The Passage

THIRTY-FIVE

For ninety-two years, eight months, and twenty-six days, since the last bus had driven up the mountain, the souls of First Colony had lived in this manner:

Under the lights.

Under the One Law.

According to custom.

According to instinct.

In the day-to-day.

With only themselves, and those they had made, for company.

Under the protection of the Watch.

Under the authority of the Household.

Without the Army.

Without memory.

Without the world.

Without the stars.

For Auntie, alone in her house in the glade, the night-the Night of Blades and Stars-commenced like so many nights before it: she was sitting at the table in her steam-fogged kitchen, writing in her book. That afternoon she had taken a batch of pages off the line, stiff with the sun-they always felt to her like squares of captured sunlight-and had passed the remainder of the daylight hours preparing them: trimming the edge on her cutting board, opening the binding and its covers of stretched lambskin, carefully undoing the stitching that held the pages in place, taking up her needle and thread to sew the new ones in. It was slow work, satisfying in the way of all things that required time and concentration, and by the time she was finished, the lights were coming on.

Funny how everyone thought she had just the one book.

The volume she was writing in, by her closest recollection, was the twenty-seventh of its kind. It seemed she was always opening a drawer or stacking cups in a cabinet or sweeping under the bed and coming across another one. She supposed that was the reason she put them away like she did, here and there, not in a neat line on some shelf to look at. Whenever she found one, it felt like bumping into an old friend.

Most told the same stories. Stories she remembered of the world and how it was. Time to time a bit of something would sail out of the blue, a memory she’d forgotten she had, like television, and the silly things she used to watch (its flickering blue-green glow and her daddy’s voice: Ida, turn that damn thing off, don’t you know it rots your brain?); or something would set her off, the way a ray of sunshine drizzled over a leaf or a breeze with a certain smell in its currents, and the feelings would start to move through her, ghosts of the past. A day in a park in autumn and a fountain billowing water and the way the afternoon light seemed to catch in its spray, like a huge sparkling flower; her friend Sharise, the girl from down the corner, sitting beside her on a step to show her a tooth she’d lost, holding it with its bloody stump in her palm for Auntie to see. (Ain’t no such thing as the tooth fairy, I know it, but she always brings me a dollar.) Her mama folding laundry in the kitchen, wearing her favorite summer dress of pale green, and the puff of scent from the towel she was snapping and folding against her chest. When this happened, Auntie knew it would be a good night of writing, memories opening into other memories, like a hall of doors her mind could walk down, keeping her busy till the morning sun was rising in the windows.

But not tonight, thought Auntie, dipping the nib of her pen into the cup of ink and smoothing the page flat beneath her hand. Tonight was not a night for these old things. It was Peter she meant to write on. She expected he’d be along directly, this boy with the stars inside him.

Things came to her in their way. She supposed it was because she’d lived so long, like she was a book herself and the book was made of years. She remembered the night Prudence Jaxon had appeared at her door. The woman was sick with the cancer, well on her way, much before her time. Standing there in Auntie’s door with the box pressed to her chest, so brittle and thin it was like she could blow away in the wind. Auntie had seen it so many times in her life, this bad thing in the bones, and there was never any right thing to do except to listen and do like the person asked, and that was what Auntie did for Prudence Jaxon that night. She took the box and kept it safe, and it wasn’t but a month before Prudence Jaxon was dead.

He has to come to it on his own. Those were the words Prudence had said to Auntie, true words; for it was the way of all things. The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.

But Peter, she thought; it wasn’t the train but Peter she had meant to write on. (Only where had they been going? Auntie wondered. Where had they taken a train to that one time, the two of them together, she and her daddy, Monroe Jaxon? They had been going to visit her gramma and cousins, Auntie remembered, in a place he called Downsouth.) Peter, and the train. Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended and the train took you away to another, and the next thing you knew you were standing in the dust with helicopters and soldiers all around, and all you had to remember folks by was the picture you found in the pocket of your coat, the one your mama, who you would never see again in all the days of your life, had slipped in there when she’d hugged you at the door.

By the time Auntie heard the knock, the screen opening and slapping as the person who’d come calling let themselves in, she’d almost stopped her stupid old crying. She’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t do it anymore. Ida, she’d said to herself, no more crying over things you can’t do nothing about. But here she was, all these years gone by, and still she could work herself into such a state whenever she thought about her mama, tucking that picture in her pocket, knowing that by the time Ida found it, the two of them would be dead.

“Auntie?”

She’d expected it would be Peter, come with his questions about the girl, but it wasn’t. She didn’t recognize the face, floating in the fog of her vision. A squished-up narrow man’s face, like he’d gotten it jammed in a door.

“It’s Jimmy, Auntie. Jimmy Molyneau.”

Jimmy Molyneau? That didn’t seem right. Wasn’t Jimmy Molyneau dead?

“Auntie, you’re crying.”

“Course I’m crying. Got something in my eye is all.”

He slid into the chair across from her. Now that she had found the right pair of glasses from the lanyards around her neck, she saw that he was, as he claimed, a Molyneau. That nose: it was a Molyneau nose.

“What you want then? You come about the Walker?”

“You know about her, Auntie?”

“Runner came by this morning. Said they found a girl.”

She couldn’t say for sure what all he wanted. There was something sad about him, defeated seeming. Usually Auntie would have welcomed a bit of company, but as the silence continued, this strange, sullen man she only vaguely recalled sitting across from her with a hangdog look on his face, she began to feel impatient. Folks shouldn’t just come barging into a place with nothing on their minds.

“I don’t really know why I came by. There was something I think I was supposed to tell you.” He sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his face. “I really should be on the Wall, you know.”

“You say so.”

“Yeah, well. That’s where the First Captain should be, right? On the Wall?” He wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at his hands. He shook his head in a way that seemed like maybe the Wall was the last place on earth he wanted to be. “It’s something, huh? Me, First Captain.”

Auntie had nothing to say to that. Whatever was on this man’s mind, it had nothing to do with her. There were times when you couldn’t fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.

“You think I could have a cup of tea, Auntie?”

“You want, I make you one.”

“If it’s no trouble.”

It was, but there seemed no escaping it. She rose and put the kettle on to boil. All the while the man, Jimmy Molyneau, sat silently at the table, looking at his hands. When the water began to thrum in its kettle she poured it through the strainer into a pair of cups and carried it back.

“Careful. It hot now.”

He took a cautious sip. He seemed to have lost all interest in talking. Which was fine by her, all things considered. Folks came in time to time to talk about a problem, private things, probably thinking since she lived alone like she did and saw almost no one that she’d have nobody to tell. Usually it was women, come to talk about their husbands, but not always. Maybe this Jimmy Molyneau had a problem with his wife.

“You know what people say about your tea, Auntie?” He was frowning into his cup, like the answer he was looking for might be floating in there.

“What’s that now?”

“That it’s the reason you’ve lived so long.”

More minutes passed, a weighty silence pressing down. At last he took a final sip of tea, grimacing at the taste, and returned it to the table.

“Thanks, Auntie.” He climbed wearily to his feet. “I guess I better be going. It’s been nice talking to you.”

“Ain’t no bother.”

He paused at the door, one hand poised on the frame. “It’s Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Molyneau.”

“I know who you are.”

“Just in case,” he said. “In case anybody asks.”

The events that began with Jimmy’s visit to Auntie’s house were destined to be misremembered, beginning with the name. The Night of Blades and Stars was, in fact, three separate nights, with a pair of days between. But as with all such occurrences-those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come-time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year. The Night of Blades and Stars.

The error was compounded by the fact that the events of the night of the sixty-fifth of summer, from which the rest descended, unfolded in a series of discrete compartments with overlapping chronologies, no single piece being wholly aware of the others. Things were happening everywhere. For instance: while Old Chou was rising from the bed he shared with his young wife, Constance, propelled by a mysterious urge to go to the Storehouse, across the Colony, Walter Fisher was thinking the same thing. But the fact that he was too drunk to get out of bed and lace his boots would delay his visit to the Storehouse, and his discovery of what lay there, by twenty-four hours. What these two men had in common was that they had both seen the girl, the Girl from Nowhere, when the Household had visited the Infirmary at first light; but it was also true that not everyone who had encountered her firsthand experienced this reaction. Dana Curtis, for instance, was wholly unaffected, as was Michael Fisher. The girl herself was not a source but a conduit, a way for a certain feeling-a feeling of lost souls-to enter the minds of the most susceptible parties, and there were some, like Alicia, who would never be affected at all. This was not true of Sara Fisher and Peter Jaxon, who had experienced their own versions of the girl’s power. But in each case, their encounters had taken a more benign, if still troubling form: a moment of communion with their beloved dead.

First Captain Jimmy Molyneau, lurking in the shadows outside his house at the edge of the glade-he had yet to appear on the catwalk, a cause of considerable confusion for the Watch, leading to the hasty deputizing of Sanjay’s nephew Ian as First Captain pro tem-was trying to decide whether or not to go to the Lighthouse, kill whomever he found there, and turn the lights off. Though the impulse to perform such a grave and final act had been building in him all day, it was not until he had gazed into his teacup in Auntie’s steam-fogged kitchen that the idea had crystallized into a specific shape in his mind, and if anyone had happened upon him standing there and asked what he was doing, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He could not have explained this desire, which seemed both to originate from some deep place within him and yet not be entirely his own. Sleeping inside the house were his daughters, Alice and Avery, and his wife, Karen. There were times in the course of his marriage, whole years, when Jimmy had not loved Karen as he should have (he was secretly in love with Soo Ramirez), but he had never doubted her love for him, which seemed boundless and unwavering, finding its physical expression in their two girls, who looked exactly like her. Alice was eleven, Avery nine. In the presence of their gentle eyes and tender, heart-shaped faces and sweetly melancholy dispositions-they were both known to burst into tears at the slightest provocation-Jimmy had always felt a reassuring force of historical continuum and, when the black feelings came, as they sometimes did, a tide of darkness that felt like drowning from within, it was always the thought of his daughters that would lift him from his gloom.

And yet the longer he stood there, skulking in the shadows, the more his impulse to douse the lights seemed wholly unrelated to, and hence beyond the reach of, the idea of his sleeping family. He felt strange within himself, very strange, as if his vision were collapsing. He stepped away from his house and by the time he reached the base of the Wall, he knew what he had to do. He felt an overwhelming relief, soothing as a bath of water, as he ascended the ladder, which connected with Firing Platform Nine. Firing Platform Nine was known as the odd-man post; because of its location above the cutout, an irregularity in the shape of the Wall to accommodate the power trunk, it was not visible from either of the adjacent platforms. It was the worst duty, the loneliest duty, and this was where Jimmy knew Soo Ramirez would be tonight.

