The Passage

TWENTY-FOUR

Log of the Watch

Summer 92

Day 51: No sign.

Day 52: No sign.

Day 53: No sign.

Day 54: No sign.

Day 55: No sign.

Day 56: No sign.

Day 57: Peter Jaxon stationed at FP 1 (M: Theo Jaxon). No sign.

Day 58: No sign.

Day 59: No sign.

Day 60: No sign.

During this period: 0 contacts. No souls killed or taken. Second Captain vacancy (T. Jaxon, deceased) referred to Sanjay Patal.

Respectfully submitted to the Household,

S. C. Ramirez, First Captain

Dawn of the eighth morning: Peter’s eyes snapped open at the sound of the herd, coming down the trace.

He remembered thinking, some time after half-night: Just a few minutes. Just a few minutes off my feet, to gather my strength. But the moment he’d allowed himself to sit, bracing his back against the rampart, and rested his weary head upon his folded arms, sleep had taken him fast.

“Good, you’re up.”

Lish was standing above him. Peter rubbed his eyes and rose, accepting without comment the canteen of water she was handing him. His limbs felt heavy and slow, as if his bones had been replaced by tubes of sloshing liquid. He took a drink of tepid water and cast his gaze over the edge of the rampart. Beyond the fireline, a faint mist was rising slowly from the hills.

“How long was I out?”

She squared her shoulders toward him. “Forget it. You’d been up seven nights without a break. You had no business being out here as it was. Anybody who says different can take it up with me.”

Morning Bell sounded. Peter and Alicia watched in silence as the gates commenced to retract into their pockets. The herd, restless and ready to move, began to surge through the opening.

“Go home and sleep,” Alicia said, as the logging crews were preparing to leave. “You can worry about the Stone later.”

“I’m going to wait for him.”

She steadied her eyes on his face. “Peter. It’s been seven nights. Go home.”

They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps ascending the ladder. Hollis Wilson hoisted himself onto the catwalk and looked at the two of them, frowning.

“You standing down, Peter?”

“All yours,” Alicia answered. “We’re done here.”

“I said, I’m staying.”

The day shift was commencing. Two more Watchers clambered up the ladder, Gar Phillips and Vivian Chou. Gar was telling some kind of story, Vivian laughing along, but when they saw the three of them standing there, they abruptly fell silent and moved briskly down the catwalk.

“Listen,” Hollis said, “if you want to take this post, it’s okay with me. But I’m the OD, so I’ll have to tell Soo.”

“No, he’s not,” Alicia said. “I mean it, Peter. It’s not a request. Hollis won’t say it, but I will. Go home.”

The urge to protest rose within him. But as he opened his mouth to speak he was met with a blast of grief that stunned him into surrender. Alicia was right. It was over; Theo was gone. He should have felt relieved, but all he felt was exhausted-a bone weariness that ran so deep he felt as if he’d be dragging it for the rest of his life like a chain. It took nearly all of his strength just to lift his cross from the floor of the rampart.

“I’m sorry about your brother, Peter,” Hollis said. “I guess I can say that now since it’s been seven nights.”

“I appreciate that, Hollis.”

“I guess that makes you Household now, huh?”

Peter had barely considered this. He supposed he was. His cousins, Dana and Leigh, were both older, but Dana had taken a pass when Peter’s father had stepped down, and he doubted Leigh would be interested in the job now, with a baby to look after in the Sanctuary.

“I guess it does.”

“Well, um, congratulations?” Hollis gave an awkward shrug. “Funny to say it, but you know what I mean.”

He’d told no one about the girl, not even Alicia, who might have actually believed him.

The distance from the mall roof to the ground had been less than Peter had thought. He had been unable to detect, as Alicia could from below, how high the sand was piled against the base of the building-a tall, sloping dune that had absorbed the impact of his fall as he tumbled headlong down it. Still clutching the axe, he’d climbed onto Omega’s back behind Alicia; it wasn’t until they were clear on the other side of Banning, and could reasonably conclude that no pursuit was forthcoming, that he’d thought to wonder how they’d gotten away, and why the horses themselves were not dead.

Alicia and Caleb had fled the atrium through the kitchen of the restaurant. This connected through a series of hallways to a loading dock. The big bay doors were rusted tight, but one was open a crack, letting in a thin beam of sunlight. Using a length of pipe as a wedge, the two of them had managed to force it open wide enough to scramble through. They rolled out into sunlight to find themselves on the south side of the mall. That was when they spotted two of the horses, obliviously chewing on a stand of tall weeds. Alicia couldn’t believe their luck. She and Caleb were making a circuit around the building when she heard the crash of the door and saw Peter on the edge of the roof.

“Why didn’t you just go when you found the horses?” Peter asked her.

They had stopped on the power station road to water the animals, not far from the place where they had seen the viral in the trees, six days earlier. They had only what was in their canteens, but after they had each taken some, they poured what was left into their hands and let the horses lick it off. Peter’s bleeding elbow was wrapped in a bandage they’d cut from his jersey; the wound wasn’t deep but would probably need stitches.

“I don’t second-guess these things, Peter.” Alicia’s voice was sharp; he wondered if he’d offended her. “It seemed like the right thing to do, and it was.”

That was when he could have told them about the girl. And yet he’d hesitated, feeling the moment pass away. A young girl alone, and the thing she’d done under the carousel, covering him with her body; the look that passed between them, and the kiss on his cheek, and the suddenly slamming door. Maybe in the heat of the moment he had simply imagined all of it. He told them he’d found a stairwell and let it go at that.

They returned to a great commotion; they were four days overdue, on the verge of being declared lost. At the news of their return, a crowd had assembled at the gate. Leigh actually fainted before anyone could explain that Arlo was not dead, that he had stayed behind at the station. Peter didn’t have the heart to go find Mausami in the Sanctuary, to give her the news about Theo. In any case, someone would tell her. Michael was there, and Sara too; it was she who washed and stitched his elbow while he sat on a rock, wincing at the pain and feeling cheated that the trancelike numbness brought on by the loss of his brother did not also apply to having one’s skin sewn closed with a needle. She wrapped it in a proper bandage, hugged him quickly, and burst into tears. Then, as darkness fell, the crowd parted, making room for him to pass, and as Second Bell began to ring, Peter ascended the rampart, to stand the Mercy for his brother.

He left Alicia at the bottom of the ladder, promising that he’d go home and sleep. But home was the last place he wanted to go. Only a few of the unmarried men still used the barracks; the place was filthy and reeked as bad as the power station. But that would be where Peter lived from now on. He needed a few things from the house, that was all.

The morning sun was already warm on his shoulders when he arrived at the house, a five-room cabin facing the East Glade. It was the only home that Peter had ever known, since coming out of the Sanctuary; he and Theo had barely done more than sleep there since their mother’s death. They certainly hadn’t done much to keep the place tidy. It always bothered Peter what a mess it was-dishes piled in the sink, clothing on the floor, every surface tacky with grime-and yet he could never quite bring himself to do anything about this. Their mother had been nothing if not neat, and had kept the house well-the floors washed and rugs beaten, the hearth swept of ashes, the kitchen clear of debris. There were two bedrooms on the first floor, where he and Theo slept, and one, his parents’, tucked under the eaves on the second. Peter went to his room and quickly packed a rucksack with a few days’ worth of clothing; he’d look over Theo’s belongings later, deciding what to keep for himself before carting the rest to the Storehouse, where his brother’s clothes and shoes would be sorted and stowed, to await redistribution among the Colony at Share. It was Theo who had seen to this chore after their mother’s death, knowing that Peter could not; one winter day, almost a year later, Peter had seen a woman-Gloria Patal-wearing a scarf he recognized. Gloria was in the market stalls, sorting jars of honey. The scarf, with its bit of fringe, was unmistakably his mother’s. Peter had been so disturbed he’d darted away, as if from the scene of some misdeed in which he was implicated.

He finished his packing and stepped into the main room of the house, a combined kitchen and living area under exposed beams. The stove hadn’t been lit in months; the woodpile out back was probably full of mice by now. Every surface in the room was coated in a sticky skin of dust. Like nobody lived there at all. Well, he thought, I guess they don’t.

A last impulse took him upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. The drawers of the small dresser were vacant, the sagging mattress stripped of bedding, the shelves in the old wardrobe barren except for a filigree of cobwebs that swayed in the shifting air when he opened the door. The small bedside table where his mother had kept a cup of water and her glasses-the one thing of hers Peter would have liked to keep, but couldn’t; a decent pair of glasses was worth a full share-was ringed with ghostly stains. Nobody had opened the windows in months; the atmosphere of the room felt trapped and ill-used, one more item that Peter had dishonored with his neglect. It was true: he felt like he’d failed them, failed them all.

He toted his pack out into the gathering heat of the morning. From all around him came the sounds of activity: the tamp and whinny of the horses in the stables, the ringing music of a hammer from the smithing shop, the calls of the day shift from the Wall, and, as he moved into Old Town, the laughing squeals of the children, playing in the courtyard of the Sanctuary. Morning recess, when for an exhilarating hour Teacher would let them all run wild as mice; Peter recalled a winter day, sunlit and cold, and a game of take-away in which he had, with miraculous effortlessness, seized the stick from the hands of a much older, larger boy-in his memory it was one of the Wilson brothers-and managed to keep it to himself until Teacher, clapping and waving her mittened hands, had summoned them all inside. The sharpness of cold air in his lungs, and the dry, brown look of the world in winter; the steam of his sweat rising on his brow and the pure physical elation as he had dodged and weaved his way through the grasping hands of his attackers. How alive he’d felt. Peter searched his memory for his brother-surely Theo had been among the Littles on that winter morning, part of the galloping pack-but could find no trace of him. The place where his brother should have been was empty.

He came to the training pits then. A trio of wide depressions in the earth, twenty meters long, with high earthen walls to constrain the inevitable stray bolts and arrows, the wildly misthrown blades. At the close end of the middle trench, five new trainees were standing at attention. Three girls and two boys, ranging in ages from nine to thirteen: in their rigid postures and anxious faces, Peter could read the same effortful seriousness he’d felt when he’d come into the pits, an overwhelming desire to prove himself. Theo was ahead of him, three grades; he recalled the morning his brother had been chosen as a runner, the proud smile on his face as he turned and made his way to the Wall for the first time. The glory was reflected, but Peter had felt it, too. Soon he would follow.

The trainer this morning was Peter’s cousin Dana, Uncle Willem’s girl. She was eight years older than Peter and had stood down to take over the pits after the birth of her first daughter, Ellie. Her youngest, Kat, was still in the Sanctuary, but Ellie had come out a year ago and was one of the trainees in the pit, first grade, tall for her age and slender like her mother, with long black hair plaited in a Watcher braid.

Dana, standing before the group, examined them with a stony expression, as if she were picking a ram for slaughter. All part of the ritual.

“What do we have?” she asked the group.

They answered with one voice. “One shot!”

“Where do they come from?”

Louder this time: “They come from above!”

Dana paused, rocking back on her heels, and caught sight of Peter. She sent him a sad smile before facing her charges once again, her face hardening into a scowl. “Well, that was horrible. You’ve just earned yourselves three extra laps before chow. Now, I want two lines, bows up.”

“What do you think?”

Sanjay Patal: Peter had been so lost in thought he hadn’t heard the man approach. Sanjay was standing beside him, arms folded over his chest, his gaze directed over the pits.

“They’ll learn.”

Below them the trainees had begun their morning drills. One of the youngest, the little Darrell boy, misfired, burying his arrow in the fence behind the target with a thunk. The others began to laugh.

“I’m sorry about your brother.” Sanjay turned to face him, drawing Peter’s attention back away from the pits. He was a physically slight man, though the impression he gave was one of compactness. He kept his face clean-shaven, his hair, wisped with gray, trimmed tightly to his scalp. Small white teeth and deep-set eyes darkened by a heavy, wool-like brow. “Theo was a good man. It shouldn’t have happened.”

Peter didn’t reply. What was there to say?

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” Sanjay continued. “To be honest, not all of it makes complete sense. This thing with Zander. And what you were doing at the library.”

Peter felt the quick shiver of his lie. They had all agreed to hold to the original story and not tell anyone about the guns, at least for the time being. But this had quickly proved itself a far more complex undertaking than Peter had anticipated. Without the guns, their story was full of holes-what they were doing on the roof of the power station, how they’d rescued Caleb, Zander’s death, their presence in the library.

“We told you everything,” Peter said. “Zander must have gotten bitten somehow. We thought it might have happened at the library, so we went to check it out.”

“But why would Theo take a risk like that? Or was it Alicia’s idea?”

“Why would you think that?”

Sanjay paused, clearing his throat. “I know she is your friend, Peter, and I do not doubt her skills. But she’s reckless. Always quick with the hunt.”

“It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s. It was just bad luck. We decided as a group.”

Sanjay paused once more, casting a meditative gaze over the pits. Peter said nothing, hoping his silence would bring about an end to the conversation.

“Still, I find it hard to understand. Out of character for your brother, to take a chance like that. I suppose we’ll never know.” Sanjay gave his head a preoccupied shake and turned to face Peter again, his expression softening. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be interrogating you like this. I’m sure you’re tired. But as long as I have you here, there’s something else I need to speak with you about. It concerns the Household. Your brother’s spot.”

Just the thought made Peter suddenly weary. But the duty was his to perform. “Let me know what you want me to do.”

“That is the thing I want to talk to you about, Peter. Your father erred, I believe, in passing his seat to your brother. His seat rightfully belonged to Dana. She was, and is, the oldest Jaxon.”

“But she turned it down.”

“That’s true. But confidentially, I will tell you that we have not always been… comfortable with the way this came about. Dana was upset. Her father, as you recall, had just been killed. Many of us think she would have been glad to serve if your father hadn’t pressured her to stand aside.”

What was Sanjay saying? That the job was Dana’s? “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Theo never said a word to me about it.”

“Well, I doubt that he would have.” Sanjay let a silent moment pass. “Your father and I did not always see eye to eye. I’m sure you know this. I opposed the Long Rides from the start. But your father never could quite let go of the idea, even after he’d lost so many men. It was his intention that your brother should revive the rides. That is why he wanted Theo on the Household.”

The trainees had moved out of the pits now, jogging down the path to begin their laps around the perimeter. What was it Theo had said, that night in the control room? That Sanjay was good at what he did? All of which only served to make Peter, at that moment, fiercely protective of a job that minutes ago he would have gladly given away to the first person he saw.

“I don’t know, Sanjay.”

“You don’t have to know, Peter. The Household has met. We are all in agreement. The seat is rightfully Dana’s.”

“And she wants it?”

“When I explained everything to her, yes.” Sanjay put a hand on Peter’s shoulder-a gesture meant to be consoling, Peter supposed, though it wasn’t, not at all. “Please don’t take it badly. It’s not a reflection on you. We were willing to overlook this irregularity because everyone held Theo in such high regard.”

Just like that, Peter thought, the waters had closed over his brother. Theo’s shirts were still folded in the drawers, his spare boots sitting under the bed, and it was as if he’d never even existed.

Sanjay lifted his face past the pits. “Well. Here’s Soo.”

Peter turned to see Soo Ramirez striding toward them from the gate; with her was Jimmy Molyneau. A tall, sandy-haired woman in her early forties, Soo had risen to the rank of First Captain after Willem’s death-a supremely competent woman with a temper that could flare at a moment’s notice, producing outbursts that made even the most hardened Watcher cower in fear.

“Peter, I’ve been looking for you. Take a few days off the Wall if you want. Let me know when you’re going to do the etching; I’d like to say a few words.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Sanjay interjected. “Let us know. And by all means, take a few days. There’s no hurry.”

Soo’s arrival at precisely this moment was no accident, Peter realized; he was being handled.

“Okay,” Peter managed. “I guess I will.”

“I really liked your brother,” Jimmy offered then, evidently thinking his presence warranted some comment. “Karen, too.”

“Thanks. I’m hearing that a lot.”

The remark came off as too bitter; Peter regretted it immediately, seeing the look on Jimmy’s hawk-nosed face. Jimmy had been Theo’s friend, too-a Second Captain, just as Theo was-and knew what it meant to lose a brother. Connor Molyneau had been killed five years ago on a smokehunt to clear out a pod in Upper Field. After Soo, Jimmy was the oldest of the officers, in his midthirties with a wife and two girls; he could have stood down years ago without an ill thought from anyone but had chosen to stay on. Sometimes his wife, Karen, would bring him hot meals on the Wall, a gesture that embarrassed him and earned him no end of jokes from the Watch, even as everyone could tell he liked it.

“Sorry, Jimmy.”

He shrugged. “Forget it. I’ve been there, believe me.”

“He’s saying it because it’s true, Peter. Your brother was someone very important to all of us.” With this final declaration, Sanjay lifted his chin officiously in Soo’s direction. “Captain, if you have a minute?”

Soo nodded, her eyes still fixed on Peter’s face. “I mean it,” she said, and touched him again, gripping his arm just above the elbow. “Take whatever time you need.”

Peter waited a few minutes to put some distance between himself and the three of them. He felt peculiarly agitated, alert but without focus. What had transpired was only talk, nothing, in the end, that should have surprised him all that much: the expected, awkward condolences he knew so well, and then the news that he wouldn’t have to be Household after all-a fact he should have welcomed, wanting nothing whatsoever to do with the daily duties of running things in the first place. And yet Peter had felt a deeper current running under the surface of the conversation. He had the distinct impression of being maneuvered, of everybody knowing something he didn’t.

Hoisting his pack over one shoulder-the thing was practically empty, why had he bothered?-he decided not to go to the barracks straight off and instead moved down the path in the opposite direction.

The Dark Night Stone sat at the far end of the plaza: a pear-shaped granite boulder twice the height of a man, grayish white with jewel-like flecks of pink quartzite, in the surface of which were engraved the names of the missing and the dead. This was why he had come. One hundred and sixty-two names: it had taken months to etch them all. Two whole families of Levines and Darrells. The entire Boyes clan, nine all told. A host of Greenbergs and Patals and Chous and Molyneaus and Strausses and Fishers and two Donadios-Lish’s parents, John and Angel. The first Jaxons to be named on the stone were Darla and Taylor Jaxon, Peter’s grandparents, who’d died in the rubble of their house under the north wall. It was easy for Peter to think of them as old since they’d been dead for fifteen years, the entirety of their lives consigned to a time before his living memory, a region of existence that Peter simply thought of as “ago.” But, in fact, Taylor hadn’t been much older than forty, and Darla, Taylor ’s second wife, just thirty-six at the time of the quake.

The Stone had originally been meant for the victims of Dark Night, but since then it had seemed only natural to keep with this custom, to record the dead and lost. Zander’s name, Peter saw, had already been inscribed. It did not stand alone: it came below his father and his sister and the woman to whom, Peter recalled, Zander had been married, years ago. It seemed so out of character for Zander to even speak to anyone, let alone be married, that Peter had forgotten all about her. The woman, whose name was Janelle, had died in childbirth with their baby, just a few months after Dark Night. The child hadn’t been named yet, so there was nothing to write, and his brief stay on earth had gone unrecorded.

“If you want, I can do the engraving for Theo.”

Peter swiveled to find Caleb standing behind him, wearing the bright yellow sneakers. They were far too large on him, giving the impression of something webbed, like the paddled feet of a duck. Looking at them, Peter felt a jab of guilt. Caleb’s huge, ridiculous sneakers: they were evidence-the only evidence, really-of the whole misbegotten episode at the mall. But somehow Peter also knew that Theo would have taken one look at Caleb’s sneakers and laughed. He would have gotten the joke before Peter had even realized it was a joke.

“Did you do Zander’s name?”

Caleb shrugged. “I’m pretty good with the chisel. Nobody else around to take care of it, I guess. He should have tried to make more friends.” The boy paused, glancing past Peter’s shoulder. For a second, his eyes seemed to be actually misting over. “It’s a good thing you shot him like you did. Zander really hated the virals. He thought the worst thing in the world would be to be taken up. I’m glad he didn’t have to be one of them for long.”

Peter decided it then. He wouldn’t write Theo’s name in the Stone, and no one else would either. Not until he was sure.

“Where are you bunking these days?” he asked Caleb.

“The barracks. Where else?”

Peter lifted one shoulder to indicate the knapsack. “Mind if I join you?”

“It’s your appetite.”

