He came down out of the gray hills in the last hour of light carrying nothing but a canvas bag pressed to his chest like a child. The road below him cracked and white. Beyond it the remains of a town. Three structures still standing and the rest just teeth in the jaw of the earth.

He walked the center of the road because there was no reason not to. No cars in a decade. No horses. Nothing on wheels but the carts men pushed and if you heard one coming you had time enough to die of other things before it reached you.

The trading post had been a garage once. The pumps out front long rusted and hollowed by scavengers who’d drained even the fumes. A man sat on a steel drum by the door watching him come. He did not rise or speak.

Water, the wanderer said.

The man on the drum gestured with his chin toward the darkness inside.

He went in. A woman stood behind a counter made of stacked tires and a sheet of plywood. On the wall behind her plastic jugs of water glowing pale in the dimness. Cans without labels. A pile of blankets that smelled of smoke and bodies.

How much for water.

She looked at him. At the bag he held.

What do you have.

He opened it and showed her. Four chips wrapped in cloth. Two of them small and ordinary. One larger with pins bent but intact. One he did not know the purpose of but it was marked with numbers that suggested importance.

She reached in and took the largest one. Held it to what light there was.

This is dead, she said.

It is not.

How do you know.

I dont.

She set it on the counter. The bent one, she said. And one of the small ones. For a jug and a can.

He said nothing. She waited. Outside the man on the drum coughed and spat.

What about shelter.

She looked past him at the door.

Theres a room in back. Roof half gone. You can have it til dawn.

How much.

The other small one.

He stood there calculating what could not be calculated. The worth of a night’s rest measured against the worth of tomorrow and the day after. The ordinary way of things now. Every transaction a small death. Every exchange a letting go of some future self who might have needed what you spent.

He gave her the chips. All three. She put them in a box beneath the counter and pointed to a door at the back.

The room was as she’d said. Half a roof. A mattress black with stains. The stars coming through where the ceiling should have been. He drank from the jug sparingly and ate the can’s contents cold. Some kind of vegetable matter. Gray and soft.

He lay on the mattress and looked up at the sky. The stars ancient and indifferent. The same ones men had navigated by when there were still places to go. He held the bag with the single remaining chip against his chest and he did not sleep for a long time.

In the morning he was gone before light. The woman never checked the room. The man on the drum watched him walk north until he was just a speck on the pale road and then not even that.