Though her emotions had yet to consolidate into anything more specific than a nameless dread, Soo as well had been feeling troubled all night. But these feelings, of something vaguely not right, were diffused by other, more personal recriminations: the array of disappointments brought about by being asked to step down as First Captain. As Soo had discovered in the hours since the inquest, this was not an entirely unwelcome development-the responsibilities had begun to take their toll-and she would’ve had to step down eventually. But getting herself fired was hardly the way she wanted to do it. She’d gone straight home and sat in her kitchen and cried for a good two hours. Forty-three years old, nothing ahead of her but nights on the catwalk and the odd dutiful meal with Cort, who meant well enough but who’d run out of things to say to her about a thousand years ago; the Watch was all she had. Cort was in the stables like always, and for a minute or two she wished he was at home, though it was just as well he wasn’t, since he probably would have just stood there with that helpless look on his face, not moving to comfort her, such gestures being completely beyond his powers of expression. (Three dead babies inside her-three!-and he’d never known what to say even then. But that was years ago.)

She had no one to blame but herself. That was the worst part about it. Those stupid books! Soo had come across them at Share, idly sifting through the bins where Walter kept the stuff nobody wanted. It was all because of those stupid books! Because once she’d cracked the binding on the first one-she’d actually sat down on the floor to read, folding her legs under her like a Little in circle-she’d felt herself being sucked down into it, like water down a drain. (“Why, if it isn’t Mr. Talbot Carver,” exclaimed Charlene DeFleur, descending the stairs in her long rustling ball gown, her eyes wide in an expression of frank alarm at the sight of the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the hallway in his dusty riding breeches, the fabric smoothly taut against his virile form. “What ever could you intend, coming here while my father is away?”) Belle of the Ball by Jordana Mixon; The Passionate Press, Irvington, New York, 2014. There was a picture of the author inside the back cover: a smiling woman with flowing handfuls of dark hair, reclining on a bed of lacy pillows. Her arms and throat were bare; atop her head was perched a peculiar, disklike hat-a hat not large enough even to keep the rain off.

By the time Walter Fisher had appeared by the bin, Soo had read to chapter three; the sound of his voice was so intrusive, so alien to her experience of the words on the pages, that she actually jumped. Anything good? Walter asked, his eyebrows lifting inquisitively. You seem pretty interested. Seeing as it’s you, Walter went on, I can let you have the whole box for an eighth. Soo should have bargained, that’s what you did with Walter Fisher, the price was never the price; but in her heart she’d already bought them. Okay, she said, and hoisted the box off the floor. You’ve got yourself a deal.

The Lieutenant’s Lover, Daughter of the South, The Hostage Bride, A Lady at Last: never in all her life had Soo read anything like these books. Whenever Soo imagined the Time Before, the thought was synonymous with machines-cars and engines and televisions and kitchen stoves and other things of metal and wire she had seen in Banning but did not know the purpose of. She supposed it had also been a world of people, too, all kinds of people, going about their business in the day-to-day. But because these people were gone, leaving behind only the ruined machines they had made, the machines were what she thought of. And yet the world she found between the covers of these books did not appear so very different from her own. The people rode horses and heated their homes with wood and lit their rooms with candlelight, and this material sameness had surprised her, while also opening her mind to the stories, which were happy stories of love. There was sex, too, lots of sex, and it wasn’t at all like the sex she knew with Cort. It was fiery and passionate, and sometimes she found herself wanting to hurry through the pages to get to one of these scenes, though she didn’t; she wanted to make it last.

She never should have brought one to the Wall that night, the night the girl had appeared. That was her big mistake. Soo hadn’t meant to, not really; she’d been carrying the book around in her pouch all day, hoping for a free minute, and had forgotten it was there. Well, maybe not forgotten, not exactly; but certainly it hadn’t been Soo’s intention, as things had occurred, that she should decide to make a quick visit to the Armory-where, alone in the quiet with no one to see her, she had pulled it out and started to read. The book she’d brought was Belle of the Ball (she’d read them all and started over), and encountering its opening passages for the second time-the impetuous Charlene descending the stairs to find the arrogant and mutton-whiskered Talbot Carver, her father’s rival, whom she loved but also hated-Soo found herself instantly reliving the pleasures of her first discovery, a feeling magnified by the knowledge that Charlene and Talbot, after much hemming and hawing, would find each other in the end. That was the best thing about the stories in the books: they always ended well.

These were Soo’s thoughts when, twenty-four hours later, busted from First Captain, Belle of the Ball still stashed in her pouch (why couldn’t she just leave the damn thing at home?), she heard footsteps ascending behind her and turned to see Jimmy Molyneau climbing off the ladder onto Firing Platform Nine. Of course it would be Jimmy. Probably he had come to gloat, or apologize, or some awkward combination of the two. Though he was hardly one to talk, Soo thought bitterly, not showing up at First Bell.

Jimmy? she said. Where the hell have you been?

The night was inhabited by dreams. In the houses and barracks, in the Sanctuary and Infirmary, dreams moved through the dozing souls of First Colony, alighting here and there, like wafting spirits.

Some, like Sanjay Patal, had a secret dream, one they’d been having all their lives. Sometimes they were aware of this dream and sometimes they were not; the dream was like an underground river, constantly flowing, that might from time to time rise to the surface, briefly washing their daylight hours with its presence, as if they were walking in two worlds at the same time. Some dreamed of a woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. Others, like the Colonel, dreamed of a girl, alone in the dark. Some of these dreams became nightmares-what Sanjay did not remember, had never remembered, was the part of the dream that involved the knife-and sometimes the dream wasn’t like a dream at all; it was more real than reality itself, it sent the dreamer stumbling helplessly into the night.

Where did they come from? What were they made of? Were they dreams or were they something more-intimations of a hidden reality, an invisible plane of existence that revealed itself only at night? Why did they feel like memories, and not just memories-someone else’s memories? And why, on this night, did the entire population of First Colony seem to lapse into this dreamer’s world?

In the Sanctuary, one of the three J’s, Little Jane Ramirez, daughter of Belle and Rey Ramirez-the same Rey Ramirez who, having found himself suddenly and terrifyingly alone at the power station, and troubled by dark urges he could neither contain nor express, was, at that moment, cooking himself to a crisp on the electrified fence-was dreaming of a bear. Jane had just turned four years old. The bears she knew were the ones in books and in stories Teacher told-large, mild creatures of the forest whose hairy bulk and gentle faces were the seat of a benign animal wisdom-and that was true of the bear in her dream, at least at the beginning. Jane had never seen an actual bear, but she had seen a viral. She was among the Littles of the Sanctuary who had actually beheld the viral Arlo Wilson with her own eyes. She had been rising from her cot, which was positioned in the last row, farthest from the door-she was thirsty and had meant to ask Teacher for a cup of water-when he had burst through the window in a great shattering of glass and metal and wood, landing practically on top of her. She had thought at first it was a man, because it seemed like a man, with a man’s displacement and presence. But he wasn’t wearing any clothes, and there was something different about him, especially his eyes and mouth, and the way he seemed to glow. He was looking at her in a sad way-his sadness seemed suggestively bearlike-and Jane was about to ask him what was wrong and why he glowed like that when she heard a cry behind her and turned to see Teacher racing toward them. She passed over Jane like a cloud, the blade she kept hidden in a sheath beneath her billowing skirt clutched in her outstretched hand, one arm raised over her head to bring it down upon him like a hammer. The next part Jane did not see-she had dropped to the floor and begun to scramble away-but she heard a soft cry and a ripping sound and the thud of something falling. This was followed by more yelling-“Over here!” someone was saying, “look over here!”-and then more screams and shouts and a general commotion of grown-ups, of mothers and fathers coming in and out, and the next thing Jane knew she was being pulled from under her cot and whisked with all the other Littles up the stairs by a woman who was crying. (Only later did she realize that this woman was her mother.)

Nobody had explained these confusing events, nor had Jane told anyone what she’d seen. Teacher was nowhere around; some of the Littles-Fanny Chou and Bowow Greenberg and Bart Fisher-were whispering that she was dead. But Jane didn’t think she was. To be dead was to lie down and sleep forever, and the woman whose airborne leap she had witnessed did not seem even slightly tired. Just the opposite: at that moment, Teacher had seemed wondrously, powerfully alive, animated by a grace and strength that Jane had never experienced-that even now, a whole night later, excited and embarrassed her. Hers was a compact existence of compact movements, a place of order and safety and quiet routine. There were the usual squabbles and hurt feelings, and days when Teacher seemed cross from beginning to end, but in general the world Jane knew was bathed in an essential mildness. Teacher was the source of this feeling; it radiated from her person in a blush of maternal warmth, as the rays of the sun heated the air and earth; but now, in the perplexing aftermath of the night’s events, Jane sensed she had glimpsed something secret about this woman who had so selflessly cared for all of them.

That was when it had occurred to Jane that the thing she’d seen was love. It could be nothing less than the force of love that had lifted Teacher into the air, into the waiting arms of the glowing bear-man, whose light was the radiance of royalty. He was a bear-prince who had come to take her away to his castle in the forest. So perhaps that was where Teacher had gone off to now, and why all the Littles had been moved upstairs: to wait for her. When she returned to them, her rightful identity as a queen of the forest revealed, they would be brought back downstairs to the Big Room, to welcome and celebrate her with a grand party.

These were the stories Jane was telling herself as she fell asleep in a room with fifteen other sleeping Littles, all dreaming their various dreams. In Jane’s dream, which commenced as a rewriting of the prior night’s events, she was jumping up and down on her bed in the Big Room when she saw the bear come in. He did not enter through the window this time but through the door, which seemed small and far away, and he was different than he’d been the night before, fat and woolly like the bears in books, lumbering his wise and friendly way toward her on all fours. When he reached the foot of Jane’s bed he sat on his haunches and gradually drew himself upright, revealing the downy carpet of his great smooth tummy, his immense bear head and damp bear eyes and huge, paddled hands. It was a wonderful thing to see, strange and yet expected, like a present Jane had always believed would arrive, and her four-year-old’s heart was moved to a rush of admiration for this great noble being. He stood in this manner a moment, taking her in with a thoughtful expression, then said to Jane, who had continued her happy bouncing, addressing her in the rich, masculine tone of his woodland home, Hello, Little Jane. I’m Mister Bear. I have come to eat you up.