It was only later, after Peter had unpacked his belongings and lain down at last on the caved-in, too soft mattress that he realized what Caleb’s eyes had sought out, past Peter’s shoulder, on the Stone. Not Zander’s name but above it, a group of three: Richard and Marilyn Jones, and, beneath that, Nancy Jones, Caleb’s older sister. His father, a wrench, had been killed in a fall from the lights during the first frantic hours of Dark Night; his mother and sister had died in the Sanctuary, crushed by the collapsing roof. Caleb had been just a few weeks old.

That was when he realized why Alicia had taken him up to the roof of the power station. It had nothing to do with the stars. Caleb Jones was an orphan of Dark Night, as she was. No one to stand for him but her.

She’d taken Peter to the roof to wait for Caleb Jones.

TWENTY-FIVE

Michael Fisher, First Engineer of Light and Power, was sitting in the Lighthouse, listening to a ghost.

That’s what Michael was calling it, the ghost signal. Peeking from the haze of noise at the top of the audible spectrum-where nothing, as far as he could tell, should be. A fragment of a fragment, there and not there. The radio operator’s manual he’d found in the storage shed listed the frequency as unassigned.

“I could have told you that,” said Elton.

They’d heard it the third day after the supply party’s return. Michael still couldn’t believe Theo was gone. Alicia had assured him that it wasn’t his fault, the motherboard had nothing to do with Theo’s death, but still Michael felt responsible, part of a chain of events that had led to the loss of his friend. And the motherboard-the worst part was, Michael had practically forgotten all about it. The day after Theo and the others had departed for the station, Michael had successfully cannibalized an old battery flow control for what he needed. Not a Pion, but enough extra processing power to squeeze out any signal at the top end of the spectrum.

And even if he hadn’t, what was one more processor? Nothing for Theo to die for.

But this signal: 1,432 megahertz. Faint as a whisper, but it was saying something. It nagged at him, its meaning always seeming to dart away from his vision whenever he looked at it. It was digital, a repeating string, and it came and went mysteriously, or so it had appeared, until he’d realized-okay, Elton had realized-that it was coming every ninety minutes, whereupon it would transmit for exactly 242 seconds, then go silent again.

He should have figured that out on his own. There really was no excuse.

And it was growing stronger. Hour by hour, with each cycle, though more so at night. It was like the damn thing was moving straight up the mountain. He’d stopped looking for anything else; he just sat at the panel and counted off the minutes, waiting for the signal to return.

It wasn’t anything natural, not at ninety-minute cycles. It wasn’t a satellite. It wasn’t anything from the battery stack. It wasn’t a lot of things. Michael didn’t know what it was.

Elton was in a mood, too. The ain’t-it-great-to-be-blind Elton that Michael had gotten accustomed to after so many years in the Lighthouse-that Elton was nowhere to be found. In his place sat this dandruffy grump who barely uttered hello. He’d clamp the phones to his head, listening to the signal when it came, pursing his lips and shaking his head, maybe say a thing or two about needing more sleep than he was getting. He could barely be bothered to power up the lights at Second Bell; Michael could have let enough gas build up to blast them all to the moon, and he had the feeling that Elton wouldn’t have said word one about it.

He could have used a bath too. Hell, they both could.

What was it? Theo’s death? Since the supply party’s return, an anxious hush had settled over the whole Colony. The thing with Zander made no sense to anyone. Stranding Caleb on the tower like that. Sanjay and the others had tried to keep it quiet, but gossip traveled quickly. People were saying they’d always known there was something a little off about that guy, that all those months down the mountain had done something to his brain. That he hadn’t been right since that thing with his wife and the baby who had died.

And then that peculiar business with Sanjay. Michael didn’t know what the hell to make of it. Two nights ago he had been sitting at the panel when suddenly the door had swung open and there was Sanjay, standing there with a round-eyed look on his face that seemed to say: Aha! That’s it, Michael had thought, the earphones still clamped to his head-his crime couldn’t have been more obvious-I’m dead meat now. Somehow Sanjay found out about the radio; I’m going to be put out for sure.

But then a funny thing happened. Sanjay didn’t say anything. He just stood in the doorway, looking at Michael, and as the silent seconds passed, Michael realized that the expression on the man’s face wasn’t quite what he’d thought at first glance: not the righteous indignation of crimes uncovered in the night but an almost animal dumbfoundedness, a blank amazement at nothing. Sanjay was wearing bedclothes; his feet were bare. Sanjay didn’t know where he was; Sanjay was sleepwalking. Lots of folks did it, there were times when it seemed half the Colony was up and cruising around. It had something to do with the lights, the way it was never quite dark enough to really settle in. Michael had taken a turn or two himself, once awakening to find himself in the kitchen, smearing his own face with honey from a jar. But Sanjay? Sanjay Patal, Head of the Household? He hardly seemed the type.

Michael’s mind was working fast. The trick would be to get Sanjay out of the Lighthouse without waking him up. Michael was concocting various strategies for this-he wished he had some honey to offer him-when Sanjay suddenly frowned sharply, cocked his head to the side as if processing some distant sound, and shuffled rigidly past him.

“Sanjay? What are you doing?”

The man had come to a halt before the breaker panel. His right hand, which hung loosely at his side, gave a little twitch.

“I don’t… know.”

“Isn’t there,” Michael ventured, “I don’t know, someplace else you have to be?”

Sanjay said nothing. He lifted his hand and held it before his face, turning it slowly back and forth as he gazed at it with the same mute puzzlement, as if he couldn’t quite decide whom it belonged to.

“Bab… cock?”

More footsteps outside; suddenly Gloria was in the room. She, too, was wearing her bedclothes. Her hair, which she tied up in the daytime, fell halfway down her back. She seemed a little out of breath, having evidently run from their house to follow him. She ignored Michael, who by now felt less alarmed than embarrassed, like an incidental witness to some private marital drama, and marched straight to her husband’s side, taking him firmly by the elbow.

“Sanjay, come to bed.”

“This is my hand, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied impatiently, “it’s your hand.” Still holding her husband by the elbow, she glanced toward Michael and mouthed the word “sleepwalking.”

“It’s definitely, definitely mine.”

She heaved a sigh. “Sanjay, come on now. Enough of this.”

A flicker of awareness came into the man’s face. He turned to look about the room, his eyes alighting on Michael.

“Michael. Hello.”

The earphones were gone, hidden under the counter. “Hey, Sanjay.”

“It seems I have… taken a walk.”

Michael stifled a laugh; though what, he wondered, had Sanjay been doing at the breaker box?

“Gloria has been good enough to come after me to take me home. So that is where I’m going to go now.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Michael. I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your important work.”

“It’s no problem.”

And with that, Gloria Patal had led her husband from the room, taking him, presumably, back to bed to finish whatever it was he’d started in his restless, dreaming mind.

Now, what to make of that? When Michael had told Elton about it the next morning, all he’d said was, “I guess it’s getting to him like the rest of us.” And when Michael had said, “What it? What do you mean by it?” Elton had said nothing at all; he seemed to have no answer.

Brood, brood, brood-Sara was right; he spent far too much time with his head stuck down the hole of worry. The signal was between cycles; he’d have to wait another forty minutes to listen to it again. With nothing else to occupy his mind, he called up the battery monitors on the screen, hoping for good news, not finding it. Bell plus two, a hard wind blowing all day through the pass, and the cells were below 50 percent already.

He left Elton in the hut and went to take a walk, to clear his mind. The signal: 1,432 megahertz. It meant something, but what? There was the obvious thing, namely that the numbers were the first four positive integers in a repeating pattern: 1432143214321432 and so on, the 1 closing out the sequence, which reloaded with the 4. Interesting, and probably just a coincidence, but that was the thing about the ghost signal: nothing about it felt like a coincidence.

He came to the Sunspot, where often there would be people milling about well into the night. He blinked into the light. A single figure was sitting at the base of the Stone, dark hair tumbling over her folded arms, which rested on top of her knees. Mausami.

Michael cleared his throat to alert her of his approach. But as he neared, she glanced his way with only passing curiosity. Her meaning was clear: she was alone and wanted to stay that way. But Michael had been in the hut for hours-Elton hardly counted-chasing ghosts in the dark, and was more than willing to risk a little rejection for even a few meager crumbs of company.

“Hey.” He was standing above her. “Would it be okay if I sat?”

She lifted her face then. He saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears.

“Sorry,” Michael said. “I can go.”

But she shook her head. “It’s all right. Sit if you want.”

Which he did. It was awkward, because the only way to sit properly was to take a place beside her, their shoulders practically touching, his back braced by the Stone as hers was. He was beginning to think this hadn’t been such a great idea after all, especially as the silence lengthened. He realized that by staying he had tacitly agreed to ask what was bothering her, even, perhaps, to find the right words to comfort her. He knew that being pregnant could make women act moodily, not that they weren’t moody to begin with, their behavior at any given moment as changeable as the four winds. Sara made sense to him most of the time, but that was only because she was his sister and he was used to her.

“I heard the news. I guess, congratulations?”

She wiped her eyes with her fingertips. Her nose was running, but he didn’t have a rag to offer her. “Thanks.”

“Does Galen know you’re out here?”

She gave a dismal laugh. “No, Galen does not.”

Which made him think that what was bothering her wasn’t just a mood at all. She had come to visit the Stone because of Theo; her tears were for him.

“I just… ” But he couldn’t find the words. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry. We were friends too.”

She did something that surprised him then. Mausami placed her hand on top of his, twining their fingers together where they rested at the top of his knee. “Thank you, Michael. People don’t give you enough credit, I don’t think. That was exactly the right thing to say.”

For a while they sat without speaking. Mausami didn’t withdraw her hand but left it where it was. It was strange-not until this moment had Michael truly felt Theo’s absence. He felt sad, but something else, too. He felt alone. He wanted to say something, to put this feeling into words. But before he could, two more figures appeared at the far end of the plaza. The pair came striding toward them. Galen and, behind him, Sanjay.

“Listen,” Mausami said, “my advice is, don’t let any of Lish’s shit get to you. That’s just how she does things. She’ll come around.”

Lish? Why was she talking about Lish? But there was no time to consider this; Galen and Sanjay were suddenly towering over them. Galen was perspiring and breathing hard, as if he’d been running laps around the walls. As for Sanjay: the befuddled sleepwalker of two nights ago was nowhere to be seen. Standing in his place was a scowling figure of pure paternal self-righteousness.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Galen’s eyes were pulled into an angry squint, as if trying to bring the image of her into focus. “You’re not supposed to be out of the Sanctuary, Maus. You’re not.”

“I’m fine, Gale.” She banished him with a wave. “Go home.”

Sanjay shouldered forward so he was standing above the two of them, an imperious presence, bathed in the lights. His skin seemed to glow with his fatherly disappointment. He glanced down at Michael once, casting his presence aside with a quick clenching of his generous eyebrows-dashing, with this single gesture, any hope Michael might have had for some light-hearted acknowledgment of the other night’s events.

“Mausami. I’ve been patient with you, but that is at its end. I don’t understand why you have to be so difficult about this. You know where you’re supposed to be.”

“I’m staying right here with Michael. Anybody who thinks different will have to take it up with him.”

Michael felt his stomach drop. “Listen-”

“You stay out of this, Circuit,” Galen snapped. “And while we’re at it, what do you think you’re doing out here with my wife?”

“What am I doing?”

“Yeah. Was this your idea?”

“For godsakes, Galen,” Mausami sighed. “Do you know how you sound? No, it wasn’t Michael’s idea.”

Michael became aware that everyone was looking at him now. That he’d come to find himself in the middle of this scene, when all he’d wanted was a little company and fresh air, seemed like the cruelest trick of fate. The expression on Galen’s face was pure burning humiliation; Michael considered whether the man was, in fact, capable of doing him real harm. There was something vaguely ineffectual about the way he carried himself, his attention always seeming to lag a step behind the goings-on around him, but Michael wasn’t fooled: Galen had a good thirty pounds on him. On top of which, and more to the point, Galen viewed himself at this moment as defending something like his honor. Michael’s knowledge of male combat was limited to a few childhood skirmishes in the Sanctuary over not very much, but he had swapped enough punches to know that it helped if your heart was in it. Which Michael’s certainly wasn’t. If Galen could actually manage to aim a blow, it would all be over fast.

“Listen, Galen,” he began again, “I was just taking a walk-”

But Mausami didn’t let him finish. “It’s all right, Michael. He knows you were.”

She rolled her face to look at him; her eyes were swollen and heavy-lidded from crying. “We’ve all got our jobs to do, right?” She took his hand again and squeezed it, as if to seal a bargain between them. “Mine apparently is to do as I’m told and not be difficult. So for now, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Galen reached down to help her to her feet, but Mausami ignored him, rising on her own. Still glowering, Sanjay had stepped back, his hands on his hips.

“I don’t see why this has to be so hard, Maus,” Galen said.

But Mausami acted like she hadn’t heard him, turning away from the two men to face Michael instead, still seated with his back against the Stone. In the glance that passed between them, Michael could feel the diminishment of her surrender, the shame of marching to her orders.

“Thanks for keeping me company, Michael.” She gave him a sad smile. “That was nice, what you said.”

Sara, in the Infirmary, was waiting for Gabe Curtis to die.

She had just returned from riding when Mar had appeared at her door. It was happening, Mar said. Gabe was moaning, thrashing, fighting for breath. Sandy didn’t know what to do. Could she come? For Gabe?

Sara retrieved her med kit and followed Mar to the Infirmary. As she stepped through the curtain into the ward, the first thing she saw was Jacob, awkwardly leaning over the cot on which his father lay, pressing a cup of tea to his lips. Gabe was choking, coughing up blood. Sara moved quickly to his side and gently took the tea from Jacob’s hand; she rolled Gabe onto his side-the poor man weighed almost nothing, just skin and bones-and with her free hand reached to the cart to retrieve a metal basin, which she tucked under his chin. Two more hacking gasps: the blood, Sara saw, was a rich red, and spotted with small black clumps of dead tissue.

Other Sandy stepped from the shadowed recess behind the door. “I’m sorry, Sara,” she said, her hands fluttering nervously. “He just started coughing like that and I thought maybe the tea-”

“You let Jacob do this by himself? What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s the matter with him?” the boy wailed. He was standing by the cot, his face stricken with confused helplessness.

“Your dad is very sick, Jacob,” Sara said. “No one’s mad at you. You did the right thing, helping him.”

Jacob had begun to scratch himself, digging the fingernails of his right hand into the scraped flesh of his forearm.

“I’m going to do my best to take care of him, Jacob. You have my word.”

Gabe was bleeding internally, Sara knew. The tumor had ruptured something. She ran her hand over his belly and felt the warm distention of pooling blood. She reached into her kit for a stethoscope, clamped it to her ears, pulled Gabe’s jersey aside, and listened to his lungs. A wet rattle, like water sloshed in a can. He was close, and yet it might take hours. She lifted her eyes to Mar, who nodded. Sara understood what Mar had meant when she’d said that Sara was Gabe’s favorite, what she was asking her to do now.

“ Sandy, take Jacob outside.”

“What do you want me to do with him?”

Flyers, what was wrong with the woman? “Anything.” Sara allowed herself a breath, to steady her nerves; it was not a time for anger. “Jacob, I need you to go with Sandy now. Can you do that for me?”

In his eyes Sara saw no real comprehension-only fear, and a long habit of obedience to the decisions that others made for him. He would go, Sara knew, if he was asked.

A reluctant nod. “Okay, I guess.”

“Thank you, Jacob.”

Sandy led the boy from the ward; Sara heard the front door opening and closing. Mar, sitting on the opposite side of the cot, was holding her husband’s hand.

“Sara, do you… have something?”

It was not something that was ever discussed in the open. The herbals were all kept in the basement in the old freezer, stored in jars stacked on metal shelves. Sara excused herself to go downstairs and retrieved the ones she needed-digitalis, or common foxglove, to slow the respiration; the small black seeds of the plant they called angel’s trumpet, to stimulate the heart; the bitter brown shaving of hemlock root, to numb the awareness-and set them on the table. She mortared them into a fine brown dust, poured it onto a sheet of paper, and, angling this over a cup, dumped the mixture into it. She put everything away, swept the table clean, and ascended the stairs.

In the outer room, she put water on to boil; the kettle was already warm, and soon the drink was ready. It had a faint greenish cast, like algae, with a bitter, earthen smell. She carried it into the ward.

“I think this will help.”

Mar nodded, taking the cup from Sara. Part of their unfolding understanding was that Sara would only provide the means; she could not do the rest.

Mar gazed into the cup’s interior. “How much?”

“All of it, if you can.”

Sara positioned herself at the head of the bed to lift Gabe’s shoulders; Mar held the cup to his mouth, telling her husband to sip. His eyes were still closed; he seemed completely unaware of them. Sara was worried that he wouldn’t be able to manage it, that they had waited too long. But then he took a first, tender sip from the cup, then another, pecking at it steadily like a bird drinking from a puddle. When the tea was gone, Sara eased him back down onto the pillow.

“How long?” Mar wasn’t looking at her.

“Not long. It’s quick.”

“And you’ll stay. Until it’s over.”

Sara nodded.

“Jacob can never know.” Mar looked at her beseechingly. “He wouldn’t understand.”

“I promise,” said Sara.

And then, just the two of them, they waited.

Peter was dreaming of the girl. They were under the carousel, in that low-ceilinged prison of dust, and the girl was on his back, breathing her honeyed breath onto his neck. Who are you, he was thinking, who are you, but the words felt trapped in his mouth, bunched inside it like a woolen rag. He was thirsty, so thirsty. He wanted to roll over to see her face but he couldn’t move, and it wasn’t the girl on him anymore, it was a viral, the teeth were sinking into the flesh of his neck and he was trying to scream for his brother but no sound came and he began to die, one part of him thinking, How strange, I’ve never died before. So this is what it’s like.

He awoke with a start, his heart thumping, the dream dispersing at once, leaving in its wake a vague but poignant impression of panic, like the echo of a scream. He lay motionless, reassembling his sense of where and when he was. He arched his neck to look out the window over his bunk and saw the lights shining. His mouth was bone dry, his tongue swollen and fibrous-feeling; he’d dreamed of being thirsty because he was. He fumbled for the canteen on the floor beside his cot, lifted the spout to his mouth, and drank.

Caleb was sleeping in the bunk beside him. Peter counted four other men in the room, snoring piles in the shadows. All had come in without his once awakening. How long since he’d slept like that?

Now, lying in the dark, he felt the first stirring of antsiness, a low-grade hum of physical impatience that seemed to have taken up a permanent residence in his chest since his return up the mountain. The obvious course was to report for duty on the catwalk. But Soo had made it clear that she wouldn’t have him on the Watch until at least a few days had gone by.

He decided to go see Auntie. He hadn’t told her about Theo yet. Probably she knew, but still he wanted her to hear the news from him, even if the information was repeated.

Sometimes it was possible to forget all about her, over in her little house in the glade. Oh, Auntie, people would say when her name came up, as if they’d only just remembered her existence. And the truth was, the old woman got on surprisingly well without much help. Peter or Theo would chop wood for her, or do small repairs on her house, and Sara might assist her at the Storehouse. But her needs were few, as she kept a large vegetable and herb patch in the sunlit plot behind her house, which she still managed to tend with virtually no aid from anyone. With the exception of her gardening, which she performed from a seated position on a stool, she spent most of her days inside her house, among her papers and mementos, her mind adrift in the past. She wore three different pairs of eyeglasses on a tangle of lanyards around her neck, alternating between them for whatever task she was attending and, except in winter, went barefoot everywhere she walked. By all accounts, Auntie was close to a hundred. She had married, or so it was said, not once but twice, but because she could never have children of her own, her life span seemed a natural marvel without purpose, like a horse that could count by stamping its hooves. No one could quite figure out how she’d survived Dark Night; her house had weathered the quake with very little damage, and in the morning they had discovered her sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of her famously awful tea, as if nothing had happened at all. “Maybe they just don’t want my old blood” was all she’d said.

The night had cooled; the windows of Auntie’s cottage were glowing faintly as Peter approached. She claimed never to sleep, that day and night were all the same to her, and in fact Peter could not recall a time when he’d failed to find her up and working. He knocked at the door and opened it a crack.

“Auntie? It’s Peter.”

From deep within he heard a shuffling of paper and the scrape of a chair on the old wood floor. “Peter, come in, come in.”

