Station Eleven

48

THREE DAYS AFTER Kirsten and August became separated from the Symphony, behind a garden shed in an overgrown backyard on the outskirts of Severn City, Kirsten woke abruptly with tears in her eyes. She’d dreamt that she’d been walking down the road with August, then she turned and he was gone and she knew he was dead. She’d screamed his name, she’d run down the road but he was nowhere. When she woke he was watching her, his hand on her arm.

“I’m right here,” he said. She must have said his name aloud.

“It’s nothing. Just a dream.”

“I had bad dreams too.” He was holding his silver Starship Enterprise in his other hand.

It wasn’t quite morning. The sky was brightening, but night lingered below in the shadows, gray light, dewdrops suspended in the grass.

“Let’s wash up,” August said. “We might meet people today.”

They crossed the road to the beach. The water mirrored the pearl sky, the first pink of sunrise rippling. They bathed with some shampoo Kirsten had found in that last house — it left a scent of synthetic peaches on their skin and floating islands of bubbles on the lake — and Kirsten washed and wrung out her dress, put it on wet. August had scissors in his suitcase. She cut his hair — it was falling in his eyes — and then he cut hers.

“Have faith,” he whispered. “We’ll find them.”

Resort hotels stood along the lakeshore, the windows mostly broken and their shards reflecting the sky. Trees pushed up through the parking lots between rusted cars. Kirsten and August abandoned their suitcases, the wheels too loud on rough pavement, made bundles out of bedsheets and carried the supplies over their shoulders. After a mile or two they saw a sign with a white airplane hanging askew over an intersection, an arrow pointed toward the center of town.

Severn City had been a substantial place once. There were commercial streets of redbrick buildings, flowers riotous in planters, and the roots of maple trees disrupting the sidewalks. A flowering vine had taken over most of the post office and extended across the street. They walked as silently as possible, weapons in hand. Birds moved in and out of broken windows and perched on sagging utility wires.

“August.”

“What?”

“Did you just hear a dog bark?”

Just ahead was the overgrown wilderness of a municipal park, a low hill rising beside the road. They climbed up into the underbrush, moving quickly, threw their bundles aside and crouched low. A flash of movement at the end of a side street: a deer, bounding away from the lakeshore.

“Something startled it,” August whispered. Kirsten adjusted and readjusted her grip on a knife. A monarch butterfly fluttered past. She watched it while she listened and waited, wings like bright paper. A faint buzz of insects all around them. She heard voices now, and footsteps.

The man who appeared on the road was so dirty that Kirsten didn’t immediately recognize him, and when she did she had to stifle a gasp. Sayid was gaunt. He moved slowly. There was blood on his face, an eye swollen shut. His clothes were filthy and torn, several days’ beard on his face. Two men and a boy followed a few paces behind him. The boy carried a machete. One of the men carried a sawed-off shotgun, the barrel pointed at the ground. The other held a bow, half-drawn, an arrow at the ready and a quiver on his back.

Kirsten, moving very slowly, drew a second knife from her belt.

“I have the gunman,” August whispered. “Get the archer.” His fingers closed around a stone the size of his fist. He rose and sent it sailing in an arc over the road. The stone crashed into the wall of a half-collapsed house and the men started, turning toward the sound just as August’s first arrow caught the gunman in the back. Kirsten was aware of footsteps receding, the boy with the machete running away. The archer drew his bow and an arrow whistled past Kirsten’s ear, but the knife had already left her hand. The archer sank to his knees, staring at the handle protruding from between his ribs. A flock of birds rose up above the rooftops and settled into the sudden quiet.

August was cursing under his breath. Sayid knelt on the road, his head in his hands. Kirsten ran to him and held his head to her chest. He didn’t resist. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, into his blood-caked hair, “I’m so sorry they hurt you.”

“There’s no dog,” August said. His jaw was clenched, a sheen of sweat on his face. “Where’s the dog? We heard a dog bark.”

“The prophet’s behind us with the dog,” Sayid whispered. “He’s got two men with him. We split up to take different roads about a half mile back.” Kirsten helped him to his feet.

“The archer’s still alive,” August said.

The archer was lying on his back. His eyes followed Kirsten, but he made no other movement. She knelt beside him. He’d been in the audience when they’d performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at St. Deborah by the Water, applauding in the front row at the end of the performance, smiling, his eyes wet in the candlelight.

“Why did you take Sayid?” she asked him. “Where are the other two?”

“You took something that belongs to us,” the man whispered. “We were going to do a trade.” Blood was spreading rapidly over his shirt and dripping down the creases of his neck, pooling beneath him.

“We took nothing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” August was going through the men’s bags. “No ammunition for the gun,” he said, disgusted. “And it was unloaded.”

“The girl,” Sayid said. His voice was a dry rasp. “He’s talking about the stowaway.”

“The fifth bride,” the archer whispered. “It was my duty. She was chosen.”

“Eleanor?” August looked up. “That scared little kid?”

“She’s the property of the prophet.”

“She’s twelve years old,” Kirsten said. “You believe everything the prophet says?”

The archer smiled. “The virus was the angel,” he whispered. “Our names are recorded in the book of life.”

“Okay,” Kirsten said. “Where are the others?” He only stared at her, smiling. She looked at Sayid. “Are they behind us somewhere?”

“The clarinet got away,” Sayid said.

“What about Dieter?”

“Kirsten,” Sayid said softly.

“Oh god,” August said. “Not Dieter. No.”

“I’m sorry.” Sayid covered his face with his hands. “I couldn’t …”

“And behold,” the archer whispered, “there was a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had passed away.” The color was draining from his face.

