“He’s walking up the road,” Tom says. Malorie hears disappointment in his voice.

“Which way?”

“The way we came.”

“Get your things,” Malorie says. “We’re continuing. Now.”

She hears the teens packing their things back into their bags. She does the same.

“Tom,” Malorie says, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Just like you know that guy was unsafe? Just like you knew the census guy couldn’t help us?”

“Tom…”

“Mom,” Tom says, and his voice is closer than she expects it to be. “The census man gave us the names of your parents. You were wrong. That’s all there is to it. You were wrong.”

But Tom is shaken, too. Malorie can hear it. A stranger in the same space as them. A man speaking of suicide and the end of the world.

Malorie waits by the door, her fists gloved now. The teens are ready before she expects them to be.

“Listen,” she says, tightening the fold around her face.

“He went the way we came,” Olympia says.

Malorie breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.

She opens the door.

“Go. Now.”

Then they’re walking again, too fast, through the dark, hardly any sleep between them. Malorie looks blind over her shoulder, back to where the teens said the man went.

She feels for him. Just like she feels for Ron Handy. Just like she feels for every person involved in all the horrid experiments documented in the papers left by the census man.

Isn’t everybody just doing the best they can?

Isn’t she?

“It’s cold,” Olympia says.

It is hours before the sun will rise. The sky and the road are as dark as the world behind their folds.

“We’ll warm up,” Malorie says.

But she can’t stop thinking of the young man. He talked of ending his own life without needing a creature to make him do it.

Malorie allows herself to imagine what he might have been like in the old world and what he might’ve been doing now if the creatures never came.

Would he have been a good friend? A thoughtful person? A father?

Her heart burns for him. For all of them. Ron Handy. The census man. The people described in the census papers.

But the empathy is short-lived as something howls in the dark distance. Malorie thinks it’s a dog. A wolf. A man.

“We’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” she says. “I promise. Just a little farther.”

But whatever the distance is to peace of mind feels more than just a little farther. It feels like it’s beyond the state of Michigan. Beyond the world. New or old.

And absolutely beyond the last stop of any train, real or imagined.

NINE

Nineteen miles along old country highways, not maintained, overgrown, cracked, no longer used.