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grocery store seems to depress Sarah. Here the ground is churned up, the grass even newer than everywhere else; the site of years and years of digging. “For a long time we kept finding things to eat, buried all around here. Cans of food, you know, and even some packaged stuff that made it through the fires.” She sighs, looks wistful. “It’s all gone now, though.”
    We walk on. Another restaurant, marked by an enormous metal counter, and two metal-backed chairs sitting side by side in a solid square of sunlight; a hardware store (“saved our lives plenty of times”). Next to the hardware store is an old bank: here, too, there are stairs that disappear into the earth, a yawning mouth cut into the ground. The dark-haired boy—the glarer—is just emerging into the sunshine. He has a rifle slung casually over one shoulder.
    “Hey, Tack,” Sarah says shyly.
    He ruffles her hair as he passes. “Boys only,” he says. “You know that.”
    “I know, I know.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m just showing Lena around. That’s where the boys sleep,” Sarah explains to me.
    So even the Invalids have not entirely done away with segregation. This small piece of normalcy—of familiarity—is a relief.
    Tack’s eyes click to me, and he frowns.
    “Hi.” My voice comes out as a squeak. I try, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’s very tall and, like everyone else in the Wilds, thin; but his forearms are roped with muscle, and his jaw is square and strong. He, too, has a procedural mark, a three-pronged scar behind his left ear. I wonder if it is a fake, like Alex’s was; or whether, perhaps, the cure didn’t work on him.
    “Just stay out of the vaults.” The words are directed at Sarah, but he keeps his eyes locked on me. They are cold, appraising.
    “We will,” Sarah says. As he stalks away, she whispers to me, “He’s like that with everyone.”
    “I can see what Raven means about the attitude problem.”
    “Don’t feel bad, though. I mean, you can’t take it personally.”
    “I won’t,” I say, but the truth is that the brief encounter has shaken me. Everything is wrong here, upside down and inverted: the door frames that open into air, invisible structures—buildings, signposts, streets, still casting the shadow of the past over everything. I can feel them, can hear the rush of hundreds of feet, can hear old laughter running underneath the birdsong: a place built of memory and echo.
    I am suddenly exhausted. We have made it only halfway down the old street, but my earlier resolution to walk the whole area now seems absurd. The brightness of the sun, the air and space around me—all of it feels disorienting. I turn around—too quickly, clumsily—and trip over a slab of limestone spattered in bird shit; for one second I am in free fall and then I’m landing, hard, facedown in the dirt.
    “Lena!” Sarah is next to me in a second, helping to pull me to my feet. I’ve bitten down on my tongue and my mouth tastes like metal. “Are you okay?”
    “Just give me a second,” I say, gasping a little. I sit back on the limestone. Something occurs to me: I don’t even know what day it is, what month. “What’s today’s date?” I ask Sarah.
    “August twenty-seventh,” she answers, still looking at me with her face all creased up, worried. But she’s keeping her distance.
    August 27. I left Portland on August 21. I’ve lost almost a week in the Wilds, in this upside-down place.
    This is not my world. My world is unfolding miles away: a world of doors that lead to rooms, and clean white walls, and the quiet hum of refrigerators; a world of carefully plotted streets, and pavement that is not full of fissures. Another pang shoots through me. In less than a month, Hana will have her procedure.
    Alex was the one who understood things here. He could have built up this collapsed street for me, turned it into a place of sense and order. He was going to lead me through the wilderness. With him, I would have been