This came out as funny-Jane felt a tickling in her stomach that was the beginning of a laugh-but the bear did not react, and as the moment elongated, she noticed there were other aspects to his person, disturbing aspects: his claws, which emerged in white curves from his mittlike paws; his wide and powerful jaws; his eyes, which did not seem friendly or wise anymore but dark with unknowable intention. Where were the other Littles? Why was Jane alone in the Big Room? But she wasn’t alone; Teacher was in the dream now also, standing beside the bed. She looked as she always looked, though there was something vague about the features of her face, as if she were wearing a mask of gauzy fabric. Come on now, Jane, urged Teacher. He’s already eaten all the other Littles. Be good and stop that jumping so Mister Bear can eat you up. I-don’t-want-to, Jane replied, still bouncing, for she did not want to be eaten-a request that seemed more silly than frightening, but even so. I-don’t-want-to. I mean it, warned Teacher, her voice rising. I am asking you nicely, Little Jane. I am going to count to three. I-don’t-want-to, Jane repeated, applying the greatest possible vigor to her defiant bouncing. I-don’t-want-to. Do you see? said Teacher, turning to the bear, who had continued his upright vigil at the foot of the cot. She raised her pale arms in exasperation. Do you see now? This is what I have to put up with, all day long. It’s enough to make a person lose her mind. Okay, Jane, she said, if that’s how you’re going to be. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Which was when the dream took its last, sinister turn into the realm of nightmare. Teacher had seized Jane by the wrists, forcing her down onto the bed. Up close, Jane saw that a piece of Teacher’s neck was missing, like a bite snatched from an apple, and there were thready things hanging there, a collection of dangling strips and tubes, wet and glistening and gross. Only then did Jane understand that all the other Littles had indeed been eaten, just as Teacher had said; they’d all been eaten by Mister Bear, bite by bite by bite, though he wasn’t Mister Bear anymore, he was the glowing man. I don’t want this, Jane was screaming, I don’t want this! But she had no strength to resist, and she watched in helpless terror as first her foot and then her ankle and then the whole of her leg were swallowed into the dark cave of his mouth.

The dreams bespoke a range of concerns, influences, tastes. There were as many dreams as there were dreamers. Gloria Patal dreamed of a massive swarm of bees, covering her body. Part of her understood these bees to be symbolic; each bee that crawled upon her flesh was a worry she had carried in her life. Small worries, like whether or not it would rain on a day when she had planned to work outside, or whether or not Mimi, Raj’s widow, her only real friend, was angry with her on a day when she had failed to visit; but larger worries, too. Worries about Sanjay, and about Mausami. The worry that the pain in her lower back and the cough that sometimes woke her at night were harbingers of something worse. Included in this catalog of apprehensions were the worried love she had felt for each of the babies she had failed to carry to term, and the knot of dread that tightened inside her each night at Evening Bell, and the more generalized worry that she-that all of them-might just as well be dead already, for all the chance they had. Because you couldn’t not think about it; you did your best to carry on (that’s what Gloria had told her daughter when she’d announced her intentions to marry Galen, crying all the while over Theo Jaxon; you had to carry on), but the facts were the facts: someday those lights were going out. So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

That’s what the bees were, they were worries large and small, and in the dream they were moving all over her, her arms and legs and face and eyes, even inside her ears. The setting of the dream was contiguous with Gloria’s last moment of consciousness; having tried without success to rouse her husband, and having fended off the inquires of Jimmy and Ian and Ben and the others who had come to seek his counsel-the matter of the boy Caleb had yet to be determined-Gloria had, against her better instincts, dozed off at the table of her kitchen, her head rocked back, her mouth hanging open, soft snores issuing from deep within her sinuses. This was all true in the dream-the sound of her snoring was the sound of the bees-with the singular addition of the swarm, which had, for reasons that were not entirely clear, entered the kitchen to settle in a single mass upon her, like a great quivering blanket. It seemed obvious now that this was the sort of thing bees did; why had she failed to protect herself against this eventuality? Gloria could feel the prickling scrape of their tiny feet on her skin, the buzzing flutter of their wings. To move, she knew, even to breathe, would arouse them into a lethal fury of simultaneous stinging. In this condition of excruciating stasis she remained-it was a dream of not moving-and when she heard the sound of Sanjay’s footsteps descending the stairs, and felt his presence in the room, followed by his wordless departure and the slap of the screen door as he stepped from the house, Gloria’s mind lit up with a silent scream that launched her into consciousness while also erasing any memory of what had happened: she awakened having forgotten not only about the bees, but about Sanjay.

On the other side of the Colony, lying on his cot in a cloud of his own smell, the man known as Elton, a lifelong fantasist of splendidly ornate and erotic flights, was having a good dream. This dream-the hay dream-was Elton’s favorite, because it was true, taken from life. Though Michael did not believe him-and, really, Elton had to admit, why would he?-there had been a time, many years ago, when Elton, a man of twenty, had enjoyed the favors of an unknown woman who had chosen him, or so it appeared, because his blindness guaranteed his silence. If he didn’t know who this woman was-and she never spoke to him-he couldn’t say anything, which implied that she was married. Perhaps she wanted a child with a man who wasn’t able, or had simply wished for something else in her life. (In self-pitying moments, Elton wondered if she’d done it on a dare.) It didn’t really matter; he welcomed these visits, which always came at night. Sometimes he would simply awaken into the experience, its distinctive sensations, as if the reality had been called forth out of a dream, to which it would then return, fueling the empty nights to come; on other occasions the woman would come to him, take him silently by the hand, and lead him elsewhere. This was the circumstance of the hay dream, which unfolded in the barn, surrounded by the whinnying of horses and the sweet dry smell of grass, lately cut from the field. The woman did not speak; the only sounds she made were the sounds of love; and it ended much too quickly, with a final shuddering exhalation and a mound of hair brushing over his cheeks as the woman released herself, rising wordlessly away. He always dreamed these events just as they’d occurred, in all their tactile contours, up to the moment when, lying alone on the floor of the barn, wishing only to have seen the woman, or even just to have heard her speak his name, he tasted salt on his lips and knew that he was crying.

But not tonight. Tonight, just as it was ending, she bent to his face and whispered into his ear:

“Somebody’s in the Lighthouse, Elton.”

In the Infirmary, Sara Fisher was not dreaming, but the girl appeared to be. Sitting on one of the empty cots, feeling brightly, almost painfully awake, Sara watched the girl’s eyes flickering behind her lids, as if darting over an unseen landscape. Sara had pretty much convinced Dale to keep his mouth shut, promising that she would tell the Household in the morning; for now the girl needed sleep. As if to support this claim, that was precisely what the girl had done, curling on the cot in that self-protective way she had, while Sara watched her, wondering what the thing in her neck had been, what Michael would find, and why, looking at the girl, Sara believed she was dreaming about snow.

There were others, quite a few, who were not sleeping either. The night was alive with wakeful souls. Galen Strauss, for one: standing at his post on the north wall-Firing Platform Ten-squinting into the pooling glow of the lights, Galen was telling himself, for the hundredth time that day, that he wasn’t a complete fool. The need to say this-he had actually caught himself muttering the words under his breath-meant of course he was. Even he knew that. He was a fool. He was a fool because he’d believed he could make Mausami love him, as he loved her; he was a fool because he’d married her when everyone knew she was in love with Theo Jaxon; he was a fool because when she’d told him about the baby, spouting her stupid lie about how many months it was, he’d swallowed his pride and plastered an idiotic smile on his face, saying only: A baby. Wow. How about that.

He’d known damn well whose baby it was. One of the wrenches, Finn Darrell, had told Galen about that night down at the station. Finn had gotten up to take a leak and, hearing a noise from one of the storage rooms, had gone to check it out. The door was closed, Finn explained, but you didn’t have to open it to know what was happening on the other side. Finn was the kind of guy who took a little too much pleasure from giving you news he thought you needed to hear; from the way he told the story, Galen guessed he’d stood outside the door a lot longer than he needed to. Jeez, Finn said, she always make noises like that?

Fucking Finn Darrell. Fucking Theo Jaxon.

And yet, for a hopeful moment, Galen had entertained the notion that maybe a baby would make things better between them. A dumb idea, but still he’d thought it. But of course the baby only made them fight more. If Theo had returned from that ride down the mountain, probably they would have told him right then; Galen could pretty much imagine the scene. We’re sorry, Galen. We should have told you. It just kind of… happened. Humiliating, but at least it would have been over by now. The way things stood, he and Maus would have to live with this lie between them forever. Probably they’d end up despising each other, if they didn’t despise each other already.

He was thinking these things while also dreading the morning to come, when he was supposed to ride down to the station. The order had come from Ian, though Galen had the feeling it wasn’t his idea, that it came from somewhere else-Jimmy, probably, or maybe Sanjay. He could take a runner with him, but that was all; they couldn’t spare the hands. Box it up and wait for the next relief crew, Ian had said, three days tops. Okay, Galen? You can handle this? And of course he’d said he could, no problem. He’d even felt a little flattered. But as the hours passed, he’d found himself regretting his quick compliance. He’d been off the mountain only a few times before, and it was awful-all those empty buildings and slims cooking in their cars-but that wasn’t the worst of it, not really. The problem was that Galen was afraid. He was afraid all the time now, more and more as the days went by and the world around him continued its slow, hazy dissolving. People didn’t really know how bad his eyesight was, not even Maus. They knew, but they didn’t really know, not the full extent, and every day it seemed to be getting worse. As things stood, his field of vision had shrunk to less than two meters; everything beyond that quickly faded into a gassy blankness, all lurching shapes and formless colors and halos of light. He’d tried a variety of eyeglasses from the Storehouse, but nothing seemed to help; all he’d gotten for his troubles were headaches that felt like someone sticking a blade into his temple, so he had long since stopped trying. He was pretty good with voices and could generally aim his face in the right direction, but he missed a lot of things, and he knew this made him seem slow and stupid, which he wasn’t. He was just going blind.

Now here he was, a Second Captain of the Watch, riding down the mountain in the morning to secure the station. A trip that, considering what had happened to Zander and Arlo, pretty much felt like suicide to Galen Strauss. He was hoping he’d have a chance to talk to Jimmy about it, maybe make him see some sense, but so far, the guy had not shown up.

