“He’d never been to Buffalo, and now it was the foundry of the future. The Nile, the Cradle of Reconstruction.”

After the Last Night, the main U.S. military headquarters is based in Buffalo, New York. As the “foundry of the future,” the officials at the base are tasked with establishing rescue centers throughout the country, providing sustenance to survivors, and planning towards reconstruction of U.S. cities. Mark dubs Buffalo “the Nile,” as the main headquarters functions like the river: it flows through a dry region, providing life, and connects one region to another. Buffalo is where every communication is funneled through and its collapse would mean the end of reconstruction efforts entirely.

“The city required people to make it go. When citizens flee or die, others must replace them.”

During Mark’s sweeps, he contemplates the makeup of New York City, a city that he has longed to live in since he was a young boy visiting his Uncle Lloyd’s Manhattan apartment. Now that New York City is largely devoid of people, he realizes that it is a defunct. It requires people to populate the space in order to constitute a true city. This is a not a romantic view in Mark’s eyes but rather points to a city’s transitory nature.

“Mark Spitz had noticed on numerous occasions that while the regular skels got referred to as it, the stragglers were awarded male and female pronouns, and he wondered what that meant.”

Throughout the novel, several people note the difference between skel and straggler behavior, although no one can explain how one becomes a skel rather than a straggler.