They arrived in waves.
The first group had driven through the night — fourteen survivors in three vehicles, the oldest among them a woman named Petra who had been eight years old when Cedar Falls fell and was now thirty, a veterinarian, with her mate and her two children and a duffel bag that contained everything she wanted to bring back to the place she still called home in the specific, aching way of people whose home had been taken from them before they had finished becoming who they would be.
The second wave came the following morning. Eleven more. Then six that afternoon. Then four who had needed an extra day to arrange coverage and had driven through a rainstorm with the wipers going and the radio on and the specific silence of people in a car who are going somewhere they have been
