The Traveling Symphony performs A Midsummer Night’s Dream at twilight in a parking lot in St. Deborah by the Water, with Lake Michigan visible nearby. The scene emphasizes that after the Georgia Flu and the loss of modern life, beauty still persists in the altered world.

Kirsten plays Titania, wearing a scavenged wedding dress stained with blue watercolor and a crown of flowers over her close-cropped hair; candlelight softens the jagged scar on her cheek. The audience watches in complete silence as Kirsten delivers Titania’s plague-haunted lines about “contagious fogs” and disease, echoing the Symphony’s own post-collapse reality.

Sayid, playing Oberon in a tuxedo Kirsten found in a dead man’s closet, circles Kirsten and speaks his lines as Titania answers him. As Kirsten continues, Titania’s speech shifts from addressing Oberon to sounding like a solitary warning about a world thrown out of balance: “the seasons alter.”

The chapter underlines the Symphony’s purpose through its artifacts and context: multiple versions of Shakespeare’s text, notes about historical plagues, and the reminder that art endured past catastrophe before. It closes on the Symphony’s identifying motto painted on the lead caravan: Because survival is insufficient.