EARLY-MORNING SUNLIGHT poured between the buildings in large shafts. People were out, in groups of twos and threes, moving among mounds of garbage and debris that had piled up during the night’s storm. Some were beginning to clear rubble from the street and collect it in large barrels. Behind me rumbled a flatbed truck. I was surprised to see a vehicle running.

The entrance to the neighboring building was open, without even a door. I scanned for signs of where Screwdriver might have taken Lily and found a set of stairs and an out-of-service elevator. Climbing the stairs, I was overcome by the repetition of it. Not the fact that every floor was just like the previous and the next but the feeling that I knew the building and this stairway. I looked on through the small circle of my vision, certain that when I finally reached the top, I’d find Lily and then pass out. Consciousness was only borrowed for the climb. I watched steps go by beneath me, the dirty white linoleum spotted with black circles of still-wet blood. The struggle to focus was exhausting. I stumbled and caught myself on the sill of an open window. Below me scrambled tiny figures on rain-washed streets. I remembered to climb. A shadow moved in the square of light ahead of me—a man burdened with something heavy. A woman’s arm, hanging over his own, swung to the rhythm of his walk. It was Screwdriver, and he turned to look down the stairway at me.

“Help me, would you?”

As fast as I could, which felt not fast at all, I climbed the last six stairs to the landing at the top floor. I helped him carry Lily’s inert body into a large apartment. Screwdriver led us down a hallway and into a bedroom where a bare mattress on a pallet lay at the center. We placed her on the bed, and I sat on the floor.

Lily’s voice was a secret. “Bring me that needle.”

The tunnel I watched the world through swung around the room. Nothing connected to anything; I caught only glimpses of early daylight bursting through windows, crumpled bed-sheets, water-damaged walls, a collection of old liquor bottles. At last something moved past me, through my line of sight, and my eyes followed. Screwdriver rummaged through a pile atop a paper-covered table, returning with a small, shining statue, like a squid with its tentacles spiraled around its body. As he walked back to Lily, I could see that the object was twisting as he carried it, opening at the base, the arms opening to reveal a long silver needle.

My voice, thick in my throat: “What are you doing?”

Screwdriver didn’t answer. He knelt over Lily, hands shaking as he gave her the device. Lily took the object, raised it to her head. I couldn’t see what she did with the needle—Screwdriver blocked her from my view—but she moaned as a whirring sound came from the device. Her feet traced slow arcs across the bed. I felt sick. At last the sound stopped and her body relaxed. She held up the device and said something to Screwdriver as he took it from her.

His voice quivered. “I’m so sorry.” He looked over his shoulder at me, eyes red and tearful. Their whispers crawled along the edges of the room and under the sparse furniture, just out of reach. As I strained to hear, my vision blossomed, and I took a deep, shuddering breath. The room came into focus.

Screwdriver, crying, leaned down to kiss Lily on the forehead. Then he stood and walked to me, the small, shining device bright silver in his outstretched hand. “She wants you to have this.”

I looked at it, unsure I even wanted to touch it. “What is it?”

“Take it. She’ll explain it to you.” His voice crackled.

I took it, started at the chill it held. “Can you help me find a doctor?”

He shook his head. He was barely holding himself together. “I’m leaving now. She wants you to take care of her.”

I shook my head, just as he had. Identical. “Stay. Please.”

His breaths came short and fast. “I can’t stay. I can’t see her die again.”

Again.

Behind him Lily talked to herself in bubbling whispers.

“Why me? What can I do?” I was desperate for his help.

“She trusts you.”

“She barely knows me.” I knew that this was wrong the moment I said it. The words pinched in my chest and made me twitch.

Screwdriver almost reached for the device in my hand. He didn’t want to leave it. That made me want to keep it more. He said, “You can do this. Know that.”

Lily muttered from her bed, hands stretched toward the ceiling as if to catch something. I knelt beside her. She lowered her hands and held her side, blood leaking between her fingers and soaking into her mattress.

I looked over my shoulder at Screwdriver. He was in shock, no different from me, eyes narrowed and face pale. He shook his head and turned away. “Fix this.” He sounded as if saying those words severed a part of him. He didn’t look back as he left. Watching him leave made me feel as if I were leaving, as if I were abandoning Lily. I thought I could hear him gasping for breath on his way out. Her hand reached over and found mine, fingers sticky with blood. The room smelled of copper. She looked up at me and said something. I leaned in, straining past roaring blood in my ears to hear her voice.

“Not him,” she said. “You.”

“Why me? I mean, why not him, too? We both can help you.”

She spoke again, her voice so weak it was only air, and I had to force myself to hear her, will myself to understand. I heard her more through the skin than through my ears, her breath brushing the hairs on my cheek—soft, wordless promises of trust and love that were unearned. Her eyes were on me but looked through me, too wide, too seeing, her lips slightly parted. I leaned in and kissed her eyes and then her mouth, a deep kiss for me, only me, because she was gone. Lily had died the moment her breath brushed my cheek, I knew it. I sat with her and listened to the sounds of voices through open windows—parrots or people, I couldn’t say—close but indecipherable, no longer hidden under the labor of her breath.

