“I think it’s because it isn’t real.” It was very late, and they were standing by the living room windows together, looking down at the deserted street.
“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.
* * *
—
The thing with the tour—the thing with all the tours—is that there was no moment when she wasn’t grateful, but also it was always too many faces. She’d always been shy. On tour all those faces kept appearing before her, face after face after face, and most of them were kind but all of them were the wrong faces, because after a few days on the road the only people Olive wanted to see were Sylvie and Dion.
But when the world shrank to the size of the interior of the apartment, and to a population of three, the people were what she missed. Where was the driver who was writing the book about the talking rats? She’d never even known the woman’s name. Where was Aretta—the out-of-office message on Aretta’s device was weeks out of date, which was worrying—and the other authors she’d met on that last tour, Ibby Mohammed and Jessica Marley? Where was the driver who sang an old jazz song as they drove through Tallinn, and the woman in Buenos Aires with the tattoo?
* * *
—
In lockdown, Colony Two was a strange, frozen place, silent except for the ambulance sirens and the soft whir of passing trolleys with their freight of masked medical workers. No one was supposed to go outside except for medical appointments and essential work, but on the one-hundredth night, while Sylvie was sleeping, Olive slipped out of the kitchen door and into the outside world. She moved swiftly and silently down the stairs to the garden, where she sat on the grass, under a small tree shaped like an umbrella. She was inches from the sidewalk but hidden by leaves. Being out of the apartment was disorienting. She was certain that the air here hadn’t changed, but after her time on Earth it seemed wrong to her, flat and overly filtered. She stayed outdoors for an hour, then slipped back in with a sense of revelation. After that she went out every night to sit under the umbrella tree.
It was on one of those nights that the journalist appeared. The last journalist, as she’d always think of him, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts of Contingencies Magazine. On the night he appeared, she was under the umbrella tree, cross-legged on the grass, trying not to think of the day’s numbers—752 dead today in Colony Two, with 3,458 new cases—and trying to let go of conscious thought, when she heard soft footsteps approaching. She didn’t think it could be a patrol officer—they walked in pairs—but the fines for being outside in lockdown were steep, so she stayed very still and tried to breathe as quietly as possible.
The footsteps stopped, so close that she could see the person’s shadow angled over the sidewalk. Could they have sensed her? It didn’t seem possible. Someone else—another set of footsteps—was approaching, from the opposite direction.
“Zoey? What are you doing here?” Olive recognized the man’s voice immediately, and her breath caught in her chest.
“I could ask you the same thing,” a woman said. She had his accent.
“I told you in the travel chamber five minutes ago,” Gaspery said. “I want to interview a literary scholar who interviewed Olive Llewellyn. One more layer of confirmation.”
“I thought it was strange that you wanted to leave again after your interview with her, on an unscheduled trip,” she said.
Gaspery didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought you didn’t travel anymore,” he said finally.
“Yes, well, I felt the circumstances warranted an exception. Gaspery, how could you?”
“I was going to just talk to her,” Gaspery said. “I was going to stick to the plan, but Zoey, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just let her die.”
There was a moment of silence, during which both of these incomprehensible people were, Olive imagined, staring directly into her living room window. She looked up, but from her angle she could see only patches of the living room ceiling, mostly obscured by leaves.
“It’s like you warned me,” he said quietly. “You said the job required a lack of humanity, and it did. It does.”
“You shouldn’t come back to the present,” Zoey said.
What?
“Of course I’ll come back to the present,” Gaspery said. “I believe in facing consequences.”
“But the consequences will be terrible,” Zoey said. “I’ve seen it happen before.”