Will gestures up at me from the cellar. It's safe, his hands say. I step quietly down along the very edge of the stairs. Experience has taught me that even if the middle collapses due to rot, it is safe against the wall, and so I cautiously put one boot down and then the other until I am standing next to him. There is the moonlight above, streaming in through the collapsed walls of the apartment, and the faint torchlight Will waves over the space we have found ourselves in. I lean against him for a brief and indulgent moment, listened to the reassuring rhythm of his heart.

We are not safe yet, not on this full moon, but we don't have a choice. We haven't eaten in days, and the days are so hot we can only travel at night. I long for a full night's sleep but I can't remember the last time I enjoyed that luxury. We aren't the only people in the city looking for shelter and food. I raise my hand to my mouth to ask. It is too dangerous to make a noise. They might be listening.

Three years ago we were in the salt mines over east. We'd made a good go of it there. For a hundred years a thousand people had survived underground, safe from the storms above - not just the weather, but the wars that had been fought over what little resources we had left. There were huge caverns that were glorious grow rooms, bountiful gardens that produced enough for all of us. We had animals too - blind things, mostly, that we raised for milk. Occasionally, we ventured to the surface, only to retreat again. Unbearable heatwaves had rendered it a wasteland. Controlled underground cities were the norm across the entire earth - anyone that lived above ground had a difficult existance, starving, often, and living off cockroaches, beetles, mealy worms and ants. Still, they had the stars above I suppose, and not cold rock.

Will shakes his head. Nothing yet. We would have to be incredibly lucky to find anything down here - maybe a spider or two, or a cockroach. The best we could hope for is a night's sleep hidden under the stairs. Hot water, if either of us had the energy to boil it. There was enough tinder to burn - the stair rails, for one, but also some books that we had found yesterday, a little miracle. We had a library in the caves, mostly practical books that taught us what we needed to survive, but all those were lost in the earthquake that brought all of that to an end. We were lucky to get out alive - many didn't. Those that survived scattered, looking for another underground refuge to take them in. That's what we had been doing for a long time now, making our way west, looking for sanctuary.

I scooch in next to him under the stairs and we huddle together for a moment, trying to make space for each others bodies. Something digs painfully into my back, and I reach a hand around quietly to find a tin tucked against the wall. It is so rare a find that we nearly both let out a noise, but stop ourselves in time. There are others in the city that would kill us and make soup from our bones. We think we are relatively safe out where we are, but cannot be too careful.

Burning coffee plantation, Brazil

I prise the tin open carefully with my fingers, and pull out a bag, looking at Will quizzically. It's a powder. In the caves we had learnt about coffee as children, and other crops too, like tea, rice, bananas and date palms. They were crops that used far too much water and space to be viable choices for underground survival zones like ours. We lived off beans, leafy greens, mushrooms, eggs and milk, and some fish from the aquaculture farms - tilapia, perch and catfish. To find coffee in a tin in a ruin in a city left here for a hundred years was an impossible find.

I prise the bag open and hold it out for Will to smell, who is grinning at me. It's coffee alright - the sticker on the bag even says so. He dips his finger into the bag and dabs a little on his tongue. 'Fire' I mouth. We use the tin to boil some water, and knife a good amount into the cups. We have no idea what we are doing, but it takes our mind off the darkness and the hunger, to undergo this ritual of making a long extinct drink. In the darkness, with the moonlight dancing on the stairwell above us and filtering through the stairs, we imagine ourselves elsewhere - a cafe in 1960's Paris, perhaps, or in a garden in Berlin in the late 2020's. Nevermind the bitter, foreign taste of the grounds, or the growling of our stomachs, the fear of being captured by cannibals, or the worry that we would never find another underground shelter to take us.

We were drinking coffee, and everything was going to be alright.

This post is in response to Cinnamon Cup Coffee's prompt this week: The year is 2500, and coffee has been extinct for decades due to climate issues. You find a vacuumed sealed packet, which smells lovely as soon as you open it. Tell us about the first cup of coffee you’ve ever experienced in this changed world. I'm sorry I couldn't find original photos or three of them - none I had suit the scenario! I hope my words are enough to adequately respond to the prompt!