“Creepy as hell,” Viola said.
Jackson appeared in the doorway. “There’s a skeleton in the men’s room.”
August frowned. “How old?”
“Old. Bullet hole in the skull.”
“Why would you look in the bathroom?”
“I was hoping for soap.”
August nodded and disappeared down the hall.
“What’s he doing?” Viola asked.
“He likes to say a prayer over the dead.” Kirsten was crouched on the floor, poking through the debris with a broken ruler. “Help me check the lockers before we go.”
But every student locker had been emptied, doors hanging askew. Kirsten picked up a couple of mildewed binders to study the stickers and the Sharpie incantations—“Lady Gaga iz da bomb,” “Eva + Jason 4 evah,” “I ♥ Chris,” etc.—and on a cooler day she might have spent more time here, interested as always in any clues she could find about the lost world, but the air was foul and still, the heat unendurable, and when August emerged from the men’s room it was a relief to walk out into the sunlight, the breeze, and the chatter of crickets.
“Christ,” Jackson said, “I don’t know how you two can stand going into these places.”
“Well, we don’t go into public bathrooms, for starters,” August said.
“I just wanted some soap.”
“Yeah, but it’s a dumb move. Someone always got executed in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, like I said, I don’t know how you stand it.”
We stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended, Kirsten thought, but not young enough to remember nothing at all. Because there isn’t much time left, because all the roofs are collapsing now and soon none of the old buildings will be safe. Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. But it seemed like too much to explain all this, so she shrugged instead of answering him.
The Symphony was resting under the trees by the side of the road. Most of them were napping. Eleanor was showing Olivia how to make a daisy chain. The clarinet was moving languidly through a series of yoga poses while the conductor and Gil studied a map.
“A mouthpiece!” the first flute said, when August revealed their discoveries, and August was the person in the Symphony who irritated her the most, but she actually clapped her hands and threw her arms around his neck.
“What was in the school?” Alexandra asked, when the horses were harnessed and the Symphony had set out again. She wanted very much to go into buildings with Kirsten and August, but Kirsten never let her join them.
“Nothing worth mentioning,” Kirsten said. Carefully not thinking about the skeleton in the men’s room, her eyes on the road. “Just that flute piece and a lot of debris.”
21
THE INTERVIEW IN Year Fifteen, continued:
FRANÇOIS DIALLO: Now, I believe you were very young when the Georgia Flu came, when the collapse happened.
KIRSTEN RAYMONDE: I was eight.
DIALLO: Forgive me, this is a fascination of mine when I speak with people who were children back then, at the time of the collapse, and I’m not sure how to phrase this, but I want to know what you think about when you consider how the world’s changed in your lifetime.
RAYMONDE: [silence]
DIALLO: Or to phrase it differently—
RAYMONDE: I understood the question. I’d prefer not to answer.
DIALLO: Okay. All right. I’m curious about your tattoo.
RAYMONDE: The text on my arm? “Survival is insufficient”?
DIALLO: No, no, the other one. The two black knives on your right wrist.
RAYMONDE: You know what tattoos like this mean.
DIALLO: But perhaps you could just tell me—
RAYMONDE: I won’t talk about it, François, and you know better than to ask.
22
WHEN KIRSTEN THOUGHT of the ways the world had changed in her lifetime, her thoughts always eventually circled back to Alexandra. Alexandra knew how to shoot, but the world was softening. There was a fair chance, Kirsten thought, that Alexandra would live out her life without killing anyone. She was a younger fifteen-year-old than Kirsten had ever been.
Now Alexandra walked quietly, sullen because she hadn’t been allowed to join the expedition to the school. The Symphony walked through the end of the day, clouds gathering and the air pressing down from above, rivulets of sweat running down Kirsten’s back. The sky low and dark by late afternoon. They were moving through a rural area, no driveways. Rusted-out cars here and there along the road, abandoned where they’d run out of gas, the caravans weaving carefully around them. Flashes of lightning and thunder, at first distant and then close. They waited out the rainstorm in the trees by the side of the road at twilight, pitched their tents on the wet ground when it was over.