“We didn’t have a lot of time,” cried Frank. “One day we get a call and now we’re here.” The others nodded.

Helen said, “We had a week to throw all this stuff together. It was crazy. We got the Manual on the bus, but . . .”

Carl sighed. “Well, I don’t even know what to say. Honestly.” He shook his head again, drenched in disappointment. “There’s not a lot of time for catch up. And our success depends on us all following these rules.” He paused, nodded his head emphatically. “These very important rules. You’re going to have to follow me very closely to survive.”

The Newcomers looked at Carl like he might save them. But a moment ago they hadn’t looked like people who thought they needed saving. Carl had convinced them of that quickly. He’d scared them into believing whatever he said. It was just like what Carl did when he and Agnes played Hunted! When he was the hunter, he liked to give long speeches about mercy and compassion and would catch her and let her go several times before he killed her. When she was the hunter, she just killed him immediately. From the ground, pretending to be dead, Carl would whisper, “You’re supposed to play with your prey a little—it’s the best part.” He liked the drama. But she didn’t see the point.

The sun began to set and the bats arrived, clicking around their heads to see if they were edible, then flitting off to more palatable prey. The Community laid their skin beds in a wider circle around the Newcomers’ ring of tents. To protect them, they said, but Agnes knew it was to contain them.

The Community built a fire and Carl made the Newcomers circle around it and read aloud sections from the Manual. Agnes hovered nearby and listened.

They skipped around, read Sections 2 through 2.18, Sections 4d, 4e, 4f, and 4g. The parts about micro trash, and hunting yield caps, and the part about Post check-ins and garbage weighing, and what they were allowed to write home about in letters. They read rules the Community didn’t even follow anymore, the part about staying in one camp no longer than seven days being a key one.

They passed it around like a book of bedtime stories. Joven and Dolores leaned on their mother. They were asleep. The Manual was a boring story.

Agnes remembered the early days when they would read stories from the books around the fire. But she didn’t remember ever reading the Manual. It was something only the adults had to read. It wasn’t funny and had no characters or animals and nothing really happened. Just a lot of lines and dots and numbers and symbols. Not like in the Book of Fables. That was her favorite book, and it had been lost in a flash flood. She had almost been lost in the flood too. She had been reading at the riverbank, tapping toes on the cold wet sand, engrossed in the description of a deep dark wood where a girl walked alone, when she was yanked from behind, dropping the book in surprise, just as a large brown slide of water rushed by, thick and muddy and sudden, like a frog’s tongue unfurling but never curling back. Glen had grabbed her. With her feet safe on the dry bank, she had a dreamlike memory of her name being called urgently again and again somewhere in the background of the fable about the stupid, careless girl and that misunderstood wolf.

When she looked down at her hands and realized the book was gone, she’d started to cry. “Because,” she had said to Glen and her mother, who had sprinted up, her eyes wet and terrifying, “I didn’t get to see what happened to the wolf.” And then, she remembered, her mother began to cry and then Glen began to cry, and they were clutching her hard and they were all crying over this book that had been swept away. They would find it a week later when they crisscrossed downriver. It was torn by rocks or scavenged for nest materials. What remained was thick, bloated, the colors and black words smeared across the pages. Agnes picked it up, and the binding split in two. The heavy halves plunged from her hands. But she didn’t cry this time. She felt no sadness at all, which made her wonder why they’d all been so upset when it was first lost. Was grief that short-lived?

After the Book of Fables disappeared, they’d begun to tell stories of their own around the fire. It made every day interesting, even if it had been a day marked only by the white sun or a sky filled with only one flat cloud. A day when no animal had stirred and barely anyone had spoken, except to signal when to stop and when to go. A story at the end of a day like that saved it.

Agnes watched Glen approach the fire. He stood and listened for a moment, until the Newcomers stopped reading and stared at him.

“You don’t have to stop for me,” Glen said. “I was just listening.”

“Why?” Patricia asked.

“Don’t you know all this stuff?” Frank said. They did not seem to appreciate being watched.