He stepped into the room. The only light came from a lantern in the kitchen, a hammered-on shack attached to the rear of the house. The space was densely cluttered but neat, the arrangement of furniture and other objects-books in towering piles, jars of stones and old coins, various knickknacks he couldn’t even identify-appearing not merely considered but possessing the intrinsic orderliness of having occupied their current position for decades, like trees in a forest. In the doorway to the kitchen, the old woman appeared, waving him in.

“You’re just in time. I’ve made some tea.”

Auntie had always “just made tea.” She brewed it from a mixture of miscellaneous herbaceous jetsam, some of which she grew and some of which she merely picked along the paths. She had been known, out walking, to make a slow, long bend to the ground to pluck out a nameless weed and pop it straight into her mouth. But drinking Auntie’s tea was simply the price one paid for her company.

“Thanks,” Peter said, “I’d be glad to take some.”

She was fussing with her glasses, picking out the right pair. She found them and slid them onto her weathered, nut-brown face-her head possessed a slightly shrunken appearance, as if the physical reductions of advanced age had moved from the top down-and located him with her eyes, smiling her toothless smile, as if then and only then had she become convinced that he was whom she believed him to be. She was clothed, as always, in a loose, scoop-necked frock of quilted fabrics, bits and pieces harvested from any number of other dresses over the years. What was left of her hair formed a vaporous tangle of white that seemed not so much to grow from her head as float in its vicinity, and her cheeks were sprayed by spots that were neither freckles nor moles but something in between.

“Come into the kitchen with you then.”

He followed her shuffling, barefooted progress down the narrow hallway to the rear of the house. The space was small, crowded by an oak table that left barely enough room to maneuver and oppressive with the heat of the stove and the steam that rose from a battered aluminum teapot resting atop it. Peter felt his pores opening with sweat. While Auntie went about her pouring, Peter raised the sash of the room’s lone window, allowing a breeze to trickle in, and took a chair. Auntie carried the pot to the table, where she placed it on an iron trivet; at the sink, she primed the pump and rinsed out a pair of mugs, which she brought to the table also.

“And to what do I owe this come-by, Peter?”

“I’m afraid I have some news. About Theo.”

But the old woman waved this away. “Oh,” she said, “I know all about that.”

Auntie sat across from him, straightening her dress on her bony shoulders as she stretched out her legs beneath her, and poured the tea into cups through a strainer. It had a thin, yellow color, like urine, and left behind in the strainer small, disturbingly biological bits of green and brown, like smashed insects.

“How it happen?”

Peter sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“I ain’t got nothing but time for stories, Peter. As long as you care to tell them, I got ears to hear by. Go on now, tea’s ready. No point letting it get cold.”

Peter took a scalding sip. It tasted vaguely like dirt, leaving behind an aftertaste of such bitterness it didn’t even seem like food. He managed a respectful swallow. On the table at his elbow was her book, the one she was always writing in. Her memory book, she called it: a fat, hand-stitched volume wrapped in lambskin, the pages covered with the tiny print she wrote in, using a crow feather and homemade ink. She made her own paper as well, boiling sawdust into pulp and forming sheets on squares of old window screens. Peter knew she was hard at work when he saw pages of this material stiffening on a line behind her house.

“How’s the writing going, Auntie?”

“It never ends.” She offered a wrinkled smile. “So much to put down, and me with nothing but time on my hands. What all that happened. The world from before. The train that brought us here in the fire. Terrence and Mazie and all those ones. All of it, I just write it down as it comes to me. I figure if there weren’t no one to do it but one old lady, then that’s what they’ll get. Someday someone will want to know what happened here, in this place.”

“You think so?”

“Peter, I know so.” She sipped, smacking her colorless lips, and frowned at the flavor. “I reckon that needs more dandelion than I put in it.” She pointed her eyes at Peter again, squinting through her glasses. “But you didn’t ask that, did you? What all do I write in there, wasn’t it?”

Her mind was like this: doubling back, forming strange connections, dipping into the past. She spoke often of Terrence, who had ridden with her on the train. Sometimes he seemed to be her brother, sometimes her cousin. There were others. Mazie Chou. A boy named Vincent Gum, a girl named Sharise. Lucy and Rex Fisher. But these wanderings through time could be interrupted, at any moment, by intervals of startling lucidity.

“Have you written about Theo?”

“Theo?”

“My brother.”

Auntie’s eyes drifted a moment. “He told me he was going down to the station. When he coming back?”

So, she didn’t know. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten, the news blending in her mind with other such stories.

“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Peter said. “That’s what I came to tell you. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t go being sorry now,” she said. “The things you don’t know would fill a book. That’s a joke now, ain’t it? A book. Go on now. Drink your tea.”

Peter decided not to press. What good would it do the old woman to hear about one more person dying? He took another sip of the bitter liquid. If anything, it actually tasted worse. He felt a little burble of nausea.

“That the birch bark you feeling. For the digestion.”

“It’s good, really.”

“No it ain’t. But it does the trick all right. Clean you out like a white tornado.”

Peter remembered his other news then. “I meant to tell you, Auntie. I saw the stars.”

At this, the old woman brightened. “Well, there you go.” She quickly touched the back of his hand with the tip of a weathered finger. “There’s something good to talk about. Tell me now, how they look to you?”

His thoughts returned to that moment on the roof, lying on the concrete next to Lish. The stars so thick above their faces it was as if he could brush them with his hand. It seemed like something that had happened years ago, the final minutes of a life he’d left behind.

“It’s hard to put into words, Auntie. I never knew.”

“Well, ain’t that a thing.” Her eyes, pointed to the wall behind his head, seemed to twinkle, as if with remembered starlight. “I ain’t seen them since I was a girl. Your father used to come in just like you’re doing now and tell me all about them. I saw them, Auntie, he’d say, and I’d say to him, How they doing, Demo? How those stars of mine? And the two of us would have a nice visit about them, just like we’re doing now.” She sipped her tea and returned her mug to the table. “Why you looking so surprised?”

“He did?”

A quick frown of correction; but her eyes, still lit with an inner brightness, seemed to be laughing at him. “Why you think he wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Peter managed. And it was true: he didn’t. But when Peter tried to imagine this scene-his father, the great Demetrius Jaxon, drinking tea with Auntie in her overheated kitchen, talking about the Long Rides-he somehow couldn’t. “I guess I never realized he told anyone else.”

She gave a little laugh. “Oh, your father and me, we talked. About a lot of things. About the stars.”

It was all so confusing. More than confusing: it was as if, in the space of just a few days-since the night the viral had been killed in the nets by Arlo Wilson-some fundamental precept of the world had changed, only nobody had told Peter what this change might be.

“Did he ever tell you… about a Walker, Auntie?”

The old woman sucked in her cheeks. “A Walker, you say? Now, I don’t recall anything about that. Theo see a Walker?”

He heard himself sigh. “Not Theo. My father.”

But she had given up listening; her eyes, pointed at the wall behind him, had gone far away again. “Now, Terrence, I believe he did tell me something about a Walker. Terrence and Lucy. She always was the littlest thing. It was Terrence who made her stop crying, you know. He always could do that.”

It was hopeless. Once Auntie went off like this, it could be hours, even days, before she came back to the present. He almost envied her, this power.

“Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”

“That’s okay, Auntie. It can keep.”

She lifted her bony shoulders in a shrug. “You say so.” A silent moment passed. Then: “Tell me something. You believe in God almighty, Peter?”

The question caught him short. Though she’d spoken of God often, never had she asked him what he believed. And it was true that looking at the stars from the station roof, he’d felt something-a presence behind them, their vast immensity. As if the stars were watching him. But the moment, and the feeling it gave him, had slipped away. It would have been nice to believe in something like that, but in the end, he just couldn’t.

“Not really,” he admitted, and heard the gloom his voice. “I think it’s just a word people use.”

“Now, that’s a shame. A shame. Because the God I know about? He wouldn’t give us no chance.” Auntie took a final sip, smacking her lips. “Now you think on that some and then tell me about Theo and where he gone to.”

The conversation seemed to end there; Peter rose to go. He bent to kiss the top of her head.

“Thanks for the tea, Auntie.”

“Anytime. You come back and tell me your answer when it comes to you. We’ll talk about Theo then. Have us a good talk. And Peter?”

He turned in the kitchen doorway.

“Just so you know. She comin’.”

He was taken aback. “Who’s coming, Auntie?”

A teacherly frown. “You know who, boy. You known it since the day God dreamed you up.”

For a moment Peter said nothing, standing in the door.

“That’s all I’m saying now.” The old woman gave a dismissive wave, as if shooing a fly away. “You go on and come back when you ready.”

“Don’t write all night, Auntie,” Peter managed. “Try to get some sleep.”

A smile creased the old woman’s face. “I got eternity for that.”

He showed himself out, stepping into a breath of cool night air that brushed his face, chilling the sweat that had gathered beneath his jersey in the overheated kitchen. His stomach was still churning under the spell of the tea. He stood a moment, blinking into the lights. It was strange, what Auntie had said. But there was no way she could have known about the girl. The way the old woman’s mind worked, stories all piled on top of stories, the past and present all mixed together, she could have meant anyone. She could have been talking about someone who’d died years ago.

Which was just when Peter heard the shouts coming from Main Gate, and all hell began to break loose.

TWENTY-SIX

It had begun with the Colonel. That much everyone was able to ascertain in the first few hours.

No one could recall seeing the Colonel for days, not in the apiary or stables or on the catwalks, where he sometimes went at night. Peter certainly hadn’t seen him over the seven nights he’d stood, but he hadn’t thought this absence strange; the Colonel came and went according to his own mysterious designs and sometimes didn’t show his face for days.

What people did know, and this was reported first by Hollis but confirmed by others, was that the Colonel had appeared on the catwalk shortly after half-night, near Firing Platform Three. It had been a quiet night, without sign; the moon was down, the open ground beyond the walls bathed in the glow of the spots. Only a few people noticed him standing there, and no one thought anything about it. Hey, there’s the Colonel, people might have said. Old guy never could quite make himself stand down. Too bad there’s nothing doing tonight.

He lingered a few minutes, fingering his necklace of teeth, giving his gaze to the empty field below. Hollis supposed he’d come to speak with Alicia, but he didn’t know where she was, and in any event, the Colonel made no move to look for her. He wasn’t armed, and he didn’t speak with anyone. When Hollis looked again, he was gone. One of the runners, Kip Darrell, claimed later to have seen him descending the ladder and heading down the trace, toward the pens.

The next time anyone saw him, he was running across the field.

“Sign!” one of the runners yelled. “We have sign!”

Hollis saw it, saw them. At the edge of the field, a pod of three, leaping into the light.

The Colonel was running straight toward them.

They fell on him swiftly, swallowing him like a wave, snapping, snarling, while on the catwalk high above a dozen bows released their arcing arrows, though the distance was too great; only the luckiest of shots would have accomplished anything.

They watched the Colonel die.

Then they saw the girl. She was at the edge of the field, a lone figure appearing out of the shadows. At first, Hollis said, they all thought she was another viral, and everyone was completely trigger-happy besides, all of them ready to shoot at anything that moved. As she broke across the field toward Main Gate, under a hail of arrows and bolts, one caught her in the shoulder with a meaty thunk that Hollis actually heard, spinning her around like a top. Still she kept on coming.

“I don’t know,” Hollis admitted later. “It might have been me who got her.”

By now Alicia was on the scene, screaming at everyone as she raced down the catwalk, yelling at them to hold fire, it was a person, a human being goddamnit, and get the ropes, get the fucking ropes now! A moment of confusion: Soo was nowhere to be seen, and the order to go over the Wall could only come from her. All of which apparently gave Alicia no pause whatsoever. Before anyone could say another word she hopped to the top of the rampart, clutching the rope in her hand, and stepped out.

It was, Hollis said, the damnedest thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

She descended in a rush, swinging down the face of the Wall, her feet skimming the surface in an airborne run, the rope buzzing through the block at the top of the Wall while three pairs of hands frantically tried to set the brake before she hit. As the mechanism caught with a scream of bending metal Alicia landed, rolling end over end in the dust, and came up running. The virals were twenty meters away, still huddled over the Colonel’s body; at the sound of Alicia’s impact, they gave a collective twitch, twisting and snarling, tasting the air.

Fresh blood.

The girl was at the base of the Wall now, a dark shape huddled against it. A glistening hump sat at the center of her back-her knapsack, now pinned to her body by the bolt embedded in her shoulder, all of it slick and shining with the gleaming wetness of her blood. Alicia snatched her like a sack, hurled her over her shoulders, and did her best to run. The rope was useless now, forgotten behind her. Her only chance was the gate.

Everybody froze. Whatever else you did, you didn’t open the gate. Not at night. Not for anyone, not even Alicia.

It was at this moment that Peter reached the staging ground, running from Auntie’s porch toward the commotion. Caleb came sprinting from the barracks, arriving at Main Gate just ahead of him. Peter didn’t know what was taking place on the other side, only that Hollis was yelling from the catwalk.

“It’s Lish!”

“What?”

“It’s Lish!” Hollis cried. “She’s outside!”

Caleb got to the wheelhouse first. It was this fact that would later be used to implicate him, while exonerating Peter of blame for what occurred. By the time Alicia reached the gate, it was open just wide enough for her to scramble through with the girl. If they had been able to close the doors then, probably none of the rest would have happened. But Caleb had released the brake. The weights were dropping, picking up speed as they slipped down the chains; the doors’ opening was now ordained by the simple fact of gravity. Peter grabbed hold of the wheel. Behind and above him he heard the shouts, the volley of bolts unleashed from their crosses, the pinging footsteps of Watchers racing down the ladders into the staging ground. More hands appeared, fastening onto the wheel-Ben Chou and Ian Patal and Dale Levine. With excruciating slowness, it began to turn in the opposite direction.

But it was too late. Of the three virals, only one made it through the doors. But that was enough.

He headed straight for the Sanctuary.

Hollis was the first to reach the building, just as the viral vaulted to the roof. It crested the roof’s apex like a stone skipping on water and dropped into the interior courtyard. As he tore through the front door, Hollis heard a crash of breaking glass inside.

He reached the Big Room at the same instant Mausami did, the two of them arriving by different hallways onto opposite sides of the room. Mausami was unarmed; Hollis had his cross. An unexpected silence met them. Hollis had braced himself for screams and chaos, the children running everywhere. But nearly all were still in their beds, their eyes wide with terrified incomprehension. A few had managed to scramble under their cots; as Hollis crossed the threshold, he detected a flurry of movement from the nearest row, as one of the three J’s, June or Jane or Juliet, rolled off her bed and scurried beneath it. The only light in the room came from the broken window, its shade ripped and hanging kitty-corner, still quivering with movement.

The viral was standing over Dora’s crib.

“Hey!” Mausami yelled. She waved her arms above her head. “Hey, look over here!”

Where was Leigh? Where was Teacher? The viral jerked its face toward the sound of Mausami’s voice. It blinked its eyes, tipping its head to the side on its long neck. A wet clicking sound rose from somewhere in the taut curve of its throat.

“Over here!” Hollis yelled, following Mausami’s lead and waving to draw the creature’s attention. “Yeah, look this way!”

The viral spun toward him, facing him squarely. Something was glinting at the base of its neck, some kind of jewelry. But there was no time to wonder about this; Hollis had his angle, his opening. Leigh entered the room then. She’d been sleeping in the office and heard nothing. As Leigh broke into a scream, Hollis aimed the crossbow and fired.

A good shot, a clean shot, dead center on the sweet spot: he felt its rightness, its perfection, the instant it leapt from the stock. And in the split second of the arrow’s flight, a distance of fewer than five meters, he knew. The glinting key on the lanyard; the look of mournful gratitude in the viral’s eyes. The thought came to Hollis fully formed, a single word that arrived on his lips at the same instant that the arrow-the merciful, awful, unrecallable arrow-struck home in the center of the viral’s chest.

“Arlo.”

Hollis had just killed his brother.

Sara-though she did not remember this and never would-first learned about the Walker in a dream: a confusing and unpleasant dream in which she was a little girl again. She was making johnnycake. The kitchen where she worked-she was standing on a stool, beating the heavy batter in a wide, wooden bowl-was both the kitchen of the house where she lived and the kitchen in the Sanctuary, and it was snowing: a gentle snow that did not fall from the sky, because there was no sky, but seemed to appear out of the air before her face. Strange, the snow; it almost never snowed and certainly not indoors that Sara could recall, but she had more important things to worry about. It was the day of her release, Teacher would come for her soon, but without the johnnycake, she would have nothing to eat in the outside world; in the outside world, Teacher had explained to her, that was the only thing people ate.

Then there was a man. It was Gabe Curtis. He was sitting at the kitchen table before an empty plate. “Is it ready?” he asked Sara, and then, turning to the girl sitting next to him, said, “I always liked johnnycake.” Sara wondered, with vague alarm, who this girl was-she tried to look at her but somehow could not see her; wherever Sara looked for her was always the very spot the girl had just departed-and the fact reached her mind, slowly and then all at once, that she was in a new place now. She was in the room Teacher had brought her to, the place of the telling, and her parents were there, waiting; they were standing at the door. “Go with them, Sara,” Gabe said. “It’s time for you to go. Run and keep on running.” “But you’re dead,” said Sara, and when she looked at her parents, she saw that where their faces should have been were regions of blankness, as if she were viewing them through a current of water; something was wrong with their necks. There was a pounding sound now, without the room, and the sound of a voice, calling her name. “You’re all dead.”

Then she was awake. She had fallen asleep in a chair by the cold hearth. It was the door that had awakened her; someone was outside, calling her name. Where was Michael? What time was it?

“Sara! Open up!”

Caleb Jones? She opened the door as he was reaching to hit it again, his fist freezing in the air.

“We need a nurse.” The boy was breathing hard. “Someone’s been shot.”

She was instantly awake, reaching for her kit on the table by the door. “Who?”

“Lish brought her in.”

“Lish? Lish is shot?”

Caleb shook his head, still trying to catch his breath. “Not her. The girl.”

“What girl?”

His eyes were amazed. “She’s a Walker, Sara.”

By the time they reached the Infirmary the sky beyond the lights had begun to pale. No one was there, which struck her as strange. From what Caleb had told her, she’d expected a crowd. She mounted the steps and rushed into the ward.

Lying on the nearest cot was a girl.

She was lying face-up, the bolt still embedded in her shoulder; a dark shape was pinned beneath her back. Alicia was standing over her, her jersey spattered with blood.

“Sara, do something,” Alicia said.

Sara moved quickly forward and eased her hand behind the girl’s neck to check her airway. The girl’s eyes were closed. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, her skin cool and clammy to the touch. Sara felt her neck for a pulse; her heart was banging like a bird’s.

“She’s in shock. Help me roll her over.”

The bolt had entered the girl’s left shoulder just below the spoon-shaped curve of her clavicle. Alicia wedged her hands under the girl’s shoulders while Caleb took her feet, and together they eased the girl onto her side. Sara retrieved a pair of scissors and sat behind her to cut the blood-soaked knapsack away, then the girl’s flimsy T-shirt, snipping it at the neck and tearing the rest of it free, revealing the slender frame of an early adolescent-the small, curving buds of her breasts and her pale skin. The bolt’s barbed tip was poking through a star-shaped wound just above the line of her scapula.

“I have to clip this off. I’ll need something bigger than these shears.”

Caleb nodded and ran from the room. As he passed through the curtain, Soo Ramirez rushed in. Her long hair had come undone; her face was streaked with dirt. She stopped abruptly at the foot of the cot.

“I’ll be goddamned. She’s just a kid.”

“Where the hell is Other Sandy?” Sara demanded.

The woman appeared dazed. “Where on earth did she come from?”

“Soo, I’m all alone in here. Where’s Sandy ?”

Soo lifted her face, focusing on Sara. “She’s… in the Sanctuary, I think.”

Footsteps and voices, a buzz of commotion from without: the outer room was filling with onlookers now.

“Soo, get these people out of here.” Sara lifted her voice to the curtain. “Everybody, out! I want this building cleared now!”

Soo nodded and darted outside. Sara checked the girl’s pulse again. Her skin appeared to have taken on a faintly mottled appearance, like a winter sky on the edge of snow. How old was she? Fourteen? What was a fourteen-year-old girl doing out in the dark?

She turned to Alicia. “You brought her in?”

Alicia nodded.

“Did she say anything to you? Was she alone?”

“God, Sara.” Her eyes seemed to float. “I don’t know. Yes, I think she was alone.”

“Is that blood yours or hers?”

Alicia dropped her eyes to the front of her jersey, seeming to notice the blood for the first time. “Hers, I think.”

