Free The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus

York. They pass through neighborhoods where George would variously be the wrong kind of man—West Harlem, the Upper West Side. He looks away, to the yellow legal pad on the leather seat beside him. He takes it up and balances it on his knee and begins to write.
    UH crossing Federation Europa in search of exiled leader of Climate Refugees, rumored hiding in principality formerly known as France. Abandoned court interior. Hall of mirrors—broken! UH sits at a table with Agent X, ambassador to the EAST. Table with skinned animals, candle. UH & X study large map.
    George’s vision is of a future where rain falls only in a thin, temperate band around the world; the rest is famine and fire. He’s still impressed with the originality of his story, its moral clarity. But he can’t quite get X and UH’s duet right. UH must convince X that he is not the marauder—Murderer! Rapist!—the queen’s regime has, upon his escape, broadcasted him to be. The car curves under the brownstone arches of Central Park, past a group on horseback trotting a dirt path, down the Upper East Side with its green awnings and pristine esplanades. They pass the John Stepney Somner Library, a gray, French-neoclassical hulk on the corner of Fifth and Seventy-Eighth. Incredible, always, to think his mother lived there as a girl. An only child, thirty-seven rooms. The smooth marble steps up to the columned entrance, under a sculpture-nestled pediment: her front door. Wrought-iron balconies girding the upper stories. Now it’s a museum and an archive, exhibiting the history of music, open to the public. No coincidence his love of opera. It’s deep in his young education, in his genes—when John Stepney Somner, George’s great-grandfather, commissioned the residence in 1911, moving the family uptown from lower Fifth Avenue, half the downstairs was dedicated to music. Among the libraries and drawing rooms and gallery and dining rooms there was a music room—in honor of his wife, Fanny, an accomplished pianist—and a formal recital room with murals depicting the interior of La Fenice in the 1830s. John Stepney, too bad for him, lived only a year in his elegant fortress, killed by cirrhosis in 1913; when Fanny died fifteen years later, CeCe’s father inherited the house. By the time CeCe was out of school, Edward George—Georgie—and his third wife (the marriage to CeCe’s mother being his second and least discussed) had moved to less drafty accommodations nearby and dedicated John’s House, as the family called it, to the public.
    And how John made his fortune! CeCe told George after he’d found himself confronting his great-grandfather’s name as a multiple-choice option (D, incorrect) to a question on industry barons of the nineteenth century during a middle-school history test. He was delighted when later that year his social studies class was asked to produce a paper entitled “My Family Story.” As his friends complained of awkward interviews with this or that grandparent, George lifted his essay from the public record and went to the movies. From the encyclopedia and The New York Times obituaries, with a smattering of quotation marks and a few changes for originality and sophistication, he transcribed:
    John Stepney Somner was born to prosperous farmers in 1837 in New York. At the age of twenty-five he bought out of service in the Civil War. After losing a tavern bet over the material origin of the newly invented rubber stamp, he set out on an expedition to Brazil, where he joined the Amazonian rubber boom. He invested in plantations and harvested the white sap called LATEX.
    By thirty-five, Somner returned to the US of A. Somner Rubber, a manufacturing company, and Somner Chemical, a “subsidiary producer of vulcanizing agents” and solvents. Such as sulfuric acid and AMMONIA. He lived in Stockport, Connecticut, “having, with diplomatic finesse, enlisted as overseas managers of production and transport those expatriates of the