Mike woke up and the apartment was quiet. That was the first thing he noticed. Not the absence of his father's snoring or his mother's radio or the neighbor's dog. Just quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight. He lay there for a while, listening to it, then got up and went to the kitchen and made coffee. Instant. The kind that comes in a jar and tastes like burnt dirt no matter how much sugar you put in it. He drank it standing at the window, looking out at the street in Duluth where the snow had stopped falling three days ago and nobody had come out to sweep it.

His parents were dead. He knew this the way you know the sky is gray: not through evidence, but through the simple absence of things that should be there. No mother making breakfast. No father reading the paper. No one to tell him he was being stupid when he knew he was being stupid. Just quiet and cold coffee and the window.

He was fifteen. His father had worked at the steel mill until the mill closed, which was before Mike was born, technically, but the closing was still the story his father told at every family dinner, the way some men told jokes or prayed. His mother worked at a diner on Third Street, pouring coffee for truckers and fishermen and people who didn't care that the coffee tasted like burnt dirt. They were the kind of people who lived in apartments that smelled like boiled cabbage and old carpet and who saved bottle caps in a jar on the windowsill because you never know.

Now they were dead and the bottle caps were still in the jar and the coffee still tasted like burnt dirt and Mike was standing at the window drinking it cold because there was no one to make it hot.

Fifteen of them gathered in the abandoned factory on the edge of town. It was a real factory--steel beams and broken windows and the ghost of machinery that had once made something, though nobody could remember what. The Math Kid--fourteen, wore glasses that were held together with tape--said they had about three weeks of food.

"Three weeks of what?" Mike asked.

"Food. Canned goods. Dry goods. Things that don't need refrigeration because the power went out the same day as the Silence."

"What happens in three weeks?"

The Math Kid took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. "I don't know."

"Can we grow stuff?"

"Winter. No."

"Can we fish?"

"The lake is frozen."

"Can we hunt?"

The Math Kid looked at him. "There's nothing to hunt in Duluth."

Mike looked at the other children. There were fifteen of them. Some were crying. Some were staring at the floor. Some were trying to look like they had a plan. Old Tom, who was seventeen and had been a truck driver's apprentice before the Silence, was sitting in a chair that looked like it had belonged to a foreman, drinking coffee from a mug that said World's Best Boss.

"I have an idea," Old Tom said.

They all looked at him.

"Exchange."

"Exchange what?" Mike asked.

"The town. With somebody. Maybe people on the other side of the Pacific. We give them the town. They give us... something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Technology. Food. Books. Something."

"What if there's nobody there?"

"Then it's a walk."

Mike looked at Old Tom. He wasn't sure if he was serious or just talking to hear his own voice. It didn't matter. "Okay," Mike said.

That was it. No debate. No vote. Just okay. Because what was the alternative? Stay in the factory and eat canned beans until they ran out and then eat more canned beans and then eat the cans? Walk to Minneapolis and get shot by someone who had food and didn't want to share? Stay and wait to die, which was basically the same thing but slower?

So they walked. Not that day. Not the next day. They waited until the food ran low enough that walking became more attractive than staying. Which took about two months.

In those two months, Mike learned a few things. First, that Lisa--thirteen, daughter of the diner waitress who had trained her to pour coffee with her left hand and count change with her right--was the best person in the group at making things last. She distributed food with a kind of ruthless efficiency that made the Math Kid's calculations look like suggestions. "Twelve hundred calories a day," she'd say. "That's it. Take it or leave it." And nobody left it, because leaving it meant hunger, and hunger was worse than twelve hundred calories.

Second, that the Math Kid was brilliant and useless in equal measure. He could calculate the exact caloric content of a can of beans to within three calories. He could not figure out how to open a can without a can opener, which they didn't have. "You hit it with a rock," Mike told him. The Math Kid looked at the rock like it was a foreign object. "That would compromise the structural integrity of the container."

"Then eat it cold."

Third, that Old Tom's idea about the Exchange was probably crazy but not crazier than anything else they'd tried. He walked in front most of the time, not because he knew where they were going but because someone had to. His advice was usually unhelpful: "You should try opening cans before you eat them." Or "Don't go to the lake in winter." Or "The sky is up. The ground is down."

They walked south. Duluth Lake was frozen, a sheet of ice that stretched to the horizon like a mirror. Mike sometimes looked at his reflection in the ice and couldn't tell if it was him or someone else. The wind cut through his jacket like a knife. He wore three shirts and a jacket and still felt cold in places he didn't know could feel cold.

On the seventeenth day of walking, they stopped at the edge of a town that might have been alive or might have been empty. Mike couldn't tell from the outside. The windows were dark. The streets were empty. But there was a coffee shop on the corner, and inside the coffee shop, there was a jar on the windowsill filled with bottle caps.

Mike picked one up. It was a Coca-Cola cap. He turned it over in his hands. It was dented. It was old. It was the kind of thing you saved because you never know.

He put it in his pocket. He didn't know why.

They entered the town. No one shot at them. No one welcomed them. No one was there at all. It was just empty streets and dark windows and the smell of old coffee in a shop that had been closed for a long time.

Mike found a mug behind the counter. It was chipped and stained and said World's Best Barista. He made coffee with water from the tap and instant powder from a jar that had been sitting on the shelf since before the Silence. He drank it standing at the window, looking out at an empty town, and it was cold.

But he drank it anyway.

Because the alternative was not drinking it. And not drinking it meant admitting that nothing mattered. And admitting that nothing mattered was harder than drinking cold coffee in an empty town in the middle of a Minnesota winter.

So he drank it. And the Math Kid calculated the water quality. And Lisa counted the remaining cans. And Old Tom walked in front of them again, toward the south, toward whatever was south of Duluth, toward a Pacific that might have people or might have nothing.

And Mike stood at the window and drank his cold coffee and watched the snow start to fall again, because in Duluth, the snow always started again.