Old Town is a small, repurposed district of the First Colony, its half-dozen former shops and stores now part of a settlement whose everyday life unfolds among the remains of the old world. Its grocery-store Infirmary preserves that history in its etched storefront name, even as it provides care for the seriously ill.

Setting and Layout

Old Town is a block of six buildings within the First Colony. The Infirmary stands across the Sunspot from the Sanctuary, placing this former commercial strip close to the Colony’s central spaces. Its buildings have been adapted from their earlier uses rather than replaced: the Infirmary itself was once a grocery store.

The Infirmary

When Sara visits, the old grocery’s front windows still bear the etched words Mountaintop Provision Co., Fine Foods and Spirits, Est. 1996, visible when the afternoon sun strikes them. The remnant is a precise piece of the vanished world preserved on a functioning medical building: a business name and founding date remain, but the storefront now belongs to the Colony’s care for its sick.

Sara stops at the Infirmary on her way to the Lighthouse with stew, intending to check on Gabe Curtis, who is forty and suffering from cancer. In its lantern-lit outer room, Sandy Chou—known as Other Sandy—crushes dillonweed seeds with a mortar and pestle while a kettle steams on the stove. Sara sets down the stew, removes the kettle from the heat, and asks whether the dillonweed is for Gabe. The scene locates Old Town not only in the Colony’s reused architecture but in the practical, shared work of tending the ill.