She put candles around the living room and they sat in the heat of the flickering darkness.

“What color is your pee?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know. It’s too dark in there. It just goes down the hole.”

“We should be peeing in jars.”

“How will that help?”

“It’s good to know what color it is.”

“I’ll start tomorrow.”

“What did you drink today?”

“That blue stuff with Mike Sr.”

“Did we finish off the juice today or yesterday?”

“Today. This morning.”

“What else do we have?”

“We have the rest of that soda.”

Eddie went into the kitchen. The soda existed only in four puddles—one in each of the plastic nubs that served as the container’s base. It was a sip’s worth. He brought it to Laura.

“Here,” he said. “Drink.”

“What about you?”

“I had some already.”

“I think we should go to my parents’,” she said. “We could walk.”

“How?”

“We walked back here.”

“Your parents are thirty miles away.”

“We could do it, though, if we had to. We’d just keep walking. We could walk over the Bay Bridge.”

“And what would we drink on the way?” he said. “It must have been a hundred degrees today. We’d die out there.”

“We could bring supplies.”

“If we had supplies to bring, this wouldn’t be an issue.”

“Try the phone again,” she said.

“The phone isn’t working.”

“Just try.”

He picked up the phone. The battery was dead. “Look,” he said.

The candles sent dim golden light to the edge of where she was. He could see her spread out on the sofa, lying on her back.

“We have to stay where we are right now,” he said.

When she didn’t answer, he thought maybe she was thinking about what he’d said.

“Your dad’s the most competent guy I know,” he said. “They’re on well water. He can get down into it if he needs to. And they keep all that bottled stuff in the garage. They never run out of bottled water.”

“That’s why we should go. Going there could save us.”

“Jesus, Laura.” He squeezed the phone and stood over her. “We don’t need to be saved. You heard what they said about oh-eight. They didn’t have power for six days.”

“But they had water.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

He thought of Mrs. Kasolos’s jug, buried in the woods. There was no reason for them to be arguing like this.

“This is stupid,” he said.

He took the flashlight off the kitchen table.

“Where are you going?”

“Just stay here,” he said. “Please? I’m just going out for a while.”

“You can’t,” she said. “You can’t just go out anymore. Not when everything’s like this.”

But Eddie left anyway. He waited on the sidewalk, thinking that she’d follow, but she didn’t. Through the picture window, he saw her shadow against the candle’s flickering light.

He walked, and at the base of the hill, he could smell wood smoke. His shoes beat against the ground too loudly for him to hear anything else. But when he stopped, the beating carried on. It was his blood pumping in his ears.

Near the aluminum rail, a deserted campfire released a dim gray cloud into the air. There were cans on the ground, a dozen of them, and he bent and picked up each, but they were empty. A white bra was in a pile. He took a stick and raised it by its strap.

In the woods, he tried to be silent. Even in the shadow of the trail, there were darker shadows, and he hid himself in them. When he came to the place along the streambed where he thought he should cross, he held his fingers over the front of the flashlight before he clicked it on so that the beam was divided and weak. He swung it back and forth but saw none of the glint from the silver threads, and so he kept on walking. In the dark, it was easy to get confused. He kept the flashlight on, pointed at the ground. The threads would reflect with a quick flash—he could see it in his mind, and his mind projected out onto the ground so that he had to stop several times to swing the beam again and again to prove that what he thought he’d seen wasn’t really there.

Finally, he saw it, but it was small, and he pressed in closer with the light. There was only one silver strand. He crossed the streambed and shone the beam over the sand on the opposite side. He walked ahead and saw another gash of silver in the ground when the light caught it. The cluster had been moved.

Someone had scattered it.

Eddie crouched and ran his fingers through his hair. He made a fist of it and pulled.

Whoever it was must have been watching him as he walked from Mrs. Kasolos’s with the jug on his shoulder. They’d either taken it for themselves or disturbed his landmarks to keep it hidden where it was.

Another pom-pom strand was in the rocks. He followed it up the slope where there were trees close together, but none of them were as close as the trees where he’d buried the jug. The rocks were too low, none of them larger than a soccer ball. He picked his way between them, going back along the opposite bank. Whoever it had been could have taken the strands and strewn them a hundred yards down just to confuse him.

Farther up, the bank sloped higher and was soft beneath the rocks, but there were still no boulders. The ash on the trees was only on the sides that faced the stream.

He looked around to get his bearings, but he’d gone either too far ahead or too far back. He waved the flashlight beam over the ground but found no more silver strands. There was a smooth rock at his feet and he sat there and rested his head in his hands, feeling his fingers dry and soft with ash.

Bill Peters.

It must have been him. He could still see him walking away down the street, Laura opening the window to shout after him. Eddie should have followed. Bill Peters was the kind of cankerous man to fester in a neighborhood. He could have been just around the corner from Mrs. Kasolos’s, hiding in a bush. He must have watched Eddie carry the jug into the park, following at a distance.

The story about his sick kid was a lie; Eddie was sure of it now. He no longer believed Bill Peters had a kid at all. He was a con man, and Eddie was his patsy. He’d scattered the threads and taken the jug and hidden it somewhere.

The water would be back soon, and when things were normal, Eddie would walk the neighborhood streets and find him. He wouldn’t threaten his life or punch him—he’d simply walk to his house in the shadows and put a brick through the windshield of his car. Or spray-paint THIEF on his front door. Something to let him know that Eddie knew. Something to keep him looking over his shoulder. Eddie would let a few weeks pass after that and then go back and do it again.

He stood up and crossed the streambed and found the trail.

He walked a long time in one direction. He was waiting for the place where the path widened and there were many small rocks and roots, where the runoff from the streets had cut a gully. That would lead to the aluminum railing along the entrance. But he walked so long that he knew he must have been walking in the wrong direction, and so he turned until he’d redoubled his steps and then some but still found nothing. He thought he might just sit down and rest until the sun came up. His legs had lost their strength and he imagined he could see the pulsing cloud of energy as it left him. He walked farther still, and then the trail opened up and he saw the gully. He passed the aluminum rail and stumbled up the hill into the neighborhood streets, and made it home.

Laura was asleep in the bedroom, but she was only sleeping lightly, and when Eddie came in, she stirred.

“Where were you?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

And then she was asleep again.