What you’ll want to know about is when we got here, and I do remember something of that, because that was how I found Terrence, my cousin. I didn’t know he was on the train with me, he was in one of the other cars. And it was a lucky thing he hadn’t been in one of the cars at the back, because by the time we arrived there weren’t more than three, and two mostly empty. We were in California, the Watchers told us. California wasn’t a state like it used to be, they said, it was a whole different country. Buses would be meeting us to take us up the mountain, someplace safe. The train slowed to a stop and everyone was afraid but excited too, to be getting off the train after all the days and days, and then the door opened and the light was so bright we all had to hold our hands over our faces. Some of the children were crying because they thought it was the jumps, the jumps were coming to get us, and someone else said, don’t be stupid, it ain’t the jumps, and when I opened my eyes I was relieved to see a soldier standing there. We were someplace in the desert. They took us off and there were lots more soldiers around and a line of buses parked in the sand and helicopters thwocking overhead, stirring up the dust all around and making every kind of a racket. They gave us water to drink, cold water. All my days I’ve never been so glad just to taste cold water. The light was so bright to my eyes it still hurt me even to look around but that’s when I saw Terrence. He was standing there in the dust like the rest of us, holding a suitcase and a dirty pillow. I’d never hugged a boy so hard or long in my life and we were both laughing and crying and saying, look at you. We weren’t first cousins but more like second, as I recall. His father was my daddy’s nephew, Carleton Jaxon. Carleton was a welder at the shipyard, and Terrence later told me his daddy was one of the men who built the train. A day before the evacuation, Uncle Carleton had taken Terrence to the station and put him in the engine car, closest to Driver, and told him to stay there. You stay put, Terrence. Do what Driver tells you. So that was how Terrence had come to be with me now. He was just three years older than me but it seemed like more at the time, so I said to him, you’ll look after me, won’t you Terrence? Say you’ll do that. And he nodded and said yes he would, and that was just what he did, until the day he died. He was the first Jaxon who was Household and a Jaxon’s been Household ever since.