And, come to think of it, where was Jimmy? Soo was out there someplace, and Dana Curtis; with Arlo and Theo gone, and Alicia off the Watch for good, Dana had come out of the pits to guard the Wall like everybody else. Galen got along with Dana, and the fact that she was Household now, he reasoned, might give her some sway with Jimmy. Maybe the two of them should talk about this whole go-down-to-the-station thing. Soo was on Nine, Dana on Eight. If he was quick about it, Galen could be back to his post in a matter of just a few minutes. And in point of fact, wasn’t that sound he was hearing-a sound of voices nearby, though noises traveled well at night-wasn’t that Soo Ramirez? And wasn’t the other voice Jimmy’s? If Galen could round up Dana too, might it be just a matter of a few right words to get Jimmy to see a little sense? Maybe get Soo or Dana to say, Well, sure, I can go down to the station, I don’t see why Galen should be the one?

Just a couple of minutes, Galen thought and, taking up his cross, he began to make his way down the catwalk.

At the same time, hidden away in the old FEMA trailer, Peter and Alicia were playing hands of go-to. With just the light of the spots to see by, the game had an unfocused quality, but both had long since stopped caring who won, if they’d ever cared in the first place. Peter was trying to decide what he should tell Alicia about what had happened in the Infirmary, the voice he’d heard in his mind, but with each passing minute it became more difficult to imagine actually doing this, how he might explain himself. He’d heard words in his head. His mother missed him. I must be dreaming, he told himself, and when Alicia broke his train of thought with an impatient lift of her cards, he only shook his head. It’s nothing, he told her. Play your hand.

Also awake at that hour, half-plus-one on the log of the Watch, was Sam Chou. Sam longed for nothing so much as the comfort of his bed and his wife’s affectionate arms around him. But with Sandy bedding down in the Sanctuary-she had volunteered to take over for April until someone else could be found-he had suffered a disruption to these customary rhythms, leaving him staring at the ceiling. He was also troubled by a feeling that, as the day had moved into night, he had recognized as embarrassment. That funny business at the lockup: he couldn’t quite explain it. In the heat of the moment, he’d honestly believed that something had to be done. But in the intervening hours, and after a trip to the Sanctuary to visit with his children-who seemed none the worse for wear-Sam had discovered that his feelings about the whole Caleb situation had moderated substantially. Caleb was, after all, just a kid, and Sam could now see how putting the boy out would solve very little. He felt a little guilty about manipulating Belle the way he had-with Rey down at the station, the woman was probably out of her mind with worry-and though there was certainly no love lost between him and Alicia, who was too full of herself by half, Sam had to admit that under the circumstances, with that fool Milo egging him on, it was a good thing she’d been there. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t. When Sam had spoken to Milo later, following up on the day’s conversations, most of which had presupposed that if the Household didn’t do anything they would take it upon themselves to put the poor kid out, and suggested that maybe they should rethink the situation, see how things looked tomorrow after a good night’s rest, Milo had responded with a look of unconcealed relief. Okay, sure, said Milo Darrell. Maybe you’re right. Let’s see how we feel in the morning.

So Sam was feeling a little bad now about the whole thing, bad and a little confounded, because it wasn’t like him to get so angry. It wasn’t like him at all. For a second there, outside the lockup, he really had believed it: somebody had to pay. It didn’t seem to matter that it was just a defenseless kid who probably thought someone on the catwalk had told him to open the gate. And the most extraordinary thing, really, was that in all that time, Sam hadn’t given much or even any thought to the girl, the Walker, who was the reason the whole thing had happened in the first place. Watching the lights of the spots playing on the eaves above his face, Sam wondered why this should be. My God, he thought, after all these years, a Walker. And not just a Walker-a young girl. Sam wasn’t one of those people who believed the Army was still coming-you’d have to be pretty stupid to think so after all these years-but a girl like that, it meant something. It meant somebody was still alive out there. Maybe a whole lot of somebodies. And when Sam considered this, he found himself strangely… uncomfortable with the idea. He couldn’t say quite why that was, except that the notion of this girl, this Girl from Nowhere, felt like a piece that didn’t fit. And what if all these somebodies just showed up out of the blue? What if she was the beginning of a whole new wave of Walkers, seeking safety under the lights? There was only so much food and fuel to go around. Sure, back in the early days it had probably seemed too cruel to turn the Walkers away. But wasn’t the situation a little different now? So many years gone by? Things having achieved a kind of balance? Because the fact was, Sam Chou liked his life. He wasn’t one of the worriers, the fretters, the keepers of bad thoughts. He knew people like that-Milo, for one-and he didn’t see the sense in it. Awful things could happen, sure, but that was always true, and in the meantime, he had his bed and his house and his wife and his children, they had food to eat and clothes to wear and the lights to keep them safe, and wasn’t that enough? The more Sam thought about it, the more it seemed that it wasn’t Caleb that something needed to be done about. It was the girl. So maybe in the morning, that’s what he’d say to Milo. Something needs to be done about this Girl from Nowhere.

Also awake was Michael Fisher. In the main, Michael viewed sleep as a waste of time. It was just another case of the body’s unreasonable demands upon the mind, and his dreams, when he cared to remember them, all seemed to be lightly retooled versions of his waking state-full of circuits and breakers and relays, a thousand problems to be solved, and he would awaken feeling less restored than rudely shot forward in time, with no discernible accomplishments to show for these lost hours.

But that was not the case tonight. Tonight, Michael Fisher was as awake as he’d ever been in his life. The contents of the chip, having disgorged itself into the mainframe-a veritable flood of data-was nothing less than a rewriting of the world. It was this new understanding that had inspired the risk Michael was now taking, running an antenna up to the top of the Wall. He’d started on the roof of the Lighthouse, connecting a twenty-meter spool of eight-gauge uninsulated copper wire to the antenna they’d stuffed up the chimney, months ago. Two more spools had gotten him to the base of the Wall. That was it for the copper he could spare. For the remainder he had decided to use an insulated high-voltage cable he would have to strip by hand. The trick now would be getting it up to the top of the Wall without being seen by the Watch. Having retrieved two more spools from the shed, he stood in the pocket of shadow underneath one of the supporting struts, weighing his options. The closest ladder, twenty meters to his left, led straight up to Platform Nine; there was no way he could climb this unnoticed. There was a second ladder situated midway between Platforms Eight and Seven, which would be ideal-except for the runners, who sometimes used it as a shortcut between Seven and Ten, it had very little traffic-but he didn’t have enough cable to reach that far.

That left only one option. Take a spool up the far ladder, move down the catwalk until he was suspended over the cutout, anchor the end of the wire, drop it to the ground below, and descend once more to connect the second wire to the first. All without anyone seeing him.

Michael knelt in the dirt, removed his wire cutters from the old canvas rucksack he used as a toolbag, and set to work, pulling the cable from its spool and stripping the plastic conduit away. At the same time he was listening for the clanging footsteps above his head that would signify a runner going through. By the time the wire was stripped and spooled back up, he’d heard the runners move through twice; he was reasonably certain he’d have a few minutes before the next one came. Depositing everything into the rucksack, he hurried to the ladder, took a deep breath, and began to ascend.

Heights had always been a problem for Michael-he didn’t like so much as standing on a chair-a fact that, in his determined state, he had failed to figure in his calculations, and by the time he reached the top of the ladder, an ascent of twenty meters that felt like ten times that many, he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the entire enterprise. His heart was galloping with panic; his limbs had turned to gelatin. Getting down the catwalk, an open grate suspended above a maw of space, would mandate every ounce of will he possessed. His eyes had begun to sting with sweat as he pulled himself up from the final rung, sliding belly-first onto the grate. Under the glare of the lights, and without the customary reference points of ground and sky to orient him, everything seemed larger and closer, possessing a bulging vividness. But at least no one had noticed him. He cautiously lifted his face: a hundred meters to his left, Platform Eight appeared to be empty, no Watcher on station. Why that should be, Michael didn’t know, but he took it as an encouraging sign. If he acted quickly, he could be back in the Lighthouse before anyone was the wiser.

He began to move down the catwalk, and by the time he was in position, he had begun to feel better-a lot better. His fear had receded, replaced by an invigorated sense of possibility. This was going to work. Platform Eight was still empty; whoever was supposed to be there would probably catch hell, but its vacancy gave Michael the opening he needed. He knelt on the catwalk and pulled the coil of wire from his rucksack. Constructed of a titanium alloy, the catwalk would make a serviceable conductor in its own right, adding its attractive electromagnetic properties to the wire’s; in essence, Michael was turning the whole perimeter into a giant antenna. He used a wrench to loosen one of the bolts that attached the catwalk’s decking to its frame, curled the stripped wire into the gap, and tightened down the bolt. Then he dropped the spool to the ground below, listening for the soft thud of its impact.

Amy, he thought. Who would have thought the Girl from Nowhere would have a name like Amy?

What Michael didn’t know was that Firing Platform Eight was empty because the Watcher on station, Dana Curtis, First Family and Household, was already lying dead at the base of the Wall. Jimmy had killed her right after he’d killed Soo Ramirez. Whom he honestly hadn’t meant to kill; he’d only wanted to tell her something. Goodbye? I’m sorry? I always loved you? But one thing had led to another in the strangely inevitable manner of that night, the Night of Blades and Stars, and now all three of them were gone.

Galen Strauss, approaching from the opposite direction, witnessed these events as if through the fat end of a telescope: a distant splash of color and movement, far beyond the range of his vision. If it had been anybody else on Platform Ten that night, someone whose eyesight was more robust, who was not going blind from acute glaucoma as Galen Strauss was, a clearer picture of events might have emerged. As it was, what occurred on Firing Platform Nine would never be known by anyone except those directly involved; and even they did not understand it.

What happened was this:

The Watcher Soo Ramirez, her thoughts still bobbing in the currents of Belle of the Ball and, in particular, a scene set in a moving coach during a thunderstorm so vividly rendered that she could practically recall it word for word (As the heavens opened, Talbot seized Charlene in his powerful arms, his mouth falling on hers with a searing force, his fingers finding the silken curve of her breast, waves of ardor roiling through her….), turned to see Jimmy hoisting himself onto the platform; and her first impression, punching through her feelings of conflicted irritation (she resented the interruption; he was late) was that something wasn’t right. He doesn’t look like himself, she thought. This isn’t the Jimmy I know. He stood a moment, his body oddly slack, his eyes squinting with perplexity into the lights; he looked like a man who had come to make an announcement, only to have forgotten his lines. Soo thought maybe she knew what this unspoken declaration was-she’d had a feeling for some time that Jimmy considered the two of them as more than friends-and under different circumstances, she might have been glad to hear this from him. But not now. Not tonight, on Firing Platform Nine.

