Chicago

Chicago is a place the post-collapse Travelling Symphony associates with both departure and uncertainty: Gil’s actors escaped from the city together, while later talk of danger there makes it a destination the troupe considers cautiously rather than a settled stop on its route.

A Place of Departure

After the collapse, Gil’s company of Shakespearean actors left Chicago together. They spent several years working on a farm before taking to the road; after three months travelling, they encountered the conductor’s orchestra, and the two groups joined forces. Chicago thus enters the troupe’s history not as its home base but as the starting point of one of the communities that eventually formed it.

A City Recalled as Dangerous

Twenty years after the collapse, the Symphony’s established territory ran along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, with routes reaching Traverse City and Kincardine and following the St. Clair River south. In a discussion about going farther south, the first cello raised a story about snipers in the Sears Tower. Gil answered that he had lived that story, tying his own past to the danger associated with Chicago without supplying further details about what happened there.

The exchange also frames Chicago as a point of hesitation on a possible new route. Gil suggests that continuing south would eventually require turning inland, unless the group especially wanted to see what had become of the city. He then recalls a rumor of a settlement at a former airport near Severn City. The conductor studies the map before acknowledging that the Symphony has discussed expanding its territory for years. Chicago therefore remains on the troupe’s imagined itinerary: a city burdened by stories of violence, set against the uncertain possibility of a surviving settlement farther south.