It’s not hard to imagine Tom gravitating toward a man like Gary. A man who claims to know the truths of the new world. Nor is it difficult to imagine Olympia wooed by a stranger’s tales of traveling the country, keeping notes on everything he’s learned.

“Sweep the camp,” she says. Tom and Olympia have assured her the man is gone, and truly, there’s no better alarm system than their ears. Still, Malorie wants a look around. Did this man really just arrive, or had he been squatting in one of the other cabins for weeks? Tom was outside when he came. Does this mean something? All three of them were together when he knocked. Does this?

She gets to Cabin Eight quickly. She opens the door. Her hands are gloved, her arms and neck covered by the hoodie. She wears sweats and thick socks.

She thinks of Annette. The blind woman who went mad. Creature-mad.

How?

Before entering the cabin, she smells the air. If there’s one sense that has gotten better through the years it’s her sense of smell. She can tell when a storm is coming, when woods aren’t far off. She can tell if something’s died outside and whether a person has called a small space home.

At the threshold to Cabin Eight, she smells nothing but the empty must of wood and bunks without mattresses. Still, knife raised, she enters.

Camp Yadin has been good to her. So good. When they arrived, there were enough canned goods to last months. And seeds to begin gardens beyond that. Tools and toys. Shelter and a piano. A sailboat for the small lake. Paths to walk for exercise. Malorie knew they’d be staying for some time. But ten years have passed fast.

Tom and Olympia are not only teenagers now, they’ve been teenagers for a while.

She uses a thick stick to check the spaces between bunks, to poke under them. More than once she’s been surprised by an animal calling a cabin home. But, in the new world, she’s come to fear animals least of all. In her many interactions, she’s discovered that acting angry makes them run. Even the mad ones (if she can ever be sure whether or not an animal is sane). Insects are more mysterious. Malorie doesn’t know if spiders go mad. But she has found webs, here in camp, built in unsettling patterns, suggesting something was seen, something was close.

Of course, creatures have traveled the paths of the camp many times. Tom and Olympia have pointed them out from inside Cabin Three.

“Anybody here and you’re gonna get stabbed,” Malorie says.