“It’s her eyes,” he said faintly; he seemed to be speaking to himself. “At least I thought it was her eyes.”

Soo stepped toward him. His face was turned away, as if he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “Jimmy? Whose eyes?”

But he didn’t answer her. One hand reached down to the hem of his jersey and proceeded to tug at it, like a nervous boy fumbling with his clothes. “Can’t you feel it, Soo?”

“Jimmy, what are you talking about?”

He had begun to blink. Fat, jeweled tears were spilling down his cheeks. “They’re all so fucking sad.”

Something was happening to him, Soo knew, something bad. In a burst of motion he yanked his jersey over his head and flung it over the edge of the platform. His chest was glazed with sweat that shone in the lights.

“It’s these clothes,” he growled. “I can’t stand these clothes.”

She’d left her cross resting against the rampart. She turned to reach for it but she’d waited too long, Jimmy had her from behind, his hands were sliding under her arms, wrapping the back of her neck, and with a sudden twisting motion something snapped at the base of her throat; and just like that her body was gone, her body had drifted away, her body was no more. She tried to cry out but no sound came; flecks of light were drifting in her vision, like shards of silver. (Oh Talbot, Charlene moaned as he moved against her, his manhood a sweet invasion she could no longer deny, oh Talbot yes, let us end this absurd game…) She was aware that someone else was coming toward her; she heard a sound of footsteps on the catwalk where she now lay helpless; and then the shot of a cross and muffled, breathy cry. She was in the air now, Jimmy was lifting her up; he was going to throw her over the Wall. She wished she’d lived a different life, but this was the one she had, she didn’t want to leave it yet, and then she was falling, down and down and down.

She was still alive when she hit the ground. Time had slowed, reversed, started again. The spots were shining in her eyes; in her mouth, a taste of blood. Above her she saw Jimmy standing at the edge of the nets, naked and gleaming, and then he, too, was gone.

And in the last instant before all thought left her, she heard the voice of the runner Kip Darrell crying from the rampart high above: “Sign, we have sign! Holy shit, they’re everywhere!”

But he spoke these words into the darkness. The lights had all gone out.

THIRTY-SIX

The meeting was called for half-day, under a sky bulging with rain that would not fall. All souls had gathered at the Sunspot, where the long table had been carried out from the Sanctuary. Seated before the assembly were just two men: Walter Fisher and Ian Patal. Walter looked his usual, disheveled self, a wreckage of greasy hair and rheumy eyes and stained clothing he had probably worn for a season; that he was now serving as acting Head of the Household, or what remained of it, was, Peter thought, one of the day’s more unpromising facts.

Ian looked far better off, but even he, after the night’s events, seemed halting and uncertain, at pains even to bring the meeting to order. It was unclear to Peter what, precisely, his role was-was he sitting as a Patal or as First Captain?-but this seemed a small concern, far too technical to worry about. For now, Ian was in charge.

Standing at the edge beside Alicia, Peter scanned the crowd. Auntie was nowhere to be seen, but that did not surprise him. It had been many years since she’d attended an open meeting of the Household. Also among the missing faces he sought were Michael, who had returned to the Lighthouse, and Sara, still in the Infirmary; he saw Gloria, standing close to the front, but not Sanjay, whose whereabouts, along with Old Chou’s, were the source of much of the talk around him, a hum of worry from people who simply had no idea what was happening to them. And it was worry that he heard, at least so far. Outright panic had yet to set in, but Peter saw this as only a matter of time; night would come again.

The other faces he saw, wishing he hadn’t, belonged to those who had lost someone, a spouse or child or parent, in the attack. Among this group were Cort Ramirez and Russell Curtis, Dana’s husband, who was standing with his daughters, Ellie and Kat, all of them looking benumbed; Karen Molyneau with her two girls, Alice and Avery, their faces washed by grief; Milo and Penny Darrell, whose son Kip, a runner, had been just fifteen years old, the youngest killed; Hodd and Lisa Greenberg, Sunny’s parents; Addy Phillips and Tracey Strauss, who looked like she had aged ten years overnight, all vitality drained from her; Constance Chou, Old Chou’s young wife, who was fiercely clutching their daughter, Darla, to her side-as if she, too, might slip away from her. It was this grieving body of survivors-for they stood as one, the scope of their loss both forming a cohesive bond among them while also separating them from the others, like a magnetic force that both attracted and repelled-to whom Ian seemed to aim his words when the crowd fell quiet long enough to bring the meeting to order.

Ian began with a recitation of the facts, which Peter already knew, or mostly. Shortly after half-night, for reasons unexplained, the lights had failed. This had apparently been caused by a power surge, which had flipped the main breaker. The only person in the Lighthouse at the time of the incident had been Elton, sleeping in the back; the engineer on duty, Michael Fisher, had briefly stepped out to manually reset one of the vents on the battery stack, leaving the panel unmanned. In this, Ian assured the crowd, Michael was not to blame; leaving the Lighthouse to vent the stack was entirely proper and there was no way Michael could have foreseen the surge that would cause the breaker to flip. All told, the lights had been out for less than three minutes-the time it had taken for Michael to race back to the Lighthouse and reset the system-but in that brief interval, the Wall had been breached. The last report was of a large pod massing at the fireline. By the time power was restored, three souls had been taken: Jimmy Molyneau, Soo Ramirez, and Dana Jaxon. All had been sighted at the base of the Wall, their bodies being dragged away.

That was the first wave of the attack. Ian was clearly at pains to maintain his composure as he related what had next occurred. Though the first, large pod had dispersed, a second, smaller pod of three had approached from the south, mounting an assault on the Wall near Platform Six-the same platform where, sixteen days before, the large female with the distinctive shock of hair had been killed by Arlo Wilson. The split seam that had allowed her ascent had since been repaired, so the three had found no purchase; but that, apparently, was not their intention. By now the Watch was in disarray, all hands moving toward Platform Six; under a storm of arrows and cross bolts, the three virals had tried, again and again, to ascend; while meanwhile, at the unmanned Platform Nine, a third pod-perhaps a part of the second, which had split in two; perhaps a wholly different pod in its own right-had managed to make its way over the Wall.

They’d come straight down the catwalk.

It was a melee. There was no other word. Three more Watchers had been killed before the pod had been repelled: Gar Phillips and Aidan Strauss and Kip Darrell, the runner who had first reported the massing pod at the fireline. A fourth, Sunny Greenberg, who had left her post at the lockup to join the fight, was unaccounted for and presumed lost. Also among the missing-and here Ian paused with a deeply troubled look-was Old Chou. Constance had awakened in the early-morning hours to find him gone; nobody had seen him since. So it seemed likely, though there was no direct evidence of this, that he had left his house in the dead of night to go to the Wall, where among the others he’d been taken. No virals had been killed at all.

That’s all, Ian said. That’s what we know.

Something was happening, Peter thought; the crowd could feel it too. Never had anybody witnessed an attack like this, its tactical quality. The closest analogue was Dark Night itself, but even then, the virals had given no evidence of presenting an organized assault. When the lights had gone out, Peter had run with Alicia from the trailer park to the Wall to fight with everyone else, but Ian had ordered them both to the Sanctuary, which in the confusion had been left undefended. So what they’d seen and heard had been both softened by distance and made worse because of it. He should have been there, he knew. He should have been on the Wall.

A voice cut through the murmuring of the crowd: “What about the power station?”

The speaker was Milo Darrell. He was holding his wife, Penny, to his side.

“As far as we know, it’s still secure, Milo,” Ian said. “Michael says there’s current still flowing.”

“But you said there was a power surge! Somebody should be going down there to check it out. And where the hell is Sanjay?”

Ian hesitated. “I was coming to that, Milo. Sanjay has taken sick. For now, Walter here is serving as Head.”

“Walter? You can’t be serious.”

Walter seemed to regain focus, stiffening in his seat to lift his bleary face toward the assembly. “Wait just a damn minute-”

But Milo cut back in. “Walter’s a drunk,” he said, his voice rising, becoming bolder. “A drunk and a cheat. Everybody knows it. Who’s really in charge here, Ian? Is it you? Because as far as I can tell, nobody is. I say open the Armory, let everybody stand the Wall who wants to. And let’s get somebody down to the station right now.”

A buzz of acknowledgment shivered the crowd. What was Milo trying to do? Peter thought. Start a riot? He glanced at Alicia; she was staring intently at Milo, her body in a posture of alert, arms held from her sides. All eyes.

“I’m sorry about your boy,” Ian said, “but this isn’t the time to go off half-cocked. Let the Watch handle this.”

But Milo paid him no attention. He swept his gaze over the assembly. “You heard him. Ian said they were organized. Well, maybe we need to be organized, too. If the Watch won’t do anything, I say we should.”

“Flyers, Milo. Calm down. People are scared, you’re not helping.”

It was Sam Chou, stepping forward, who spoke next: “They should be scared. Caleb let that girl in here, and now, what, eleven people are dead? She’s the reason they’re here!”

“We don’t know that, Sam.”

“I know it. And so does everybody else. Caleb and that girl, that’s where this all started. I say let it end with them, too.”

Peter heard it then, voices rising here and there: the girl, the girl, people were saying. He’s right. It was the girl.

“Just what do you want us to do about it?”

“What do I want you to do?” Sam said. “What you should have done already. They should be put out.” He swiveled to face the crowd. “Everyone, listen to me! The Watch won’t say it, but I will. Crosses can’t protect us, not against this. I say we put them out now!”

And with that, the first echoing voice rose from the crowd, then another and another, gathering into a chorus:

Put them out! Put them out! Put them out!

It was, Peter thought, as if a lifetime of worry had come suddenly un-dammed. Up front, Ian was waving his arms, bellowing for silence. The scene seemed poised on the verge of violence, some terrible act. There was nothing to stop it; the pretense of order had been stripped away.

He knew it then: he had to get the girl out of here. Caleb too, whose fate was now bound up with hers. But where could they go? What place would be safe?

He turned to Alicia, but she was gone.

Then Peter saw her. She had barged her way through the roiling mass of people. With an agile hop she mounted the table and spun to face the assembly.

