While this was going on, people wandered past the cinder-block medical cottage with greater frequency than usual, not lingering but flicking glances at the narrow windows set high in the rough walls before continuing on their way to the comfort tents or the merchant stalls or the worn walking path around the perimeter of the Box.

The Box was a haven for addicts, for people seeking oblivion, for shysters and sharks and whores. It was a place where you could buy anything that Aftertime grudgingly offered, except hope. What role could a boy of seven or eight have in such a place?

As the afternoon wore on, Cass worked in the raised garden beds with Ruthie playing nearby on a quilt spread over the earth. It was warm for late September-Indian summer, they used to call it-and people came out of the tents and sheds and milled around in the common areas, near enough that Cass could hear their voices, carried on the wind, and sense their collective restlessness, waiting for the spoils of the raid to be sorted and catalogued and distributed to the merchants. Waiting to barter and buy. Or, for those with nothing to trade, just to look, to wish, to covet. There was little enough in the way of entertainment to be found.

Cass remembered a book she’d read in elementary school, about a girl who lived in a long-ago Western frontier town next to a railroad. Twice a week the train would stop, and the townspeople would leave off what they were doing and come to watch the passengers who left the cars to stretch their legs, to catch a glimpse of the belongings they carried with them and imagine where they might be going, who they might meet at the other end of their journey. It was the girl’s only contact with the world outside the town, a notion that had stunned Cass. Cass, whose own father left for weeks at a time to travel the West Coast with his band, and sent her postcards from Canada and Oregon and Mexico. Someday, when she was old enough, Cass meant to go along with her daddy and see these things for herself.