Kirsten wrenched her knife from the archer’s chest. He gasped, the blood welling, and she heard a gurgle in his throat as his eyes dimmed. Three, she thought, and felt immensely tired.

“We heard a whimpering in the forest,” Sayid said. He walked slowly, limping. “That night on patrol. We were about a mile from the Symphony, about to turn back, and there was a sound coming from the bushes, sounded like a lost child.”

“A ruse,” August said. He had a glazed look when Kirsten glanced at him.

“So like idiots we went to investigate, and the next thing I know something’s pressed over my face, a rag soaked in something, a chemical smell, and I woke up in a clearing in the woods.”

“What about Dieter?” It was difficult to force the words from her throat.

“He didn’t wake up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly that. Was he allergic to chloroform? Was it actually chloroform at all, or something much more toxic? The prophet’s men gave me water, told me they wanted the girl, they’d decided to take two hostages and broker a trade. They’d guessed we were headed for the Museum of Civilization, given the direction of travel and the rumors that Charlie and Jeremy had gone there. And the whole time, they’re explaining this, and I’m looking at Dieter sleeping beside me, and he’s getting paler and paler, and his lips are blue. I’m trying to wake him up, and I can’t. I couldn’t. I was tied up next to him, and I kept kicking him, wake up, wake up, but …”

“But what?”

“But he didn’t wake up,” Sayid said. “We waited all through the following day — me tied up there and the men coming and going — and then in the late afternoon, his breathing stopped. I watched it happen.” Kirsten’s eyes filled with tears. “I was watching him breathe,” Sayid said. “He’d gone so pale. His chest rising and falling, and then one last exhale, and no more. I shouted and they tried to revive him, but it didn’t … nothing worked. Nothing. They argued for a while, and then two of them left and returned a few hours later with the clarinet.”

49

THE TRUTH WAS, the clarinet hated Shakespeare. She’d been a double major in college, theater and music, a sophomore the year the world changed, lit up by an obsession with twenty-first-century experimental German theater. Twenty years after the collapse, she loved the music of the Symphony, loved being a part of it, but found the Symphony’s insistence on performing Shakespeare insufferable. She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.

A year before she was seized by the prophet’s men, the clarinet was sitting alone on the beach in Mackinaw City. It was a cool morning, and a fog hung over the water. They’d passed through this place more times than she could count, but she never tired of it. She liked the way the Upper Peninsula disappeared on foggy days, a sense of infinite possibility in the way the bridge faded into cloud.

She’d been thinking lately about writing her own play, seeing if she could convince Gil to stage a performance with the Symphony actors. She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed this age in which they’d somehow landed. Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He’d trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Traveling Symphony. But look, she’d told him, the difference was that they’d seen electricity, they’d seen everything, they’d watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn’t. In Shakespeare’s time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost. “If you think you can do better,” he’d said, “why don’t you write a play and show it to Gil?”

“I don’t think I can do better,” she’d told him. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the repertoire’s inadequate.” Still, writing a play was an interesting idea. She began writing the first act on the shore the next morning, but never got past the first line of the opening monologue, which she’d envisioned as a letter: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” She was distracted just then by a seagull, descending near her feet. It pecked at something in the rocks, and this was when she heard Dieter, approaching from the Symphony encampment with two chipped mugs of the substance that passed for coffee in the new world.

“What were you writing?” he asked.

“A play,” she said. She folded the paper.

He smiled. “Well, I look forward to reading it.”

She thought of the opening monologue often in the months that followed, weighing those first words like coins or pebbles turned over and over in a pocket, but she was unable to come up with the next sentence. The monologue remained a fragment, stuffed deep in her backpack until the day, eleven months later, when the Symphony unearthed it in the hours after the clarinet was seized by the prophet’s men and wondered if they were looking at a suicide note.

While they were reading it, she was waking in a clearing from an unnatural sleep. She had been dreaming of a room, a rehearsal space at college, an impression of laughter — someone had told a joke — and she tried to hold on to this, clinging at these shreds because it was obvious even before she was entirely awake that everything was wrong. She was lying on her side in the forest. She felt poisoned. The ground was hard under her shoulder, and she was very cold. Her hands were tied behind her back, her ankles bound, and she was aware immediately that the Symphony was nowhere near, a terrible absence. She’d been filling water containers with Jackson, and then? She remembered a sound behind her, turning as a rag was pressed to her face, someone’s hand on the back of her head. It was evening now. Six men were crouched in a circle nearby. Two armed with large guns, one with a standard bow and a quiver of arrows and another with a strange metal crossbow, the fifth with a machete. The sixth had his back to her and she couldn’t see if he had a weapon.

“But we don’t know what road they’ll take,” one of the gunmen said.

“Look at the map,” the man who had his back to her replied. “There’s exactly one logical route to the Severn City Airport from here.” She recognized the prophet’s voice.

“They could take Lewis Avenue once they reach Severn City. Looks like it’s not that much longer.”

“We’ll split up,” the prophet said. “Two groups, one for each route, and we meet up at the airport road.”

“I assume you have a plan, gentlemen.” This was Sayid’s voice, somewhere near. Sayid! She wanted to speak with him, to ask where they were and what was happening, to tell him the Symphony had searched for him and Dieter after they’d disappeared, but she was too nauseous to move.

“We told you, we’re just trading the two of you for the bride,” the gunman said, “and as long as no one attempts anything stupid, we’ll take her and then we’ll be on our way.”

“I see,” Sayid said. “You enjoy this line of work, or are you in it for the pension?”

“What’s a pension?” the one with the machete asked. He was very young. He looked about fifteen.

“All of this,” the prophet said, serene, “all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it’s all part of a greater plan.”

