In the summer of Year Fifteen, Jeevan Chaudhary sits drinking wine by a river near McKinley, a settlement built around an abandoned motel in what used to be Virginia. Jeevan has walked a thousand miles since the collapse and, after joining McKinley in Year Three, married Daria in Year Ten. With Daria and their friend Michael, Jeevan listens as they debate whether teaching children about the old world still makes sense when the knowledge mostly confuses and upsets them.

Jeevan’s calm evening follows a brutal day of medical work: he has set a neighbor’s broken arm without anesthesia, reminding him how much suffering the post-flu world contains. Despite the horror, Jeevan values being the closest thing to a doctor for miles, and he feels grateful for the stability McKinley offers.

The conversation breaks when a man arrives on horseback carrying his wounded wife. The man, Edward, says his wife has been shot, and Jeevan brings her into the motel room used as a surgery. Jeevan explains he is not a formally trained doctor, but a former paramedic who apprenticed for years, and he prepares to treat the wound as Edward anxiously questions every step.

As Jeevan cleans and stitches the abdomen wound, Edward tells how a “prophet” and a group of followers came to Edward’s plantation community, smiling and singing, and demanded guns and ammunition. They produced Edward’s bound and gagged five-year-old son to force compliance and had abducted Edward’s wife as leverage; after the trade, Edward’s neighbors later found her shot on the roadside. Edward says the prophet wanted Edward’s wife to go north and become a “wife” to one of the men, and shot her out of spite when she refused.

Jeevan finishes stitching and bandaging, telling Edward the woman will likely survive if the wound doesn’t become infected, and advising them to stay in McKinley for several days. Afterward, while sterilizing his tools, Jeevan broods over the cruelty he has witnessed and the danger implied by the prophet’s group traveling north toward unsuspecting settlements, before Daria quietly leads him back to bed.