And she thinks of the train. And she hopes the stop they just made, the few minutes they took to talk about the whereabouts of the creature, hasn’t made it so they miss it. Because if they do, if they miss the train by an hour, by a day…how can they be sure they’ll learn its schedule, if it has a schedule at all?

Malorie walks. She wants to move faster than they are, faster than they can. She wants to make up the time they just took to talk. She wants to make up the ten years they spent at Camp Yadin. And the six years before that. She wants to return to the moment when her parents stopped answering their phones, when she and Shannon shared a silent look in which both agreed Sam and Mary Walsh had died.

Malorie wants it all back. Now.

“Mom,” Olympia says. “Be careful.”

Her daughter’s hand comes to her wrist, guides her across a dip in the road.

“Thank you,” she says. She wants to believe in Fate, wants to believe there is a reason for everything. That they were supposed to leave now. That no time has been lost. That a bigger purpose will be revealed in the end.

But Malorie doesn’t think this way.

“Hey,” Tom says. “There’s something ahead in the road.”

Malorie opens her mouth to tell the teens to stop. But she doesn’t want to stop. And if the world is teeming with creatures now, and if they’re present with every step she takes toward her parents, then she’s going to have to live with walking among them.

She thinks of something else she read in the census papers. Something about a town called Indian River. And the woman who runs it.

Athena Hantz.

She simply cannot let Tom read about that place. The descriptions, the dangers, were enough to blanch Malorie white. But Athena Hantz’s philosophy is what sticks with Malorie now. The woman claimed to live freely among creatures. No different than she lived before their arrival. And the way the census man put it, his exact words, were chilling:

Miss Hantz claims she has “wholly accepted the creatures.” She insists they no longer drive people mad and have no intention of doing so. She believes, fiercely, they have changed over time. Her words: “They don’t punish us anymore.”

What he wrote next was worse:

This philosophy, scant as it is, has garnered followers.

And his summation was perhaps most troubling of all:

Without being able to verify if she lives the way she claims, I only have our brief encounter to judge her by. And by my own estimation, Athena Hantz is sane.

“Should we stop?” Tom asks. Malorie knows where this question is coming from. Has she ever not told them to stop in the presence of a creature?