“You’d be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.” The clarinet was remembering something she’d always known about Sayid, which was that he had trouble keeping his mouth shut when he was angry. She strained her neck and saw Dieter, lying on his back a few yards away, unmoving. His skin looked like marble.

“Some things in this life seem inexplicable,” the archer said, “but we must trust in the existence of a greater plan.”

“We’re sorry,” the boy with the machete said, sounding as if he meant it. “We’re very sorry about your friend.”

“I’m sure you’re sorry about everyone,” Sayid said, “but while we’re discussing strategy here, there was absolutely no reason for you to abduct the clarinet.”

“Two hostages are more persuasive than one,” the archer said.

“You’re so bright, the lot of you,” Sayid said. “That’s what I admire most about you, I think.”

The gunman muttered something and started to rise, but the prophet placed a hand on his arm and he sank back to the ground, shaking his head.

“The hostage is a test,” the prophet said. “Can we not withstand the taunts of the fallen? Is that not part of our task?”

“Forgive me,” the gunman murmured.

“The fallen walk among us. We must be the light. We are the light.”

“We are the light,” the other four repeated in murmured unison. The clarinet shifted painfully — the movement brought a storm of dark spots over her vision — and craned her neck until she saw Sayid. He was ten or twelve feet away, tied up.

“The road is fifty paces due east,” he mouthed. “Turn left when you get there.” The clarinet nodded and closed her eyes against a wave of nausea.

“Your clarinet friend still sleeping?” The archer’s voice.

“If you touch her, I’ll kill you,” Sayid said.

“No need for that, friend. No one will bother her. We’re just hoping to avoid a repeat …”

“Let her sleep,” the prophet said. “The Symphony’s stopped for the night anyway. We’ll catch up to them in the morning.”

When the clarinet opened her eyes, the men were apparently sleeping, bundled on the forest floor. Some time had passed. Had she slept? She was less ill than she had been. Someone had placed a cloth over Dieter’s face. Sayid was sitting where she’d seen him last, talking to the boy with the machete, who had his back to her.

“In the south?” the boy was saying. “I don’t know, I don’t like to think about it. We did what we had to.”

She didn’t hear Sayid’s reply.

“It hollows you out,” the boy said, “thinking about it. Remembering what we did, it just guts me. I don’t know how else to put it.”

“But you believe in what he says? All of you?”

“Well, Clancy’s a true believer,” she heard the boy say very softly. He gestured toward the sleeping men. “Steve too, probably most of the others. If you’re not a true believer, you’re not going to talk about it. But Tom? The younger gunman? To be honest, I think he’s maybe just in it because our leader’s married to his sister.”

“Very shrewd of him,” Sayid said. “I still don’t get why the prophet’s with you.”

“He comes along on patrols and such every now and again. The leader must occasionally lead his men into the wilderness.” Was she imagining the sadness in his voice? The clarinet lay still for a while, until she located the North Star. She discovered that it was possible, by lying on her side and arching her back, to bring her feet close enough to her hands to loosen the rope that bound her ankles. Sayid and the boy were still talking quietly.

“Okay,” she heard Sayid say, “but there are six of you, and thirty of us. Everyone in the Symphony’s armed.”

“You know how quiet we are.” The boy sighed. “I’m not saying it’s right,” he said. “I know it’s not right.”

“If you know it’s not right …”

“What choice do I have? You know how this … this time we live in, you know how it forces a person to do things.”

“That seems a strange statement,” Sayid said, “coming from someone too young to remember any different.”

“I’ve read books. Magazines, I even found a newspaper once. I know it all used to be different.”

“But getting back to the subject at hand, there are still only six of you, and—”

“You didn’t hear us come up behind you on the road, did you? This is our training. We move silently and we attack from behind. This is how we disarmed ten towns and took their weapons for our leader before we reached St. Deborah by the Water. This is how we took two of our leader’s wives. And look, your friend for example”—the clarinet closed her eyes—“we came up behind her in the forest and she heard nothing.”

“I don’t—”

“We can pick you off one by one,” the boy said. He sounded apologetic. “I’ve been training since I was five. You’ve got weapons, but you don’t have our skills. If the Symphony won’t swap you for the girl, we can kill you one at a time from the safety of the forest until you give her back to us.”

The clarinet began to move again, frantically working the knot at her ankles. Sayid could see her, she realized, but he was keeping his gaze on the boy’s face. A long time passed when she didn’t listen to the conversation, concentrating on nothing but the rope. When her ankles were unbound, she struggled to her knees.

“But I’m not sure I quite follow,” Sayid was saying. “That part in your philosophy about being the light. How do you bring the light if you are the light? I wonder if you could just explain to me …”

The clarinet was one of the Symphony’s best hunters. She had survived alone in the forest for three years after the collapse, and now, even sick with whatever poison they’d used on her, even with her wrists bound behind her back, it was possible to turn and vanish noiselessly between the trees, away from the clearing, to make almost no sound at all as she stepped out onto the road. Running as night faded to gray dawn and the sun rose, walking and stumbling through the dragging hours, hallucinating now, dreaming of water, falling into the arms of the Symphony’s rear scouts in the morning as the sky darkened overhead, delivering her message—“You must change the route”—as they carried her back to the Symphony, where the last tree blocking the road had just been sawed away. The first raindrops were falling as the conductor heard the message and ordered an immediate change of course, scouts sent to find Kirsten and August — fishing somewhere along the road ahead — but unable to locate them in the storm, the Symphony veering inland into a new route, a circuitous combination of back roads that would take them eventually to the Severn City Airport, the clarinet slipping in and out of consciousness in the back of the first caravan while Alexandra held a bottle of water to her lips.

