For the first time I realize how haggard his face is, how bruised the skin under his eyes. “This is what you need to know, Annah.” He physically turns me until I’m staring at the map, his grip tight.

“A black pin means there’s nothing. Overrun by the dead. Gone. Never heard from again.”

I stare at the wall, eyes traveling from pin to pin. Almost all of them are black. “That can’t be right,” I say. The entire country—the entire world—is covered with black pins.

Ox drops his arms, moves away from me, every gesture screaming exhaustion. He knows what this means—has known. It’s what keeps him from sleeping and eating.

It means most of the world is gone.

I struggle to focus as I step closer to the map, searching for evidence that I’m somehow wrong. That not everything is gone. I scan the walls from pin to pin, trying to find some color in the emptiness of the black. And then I see it: a tiny green pin down the coast from the Dark City, on a peninsula jutting out between the Forest and the ocean. I reach a finger toward it but then hesitate, eventually letting my hand drop.

“What’s going on?” I ask him. “What is this?” My voice is shaking, my entire body trembling.

He says nothing and I turn on him. “Why did you show this to me? I don’t understand.” I want to fight, to prove this man and this map wrong. I’m not willing to believe any of what Ox is telling me.

“This is the world, Annah. This is where we are now.” He shoves himself from the desk and I notice he winces at the effort of it. Slowly, he walks to the wall and pulls out a pin from the middle of the country. “This was a city. At the Return it had a population of five hundred thousand. After the Return they tried to hold on. They were overrun fifty years ago.”

He drops the pin and pulls out three more nearby. “These were tiny suburbs around it, little enclaves that were holding on and then the walls gave out.”

Running his hand over the map, he dislodges the pins, and they scatter to the floor with tiny metallic plinks. “All these places—these were survivors. These were people trying to make it and eventually failing.

“This one.” He holds another underneath my chin. “This fell only a year ago. And this one”—he takes another—“barely lasted the Return.”

“How do you know these things?” I whisper.