Station Eleven

“I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the tuba said, midmorning, after several hours of searching for Sayid and Dieter. No one understood. No one responded. The disappearances were incomprehensible. They could find no trace. The Symphony searched in teams of four, grimly, methodically, but the forest was dense and choked with underbrush; they could have passed within feet of Dieter and Sayid and not known it. In those first hours there were moments when Kirsten caught herself thinking that there must have simply been some misunderstanding, that Dieter and Sayid must have somehow walked by them in the dark, somehow gone the wrong way down the road, that they’d reappear with apologies at any moment, but scouts had gone back and forth on the road for miles. Again and again Kirsten stopped still in the forest, listening. Was someone watching her? Just now, had someone stepped on a branch? But the only sounds were of the other search teams, and everyone felt watched. They met in the forest and on the road at intervals, looked at one another and said nothing. The slow passage of the sun across the sky, the air over the road unsteady with heat waves.

When night began to fall they gathered by the lead caravan, which had once been an extended-bed Ford pickup truck. “Because survival is insufficient,” words painted on the canopy in answer to the question that had dogged the Symphony since they’d set out on the road. The words were very white in the rising evening. Kirsten stood by Dieter’s favorite horse, Bernstein, and pressed her hand flat against his side. He stared at her with an enormous dark eye.

“We have traveled so far together,” the conductor said. There are certain qualities of light that blur the years. Sometimes when Kirsten and August were on watch together at dawn, she would glance at him as the sun rose and for a fleeting instant she could see what he’d looked like as a boy. Here on this road, the conductor looked much older than she had an hour earlier. She ran a hand through her short gray hair. “There have been four times,” she said, “in all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony, and in every single instance they have followed the separation protocol, and we’ve been reunited at the destination. Alexandra?”

“Yes?”

“Will you state the separation protocol, please?” It had been drilled into all of them.

“We never travel without a destination,” Alexandra said. “If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait.”

“And what is the current destination?”

“The Museum of Civilization in the Severn City Airport.”

“Yes.” The conductor was quiet, looking at them. The forest was in shadow now, but there was still some light in the corridor of sky above the road, the last pink of sunset streaking the clouds. “I have been on the road for fifteen years,” she said, “and Sayid’s been with me for twelve. Dieter for even longer.”

“He was with me in the beginning,” Gil said. “We walked out of Chicago together.”

“I leave neither of them willingly.” The conductor’s eyes were shining. “But I won’t risk the rest of you by staying here a day longer.”

That night they kept a double watch, teams of four instead of two, and set out before dawn the following morning. The air was damp between the walls of the forest, the clouds marbled overhead. A scent of pine in the air. Kirsten walked by the first caravan, trying to think of nothing. A sense of being caught in a terrible dream.

They stopped at the end of the afternoon. The fevered summers of this century, this impossible heat. The lake glittered through the trees. This had been one of those places that wasn’t quite suburbia but wasn’t quite not, an in-between district where the houses stood on wooded lots. They were within three days of the airport now. Kirsten sat on a log with her head in her hands, thinking, Where are you, where are you, where are you, and no one bothered her until August came to sit nearby.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I think they were taken,” she said without raising her head, “and I can’t stop thinking about what the prophet was saying in St. Deborah, that thing about the light.”

“I don’t think I heard it. I was packing up.”

“They call themselves the light.”

“What about it?”

“If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?”

“I suppose.”

“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

He sighed. “We can only remain hopeful,” he said. “We have to assume that the situation will become more clear.”

But four teams set out in search of dinner, and only three and a half returned.