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straight A report card, which he seemed to find inexplicable.
    But he hadn’t been in love with her. He had loved Laura Sparks, with her Angelina Jolie lips and her C+ report card and her Cliff Notes and her pep, which was always on tap.
    Clare looked at Bear, who was dozing at her feet, and she thought about Robin’s Plan B. The man on the television. A master of the situation. A man with a real cure.
    It might be worth living, if there were a real cure.
    How many people needed to be left for there to be an actual human race anymore?
    Clare had read in school about passenger pigeons, about the way they had darkened the sky for days at a time and made slick the earth with their guano. There had been billions of them. Billions. Then, when their populations had declined beyond the tipping point (and that was when there were still millions of them), Clare read that their numbers had simply dwindled until they had become extinct. She supposed it was like that with humans, too. Pest might have tipped them over the edge. There might be others like her, but there would be no more cities or schools, or, finally, people to think thoughts about passenger pigeons. The world would pass into another age.
    Clare felt she should write some things down, maybe just because, as her father used to say, that’s what human beings did. So, with Bear walking beside her like an enormous mythical creature, she went slowly back to her own house where the paper was, where the pens were, where her father’s study waited.
    Along the way, she picked some flowers.
    When she got to the house, the stench wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be. She left the flowers in front of her parents’ closed bedroom door. In her father’s study, she found a block of paper and a pen. Bear lay at her feet, and she rested her toes on him. Clare looked at her father’s prizes and degrees—he had always kept them in the country house and not in the city, although she wasn’t sure why. And then, with all her father’s diplomas hanging on the walls around her, with his Pulitzer Prize gleaming at her from his desk, she tried to write. About the Cured. About the stink that rose from the dead city. About the pandemic—she liked the word ‘pandemic’—that had thrown her into adulthood. Then she scratched everything out and started again.
    She knew that whatever she wrote would be inadequate for the occasion, but she also knew that, anyway, there wouldn’t be any more Pulitzer Prizes given out anytime soon. So she just wrote what had been on her mind. She wrote in small print letters:
    The last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, and, after that, there weren’t any passenger pigeons ever again.

CHAPTER SIX
    THE MOMENT THAT DETERMINED
     
     
    T HE NIGHTS WERE getting colder. She and Bear sat on Sander’s Hill companionably, her arm around the great dog. She opened a new block of paper and started a fresh page with the heading, ‘Getting Ready For Winter.’ She was preparing to go into Fallon, but she wanted the trip to be as fast and efficient as possible. “A surgical strike,” Michael would have called it. A few leaves drifted into her hair as she prepared to write ‘gloves,’ but the pen remained poised above the page. She was deeply uninterested in gloves, or scarves, or boots, or going into Fallon. A few rogue leaves might have been falling, but winter still seemed far away. Maybe she was fooling herself, but it was hard to think ahead. The light was a syrupy golden morning glow that highlighted Bear’s black fur. In the long grass, blue cornflowers and tattered Queen Anne’s Lace still held sway. Instead of writing ‘gloves,’ she started to doodle.
    She found herself writing Michael’s name, and soon it curled down the margin, dark and important, underlined, shaded. Delicate tendrils of climbing vines wound up onto the page from the ‘h’ and the ‘l,’ while Clare pictured Michael going ahead of