“There was a bubble machine like that in my hometown museum, too,” Lindsay said. She smelled so clean. I felt blinded by how little she smelled.

We looked for a moment at the view, the far blue ridges truncated by nearby hills. I felt a drumbeat of fear. I could almost see the terrible future Dice had described. I could see the hills beset by swarms of invading insects. I could see the megafauna dying off, every biome overrun by the vining, strangling pioneers, the animals of the world growing more desperate. The world was changing. But if we tried hard enough, if I tried hard enough, the family could keep this one place whole.

“How long are you planning on staying?” Lindsay said.

“Staying?” I said. “My three days are long over.” Looking at her, I felt a muffled yearning for the feeling of my long hair falling over my shoulders.

“What?” she said.

“It’s three days or the rest of your life,” I said. “No one told you that?”

“No,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “now you know.”

She reached for a flower near my hip and plucked it out of the ground. “You just seem like you have a lot going for you,” she said. “You know, out there.” She was staring at the scar on my palm, from the splinter when I first met Bay. I turned my hand so she couldn’t keep looking.

“You don’t know what I was like out there,” I said. Even as I spoke, I knew my answer was the wrong one. What I should have said was that I always wanted a purpose and now I had one.

“It’s so dirty,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “There’s blood all over the kitchen and out here I keep stepping on bones.” Her nails were painted black, as though she’d knocked every last one with a hammer until she had darkened the nailbeds.

“Dice says it’s only in this century that people have become obsessed with ‘cleanliness,’ which was conveniently defined for them by the soap industry.”

“Where are you from?” She had changed the subject. I wondered if that was her way of admitting defeat.

I knew that responding wasn’t wise. But this was the problem with me—I always wanted to please, to smooth things over; an inheritance from my mother. It was nice, every so often, to talk about the past. “Durham.”

“Yeah, me too,” she said, smiling. “I thought you looked familiar.”

“What high school did you go to?” I said.

“I was about to ask you,” she said.

I named my high school before I considered whether it was wise.

She said she knew all kinds of people who went there, and listed names I didn’t know. Then she said, “Isaac. Isaac the painter.”

“He’s a photographer,” I said.