They spend the night in their private car. The hours pass, and with each one Malorie feels closer. Safer. The reality of this experience becomes palatable, a thing she wouldn’t have dreamed possible in Camp Yadin. When she visited Ron Handy, the idea of a train felt more akin to a giant spider, something that could leap at her, attack her, kill her. But now the details of the train are filling in. The sounds and the smells. The feel of the cushions beneath the bench she sits on. The sense of being taken. And within this new reality (they’re on a train), she finds her own strength, her own rules to live by, a way to convince herself she has not put her teens in danger. They could leap. They could fight. They could stay in this car until the train stops.

But Malorie knows that isn’t how this is going to go. She hasn’t fully admitted it, but the tendrils of acquiescence have arrived. And they only get stronger as the hours pass.

Yes, she is going to visit that dining car. She is going to talk with Dean Watts about his train. If she’s honest with herself, she’ll admit it’s not only because the teens have a safe place to stay. It’s not only because an old-world mode of travel that she believed long dead has risen. Yes, she is awed by the machine that carries her. Yes, the romanticized past is present in this way.

But none of that is why she wants to speak with Dean.

The reason is, she likes him.

It’s a feeling she hasn’t felt in years. A decade or more. A thing she also thought long buried, yet now, opening its eyes.

“Sleep,” she tells her teens. But they already do. She hears them both breathing heavy, the light snoring of two young people who deserve rest after the few days they’ve had.

Malorie deserves rest, too.

And so she allows herself some. She closes her eyes, behind the blindfold. She allows the train to take her north, closer to the place where her parents were listed as having survived. How long ago was that list made? Right now it doesn’t matter. Right now she needs sleep. And for the hours to move. So that two days pass as quickly as they can. As the machine that takes them cuts through an entire world she is no longer allowed to look at. Where creatures no doubt outnumber the people. Where the reason for all these precautions, all this fear, roams freer than the people who have survived them.

Malorie sleeps.

Rocked to sleep.

And the hours pass.

And the dreams that come include Sam and Mary Walsh. At turns they stand before her, living, before becoming dust, sand blown away by a moving train, two tiny points in infinity that no sane woman can be expected to find.