Kira sat up, stretching her back and shoulders and popping a stiff joint in her neck. “Good morning,” she said. “Thanks for the blanket.”

“Good morning,” said Samm. His eyes were locked on the window. “You’re welcome.”

Kira stood, pausing to hang her blanket on a row of nearby chairs before squatting down to open her pack. Heron and Afa were asleep, so she kept her voice down. “What sounds good for breakfast this morning? I have beef jerky, an indistinguishably different flavor of beef jerky, and . . . peanuts. All pre-Break, picked up at that place we stopped in Pennsylvania.” She looked again in her bag. “We’re running low on food.”

“We should forage through the city before setting out,” said Samm. “We’re not far from the toxic waste, and I don’t know if we can trust anything we find there.”

“We passed a grocery store last night,” said Kira, grabbing all three of her food selections and placing them on the table next to Samm. She sat on the far side and opened the peanuts. “We can head back there before we move on, but for now, dig in.”

Samm looked down at the food, selected a bag of jerky at random, and tore it open. He sniffed it carefully before pulling out a piece of black, twisted meat as solid as rawhide. “What do you have to do to meat to make it stay good for twelve years?”

“Define ‘good,’” said Kira. “You’ll be sucking on that thing all day before it’s soft enough to eat.”

He tore off a strip, long and whip-thin and almost hilariously fibrous. “We’ll have to boil it,” he said, dropping the strips back into the bag. “Still, though—edible food that’s almost as old as we are. That cow might actually have been as old as we are, and he died before that tree was even born.” He pointed at a twenty-foot poplar sprouting up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt parking lot. “And yet we can eat it. We don’t have anything in the world today that can preserve food like that. We might never have it again.”

“I don’t know if we want to,” said Kira. “Give me some fresh Riverhead jerky any day.”

“It’s just . . .” Samm paused. “One thing after another. Cars that won’t run. Planes that will never fly again. Computer systems we can barely use, let alone re-create. It’s like . . . time is flowing backward. We’re caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.”

Kira said nothing, chewing on the soft peanuts as the sun peeked over the mountainous city beyond. She swallowed and spoke. “I’m sorry, Samm.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Not the caveman thing,” she said, “or the jerky or . . . I’m sorry for getting mad at you. I’m sorry for saying things that made you mad at me.”