“Everybody!” she cried. “Listen to me!”

Peter felt the crowd tense around him. A fresh dread bored through his veins. Lish, he thought, what are you doing?

“She’s not the reason they’re here,” Alicia said. “I am.”

Sam hurled his voice toward her: “Get down, Lish! This isn’t up to you!”

“All of you. This is my fault. It’s not the girl they want, it’s me. I was the one who torched the library. That’s what started this. It was a nest, and I led them all right back here. If you’re going to put anybody out, I should be the one. I’m the reason those people are dead.”

It was Milo Darrell who made the first move, lunging toward the table. Whether or not he was trying to get to Alicia, or Ian, or even Walter was unclear; but with this provocation a force of violence was suddenly unleashed in a wave of pushing and shoving, the crowd surging forward, a vaguely coordinated mass propelled only by itself. The table was overrun; Peter saw Alicia tumbling backward, enveloped by the mob. People were screaming, shouting. Those with children seemed to be trying to move away, while others wanted only to get to the front. The only thought in Peter’s mind was to reach Alicia. But as he labored to move forward, he, too, was caught in the crush of bodies. He felt his feet snarling up below him-he sensed that he was stepping on someone-and as he tumbled forward he saw who this person was: Jacob Curtis. The boy had dropped to his knees and was holding his hands protectively over his head against the rain of trampling feet. They impacted with a mutual grunt, Peter somersaulting over the boy’s broad back; he scrabbled to his knees and launched forward again, rising through a mass of arms and legs, propelling himself like a swimmer through a sea of people, flinging bodies aside. Something struck him then-a blow to the back of the head that felt like a punch-and as his vision flared he turned, swinging, his fist connecting solidly with a bearded, heavy-browed face that only later did he realize belonged to Hodd Greenberg, Sunny’s father. He had by this moment neared the front of the crowd; Alicia was on the ground, fleetingly visible through the throng that surrounded her. Like Jacob, she had drawn her hands up over her head, curling her body into a ball as a pummeling storm of hands and feet fell down upon her.

It wasn’t even a question. Peter drew his blade.

What might have happened next, Peter never learned. From the direction of the gate came a second rush of figures: the Watch. Ben and Galen, holding crosses. Dale Levine and Vivian Chou and Hollis Wilson and the others. Weapons drawn, they quickly formed a battle line between the table and the crowd, their presence immediately sending everyone scurrying back.

“Go to your homes!” Ian shouted. Blood was soaking his hair, running down the side of his face into the neck of his jersey. His cheeks were crimson with anger; spit was soaring in bright specks from his lips. He swept his cross across the crowd, as if unable to decide whom to fire on first. “The Household is suspended! I am declaring a state of martial law! An immediate curfew is in effect!”

Everything seemed held in a brittle silence. The mob had separated around Alicia, leaving her exposed. As Peter dropped to his knees beside her, she pivoted her dirt-streaked face toward him, the whites of her eyes enormous in their urgency.

She mouthed a single word: “Go.”

He rose and backed away, melting into the throng-some standing, some on the ground, a few who had fallen being lifted to their feet. Everybody was covered in dust; Peter realized his mouth was choked with it. Walter Fisher was sitting by the overturned table, clutching the side of his head. Sam and Milo were nowhere visible; like Peter, they had faded away.

A pair of Watchers, Galen and Hollis, came forward and pulled Alicia upright; she offered no resistance as Ian stripped her of her blades. Peter could tell she was injured but did not know how; her body seemed both limp and rigid at the same time, as if she were holding the pain in check. A smear of blood was on her cheek, another on her elbow. Her braid had come undone; her jersey was torn at the sleeve, hanging by threads. Ian and Galen were holding her now, each on a side, like a prisoner. It was then that Peter understood: by drawing the fury of the crowd down upon herself, she had deflected it away from the girl and bought them some time. If only to keep control of the crowd, Ian would have to put her in the lockup now. Be ready, her eyes had told him.

“Alicia Donadio,” Ian said, loudly enough for all to hear, “you are under arrest. The charge is treason.”

“Put the bitch out now!” someone yelled.

“Quiet!” But Ian’s voice was thin, trembling. “I mean what I say. Go to your homes now. The gates will stay closed until further notice. Anyone seen out and about will be subject to arrest by the Watch. Anyone carrying a weapon will be fired on. Don’t think I won’t do it.”

And while Peter looked on helplessly, in a world that had become completely strange to him, among people he felt he no longer knew, the Watch led Alicia away.

THIRTY-SEVEN

In the Sanctuary, Mausami Patal, having passed a restless night and an even more restless morning in the second-floor classroom among the Littles-the story of the night’s terrible events having reached her via Other Sandy, whose husband, Sam, had come in at first light-had made a decision.

The idea had come upon her with quiet suddenness; she hadn’t even known she was thinking it. But she had awakened with the distinct impression that something had changed inside her. The decision had made itself known simply, almost arithmetically. She was going to have a baby. The baby was Theo Jaxon’s. Because this baby was Theo Jaxon’s, Theo could not be dead.

Mausami was going to find him, and tell him about their baby.

The moment to make her exit would be just before Morning Bell, at the changing of the shift. That would afford both the cover she needed and a full day’s light to make it on foot down the mountain; from there she could figure out where to go. The best place to exit would be over the cutout, with its limited angles of sight. Once Sandy and the others had gone to sleep, she would slip away to the Storehouse and equip herself for the journey: a strong rope to ride down the Wall, food and water, a cross and blade, a pair of good sturdy boots and a change of clothes and a pack to carry everything in.

With the curfew, no one would be about. She would make her way to the cutout, keeping to the shadows, and wait for dawn to come.

As the plan blossomed in her mind, assuming shape and detail, Mausami came to see what she was doing: that she was staging her own death. She’d actually been doing it for days. Since the resupply party had returned, she had given every indication of a mind in distress: breaking curfew, moping like a crazy person, making everyone scramble around, worried for her safety. She couldn’t have built a more convincing case if she’d tried. Even that tearful scene at Main Gate, when Lish had made her stand down, would play its part in the backtracking narrative people would assemble to explain her fate. How did we fail to see this coming? they would all say, mournfully shaking their heads. She gave us all the signs. Because in the morning, when Other Sandy awoke to discover that Mausami’s cot was empty, perhaps waiting a few hours before noting the oddness of this fact but eventually reporting it, and others in due course went to search for her, the rope over the cutout would be discovered. A rope with only one possible meaning: a rope to nowhere and nothing. There would be no other conclusion people could draw. She, the Watcher Mausami Patal Strauss, wife of Galen Strauss, daughter of Sanjay and Gloria Patal, First Family, pregnant and afraid, had chosen to let it go.

Yet here was the day. Here she was, knitting her booties in the Sanctuary-she’d made almost no progress-listening to Other Sandy chattering away, keeping the Littles occupied with games and stories and songs, the news of Mausami’s death like a fact delayed-like an arrow that, once launched from its bow, had merely to sink itself into its target to reveal the meaning of its aim. She felt like a ghost. She felt like she was gone already. She thought about visiting her parents one last time, but what was there to say? How could she say goodbye without saying it? There was Galen to consider, but after last night she didn’t want to see him ever again in her life. He hadn’t gone down to the station after all, Other Sandy had told her, thinking this would be good news to her. Galen was among the Watchers who had arrested Alicia. Mausami wondered if Galen would be the first person they told, or the second, or the third. Would he be sad? Would he cry? Would he imagine her sliding down the Wall and feel relieved?

Her hands had paused over her knitting. She wondered if she really might be crazy. Probably she was. You’d have to be crazy, to think that Theo wasn’t dead. But she didn’t care.

She excused herself to Other Sandy, who waved her distractedly away-she had cleared a space for the Littles to sit in circle and was trying to quiet them, to begin their lesson for the day-and stepped into the hall, sealing the door and the voices of the children behind her. A blast of quiet that felt like noise; she stood a moment in the hushed corridor. At such a moment, it was almost possible to imagine that the world was not the world. That there was some other world in which the virals did not exist, as they did not exist for the Littles, who lived in a dream of the past. Which was probably the reason the Sanctuary had been built in the first place: so there was still a place like that. She moved down the hall, her sandals slapping the cracked linoleum, past the doors of the empty classrooms, and descended the stairs. The odor of spirits was still strong in the Big Room, enough to bring tears to her eyes, and yet as Mausami settled down with her knitting, she knew that she would remain there the rest of the day. She would sit in the quiet and finish knitting the baby booties, so that she could take them with her.

THIRTY-EIGHT

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn’t have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.

Michael had just rolled the spool off the catwalk when it happened: a plunge into blackness so total, so consuming in its three-dimensional nothingness, that for a heart-seizing instant he wondered if he had rolled off after the spool and simply failed to notice-that this was the darkness of death. But then he heard Kip Darrell’s voice-“Sign, we have sign! Holy shit, they’re everywhere!”-and the information shot into his brain that not only was he still alive but the lights, in fact, were out.

The lights were out!

That he had managed to make his way back down the catwalk and descend the ladder at something close to a dead run, in utter darkness, was a feat that, in hindsight, seemed completely incredible. He had taken the last few meters at a drop, tool bag swinging, knees bent to absorb the impact, and sprinted toward the Lighthouse. “Elton!” he was shouting as he skidded around the corner and mounted the porch and blasted through the door. “Elton, wake up!” He expected to find the system crashed, but when he reached the panel, Elton lumbering into the room from the other side like a big blind horse, and he saw the glow of the CRTs, all meters in the green, he froze.

Why the hell were the lights off?

He lurched across the room to the box, and there he saw the problem. The main breaker was open. All he had to do was close it, and the lights came on again.

Michael made his report to Ian at first light. The story of the power surge was the best he could come up with, to get Ian out of the Lighthouse. And he supposed a surge could do it, although this would have been logged by the system, and there was nothing in the file. The problem could have been a short somewhere, but if that were true, the breaker wouldn’t have held; the circuit would have failed again the moment he flipped the switch. He’d spent the morning checking every connection, venting and reventing the ports, charging the capacitors. There was simply nothing wrong.

Was anyone in here? he asked Elton. Did you hear anything? But Elton only shook his head. I was sleeping, Michael. I was sound asleep in the back. I didn’t hear a thing until you came in yelling.

