“Well, I’m sure she meant to,” Bea said.

He laughed a short sharp laugh. “Yeah, she meant to, but couldn’t quite manage it.” He shook his head, and Bea snorted in surprise that he’d take a swipe—and such an apt one—at his ally. She covered her mouth and glanced at Agnes, who really did seem to be asleep, her breathing relaxed in her throat. That was the first time she’d thought of Carl and Val like that. They were a couple, sure, but more, they were allies, and the distinction felt important.

“What a crazy thing that was,” Carl said, sounding frightened of what they’d seen.

“I was terrified.”

“Bea, I was too. I was never so scared in my life,” he said, a catch in his breath. “But then, it was so incredible. The landscape was utterly changed.”

The moon broke from the clouds.

Bea peered at Carl’s silver-lit face. He had two bloody lashes across his forehead. She resisted the urge to reach out to them, touch them, tend to them. “Someone must be injured,” she said. “Or worse.”

He nodded. “Are you worried about Glen?” he asked.

“I am. Are you worried about Val?”

He sat up straight. “Not really.” And Bea thought that could mean any number of things.

They were quiet. Bea listened to the frog’s throaty bellows at the pond’s edge. It seemed to gloat of its size, each croak bigger than the next. Its mate from earlier had vanished.

“You know, Agnes thought you’d caused it.”

“Caused what?”

“Caused the dust storm. Because you’d told us to be prepared to split up and then we had to split up.”

Carl laughed a delighted laugh. “I hope you told her I did.”

Bea chuckled.

Then he made his voice serious. “I didn’t, of course,” he clarified.

“I know.”

More ducks landed on the pond, and Bea pictured their landing V splitting open the water’s surface.

“Bea?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” He sounded concerned and wounded at the thought, but also certain.

What could she say? She didn’t like him very much. And she was sure he didn’t like her either. There was something sly about him normally, but tonight that felt put aside. Tonight, things felt different, like there were new rules, or, rather, no rules. She breathed, preparing to speak.

“How about don’t answer that,” he interrupted. “I just want you to know that whatever you think, or how about whatever I’ve done, I’m not a bad guy.”

“I don’t think you’re a bad guy,” she said. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was a child, a bully, dim in everything except survival, and so here he was a king because survival was king. It irritated her that different people thrived in different places. It irritated her that Glen, who romanticized this life and knew its history, was not particularly good at living it. If he were easier to disappoint, he might give up on it. Agnes wasn’t sick anymore. So they might go home. If home even seemed like a good idea anymore. Good ideas were so relative and hard to discern in the dark, with goose blood gurgling in her gut, an animal skin warming her own.

“Well, I’m glad. I admire you and what you’re doing out here with your daughter. You’re very important here.”

“I don’t know about that.” She chuckled.

“Well, I do.” His sincerity silenced her.

The moon had moved and was now tipping its contents into the sky. The stars pouring from it.

“It is damn cold, though,” Carl said, finishing a conversation aloud that he’d been having in his head.

She looked down at Agnes and thought of the warmth her small, thrumming body was creating beneath the new blanket.

“We should sleep,” Bea said. “On that tree, we’ve hung some goose we caught and cooked up. There should be some good chunks of meat there for you.”

“See, you’re the best one out here,” he said, his voice thick with false flattery. This was the Carl she took lightly. The one always seeming to be angling for something. The one who wanted her vote in some imaginary election.

She lay down and listened to him step carefully to the tree. The sound of his footsteps now so unmistakable. How stupid to think he was some animal coming to eat us, she thought. The steps were so obviously human. Funny that out here that’s a comfort. She tried to imagine waking in the City to the sound of some uninvited human creeping near where she slept. How relative terror was.

The clouds overhead stretched thin in the air, crossing one another haphazardly like a mess of power lines.

Carl returned and crawled under the skin he’d brought that lay over them all. It was big, and he was able to be covered by it without touching Bea.

She heard his chattering teeth, and she could tell that he was trying to calm them so as not to be heard. But his shivering trembled the skins. And then she felt the creeping warmth he was adding to their world under the skins and she felt a little soothed. She turned from Agnes just enough to take Carl’s arm and rope him toward her. He scooted quickly to her and wrapped one arm around her and Agnes and cradled Bea’s head with the other, protective and tender. She felt his fingers there and thought he might thread them intimately through her hair, but he didn’t. They just cradled her head like a pillow. They smelled of goose fat and of Carl.

“It was damn cold.” He sighed into her hair. And they lay there like that, building heat under the blanket, like a little lost family. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt as warm.

*

When Bea opened her eyes in the morning, Agnes was staring at her, full of contempt and a mix of other less obvious emotions. Carl’s arms were still around Bea, but because Agnes was up, the scene that had felt sweet last night now looked unseemly. But Agnes’s scorn wasn’t that easy. Bea wished it were. The look was something that made her stomach do loops, and for a moment she thought she must be guilty of something worse. Much worse.

Carl, lost to a dream, squeezed her tighter and nuzzled into her neck. It was so warm under the blanket that they were now both sweating, and she felt stuck to him. She disengaged as quickly as she could.

“Did you hear Carl stumble into camp last night,” she asked Agnes, too brightly.

Agnes squinted. “No.” But Bea could tell she was lying.

“Well, he did and he had this warm pelt, so we all slept under it.”

“Is this one of those coincidences?”

“Excuse me?”

Agnes kicked a stone and stayed silent.

“Don’t get surly with me, young lady.”

“What’s surly?”

“It’s being a brat,” Bea said, and even though she never said such things to her daughter, Agnes winced and so Bea knew her flash of anger had been noticed. The message had been clear. She felt the lovely spell of their night together broken, and resentment that Carl had come at all curdled her memory.

“Good morning,” he sang out, stretching happily under the skin. “Did you hear me come in last night, Agnes? I must have made a racket. And your mom and I talked and talked—”

Agnes walked away.

“Stop,” Bea said to him.

“What?” Carl drooped his face like his feelings were hurt. Or maybe he was mocking her. Didn’t he know precisely the trouble his arrival had caused? The thought was as paranoid as it was potentially true.

Bea heard a birdlike chirp from above the lake. A birdlike chirp that sounded like it came from a man. Then one from a woman. The Community was signaling. From a plateau above their pond, a reflector glinted, the cracked mirror they used when hunting, that was to come in handy for times they got separated, which had never happened before now. Bea chirped back, and then behind her, Agnes howled, “Dad,” like she was being kidnapped. She usually called him Glen.

“Agnes?” his alarmed voice yelled back.

“She’s fine!” Bea yelled, to stomp any budding drama of the reunion.

“Bea!” Glen yelled, relieved.

“Water down here,” Carl yelled.

“Carl?” Glen yelled, his rising tone laying a string of question marks.

Bea saw him appear at the edge. He was standing tall until he spotted them; then he slumped and scratched his head. She waved up ecstatically.

“We’re here for water,” she cried excitedly, hoping to seed in his mind some narrative of how she’d just arrived, found water and Carl, and so there was nothing to be concerned about, all with her flailing arm and her shrill voice.

He waved from the elbow, which stayed glued to his side.

Val appeared next to him and shielded her eyes to peer at them. Bea could see her face squish at the sight of the three of them together, and she turned to Glen, who shrugged. The rest of the Community appeared at the ridge then and cheered.