My chest is tight, and heat stings my eyes. It feels like I’m losing the people I love all over again. All those family dinners, car rides to Ryan’s and my games, late night comedy shows with Paul, painting and decorating my bedroom with Mom, Netflix binges with Shawntelle . . . They were the walking dead all along, and we never even knew it. I lean forward against the table. “How many?” I ask. “How many vaccines did you deploy?”

Manny’s lips press together, and it’s a moment before he gathers himself enough to say, “Three thousand, four hundred, seventy-two. In all the world.”

“And of those,” Wyatt adds, “probably less than half survived the chaos.”

“Planes fell out of the sky,” Manny says, and his face grows haunted. “Cars piled up on freeways all over the world. Some people went full Purge and just started indiscriminately killing, then came a rash of suicides. . . .”

“And now drones and walkers are cleaning up the leftovers,” Wyatt says.

“I watched a drone take out two kids,” Trey says. “They were just walking down the sidewalk . . .”

“Were they infected?” Manny asks. “I don’t remember two kids on our list.”

Trey shrugs. “It was about two weeks ago, when there were still a few people left alive. I’m pretty sure they were sick, and after it happened, I got the hell out of there.”

“You did the right thing,” Manny says.

“How did you choose?” I ask. “How did you pick who got to live?” How did you not pick my brother? I want to scream. Or my mom or stepdad? Or Shawntelle?

“Oh, Paige, I know this is hard,” Manny says. “All I can say is that we had so little time to figure everything out. So we prioritized those who were young—mostly late teens and early twenties—healthy, and smart, people we hoped would give humanity its best chance of survival.”

“So, no disabled people?” Tanq says. “That’s . . . gross.”

“Oh, we definitely chose some disabled people,” Manny says. “Though, to be honest, all candidates were exceptional in some way we hoped would be useful to survival. Several members of our committee argued that for humanity to survive, we had to make moral, human choices, that we couldn’t let our selection process dissolve into a kind of eugenics. We also chose from all different ethnic groups, different societal strata. We prioritized indigenous peoples. We gave special consideration to those who had already lost many of their loved ones, hoping they’d have fewer people to mourn—this might have been silly on our part; I don’t even know. And after all that, there was an element of randomization. We had far more candidates than we had vaccines. By a factor of thousands.”

“You were short by about seven billion,” Tanq mumbles.

“Hey, they did the best they could,” Wyatt says. “And they picked you.”