“Hey,” the man said, closer than he had been, though not trying to stop him. “You leave here again now, you’re not coming back.”

You can’t do that, Tyler didn’t say. He slid the glass door open and left, the same way he’d entered a thousand times before, ever since his house key had been revoked. He slid it shut behind him.

He pulled the hoodie over his clothes in the shadow of the tree in the backyard, where the tire swing still hung. The motions of pulling it over his head, fitting his arms through the sleeves, felt needlessly complex and exhausting. The ruptured skin on his back screamed as he pulled it over his chest. He drew up the hood. It was too hot, but he didn’t care; the material was thicker, harder to bleed through, and he could sweat off the gasoline. He hopped the fence again, his wounds masked, for the time being. The urge to anonymize himself was almost mechanical. And he kept walking, indefatigable Tyler; as his house shrank and disappeared behind him, he turned, out of his block, out of the neighborhood. He turned right before the train tracks, and then drew an unwavering line northeast. He passed chain restaurants, auto dealers, low ugly sprawl, and eventually a golf course, then another.

As morning arrived, somewhere north, when the houses jumped in size and cobblestones appeared, as the sky shifted white, he passed another person on the sidewalk jogging in the opposite direction, a blond girl around his age, the only human he’d seen on the street since the night before. What time was it? The girl turned her head and their eyes met as they passed each other, she stumbled briefly in alarm at the sight of his bloodied face, and Tyler recognized something there for a split second, he saw a familiar bearing in her eyes, an aspect he knew, a notch in her like there was a cut in him. He tried to look back, but both of them were moving on, the distance between them widening automatically, and it was clear their paths would never cross again. Two hundred feet later, it dawned on him that it had been Claire, totally transformed. He turned back, which felt like a superhuman feat—she disappeared over the hill, and was no more. The name was there, and then it was gone with her. He turned left, and continued that way.