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Kirsten didn't want to look at the prophet anymore, or more precisely, she didn't want the last thing she saw on earth to be his face and the point of the rifle. She raised her head to look past him at leaves flickering in sunlight, at the brilliant blue of the sky. Birdsong. Aware of every breath, every heartbeat passing through her. She wished she could convey a message to August, to reassure him somehow.

"It's a newspaper," the trader said. Three consecutive issues, a few months out of date. It was published irregularly out of New Petoskey, the trader said. There were announcements of births and deaths and weddings. A column for bartering. A local man was seeking new shoes in exchange for milk and eggs. There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.

The lobby was deserted, but the glass doors had been smashed. The world had emptied out since he'd last seen it. There was no movement on the plaza or on the street, or on the distant expressway. A smell of smoke in the air, with a chemical tinge that spoke of burning offices and house fires. But most striking was the absolute absence of electric light.

Survival is insufficient: Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of 15 and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since. Dieter harbored strong anti-tattoo sentiments. He said he'd seen a man die of an infected tattoo once. Kirsten also had two black knives tattooed on her right wrist, but there were less troubling to Dieter, being inked to mark specific events.

She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it's all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills. Luli wanders near them, snuffling in the grass. There are stars tonight, a few, although most are blanked out by the haze of the city.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween.

The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear's daughters, and now they'd returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached for them as he flitted here and there in the shadows.