Jeremy

Jeremy enters the narrative not alone but as one part of a family: he arrives at Severn City Airport with his wife, Charlie, and their baby, Annabel, after the three have become separated from the Travelling Symphony. Their arrival joins the airport’s community to the travelling group’s story, carrying both the ordinary needs of a young family and visible traces of the altered standards of the post-collapse world.

Identity and Arrival

Clark Thompson meets Jeremy when the head of security, Sullivan, introduces the latest arrivals. Jeremy and Charlie appear to be in their early thirties; Annabel is carried in a sling. When Clark asks whether they will stay, Jeremy says they have been separated from their people and asks whether the airport will take them in. His account is brief, but it establishes the immediate circumstance shaping his presence there: the family is seeking refuge and a place among others after losing contact with its community.

The family’s people are the Travelling Symphony, identified by Charlie when Sullivan connects them with newspapers from New Petoskey. The arrival therefore brings more than three unfamiliar residents to the airport. It links its settled population to the travelling performers and to the events that have disrupted the Symphony’s journey. Jeremy does not explain how the separation happened; Charlie calls the story complicated and begins with the existence of a prophet who claimed to come from the airport.

Family and the Marks of the New World

Jeremy is Charlie’s husband and Annabel’s father. The scene presents their relationship through the practical unity of their arrival and through matching signs on their bodies. Charlie’s arms bear many tattoos, including four knives in a row on her right forearm; Jeremy has two small arrows on the back of his left wrist. Clark recognizes the marks as a count of people each has killed: four for Charlie and two for Jeremy. The text gives no account of those deaths, so the tattoos register a past without explaining its circumstances.

That history sits beside the baby in Charlie’s sling. Annabel smiles at Clark, who smiles back, a small exchange of welcome within a scene where the adults’ tattoos disclose a kind of experience that would once have seemed incompatible with family life. Clark recognizes the mismatch as ordinary by the new world’s standards, even as part of him continues to find those standards absurd. Jeremy’s introduction thus makes no claim that violence defines his family; instead, it places the marks of survival alongside care for an infant and the hope of being received.

The Airport as Shelter

The family’s request to stay occurs in a community whose arrangements have developed around both proximity and the need for privacy. By the beginning of the second year, the airport’s occupants had constructed two rows of tents along Concourse B. They built the frames from branches brought in from the woods and covered them with sheets salvaged from nearby hotels, stapling the fabric in place. The sheets had been a contested resource, but the residents’ longing for privacy had prevailed.

Charlie and Jeremy’s tent contains a bed, two plastic crates for clothes and diapers, and the family’s instruments. Its space accommodates domestic life and the remnants of the travelling life they shared with the Symphony. Kirsten lies there after arriving at the airport, while Luli settles beside her. The tent is therefore both the family’s home within the settlement and a place where the separated members of the wider travelling community can meet again. Jeremy’s presence is associated with this modest infrastructure of shelter: a private space assembled from salvaged materials, shared when another person needs care.

Reunion and Narrative Significance

The scale of the settlement gives the family’s arrival a wider context. In the year described, 320 people live at Severn City Airport, making it one of the largest settlements Kirsten has seen. When the new arrivals approach the Departures entrance, two sentries emerge with crossbows. One stops speaking, drops her bow, and runs toward the newcomers, laughing, calling their names, and trying to embrace them all at once. The scene turns a guarded threshold into a recognition and reunion; Jeremy arrives as part of the group that prompts that response.

Jeremy remains a lightly characterized figure in these scenes. He is not given an independent account of the separation or a stated objective beyond asking for shelter with his family. Yet his role is consequential in how the narrative joins its communities: Charlie’s identification of the Travelling Symphony connects the arrivals to a story already known at the airport, while the family’s tent and instruments make their former travelling life visible inside the settlement. Through Jeremy, the return of separated companions is not only a plot connection but a practical transition—from the road to a shared place where a family can sleep, keep its belongings, and be received.