It was past half-day before Michael was able to reassemble the frame of mind to return to work on the radio. In all the excitement, he’d almost forgotten about it, but as he exited the Lighthouse in search of the spool he had dropped the night before, then found it lying undisturbed in the dust, the long wire arcing up to the top of the Wall, he was convinced anew of its importance. He spliced the wire to the copper filaments he’d left in place, returned to the Lighthouse, pulled the logbook down off the shelf to check the frequency, and clamped the headphones to his ears.

Two hours later, lit with adrenaline, his hair and jersey drenched with sweat, he found Peter in the barracks. Peter was sitting on a bunk, spinning a blade around his index finger. No one else was in the room; at the sound of Michael’s entry, Peter glanced up with only passing interest. He looked like something awful had happened, Michael thought. Like he wanted to use that blade on someone but couldn’t decide just who. And come to think of it, Michael wondered, where was everybody? Wasn’t it awful damn quiet around here? Nobody ever told him anything.

“What is it?” Peter said, and resumed his melancholy spinning. “Because whatever it is, I hope it’s good news.”

“Oh my God,” said Michael. He was struggling to get the words out. “You have to hear this.”

“Michael, do you have any idea what’s going on around this place? What do I have to hear?”

“Amy,” he said. “You have to hear Amy.”

THIRTY-NINE

In the Lighthouse, Michael took a seat at his terminal. The device they’d removed from the girl’s neck now lay in pieces on a leather mat beside Michael’s CRT.

“The power source,” Michael was saying, “now, that’s interesting. Very interesting.” With a pair of tweezers, he lifted a tiny metal capsule from inside the transmitter. “A battery, but not like anything I’ve seen. Given how long it’s been running, my guess is nuclear.”

Peter startled. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It wasn’t to her, apparently. And it’s been inside her a long time.”

“What’s long?” Peter looked at his friend, whose face glowed with excitement. So far he’d provided only the vaguest answers to Peter’s questions. “You mean like a year?”

Michael grinned mysteriously. “You don’t know the half of it. Just hang on a minute.” He directed Peter’s attention again to the object on the counter, using his tweezers to identify the parts. “So you’ve got a transmitter, a battery, and then-the rest. My first guess was a memory chip, but it was way too small to fit into any of the ports on the mainframe, so I had to solder it hard.”

With a couple of quick strokes on his keyboard, Michael called up a page of information on the screen.

“The information on the chip is divided into two partitions, one much smaller than the other. What you’re looking at is the first partition.”

Peter saw a single line of text, letters and numbers all run together. “I can’t really read it,” he confessed.

“That’s because the spaces have been removed. For some reason, some of it’s transposed, too. I think it’s just a bad sector on the chip. Maybe something happened when I soldered it to the board. Either way, it looks like a lot of it is gone. But what’s here tells us a lot.”

Michael called up a second screen. The same figures, Peter saw, but the numbers and letters had reorganized themselves.

AMY NLN

SUB 13

ASSTO NOAH USAMRIID SWD

G:F W:22.72K

“Amy NLN.” Peter lifted his eyes from the screen. “Amy?”

Michael nodded. “That’s our girl. I don’t know for sure what NLN stands for, but I’m thinking ‘no last name.’ I’ll get to the stuff in the middle in a second, but the bottom line is pretty clear. Gender, female. Weight, 22.72 kilos. That’s about the size of a five-or six-year-old kid. So I’m figuring she was about that age when the transmitter was put in.”

None of it was clear to Peter, and yet Michael spoke with such confidence he could only take his friend’s word for it. “So it’s been in there, what, ten years?”

“Well,” Michael said, still grinning, “not exactly. And don’t jump ahead, I’ve got a lot to show you. It’s better if you just let me walk you through it. Now, that’s all I can get from the first partition, and it isn’t much, but it’s not nearly the most interesting stuff by a long shot. The second partition is the real storehouse. Close to sixteen terabytes. That’s sixteen trillion bytes of data.”

He pressed another key. Dense columns of numbers began to fly up the screen.

“It’s something, isn’t it? I thought at first it was some kind of encryption, but it actually isn’t. Everything’s right here, it’s just all run together like the first partition.” Michael did something to freeze the rush of columns and tapped a finger against the glass. “The key was this number here, first in the sequence, repeated down the column.”

Peter squinted at the screen. “Nine hundred eighty-six?”

“Close. Ninety-eight point six. Ring any bells?”

Peter could only shake his head. “Not really, no.”

“Ninety-eight point six is a normal human body temperature, using the old Fahrenheit scale. Now look at the rest of the line. The seventy-two is probably heart rate. You’ve got respiration and blood pressure. I’m guessing the rest has to do with brain activity, kidney function, that sort of thing. Sara would probably understand it better than I do. But the most important thing is that they come in discrete groups. It’s pretty obvious if you look for the first number and see where the sequence remounts. I’m thinking this thing is a kind of body monitor, designed to transmit data to a mainframe. My guess is she was a patient of some kind.”

“A patient? Like in an infirmary?” Peter frowned. “No one could do this.”

“No one could now. And here’s where it gets more interesting. All told, there are five hundred forty-five thousand four hundred and six groups on the chip. The transmitter was set to cycle every ninety minutes. The rest was just arithmetic. Sixteen cycles a day times three hundred sixty-five days in a year.”

Peter felt like he was trying to take a sip of water from a blasting hose. “I’m sorry, Michael. You’ve lost me.”

Michael turned to face him. “I’m telling you that this thing in her neck has been taking her temperature every hour-and-a-half for a little more than ninety-three years. Ninety-three years, four months, and twenty-one days, to be exact. Amy NLN is a hundred years old.”

By the time his mind was able to bring Michael’s face back into focus, Peter realized he had collapsed into a chair.

“That’s impossible.”

Michael shrugged. “Okay, it’s impossible. But there’s no other way I can figure it. And remember the first partition? That word, USAMRIID? I recognized it right away. It stands for United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. There’s tons of stuff with USAMRIID all over it in the shed. Documents about the epidemic, lots of technical material.” He turned in his chair and directed Peter’s attention to the top of the screen. “See this here? This long string of numbers in the first line? That’s the mainframe’s digital signature.”

“The what?”

“Think of it as an address, the name of the system this little transmitter is looking for. You might think it was just gibberish, but if you look closely the numbers actually tell you more. This thing had to have some kind of onboard locator system, probably linked to a satellite. Old military stuff. So what you’re seeing are actually coordinates on a grid, and not anything fancy. It’s just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west. So, we go to the map-”

Michael cleared the screen again, tapping briskly at the keys. A new image sprang into view. It took Peter a moment to understand what he was seeing, that it was a map of the North American continent.

“We type in the coordinates, like so… ”

A grid of black lines appeared over the map, breaking it into squares. With a flourish, Michael lifted his fingers from the keyboard and slapped Enter. A bright yellow dot appeared.

“… and there we have it. Southwestern Colorado. A town called Telluride.”

The name meant nothing to Peter. “So?”

“Colorado, Peter. The heart of the CQZ.”

“What’s the CQZ?”

Michael sighed impatiently. “You really need to brush up on your history. The Central Quarantine Zone. It’s where the epidemic began. The first virals all came out of Colorado.”

Peter felt like he was being dragged from a runaway horse. “Please, just slow down. Are you telling me she comes from there?”

Michael nodded. “Basically, yeah. The transmitter was short-range, so she had to be within a few clicks when they put it in. The real question is why.”

“Flyers. You’re asking like I know?”

His friend paused, searching Peter’s face for a long moment. “Let me ask you something. Have you ever really thought about what the virals are? Not just what they do, Peter. What they are.”

“A being without a soul?”

Michael nodded. “Right, that’s what everybody says. But what if there’s more to it? This girl, Amy, she’s not a viral. We’d all be dead if she were. But you’ve seen the way she heals, and she survived out there. You said it yourself, she protected you. And how do you explain the fact that she’s almost a hundred years old but doesn’t look a day over, what, fourteen? The Army did something to her. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. This transmitter was broadcasting on a military frequency. Maybe she was infected and they did something to her that made her normal again.” He paused once more, his eyes fixed on Peter’s face. “Maybe she’s the cure.”

“That’s… a big leap.”

“I’m not so sure.” Michael lifted in his chair to remove a book from the shelf above his terminal. “So I went back through the old logbook to see if we had ever picked up a signal from those coordinates. Just a hunch. And sure enough, we did. Eighty years ago, we picked up a beacon broadcasting these same coordinates. Military distress frequency, old-style Morse. But then there’s this notation.”

Michael opened the log to the page he’d marked. He placed the book in Peter’s lap, pointing at the words written there.

If you found her, bring her here.

“And here’s the clincher,” Michael went on. “It’s still transmitting. That’s what took me so long. I had to run a cable up the Wall to get a decent signal.”

Peter lifted his eyes from the page. Michael was still looking at him with the same intense gaze.

“It’s what?”

“Transmitting. Those same words. ‘If you found her, bring her here.’”

Peter felt a kind of dizziness, gathering at the fringes of his brain. “How could it be transmitting?”

“Because somebody’s there, Peter. Don’t you get it?” He smiled victoriously. “Ninety-three years. That’s year zero, the start of the outbreak. That’s what I’m telling you. Ninety-three years ago, in the spring of the year zero, in Telluride, Colorado, somebody put a nuclear-powered transmitter inside a six-year-old-girl’s neck. Who’s still alive and sitting in quarantine, like she walked straight out of the Time Before. And for ninety-three years, whoever did this has been asking for her back.”

FORTY

It was nearly half-night, no one about, everyone but the Watch inside because of the curfew. All seemed quiet on the Wall. During the intervening hours, Peter had done all he could to get a handle on the situation. He hadn’t reported for duty, and nobody had come looking for him, though probably they wouldn’t have thought to look in the Lighthouse or in the FEMA trailer, from which he had scouted the lockup. With the coming of night, and the Watch so depleted, Ian had posted only a single guard there, Galen Strauss. But Peter doubted Sam and the others would try anything before first light. By then he planned to be gone.

The Infirmary was under heavier guard-a pair of Watchers, one in the front and one in the rear. Dale had been moved up to the Wall, so there was no way Peter could get inside, but Sara was still free to come and go. He had hidden in the shrubbery at the base of the courtyard wall and waited for her to appear. A long time passed before the door opened and she stepped onto the porch. She spoke briefly to the Watcher on duty, Ben Chou, before descending the stairs and making her way down the path, evidently headed to her house to get something to eat. Peter followed her at a discreet distance until he was sure they were out of sight and made his quick approach.

