Twenty years after “the collapse,” as they call it, a group of musicians and actors known as the Traveling Symphony walk alongside horse-drawn caravans fashioned from pickup trucks near Lake Michigan. The group formed and began traveling five years after the pandemic, when members of a military orchestra joined up with a company of actors to perform in the Great Lakes region, now dotted by small settlements. As she walks, Kirsten, now in her twenties, rehearses King Lear with her fellow actors.

The Symphony stops to rest, and Kirsten practices throwing the knives she keeps in her belt. Prompted by a recent experience with a man who powered a computer with a makeshift generator, Alexandra, the Symphony’s youngest actor, asks Kirsten about computers; to her disappointment, Kirsten cannot tell her much.

Kirsten and August, the Symphony’s second violinist, have a habit of exploring abandoned houses. August, who watched a lot of TV in his preteen years before the collapse, looks for TV Guides and poetry books. Kirsten searches for celebrity magazines for information about Arthur, whom she remembers fondly. She still has a pair of comic books he gave her.