More commotion from without the room, and Caleb’s voice yelling, “Coming through!” He burst through the curtain, waving a heavy cutter, and thrust it into Sara’s hands.

A greasy old thing, but it would do. Sara poured spirits over the blades of the cutter and then her hands, wiping them dry on a rag. With the girl still lying on her side, she used the cutters to clip the arrowhead free, and poured more alcohol over everything. Then she directed Caleb to wash his hands as she had done while she took a skein of wool from the shelf and snipped off a long piece, rolling it into a compress.

“Hightop, when I back the bolt out, I want you to hold this against the entry wound. Don’t be gentle, press hard. I’m going to suture the other side, see if I can slow this bleeding.”

He nodded uncertainly. He was in over his head, Sara knew, but the truth was they all were. Whether or not the girl survived the next few hours depended on the extent of the bleeding, how much damage there was inside. They rolled the girl onto her back again. While Caleb and Alicia braced her shoulders, Sara took hold of the bolt and began to pull. Sara could sense, through the bolt’s metal shaft, the fibrous gristle of destroyed tissue, the clack of fractured bone. There was no way to be gentle; it was best to do it fast. With a hard tug, the bolt pulled away in a sighing gush of blood.

“Flyers, it’s her.”

Sara turned her head to see Peter standing in the doorway. What did he mean, it’s her? As if he knew her, as if he knew who this girl was? But of course that was impossible.

“Turn her on her side. Peter, help them.”

Sara positioned herself behind the girl, taking up a needle and a spool of thread, and began to stitch the wound. There was blood everywhere now, pooling on the mattress, dripping onto the floor.

“Sara, what should I do?” Caleb’s compress was sodden already.

“Just keep pressure on it.” She drew the needle through the girl’s skin, pulling a stitch taut. “I need more light over here, someone!”

Three stitches, four, five, each one pulling the edges of the wound together. But it was no use, she knew. The bolt must have nicked the subclavian artery. That’s where all the blood was coming from. The girl would be dead within minutes. Fourteen years old, Sara thought. Where did you come from?

“I think it’s stopping,” Caleb said.

Sara was tying off the last stitch. “That can’t be right. Just keep pressure on it.”

“No, really. Look for yourself.”

They rolled the girl onto her back again, and Sara pulled the sodden compress aside. It was true: the bleeding had slowed. The entry wound even looked smaller, pink and puckered at the edges. The girl’s face was gently composed, as if she were napping. Sara placed her fingers at the girl’s throat; a hard, regular beat met her fingertips. What in the world?

“Peter, hold that lantern over here.”

Peter swung the lantern over the girl’s face; Sara gently peeled back the lid of her left eye-a dark, dewy orb, the disklike pupil contracting to reveal the ribbed iris, the color of wet earth. But something was different; something was there.

“Bring it closer.”

As Peter shifted the lantern, blazing the eye with light, she felt it. A sensation like falling, as if the earth had opened under her feet-worse than dying, worse than death. A terrible blackness all around and she was falling, falling forever into it.

“Sara, what’s wrong?”

She was on her feet, backing away. Her heart was lurching in her chest, her hands were shaking like leaves in the wind. Everyone was looking at her; she tried to speak but no words came. What had she seen? But it wasn’t something she’d seen, it was something she’d felt. Sara thought the word: alone. Alone! That’s what she was, what they all were. That was what her parents were, their souls falling forever in blackness. They were alone!

She became aware that others were in the ward now. Sanjay and, beside him, Soo Ramirez. Two more Watchers hovered behind them. Everyone was waiting for her to say something; she could feel the heat of all their eyes upon her.

Sanjay stepped forward. “Will she live?”

She took a breath to calm herself. “I don’t know.” Her voice felt weak in her throat. “It’s a bad wound, Sanjay. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

Sanjay regarded the girl a moment. He appeared to be deciding what to think of her, how to account for her impossible presence. Then he turned toward Caleb, who was standing by the cot with the blood-soaked compress in his hands. Something seemed to harden in the air; the men at the door came forward, hands on their blades.

“Come with us, Caleb.”

The two men-Jimmy Molyneau and Ben Chou-grabbed the boy by the arms; he was too surprised to resist.

“Sanjay, what are you doing?” Alicia said. “Soo, what the hell is this about?”

It was Sanjay who answered. “Caleb is under arrest.”

“Arrest?” the boy squealed. “What am I under arrest for?”

“Caleb opened the gate. He knows the law as well as anyone. Jimmy, get him out of here.”

Jimmy and Ben began to pull the struggling boy toward the curtain. “Lish!” he cried.

She quickly blocked their way, positioning herself in front of the door. “Soo, tell them,” Alicia said. “It was me. I was the one who went over. If you want to arrest someone, arrest me.”

Standing beside Sanjay, Soo said nothing.

“Soo?”

But the woman shook her head. “I can’t, Lish.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Because it isn’t up to her,” Sanjay said. “Teacher is dead. Caleb is under arrest for murder.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

By midmorning, everyone in the Colony knew the story of the night before, or some version of it. A Walker had appeared outside the walls; Caleb had opened the gate, letting in a viral. The Walker, a young girl, was in the Infirmary, dying, shot by a bolt from a Watcher’s cross. The Colonel was dead, an apparent suicide-how he’d gotten over the Wall, no one knew-and Arlo too, killed in the Sanctuary by his brother.

But worst of all was Teacher.

They found her under the window in the Big Room; Hollis’s line of sight had been obscured by a line of empty cots. Probably she had heard the viral coming down off the roof and tried to make a stand. A blade was in her hand.

There had been many Teachers, of course. But in a truer sense there had only been one. Each woman who took the job down through the years became that person. The Teacher who had died that night was actually a Darrell-April Darrell. She was the woman Peter remembered laughing at his questions about the ocean, though she had been younger then, not much older than he was now, and pretty in a soft, pale way, like an older sister who was kept indoors by some physical ailment; she was the woman Sara recalled from the morning of her release, leading her with her chain of questions, like a flight of stairs taking her down to a dark basement in which lay the terrible truth, then giving her into her mother’s arms, to weep over the world and what it was. It was a hard job, being Teacher, everyone knew that, a thankless job, to live locked away with the Littles with barely any grown-up company except for women who were pregnant or nursing, with nothing on their minds but babies; and it was also true that because Teacher was the one to tell you-tell everyone-she bore the collective resentment of this trauma. Except for First Night, when she might make a brief appearance in the Sunspot, Teacher hardly ever set foot outside the Sanctuary, and when she did, it was as if she moved in an invisible container of betrayal. Peter felt sorry for her, but it was also true that he could barely bring himself to meet her eye.

The Household, which assembled at first light, had declared a state of civil emergency. Runners were dispatched from house to house, passing the word. Until more was known, all activities beyond the Wall would be suspended; the herd would stay inside, as well as any HD crews; the gate would remain closed. Caleb had been remanded to the lockup. For the time being, it was agreed, with so many souls lost, and such fear and confusion having gripped the Colony, no sentence would be passed.

And then there was the question of the girl.

In the early-morning hours, Sanjay had led the members of the Household to the Infirmary to examine her. The wound to her shoulder was obviously serious; she had yet to regain consciousness. There was no sign of viral infection, but it was also the case that her appearance was completely inexplicable. Why had the virals not attacked her? How had she survived, all alone in the dark? Sanjay ordered anyone who had been in contact with her to be stripped and washed, their clothing burned. The girl’s backpack and clothing went into the fire as well. The girl had been placed under strict quarantine; no one but Sara would be allowed in the Infirmary until more was known.

The inquest was held in an old classroom in the Sanctuary-the same room, Peter realized, that Teacher had taken him to on the day of his release. An inquest: that was the term Sanjay had used, a word Peter had never heard before. It seemed to Peter that it was a fancy name for looking for someone to blame. Sanjay had instructed the four of them-Peter, Alicia, Hollis, and Soo-not to speak to one another until each had been questioned in turn. They waited outside in the hall, wedged into undersized desks shoved in a line against the wall, with a single Watcher-Sanjay’s nephew, Ian-waiting with them. Around them the building was oddly silent; all the Littles had been moved upstairs while the Big Room was washed down. Who knew what they would make of the night’s events-what Sandy Chou, who had stepped in for Teacher, would tell them. Probably she would tell them they had simply all dreamed it; with the youngest children, that likely would do the trick. As for the older ones, Peter had no idea. Maybe they would have to be released early.

Soo had been called first, emerging from the room a short time later and striding down the hall with a harried look. Hollis was then summoned inside. Unfolding his long legs from under the desk, he appeared completely devoid of energy, as if some essential piece of him had been carved away. Ian was holding the door open, eyeing the group with a look of impatient warning. At the threshold Hollis stopped and turned to look at all of them, uttering the first words any of them had spoken in an hour.

“I just want to know it wasn’t for nothing.”

They waited. Through the door to the classroom, Peter could hear the murmur of voices. Peter wanted to ask Ian if he knew anything, but the expression on the man’s face told him not to try. Ian was Theo’s age, part of a group that had come up at around the same time; he and his wife, Hannah, had one young daughter, Kira, in the Sanctuary. So, Peter thought, that explained the look on Ian’s face: it was the look of a parent, a father.

Hollis emerged, briefly meeting Peter’s eyes and giving him a curt nod before retreating down the hall. Peter began to rise but Ian said, “Not you, Jaxon. Lish is next.”

Jaxon? Since when did anybody call him Jaxon-especially someone on the Watch? And why did it sound suddenly different to him, coming from Ian’s mouth?

“It’s all right,” Lish said, and got to her feet wearily. He had never seen her looking so defeated. “I just want to get this over with.”

Then she was gone, leaving Peter and Ian alone. Ian had awkwardly fixed his gaze on the square of wall above Peter’s head.

“It really wasn’t her fault, Ian. It wasn’t anybody’s.”

Ian stiffened but said nothing.

“If you’d been there, you might have done the same thing.”

“Look, save it for Sanjay. I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

By the time Lish appeared, Peter had actually managed to doze off. She stepped from the room with a wordless look he knew: I’ll find you.

Peter felt it the moment he stepped into the room. Whatever was going to happen had already been decided. His appearance, whatever he had to say for himself, would make very little difference. Soo had been asked to recuse herself from the proceedings, leaving only five members of the Household in attendance: Sanjay, who was seated at the center of a long table, and, on either side of him, Old Chou, Jimmy Molyneau, Walter Fisher, and Peter’s cousin Dana, occupying the Jaxon seat. He noted the odd number; Soo’s absence had effectively prevented any kind of deadlock. An empty desk had been positioned to face the table. The tension in the room was palpable; no one was speaking. Only Old Chou seemed willing to meet Peter’s eye; everyone else was looking away, even Dana. Slumped in his chair, Walter Fisher seemed hardly to know where he was, or to care. His clothing seemed unusually filthy and rumpled; Peter could actually smell the shine coming off him.

“Have a seat, Peter,” Sanjay said.

“I’d rather stand, if that’s all right.”

He felt the small pleasure of defiance, a point being scored. But Sanjay did not react. “I suppose we should get on with it.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “Though there is some confusion on this point, the general opinion of the Household, based in large part on what Caleb has told us, is that you were not responsible for opening the gate, that this was his doing entirely. Is this your version?”

“My version?”

“Yes, Peter,” Sanjay said. He sighed with unconcealed impatience. “Your version of events. What you believe occurred.”

“I don’t believe anything. What did Hightop tell you?”

Old Chou held up a hand and leaned forward. “Sanjay, if I may.”

Sanjay frowned but said nothing.

Old Chou leaned forward over the table, a gesture of command. He had a soft, wrinkled face and damp eyes that gave him an appearance of absolute earnestness. He had been Head of the Household for many years before yielding the position to Theo’s father, a history that still gave him considerable authority if he cared to use it. For the most part, he didn’t; after his first wife had been killed on Dark Night, he had taken a second, much younger wife, and now passed most of his days in the apiary, among the bees he loved.

“Peter, no one doubts that Caleb thought he was doing the right thing. Intention is not the issue here. Did you open the gate or not?”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“That hasn’t been decided. Please answer the question.”

Peter tried to meet Dana’s eye but couldn’t; she was still looking at the table.

“I would have, if I’d gotten there first.”

Sanjay gave an indignant lift in his chair. “You see? This is what I’m saying.”

But Old Chou paid this interruption no mind, keeping his eyes locked on Peter’s face. “So am I correct in understanding that your answer is no? You would have, but in fact you did not.” He folded his hands on the table. “Take a moment to think if you need to.”

It seemed to Peter that Old Chou was trying to protect him. But saying what had happened would shift all the blame to Caleb, who had simply done what Peter himself would have, if he’d gotten to the wheelhouse first.

“No one doubts your loyalty to your friends,” Old Chou went on. “I would expect nothing less from you. But the greater loyalty here must be to the safety of everyone. I’ll ask you again. Did you help Caleb in opening the gate? Or did you, in fact, try to close it, once you saw what was happening?”

Peter had the feeling of standing at the edge of a great abyss: whatever he said next would be final. But the truth was all he had.

He shook his head. “No.”

“No what?”

He took a long breath. “No, I didn’t open the gate.”

Old Chou visibly relaxed. “Thank you, Peter.” His gaze passed over the group. “If nobody has anything else-”

“Wait,” Sanjay cut in.

Peter felt the air in the room tighten; even Walter seemed suddenly alert. Here it comes, thought Peter.

“Everyone here knows of your friendship with Alicia,” Sanjay said. “She is someone who confides in you. Would that be fair to say?”

Peter nodded warily. “I guess.”

“Has she in any way indicated to you that she knows this girl? Has seen her before, perhaps?”

A knot tightened in his stomach. “Why would you think that?”

Sanjay glanced at the others before returning his eyes to the front of the room. “There is a question, you see, of coincidence. You three were the last to return from the power station. And the story you tell, first about Zander and then Theo… well, you must admit it’s pretty strange.”

The anger Peter had been holding in check gave way. “You think we planned this? I lost my brother down there. We were lucky to get back alive.”

The room had grown very quiet again. Even Dana was looking at Peter with frank suspicion.

“So, for the record,” Sanjay said, “you are saying you don’t know the Walker, you’ve never seen her before.”

Suddenly it wasn’t about Alicia, he realized. The question was about him.

“I have no idea who she is,” he said.

Sanjay held his eyes on Peter’s face for what seemed like an unnaturally long moment. Then he nodded.

“Thank you, Peter. We appreciate your candor. You’re free to go.”

Just like that it was over. “That’s all?”

Sanjay had already busied himself with the papers before him. He looked up, frowning, as if surprised to find Peter still in the room. “Yes. For now.”

“You’re not going to… do anything to me?”

Sanjay shrugged; his mind had already moved on. “What do you want us to do?”

Peter felt an unexpected disappointment. Sitting outside with Alicia and Hollis, he’d felt a bond, a shared stake in the outcome. Whatever was going to happen would happen to them all. Now they had been separated.

“If it happened as you say, you’re not to blame. The blame is Caleb’s. Soo has said, and Jimmy agrees, that the stress of standing for your brother could be considered a factor here. Take a few more days before returning to the catwalk. After that, we’ll see.”

“What about the others?”

Sanjay hesitated. “I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you, since everyone will know soon enough. Soo Ramirez has offered her resignation as First Captain, which the Household has, with reluctance, agreed to accept. But she was out of position when the attack occurred and shares some of the blame. Jimmy will serve as new First Captain. As for Hollis, he’s off the Wall for the time being. He can return when he’s ready.”

“And Lish?”

“Alicia has been ordered to stand down from the Watch. She’s been reassigned to Heavy Duty.”

Of everything that had happened, this development was actually the most difficult for him to process. Alicia as a wrench: it was simply beyond Peter’s power to imagine such a thing. “You’re joking.”

Sanjay gave a correcting lift of his generous eyebrows. “No, Peter. I promise you, I am not joking.”

Peter exchanged a quick glance with Dana: Did you know anything about this? Her eyes said she did.

“Now, if that’s all… ” Sanjay said.

Peter stepped toward the door. But as he reached the threshold, a sudden doubt occurred to him. He turned to face the group once more.

“What about the power station?”

Sanjay heaved a weary sigh. “What about it, Peter?”

“If Arlo’s dead, shouldn’t we be sending someone down there?”

Peter’s first impression, considering the startled looks on everyone’s faces, was that he’d somehow implicated himself at the last second. But then he understood: they had failed to consider this.

“You didn’t send somebody down there at first light?”

Sanjay swiveled toward Jimmy, who shrugged nervously, evidently caught short. “It’s too late now,” he said quietly. “They’d never make it before dark. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

“Flyers, Jimmy.”

“Look, I just missed it, all right? There was a lot going on. And Finn and Rey could still be all right.”

Sanjay seemed to take a moment just to breathe, composing himself. But Peter could tell he was furious.

“Thank you, Peter. We’ll take this under advisement.”

There was nothing more to say; Peter stepped from the room, into the hall. Ian was just where he’d left him, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest.

“I guess you heard about Lish, huh?”

“I heard.”

Ian shrugged; the stiffness had gone out of him. “Look, I know she’s your friend. But you can’t say she didn’t have it coming. Going over like she did.”

“What about the girl?”

Ian startled, a blaze of anger in his eyes. “Flyers, what about her? I’ve got a kid, Peter. What do I care about some Walker?”

Peter said nothing. As far as he could see, Ian had every reason to be angry.

“You’re right,” he said finally. “It was stupid.”

But Ian’s expression softened then. “Look,” he said, “people are just upset is all. I’m sorry I got mad. Nobody thinks it’s your fault.”

But it was, Peter thought. It was.

The answer had come to Michael just after dawn: 1,432 megahertz-of course.

The bandwidth was officially unassigned, because it really had been assigned-to the military. A short-range digital signal, cycling every ninety minutes, looking for its mainframe.

And all night long, the signal had been growing stronger. It was practically on their doorstep.

The encryption would be the easy part. The trick would be finding the handshake, broadcasting the one reply that would cause the signal’s transmitter, wherever and whatever it was, to link up with the mainframe. Once he did this, the rest would be just a question of uploading the data.

So what was the signal looking for? What was the digital answer to the question it was posing, every ninety minutes?

Something Elton had said, just before he’d gone to bed: Someone’s calling us.

That was when he’d figured it out.

He knew just what he needed. The Lighthouse was full of all kinds of crap, stored in bins on the shelves; there was at least one Army handheld that he knew of. They had some old lithium cells that could still hold a charge-not more than a few minutes’ worth, but that was all he’d need. He worked quickly, keeping an eye on the clock, waiting for the next ninety-minute interval to pass so he could grab the signal. Dimly he sensed some kind of commotion going on outside, but who knew what that was. He could jack the handheld into the computer, snatch the signal as it came in, capture its embedded ID, and program the handheld from the panel.

Elton was asleep, snoring on his cratered cot in the back of the Lighthouse. Flyers, if the old man didn’t take a bath soon, Michael didn’t know what he’d do. The whole place stank like socks.

By the time he was through it was almost half-day. How long had he been working, barely rising from his chair? After that whole thing with Mausami, he’d been too restless to sleep and returned to the hut; that might have been ten hours ago. His ass felt like he’d been sitting that long at least. He really had to pee.

He stepped from the hut, too quickly, unprepared for the blast of daylight that filled his eyes.

“Michael!”

Jacob Curtis, Gabe’s boy. Michael saw him jogging up the path with a lumbering gate, waving his arms. Michael took a breath to prepare himself. It was hardly the boy’s fault, but talking to Jacob could be a trial. Before Gabe had gotten sick, he would sometimes bring Jacob around the Lighthouse, asking Michael if he could find something for the boy to do to make himself useful. Michael had done his best, but there really wasn’t much Jacob could understand. Whole days could be swallowed up by explaining the simplest tasks to him.

He came to a halt before Michael, dropping his hands to his knees and heaving for breath. Despite his size, his movements possessed a childlike disorderliness, the parts never quite seeming in sync. “Michael,” he gulped, “Michael-”

“Easy, Jacob. Slow down.”

The boy was flapping a hand before his face, as if to push more oxygen into his lungs. Michael couldn’t tell if he was upset or simply excited. “I want to see… Sara,” he gasped.

Michael told him she wasn’t there. “Did you try at the house?”

“She’s not there either!” Jacob lifted his face. His eyes were very wide. “I saw her, Michael.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t find her.”

“Not her. The other one. I was sleeping and I saw her!”

