the highway exit and have to ask strangers on the street for directions. As I approach the place my grandparents are buried, I realize there’s another visitor.

My mom stands up from where she’s placing offerings in front of the gravestone. Her hair is grayer every time I see her, still styled short and neat.

“I dreamed about Ah-ma,” I explain. “A little while ago, and then all this happened.”

She lights incense for both of us. “So did I.”

The smoke curls in thin, fragrant tendrils toward the sky as she tells Ah-ma and Ah-gong about the state of the world, asking for guidance and good fortune. When she’s done, we stick the incense into the grass next to the fresh flowers and fruit.

“When I learned how she died,” I say, “some things made more sense—about myself, mostly.” I haven’t admitted this part out loud before; I’ve barely admitted it to myself. “That I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I do sometimes, like I’d rather just—rather not be at all.”

My mom is quiet for a moment. “I didn’t tell you because it didn’t change how I saw her. I knew she was hurting for all her life.” She sighs. “I wanted to love you enough that it didn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not yours, either. Or Ah-ma’s.” I stare hard at the gravestone, carved with Chinese characters in red and English in white. “I thought changing my research would help. Instead of just observing climate change as it happens, help solve the problem. Support renewable energy, a just transition, good green jobs. But I couldn’t shake that despair. It never felt like enough; it always felt too slow.”

My mom shakes her head. “All this environmentalism and saving the world.”

I mirror her movement, the words tumbling out. “It’s not saving the world; that’s the thing. It actually makes more sense now that I know those things—they’re all gold mountains. Gold mountains melting into black gold evaporating into white gold. We’re still killing the earth—us, here, living the way we are. We’re still pushing our problems onto other land, other people. And if we are still part of the earth then we’re killing ourselves, too.”

“Iris,” she says. “You know what Ah-ma used to say? There’s always time to make things right.”

“I don’t want to want to die.” I’m crying now, quietly, salt tears sliding down my cheeks. “I want to live, too.”

The breeze feels warm around me, an embrace.

“Do you smell that?” my mom asks.

The sweet incense turns just this side of savory, like soy sauce on a hot pan.

I crash at my parents’ house for the night. They’re closer than my place, and I don’t have enough charge to make it back.

The next day, I decide to leave my car altogether. There’s a battery hub a few towns over I could use to charge it, but I figure people need the limited power supply for more important things than I do right now. I borrow my dad’s bike instead, adjusting it to my height.

Even in a situation like this one, they don’t let me go without a few treats in the pannier: a sticker from the grocery store and my favorite rice crackers. “For Maya,” my mom says, stuffing dried mango into a side pouch.

It can be a peace offering.

Whatever I expected when I got back, it wasn’t Maya and a few other neighbors digging up the lawn in the apartment complex. Maya looks so relieved when I ride up at sunset, exhausted from the long trip, and once I’ve washed and eaten it’s easier than I’d feared to tell her about Ah-ma and the cemetery and white gold in the desert.

She’s come to her own new conclusions, too.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, before you left,” she explains, gesturing out the window at the half-cleared lawn. The stars are out, brighter than I’ve ever seen them in the city, and the bed is warm where we sit side by side. “I kept wondering, have we been going about this all wrong? Targeting what kind of energy we’re using, instead of energy itself, and the conditions that demand it?”

“We did what we knew how to do,” I say, thinking of the samples in the lab. “But our teachers were the things we were trying to change.”

She nods. “So why protect them now while they’re vulnerable? The system—capitalism, colonialism, the military and all that—relies on energy and digital communication just as much as we do, maybe more. We might as well fuck shit up on our own terms, right?”

I feel giddy seeing all her energy redirected this way. “This is why we need people like you,” I tell her. “I’m just a scientist.”

“You are just nothing,” she says, nudging my shoulder with hers. “Please. Besides, we’ll need scientists.”

“To run the mass spec,” I say, scoffing at myself. “Load of help that is right now.”

“To observe and analyze,” she says. “To relearn what’s been forgotten.”

I get out from under the covers and take down the poster of the renewable energy future. Maya puts up a blank piece of paper in its place.

I take her hand. “We’ll fill it in together.”

When I sleep, I dream I’m back in the lab in the desert. I’m sitting at a bench, but instead of a microscope in front of me, there’s a sample of brine identical to the ones in my lab. I take it with me as I step out the door.

I walk into the middle of a lively protest. Hundreds of people block the road: women in brightly colored sweaters, young men in baseball caps among the flat-topped hats, wrinkled grandmothers wrapped in scarves. They chant and sing, holding signs proudly declaring Territorio Lickan Antay and Agua es Vida: water is life. The trucks stalled behind the blockade say Litio Nacional in bold white letters, and I don’t know how much of this is real, but I hope that something about it is.

As I wade through the commotion, I spot Ah-ma dancing in the crowd, pausing only when Maya emerges to hand her water. They wave and smile, motioning for me to turn around. When I look back, the scientist from before catches my eye, beckoning for me to follow her.

The noise fades as we walk into the desert. We pass one of the black snake pipes, cut open, the water it caged now spilled onto the damp ground around it.

The lagoon is full of flamingos feeding in the shallow water. The grass casts spindly shadows. Salt crunches under our feet.

When we reach the shore, I hand the sample of brine to her. She opens it and pours the water back into the lagoon.