“Hey,” Olympia says to a woman who stands facing the black metal slate that was once a window. “You should close your eyes.”

By way of the woman’s profile, Olympia sees a sadness she has not encountered before. When the creatures arrived, Malorie, Olympia knows, got angry. She got scared. But she never let the sadness of the new world rule her.

Mom, Olympia thinks. I’m coming.

Malorie thought her parents dead for seventeen years, for longer than Olympia has been alive! Yet she found the energy to raise her kids. She’s found the resolve to repeat her rules, over and over again, to pound safety into their heads, always. What would Olympia do if she’d read her birth mother’s name on that list of survivors? Would she have reacted as swiftly as Malorie did? Or would she have withdrawn?

“It’s over,” the woman says. But she doesn’t seem to be speaking directly to Olympia.

Olympia begins to tell her to close her eyes again but stops herself.

The woman has painted open eyes on her closed lids.

“It’s over,” the woman says again.

A cabin door opens. A man peers out.

“Close your eyes,” Olympia says. “A lot of creatures outside.”

The man does more than that; he vanishes back into his room and slides the door closed. Olympia hears him moving something in front of the door.

Good, she thinks. And she knows Malorie would think the same. And it feels good, God, it feels good, to play the part of Malorie. To step into her shoes, Mom, who must be losing her mind, looking for Tom, thinking of her parents, so long believed dead.

Dead!

Olympia reaches the end of the car. She slides the door open, steps through. No sign of Malorie or Tom yet. Maybe they’re in the dining car. Maybe they’re fine.

But why hasn’t Malorie come back to check on her?

It strikes Olympia that the people they are going to see, Sam and Mary Walsh, the people she wants so badly to be alive, are the people who checked on Malorie her whole life, too.

Until the creatures came.

Creatures that, Olympia can hear, number in the hundreds. As if the entire landscape is made up of them. As if this very spot, here in the middle of Michigan, U.S.A., as if this is where they came from, broke through, entered the old world, making it the new.

A door slides open to her left. A kid looks out.

“No, no,” Olympia says. “Back in. And close your eyes.”

“Why?”

It’s a little boy. He reminds Olympia of Tom. Dark-haired. Fierce-eyed.

“Because we’re passing through a dangerous area and we may as well be extra safe. Right?”