She found a bathroom and giddily washed her hands. Then she pulled up her tunic, wet a handful of paper towels, and scrubbed her vagina. It left the brown paper towel even more brown. The paper pilled, and she unhappily realized she’d be leaving tiny balls of paper towel everywhere she peed for the next few days. Or the bits might entangle in her pubic hair, making it snarl and clump. She sat on the toilet lid and spread her legs, hunching to investigate. She felt around for them and picked them out one by one as though they were an infestation of something worse. The cool porcelain felt good against her skin. So smooth and clean. When she stood, she’d left a vaguely heart-shaped smudge in scum on the lid. She wiped it away with more paper towel. She washed her hands again and splashed water on her face until the water ran clean. Then she noticed a mirror hung on the door, partially hidden by an old stiff towel. She held her breath, closed her eyes as she removed the towel. Then opened them.

Her skin had wrinkled in the sun. Her eyes turned down, as did her mouth. She looked many years older than she should. She had freckles for the first time since she was a child. And she only remembered them because of pictures that proved they’d been there. She had no memory of her young face anymore. Except, occasionally, she saw something in Agnes that looked achingly familiar. And she thought it must be because it was something she’d looked at every day as a girl, studied as a girl, picked at as a girl. Or, other times, it was because Agnes made a face that her own mother made. Or laughed in a way her mother laughed. In those moments genetic lines seemed like the only thing that mattered in all of life. That proved anything. She thought of the way children were viewed in the City. There were simply too many people already. Making more wasn’t encouraged. No one became an ob-gyn anymore. She’d been lucky to get in with a doctor at one of the last birthing hospitals with Agnes. Home births now. Hidden behind doors. With no help if something went wrong. No one specialized in new life.

No one specializes in old life either, she reminded herself, pushing the corners of her mouth up until they formed what could pass as a smile.

Her hair was sun-bronzed like Agnes’s; the old charcoal tones had turned the color of wet sand. It looked as though someone had sprinkled acorn flour on her temples and in streaks from her scalp. She looked like a different person.

“No, you look like you,” said Bea to her face in the mirror. “I just haven’t seen you in a while.” She stared a beat longer. She raised a rigid palm and swept it in an arc in front of her. “Hello, you,” she said to her reflection, and forced a yearbook smile. The tendons of her neck popped and a thick vein throbbed across her brow. She frowned and covered the mirror again with the towel. No one needed to see this.

In the next room she found reams of paper, a neglected printer that seemed broken. Light bulbs on shelves. Sponges, paper towel packs. A bucket and mop, vacuum, other implements of cleaning, and she wondered who did that work. The Rangers? Or did some cleaning crew from elsewhere come in? Did someone’s wife do it for extra money? Did Ranger households need extra money? Did they need money at all?

She’d never thought about it at any Post. She’d never seen the inner workings before. The idea of all those people milling around this office, tidying up, making it smell nice, sucking dust up from the flooring, made her sweat with longing. What she wouldn’t give to be the cleaner here. A small, clean bunk that she could tightly make each morning, then ease under the nubby, overwashed sheet at the end of the day. She’d wander around picking things up, wiping them off, placing them back in the perfect place. She’d scrub the toilet with bleach. Her nose burned at the memory of the smell. But why waste time on memories, she thought. She pulled a jug of bleach down and opened it. She inhaled and doubled over into convulsive coughs, sloshing bleach onto her hands and the floor. She put a wet finger up to her mouth and tentatively touched it with her tongue. Her mouth watered.

In the next room, she found a table, a worn couch covered in stains. Along the sides of the room were counters, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a coffee maker whose glass carafe was crusted in burnt coffee. She sniffed the room. It smelled of rot. A mix of stagnant marsh and carrion on a hot day. It was beginning to seem that this Post was abandoned too.

