Part One

But Arthur Leander was running out of time. He swayed, his eyes unfocused, and it was obvious to Jeevan that he wasn’t Lear anymore. Chapter 1

No one looked at Jeevan, and it occurred to him that his role in this performance was done. Chapter 1

He was thinking about the way the dropped curtain closed off the fourth wall and turned the stage into a room, albeit a room with cavernous space instead of a ceiling, fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected. That’s a ridiculous thought, Jeevan told himself. Don’t be stupid. But now there was a prickling at the back of his neck, a sense of being watched from above. Chapter 1

In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. ‘To Arthur,’ they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Chapter 2

Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city. Chapter 2

‘Good night, Jeevan.’ Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. Chapter 3

That evening on the beach below her hotel, Miranda was seized by a loneliness she couldn’t explain. …. The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale kingdom. Chapter 5

Part Two

‘If you can remember your lines in questionable territory, you’ll be fine onstage.’ (Gil) Chapter 7

They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. ‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. Chapter 7

‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present. He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar. Chapter 7

August always gazed longingly at televisions. Chapter 7

They walked slowly with weapons in hand, the actors running their lines and the musicians trying to ignore the actors, scouts watching for danger ahead and behind on the road. (Travelling Symphony) Chapter 7

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth. (from Dr Eleven) Chapter 8

The problem with the Traveling Symphony was the same problem suffered by every group of people everywhere since before the collapse, undoubtedly since well before the beginning of recorded history. Chapter 10

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labelled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. Chapter 11

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Chapter 11

Because survival is insufficient. (Travelling Symphony motto) Chapter 11

Being alive is a risk. (The Conductor) Chapter 12

The flu,’ the prophet said, ‘the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved …. We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure.’ Chapter 12

‘I submit,’ the prophet said, ‘that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason.’ Chapter 12

There is a magnificent year when they are inseparable and go out four nights a week with fake IDs, and then when both of them are nineteen. (Clark and Arthur) Chapter 13

Part Three

Arthur’s is magnificent, smooth and expensive-looking, Miranda’s a battered peacoat that she found in a thrift store for ten dollars. Chapter 13

‘I love it.’ The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom. (Miranda) Chapter 13

‘You’re always half on Station Eleven,’ Pablo said during a fight a week or so ago, ‘and I don’t even understand your project. What are you actually going for here?”
‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.’ (Miranda) Chapter 14

‘I repent nothing.’ (Miranda) Chapter 14

My poor corporate baby,’ he said. ‘Lost in the machine.’ Pablo talks about metaphorical machines a lot, also the Man. He sometimes combines the two, as in ‘That’s how the Man wants us, just trapped right there in the corporate machine.’ Chapter 14

A hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth’s population, but a few hundred rebels managed to steal a space station and escape. Dr. Eleven and his colleagues slipped Station Eleven through a wormhole and are hiding in the uncharted reaches of deep space. This is all a thousand years in the future. Chapter 14

All they want is to see sunlight again. Can you blame them? (Captain Lonegan from Dr Eleven) Chapter 14

There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonourable leave when things get difficult. Chapter 14

‘What’s the point of doing all that work,’ Tesch asks, ‘if no one sees it?’
‘It’s the work itself that’s important to me.’ Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true? ‘Not whether I publish it or not.’ Chapter 15

‘I prefer you with a crown.’ (Miranda to Arthur) Chapter 15

‘No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.’
‘I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen.’ Elizabeth speaks very softly. (Miranda and Elizabeth) Chapter 15

‘I’d prefer not to think that I’m following a script,’ Miranda says. Chapter 15

Her gaze falls on the gift that Clark brought this evening, a paperweight of clouded glass. (Miranda) Chapter 15

He was performing. Clark had thought he was meeting his oldest friend for dinner, but Arthur wasn’t having dinner with a friend, Clark realized, so much as having dinner with an audience. Chapter 17

Some towns are easier to visit than others. Some places have elected mayors or they’re run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous. Chapter 18

Part Four

‘That quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.’ (Dieter) Chapter 19

Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. (Kirsten) Chapter 20

Kirsten thought, that Alexandra would live out her life without killing anyone. She was a younger fifteen-year-old than Kirsten had ever been. Chapter 22

Hell is the absence of the people you long for. Chapter 23

‘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.’ (Prophet) Chapter 23

‘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. Chapter 23

What the Symphony was doing, what they were always doing, was trying to cast a spell, and costuming helped; the lives they brushed up against were work-worn and difficult, people who spent all their time engaged in the tasks of survival. Chapter 24

