On their second day without the Traveling Symphony, Kirsten and August follow the road north and find a long queue of abandoned cars leading to an isolated gas station. The vehicles have been stripped clean, including a Chicago taxicab riddled with two bullet holes. When a dog barks, Kirsten and August brace for violence, but the armed man who approaches—Finn—speaks cautiously rather than shooting.

Kirsten explains they are headed to the Severn City Airport to find their friends, and Finn offers them water from a hand pump. Behind the station, Kirsten notices Finn has two redheaded twin children and recognizes him from St. Deborah by the Water, which makes Finn tense and briefly suspect they were sent by the prophet. When Kirsten and August identify themselves as members of the Symphony, Finn relaxes and says the Symphony’s music was the best he’d heard in years; he also confirms he fled St. Deborah after the prophet’s takeover.

Kirsten asks about Charlie and Jeremy, and Finn recalls them as Symphony musicians who left town with their baby before he did, but he doesn’t know where they went. Finn says there is little down the road besides abandoned towns and then Severn City and the lake, and he admits he knows of the airport “museum,” rumored to hold many people. Finn avoided it because the prophet is supposedly from there, raising the possibility that the airport community could be aligned with the prophet.

As Kirsten and August continue walking, they reflect on the strange quiet of Year Twenty and the possibility that humanity could eventually vanish. August points out Finn’s facial scar: the same stylized “t” symbol Kirsten saw spray-painted in St. Deborah. With no clear explanation for why the Symphony left no trace on this route, they keep moving, uncertain whether they were abandoned, rerouted, or forced away.

In the afternoon, August finds an overgrown gravel driveway leading to a seemingly untouched two-story house. After confirming no one is inside, Kirsten picks the locked door and they enter a pristine, dust-coated home, then discover a dead family: a child in bed and the parents in the master bedroom. August murmurs private words over the bodies while Kirsten gathers useful items—forks, Q-tips, towels, clothes, salt, magazines—and takes costumes, believing the Symphony’s performances need elegance. Before leaving with suitcases of supplies, Kirsten searches the bookshelves for familiar titles and remembers how she once chose to carry her mother’s forbidden book, Dear V., the unauthorized portrait of Arthur Leander.