In Year Nineteen, Clark, now seventy, moves slowly with aching joints and a constant awareness of death. Annette has died in Year Seventeen, and Clark wears her Lufthansa scarf as he sits in the Museum of Civilization watching the airport’s daily life: hunters butchering game beneath a plane wing, gardens and cornfields, and a graveyard marked by tray tables.

Clark has opened Water Inc.’s old 360-degree executive reports for public reading, assuming everyone involved is dead. He and Garrett, now close friends, pass afternoons mocking the corporate language in the reports, but Garrett’s fascination turns painful as he returns to his last pre-flu phone call—filled with empty phrases to his boss—while he grieves the wife and twins he left in Halifax.

Clark drifts into memories of his pre-collapse life and increasingly dozes off without meaning to, feeling it as a rehearsal for dying. He wakes near dusk to find Garrett gone and Sullivan, head of security, quietly waiting to introduce new arrivals.

Sullivan brings in a couple, Charlie and Jeremy, traveling with their baby Annabel. Clark immediately recognizes the knife and arrow tattoos as kill marks—four for Charlie and two for Jeremy—an unsettling normalcy in the new world. They ask to stay because they have been separated from their people, who turn out to be the Traveling Symphony.

When Charlie and Jeremy mention a prophet who claimed he was “from here” and describe a blond man who ruled St. Deborah by the Water with charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from Revelation, Clark’s reaction shifts to alarm. Clark rushes to the museum case holding Elizabeth’s passport and urgently questions whether the prophet’s mother is alive, then closes his eyes imagining Tyler—Arthur Leander’s son—reading plague verses beside the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452.