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What We Became: Two Strangers
Paperback
Science FictionGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 4 2026
Pages: 376
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.94 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Stacy Halloran is the reasonable one. She wins arguments. After the end of the world, she is going to win one she would give anything to have lost.
Fourteen months ago a plane came apart over the Atlantic with both her parents on it. Since then the three Halloran children have been holding each other up on the fiftieth floor of the Los Angeles Enclave, ninety thousand people sealed in at twenty-one degrees, and nobody has opened their parents' door. David came home four terms short of being an engineer, and he has been trying to bake their mother's soda bread from a card where every g looks like a fish. He has made forty-one bricks. Cathy, the youngest, is honest as a hammer, and every Sunday she says good morning to an old man in the lift who has not answered anybody in four years. Stacy is nineteen. She has spent perhaps forty hours of her life outdoors, and she keeps a secret list of things she has never done out there. Hear rain on a roof from underneath it. Be cold on purpose.
On the ninth of June, 2058, the forty-second loaf comes out right. That night the angels come.
Then the power goes, and the water, and a building of ninety thousand people begins to empty by physics. Nine days later, with smoke coming up the stairwell, the three of them sit on the kitchen floor and eat their mother's bread, and then they walk down fifty floors. On the forty-fourth landing Cathy stops four thousand people to say good morning to the old man, and he answers.
Below, there is a settlement with a piano nobody can play properly, so everybody who passes it plays one note. There is a child who needs water the three of them cannot spare. And there is the rest of the world.
Twelve years later they call Stacy the Sitter. She walks a loop of eleven settlements north of Los Angeles, and she is the woman who comes and sits with your dying. She keeps three rules, and a fourth. Never sleep where you ate. Never take the good bed. If a place has no old people in it, leave. She prays every night, and what she says is a report: You were not here today either. Here is what happened. A friend offers her a room of her own, and she runs. She has made it so nothing can get at her. It works. That is the trouble with it.
Then, on the coast road in December 2070, six men stop her, and a thin stranger in a mended black coat does the most competent thing she has ever seen a human being do, and the most frightening. Afterwards he sits in the road, bleeding, and tells her that otters hold hands when they sleep so they don't drift apart. She falls asleep in nine minutes, for the first time in eleven years.
His name is Jack Hooper. He is a widower, and he keeps eleven pages about his wife and his sons in oilcloth, with a blank in them for the thing he has already forgotten. On Christmas morning he does what nobody on earth has managed in twelve years, and within weeks the whole coast is telling a story about him that he cannot stand.
He is very good at leaving. He tells her so, plainly, so that she has it in writing. That evening she moves her fire four feet closer, and he moves his eighteen inches to make the geometry better. And when his eleven pages start to come apart, Stacy copies them out by hand, every mistake and every sentence that stops in the middle, and leaves the blank blank.
Two Strangers is the story of two people who have each made a craft of leaving, and what it costs them to stay. It is about a family holding itself up with bread and bad jokes and an old man in a lift, the rules we make so we never have to choose again, and a love built almost entirely out of noticing.
For readers of Station Eleven, The Dog Stars and The Passage.
Book Two of What We Became.
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