Agnes looked up at her mother for the first time. She wanted to see her damage. To see her hurt as much as Agnes had been hurt. As much as Glen had been hurt.

Her mother’s face was a dark cloud. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the skin around her eyes welted red as though she’d been pummeled. Her face was streaked almost clean from dried tears. She looked like she’d been crying, and crying hard, for days. Then how had she been laughing with Carl? Agnes choked on her breaths. Panicking. She had invited a new kind of hardness between them when, she now realized, before there had only been simple grief. Something they could have shared. Agnes felt a wave of shame, an impulse to drop to her knees, erase what she’d just said. But there was no going back from it. It was too late. Why did her mother insist on being so many people at once when Agnes only needed her to be the one? Her mother’s face stormed, seeming at odds with even itself. She looked like a deer might look when Agnes was about to cut its throat. There was a current of despair there, but also a bolt that went through it. She knew to hold tight then, to lean on the legs. Because that bolt was its last defense.

Her mother turned to the fire, now standing shoulder to shoulder with her daughter. Not looking at her, she said, “There are some things you don’t understand. You think you do. But you don’t. I hope you never have to.”

For the first time Agnes believed her mother was right about this. Agnes looked at her mother’s profile in the firelight. It was dreadful.

“I love you,” her mother seethed. “I know you love me.”

Agnes’s eyes filled with hot remorseful tears. She reached out, but her mother flinched angrily, and Agnes froze.

Her mother continued in the slowest, hardest voice Agnes had heard come from her. “But if you don’t like what you’re seeing, Agnes Day—” Her mother spit into the fire. It hissed in the coal’s red core. “Then you’d better cover your fucking eyes.”

All the light of the night was snuffed out.

Her mother turned away from her and joined Carl in bed.

? ? ?

It was obvious when they had arrived at the top of the Caldera because the winds shifted from blowing at their backs to blowing in their faces. The land across seemed flat, but only because they’d been on the side of a mountain for so long. They hadn’t had a vantage in a long time. But at the top here, the highest thing around, they could see where they’d come from. They saw the extent of their up-and-down trekking over the past seasons. The Caldera had wide, swelling foothills. They saw how many cinder cones popped up from the tree-covered landscape. Some were bare-topped. But others were pint-sized volcanoes, thick black cauldron bubbles covered almost to the top now with trees.

In the further distance they saw plumes of smoke, and hazy skies at the horizon in each direction. Fires in the sage sea. Fires in the mountains. The air was singed. It made the top look like an aged photograph of a place that no longer existed.

As they approached the middle, they walked downhill again. They were walking into the Caldera proper, the volcano’s pock. Its wound. It was eerily quiet, as though nothing lived there. It was unlike any landscape they’d been to, barren and full all at once.

Around a bend the lakes emerged. One black and one blue. The closer they got, the more the black one evolved into a deep murky green and the blue one became white like the clouded sky above it.

The lakes were bordered by tall pines, with the greenest needles Agnes had seen in a long time and tall rusty-orange trunks. Healthy trees. Not thirsty like what they’d seen lately. They were watered well by the lakes and snowmelt. So much vibrancy in a landscape marred by lava. The obsidian flows were glassy fingers reaching for the lakes. Elsewhere, those fingers were rough, the rock sharp, reddened, and treacherous. Pumice cliffs and peaks surrounded the lakes and the Caldera rim. Between the lakes lay a flow that had hardened as it had swirled, molten, like a hurricane around its own eye.

“We are swimming in those lakes,” said Debra in a reverent whisper. “I don’t care how cold they are.”

They quickened their pace.

Their feet crunched, and that sound ricocheted back from what they were descending into. They walked over hardened lava rather than pick their way among the trees, even though the understory was clean. Dead, even. The path clear. But they wanted to have clear views. They didn’t know who else was here. It was likely they were alone. It certainly felt like they were alone. They’d never found Adam’s track again. But it was also possible he was lurking close by. And maybe other Trespassers were with him.

Overhead, birds of prey soared, but Agnes didn’t hear songbirds or insects, the cautious chattering of the squirrels. But there had to be something alive here. If for no other reason than to feed the circling raptors. Then she watched a large eagle swoop down, dip its talons into the lake, and bound up with a sizable fish. The lakes had been stocked at some point.

“Finally, some decent fishing,” Carl said.

They descended and found a structure, what was supposed to be the Caldera Post. It was boarded up, and looked to have been that way for a while. It was ramshackle and boards covered some windows. It reminded Agnes of something she might have seen in a book or magazine from long ago. A log lodge. On a mountain lake. A great room with great windows soaring three stories. Two wings spreading from it, full of what must be guest rooms. Something built for enjoyment. It was clearly the Ranger’s Lodge.

They halfheartedly tried doors, but none of them really wanted inside. Outside, a breeze blew; the sun twinkled over the lake surface. In front of the Lodge was a stretch of sandy beach. Dramatic cliffs rose on either side. It was beautiful. Their unease from earlier dissipated as they set up camp on the shore. Carl sent the children to find sticks, and he set about making poles for fishing. He pulled out a fly and line he’d kept in his bag since they’d first arrived. It was possibly the only thing that had survived since the very beginning. Besides the Manual. And some of the books and knives.

That night they camped in a semicircle around the fire on the shore of the lake. The stars felt closer than ever before. They twinkled big and dangled from the sky like hanging lights. The wind blew the smell of fires away. The smog lifted. For the first time they noticed the heavy scent of water and hot rock cooling under the evening sky. Their bellies were full of flame-cooked fish. Their fingers were sticky with the fish’s oils. They picked scales from their teeth and burned the fine bones in the fire.

They woke in the morning and stood around. There was enough fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Camp was set up; firewood was gathered and plentiful.

“Isn’t there something we should be doing?” asked Dr. Harold.

“What do we usually do with our time?” asked Linda.

“Hunt, skin, tan, smoke, sew, gather—” Carl said.

“But there’s nothing started right now, and we have plenty,” said Linda. “So we have—”

“The morning off?” Debra asked.

Before anyone could reply, Debra was running toward the lake, pulling her smock over her head.

Linda and Dr. Harold followed. Then Val with Baby Egret and Carl. Then Frank and Patty’s mom. Soon everyone was stripped down and in the water.

Only the adults had ever really learned to swim. The rest of them had figured it out in the deeper parts of the bigger streams. Once or twice in very slow parts of a rare wide river.

The children splashed around near the beach. The teenagers paddled sloppily out to where their feet could just touch. The adults took smooth strokes and popped underwater, flicked their feet like fishtails.

Her mother had taught Agnes how to swim at the first river they’d camped at. And before that, back in the City, she’d made Agnes practice holding her breath in the bathtub. When Agnes would snort in water, flail up gasping, her mother would be there with a towel to wipe off her face.

“See,” she would say. “You panicked, but you’re fine. Water won’t hurt you if you know how to behave around it.”

In the rivers during those earliest days, her mother would hold her around the waist and have Agnes put her face in the slow-moving current. Agnes would flail until she calmed down and began to paddle, her mother’s arms never unwrapping from around her.

Agnes had seen how Debra taught Pinecone to swim. And how Sister and Brother had learned from Juan. All by nearly drowning. They learned fast. But they didn’t like the water now. They all stayed close to the beach, only going in up to their navels.