Elizabeth Colton and Tyler Leander leave Severn City Airport in the summer of Year Two, joining a group of religious wanderers bound south. Their departure is both a practical break from the airport community and a personal rupture for Clark Thompson, who later keeps their passports and remains unsettled by their absence.

The Wanderers at the Airport

The group’s precise religion is never established. Its members speak of visions, signals, and dreams, and describe a new world as requiring new gods. The airport community lets them stay for a few uneasy nights, judging this less dangerous than driving them away. In return for food, the wanderers offer blessings through brief prayers and gestures of laying hands on people. At night, they gather in Concourse C to chant in a language unfamiliar to the airport residents.

Elizabeth and Tyler Leave

When the group departs, Elizabeth and Tyler go with them. Elizabeth explains their decision as a wish to live more spiritually and apologizes to the people they are leaving, treating her departure as a personal abandonment. Tyler follows at the back of the group, appearing small as they leave the airport. The account gives no destination beyond the wanderers’ southward direction, and it does not explain what Elizabeth expects to find there.

Clark’s Response

Clark Thompson experiences the departure as a failure to protect Elizabeth. He thinks he should have done more to draw her back, but recognizes that he had been struggling to keep himself from the edge of his own capacity. His regret is therefore bound up with helplessness: he can imagine intervening, yet knows how little strength he had to spare. He is also certain that other people share his relief when the group disappears along the airport road. The departure brings competing responses—loss, self-reproach, and relief—rather than a single communal judgment.

The Passports and the Aftermath

The night before leaving, Elizabeth gives Clark Thompson her and Tyler’s passports. By Year Fifteen, he keeps them open to their picture pages in the Museum of Civilization, and they still unsettle him. Their preservation gives the departure a material afterlife: among objects kept from the vanished world, the passports remain tied to two people who left the airport and to a choice Clark could neither prevent nor resolve. In a world where ordinary air travel has ended and dormant planes have been repurposed, their southbound departure belongs to a broader transformation in which movement continues, but no longer under the reliable systems of the former world.