The other side of the room had a refrigerator and a vending machine. Bea floated to the machine as though pulled by a magnet. It was half full. The good stuff was gone. Instead there were granola bars, fruit-shaped gummies, a potato chip brand she didn’t recognize but whose flavor turned her stomach. Beef stew. But whose beef stew did it taste like? She thought of a dish her grandmother made. When people could still freely travel, her grandmother had picked up a taste for interesting spices. These chips couldn’t possibly taste like her grandmother’s beef stew.

Bea opened the fridge and found the origin of the smell. An uncovered old turkey sandwich and, in the crisper drawer, a head of disintegrating romaine. What a surprising waste. Precious lettuce. How could the Rangers have just forgotten about it? She wondered if the life of a Ranger was even more glamorous than she or Glen had imagined. They worked for the Administration. Perhaps those in charge had other supplies, stores of food, different choices, cheaper prices, discounts. Discounts! That’s what people claimed when they spread rumors about the Private Lands. That the people there had all the things you could ever want. All the things you used to take for granted. Like discounts. For some reason finding a stocked cleaning closet and wasted food made Bea more receptive to the idea of Private Lands than ever before.

Other items in the fridge: powdered milk and yogurt, a large block of lard, boxed rice, orange drink, some Meat? wrapped in white butcher paper. She lifted it to smell. It smelled nothing like the meat she ate now, but she could tell what it was by the way she began salivating. Bacon. Where had Rangers found bacon? She tucked it under her arm. She needed an implement or some help to get into the vending machine. Juan was very good at snaking a wire and catching a treat. And bacon would blow their minds. She thought Carl might even cry. She smiled at how happy Carl would be. Then she scowled that feeling away.

Through the final door, she found a closet full of rags, for cleaning she supposed. Some electric cords. And two fifty-pound bags of sand. A catchall closet. Then a stack of blankets caught her eye. She pulled them down and nuzzled her cheek to one that she would have described, at some point in her life, as scratchy. But to her cheek now it felt like fluffy cotton. There were softer things in the world—hides, furs, new grass, moss—but that it was man-made made it seem careful, tender. She would sleep under this blanket tonight, she decided.

From the hallway window, Bea could see Sister and Brother outside tossing a rock in the air. Then she heard the clang of it on the metal roof. Again and again. They never got any mail, and their mother, when she was still alive, had never gotten any mail either. How awful it must have felt to not have anyone missing them. They kept throwing the rock. Clang. Bea felt bad. She barely registered the other children. Debra and Juan took care of them all.

The Community were now crowded so close to the help counter, their hands were almost touching their stacks of mail, and they shouldered one another to keep their positions. Pinecone careened around, pinging from one wall to another, and Agnes sat on the floor scratching shapes into the carpet with her fingers. Glen too held back, watching the proceedings with a smile, scolding those who attempted to touch their mail.

“Not yet,” he said. “Not until every last piece—”

And that’s when Val, after placing a piece with great reverence, looked up at the others.

“The mailbox is empty,” Val announced.

They pounced.

Glen yelled, “Slow, slow, careful, careful,” over the commotion of the Community lunging for their mail and scrambling to find a place to open it undisturbed, to feel their feelings and eat their stale cookies in peace.

Juan milled about, tapping a new set of paints to his chest and cooing “Mamá.” When they were at rivers, he liked to paint the stones and then wash them off. Leave no trace, he would say and kiss the clean stone. He said it was how he expressed his artistic side.

Bea saw Agnes with a small box in front of her. And she saw her gnashing her teeth against something that looked like a brownie that was now rock hard from one of these pen pal projects some schools did. They sometimes got letters from stranger children, carefully written out, spelling checked by a parent, asking what nature was like and why they were there and needling to write back soon. They never wrote back anymore. At first, when mail, always precious, had been desperately so, some had written back. Now they limited their time in Post, and Post was where the pens and paper were. Time in Post was spent writing to family. It had become an unofficial rule. But even those letters were waning.

They’d carried stationery and pens, but the paper got wet and the pens broke, leaking onto their hands. One Ranger fined them because he claimed to have found blue ink smeared on a boulder. An indelible mark, he’d said, though it washed away in the next rain.