Jacob didn’t always make perfect sense, but Michael had never seen the boy like this. His face wore a look of complete panic.

“Did something happen to your dad, Jacob? Is he okay?”

A frown creased the boy’s damp face. “Oh. He died.”

“Gabe’s dead?”

Jacob’s tone was disturbingly matter-of-fact; he might have been telling Michael what the weather was. “He died and he won’t wake up anymore.”

“Flyers, Jacob. I’m sorry.”

That was when Michael saw Mar hurrying down the path. He felt a gush of relief.

“Jacob, where have you been?” The woman stopped before them. “How many times do I have to tell you? You can’t run off like that, you can’t.”

The boy backed away, his long arms flailing. “I have to find Sara!”

“Jacob!”

Her voice seemed to hit him like an arrow: he froze where he stood, though his face was still animated by a strange, unknowable dread. His mouth was open and he was breathing fast. Mar moved toward him cautiously, as if she were approaching some large, unpredictable animal.

“Jacob, look at me.”

“Mama-”

“Hush now. No more talk. Look at me.” She reached up to his face, placing a hand on each of his cheeks, focusing her eyes on his face.

“I saw her, Mama.”

“I know you did. But it was just a dream, Jacob, that’s all. Don’t you remember? We went back to the house and I put you to bed and you were sleeping.”

“I was?”

“Yes, honey, you were. It was nothing, just a dream.” Jacob was breathing more easily now, his body stilling beneath his mother’s touch. “I want you to go home now and wait for me there. No more looking for Sara. Can you do that for me?”

“But, Mama-”

“No buts, Jacob. Can you do as I ask?”

Reluctantly, Jacob nodded.

“That’s my good boy.” Mar stepped back, releasing him. “Straight home, now.”

The boy looked at Michael once, a quick, furtive glance, and jogged away.

Finally Mar turned to Michael. “It always works when he gets like this,” she said with a weary shrug. “It’s the only thing that does.”

“I heard about Gabe,” he managed. “I’m sorry.”

Mar’s eyes looked as if she had cried so much there were no tears left in her at all. “Thank you, Michael. I think Jacob wanted to see Sara because she was there, at the end. She was a good friend. To all of us.” Mar halted a moment, a look of pain skittering across her face. But she shook her head, as if to ward this thought away. “If you can get her a message, tell her we’re all thinking of her. I don’t think I had a chance to properly thank her. Will you do that?”

“I’m sure she’s around here someplace. Did you check the Infirmary?”

“Of course she’s in the Infirmary. That was the first place Jacob went.”

“I don’t understand. If Sara’s in the Infirmary, why didn’t he find her?”

Mar was looking at him strangely. “Because of the quarantine, of course.”

“Quarantine?”

Mar’s face fell. “Michael, where have you been?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Alicia didn’t find him, after all; it was the other way around. Peter knew just where she’d be.

She was sitting in a wedge of shade outside the Colonel’s hut, her back braced against a stack of wood, knees pulled to her chest. At the sound of Peter’s approach, she looked up, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Oh, damn, damn,” she said.

He took a seat beside her on the ground. “It’s okay.”

Alicia sighed bitterly. “No it isn’t. You tell anyone you saw me like this I will blade you, Peter.”

They sat in silence for a while. The day was cloudy, cast with a pale and smoky light, carrying with it a strong, acrid odor-the body detail, burning the corpses outside the Wall.

“You know, I always wondered something,” Peter said. “Why did we call him the Colonel?”

“Because that was his name. He didn’t have another one.”

“Why do you think he went out there? He didn’t seem like the type. To, you know, let it go like that.”

But Alicia didn’t respond. Her relationship with the Colonel was something she rarely spoke of, and never in detail. It was a region of her life, perhaps the one region, that she withheld from Peter’s view. And yet its presence was something he was always aware of. He did not believe she thought of the Colonel as a father-Peter had never detected any trace of that kind of warmth between them. On those rare occasions when his name arose, or he appeared on the catwalk at night, Peter felt a rigidity come into her, a cold distance. It was nothing overt, and probably he was the only person who would have noticed. But whatever the Colonel had been to her, their bond was a fact; he understood that her tears were for him.

“Can you believe it?” Alicia said miserably. “They fired me.”

“Sanjay will come around. He’s not stupid. It’s a mistake-he’ll figure it out.”

But Alicia seemed to be barely listening. “No, Sanjay’s right. I never should have gone over the Wall the way I did. I totally lost my head, seeing the girl out there.” She shook her head hopelessly. “Not that it matters now. You saw that wound.”

The girl, Peter thought. He’d never learned anything about her. Who was she? How had she survived? Were there others like her? How had she gotten away from the virals? But now it looked as if she would die, taking the answers with her.

“You had to try. I think you did the right thing. Caleb, too.”

“You know, Sanjay’s actually thinking of putting him out? Putting out Hightop, for godsakes.”

To be put out: it was the worst fate imaginable. “That can’t be right.”

“I’m serious, Peter. I promise you, they’re talking about it right now.”

“The others would never stand for it.”

“Since when do they really have a say about anything? You were in that room. People are scared. Somebody’s got to take the blame for Teacher’s death. Caleb’s all alone. He’s easy.”

Peter drew a breath and held it. “Look, I know Sanjay. He can be pretty full of himself, but I really don’t think he’s like that. And everybody likes Caleb.”

“Everybody liked Arlo. Everybody liked your brother. It doesn’t mean the story won’t end badly.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Theo.”

“Maybe so.” She was gazing ahead, squinting into the light. “All I know is, Caleb saved me last night. Sanjay thinks he’s going to put him out, he’s going to have to deal with me.”

“Lish.” He paused. “Be careful. Think about what you’re saying.”

“I have thought about it. Nobody’s putting him out.”

“You know I’m on your side.”

“You may not want to be.”

Around them, the Colony was eerily quiet, everyone still stunned by the events of the early hours of the morning. Peter wondered if this was the silence that came after something, or before. If it was the silence of blame being tallied. Alicia wasn’t wrong; people were frightened.

“About the girl,” Peter said. “There’s something I should have told you.”

The lockup was an old public bathroom in the trailer park on the east side of town. As they made their approach, Peter and Alicia heard a swell of voices on the air. They picked up the pace as they moved through the maze of tipping hulks-most had long since been stripped for parts-and arrived to find a small crowd at the entrance, about a dozen men and women gathered tightly around a single Watcher, Dale Levine.

“What the hell is going on?” Peter whispered.

Alicia’s face was grim. “It’s started,” she said. “That’s what.”

Dale was not a small man, but at that moment, he seemed so. Facing the crowd, he looked like a cornered animal. He was a little hard of hearing and had a habit of turning his head slightly to the right in order to point his good ear at whoever was talking to him, giving him a slightly distracted air. But he didn’t seem distracted now.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Dale was saying, “I don’t know anything you don’t.”

The person he was addressing was Sam Chou, Old Chou’s nephew-a thoroughly unassuming man whom Peter had heard speak only a few times in his life. His wife was Other Sandy; between them they had five children, three in the Sanctuary. As Peter and Alicia moved to the edge of the group, he realized what he was seeing: these were parents. Just like Ian, everyone standing outside the lockup had a child, or more than one. Patrick and Emily Phillips. Hodd and Lisa Greenberg. Grace Molyneau and Belle Ramirez and Hannah Fisher Patal.

“That boy opened the gate.”

“So what do you want me to do about it? Ask your uncle if you want to know more.”

Sam pointed his voice to the high windows of the lockup. “Do you hear me, Caleb Jones? We all know what you did!”

“Come on, Sam. Leave the poor kid alone.”

Another man moved forward: Milo Darrell. Like his brother, Finn, Milo was a wrench, with a wrench’s solid build and taciturn demeanor: tall and slope-shouldered, with a woolly beard and unkempt hair that fell in a tangle to his eyes. Behind him, dwarfed by his height, was his wife, Penny.

“You’ve got a kid, too, Dale,” Milo said. “How can you just stand there?”

One of the three J’s, Peter realized. Little June Levine. Dale’s face, Peter saw, had gone a little white.

“You think I don’t know that?” Whatever wedge of authority had separated him from the crowd was dissolving. “And I’m not just standing here. Let the Household handle this.”

“He should be put out.”

The voice, a woman’s, had risen from the center of the crowd. It was Belle Ramirez, Rey’s wife. Their little girl was Jane. Peter saw that the woman’s hands were trembling; she looked close to tears. Sam moved toward her and put his arm around her shoulder. “You see, Dale? You see what that boy did?”

Which was the moment Alicia shouldered her way through the crowd. Without looking at Belle, or anyone at all, she stepped up to Dale, who was gazing at the stricken Belle with an expression of utter helplessness.

“Dale, hand me your cross.”

“Lish, I can’t do that. Jimmy says so.”

“I don’t care. Just give it to me.”

She didn’t wait, but snatched it away. Alicia turned to face everyone, holding the cross loosely at her side-a deliberately unthreatening posture, but Alicia was Alicia. Her standing there meant something.

“Everyone, I know you’re upset, and if you ask me, you have a right to be. But Caleb Jones is one of us, as much as any of you.”

“That’s easy for you to say.” Milo was standing with Sam and Belle now. “You were the one outside.”

A murmur of agreement flickered through the crowd. Alicia eyed at the man coolly, allowing the moment to pass.

“You have a point there, Milo. If not for Hightop, I’d be dead. So if you were maybe thinking about doing something to him, I’d think long and hard.”

“What are you going to do?” Sam sneered. “Stick us all with that cross?”

“No.” Alicia frowned, not seriously. “Just you, Sam. I thought I’d take Milo here on the blade.”

A nervous laugh from a few of the men; but it just as quickly died. Milo had taken a step back. Peter, still at the edge of the crowd, realized his hand had dropped to his blade. Everything seemed to depend on what would happen next.

“I think you’re bluffing,” Sam said, his eyes held tightly on Alicia’s face.

“Is that so? You must not know me very well.”

“The Household will put him out. You wait and see.”

“You could be right. But that’s not for either of us to decide. Nothing’s happening here except you upsetting a lot of people for no reason. I won’t have it.”

The crowd had grown suddenly silent. Peter felt their uncertainty; the momentum had shifted. Except for Sam, and maybe Milo, their anger had no weight. They were simply afraid.

“She’s right, Sam,” Milo said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Sam’s eyes, burning with righteous anger, were still locked on Alicia’s face. The cross had yet to move from Alicia’s side, but it didn’t have to. Peter, standing behind the two men, still had his hand on his blade. Everyone else had moved away.

“Sam,” Dale said, finding his voice again, “please, just go home.”

Milo reached for Sam then, meaning to take him by the elbow. But Sam jerked his arm away. He appeared rattled, as if the touch of Milo ’s hand had nudged him from a trance.

“All right, all right. I’m coming.”

It wasn’t until the two men had disappeared into the maze of trailers that Peter allowed himself to expel the breath of air he realized he’d been holding in his chest. Just a day ago, he never would have imagined that such a thing was possible, that fear could turn these people-people he knew, who did their work and went about their lives and visited their children in the Sanctuary-into an angry mob. And Sam Chou: he’d never seen the man so angry. He’d never seen him angry at all.

“What the hell, Dale?” Alicia said. “When did this start?”

“About as soon as they moved Caleb over here.” Now that they were alone, the full magnitude of what had occurred, or almost occurred, could be read in Dale’s face. He looked like a man who had fallen from a great height only to discover that he was, miraculously, uninjured. “Flyers, I thought I was going to have to let them in. You should have heard the things they were saying before you got here.”

From inside the lockup came the sound of Caleb’s voice. “Lish? Is that you?”

Alicia pointed her voice to the windows. “Just hang tight, Hightop!” She fixed her eyes on Dale again. “Go and get some other Watchers. I don’t know what Jimmy was thinking, but you need at least three out here. Peter and I can stand guard till you get back.”

“Lish, you know I can’t leave you here. Sanjay will have my ass. You’re not even Watch anymore.”

“Maybe not, but Peter is. And since when did you start taking orders from Sanjay?”

“Since this morning.” He gave them a puzzled look. “Jimmy says so. Sanjay declared a… what do you call it? A civil emergency.”

“We know all about that. That doesn’t mean Sanjay gives the orders.”

“You better tell Jimmy. He seems to think so. Galen too.”

“Galen? What does Galen have to do with anything?”

“You haven’t heard?” Dale scanned their faces quickly. “I guess you wouldn’t have. Galen’s Second Captain now.”

“Galen Strauss?”

Dale shrugged. “It doesn’t make sense to me, either. Jimmy just called everyone together and told us Galen had your slot, and Ian has Theo’s.”

“What about Jimmy’s? If he’s moved up to First Captain now, who has his slot at second?”

“Ben Chou.”

Ben and Ian: It made sense. Both were in line for second. But Galen?

“Give me the key,” Alicia said. “Go get two more Watchers. No captains. Find Soo if you can, and tell her what I told you.”

“I don’t know who that leaves-”

“I mean it, Dale,” Alicia said. “Just go.”

They opened the lockup and stepped inside. The room was barren, a featureless concrete box. Old toilet stalls, long since emptied of their fixtures, stood along one wall; facing these was a line of pipes and above it a long mirror, fogged with tiny cracks.

Caleb was sitting on the floor under the windows. They’d left him a jug of water and a bucket, but that was all. Lish balanced her cross against one of the stalls and crouched before him.

“Are they gone?”

Alicia nodded. Peter could see how frightened the boy was. He looked like he’d been crying.

“I’m so screwed, Lish. Sanjay’s going to put me out for sure.”

“That’s not going to happen. I promise you.”

He wiped his runny nose with the back of a hand. His face and hands were filthy, his nails encrusted with grime. “What can you do?”

“Let me worry about that.” She drew a blade off her belt. “You know how to use this?”

“Flyers, Lish. What am I going to do with a blade?”

“Just in case. Do you?”

“I can whittle some. I’m not very good.”

She pressed it into his hand. “Put it out of sight.”

“Lish,” Peter said quietly, “you think that’s such a good idea?”

“I’m not leaving him unarmed.” She fixed her eyes on Caleb again. “You just hold tight and be ready. Anything happens, and you have a chance to get away, don’t hesitate. You run like hell for the cutout. There’s cover there, I’ll find you.”

“Why there?”

They heard voices outside. “It’ll take too long to explain. Are we clear?”

Dale stepped back into the room, a single Watcher trailing behind him, Sunny Greenberg. She was just sixteen, a runner. Not even a season on the Walls.

“Lish, I’m not fooling,” Dale said. “You have to get out of here.”

“Relax. We’re leaving.” But when Alicia rose to her feet and saw Sunny standing in the doorway, she stopped. Her eyes flashed with anger. “This is the best you could do? A runner?”

“Everybody else is on the Wall.”

Twelve hours ago, Peter realized, Alicia could have gotten anyone she wanted, a full detail. Now she had to beg for scraps.

“What about Soo?” Alicia pressed. “Did you see her?”

“I don’t know where she is. She’s probably up there too.” Dale’s eyes darted to Peter. “Will you just get her out of here?”

Sunny, who so far had said nothing, moved farther into the room. “Dale, what are you doing? I thought you said Jimmy ordered another guard. Why are you taking orders from her?”

“Lish was just helping out.”

“Dale, she’s not a captain. She’s not even Watch.” The girl acknowledged Alicia with a quick, faintly embarrassed shrug. “No offense to you, Lish.”

“None taken.” Alicia gestured toward the cross the girl was holding at her side. “Tell me something. You any good with that thing?”

A falsely modest shrug. “Highest scores in my grade.”

“Well, I hope that’s true. Because it looks like you just got promoted.” Alicia turned to Caleb again. “You’ll be all right in here?”

The boy nodded.

“Just remember what I told you. I won’t be far.”

And with that, Alicia looked at Dale and Sunny one last time, using her eyes to communicate her meaning-Make no mistake, this is personal-and led Peter from the lockup.

TWENTY-NINE

Sanjay Patal, Head of the Household, might have said that it had all started years ago. It had started with the dreams.

Not about the girl: he’d never dreamed about her, of that he was certain. Or mostly certain. This Girl from Nowhere-that’s what everyone was calling her, even Old Chou; the phrase had, in the space of just a morning, become her name-had arrived in their midst full blown, like an apparition borne from the darkness as a being of flesh and blood. Her sheer impossibility refuted by the fact of her existence. He’d searched his mind but could find her nowhere in it, not in the part he knew as himself, as Sanjay Patal, nor in the other: the secret, dreaming part of him.

For the feeling had lain within him as long as Sanjay could remember. The feeling that was like a whole other person, a separate soul that dwelled within his own. A soul with a name and a voice that sang inside him, Be my one. I am yours and you are mine and together we are greater than the sum, the sum of our parts.

Since he was a Little in the Sanctuary, the dream had come to him. A dream of a long-gone world and a voice that sang inside him. It was, in its way, a dream like any other, made of sound and light and sensation. A dream of a fat woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. The woman shoving food into her wide, wobbling cave of a mouth, talking into her telephone, a curious object with a place to talk into and another to listen. Somehow he knew what this thing was, that it was a telephone, and in this manner Sanjay had come to understand that this wasn’t just a dream he was having. It was a vision. A vision of the Time Before. And the voice inside him singing its mysterious name: I am Babcock.

I am Babcock. We are Babcock.

Babcock. Babcock. Babcock.

He’d thought of Babcock, back then, as a kind of imaginary friend-no different, really, than a game of pretend, though the game did not end. Babcock was always with him, in the Big Room and the courtyard and taking his meals and climbing into his cot at night. The events of the dream had felt no different to him than the other dreams he had, the usual sorts of things, silly and childish, like taking a bath or playing on the tires or watching a squirrel eating nuts. Sometimes he dreamed those things and sometimes he dreamed about a fat woman in the Time Before, and there was no rhyme or reason to it.

He remembered a day, long ago, sitting in circle in the Big Room when Teacher had said, Let’s talk about what it means to be a friend. The children had just had lunch; he was full of the warm, sleepy feeling of having eaten a meal. The other Littles were laughing and fooling around though he was not, he wasn’t like that, he did as he was told, and then Teacher clapped her hands to silence them and because he was so good, the only one, she turned to him, her kind face wearing the expression of someone about to bestow a present, the wonderful present of her attention, and said, Tell us, Little Sanjay, who are your friends?

“Babcock,” he replied.

No thought was involved; the word had simply popped out on its own. At once he realized the scope of his error, saying this secret name. Out in the air it seemed to wither, diminishing with exposure. Teacher was frowning uncertainly; the word meant nothing to her. Babcock? she repeated. Had she heard him correctly? And Sanjay understood that not everyone knew who this was, of course they didn’t, why had he thought they did? Babcock was something special and private, all his own, and saying his name the way he had, so thoughtlessly, wishing only to please and be good, was a mistake. More than a mistake: a violation. To say the name was to take its specialness away. Who is Babcock, Little Sanjay? In the awful silence that followed-the children had all stopped talking, their attention snapping to this alien word-he heard someone snicker; in his memory it was Demo Jaxon, whom he hated even then-and then another and another, the sounds of their ridicule leaping around the circle of seated children like sparks around a fire. Demo Jaxon: of course it would be him. Sanjay was First Family too, but the way Demo acted, with his smooth, easy smile and effortless way of being liked, it was as if there was a second, rarer category, First of the First, and he, Demo Jaxon, was the only one in it.

But most hurtful of all was Raj. Little Raj, two years Sanjay’s junior-who should have respected him, who should have held his tongue-had joined in the laughter too. He was seated on his folded legs to Sanjay’s left-if Sanjay was at six o’clock and Demo at high noon, Raj was somewhere in the middle of the morning-and as Sanjay watched in horror, his brother shot Demo a quick inquiring glance, seeking his approval. You see? Raj’s eyes said. See how I can make fun of Sanjay, too? Teacher was clapping her hands again, trying to restore order; Sanjay knew that if he didn’t do something fast, he’d never hear the end of it. Their shrill chorus would ring in his ears, at meals and after lights-out and in the courtyard when Teacher had stepped away. Babcock! Babcock! Babcock! Like a bathroom word or worse. Sanjay has a little Babcock!

He knew what he had to say.

“I’m sorry, Teacher. I meant Demo. Demo is my friend.” He gave his most earnest smile to the little boy across from him, with his cap of dark hair-Jaxon hair-and pearl-like teeth and restless, roving eyes. If Raj could do it, so could he. “Demo Jaxon is my best friend of all.”

