(This should follow upload Exit, 1, as it's a later chapter in the same incomplete work.)

We are sitting on the edge of the glass sea. We hardly even know one another, but we're both human, so that's enough.

Lanie's sneakers don't touch the gravel and dust. She dangles her feet from the edge of the rusted scaffolding, swings them back and forth, beats her white rubber heels against the brick. We are all yellow and white; the sun is wan, and our hair is washed in dust, washed out. I've become acquainted with her skinny fingers, braced on either side of her now, curled around her little perch like bird claws. Rust or blood under the bitten-down nails; I can't tell which.

It's too hot to talk. No matter how high the sky dome looks, it always feels oppressive. We have to keep our eyes squinted against the shattered blue. A plastic bag blows silently across the broken glass like a white cloud over the ocean. We watch the ironic little tableau as it biodegrades.

I can feel the back of my neck burning, and Lanie says she's hungry. On the other side of the sea, the black hands of skyscraper skeletons are jutting and curling like the fingers of the dead.

'You want to go to McDonald's?'� Lanie asks.

'The McDonald's caved in,'� I remind her. It's hard to talk, my tongue thick with dust and the strange vibrance of the air.

She's not a child, but she looks like one. 'I wanted a happy meal,'� she sighs. The pale sunlight turns her pink lower lip to wax. It makes me guilty to look at her.

'I'm sorry,'� is all I can think of to say. There is no one else here for miles, no one else left alive in the city.

She pounds the brick with her heels, she looks out across the sea, squinting her eyes against the onslaught of the sun.

'I'll live,'� she says, simply.

A deformed bird stumbles and seizes a few feet away in a desperate dustbath.

Lanie says, 'I think the Burger King is still there.'�

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