The guitars in the room go slightly out of tune before one of the players finds his or her place again.

“Do you know anything about a census?” she asks, avoiding his question.

“I’ve heard they’re out there, but I haven’t met anybody yet. Why?”

“I’m just curious. The numbers of the world. Statistics.”

“And? Would you take more risks, depending on those numbers? Or would you still do things the way we did them when the world first changed?”

If anybody else had asked her this question, she would’ve left the table, the car, and possibly the train. She doesn’t want to talk about taking more risks. But the man reminds her so much of Tom the man that she can’t bring herself to turn from him.

When’s the last time Malorie heard an optimistic voice her own age? When’s the last time she could swap ideas, theories, even just moods with someone who understands the world as she does for having witnessed its change? Tom, her son, speaks like this. But he’s only sixteen. And her job, as she sees it, is to make sure he remains smart about whatever he wants to do. That means telling him no. That means discouraging him. That means…

Take note, she thinks. Your son talks a lot like the one man whose advice you’ve leaned on for the past seventeen years. And all you do is tell him no.

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says. But it feels wrong to say it, like she means it in a different way than she feels it. Malorie understands that Tom and Olympia were born into this world. She understands that they hear better than she does, that their instincts are naturally stronger than hers will ever be. She gets that Tom and Olympia could be reading a book, completely distracted, and still close their eyes before something rushed into view, as if they can sense an intake of air when anything, man, woman, creature, is near. But she also knows that she herself is the sole survivor of two major incidents—unfathomable tragedies where everyone else went mad and hurt one another, hurt themselves. Forget the countless harrowing events—Shannon’s death, Ron Handy in the service station, the trip on the river—Malorie has actually walked from the new world equivalent of two train wrecks. The house on Shillingham and the school for the blind. In the old world she would’ve been on the news for this. And when the reporter asked her how she did it, she would’ve held up a black piece of cloth and said no more.

While Dean doesn’t know any of this yet, does he sense she’s been through more than most?

“Do you have kids?” she asks him.

“I had two. Both went mad.”

“I’m—”