Strange to recall that day now, so many years later. Demo Jaxon gone without a trace, and Willem, and Raj, too; half the children who’d sat in the circle that afternoon were dead or taken up. Dark Night would get the majority; the others would find their own ways to vanish, each in his time. A kind of slow nibbling, of being eaten away; that’s what life did, that was how it felt. So many years gone by-the passage of time itself a kind of marvel-and Babcock a part of it all. Like a voice inside him, quietly urging, being a friend to him when others could not, though not always speaking in words. Babcock was a feeling he had about the world. Not since that day in the Sanctuary had he spoken of Babcock again.

And it was true that, over time, the feeling of Babcock, and the dreams, had become something else again. Not the fat woman in the Time Before, though that still happened every now and then. (And come to think of it, what had Sanjay been doing in the Lighthouse that strange night? He no longer recalled.) Not the past but the future, and his place, Sanjay’s place, within its new unfolding. Something was about to happen, something large. He didn’t know quite what. The Colony couldn’t last forever, Demo had been right about that, and Joe Fisher too; someday, the lights were going out. They were living on borrowed time. The Army was gone, dead, never to return; a few people still clung to the idea, but not Sanjay Patal. Whatever was coming wasn’t the Army.

He knew all about the guns, of course. The guns that weren’t a secret, quite. It wasn’t Raj who had told him; Sanjay should have expected this, but still it came as a disappointment, to know that Raj had chosen Demo over him. But Raj had told Mimi, who had told Gloria-Raj’s chattering gossip of a wife couldn’t keep a secret longer than about five seconds; she was a Ramirez, after all-who, one morning over breakfast, in the days right after Demo Jaxon had disappeared, slipping out the gate when no one was looking without so much as a blade in his belt, had let it drop, then flat-out blurted the story, saying, I’m not sure you’re supposed to know.

Twelve crates of them, Gloria told him, her voice lowered confidentially, her face radiating the earnestness of an eager pupil. Down at the station, behind a wall that pulled away. Shiny new guns, Army guns, from a bunker Demo and Raj and the others had found. Was it important? Gloria wanted to know. Had she done the right thing, telling him? Her anxiety was all pretense; her voice said one thing, but her eyes told him the truth. She knew what the guns meant. Yes, he said, nodding equably. Yes, I think it may be. I think it’s best if we keep this to ourselves. Thank you, Gloria, for letting me know.

Sanjay had no illusions that he was the only one. He’d gone straight to Mimi that morning, explaining to her in no uncertain terms that she mustn’t tell anyone else. But surely a secret like that would be impossible to keep. Zander had to know; the station was his domain. Probably Old Chou too, since Demo told him everything. Sanjay didn’t think Soo knew, or Jimmy, or Dana, Willem’s girl. Sanjay had probed around the edges, never detecting a thing. But certainly there were others-Theo Jaxon, for one-and whom had they told? To whom had they, in confidence, as Gloria had that morning at breakfast, whispered, “I have a secret you should know”? So it wasn’t a question of whether the guns would come out, only when, and under what circumstances, and-a lesson he had learned that morning in the Sanctuary-who was friends with whom.

Which was why Sanjay had wanted Mausami off the Watch, away from Theo Jaxon.

Since the day she’d been born, Sanjay had known it about her: she was the reason for everything. True, there had been times, even recently, when Sanjay had found himself wishing for a son, sensing that this would have bestowed a completeness that his life would otherwise lack. But Gloria was simply not able; the usual miscarriages and false alarms, and her bleeding had faded away. Mausami had been born after a pregnancy that itself had seemed like yet one more disaster in the making-Gloria had spotted nearly the entire time-and a torturous, two-day labor that had seemed to Sanjay, forced to listen to her desperate moans from the outer room of the Infirmary, like nothing a person could possibly withstand.

And yet Gloria had prevailed. It was Prudence Jaxon, of all people, who had brought Sanjay’s daughter to him where he sat with his head in his hands, his mind wiped clean by the hours of waiting and the terrible sounds from the ward. He had by then given himself over to the idea that the child would die, and Gloria as well, leaving him alone; it was with complete incomprehension that he received the swaddled bundle, believing for a moment that what Prudence had actually handed him was his own dead baby. It’s a girl, Prudence was saying, a healthy girl. And even then it had taken a moment for the idea to sink in, for Sanjay to connect these words with this strange new thing he held in his arms. You have a daughter, Sanjay. And when he drew the swaddling aside and saw her face, so startling in its humanness, her tiny mouth and crown of dark hair and tender, bulging eyes, he knew that what he was feeling, for the first and only time in his life, was love.

And then he’d almost lost her. A bitter irony, for her to take up with Theo Jaxon, the son so like the father; Mausami had done her best to hide it from him, and Gloria too, to protect him from this knowledge. But Sanjay could see what was happening. So it had come to him with a feeling of rescue when, just as he was expecting to hear that she had decided to pair with Theo, Gloria had told him the news. After everything, Galen Strauss! It wasn’t that Galen was whom he would have chosen for his daughter-far from it. He would have preferred someone sturdier, like Hollis Wilson or Ben Chou. But Galen wasn’t Theo Jaxon, that was the important thing; he wasn’t any kind of Jaxon, and it was obvious to everyone that he loved Mausami. If this love had, at its core, a quality of weakness, even of desperation, that was something Sanjay could accept in the bargain.

All of which was on his mind as he stood in the Infirmary at half-day, gazing upon the girl. This Girl from Nowhere. As if all the strands of Sanjay’s life, Mausami and Babcock and Gloria and the guns and all the rest, were braided together in her impossible person, the mystery that she was.

She appeared to be sleeping. Or something like sleeping. Sanjay had banished Sara to the outer room with Jimmy; Ben and Galen were guarding the door outside. Why he’d done this he couldn’t quite say, but something in him wanted to examine the girl alone. The wound was obviously serious; everything Sara had told him led Sanjay to believe the girl would not survive. Yet as she lay before him, her eyes closed and her body still, no trace of struggle or distress in her face or the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, Sanjay could not shake off the impression that she was more resilient than she looked. Stuck by a Watcher’s cross: such an injury would have killed a grown man, let alone a girl her age, which was what? Sixteen? Thirteen? Was she younger or older? Sara had done her best to clean the girl off and had gotten her a gown to wear, a cotton shift that opened in the front, the not-quite-sheer fabric dulled to a wintry gray by so many years of washing. It was held on her body only by the right sleeve; the left hung with disturbing emptiness, as if holding an invisible limb. The gown had been left open to expose the thick woolen dressing that encased her chest and one slender shoulder, rising to the base of her pale white neck. Her body wasn’t a woman’s body, her hips and chest were as compact as a boy’s, her legs, where they appeared below the frayed hem of the gown, possessing a coltish sleekness and an adolescent’s knobby knees. It was surprising, on knees such as those, not to see a scar or two, the evidence of some small childhood mishap-a fall from a swing, a game of roughhouse in the yard.

And her skin, Sanjay thought, looking at her knees, then her arms, and finally her face, his eyes traveling upward to take in the whole of her once more. Not white, not pale; neither word seemed to capture its quality of muted radiance. As if the lightness of its tone were not an absence of color but something in its own right. A lightness, Sanjay decided; that’s what her skin was, a lightness. But, in fact, he could see some color where the sun had touched her, her hands and arms and face, leaving a saddle of faded freckles across her cheeks and nose. It moved him to a feeling of fatherly tenderness, grounded in memory: Mausami, when she was just a girl, had had freckles like those.

The girl’s clothing and pack had gone into the fire, but not before the Household, wearing heavy gloves, had examined the meager, blood-soaked contents. Sanjay didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t what he’d found. The pack itself was ordinary green canvas, maybe military, but who could say? A few items, they’d all agreed, seemed genuinely useful-a pocketknife, a can opener, a ball of heavy twine-but most seemed arbitrary, their collective significance impossible to know. A rock of surprisingly rounded smoothness; a hunk of sun-bleached bone; a necklace with an empty locket; a book bearing the mysterious title Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Illustrated Edition. The bolt had passed straight through it, skewering it like a target; the pages were swollen with the girl’s blood. Old Chou recalled that Christmas was a kind of gathering in the Time Before, like First Night. But no one really knew.

Which left only the girl herself to tell her story. This Girl from Nowhere, encased in her bubble of silence. The significance of her appearance was obvious: someone out there was still alive. Whoever and wherever these people were, they had cast off one of their own into the wilderness, a defenseless girl, who had somehow made her way here. A fact that, as Sanjay considered it, should have been good news, a cause for outright celebration, and yet in the hours since her arrival had produced nothing more than anxious silence. Not once had he heard anyone say: We are not alone. That’s what this means. The world is not a dead place after all.

Because of Teacher, he thought. And not just the fact that Teacher was dead; it was because of what Teacher told you, the day you came out of the Sanctuary. It was common for people, looking back, to laugh this off, telling the story of their release. I can’t believe what a fuss I made! they’d all say. You should have seen how I cried! As if they were speaking not of their childhood selves, innocent creatures to be regarded with compassion and understanding, but of some other being entirely, viewed at a distance and faintly ridiculous. And it was true: once you knew that the world was a place that swarmed with death, the child you’d been no longer seemed like you at all. Seeing the pain in Mausami’s face, the day she’d come out, had been one of the worst experiences of Sanjay’s life. Some people never managed to get over it-these were the ones who let it go-but most found a way to carry on. You found a way to put hope aside, to bottle it and put it on a shelf somewhere and get on with the duties of your life. As Sanjay himself had done, and Gloria and even Mausami; all of them.

But now there was this girl. Everything about her flew straight into the face of the facts. For a person-a defenseless child-to materialize out of the dark was as fundamentally disturbing as a snowfall in midsummer. Sanjay had seen it in the eyes of the others, Old Chou and Walter Fisher and Soo and Jimmy and all the rest: everyone. It was wrong; it made no sense. Hope was a thing that gave you pain, and that’s what this girl was. A painful sort of hope.

He cleared his throat-how long had he been standing there, looking at her?-and spoke.

“Wake up.”

No response. Yet he believed he detected, behind her eyelids, an involuntary flicker of awareness. He spoke again, louder this time:

“If you can hear me, wake up now.”

His train of thought was broken by movement behind him. Sara entered through the curtain, Jimmy trailing behind.

“Please, Sanjay. Let her rest.”

“This woman is a prisoner, Sara. There are things we need to know.”

“She’s not a prisoner, she’s a patient.”

He regarded the girl again. “She doesn’t look like she’s dying.”

“I don’t know if she is or not. It’s a miracle she’s still alive, all the blood she lost. Now will you please go? It’s a wonder I can keep this place clean with all of you trooping through here.”

Sanjay could see how worn down Sara was, her hair sweaty and askew, her eyes bleary with exhaustion. It had been a long night for everyone, leading to an even longer day. And yet her face radiated authority; in here she made the rules.

“And you’ll let me know if she wakes up?”

“Yes. I told you.”

Sanjay turned to Jimmy where he stood by the curtain. “All right. Let’s go.”

But the man made no response. He was looking at the girl-staring, really.

“Jimmy?”

He broke his gaze away. “What did you say?”

“I said let’s go. Let’s let Sara do her work.”

Jimmy shook his head vaguely. “Sorry. Guess I went away for a second there.”

“You should get some sleep,” Sara said. “You too, Sanjay.”

They exited onto the porch, where Ben and Galen were standing guard, sweating in the heat. Earlier, there had been a crowd, people eager for some glimpse of the Walker, but Ben and Galen had managed to send them all away. It was past half-day; only a few people were moving about. Across the way, Sanjay saw an HD crew with masks and heavy boots and buckets headed to the Sanctuary, to wash the Big Room down again.

“I don’t know what it is,” Jimmy said. “But something about that girl… Did you see her eyes?”

Sanjay startled. “Her eyes were closed, Jimmy.”

Jimmy was squinting down at the floor of the porch, as if he’d dropped something and couldn’t find it. “Come to think of it, I guess maybe they were closed,” he said. “So why would I think she was looking at me?”

Sanjay said nothing. The question made no sense. And yet something about Jimmy’s words hit a nerve. Watching the girl, he’d had the distinct feeling of being observed.

He looked toward the other two men. “Do either of you know what he’s talking about?”

Ben shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe she’s got a thing for you, Jimmy.”

Jimmy turned sharply. His face, glowing with sweat, was actually panicked. “Will you be serious? You go in there and see what I mean. It’s weird, I’m telling you.”

Ben flicked his eyes quickly to Galen, who offered only a helpless shrug. “Flyers,” said Ben, “it was just a joke. What are you getting so riled up for?”

“It wasn’t funny, goddamnit. And what are you smirking at, Galen?”

“Me? I didn’t say anything.”

Sanjay felt his impatience boiling over. “The three of you, enough. Jimmy, no one gets in here. Is that understood?”

Jimmy gave a chastened nod. “Sure. Like you say.”

“I mean it. I don’t care who it is.”

Sanjay focused his eyes on Jimmy’s face, holding them there an extra moment. The man was no Soo Ramirez, that was obvious; he was no Alicia, either. Sanjay wondered if that was why, in the end, he’d chosen him for the job.

“What do you want us to do about Hightop?” Jimmy asked. “I mean, we’re not really putting him out, are we?”

The boy, Sanjay thought wearily. The last thing he wanted to think about, suddenly, was Caleb Jones. Caleb had given the first hours of the crisis a kind of clarity it demanded; people needed something to focus their anger on. But in the light of day, putting the boy out had begun to seem simply cruel, a pointless gesture that everyone would regret later. And the boy had real courage. When the charges were read, he’d stood before the Household and taken full blame without hesitation. Sometimes you found courage in the strangest places, and Sanjay had seen it in the wrench named Caleb Jones.

“Just keep a guard on him.”

“What about Sam Chou?”

“What about him?”

Jimmy hesitated. “There’s talk, Sanjay. Sam and Milo and some others. About putting him out.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“I didn’t. Galen did.”

“That’s what I heard,” Galen volunteered. “It was actually Kip who told me. He was at his folks’ place and heard a bunch of them talking.”

Kip was a runner, Milo ’s oldest boy. “Well? What did he say?”

Galen shrugged uncertainly, as if to distance himself from his own story. “That Sam says if we don’t put him out, he will.”

He should have seen this coming, Sanjay thought. It was the last thing he needed, people taking the situation into their own hands. But Sam Chou-it seemed completely out of character for the man, as mild a fellow as Sanjay had ever known, to go off half-cocked like that. Sam ran the greenhouses, a Chou always had; it was said that he fussed over the banks of peas and carrots and lettuce like pets. He supposed all those Littles had something to do with it. Every time Sanjay turned around, it seemed, Sam was passing out the celebratory shine and Other Sandy was pregnant again.

“Ben, he’s your cousin. You hear anything about this?”

“When would I? I’ve been here all morning.”

Sanjay told them to double the guard at the lockup and stepped down onto the path. It really was awfully damn quiet, he thought. Not even the birds were singing. It made him think again of looking at the girl, the feeling he’d had of being seen. As if, behind her sweetly sleeping face-and there was something sweet about it, he thought, a babyish kind of sweetness; it reminded him of Mausami when she was just a Little, climbing into her cot in the Big Room and waiting for Sanjay to bend toward her to kiss her good night-as if her mind, the girl’s mind, behind her eyelids, that veil of soft flesh, was seeking his out in the room. Jimmy wasn’t wrong; there was something about her. Something about her eyes.

“Sanjay?”

He realized his thoughts were drifting, carrying him away on a current. He swiveled to find Jimmy standing on the top step, his eyes pulled into a squint and his body leaning forward expectantly, the words of some unspoken declaration stalled on his lips.

“Well?” Sanjay’s mouth was suddenly dry. “What is it?”

The man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came; the effort seemed lost.

“It’s nothing,” Jimmy said finally, looking away. “Sara’s right. I really could use some sleep.”

THIRTY

There would come a time, many years later, when Peter would recall the events surrounding the girl’s arrival as a series of dancelike movements: bodies converging and separating, flung for brief periods into wider orbits, only to be drawn back again under the influence of some unknown power, a force as calm and inevitable as gravity.

When he’d come into the Infirmary the night before and seen the girl-so much blood, blood everywhere, Sara frantically trying to seal off the wound and Caleb with the soaked compress in his hands-he’d felt not horror or surprise but a blast of pure recognition. Here was the girl of the carousel; here was the girl of the hallway and the mad dash in darkness; here was the girl of the kiss and the closing door.

The kiss. In the long hours on the catwalk, standing the Mercy for Theo, Peter’s mind had returned to it, again and again, to the puzzle of its meaning, the kind of kiss it was. Not a kiss like Sara’s, that night under the lights; not the kiss of a friend or even, strictly speaking, the chaste kiss of a child, though there had been something childlike about it: its furtive haste and embarrassed quickness, ending almost before it had begun, and the girl’s abrupt reversal, stepping back into the hallway before he could say a word and sealing the door in his face. It was all of these and none, and it wasn’t until he’d come into the Infirmary and seen her lying there that he understood what it was: a promise. A promise as clear as words from a girl who hadn’t any. A kiss that said: I’ll find you.

Now, hidden behind a stand of junipers at the base of the Sanctuary wall, Alicia and Peter watched Sanjay depart. Jimmy left a moment later-there was something odd about his movements, Peter thought, a directionless lassitude, as if he didn’t quite know where to go or what to do with himself-leaving Ben and Galen standing guard in the shade of the porch.

Alicia shook her head. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to talk our way past them.”

“Come on,” he said.

He led her around to the rear of the building, a protected alleyway running between the Infirmary and the greenhouses. The back door of the building and its windows were all bricked in, but behind a pile of empty crates was a metal bulkhead. Inside was an old delivery chute, leading to the basement; sometimes at night, when his mother had been working alone and he was still young enough to take enjoyment from such a thing, she’d let him come over and ride the chute.

He swung the metal door open. “In you go.”

He heard her body banging off the sides of the tube, then her voice from below: “Okay.” Gripping the edges of the door, he eased himself inside, drawing the bulkhead down over his head-a sudden, enveloping blackness; it had been part of the thrill, he recalled, to ride the chute in darkness-and let go.

A quick, rattling plunge; he landed on his feet. The room was as he recalled, full of crates and other supplies and to his right the old walk-in freezer with its wall of jars, and at the center the wide table, with its scale and tools and guttered candles. Alicia was standing at the base of the stairs that led to the Infirmary’s front room, angling her head upward into the shaft of light that fell from above. The steps emerged, at the top, in full view of the porch. Getting past the windows would be the tricky part.

Peter ascended first. Near the top he peeked out, lifting his eyes over the final step. The angle was wrong, he was too low, but he could hear the muffled sound of the two men’s voices; they were facing away. He turned back to Alicia, signaling his intentions, then quickly rose and moved furtively across the room and down the hall to the ward.

The girl was awake and sitting up. That was the first thing he saw. Her bloody clothing was gone, replaced by a thin gown that revealed the white swath of her dressing. Sara, positioned on the edge of the narrow cot, was facing away; the girl’s wrist was in her hand.

The girl’s eyes flicked up then, meeting his own. A burst of panicked movement: she yanked her hand away and scrambled to the head of the cot, as Sara, sensing his presence behind her, vaulted to her feet and spun to face him.

“Flyers, Peter.” Her whole body seemed clenched; she spoke in a hoarse whisper. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“Through the basement.” The voice came from behind him: Alicia. The girl had pulled herself into a ball, her knees defensively compressed to her chest to form a barricade, the loose fabric of her gown drawn down over her legs, which she was gripping with her hands.

“What happened?” Alicia said. “That shoulder was torn to shreds a few hours ago.”

Only then did Sara’s posture relax. She huffed a weary sigh and dropped onto one of the adjacent cots.

“I might as well tell you. As far as I can see, she’s perfectly okay. The wound is practically healed.”

“How can that be?”

Sara shook her head. “I can’t explain it. I don’t think she wants anyone to know, though. Sanjay was just in here with Jimmy. Anybody comes in here, she pretends to be asleep.” She shrugged. “Maybe she’ll talk to you. I can’t get a word out of her.”

Peter heard this exchange only distantly; it seemed to be occurring in another room of the building. He had moved forward, toward the cot. The girl was peering at him warily over the tops of her knees, her eyes hooded by a tangle of her hair; he had the sense of moving into the presence of a skittish animal. He sat on the edge of the bed, facing her.

“Peter.” This was Sara. “What are you… doing?”

“You followed me. Didn’t you?”

A tiny nod, almost imperceptible. Yes. I followed you.