Guilt weighed me down. I waited for my shaking to stop. When it did, I found myself holding something in each hand: in one, the small silver device, the squid, whose oblong glass head was now full of pale pink liquid; in the other, the video camera. The power light on. I felt the gentle hum of it, and realized that Seventy had turned it on and set it to record before handing it over. I looked into the lens for a moment, realized that it would be recording me then, catch me looking into it, and I turned it away. As I did, I felt a tug at my cheek, the cheek that had felt Lily’s dying breath, and I felt for an instant that the camera had taken something from me. I dropped the camera onto the table and reached up to touch my cheek. It was cold. I climbed into Lily’s low bed, lay beside her, and fell asleep.

I woke at midday to the sound of laughter. The sun stood overhead, and the apartment was hot and filled with indirect light. I went to a window to find it already open. Below, in the alley between her building and the hotel, a crowd had formed around the fire-escape scaffold ruin. Groups of men worked on the twisted metal in concert, brandishing small handsaws, laughter rising at jokes I couldn’t hear. They seasoned themselves with bits of rust. In minutes they had the steps and ladders in parts and the parts loaded into wagons and old shopping carts. Most of the men pulled their wagons themselves; one had a large dog attached to a harness, its tongue hanging low despite the shade. In the short time they’d worked, the scaffold had been deconstructed, nothing left behind but bits too thin and brittle to be of value, and a paprika-colored dusting on the ground.

I watched the street a moment, surprised that I had caught these scrap collectors. A handful of pedestrians passed through the alley. They wore suits or coveralls, carried bags and umbrellas. They looked suspiciously like commuters, and if the city weren’t a ruin, I might have thought this the end of the workday stream.

Among them hobbled a man on a cane. His white hair caught my eye, still at a distance, crossing toward this building. I nearly turned away before realizing it must be Seventy, that he could only be coming for me. I tried to leave the room, but Lily’s body lying before me became a barrier I could not cross. I choked on guilt. Such a short time before I had lain next to her, and now I could barely look at her. I sat on the floor and waited for Seventy. I waited a long time.

When his face appeared at the door, he said, “Can I speak to you outside?”

“I’d rather not leave her.”

“It will be just a moment.”

I edged around the perimeter of the room and followed the old man to the stairs. The room had filled with light, and as a result the hallway seemed darker than tar. From somewhere downstairs a radio shouted out old songs, Top 40 hits from an era long gone quiet, but too fast, voices pitching up too high.

“Where’s Screwdriver?”

Seventy laughed. “Is that what you called him?”

We refused to look at each other. The dark of the hallway obliged us.

“Lily’s not dead in the past.”

I said, “Don’t you think I’ve already fucked things up enough?” I had meant just Lily, but the way Seventy was nodding I realized it could mean so much more.

“Oh, yes. You have. You fucked everything up very nicely. But now you know your goal has changed. Lily didn’t deserve this. Fuck what happens to you. You’re dead already. But Lily—”

“How?”

“All you have to do is keep her from going to the hotel. One of us invites her. Stop that invitation. How hard can that be?”

I watched the floor between us. The songs on the radio fuzzed out and were replaced by voices speaking Chinese.

“Shit,” I said.

He nodded. “You’ve got no fucking choice.” He gripped his cane like a club, as he had before.

“You gonna threaten me again?”

“Don’t have to. There’s a whole group of Elders who are ready to kick the shit out of you if you try to chicken out.”

I put on the jacket. “Why can’t one of you do it?”

“We don’t need to go back,” he said simply. “We already know you do.”

I laughed and returned to the room where Lily lay, surveying it for anything I might have dropped. On the table was the strange silver device, the only thing she’d given me. I took that. I lifted the video camera, popped out the tape and pocketed it.

From the door Seventy held out a hand. “I’ll take the tape.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s mine.”

I pulled the tape out, thought that I could snap open the cassette and rip the tape before he could stop me. I handed it to him, certain it was the wrong thing to do. At her sink I ran a glass under the weak stream of dirty water, filled it, and drank, then refilled and drank again. I’d need to get food but didn’t want to look through her cupboards.

The hallway was empty, Seventy already gone. I didn’t see him or any Elders on my way to the raft. Truth was I didn’t look for them. Instead I focused on my own hunger and the weight of the guns and the odd metallic squid in my pocket. How far back I needed to go was a guess. I thought six months would be sufficient. As if to confirm this, my hand dipped into my pocket and hit the extra timepiece I carried. Of course six months was enough. It already had been. I worried the watch I’d found meant I was doomed to another failure.

I’d have to find someplace long-term to set the raft. I’d figure that out when I got there.