50

THE KNIFE TATTOOS on Kirsten’s wrist:

The first marked a man who came at her in her first year with the Symphony, when she was fifteen, rising fast and lethal out of the underbrush, and he never spoke a word but she understood his intent. As he neared her, sound drained from the world, and time seemed to slow. She was distantly aware that he was moving quickly, but there was more than enough time to pull a knife from her belt and send it spinning — so slowly, steel flashing in the sun — until it merged with the man and he clutched at his throat. He shrieked — she couldn’t hear him, but she watched his mouth open and she knew others must have heard, because the Symphony was suddenly all around her, and this was when the volume slowly rose and time resumed its normal pace.

“It’s a physiological response to danger,” Dieter told her, when Kirsten mentioned the soundlessness of those seconds, the way time stretched and expanded. This seemed a reasonable-enough explanation, but there was nothing in her memories to account for how calm she was afterward, when she pulled her knife from the man’s throat and cleaned it, and this was why she stopped trying to remember her lost year on the road, the thirteen unremembered months between leaving Toronto with her brother and arriving in the town in Ohio where they stayed until he died and she left with the Symphony. Whatever that year on the road contained, she realized, it was nothing she wanted to know about.

The second knife was for a man who fell two years later, outside Mackinaw City. The Symphony had been warned of brigands in the area, but it was a shock when they materialized out of fog on the road ahead. Four men, two with guns and two with machetes. One of the gunmen asked for food, four horses, and a woman, in a flat monotone voice. “Give us what we want,” he said, “and no one has to die.” But Kirsten sensed rather than heard the sixth guitar fitting an arrow to his bow behind her back. “Guns first,” he murmured, close to her ear. “I’ve got the one on the left. One, two—” and on three the men with guns were falling, one staring past the arrow protruding from his forehead and the other clutching at Kirsten’s knife in his chest. The conductor finished the others with two quick shots. They retrieved the weapons, dragged the men into the forest to be food for the animals, and continued on into Mackinaw City to perform Romeo and Juliet.

She’d hoped there would never be a third. “There was a new heaven and a new earth,” the archer whispered. She saw the look on August’s face just afterward and realized that the gunman had been his first — he’d had the colossal good fortune to have made it to Year Twenty without killing anyone — and if she weren’t so tired, if it didn’t take all of her strength to keep breathing in the face of Sayid’s terrible news, she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

Where was the prophet? They walked mostly in silence, stunned by grief, Sayid limping, listening for the dog. The signs for the airport led them away from the lake, out of downtown, up into residential streets of wood-frame houses. A few of the roofs had collapsed up here, most under the weight of fallen trees. In the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had sprung up through the gravel of long-overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world. An ache in Kirsten’s throat. The houses thinned out, longer spaces between the overgrown driveways, and now the right lane of the road was clogged with cars, rusted exoskeletons on flat tires. When she glanced in the windows, she saw only trash from the old world, crumpled chip bags, the remains of pizza boxes, electronic objects with buttons and screens.

When they came to the highway there was a sign indicating the direction to the airport, but finding the airport would have been as simple as following the traffic jam. Everyone had apparently been trying to get there at the end, just before they ran out of gasoline or had to abandon their cars in the gridlock or died of flu at the wheel. There was no sign of the prophet, no movement among the endless lines of cars glittering in sunlight.

They walked on the gravel shoulder. There was a place where ivy had spread from the forest and covered acres of highway in green. They waded through it, the leaves soft on Kirsten’s sandaled feet. Every sense attuned to the air around her, trying to sense the prophet’s position — behind or ahead? — and met only by the racket of the world around them, the cicadas, the birds, dragonflies, a passing family of deer. The alignment of the cars was askew, some stopped at odd angles, some hard up against the bumper of the next vehicle, others halfway off the road. The windshield wipers were up, puddles of rusted chains tangled around some of the wheels. It had been snowing, then, perhaps heavily, and the highway hadn’t been plowed. The cars had slipped and skidded on packed snow and ice.

“What is it?” August asked, and she realized that she’d stopped. The flu, the snow, the gridlock, the decision: wait in the car, boxed in now by all the cars that have piled up behind, idling to keep the heat on until you run out of gas? Or abandon your car to walk, perhaps with young children, but where exactly? Farther on, toward the airport? Back home?

“Do you see something?” Sayid spoke in a whisper. August had been supporting him for the last mile or so, Sayid’s arm over his shoulders.

I see everything. “It’s nothing,” Kirsten said. She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string. The way the archer had smiled, just at the end.

They took the exit to the airport and reached the roadblock in the midafternoon. An ancient plywood quarantine sign warning of the Georgia Flu, a line of fallen traffic cones and orange plastic fencing collapsing to the ground. The thought of walking here in the snowstorm, desperate to get away from the sickness in town, and at the end of that walk there’s this sign, and when you read it you understand that it isn’t going to be possible to get away from this. By now perhaps you’re already ill, perhaps carrying a feverish small child in your arms. Kirsten turned away from the roadblock, and knew without looking that there would be skeletons in the forest here. Some people would have turned back and retraced their steps for miles, tried to find another way to escape from an illness that was everywhere, that was inescapable by then. Others, sick or very tired, would have stepped off the road and lay down on their backs to watch the snow falling down upon them, to look up at the cold sky. I dreamt last night I saw an airplane. She stopped walking, overcome by the thought of Dieter, and in that moment of stillness she heard the distant bark of a dog.

“Kirsten,” August said over his shoulder. She saw in his face that he hadn’t heard what she had. “We’re almost there.”

“Into the woods,” she said quietly. “I think I heard the prophet’s dog.” They helped Sayid off the road. He was very pale now. He collapsed into the underbrush, gasping, and closed his eyes.

