By the end of Year Fifteen, Severn City Airport holds about three hundred people, and Clark’s Museum of Civilization has expanded to fill the Skymiles Lounge. With survival labor now shared among many hands and Clark growing older, Clark spends most days cataloging and preserving artifacts people value for memory rather than utility, including electronics, magazines, engines, and personal documents from the dead.

Clark keeps Elizabeth and Tyler’s passports open in the museum, still unsettled by their departure. A flashback to Year Two explains why: Clark finds young Tyler at the quarantined Air Gradia jet—sealed with corpses—reading aloud from the Book of Revelation. Tyler insists he is “reading to the people inside” and argues the plague happened “for a reason,” implying that survivors were saved because they were “good” and “weren’t weak,” which alarms Clark.

Clark confronts Elizabeth, hoping she will correct Tyler’s growing apocalyptic certainty, but Elizabeth calmly affirms that everything happened for a reason and dismisses Clark’s objections as unknowable divine plan. Soon after, a band of religious wanderers arrives at the airport, preaching visions and “new gods.” After several uneasy nights, the group leaves, and Elizabeth and Tyler depart with them, leaving Clark guilty for not intervening but also relieved.

Back in Year Fifteen, the museum functions like a secular chapel where exhausted workers seek the past: James repeatedly visits the motorcycle he once rode, and Emmanuelle—the first child born at the airport—stares at the phones. A school in Concourse C teaches children about airplanes, borders, and the Internet, concepts that have become abstractions to those born after the collapse.

In fall of Year Fifteen, a longtime trader brings Clark three issues of a new, irregular newspaper from New Petoskey. The paper reports local life, warns about ferals, and describes the Traveling Symphony’s visit, praising a performance of King Lear starring Gil as Lear and Kirsten Raymonde as Cordelia. Clark is shaken to read an interview with Kirsten describing Arthur Leander’s death onstage, and the airport passes the papers hand to hand for days; the existence of new journalism makes Clark briefly believe broader rebuilding might be possible, though no more papers arrive afterward.