I took hold of the door handle and pushed it down. The floor, the nice, clean floor, was covered with dust.

There was only an empty space where the desk had been. A clean square on a gray surface, as when a picture is removed from a wall. In the middle lay an extension cord that had been connected to the computer, dead and useless.

“They’ve left,” Lou said. “The finders have left.”

“No, they haven’t,” I said. “For sure the office has just been moved somewhere else in the camp.”

Lou didn’t say much more as we trawled through barracks, tents, and halls. I talked all the more.

“Look here, here they are, for sure, around this corner. No, but what about this? And him, we can ask him, I’m sure he knows something. Let’s go to the entrance, maybe they know something there. The main office, then—they must know something there, at least. No, you know what, nobody knows anything here, but we can manage on our own, we can figure it out, right? We can manage on our own. We will find Mommy and August.”

I talked, not solely to keep my own spirits up, not solely to reassure her, but to hide what I saw.

Things had gotten even worse. Garbage cans filled to the brim. Clean laundry torn down from a clothesline, soiled with dirt and dust. Dirty pots thrown into a ditch. Personal possessions, a bag, two cups, a bra, a book, scattered across the ground between two barracks.

Two guards were standing in front of the warehouse, both wearing uniforms, both wearing helmets and Kevlar vests, and holding machine guns. I kept talking as if they weren’t there. But Lou squeezed my hand, tightly, while looking in the other direction, neither at me nor at them.

But I don’t think she saw the very worst. Because when I discovered it, when I discovered the water tanks, I took her away from there in a hurry.

They were located in the very back of the camp and had been refilled on a daily basis. I had never seen them less than three-quarters full. But now they were only half-full of water.

I hauled Lou away.

“Wait,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. But I kept tugging.

We should leave, move on, get away from here. But I didn’t know where to go, because the war was advancing from the south, and north of us the borders were closed.

To the west, that was the only direction open, but the ocean was there, only the ocean. We could leave. Try to get onto a boat. But the ocean was many miles away. And we didn’t have any water. We couldn’t just start walking without water.

And then, the most important thing of all, Anna and August . . . they had to get here. We had agreed on that. Sooner or later they would have to arrive.