In the quiet that followed the dog’s bark, Kirsten crouched in the bushes and listened to her heartbeat. The prophet and his men had been some distance behind them. A long time passed before she heard their footsteps. The sound seemed strangely amplified, but she knew it was only the tension singing through her, her senses made acute by fear. The sunlight on this stretch of road was filtered through leaves, and her first sighting was the long barrel of the prophet’s rifle moving in and out of shadow as he walked. He led the group, serene and unhurried, the dog trotting by his side. The boy who’d escaped Kirsten and August’s ambush that morning carried a handgun now, the machete strapped to his back, and behind them walked a man with a complicated weapon of a kind that Kirsten had never seen before, a vicious metal crossbow with four short arrows preloaded, and a fourth man with a shotgun.

Don’t stop. Don’t stop. But as the dog drew alongside the bush where Kirsten was hiding, he slowed and raised his nose in the air. Kirsten held her breath. She hadn’t gone far enough from the road, she realized. She was no more than ten paces away.

“You smell something, Luli?” the man with the crossbow asked. The dog barked once. Kirsten held her breath. The men gathered around the dog.

“Probably just another squirrel,” the boy said, but he sounded uneasy. Kirsten saw that he was afraid, and the realization carried such sadness. I never wanted any of this.

“Or maybe there’s someone in the woods.”

“Last time he barked, it was just a squirrel.”

The dog had gone still, his nose twitching. Please, she thought, please. But Luli barked again and stared directly at Kirsten through her screen of leaves.

The prophet smiled.

“I see you,” the man with the crossbow said.

She could rise out of the underbrush and throw a knife, and as it spun through the air she would be felled by a bullet or a metal arrow — the crossbow and three guns were trained on her now — or she could remain unmoving until they were forced to approach, attack at close range and be killed by one of the others. But would they approach at all, or would they fire into the bush behind which she was hiding? She felt August’s anguish, a low current in the air. He was better hidden than she, crouched behind a stump.

A metal arrow drove into the dirt by her feet with a hollow thud.

“The next one lands in your heart.” The man with the crossbow was older than the prophet, an old burn scar on his face and neck. “Stand up. Slowly. Hands in the air.”

Kirsten rose out of hiding.

“Drop the knife.”

She let it fall from her hand into the underbrush. Acutely aware of the other two knives in her belt, so close but unreachable. If she reached now, if she were fast enough, would there be time to at least take out the prophet before the first bullet tore her heart? Unlikely.

“Step forward. If you reach for those knives, you’ll be dead.” The man with the crossbow spoke calmly. Nothing about this situation was new to him. The boy looked stricken.

The shock of realizing that this was probably actually the ending, after a lifetime of near misses, after all this time. She walked forward through the radiant world, the sunlight and shadow and green. Thinking of trying to do something heroic, sending a knife spinning through the air as she fell. Thinking, please don’t let them find August and Sayid. Thinking of Dieter, although thoughts of Dieter carried a pain that was almost physical, like probing at an open wound. She stepped up onto the hard surface of the road and stood before the prophet, her hands in the air.

“Titania,” the prophet said. He raised the point of his rifle to the spot between her eyes. In his gaze she saw only curiosity. He was interested to see what would happen next. All three guns were on Kirsten. The man with the crossbow was sighting his weapon into the underbrush, but nothing in his aim or his movements suggested that he’d seen August or Sayid. The prophet nodded to the boy, who stepped forward and pulled her knives very gently from her belt. She recognized him now. He’d been the sentry as they left St. Deborah by the Water, standing watch and roasting his dinner on a stick. He didn’t meet her eyes. The dog had apparently lost interest in following scents from the woods and had laid down on the pavement, watching them, his chin resting on his paw.

“On your knees,” the prophet said. She knelt. The point of the rifle followed her. He stepped closer.

She swallowed. “Do you have a name?” she asked. Some vague instinct to stall.

“Sometimes names are an encumbrance. Where are your companions?”

“The Symphony? I don’t know.” The pain of this, even now when it was too late to matter anymore. Thinking of the Symphony, the horse-drawn caravans moving under the summer sky, the clopping of horses. Traveling somewhere or perhaps already at the airport, in safety, in grace. She loved them so desperately.

“And your other companions? The ones who helped you kill my men on the road this morning.”

“We had no choice.”

“I understand,” he said. “Where are they?”

“They’re dead.”

“Are you sure?” He moved the rifle just slightly, tracing a small circle in the air.

“There were three of us,” she said, “including Sayid. Your archer got the other two before he died.” It was plausible. The boy with the machete had run away before the archer fell. She was careful not to look at him.

“My archer was a good man,” the prophet said. “Loyal.”

Kirsten was silent. She understood the calculations August was making at that moment. The prophet’s rifle was an inch from her forehead. If August revealed his position by taking out one of the men, the others would be upon him and Sayid in an instant. Sayid was defenseless, lying bloodied and weakened, and Kirsten — kneeling on the road, disarmed, a gun to her head — would in all likelihood still die.

“I have walked all my life through this tarnished world,” the prophet said, “and I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors.”

Kirsten didn’t want to look at the prophet anymore, or more precisely, she didn’t want the last thing she saw on earth to be his face and the point of the rifle. She raised her head to look past him at leaves flickering in sunlight, at the brilliant blue of the sky. Birdsong. Aware of every breath, every heartbeat passing through her. She wished she could convey a message to August, to reassure him somehow: I know it was me or all three of us. I understand why you couldn’t shoot. She wished she could tell Sayid that she still loved him. A sense memory of lying next to Sayid in the nights before they broke up, the curve of his ribs under her hand when she ran her hand down the length of his body, the soft curls at the nape of his neck.

