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Lori clutches Carl, and his heart batters against her embrace.

Don’t look, don’t look, she pleads, but he has already seen too much.

“I loved her,” Carl weeps.

“Baby, don’t look,” Lori says. “Don’t watch.”

Rick’s bullet takes Sophia out, and the search ends. Carol wails, but everyone else falls silent. Before Shane flipped out, there was an electric heaviness to the air, like before a violent thunderstorm, but now the balance of everything shifts.

This is the world the baby will come into – a world filled with unimaginable grief, where horror is the norm and no guarantees exist.

Maggie clings to Glenn, crying. “You all did the right thing.” But her voice hitches, as if it is really a question.

“There was nothing left of how they were. Your mama would have ripped you to pieces.”

Maggie nods, wiping her eyes. “If it had been the other way around, Mama would have. . . There would have been no Walkers in the barn. She loved her neighbors and would have given her life for any of us, but she was no fool. Now they’re all. They’re really gone now. Their souls can rest in peace.”

Glenn kisses her.

Andrea often wakes from nightmares in which she shoots her sister, but just after pulling the trigger, Amy changes back to her normal self. The dreams plague Andrea into wakefulness, and she wonders whether any part of Amy could have been saved. If she had been able to keep her alive and safe, like Hershel did, maybe a cure could have been found. She imagines Amy gliding through the sea like the mermaids she loved so dearly, her golden hair a halo around her.

“I wish I’d never seen her like that,” Carol says.

Andrea squeezes her hand. “I know.”

You fucking fool, Daryl thinks, when Sophia steps out of the barn. He should have known, but he has refused to allow the darkness in. Hope has flickered in a little girl, somewhere out there, waiting to be found. Merle would be laughing his ass off because Merle had known that hope is fool’s gold. Never had been, even before the world had gone to shit. “The world is a toilet filled with turds,” Merle was fond of saying. “The key is to be one of the floaters.”

All of them so far that have survived this world are floaters.