‘Correct,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.’ (Dahlia, an employee being interviewed by Clark) Chapter 26

Part Five

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. Chapter 30

‘There’s still a world out there,’ Jeevan said, ‘outside this apartment.’
‘I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive.’ (Frank and Jeevan) Chapter 32

‘I’ve been thinking about immortality lately. … They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.’ (Frank) Chapter 34

He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad. (Jeevan) Chapter 36

‘I can’t remember the year we spent on the road, and I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it. But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this—this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu—doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?’ (Kirsten) Chapter 37

‘What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.’ (Kirsten) Chapter 37

Part Six

‘Well, it’s nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived.’ (Kirsten) Chapter 38

In any event, August liked the idea of an infinite number of parallel universes. Chapter 38

She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothes and her hair sticking up …. a twenty-seven- year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear… remembering them was almost like remembering other people, … she felt such compassion for them. ‘I regret nothing.’ Chapter 39

I think about my childhood, the life I lived on Delano Island, that place was so small. Everyone knew me, not because I was special or anything just because everyone knew everyone, and the claustrophobia of that…. I just wanted to get out…. Toronto felt like freedom. (Arthur) Chapter 40

‘He was wonderful,’ Clark said. ‘Back then, back at the beginning.’ Chapter 40

A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead—I see you, I see you—and hoped this was enough. (Miranda in Malaysia) Chapter 41

Part Seven

‘Are you leaving?’ Clark asked. It still wasn’t entirely real.
‘Not yet,’ Elizabeth said. She looked a little deranged. Chapter 42

Noted film and stage actor, dead at fifty-one. A life summed up in a series of failed marriages—Miranda, Elizabeth, Lydia—and a son, whose present absorption in his handheld Nintendo was absolute. When Arthur collapsed onstage, someone from the audience had performed CPR, the obituary said, but that audience member remained unidentified. Chapter 42

‘I was in the hotel,’ he said finally. ‘I followed your footprints in the snow.’ There were tears on his face.
‘Okay,’ someone said, ‘but why are you crying?’
‘I’d thought I was the only one,’ he said. (Man walking in to airport) Chapter 43

‘Yeah but that’s because Elizabeth is a fucking lunatic’ Garrett said. Chapter 43

‘What if we were saved for a different reason?’
‘Saved?’ Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often.
‘Some people were saved, people like us …. people who were good … people who weren’t weak.’ (Tyler and Clark) Chapter 44

The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain. Chapter 44

‘Right now he’s over by the quarantined plane,’ Clark said, ‘reading aloud to the dead from the Book of Revelation.’ … ‘I think maybe he’s picked up some strange ideas about, well, about what happened.’ … ‘He thinks the pandemic happened for a reason,’ Clark said.
‘It did happen for a reason.’ (Clark and Elizabeth) Chapter 44

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Daria said. ‘I suppose the question is, does knowing these things make them more or less happy?’ Chapter 46

‘He’s a high-functioning sleepwalker, essentially.’ (Dahlia, an employee being interviewed by Clark) Chapter 47

Part Eight

‘Have faith,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll find them.’ (August) Chapter 48

Severn City had been a substantial place once. Chapter 48

‘Some things in this life seem inexplicable,’ the archer said, ‘but we must trust in the existence of a greater plan.’ Chapter 49

She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string. The way the archer had smiled, just at the end. (Kirsten) Chapter 50

Who were you? How did you come to possess this page? Kirsten knelt by the prophet, by the pool of his blood, but he was just another dead man on another road. Chapter 50

She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string. The way the archer had smiled, just at the end. (Kirsten) Chapter 50

She stepped back. ‘It isn’t possible,’ she said.
‘But there it is. Look again.’
In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity. (Kirsten and Clark) Chapter 51

A thousand miles to the south of the airport, Jeevan is baking bread in an outdoor oven. He rarely thinks of his old life anymore, although he has dreams sometimes about a stage, an actor fallen in the shimmering snow … Chapter 52

Part Nine

‘I have a present for you.’ He felt a little guilty as he handed her the Dr. Eleven comics, …. but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son. (Arthur and Kirsten) Chapter 53

He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. ….. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken … The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or fame or immortality or all of the above. (Arthur) Chapter 53

He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good. .. pink magnolias in the backyard of the house in Los Angeles. .. Outdoor concerts, the way the sound rises up into the sky. Tyler … Dancing with Clark when they were both eighteen, their fake IDs in their pockets, Clark flickering in the strobe lights. Miranda’s eyes … Tyler. (Arthur) Chapter 53

Dr Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream. Chapter 54