“This world,” the prophet said, “is an ocean of darkness.”

She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.

“Someone’s coming,” one of the prophet’s men said. Kirsten heard it too. A distant percussion of hooves, two or three horses approaching at a brisk walk from the direction of the highway.

The prophet frowned, but didn’t look away from Kirsten’s face.

“Do you know who’s coming?” he asked.

“No,” she whispered. How distant were the horses? She couldn’t tell.

“Whoever they are,” the prophet said, “they’ll arrive too late. You think you kneel before a man, but you kneel before the sunrise. We are the light moving over the surface of the waters, over the darkness of the undersea.”

“The Undersea?” she whispered, but the prophet was no longer listening to her. A look of perfect serenity had come over his face and he was looking at her, no, through her, a smile on his lips.

“ ‘We long only to go home,’ ” Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. “ ‘We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.’ ”

The prophet’s expression was unreadable. Did he recognize the text?

“ ‘We have been lost for so long,’ ” she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. “ ‘We long only for the world we were born into.’ ”

“But it’s too late for that,” the prophet said. He drew in his breath and adjusted his grip on the rifle.

The shot was so loud that she felt the sound in her chest, a thud by her heart. The boy was in motion and she wasn’t dead, the shot hadn’t come from the prophet’s rifle. In the fathomless silence that followed the sound, she touched her fingertips to her forehead and watched the prophet fall before her, the rifle loose in his hands. The boy had shot the prophet in the head. The other two men seemed frozen in amazement, only for an instant but in that instant one of August’s arrows sang through the air and the man holding the crossbow crumpled, choking on blood. The man with the shotgun fired wildly into the trees and then his trigger clicked uselessly, no ammunition, he cursed and fumbled in his pocket until another arrow pierced his forehead and he fell, and then Kirsten and the boy were alone on the road together.

The boy was wild-eyed, his lips moving, staring at the prophet where he lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood. He lifted the handgun to his mouth. “Don’t,” Kirsten said, “no, please—” But the boy closed his lips around the barrel and fired.

She knelt there, looking at them, and then lay on her back to look up at the sky. Birds wheeling. The shock of being alive. She turned her head and looked into the prophet’s dead blue eyes. Her ears were ringing. She felt the vibration of hooves on the road now. August shouted her name and she looked up as the Symphony’s forward scouts rounded the curve of the road on horseback like a vision from a dream, Viola and Jackson, sunlight glinting on their weapons and on the binoculars that hung on Viola’s neck.

“Do you want this?” August asked some time later. Kirsten had been sitting by the prophet, staring at him, while Jackson helped Sayid out of the forest and August and Viola went through the bags that had belonged to the prophet and his men. “I found it in the prophet’s bag.”

A copy of the New Testament, held together with tape. Kirsten opened it to a random page. It was nearly illegible, a thicket of margin notes and exclamation points and underlining.

A folded piece of paper fell out of the book.

It was a page torn from a copy of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven, the first page of Station Eleven she’d ever seen that hadn’t come from her copies of the books. The entire page devoted to a single image: Dr. Eleven kneels by the lifeless body of Captain Lonagan, his mentor and friend. They are in a room that Dr. Eleven sometimes uses as a meeting place, an office area with a glass wall that overlooks the City, the bridges and islands and boats. Dr. Eleven is distraught, a hand over his mouth. An associate is there too, a speech bubble floating over his head: “You were his second-in-command, Dr. Eleven. In his absence, you must lead.”

Who were you? How did you come to possess this page? Kirsten knelt by the prophet, by the pool of his blood, but he was just another dead man on another road, answerless, the bearer of another unfathomable story about walking out of one world and into another. One of his arms was outstretched toward her.

August was talking to her again, crouched by her side. “The Symphony’s only a few hours behind us,” he was saying very gently. “Viola and Jackson are going back to them, and the three of us will go on ahead to the airport. It isn’t far.”

I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. “The road,” he’d always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he’d been dreaming of. He’d said, “I hope you never remember it.”

The prophet was about her age. Whatever else the prophet had become, he’d once been a boy adrift on the road, and perhaps he’d had the misfortune of remembering everything. Kirsten brushed her hand over the prophet’s face to close his eyes, and placed the folded page from Station Eleven in his hand.

51

WHEN SAYID AND AUGUST AND KIRSTEN walked away from the bodies on the road, resuming their slow progress to the airport, the prophet’s dog followed at some distance. When they stopped to rest, the dog sat a few yards away, watching them.

“Luli,” Kirsten said. “Luli.” She threw a strip of dried venison, and the dog snapped it out of the air. He came close and let her stroke his head. She ran her fingers through the thick fur at the base of his neck. When they set out again, the dog stayed close by her side.

A half mile farther, the road curved out of the trees, the terminal building massive in the near distance. It was a two-story monolith of concrete and glass, shimmering over an ocean of parking lot. Kirsten knew they were almost certainly being watched by now, but she saw no movement in the landscape. The dog whined and raised his nose in the air.

“Do you smell that?” Sayid asked.

“Someone’s roasting a deer,” August said. The road divided before them, separate lanes for Arrivals, Departures, and Parking. “Which way?”

“Let’s pretend there’s a way to get off this continent.” Sayid had a distant look about him. The last time he’d seen an airport had been two months before the collapse, when he’d returned home from visiting his family in Berlin and landed for the last time at Chicago O’Hare. “Let’s go to Departures.”

The Departures lane rose to a second-story entrance, a line of glass-and-steel revolving doors, a municipal bus glinting in sunlight. They were a hundred yards from the door when the whistle sounded, three short blasts. Two sentries stepped out from behind the bus, a woman and a man, their crossbows aimed at the ground.

