Noche’s disappearance warped Berry’s mind. She waded through the minutes, her swamp-mind slow, slopping along as if time were mud or the fresh cement of a sidewalk—here the footprint of a child, there a pair of initials inside a heart, the word forever scratched with a stick. She discovered that time had holes. She discovered she could fall through those holes into the dark cosmos where chronology made no sense; history, a single slow heartbeat, a wave of liquefied present, a spill. She was disoriented most of the day. And she discovered she wasn’t alone: everyone at the End of the World camp seemed at least a little disoriented, which was, for Berry, a weird and comforting discovery.
There were some weird humans camped out up there in the shruburbs in their vandominiums.
