The Yard

The Yard is an expansive machinery salvage ground where Klara settles after the events of her life with Josie. Although its damaged equipment first strikes her as disorderly, she comes to recognize the yardmen’s careful arrangement of it. With few visitors and an unobstructed view of the sky, the Yard gives Klara a quiet place to watch the Sun, revisit her memories, and eventually meet the Manager again.

Setting and Arrangement

The Yard is large and mostly open to the sky. From Klara’s chosen place, the only tall object she can see is a distant construction crane. The wide horizon recalls the view she once shared with Rick while crossing Mr McBain’s fields, especially after the grass had been cut. Here, however, the openness has a practical consequence: nothing blocks her view of the Sun’s path, and even on cloudy days she remains aware of where he is overhead.

At first Klara takes the Yard’s machinery for evidence of untidiness. Its objects have rough, damaged appearances—severed cables protrude from some, and grille panels are dented. Looking more closely changes her judgment. The yardmen have placed machinery, crates, and bundles in orderly rows, leaving long passages through which a visitor can inspect the objects one at a time. The passages are not entirely safe to walk: rods and wires still require care. The setting’s order therefore does not erase the evidence of damage; it makes damaged things legible without making them whole.

Visitors and Everyday Life

The open ground makes movement easy for Klara to notice. She can spot visitors even at a distance, as small figures among the rows, but they do not come often. The human voices she most commonly hears are the yardmen calling to one another, so the Yard’s ordinary life is marked less by conversation with visitors than by work heard across the salvage ground.

Birds sometimes descend, only to find little of interest. On one occasion a group of dark birds lands in formation on machinery near Klara. For a moment she wonders whether they might be Rick’s drone birds, sent to observe her; she then recognizes that they are natural birds. They perch motionless despite the wind ruffling their feathers, before taking off together. The brief uncertainty shows how the Yard’s scattered machinery and Klara’s remembered relationships can lend an ordinary sight a personal meaning, without confusing her about what she has actually seen.

A kind yardman tells Klara that three AFs are on the South Side and two are in the Ring, and offers to take her to either area. She declines, content to stay in her chosen place. The offer establishes that other AFs are present elsewhere in the Yard, but Klara’s decision matters more than the prospect of company: she does not ask to be moved and remains attached to the spot where she can watch the sky and keep her own thoughts.

Klara and the Manager

Several days before the reunion, Klara notices a long-coated visitor moving behind her. The woman carries a pouch-like bag at the end of a strap; when she bends to examine objects on the ground, the bag swings forward. Klara cannot watch her continuously, and for a time her attention shifts away. When a sound draws her back, the visitor is standing in front of her. Before the woman crouches to look at her face, Klara recognizes the Manager, and happiness fills her mind. The gradual recognition makes the meeting an interruption of Klara’s solitude rather than a planned visit.

The Manager confirms that she no longer looks after AFs, a responsibility that ended some time earlier. She now comes to the Yard from time to time, and also visits the yard at Memorial Bridge, but prefers this place. She collects small souvenirs in her pouch; visitors are not allowed to take anything substantial, though smaller items are permitted. The workers know her, and her visits also carry the hope of encountering one of the AFs she once cared for. The Yard is thus connected not only to Klara’s present but to the Manager’s former work and continuing attachments.

The Manager tells Klara that she had been one of the most remarkable AFs in her care, praising her unusual insight and powers of observation. She is glad that things went well, while recognizing that even remarkable abilities could not guarantee an outcome. Her praise joins the Yard’s emphasis on looking closely: Klara’s attentiveness, which once helped define her as an AF, remains part of how the Manager remembers her.

Memory, Solitude, and Significance

The Yard’s openness provides a physical counterpoint to Klara’s inward life. In her final days, memories of different places and moments sometimes overlap: the dark-sky morning when the Sun saved Josie, the trip to Morgan’s Falls, and the illuminated diner chosen by Mr Vance can merge into one composite scene. Klara remains able to separate them and put each back in its proper context, but these vivid combinations can temporarily make her forget that she is sitting on the Yard’s hard ground. The place holds her in the present even as her mind moves among earlier settings.

When the Manager offers to have the workers move Klara near some B3s on the far side, Klara refuses. She likes her spot and has her memories to sort into their proper order. The Manager accepts that this is probably wise and admits that she never felt toward B3s as she did toward Klara’s generation; she thinks customers likewise failed to take to them despite their technical advances. The contrast places the Yard at a transition between generations of AFs, while showing that technical progress has not displaced the personal regard attached to particular individuals.

The conversation also returns to the question of what could be continued in Josie. Klara recalls that Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that could not be continued, but concludes that he searched in the wrong place: what was special existed in the people who loved her. She therefore believes she would not have succeeded as a replacement and is glad she chose as she did. The Manager welcomes this lack of regret, and says she has thought of Klara often and considered her one of the finest AFs she had. In this quiet setting, the Yard becomes a place where neither past affection nor Klara’s decision is undone; instead, memory can be examined and placed in order, beneath the open sky she has chosen to keep watching.