“Sorry about the crossbows,” the man said pleasantly, “necessary precaution, I’m afraid—” But he stopped then, confused, because the woman’s bow had clattered to the pavement and she was running to the new arrivals, she was laughing and shouting their names and trying to embrace all of them at once.

There were 320 people living in the Severn City Airport that year, one of the largest settlements Kirsten had seen. August took Sayid to the infirmary, and Kirsten lay dazed in Charlie’s tent.

By the beginning of Year Two the occupants of the airport had been sick of looking at one another but on the other hand they hadn’t wanted to sleep too far apart, so they’d constructed a double line of tents down the length of Concourse B. The tents were of varying sizes, with frames made of branches dragged in from the woods, squares of about twelve feet by twelve feet with peaked roofs. They’d raided the airport offices for staplers, stapled sheets over the frames. There’d been some debate over whether this was the best use of the mountain of sheets they’d salvaged from the nearby hotels, but there was such a longing for privacy by then. In Charlie and Jeremy’s tent there was a bed, two plastic crates for clothes and diapers, their instruments. A watery light filtered through the cloth. Luli crowded in and lay by Kirsten’s side.

“I’m so sorry about Dieter,” Charlie said. “August told me.”

“It doesn’t seem real.” Kirsten wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid of what she’d dream of if she slept. “Is there a tattooist here, Charlie?”

Charlie brushed her fingertips over Kirsten’s right wrist, the two black knives inked two years apart. “How many?”

“One. An archer on the road.”

“There’s a tattooist who lives in the Lufthansa jet. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”

Kirsten was watching an ant cross the roof of the tent on the outside, the shadow of its tiny body and the pinpoint impressions of its legs on the fabric. “I’ve been thinking about the nursery,” she said.

A few years ago, they’d been going through a massive country house near the mouth of the St. Clair River, Kirsten and Charlie and August, a place that had been picked over more than once but not for years or maybe a decade, dust everywhere, and eventually August had said something about getting back to the Symphony. Kirsten had gone upstairs in search of Charlie and found her in a room that had obviously been a nursery once, staring at a porcelain tea set sized for dolls. She didn’t look up when Kirsten said her name.

“We should go, Charlie,” she’d said. “We’re a mile from the road.” But Charlie gave no sign of having heard her. “Come on,” Kirsten had said, “we can take it with us,” gesturing to the tea set, which had been set up with improbable precision on a miniature table. Charlie still said nothing. She was staring at the tea set as if in a trance. August called their names from downstairs, and all at once Kirsten had the impression that someone was watching them from a corner of the room, but except for Kirsten and Charlie, the room was empty. Most of the furniture in the nursery was gone, nothing remaining except this little table set for dolls and there, in the corner, a child-size rocking chair. How could this table have remained set, when the rest of the house was ransacked and in disarray? Now that Kirsten looked, she realized there was no dust on the tea set. The only footprints in the dust were hers and Charlie’s, and Charlie wasn’t sitting close enough to the table to touch it. What small hand had placed the doll’s teacups on the table? It was very easy to imagine that the rocking chair was moving, just slightly. Kirsten tried not to look at it. She wrapped the tiny plates and saucers in a pillowcase as quickly as possible while Charlie watched, still not speaking, and then Kirsten stuffed the bundle into Charlie’s bag, took her hand and led her downstairs, out to the overgrown lawn, where Charlie blinked and came back to herself slowly in the late-spring light.

“The nursery was just a strange moment,” Charlie said now, all these years later in her airport tent. “A strange moment in a lifetime of strange moments. I can’t explain what came over me.”

“Is that all? Just a strange moment?”

“We’ve talked about this a hundred times. There was no one else in the room with us.”

“There was no dust on the tea set.”

“Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

“Of course not. Imagine how many there’d be.”

“Yes,” Kirsten said, “that’s exactly it.”

“Close your eyes,” Charlie murmured. “I’ll sit here with you. Try to sleep.”

There was music that night, August with Charlie and the sixth guitar. Sayid slept in the infirmary downstairs in Baggage Claim, his injuries cleaned and bandaged. Charlie played the cello with her eyes closed, smiling. Kirsten stood at the back of the crowd. She tried to concentrate on the sound, but music had always unmoored her, and her thoughts drifted. Dieter. The prophet, the only other person she’d ever met who had been in possession of Station Eleven. The archer on the road, her knife in his chest. Dieter as Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dieter brewing his fake coffee in the mornings, Dieter arguing with her about tattoos. Dieter the night she met him in central Ohio, when she was fourteen and Dieter was in his late twenties, half a lifetime ago.

On her first night with the Symphony he’d served her dinner by the fire. She’d been so alone since her brother’s death, and when the Symphony agreed to let her join them it had seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to her, and that first night she’d been almost too excited to eat. She remembered Dieter talking to her about Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s works and family, Shakespeare’s plague-haunted life.

“Wait, do you mean he had the plague?” she asked.

“No,” Dieter said, “I mean he was defined by it. I don’t know how much schooling you’ve had. Do you know what that means, to be defined by something?”

Yes. There was a new heaven and a new earth. Kirsten turned away from the light and the music. The terminal’s south wall was almost entirely glass, the smudges of children’s handprints here and there at waist height. Night was falling, airplanes luminous in starlight. She heard the distant movements of the airport’s four cows, sequestered in a loading dock for the night, the clucking of hens. A liquid movement below on the tarmac; a cat, hunting in the shadows.

An old man was sitting on a bench some distance from the performance, watching her approach. He’d shaved off all his hair and wore a silk neck scarf tied in a complicated knot. She saw a glint of earrings, four loops in his left earlobe. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, but by the time she saw him it was too late to turn away without being rude, so she nodded to him and sat at the far end of his bench.

