Twenty years after air travel ends, the Traveling Symphony moves along a cracked, overgrown road near Lake Michigan in a punishing heat wave. To spare the horses, most people walk with weapons ready while actors rehearse King Lear and scouts watch the road. Gil, the elderly director riding in the second caravan, urges them to keep their lines straight even in dangerous territory.

Kirsten, once a child extra in King Lear before the collapse, walks in tire-soled sandals with knives at her belt and feeds lines to August, a violinist newly trying acting. Dieter, cast as Lear, mutters his part while walking with his horse, Bernstein. The Symphony’s caravans—former pickup trucks converted to horse-drawn wagons—carry children and supplies as the group pushes toward St. Deborah by the Water.

The narration fills in how the post-flu world stabilized: gasoline went stale by Year Three, survivors clustered into small settlements, and five years after the collapse a conductor left an air base with a military orchestra. That orchestra later met Gil’s Shakespeare troupe, and the two groups merged into the Traveling Symphony. Now they circulate a mostly tranquil Great Lakes circuit, and audiences unexpectedly prefer Shakespeare because it represents “what was best about the world.”

After tempers fray and rehearsal fades, the Symphony stops to rest the horses. Kirsten, restless, practices throwing knives into a tree, then climbs into the second caravan where Alexandra mends costumes and returns to a conversation about a lit computer screen in Traverse City. Kirsten admits she barely remembers computers, while Alexandra is enthralled by the idea of electricity and an inventor’s attempt to pedal-power a laptop and “find the Internet,” a hope Kirsten doubts but still finds mesmerizing.

Kirsten’s thoughts shift to scavenging abandoned houses with August, a habit tolerated because they sometimes find useful items. August mourns television and searches for old TV Guide issues and poetry, clinging to fragments of pre-collapse continuity. Kirsten, meanwhile, hunts celebrity magazines and builds a ziplock-bag archive of Arthur Leander photos—Arthur with Miranda, Elizabeth, their son Tyler, and later wives—because Arthur is one of the few pre-collapse figures she remembers clearly. Her strongest memory returns: the night Arthur died onstage, paramedics over him under blazing stage lights, as Kirsten stood nearby in shock.