He lifted his face. Sara was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at him.

“She saved me,” Peter explained. “At the mall, when the virals attacked. She protected me.” He gave his eyes to the girl again. “That’s right, isn’t it? You protected me. You sent them away.”

Yes. I sent them away.

“You know her?” Sara said.

He hesitated, struggling to assemble the story in his mind. “We were under a carousel. Theo was already gone. The smokes were coming, I thought it was all over. Then she… climbed on top of me.”

“She climbed on top of you.”

He nodded. “Yes, on my back. Like she was shielding me. I know I’m not telling it right, but that’s how it happened. Next thing I knew, the smokes were gone. She led me to a hallway and showed me the stairs that led to the roof. That’s how I got out.”

For a moment Sara said nothing.

“I know it sounds strange.”

“Peter, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

He shrugged, at a loss. He had no defense, at least not a good one. “I should have. I wasn’t even sure the whole thing had actually happened. And once I didn’t say anything, it became harder and harder to actually do it.”

“What if Sanjay finds out?”

The girl had inched her face above the barricade of her knees; she appeared to be studying him, probing his face with a dark and knowing look. The feeling of wildness was still there, an animal jitteriness in the way she moved and held herself. But in the few minutes since they had entered the ward, a shift had occurred, a perceptible lessening of fear.

“He’s not going to,” Peter said.

“Oh my God,” a voice behind them said. “It’s true.”

They all turned to see Michael standing at the curtain.

“Circuit, how did you get in here?” Alicia hissed. “And keep your voice down.”

“Same as you. I saw the two of you going down the alley.” Michael moved cautiously toward the cot, his eyes locked on the girl. He was clutching something in his hand. “Seriously, who is that?”

“We don’t know,” Sara said. “She’s a Walker.”

For a moment Michael fell silent, his expression unreadable. Yet Peter could detect the workings of his mind, the swift calculations. He seemed, all of a sudden, to take notice of the object he was carrying.

“Holy shit. Holy shit. It’s just like Elton said.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The signal. The ghost signal.” He shushed them with a hand. “No, wait… hang on. I can’t believe this. Everybody ready?” His face lit up with a triumphant smile. “Here it comes.”

And just like that, the device began to buzz.

“Circuit,” said Alicia, “what the hell is that?”

He held it up to show them. A handheld.

“That’s what I came to tell you,” Michael said. “That girl? The Walker? She’s calling us.”

The transmitter had to be somewhere on her person, Michael explained. He couldn’t say exactly what it would look like. Large enough to have a power source, but beyond that he couldn’t say.

Her knapsack and its contents had gone into the fire. This left something on the girl herself as the source of the signal. Sara sat beside her on the cot and explained what she wanted to do, asking the girl to hold still. Moving from her feet, Sara ran her hands up the girl’s body, gently touching every surface, examining her legs and arms and hands and neck; when this was done she rose and moved behind her, positioning herself at the head of the cot, and pulled her fingers slowly through the matted nest of her hair. Through all of it the girl held herself with a motionless compliance, lifting her arms and legs when Sara asked, her eyes floating about the room with a neutral inquisitiveness, as if she was not quite sure what to make of it all.

“If it’s here, it’s well hidden.” Sara paused to push a strand of hair from her face. “Michael, are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. It has to be inside her then.”

“Inside her body?”

“It should be near the surface. Probably just under the skin. Look for a scar.”

Sara considered this. “Well, I’m not doing it in front of a crowd. Peter and Michael, both of you turn around. Lish, get over here. I might need you.”

Peter used this moment to step to the curtain and peek through. Ben and Galen were still outside, blurred figures facing away on the far side of the windows. He wondered how much longer they had. Surely someone else would come, Sanjay or Old Chou or Jimmy.

“Okay, you can look now.”

The girl was sitting on the edge of the bed, her head bent forward at the neck. “Michael was right; I didn’t have to look very long.” Sara lifted the tangle of the girl’s hair to show them: a distinct white line at the base of her neck, no more than a couple of centimeters long. Above it was the telltale bulge of some foreign object.

“You can feel the edges.” Sara pressed her fingers against it to demonstrate. “Unless there’s more to it, I think it should come out clean.”

Peter asked, “Will it hurt?”

Sara nodded. “It’ll be quick, though. After last night it should feel like nothing. Like removing a big splinter.”

Peter sat on the cot and spoke to the girl. “Sara needs to remove something from under your skin. A kind of radio. Is that okay?”

He saw a flicker of apprehension in her face. Then she nodded.

“Just be careful,” said Peter.

Sara went to the storage cabinet and returned with a basin, a scalpel, and a bottle of spirits. She wet a cloth and cleaned the area. Then, positioned behind the girl once more, holding her hair away, she took the scalpel from the basin.

“This will sting.”

With a stroke of the scalpel’s blade she traced the line of the scar. If the girl felt any pain, she made no indication. A single bead of blood appeared at the wound, running down the long line of the girl’s neck to disappear into her gown. Sara dabbed the wound with the cloth and angled her head toward the basin.

“Somebody hand me those tweezers. Don’t touch the tines.”

Alicia was the one to do this. Sara eased the ends of the tweezers through the jacketlike opening in the girl’s skin, holding the blood-tinged cloth below it. So intense was Peter’s focus that he could feel-actually feel in the tips of his fingers-the moment when the ends of the tweezers caught hold of the object. With a slow pulling motion, Sara drew it free, a dark shadow emerging, and placed it on the cloth. She held it up for Michael to see.

“Is this what you’re looking for?”

Resting on the bed of cloth was a small, oblong-shaped disk, made of some shiny metal. A fringe of tiny wires, like hairs, beaded at the tips, encircled its edges. Altogether it looked to Peter like some kind of flattened spider.

“That’s a radio?” Alicia said.

Michael was frowning, his brow furrowed. “I’m not sure,” he confessed.

“You’re not sure? How is it you could make the phone ring but you don’t know what this is?”

Michael rubbed the object with a clean rag and held it to the light. “Well, it’s some kind of transmitter. That’s what these wires are probably for.”

“So what’s it doing inside her?” Alicia asked. “Who could have done something like that?”

“Maybe we should ask her what it is,” Michael said.

But when he held the object out to show her, lying on its bed of bloodstained cloth, the girl responded with a look of puzzlement. Its very existence in her neck seemed as mysterious to her as it was to them.

“You think the Army put it in there?” Peter asked.

“It could be,” Michael said. “It was broadcasting on a military frequency.”

“But you can’t tell by looking at it.”

“Peter, I don’t even know what it’s transmitting. It could be reciting the alphabet for all I know.”

Alicia frowned. “Why would it be reciting the alphabet?”

Michael let this pass without comment. He looked at Peter again. “That’s all I can tell you. If you want to know more, I’ll have to open it.”

“Then open it,” said Peter.

THIRTY-ONE

Sanjay Patal had left the Infirmary intending to find Old Chou. There were things that needed to be decided, things to be discussed. Sam and Milo, for starters-that was a wrinkle Sanjay hadn’t planned on-and what to do about Caleb, and the girl.

The girl. Something about her eyes.

But as he moved away from the Infirmary, into the afternoon, an unexpected heaviness came over him. He supposed it was only natural-up half the night and then a morning like the one he’d had, so much to do and say and worry over, so many things to consider. People often joked about the Household, that it wasn’t a real job, one of the trades, Watch or HD or Ag-it had been Theo Jaxon who had dubbed it “the plumbing committee,” a joke that had cruelly stuck-but that was because they didn’t know the half of it, the responsibility. It weighed on a person; it was a load you carried and never quite put down. Sanjay was forty-five years old, which wasn’t young, but as he moved down the gravel path, he felt much older.

At this time of day, Old Chou would be in the apiary-never mind that the gates were closed; the bees would care nothing about that. But the thought of the long walk over there, under the high, hot sun of midday, and whom Sanjay might encounter along the way and be forced to talk to, filled him with a sudden weariness like a gray mist in his brain. He decided it then: he had to get off his feet. Old Chou would keep. And almost before he knew it, Sanjay found himself moving at a slow trudge through the shadowed glade in the direction of his house, then stepping through the door (he listened for the sounds of Gloria elsewhere in the house, detecting nothing), climbing the creaking stairs under the eaves with their cobwebby corners, and lying down in bed. He was tired, so tired. Who knew how long it had been since he had let himself take a nap in the middle of the day.

He was asleep almost before he’d finished asking himself this question.

He awoke sometime later with a savagely sour taste in his mouth and a rush of blood in his ears. He felt not so much awake as ejected bodily from sleep; his mind felt beaten clean. Flyers, how he’d slept. He lay motionless, savoring the feeling, floating in it. He realized he’d heard voices downstairs, Gloria’s and someone else’s, deeper, a man’s; he thought it might be Jimmy or Ian or maybe Galen, but as he lay and listened he realized more time had passed, and the voices had gone away. How nice it was, simply to lie there. Nice and a little strange, because in fact it seemed to him that he should have gotten up some time ago; night was falling, he could see this through the window, the whiteness of the summer sky pinkening with dusk, and there were things to do. Jimmy would want to know about the power station, and who should ride down in the morning (though Sanjay couldn’t, at that moment, recall precisely why this had to be decided), and there was still the question of the boy, Caleb, whom everyone called Hightop for some reason, it had something to do with his shoes. So many things like this. And yet the longer he lay there, the more these concerns seemed distant and indistinct, as if they applied to someone else.

“Sanjay?”

Gloria was standing in the doorway. Her presence touched him less as a person than as a voice: a disembodied voice, calling his name in the dark.

“Why are you in bed?”

He thought: I don’t know. How strange I don’t know why I’m lying in this bed.

“It’s late, Sanjay. People are looking for you.”

“I was… napping.”

“Napping?”

“Yes, Gloria. Napping. Taking a nap.”

His wife appeared above him, the image of her smooth round face floating bodiless in the gray sea of his vision. “Why are you holding the blanket like that?”

“Like what? How am I holding it?”

“I don’t know. Look for yourself.”

The effort, imagined in advance, seemed huge, nothing he wished to attempt. And yet somehow he managed it, tipping his head forward from the sweat-moistened pillow to troll the length of his body. It appeared that in his sleep he had pulled the blanket from their bed and twisted it into the form of rope, which he was now holding across his waist, clutching it tightly with his hands.

“Sanjay, what’s the matter with you? Why are you talking like that?”

Her face was still above him and yet he could not seem to focus on it, to bring it fully into view. “I’m fine. I was just tired.”

“But you’re not tired anymore.”

“No. I don’t think so. But perhaps I will sleep some more.”

“Jimmy was here. He wants to know what to do about the station.”

The station. What about the station?

“What should I tell him if he comes back?”

He remembered then. Somebody had to go down to the station to secure it, from whatever it was that might be happening there.

“Galen,” he said.

“Galen? What about him?”

But her question touched him only vaguely. His eyes had closed again, the image of Gloria’s face shifting before him, resolving, replaced by another: the face of a girl, so small. Her eyes. Something about her eyes.

“What about Galen, Sanjay?”

“It would be good for him, don’t you think?” he heard a voice saying, for one part of him was still there in the room while the other part, the dreaming part, was not. “Tell him to send Galen.”

THIRTY-TWO

The hours passed and night came on.

They’d heard no word yet from Michael. After the three of them had slipped out the back of the Infirmary, the group had separated: Michael to the Lighthouse, Alicia and Peter to the trailer park, to watch over Caleb from one of the empty hulks, in case Sam and Milo returned. Sara was still inside with the girl. For the time being, the only thing to do was wait.

The trailer where they hid was two rows away from the lockup, far enough that they could go undetected but still with a view of the door. It was said the trailers had been left by the Builders, who had used them to house the workers who had built the walls and lights; as far as Peter knew, no one else had ever lived there. Most of the paneling had been stripped away to get at the pipes and wires, and all the fixtures and appliances had been taken out, chopped up and dispersed. There was a space in the back where a mattress had sat on a platform, separated by a flexible, sliding door on a track, and a couple of sleeping cubbies tucked into the walls; a tiny table was situated at the other end with a pair of benches facing each other. These were covered in cracked vinyl, the gaps in the fabric disgorging a brittle foam that crumbled to dust when you touched it.

Alicia had brought a deck of cards to pass the time. Between hands of go-to, she would shift restlessly on the bench, glancing out the window toward the lockup. Dale and Sunny were gone, replaced by Gar Phillips and Hollis Wilson, who evidently had decided not to stand down after all. Sometime in the late afternoon, Kip Darrell had appeared, bearing a tray of food. Otherwise they’d seen no one.

Peter dealt a fresh hand. Alicia turned away from the window, took her cards from off the table, and looked at them quickly, frowning.

“Flyers. Why’d you give me such junk?”

She sorted her cards while Peter did the same, and led with a red jack. Peter matched the suit and countered with the eight of spades.

“Go to.”

He had no more spades; he drew from the deck. Alicia was gazing out the window again.

“Stop it, will you?” he said. “You’re making me nervous.”

Alicia said nothing. It took Peter four draws to match the suit; his hands were now hopelessly full of cards. He played a deuce and watched while Alicia played out the two of hearts, rolling the suit, and ran with four cards in a row, flipping on a queen to bring him back to spades.

He drew again. She was long in spades, he could feel it, but there was nothing he could do. She had him completely boxed. He played a six and watched while she dealt out a sequence of cards, flipping to diamonds on a nine, and emptied the rest of her hand.

“You always do that, you know,” she said, as she was scooping up the cards. “Play out your weakest suit first.”

Peter was still looking at his hand, as if there was something left to play. “I didn’t know that.”

“Always.”

First Bell was moments away. How strange it would be, Peter thought, not to spend this night on the catwalk.

“What will you do if Sam comes back?” Peter asked.

“I really don’t know. Try to talk him out of it, I guess.”

“And what if you can’t?”

She tipped a shoulder, frowning. “Then I’ll deal with it.”

They heard First Bell.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Alicia said.

He wanted to say: Neither do you. But he knew this wasn’t so.

“Trust me,” Alicia said, “nothing’s going to happen after Second Bell. After last night, everybody’s probably hiding in their houses. You should go look in on Sara. The Circuit, too. See if he’s found anything.”

“What do you think she is?”

Alicia shrugged. “As far as I can see, she’s just a frightened kid. That doesn’t explain that thing in her neck, or how she survived out there. Maybe we’ll never figure it out. Let’s see what Michael comes up with.”

“But you believe me? About what she did at the mall.”

“Of course I believe you, Peter.” Alicia was frowning at him. “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

“It’s a pretty crazy story.”

“If you say that’s what happened, then that’s what happened. I’ve never doubted you before, and I’m not going to start now.” She examined him closely for a moment. “But that’s not what you were asking about, is it?”

He let a silence pass. Then: “When you look at her, what do you see?”

“I don’t know, Peter. What should I see?”

Second Bell began to ring. Alicia was still studying him, waiting for his reply. But he had no words for what he felt, at least none that he trusted.

A blaze from outside: the lights were on. Peter unfolded his legs from under the table and rose to his feet.

“Would you really have stuck Sam with that cross today?” he asked her.

Alicia was below him now, illuminated from behind, her face sunk in shadow. “Honestly? I don’t really know. I might have. I’m sure I’d be sorry if I had.”

He waited, saying nothing. Resting on the floor was Alicia’s pack-food and water and a bedroll, her cross beside it.

“Go on,” she urged, tipping her head toward the door. “Get out of here.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Peter,” she said with a laugh, “when wasn’t I?”

In the Lighthouse, Michael Fisher was having more than his share of problems. But worst of all was the smell.

It had gotten bad, really bad. A sour, armpitty reek of unwashed body and old socks. A moldy-cheese-and-onions sort of smell. The air was so rank that Michael could barely concentrate.

“Flyers, Elton, just get out of here, will you? You’re stinking the whole place up.”

The old man was sitting in his usual spot at the panel to Michael’s right, his hands lying heavily on the arms of his old wheeled chair, face turned slightly to the side, away. After they’d powered up for the night-levels all green as far as that went; the station, whatever might have happened down there, was still sending current up the mountain-Michael had resumed work on the transmitter, which now lay in pieces on the counter, their images bulging through the articulated magnifying glass he’d carried out from the shed. He’d been nervously anticipating a visit from Sanjay, to ask him about the batteries; he was ready at a moment’s notice to scoop the whole thing into a drawer. But the only official visit had come from Jimmy, late in the afternoon. Jimmy didn’t look so hot, sort of flushed and out of it, like maybe he was coming down with something, and he’d asked about the batteries sheepishly, as if he’d forgotten all about them and was almost too embarrassed to bring it up now. He hadn’t gotten farther than a meter from the door, though the smell would keep anyone away, a barricade of human stink, and had appeared to take no notice of the magnifier, sitting out there for anyone with half a brain to see, nor the open slot on the panel with its colored cables and exposed circuitry and the soldering iron resting beside it on the counter.

“I mean it, Elton. If you’re going to sleep, go do it in back.”

The old man twitched to life, fingers tightening on the arms of his chair. He turned his blind, rigid face to Michael.

“Right. Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Did you solder it?”

“I’m going to. Seriously, Elton. You’re not alone in here. When was the last time you took a bath?”

The old man said nothing. Come to think of it, he didn’t look so great himself, not that the standards where Elton was concerned were all that high to begin with. Sweaty and washed out and somehow not there. While Michael watched, Elton drifted a slow hand toward the surface of the counter, his fingers tapping lightly in a searching way until they alighted on the headphones, though he didn’t pick them up.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m just saying you don’t look so great is all.”

“Are we lights up?”

“That was an hour ago. How asleep were you?”

Elton licked his lips with a heavy tongue. Flyers, what was it? Something in his teeth?

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I will go lie down.”

The old man lumbered to his feet and shuffled down the narrow hallway that connected the work area with the back of the hut. Michael heard the creek of springs as his big body hit the cot.

Well, at least he wasn’t in the room.

Michael turned his attention back to the work that lay before him. He’d been right about the thing in the girl’s neck. The transmitter was connected to a memory chip, but not any kind he’d ever seen, much smaller and without any obvious ports except for a pair of tiny gold brads. One was linked to the transmitter, the other to the filigree of beaded wires. So either the wires were an antenna array and the transmitter ran off the chip, which didn’t seem likely, or the wires themselves were sensors of some kind, the source of the data the chip was recording.

The only way to find out for sure was to read the data on the chip. And the only way to do that was to solder it hard to the mainframe’s memory board.

It was a risk. Michael was hard-soldering a piece of unknown circuitry to the control panel itself. Maybe the system wouldn’t see it. Maybe the system would crash and the lights would all go out. Probably the wisest course would be to wait until morning. But by this point he was moving forward on sheer momentum, his mind clamped onto the problem like a squirrel with a nut in his teeth; he couldn’t have waited if he wanted to.

He’d have to take the mainframe off-line first. This meant shutting down the controllers to run straight off the batteries. You could do this for a while but not for long; without the system to monitor the current, any fluctuation could flip a breaker. So once the mainframe was off-line, he’d have to work fast.

He took a deep breath and called up the system menu.

Shut down?

He clicked on: Y

The hard drive began to spin down. Michael darted from his chair and shot across the room to the breaker box.

None of the breakers moved.

He got quickly to work, pulling the motherboard free, placing it on the counter under the magnifier, taking up the hot iron in one hand and the strip of solder in the other. He touched it to the tip of the iron-a waft of smoke curling in the air above it-and watched as a single drop descended toward the open channel on the motherboard.

Bull’s-eye.

He tweezered the chip; he had one shot to get this right. Gripping his right wrist to keep it steady, he gently lowered the chip’s exposed contacts into the solder, freezing it in place for a count of ten while the bead of liquid solder cooled and stiffened around it.

Only then did he let himself breathe. He slid the board back into the panel, locked it in place, and booted the mainframe back up.

In the long minute that followed as the system came back online, the hard drive clicking and whirring, Michael Fisher closed his eyes and thought: Please.

And there it was. When he opened his eyes he saw it, sitting in the system directory. UNKNOWN DRIVE. He selected the image and watched as the window sprang open. Two partitions, A and B. The first was tiny, just a few kilobytes. But not B.

B was huge.

It contained two files, identical in size; one was probably a backup of the other. Two identical files of such immensity it simply boggled the mind. This chip: it was like the whole world was written inside it. Whoever had made this thing and put it inside the girl, that person was not like anyone he knew; they did not seem to be from a world he was part of. He wondered if he should maybe get Elton, ask him what he thought. But the snores coming from the back of the hut told him this would be a waste of his energy.

