Location from deaths-end by
The continent on which the Trisolarans corral 4.5 billion humans without infrastructure, food, or law — the reservation where humanity is meant to eat itself down to two hundred million.
Sophon orders the relocation in days. The droplets enforce it from orbit — anyone still off-continent at the deadline is killed without warning. Once the population is in place, the Trisolarans destroy every electrical and agricultural facility on the continent and wait. The Aboriginal population is permitted to remain on traditional land. Cheng Xin and AA live in the desert near Warburton in a tin-roofed shelter Fraisse maintains for them. Australia is where humanity learns what it is willing to do to the person next to it; it is also where Cheng Xin re-encounters Wade, who tells her plainly to leave the continent and never explains why.
Red dust, harsh sky, thin scrub. The cities — Sydney, Melbourne, Perth — choke with refugees living in tents, freight containers, rusting buses. Outside the cities, infinite ochre country broken by salt flats and dry creeks. At night the camps glow with cookfires and at dawn with smoke. By the second month, the smell is unforgettable: human waste, smoke, and the chemical sweetness of the food synthesizers Sophon shut off.