Jeevan leaves the apartment after Frank’s death, determined to stay off roads by following the lake to avoid other people. Before going, Jeevan watches the expressway through a telescope, repeatedly checks that Frank is truly gone, and pockets a page from Frank’s manuscript marked with a note about immortality. With Frank’s old hiking backpack, Jeevan pushes past the building’s reeking corridor and slips into a lobby with smashed glass doors.

Outside, Toronto is unnaturally dark and silent—no electric light anywhere—and the air smells of smoke. Jeevan walks cautiously along the lakeshore in twilight, hyperalert to threats and to the thought of being robbed for his supplies. He notices a white sailboat on the lake, then keeps moving as the city gradually falls away; distant gunshots make him fear he is too slow and exposed.

Exhausted and freezing, Jeevan struggles to stay hydrated by eating snow and remembers childhood moments with Frank before Frank’s spinal-cord injury. At sunrise Jeevan builds a crude shelter from driftwood and garbage bags to block the wind and hide his presence, then sleeps fitfully. When Jeevan wakes, disoriented and colder than ever, the loneliness begins to feel like proof of how completely the Georgia Flu has erased the population.

After five days alone, Jeevan sees three survivors ahead on the shore and follows at a distance before approaching their fire with his hands raised. The group—Ben, Abdul, and Jenny—confirm that there is crime but fewer people than expected, and Ben explains how fast the sickness killed his family and how he buried them himself, implying Ben is immune. Jeevan travels with them for nearly a week until they split: Jeevan continues along the lake while the others head west toward a town where Jenny hopes to find her sister.

Alone again, Jeevan briefly glimpses Toronto across the water like a distant fairy tale, but the journey is dominated by corpses, abandoned cars, hungry dogs, and travelers moving south. Jeevan avoids roads and towns, scavenges food from empty houses, and fights to hold onto his identity by repeating biographical facts until they fragment into a single command: “Keep walking.”