In time, I got better. On some level, I thrived. My leg healed enough that I didn’t need the cane except when the barometer dropped and my joints ached. My shoulder popped and crackled, and cold days around a too-small campfire made it cry out. But mostly I felt well, almost good. Even if I could never really escape the burning warehouse, or the deep water beneath Unitopia.

Live in the moment. Funny how if that had been a saying carved into Lorraine’s front door I would’ve sneered at it. But there was such blessed relief, among all the regrets, to put Shot aside, my mother and father aside. They didn’t live within me as they had before. Ned had faded, too, as if he was a problem I’d solved or decided was unsolvable. He was still there, but I’d kept him in my thoughts for so long that I was exhausted by him. No matter who he’d been.

Memories of the outside world came to me more as glimpses of people I’d never really known. The man who drove me to the storage palace. The woman behind the counter at the storage palace who wanted my ID. The barista who handed me Silvina’s note. But Charlie at the gym most of all. The one I’d seen so often but only ever really exchanged pleasantries with. Perhaps I puzzled over them because they might be alive. Or because they’d existed on the fringes of a mystery so central to my life.

I came across people rarely, I had struck out so far into the roadless interior. Often, I kept to high elevations, coming down to the same streams as the bears and deer. I learned to travel during moonlit nights and sleep during the day. People unsettled me. Gruff or polite, friendly or wary—didn’t matter to me. Had nothing to say to them—sometimes drew my gun as a precaution. Didn’t want to meet their gaze, know their stories. Just waved them on, or stood aside on the trail, amid moss lumps and thick stands of giant ferns, waiting for them to leave.

Still a paranoia about Vilcapampa, some lingering doubts that Langer’s death had closed that account. But mostly Vilcapampa. Because even in the midst of crisis, when I came to places where my phone worked, I could tell that the Vilcapampa companies soldiered on. It might be short-term, but in the moment, they had converted over to making vaccines, to making masks, to providing essentials like bottled water. Even fossil fuel extraction, even this late in the game.