When Michael opened the file, as he did in due course, he did it almost furtively, one hand raised before his eyes, which were peeking through his fingers.

THIRTY-THREE

A lucky stroke: approaching the Infirmary, Peter saw a single Watcher standing guard. He marched straight up the steps.

“Evening, Dale.”

Dale’s cross hung loosely at his side. He sighed with exasperation, cocking his head a little, giving Peter his good ear. “You know I can’t let you in.”

Peter craned his neck to look past Dale through the front windows. A lantern was glowing on the desk.

“Sara inside?”

“She left a little while ago. Said she was getting something to eat.”

Peter held his ground, saying nothing more. It was a waiting game, he knew. He could see the indecision moving through Dale’s face. At last he huffed in surrender and stood aside.

“Flyers. Just be quick about it.”

Peter stepped through the door and moved back into the ward. The girl was curled on the cot, her knees tucked against her chest, facing away. At the sound of his entry, she made no movement; Peter guessed she was asleep.

He positioned a chair by the cot and sat with his chin in his hands. Under the tousle of her hair, he could see the mark on her neck where Sara had cut away the transmitter-a barely detectible line, almost completely healed.

She roused then, as if to meet his thoughts, and shifted on the cot to face him. The whites of her eyes were moist and full, shining in the lamplight that leaked through the curtain.

“Hey,” he said. His voice felt thick in his throat. “How are you feeling?”

Her hands were pressed together, buried to her slender wrists in the crevice between her knees. Everything about the way she held her body seemed conceived to make her appear smaller than she was.

“I came to thank you, for saving me.”

A quick tightening of her shoulders under the gown. You’re welcome.

How strange it was, speaking this way-strange because it wasn’t so strange. He had never heard the sound of the girl’s voice, and yet he did not feel this as a lack. There was something calming about it, as if she had put aside the noise of words.

“I don’t suppose you feel like talking,” Peter ventured. “Like maybe telling me your name? We could start with that, if you want.”

The girl said nothing, indicated nothing. Why would I tell you my name?

“Well, that’s okay,” Peter said. “I don’t mind. We can just sit here.”

Which was what he did; he sat with her, in the dark. After a time, a slackness came into the girl’s face. More minutes passed, and without any further acknowledgment of his presence, she closed her eyes again.

As Peter waited in the quiet, a sudden weariness came over him, and with it a memory: of a night, long ago, when he had come into the Infirmary and seen his mother watching over one of her patients-just as he was doing now. He couldn’t remember who this person was or if, in fact, the memory was several memories, folded over one another. It could have been one night or many. But on the night he recalled, he had stepped through the curtain and found his mother sitting in a chair by one of the cots, her head tipped to the side, and knew she was asleep. The person on the cot was a child, a small form hidden in darkness; the only light came from a candle on a tray by the bed. He moved forward, not speaking; no one else was in the room. His mother stirred, tilting her face toward him. She was young, and healthy, and he was glad, so glad, to see her again.

Take care of your brother, Theo.

– Mama, he said. I’m Peter.

He’s not strong, like you.

He was jarred by voices outside and the clatter of the opening door. Sara strode into the ward, the lantern swinging from her hand.

“Peter? Is everything okay?”

He blinked into the sudden blaze. It took him a moment to reassemble his sense of where he was. He had slept only a minute, and yet it felt like longer. Already the memory, and the dream it had produced, were gone.

“I was just… I don’t know.” Why was he apologizing? “I think I must have dozed off.”

Sara was busying herself with the lantern, moving a wheeled tray to the side of the cot, where the girl was sitting up, an alert and watchful expression on her face.

“How’d you talk Dale into letting you in?”

“Oh, Dale’s all right.”

Sara sat on the girl’s cot and opened her kit to reveal what she’d brought: flatbread, an apple, a wedge of cheese.

“Hungry?”

The girl ate quickly, polishing off her meal with darting bites: first the bread and then the cheese, which she sniffed suspiciously before tasting, and finally the apple, right down to the core. When it was gone she wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing juice over her cheeks.

“Well, I guess that settles it,” Sara declared. “Not the best table manners I’ve ever seen, but your appetite is normal enough. I’m going to check your dressing, okay?”

Sara untied the gown, drawing it aside to expose the girl’s bandaged shoulder while leaving the rest covered. With a pair of shears, she snipped the cloth away. Where the bolt had entered, tearing skin and muscle and bone, all that remained was a small pink depression. It reminded Peter of a baby’s flesh, that soft freshness of new skin.

“All my patients should heal so fast. No point in leaving those stitches in, I guess. Turn around so I can do the back.”

The girl complied, swiveling on the cot; Sara took up a pair of tweezers and began pulling the sutures from the exit wound, dropping them one by one into a metal basin.

“Does anybody else know about this?” Peter asked.

“About the way she heals? I don’t think so.”

“So nobody else has been in to see her since this afternoon.”

She clipped off the final stitch. “Just Jimmy.” She pulled the girl’s gown back over her shoulder. “There you go, all set.”

“Jimmy? What did he want?”

“I don’t know, I assume Sanjay sent him.” Sara shifted on the cot to look at Peter. “It was kind of strange, actually. I never heard him come in, I just looked up and there he was, standing in the doorway with this… look on his face.”

“A look?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it. I told him she hadn’t said anything, and then he left. But that was hours ago.”

Peter felt suddenly rattled. What did she mean by a look? What had Jimmy seen?

Sara took up her tweezers again. “Okay, your turn.”

Peter was about to say, My turn for what? But then he remembered: his elbow. The bandage had long since worn down to a filthy rag. He guessed the cut was healed by now; he hadn’t looked at it for days.

He sat on one of the empty cots. Sara took a place beside him and unwrapped the bandage, releasing a sour odor of stale skin.

“Did you bother keeping this thing clean at all?”

“I guess I forgot.”

She took hold of the arm, bending closely with the tweezers. Peter was aware of the girl’s eyes, intently watching them.

“Any news from Michael?” He felt a jab of pain as she tugged the first suture. “Ow, be careful.”

“It would help if you held still.” Sara repositioned his arm, not looking at him, and resumed her work. “I stopped by the Lighthouse on the way back from the house. He’s still working. Elton’s helping him.”

“Elton? Is that so smart?”

“Don’t worry, we can trust him.” Her eyes flicked upward with a troubled glance. “Funny how we’re all talking like that, all of a sudden. Who can trust who.” She gave his arm a pat. “There, move it around a little.”

Balling his hand into a fist, he pumped his arm back and forth. “Good as new.”

Sara had stepped to the pump to clean her tools. She turned and faced him, drying her hands on a rag.

“Honestly, Peter. Sometimes I worry about you.”

He realized that he was still holding his arm away from his body. He awkwardly dropped it to his side. “I’m fine.”

She raised her eyebrows doubtfully but said nothing. That one night after the music, Arlo and his guitar and everybody drinking shine; something had come over him, a sudden, almost physical loneliness, but then, the moment he kissed her, a puncturing jab of guilt. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, nor that she had failed to make her interest less than plain. Alicia was right, what she’d said on the roof of the power station. Sara was the obvious choice for him. But he couldn’t will himself to feel something he didn’t. There was a part of him that simply didn’t feel alive enough to deserve her, to offer in kind what she was offering him.

“As long as you’re here,” Sara said, “I’m going to go look in on Hightop. Make sure somebody remembered to feed him.”

“What do you hear?”

“I’ve been inside all day. You probably know more than I do.” When Peter said nothing, Sara shrugged. “I expect people are divided. There’s going to be a lot of anger about last night. The best thing would be for a little time to pass.”

“Sanjay better think twice about doing anything with him. Lish will never stand for it.”

Sara seemed to stiffen. She drew her kit from the floor and hung it on her shoulder again, not looking at him.

“What did I say?”

But she shook her head. “Forget it, Peter. Lish is not my problem.”

Then she was gone, the curtain shifting with her departure. Well, Peter thought, what to make of that? It was true that Alicia and Sara couldn’t have been two more different women, and nothing said they had to get along. Maybe it was simply the case that Sara blamed Alicia for Teacher’s death, which would hit Sara harder than most. It was sort of obvious, now that Peter considered it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

The girl was looking at him again. She gave a quizzical lift of her eyebrows: What’s wrong?

“She’s just upset is all,” he said. “Worried.”

He thought it again: How strange it all was. It was as if he could hear her words in his head. Anybody who saw him talking like this would think he’d lost his mind.

Then the girl did something he hadn’t expected at all. Aroused by some unknown purpose, she rose from her cot and moved to the sink. She primed the pump, three hard pushes, and filled a basin with water. This she carried back to the cot where Peter sat. She placed it on the dusty floor at his feet and took a cloth from the cart and sat beside him, bending at the waist to dip the rag in the water. Then she took his arm in her hand and began to dab the place where the sutures had been with the moistened cloth.

He could feel her breath on him, breezing over his damp flesh. She had unfolded the cloth against her open hand to increase the surface area. Her gesture was more thorough now, not a cautious dabbing but a smooth, even stroking motion, rubbing the dirt and desiccated skin away. An ordinary kindness, to wash his skin, and yet completely surprising: it was full of sensation, of memory. His senses seemed to have gathered around it, the feel of the washcloth on his arm, her breath on his skin, like moths around a flame. As if he were a boy again, a boy who had fallen and scraped his elbow and run inside, and she was washing him clean.

She misses you.

Every nerve in his body seemed to jump. The girl was holding his arm in a firm grip, immovable. Not words, not spoken words. The words were in his mind. She was gripping his arm; their faces were inches apart.

“What did you-?”

She misses you she misses you she misses you.

He was on his feet, lurching away. His heart was pounding in his chest like a great caged animal. He had backed with his full weight into some kind of glass cabinet, sending the contents spilling off the shelves behind him. Someone had stepped through the curtain, a figure at the periphery of his vision. For a moment his mind came mercifully into a wider focus. Dale Levine.

“What the hell is going on in here?”

Peter swallowed, trying to answer. Dale was standing at the curtain, wearing a look of confusion, his emotions unable to coalesce around any single point in the unfolding scene. He shifted his face toward the girl, who was still seated on the cot with the basin at her feet, then looked at Peter again.

“She’s awake? I thought she was dying.”

Peter found his voice at last. “You can’t… tell anyone.”

“Flyers, Peter. Does Jimmy know about this?”

“I mean it.” He knew suddenly that if he didn’t leave the room at once he would dissolve. “You can’t.”

Then he turned, brushing past Dale, practically knocking him over; he was through the curtain and out the door and stumbling down the steps into the spotlit yard, his mind still caught in the flow of words in his head-she misses you she misses you-his vision wavering through the tears that were rising to his eyes.

THIRTY-FOUR

For Mausami Patal, the night began in the Sanctuary.

She was sitting alone in the Big Room, trying to teach herself to knit. All the cots and cribs had been taken out; the children had bedded down upstairs. The broken window was boarded up, the glass swept away, the room and all its surfaces washed down with spirits. The smell would linger for days.

It wasn’t anyplace she should have been. The aroma of alcohol was so strong it was making her eyes tear up. Poor Arlo, Maus thought. And Hollis, having to kill his brother like that, though it was lucky that he had. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he’d missed. And of course Arlo wasn’t really Arlo anymore, just as Theo, if he was still alive out there, wasn’t Theo. The virus took the soul, the person you loved, away.

The chair where she sat was an old nursing rocker she’d found in the storage closet. She’d positioned a small table beside it; resting on this was a lantern, giving her enough light to work by. Leigh had instructed her in the basic stitches, which had seemed easy enough when she’d started, but somewhere along the way she had taken a wrong turn. The stitches weren’t coming out even, not at all, and her left thumb, when she tried to draw the yarn around the needle, as Leigh had demonstrated, kept getting in the way. Here she was, a woman who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power. She’d gotten so distracted that twice the ball of yarn in her lap had dropped to the floor to roll across the room, and by the time she’d gotten it rolled back up, she’d forgotten where she was and had to start over.

Part of her simply couldn’t absorb the notion that Theo was gone. She had planned to tell him about the baby on the ride, their first night at the station. With its warren of rooms and heavy walls and doors that sealed, it was easy to find an occasion to be alone there. A fact that, as long as she was being honest with herself, was the reason the whole situation existed in the first place.

Pairing with Galen: why had she done it? Cruel in a way, because he wasn’t a bad person; it was hardly his fault that she didn’t love him, or even much like him, not anymore. A bluff. That’s what it had been. To jar Theo out of his gloom. And when she’d said to him that night on the Wall, Maybe I just will marry Galen Strauss, and Theo had said, All right, if that’s what you want, I only want you to be happy, the bluff had hardened into something else, something she had to do, to prove that he was wrong. Wrong about her, wrong about himself, wrong about everything. You had to try. You had to act. You had to get on with things and make do. A feat of stubbornness, that’s what it was, marrying Galen Strauss, and all for Theo Jaxon.

For a time, most of that summer and into the fall, she had tried to make the marriage work. She had hoped she could will the right emotions into being, and for a while she had almost done it, simply because the sheer fact of her existence seemed to make Galen so happy. They were both Watch, so it wasn’t like they saw each other all that much or kept any kind of regular hours; it proved, in fact, pretty easy to avoid him, because he was on the day shift most of the time, a subtle but unmistakable comment on the fact that he had come up last in his grade, and with his eyes the way they were, no good in the dark. Sometimes when he looked at her, squinting like he did, she wondered if in fact she was the girl he really loved at all. Maybe it was some other woman he saw, one he had made up in his mind.

She’d found a way to almost never let him near her.

Almost: because you couldn’t not lie with your husband. Is he tender with you? her mother had asked her. Is he kind? Does he care about what’s happening to you? That’s all I want to know. But Galen was too happy to be tender. I can’t believe it! his face and body said. I can’t believe you’re mine! Which she wasn’t; while Galen huffed and puffed above her in the dark, Mausami was miles away. The harder he tried to be a husband, the less she felt like a wife to him, until-and this was the bad part, the part that didn’t seem fair of her-she’d found herself actually disliking him. By the first snowfall she’d caught herself imagining she could close her eyes and simply wish him off the face of the earth. Which only made Galen try harder, and left her disliking him even more.

How could he not know the baby wasn’t his? Could the man not do basic math?

True, she’d fudged the numbers. The morning he’d caught her throwing up her breakfast into the compost pile, she’d told him three periods, when it was really two. Three and it was Galen’s baby; two and it was not. Galen had come to her only one time the month she’d gotten pregnant; she had refused him on some pretense, she couldn’t even remember what. No, it was all perfectly clear to Mausami, the when and who. She had been down at the station when it happened; Theo was there, and Alicia, and Dale Levine. The four of them had stayed up late playing hands of go-to in the control room, and then Alicia and Dale had gone to bed, and the next thing she knew, she and Theo were sitting alone together, the first time since her wedding. She began to cry, surprised at how much she wanted to and by the sheer volume of her tears, and Theo had taken her in his arms to comfort her, which was what she wanted too, both of them saying how sorry they were, and after that it had taken all of about thirty seconds. They never stood a chance.

She’d barely seen him after that. They’d ridden back the next morning, and life returned to normal-though it wasn’t normal, not at all. She was a person with a secret. It lay like a warm stone inside her, a private glowing happiness. Even Galen seemed to detect the change, remarking something along the lines of Well, I’m glad to see your mood has picked up. It’s nice to see you smiling. (Her response, wholly absurd and nothing that could be acted upon, was a friendly desire to tell him, so he could share in her good news.) She didn’t know what would happen; she didn’t think about it at all. When she missed her period, she gave it scarcely any thought. It wasn’t like she was anything close to regular; she’d always been that way, it came and went as it pleased. All she could think about was the next trip down to the station, when she could make love to Theo Jaxon again. She saw him on the catwalk, of course, and at evening assembly, but that wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the time and place to touch or even talk. She would have to wait. But even this, the waiting, the torturous crawl of days-the date of their next departure for the station was plainly listed on the duty roster, where anyone could see it-was part of her happiness, the blur of love.

Then she missed another period, and Galen caught her throwing up into the compost pile.

Of course she was pregnant. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? How had this eventuality escaped her attentions? Because the one thing Theo Jaxon wouldn’t want was a baby. Maybe under the right circumstances she could have won him over to the idea. But not like this.

Then another thought had come to her, dawning with a simple clarity: a baby. She was going to have a baby. Her baby, Theo’s baby, their baby together. A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

Maybe the thing Theo Jaxon needed most of all was a baby.

That’s what Mausami would have told him down at the station, in the little room of shelves that was now theirs. She had imagined the scene unfolding a number of ways, some good and some not so good, the worst of all being the one in which she lost her nerve and said nothing. (The second worst: Theo guessed, her courage failed her anyway, and she told him it was Galen’s.) What she hoped was that she’d see a light in his eyes come on. The light that had gone out, long ago. A baby, he would say. Our baby. What should we do? What people always do, she would have told him, and that was when he would take her in his arms again, and in this zone of sheltering safety she would know that everything would be all right, and together they would ride back to face Galen-to face everyone-together.

But now this would never happen. The story she had told herself was just that, a story.

She heard footsteps coming down the hall behind her. A heavy, loose-limbed tread she knew. What did she have to do to get a moment’s peace? But it wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself again; nothing was Galen’s fault.

“What are you doing down here, Maus? I’ve been all over.”

He was standing above her. She shrugged, still giving her eyes to her horrible knitting.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“It’s washed down, Galen.”

“I mean you shouldn’t be here alone.”

Mausami said nothing. What was she doing here? Just a day ago, she’d felt so suffocated by the place that she thought she’d lose her mind. What made her think she could ever learn to knit?

“It’s fine, Gale. I’m perfectly fine where I am.”

She wondered if it was guilt that made her torment him so. But she didn’t think it was. It felt more like anger-anger at his weakness, anger that he loved her like he did when she’d clearly done nothing to deserve it, anger that she would have to be the one to look him in the eye after the baby was born-a baby that would, as long as life was being so ironic, look just like Theo Jaxon-and explain the truth to him.

“Well.” He paused, clearing his throat. “I’m leaving in the morning. I just came to tell you.”

She put her needles down to look at him. He was squinting at her in the dim light, giving his face a scrunched, boyish appearance. “What do you mean, ‘leaving’?”

“Jimmy wants me to secure the station. With Arlo gone, we don’t know what’s going on down there.”

“Flyers, Galen. Why is he sending you?”

“You think I can’t handle it?”

“I didn’t say that, Gale.” She heard herself sigh. “I’m just wondering why you, is all. You’ve never been down there before.”

“Someone has to go. Maybe he thinks I’m the best man for the job.”

She did her best to look agreeable. “Be careful, okay? All eyes.”

“You say that like you actually mean it.”

Mausami didn’t know how to answer that. She felt suddenly tired.

“Of course I mean it, Gale.”

“Because if you don’t, you should probably just say so.”

Tell him, she thought. Why didn’t she just tell him?

“Go on, it’s all right.” She took up her knitting again. “I’ll be here when you get back. Go to the station.”

“You really think I’m so stupid?”

Galen was standing with his hands at his sides, glaring at her. One hand, his right, closest to his blade, gave a small, involuntary-seeming twitch.

“I didn’t… say that.”

“Well, I’m not.”

A silent moment passed. His hand had moved to his belt, perched beside the handle of his knife.

“Galen?” she asked gently. “What are you doing?”

The question appeared to jar him. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you’re staring at me. What you’re doing with your hand.”

He dropped his gaze to look. A little hmm sound rose in the back of his throat. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “I guess you’ve got me there.”

“Won’t they be looking for you on the catwalk? Aren’t you supposed to be there?”

There was, she thought, something strangely inward about his expression, as if he wasn’t quite seeing her. “I guess I better go,” he said.

But still he made no effort to leave, nor to move his hand away.

“So I’ll see you in a few days,” Mausami said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because you’re going to the station, Galen. Isn’t that what you said?”

A glimmer of recognition came into his face. “Yeah, I’m going down there tomorrow.”

“So take care of yourself, okay? I mean it. All eyes.”

“Right. All eyes.”

She listened to his footsteps receding down the hall, the sound abruptly muffled as the door to the Big Room sealed in his wake. Only then did Mausami realize that she had slid one of her knitting needles free and was clutching it in her fist. She looked around the room, which suddenly seemed too large, a place abandoned, empty of its cribs and cots. All the Littles gone.

The feeling touched her then, a cold shiver from within: something was about to happen.