Glen stuttered. “Well, yeah, I just . . .” He hesitated, then sat down. “I just had a question.”

“Okay?” Frank raised his eyebrows.

“I know we’re all here now and we want to concentrate on surviving and all that, but I was just curious. Can you elaborate on how bad it is in the City?”

“What do you mean?” said Helen.

“I mean, you all have referenced how bad it is. So bad there’s an extraordinarily long waitlist, and I get the sense that you’re not all scientists, or adventurers, or people with very sick children. And that’s kind of the roster we came in with. So I’m just curious if you could give me some context for just how bad it is. Because we could barely find the original twenty people to come here in the first place. So I’m just astonished people want to come here now.”

Agnes had never seen Glen talk so much at once. He seemed nervous about his question. She looked at the Newcomers and their squinting eyes. Was he being rude somehow?

“When you say, ‘We couldn’t find people,’ who’s ‘we’?” Frank asked.

“Me and my wife. We kind of got this experiment up and running.”

The Newcomers looked at one another.

“I thought Carl started it,” said Linda.

Glen looked struck. But he smiled. “Well, no. Carl was one of my students a long time ago. And he certainly helped. But no, it was me and Bea and Agnes. We were the first subjects.” He touched Agnes’s head and she blushed.

“Who is Bea?” said Patricia.

Glen looked stunned to realize they wouldn’t know her. Of course they wouldn’t know her. She wasn’t here. He stuttered, “She’s my wife. Agnes’s mother.”

“Did she die?”

“No, no, no.” He shook his head violently. “She had to go back to the City.”

A few of the Newcomers gasped.

“Why?” cried Helen.

“Her mother died. She had to go deal with it.”

“Deal with what?” Helen asked, confused.

“Her mother’s death.”

“But her mother was dead,” Frank said.

“Right.”

“So why did she need to go back if she was dead? I can see if she was dying, but she was already dead, is that right?”

Glen swallowed. He nodded.

“There’s no way she went back for that,” said Frank.

“Excuse me?”

“No one would ever try to go to the City on purpose. Everyone’s trying to leave.”

“Don’t be hyperbolic, Frank,” Patricia said. “Not everyone is trying to leave. There’s a lot of people you don’t know.”

“Well, there’s a lot of people I do know, Patricia,” Frank spat. “I know a lot more than you do.” Agnes was surprised at his tone. He’d seemed benign.

Agnes saw Glen purse his lips as he often did when he was aggravated. He did it when he got mail from his department. He did it when Carl was giving a speech. Agnes put her hand on his arm and he took a breath.

“Sorry, Patricia,” said Helen, “but I have to agree with Frank.” She turned to Glen. “The City is not a place you return to. I’ll bet she went somewhere else.”

“No,” Glen said calmly. “She’s in the City.”

“She probably went to the Private Lands,” said Linda.

The Newcomers made sounds with their mouths, tsks and clicks and hmms, judgmental sounds, understanding sounds, sounds full of pity.

“I’m sure that’s where she is,” Frank said.

“Lucky woman,” said Patricia.

“But she just left you behind, sweetie?” Helen cried, touching Agnes’s cheek, and Agnes recoiled.

“Enough,” Glen cried, and the entire camp fell silent. “I just want to know about the City. My wife is there. And I’m worried about her.”

Agnes heard his voice tremble and she swallowed, stunned. How could he worry about her when clearly she hadn’t worried about them? And all these people knew it too. Didn’t he hear Helen? She left us.

Helen signed, exasperated. “What more do you need to know? It’s bad. We left and there are many more trying.”

Again the Newcomers made mouth noises to express their pity, and Glen’s shoulders sank and he walked away.

The Newcomers fell into quieter sounds, clicking to themselves now, as though telegraphing private thoughts and ideas and feelings to one another that no one else could interpret, like a colony of bats. They were a tight group, and Agnes thought for the first time that maybe they were not as hapless as they seemed.

She turned to leave.