“You’re Kirsten Raymonde.” He retained the traces of a British accent. “Clark Thompson.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “we were introduced earlier, weren’t we?”

“You were going to let me take you on a tour of my museum.”

“I’d like to see it. Maybe tomorrow. I’m so tired tonight.”

“I understand.” They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the music. “I’m told the Symphony will arrive soon,” he said.

She nodded. It would be a different Symphony now, without Dieter. All she wanted was to sleep. There was a clicking of claws on the floor as Luli came to find her. He sat by her side and rested his chin on her lap.

“That dog seems devoted to you.”

“He’s my friend.”

Clark cleared his throat. “I’ve spent a great deal of time with Charlie, this past year. She mentioned that you have an interest in electricity.” He stood, leaning on his cane. “I know you’re tired,” he said. “I understand you’ve had a difficult few days. But there’s something I think you’d like to see.”

She considered this for a moment before she accepted. She wasn’t in the habit of following strangers, but he was elderly and moved slowly and she had three knives in her belt. “Where are we going?”

“The air traffic control tower.”

“Outside?”

He was walking away from her. She followed him through a steel door near the entrance to the museum, down an unlit flight of stairs and into the night. The singing of crickets, a small bat darting on a hunt. From the tarmac, the concert was a smudge of light in Concourse C.

Up close the airplanes were larger than she would have imagined. She looked up at the dark windows, the curve of wings. Impossible to imagine that machines so enormous had ever taken to the air. Clark walked slowly. She saw the cat again, running fast and low at the base of the air traffic control tower, heard the squeak of a rodent when it pounced. The tower’s steel door opened, and she found herself in a small room where a guard kept watch through a peephole, candlelight glinting on elevator doors. The door to the stairwell was propped open with a rock.

“It’s nine stories,” Clark said. “I’m afraid this may take some time.”

“I’m not in a hurry.” It was peaceful, climbing the stairs with him. He seemed to expect no conversation from her. A slow ascent between shadowed stairs and moonlit landings, the tapping of his cane on steel. His breathing was labored. At every landing they stopped to rest, once for so long that Kirsten was almost asleep before she heard him pull himself up on the railing. The dog lay down and let out a theatrical sigh at each landing. There were open windows on every floor, but there was no breeze that night and the air was hot and still.

“I read that interview you gave a few years back,” he said on the sixth floor.

“That newspaper in New Petoskey.”

“Yes.” Clark was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. “I want to talk to you about it tomorrow.”

On the ninth landing, Clark rapped a pattern with his cane on a door and they were admitted into an octagonal room with walls of glass and arrays of darkened screens, four people with binoculars watching the tarmac, the terminal, the shadows of the gardens, the barrier fence. The dog sniffed around in the shadows. It was disorienting, being so high off the ground. The airplanes gleamed pale under the stars. The concert in Concourse C seemed to have ended.

“Look there,” Clark said, “to the south. It’s what I wanted to show you.” She followed the line of his finger, to a space on the southern horizon where the stars seemed dimmer than elsewhere in the sky. “It appeared a week ago,” he said. “It’s the most extraordinary thing. I don’t know how they did it on such a large scale.”

“You don’t know how who did what?”

“I’ll show you. James, may we borrow the telescope?” James moved the tripod over and Clark peered through, the lens aimed just below the dim spot in the sky. “I know you’re tired tonight.” He was adjusting the focus, his fingers stiff on the dial. “But I hope you’ll agree this was worth the climb.”

“What is it?”

He stepped back. “The telescope’s focused,” he said. “Don’t move it, just look through.”

Kirsten looked, but at first she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. She stepped back. “It isn’t possible,” she said.

“But there it is. Look again.”

In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.

52

KIRSTEN STARES THROUGH the telescope at the town with electric light.

In the terminal building, Charlie and August sit by Sayid’s bed in the Baggage Claim infirmary and tell him about the concert, and he smiles for the first time in a number of days.

A thousand miles to the south of the airport, Jeevan is baking bread in an outdoor oven. He rarely thinks of his old life anymore, although he has dreams sometimes about a stage, an actor fallen in the shimmering snow, and other dreams where he’s pushing shopping carts through blizzards. His small son kneels by his feet, playing with a puppy. This boy born into the new world, his mother resting indoors with the baby.

“Frank,” Jeevan says to his son, “go see if your mother’s hungry.” He lifts the pan with the bread from the oven, which in a previous incarnation was an oil drum. His son runs indoors, the puppy close at his heels.

It’s a warm night, and he hears a neighbor laughing. A scent of gardenias carries on the breeze. In a moment he will go down to the river to retrieve the preserved meat cooling in an old coffee can in the water, he’ll make sandwiches for his small family and offer some bread to their neighbors, but for now he lingers to watch the silhouettes of his wife and children behind the thin curtains of the room where they live. Daria leans down to lift the baby from the crib, stoops again to blow out the candle and in that movement she vanishes, the silhouettes blinking out, and Frank runs ahead of her out onto the grass.

“Come check the bread,” he says, and little Frank kneels by the bread with a grave expression, pokes at it with one finger, leans in close to inhale the warmth.

“He seems better,” Daria says. Frank had a fever the night before. She sang him soft lullabies while Jeevan pressed cold compresses to his forehead.

“Back to normal,” Jeevan says. “How’s that bread looking, Frank?”

“I think it’s too hot to eat.”

“We’ll let it sit for a moment.” The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.

Far to the north, in a place so distant that in this flightless world it might as well be another planet, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony are arriving at the Severn City Airport.