The gas station on Route 95 had been open forty-three years. Jack Morrison had worked there for eleven, which meant he had seen most of the people who lived in this part of Pennsylvania come and go. Or go, anyway. Most of them. It was his third night in a row. The kind of night where the fluorescent lights buzzed loud enough to hear and the cold came through the brick walls like it had a personal grudge. Jack pumped gas into a pickup truck belonging to a man who had been pumping gas here since before Jack was born. The man looked forty. He was seventy-two. "How's the weather up north, Jack?" the man asked, wiping rain from his forehead with a hand that had no wrinkles. "Same as always, Mr. Kowalski. Cold." Denny Kowalski—Denny "Rich," as everyone called him now, though he had never been rich in the old sense, before the extension—smiled with teeth that had never seen a dentist's bill. He filled his tank and drove off toward the coast, toward the communities where the extended lived in houses that never needed repair because their owners had centuries to fix them. Jack went back inside the convenience store and poured coffee from the bottom of the pot. It tasted like burnt water and habit. His phone rang at 2:17 AM. It was Linda. Of course it was Linda. She always called when she knew he would be alone, which was every night, which was every day now that they lived in different states and she had three hundred years ahead of her and he had whatever he had left. "Jack," she said. Her voice was different. Younger, somehow. Or maybe just lighter, like the weight of time had been lifted from her throat. "I got the confirmation. The procedure went well." "When?" "Last month. In San Francisco." Jack nodded even though she could not see him. "That's good, Linda. That's really good." "Are you coming?" "No." "Jack—" "I'm forty-five, Linda. My back hurts when it rains. My knees click when I walk up stairs. I'm not going to San Francisco to stand in line with twenty-year-olds who can afford it because they inherited money or won the lottery or—" He stopped. He had said too much. He always said too much on the phone. "Jack, you don't have to—" "Yes, I do. I'm saying it. I can't afford it. I've known that for five years. I've known it since the first clinics opened and the price was set at a number that might as well have been written in a language I don't speak." Silence on the other end. The kind of silence that is not empty but full of everything neither person is willing to say. "I'm sorry," Linda said finally. "So am I." He hung up and stared at the phone. The coffee was cold. The rain had not stopped. Outside, a truck rumbled past on the highway, heading somewhere Jack would not be going. Old Man Hensley died on a Tuesday. Jack found him in the morning, as he always did, checking on the neighbor who lived in the trailer two spaces down. Hensley was slumped over his breakfast table, a cup of coffee still warm in front of him. Cancer. Stage four. Jack had known it was coming for six months but had not known how to talk about it. No one knew how to talk about it. The funeral was small. Thirteen people came, counting Jack. He was the only one under sixty. He stood at the grave and looked at the faces of the older people—the widows, the cousins, the friends who had known Hensley since before the war, before the factories, before this town had a name. They were dying in a wave, one after another, and Jack was standing at the edge of the shoreline, watching the water pull them under. He was forty-five years old and he was the youngest person at a man's funeral who had been older than him. That night, Jack sat in his trailer and watched the news. The extension clinics had expanded to forty states. The life expectancy in the extended communities was now estimated at two hundred and eighty years. The non-extended, the vast majority, were being referred to in medical journals as the "natural lifespan population." The phrase made Jack's stomach turn, as if his body still remembered a time when death was normal and anything else was the disease. He opened his bank book. He had saved four thousand dollars over the past year. The cheapest extension cost two hundred thousand. He would need to save for fifty years. He was forty-five. He would be ninety-five. Ninety-five. An age he had never expected to reach. Now it was the ceiling. He closed the bank book. He turned off the light. He lay in bed and listened to the trailer settle around him, the metal groaning in the cold. His back hurt. His knees clicked. He was, in every measurable way, a man wearing out. But not yet. Not tonight. In the morning, he would go to the gas station. He would pump gas and sell cigarettes and pour coffee from the bottom of the pot. He would drive home and lie in bed and listen to the rain. And somewhere in the back of his mind, beneath the fatigue and the resignation and the cold, a voice would whisper the same thing it had whispered every night for eleven years: Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll think about it. Tomorrow, he would save. Not enough. Not nearly enough. But something. A dollar here, a dollar there. A quarter from the register, a bill from his paycheck. It was not a plan. It was not a decision. It was the smallest possible gesture toward a future that would almost certainly not include him. But it was something. And in the rust belt of Pennsylvania, in a trailer that smelled of old coffee and colder air, that was the closest thing to hope that Jack Morrison had ever managed.