Apparently cued by Sophia’s reference to a graveyard, Julian had pulled his glasses down over his eyes and begun conducting research. Her grandparents had died and been put in the black soil sufficiently long ago that the details had found their way onto reasonably credible sites on the Old Internet—the Miasma, as many people in Sophia’s life referred to it. The Miasma as such had fallen some years ago, but emulators of it were still running and could be browsed on what had replaced it, which was too ubiquitous even to have a name. In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”

“You can’t possibly remember . . . Patricia . . . or John,” Julian ventured, “but you must remember Alice.”

“Grandma Alice died when I was twelve,” Sophia confirmed.

“And she and John and Patricia are all buried  . . .”

“Where we are going,” Sophia said. “Yeah.”

At last they had reached the entrance of the Walmart—or to be precise, one of its entrances, since it had been hacked up into a number of quasi-distinct storefronts. They got inside and just stood there for a few moments, allowing their bodies to recalibrate in the air-conditioning. Then they split up. Sophia and Anne-Solenne figured out how to buy flowers. Phil and Julian ransacked the snack aisle. Somewhere along the line Phil also picked up a tactical camo baseball cap, Levitican compliant. Having paid for their stuff, they went out and got back in the car. Tom and Kevin had peeled off and checked into a motel across the street and so they drove the last few miles into town without an escort.

Anne-Solenne shifted the flowers in her lap. “As long as we’re talking about dead Forthrasts,” she said, “where’d you-know-who end up? His fate is shrouded in mystery.”

“No it isn’t,” Julian said, in the somewhat halting and breathy tone indicative of browsing and talking at the same time, “he died in—”

“I know when he died,” Anne-Solenne said. “But because Sophia’s from the weirdest family in the whole universe, that’s different from his fate.”

“We’re breathing him,” Sophia announced. That silenced the Land Cruiser for a little, and even caused Phil to push his glasses up on his head.

“His molecules, you mean?” Phil guessed.

“Atoms, more like,” said Julian, getting the drift.

“So he was finally cremated?” Anne-Solenne guessed.

“He was cremated one ion at a time, by a particle beam scanning his cryogenically preserved remains.”

“Probably a good thing,” Phil mused, “otherwise the data—”

“Could be anywhere,” Sophia said with a nod and a glance back in the mirror. “Yeah. I guess sometimes it’s better to wait.”