After a while it began to rain. The ash congealed like paste on the ground, stuck to the hood like blobs of papier maché. Some of those blobs were almost heavy enough to thwart the windshield, leaving light smudges on the glass before the static field bounced them away.

They didn't exchange a word during that whole time. Unfamiliar music filled the silence between them, archaic compositions full of clonking pianos and nervous strings. Ouellette seemed to like the stuff, anyway. She focused on driving while Clarke stared out the window, reflecting on the allocation of damage. How much of this devastation could be laid at her door? How much at the doors of demons who'd adopted her name?

Eventually they left the scorched zone behind. Now there was real grass at the side of the road, occasional shrubs pocking the ditches further back, real evergreens looming like ranks of ragged, starving stickmen on the other side. Mostly brown, of course, or turning brown, as though in the grip of a great endless drought.

This rain wouldn't help them. They were hanging on—some even flew flags of hardy, defiant green from their limbs—but ßehemoth was everywhere, and it was implacable, and it had all the time in the world. Sometimes it massed so abundantly that it was visible to the naked eye: patches of ochre mould smothering the grass, or spreading across the trunks of trees. And yet, the sight of all this vegetation—not truly alive, perhaps, but at least physically intact—seemed cause for some small celebration after the charnel house they'd just escaped.

"So, do you ever take those out?" Ouellette wondered.

"Sorry?" Clarke brought herself back to the moment. The doctor had gone to autopilot—a simple follow-the-road mode, with no dangerous navigational forays into GPS.

"Those caps on your eyes. Do you ever...?"

"Oh. No. Not usually."

"Nightshades? Let you see in the dark?"

"Sort of."

Ouellette pursed her lips. "I remember seeing those, years ago. All over the place, just before everything went bad. They were really popular for about twenty minutes."

"They still are, where I come from." Clarke looked out the rain-spattered side window. "With my tribe, anyway."

"Tribe? You're not all the way from Africa?"

Clarke snorted softly. "Fuck no." Only about half the way, actually...

"Didn't think so. You don't have the melanin, not that that means much these days of course. And the Tutsis wouldn't be over here anyway, except maybe to gloat."

"Gloat?"

"Not that you can blame them, mind you. There's barely anyone left over there more than forty years old. Firewitch is pure poetic justice as far as they're concerned."

Clarke shrugged.

"So if not Africa," Ouellette said, pushing it, "maybe you're from Mars."

"Why would you say that?"

"You're definitely not from around here. You thought Miri was an ambulance." She patted the dashboard affectionately. "You don't know about the Lenies—"