Memory and the now, melded.

Her childhood bedroom has blankets over the windows. The bus ride to school is terrifying, as the driver can’t look.

The train the train the TRAIN you’re heading toward is a blind train, Malorie, what are you doing what are you doing what?

Sam and Mary sit in the front seat of the family car. Shannon and Malorie play games in the back. Dad turns the wheel suddenly, and the girls cry out and Mom says that was close, and Malorie, now, here, Malorie remembers it as if there was something in the road Dad wasn’t supposed to see, something that drove him mad.

But Mom and Dad might not be mad.

And somehow that’s the craziest part of all.

“A car,” Tom says.

For a second Malorie imagines he’s read her mind, as if her son, who has performed so many incredible auditory feats, heard all the way into her head.

“A car?” she echoes.

“Something,” Olympia says.

“Not something,” Tom says. “A car.”

“Stop,” Malorie says. “Side of the road. Now.”

She doesn’t want to step off the road. She doesn’t want the straight line made between herself and her parents to be compromised. She wants to go to them, go to them, go to them now.

“Car,” Olympia says.

“Told you,” Tom says.

“Now,” Malorie says.

She feels grass beneath her boots but it’s not far enough. In the new world, someone driving could be driving blind. Malorie’s done it herself.

“Farther,” she says.

But she hears the engine pick up speed. As if the driver saw them. As if the driver is looking for people just like them.

“Down,” Malorie says. But she can hear it’s too late for that. The car is closer, closer, and slowing to a halt.

It’s level with them now.

It stops.

The engine idles. It revs. It idles. It revs.

Malorie imagines a gun pointing out an open window. A face behind it, shaped by madness.

But nobody speaks. And no sudden sound breaks the sky above the open country road.

Malorie faces the car.

The car idles.

She thinks of Camp Yadin and how safe they were. She can almost feel the texture of the rope in her gloved hands, rope connecting each building, one of which housed canned goods, another with a garden beside it. She sees herself, waking there, walking there, living there, safe. She hears herself asking the teens what might be outside. She hears their answers. They lived alone. They lived safe.

They lived by the blindfold.

The grass beside her crunches fast, too fast. Malorie cries out.

It sounds like an animal.

Something slams into the side of the car.

“Don’t move!” she yells to the teens, but her voice is lost in the noise of repeated blows to the side of the car. She hears a man yelling, someone who sounds dangerously angry, possibly mad.