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didn’t understand.
    And what about the dream itself? What did that mean?
    â€œIs that what it was like before?” said Melinda.
    â€œNo,” he said quickly. “It was just a dream. Forget it.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Chaos started the car, pulled it onto the highway, and settled in for another patch of driving. Melinda threw the empty can out her window and put the opener in the glove compartment.
    â€œToo bad, though,” she said after a while.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI wanted to go there. I liked it.”
    Me too, thought Chaos impulsively, but didn’t say it. Then he remembered the rest of the dream, the sense of loneliness, and thought: She doesn’t know the whole story. All she saw was the car and the lake and the forest. Like some paradise, to her. But it wasn’t a dream of paradise. There were some real problems with that place. He felt this profoundly.
    So why did he want to get back there so badly?
    They drove through the morning, until the sun was high. Ahead, the desert was turning into mountains. He let a series of towns pass, ignoring the signs, ignoring the exits. Melinda sniffed at the air and squinted at the far-off buildings, but Chaos mostly didn’t even look. They never left the highway. When they had to eat, they pulled over and plundered the trunk, and when the gas got low. Chaos emptied Kellogg’s spare can into the tank. Chaos peed against the side of a billboard strut; Melinda crossed the highway and squatted in the sand. They passed abandoned cars, but never any on the road. The last sure sign of human life had been back in Little America.
    â€œWe’re going to run out of gas,” he said.
    â€œYou threw my siphon away,” she said.
    â€œKellogg’s got one in the trunk.”
    The next car they came to, they stopped and drained its tank. By sundown they’d halved their distance to the mountains. The fog ahead looked green, and the wind over the foothills was cold. Chaos stopped the car behind a padlocked shed just off the highway and built a small fire while Melinda gathered a dinner of cans and water from the trunk, but when night came, they slept in the car again, he in the back seat, she in the front.
    He dreamed again of the house by the lake, but this time he left the computer alone. He wasn’t ready to hear what it had to say, to sort through its theories; it was too much like listening to Kellogg again. When he woke, the sun was already up and the girl wasn’t in the front seat. He got out of the car, promising himself not to mention the dream.
    She wasn’t anywhere in sight. She’d either crossed the highway or wandered out into the desert, over the low brushy hills to the north. He rinsed his mouth with water and spat it out onto the sand, then walked over to pee on the side of the shed. His urine rattled against the aluminum, and he didn’t hear her voice until the stream fell away.
    â€œCut it out,” she said from inside the shed. “It’s leakin’ in.”
    He circled the shed and found the curled-away strip of aluminum she’d used as an entrance.
    â€œLookit this,” she said, poking her head through the gap. “You gotta see this. Come on.”
    He pulled at the aluminum, careful not to cut his hands, until he’d widened the entrance enough to crawl through.
    â€œLook. The cars.”
    The shed was a floorless shell built on posts buried in the sand, just big enough to house the two cars. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw the cause of her excitement: they were like the car from his dream. Short, stubby, made of some kind ol lightweight plastic, with solar panels. And fingerprint plates instead of keyholes. Both were new, their surfaces gleaming in the dim light of the shed.
    Melinda smiled at him smugly. “Watch.” She pressed her hand to the plate, and the door opened, the engine purring into life.
    â€œTurn it off,” he said.
    She put her