The water had reached the second floor at eleven at night. Mei knew because she had counted the steps as they disappeared, one after another, down the stairwell. At eleven, four were left. By midnight, none.

Old Shen lay in his bed against the east wall, where they had put him ever since his legs gave out. He couldn't get up. He could turn his head, move his hands, hold the volume of the radio. The radio was a grey transistor Panda, its antenna bent in half and mended with copper wire. It had stood on the nightstand for thirty years. It told the hour, the weather, the level of the rivers.

Now it was talking about the Liulan reservoir. The dam had broken toward evening. The voice read the names of the villages downstream of Hengzhou like a shopping list. Mei listened to the names and searched for her own.

She got things ready before they were needed. She took the blue plastic sheet that covered the motorbike on the balcony. She spread it on the floor. She found the clothesline and cut it into four equal pieces with the kitchen knife. She tied the pieces to the eyelets of the sheet, one at each corner. She made double knots. She tested them with a pull. The sheet held.

The child was asleep on the couch with his shoes on. Mei had left them on him on purpose.

The boat came at a quarter to two. She heard it before she saw it: the outboard motor, low, turning against the current under the window. Then the torch. A man in an orange life jacket lit the room from below, from the black water that was now the street.

"How many of you," the man said. It was not a question.

"Three," Mei said. "A child, an old man who can't walk, me."

The man moved the torch onto the old man, onto the bed, onto the still legs under the sheet. Then he moved it onto the boat below him. Mei looked too. There was a woman with two children, an elderly man, a boy holding the oar. The boat sat low in the water.

"One place," the man said. "Only one. Then we come back. The child."

Old Shen turned up the radio. The voice said the teams were reaching Hengzhou with drones, that the missing were missing, that forty-eight thousand people were already out. The old man listened the way you listen to something that concerns someone else.

Mei took the child from the couch. She stood him up, held his face in her hands, told him not to let go of the hand of the man in the life jacket. The child did not cry. He was looking at the black water where the courtyard used to be.

"You get on too," the man said. "We'll take the old man after. Rule. You board in order. Women, children."

"He can't be left alone," Mei said.

"We'll be back in half an hour."

"The water rises one floor every two hours," Mei said. "In half an hour it's at the third. He's on the bed. He can't get up."

The man held the torch steady on Mei's face. Then he lowered the child into the boat, into the arms of the woman with the two children. The boat sank a little more. The motor changed its sound.

"Half an hour," the man said. The boat pulled away from the window and vanished behind the corner of the building, toward the gathering point, the sound growing small.

Mei half-closed the window, against the wind. She went back to the old man. She passed the sheet's ropes under his back, the way she had rehearsed, one corner at a time, lifting just barely. The old man was light. He weighed less than the wet cover of a motorbike.

"When the boat comes back I'll lower you from the window," Mei said. "Shoulders first. Slowly."

Old Shen did not answer. He turned the volume up again. The radio was giving music now, an old Guangxi song, from when rivers were just rivers. He moved his head slowly, in time.

The water came in under the bedroom door at five to two, sooner than expected. Mei felt it cold at her ankles. It rose a finger, then two. Mei raised the bed by putting under its legs the bricks she kept on the balcony for the flowerpots. She gained ten centimetres. She carried the radio to the windowsill, to the dry, its antenna pointing out so it would still catch.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed, beside the old man, and kept her eye on the corner of the street from which the motor was to return. The water rose against the bricks. The radio, on the sill, went on playing the song, then the forecasts, then again the names of the villages. It said theirs, now. It said it and passed on, to the next, as it had done for all of them.

At ten past two the water reached the sill. The radio drank one drop, then another, then fell silent in the middle of a word. Mei took it, shook it, dried it against her chest. It did not come back on. Old Shen watched the door. Outside, far off, behind the corner, a motor could be heard. Mei stood up on the bed, the dead radio in her hand, and began to call toward the window.