“Come with me now,” he said.

He led her to the Lighthouse, where Michael and Elton were waiting. Moving through the same explanation he had given Peter, Michael told his sister what he knew. When he came to the part about the signal and showed her the words in the logbook, Sara took it from his hands and examined it.

“Okay.”

Michael frowned. “What do you mean ‘okay’?”

“Michael, it’s not that I doubt you. I’ve known you too long. But what are we supposed to do with this information? Colorado is, what, a thousand kilometers from here?”

“About sixteen hundred,” Michael said. “Give or take.”

“So how are we supposed to get there?”

Michael paused. He glanced past his sister to Elton, who nodded.

“The real problem is what happens if we don’t.”

And that was when Michael told them about the batteries.

Peter absorbed this news with a strange detachment, a feeling of inevitability. Of course the batteries were failing; the batteries had been failing all along. He could feel it in everything that had happened; he felt it in the core of him, as if he’d always known. Like the girl. This girl, Amy, the Girl from Nowhere. That she had arrived in their midst when the batteries were failing was more than coincidence. All that remained was for him was to act upon this knowledge.

He became aware that no one had spoken for a while. “Who else knows about this?” he asked Michael.

“Just us.” He hesitated. “And your brother.”

“You told Theo?”

Michael nodded. “I always wished I hadn’t. He was the one who told me not to tell anyone. Which I didn’t, until now.”

Of course, Peter was thinking. Of course Theo had known.

“I think he didn’t want people to be afraid,” Michael explained. “As long as there wasn’t anything we could do.”

“But you think there is.”

Michael paused to rub his eyes with the tips of his fingers. Peter could see the long hours catching up with him. None of them had slept at all.

“You know what I’d do, Peter. The signal’s probably automated. But if the Army’s still out there, I don’t see how we can just do nothing. If she did what you said at the mall, maybe she could protect us.”

Peter turned his face toward Sara. After what Michael had just told them, he was surprised to find her so composed, her face revealing no emotion. But she was a nurse; Peter knew that toughness.

“Sara? You haven’t said anything.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“You’ve been with her all this time. What do you think she is?”

Sara released a weary sigh. “All I know is what she isn’t. She’s not a viral, that’s obvious. But she’s not an ordinary human being, either. Not the way she heals.”

“Is there any reason she can’t speak?”

“Nothing I can find. If she’s as old as Michael says, maybe she’s forgotten how.”

“And no one else has been in to see her.”

“Not since yesterday.” She hesitated. “I get the feeling everyone’s sort of… afraid of her.”

“Are you?”

Sara frowned. “Why would I be afraid of her, Peter?”

But he didn’t know. The question had felt strange to him even as he’d asked it.

Sara rose to her feet. “Well, I’m going to have to get back. Ben will start to wonder.” She placed a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Try to get some rest. You too, Elton. The two of you, you look like hell.”

She had nearly reached the door when she turned, focusing her attention on Peter again.

“You’re not really serious about this, are you? Going to Colorado.”

The question seemed too simple. And yet everything they’d been saying pointed to this conclusion. Peter felt much as he had outside the library, Theo asking him, What’s your vote?

“Because if you were,” Sara said, “with the way things are going, I wouldn’t wait much longer to get her out of here.” And then she slipped from the Lighthouse.

In Sara’s absence, a deeper silence settled over the room. Peter knew she was right. And yet his mind still could not grasp the totality of what they were contemplating, to bring it into focus. The girl, Amy, and the voice in his head, telling him his mother missed him; the failing batteries, which Theo had known about; the message on Michael’s radio, like a transmission that had crossed not just a width of space but time itself, speaking to them out of the past. It was all of a piece, and yet its shape remained elusive, as if some crucial bit of information was still absent from its design.

Peter found himself looking at Elton. The old man hadn’t spoken a word; Peter thought he might have fallen asleep.

“Elton?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re pretty quiet.”

“Nothing to say,” he replied, his blank eyes roaming upward. “You know who you need to talk to. You Jaxon boys, it’s always the same. I don’t have to tell you.”

Peter rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Michael asked.

“To get the answer,” he said.

Sanjay Patal couldn’t sleep. Lying in his bed, he couldn’t even close his eyes.

It was the girl. This Girl from Nowhere. She’d gotten into him somehow, into his mind. The girl was there with Babcock and the Many-what Many? he wondered; why was he thinking about the Many?-and it was as if he was somebody else now, somebody new and strange to himself. He’d wanted… what? A little peace. A little order. To stop the feeling that everything wasn’t what it seemed to be, that the world was not the world. What had Jimmy said about the girl’s eyes? But her eyes were closed, he’d seen that plainly; her eyes were closed and never opened. They were inside him, those eyes, as if he were viewing everything from two angles at once, within and without, Sanjay and not Sanjay, and what he saw was a rope.

Why was he thinking about a rope?

He’d meant to find Old Chou. That was why he’d left the house last night, leaving Gloria asleep in the kitchen. The need to find Old Chou was the force that had called him from bed, down the stairs and out the door. The lights, Sanjay remembered. As soon as he’d stepped into the yard they had filled his eyes like a bomb, the brightness exploding on his retinas, searing his mind with a pain that wasn’t real pain, exactly, it was like a memory of pain, washing away any thoughts of Old Chou or the Storehouse or what he’d intended there. What he had next done seemed to have unfolded in a state without volition. The images in his memory lacked any coherence, like a pack of cards spilled on the floor. It was Gloria who had found him afterward, huddled in the bushes at the base of their house, whimpering like a child. Sanjay, she was saying, what did you do? What did you do, what did you do? He could not answer her-at that point, he honestly had no idea-but he could tell from her face and voice that it was awful, unthinkable, as if he might have killed someone, and he let her lead him back inside and up to bed. It wasn’t until the sun was rising that he remembered what he’d done.

He was going mad.

So the day had passed. It was only by remaining awake-not merely awake but lying absolutely still, bringing all the force of his will to bear-that he believed he might restore some coherence to his troubled mind and avoid a repetition of the previous night’s events. This was his new vigil. For a time, shortly after dawn and then later, as darkness was coming on, there had been a commotion of voices downstairs (Ian’s and Ben’s and Gloria’s; he wondered what had happened to Jimmy). But this had ended too. He felt himself to be in a kind of bubble, everything unfolding at a distance, beyond his reach. At intervals he became aware of Gloria’s presence in the room, her worried face hovering above him, asking questions he could not bring himself to answer. Should I tell them about the guns, Sanjay? Should I? I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do. Why won’t you speak to me, Sanjay? But still he could say nothing. Even to speak would break the spell.

Now she was gone. Gloria was gone, Mausami was gone, everyone was gone. His Mausami. It was her image he was holding in his mind now-not the grown woman she had become but the tiny baby she’d been, this bundle of warm new life that Prudence Jaxon had placed into his arms-and as this image faded away, and Sanjay closed his eyes at last, he heard the voice, the voice of Babcock, coming out of the darkness.

Sanjay. Be my one.

He was in the kitchen now. The kitchen of the Time Before. Part of him was saying: You have closed your eyes, Sanjay. Whatever you do, you must not close your eyes. But it was too late, he was in the dream again, the dream of the woman and the telephone and her laughing voice of smoke and then the knife; the knife was in his hand. A great, heavy-handled knife that he would use to cut the words, the laughing words, from her throat. And the voice rose to him out of the darkness.

Bring them to me, Sanjay. Bring me one and then another. Bring them to me that you should live in this way and no other.

She was sitting at the table looking at him with her great padded face, smoke puffing from her lips in tiny clouds of gray. Watchoo doing with that knife? Huh? Is that supposed to scare me?

Do it. Kill her. Kill her and be free.

He lunged toward her and brought the knife down hard, all his force behind it.

But something was wrong. The knife had stopped, its gleaming brilliance frozen mid-plunge. Some force had come into the dream and stayed his hand; he felt its grip upon him. The woman was laughing. He was tugging and pulling, straining to bring the knife down, but it was no use. The smoke was pouring from her mouth and she was laughing at him, laughing laughing laughing…

He jerked awake. His heart was lurching in his chest. Every nerve in his body seemed to be firing at once. His heart! His heart!

“Sanjay?” Gloria had come into the room, carrying a lantern. “Sanjay, what is it?”

“Get Jimmy!”

Her face, disturbingly close to his own, was distorted with fear. “He’s dead, Sanjay. Don’t you remember? Jimmy’s dead!”

He hurled the covers aside, was standing, now, in the middle of the bedroom, a wild force galloping through him. This world, with its little things. This bed, this dresser, this woman named Gloria, his wife. What was he doing? Where had he meant to go? Why had he been calling for Jimmy? But Jimmy was dead. Jimmy was dead, Old Chou was dead, Walter Fisher and Soo Ramirez and the Colonel and Theo Jaxon and Gloria and Mausami and even he himself-all of them were dead! Because the world was not the world, that was the thing, that was the terrible truth he had discovered. It was a dream world, a veil of light and sound and matter that the real world hid behind. Walkers in a dream of death, that’s what they were, and the dreamer was the girl, this Girl from Nowhere. The world was a dream and she was dreaming them!

“Gloria,” he croaked. “Help me.”

A lantern was still on in Auntie’s kitchen, spilling mullioned rectangles of yellow light onto the ground. Peter knocked on the door first, then quietly let himself in.

Peter found the old woman sitting at her kitchen table. She was neither writing nor drinking her tea, and as he entered she lifted her face toward him, simultaneously reaching into the tangle of eyeglasses around her neck. The right pair found her face.

“Peter. Been thinking I’d see you.”

He took a chair across from her. “How did you know about her, Auntie?”

“Who that now?”

“You know who, Auntie. Please.”

She gave a little wave. “The Walker, you mean? Oh someone must have come by and told me. That Molyneau man, I think it was.”

“I meant two nights ago. You said something. Told me she was coming. That I knew who she was.”

“I said that?”

“Yes, Auntie. You did.”

The old woman frowned. “Can’t imagine what was on my mind. Two night ago, you say?”

He heard himself sigh. “Auntie-”

She held up a hand to quiet him. “Okay, don’t work yourself up into a condition. I was just having a bit of fun. Haven’t done that in so long I couldn’t resist it. You looking like you do.” She met his eye with an unblinking gaze. “So tell me. Before I go offering my own opinion. What you think she is? This girl?”

“Amy.”

“Don’t know what she’s called. You want to call her Amy, go right on with it.”

“I don’t know, Auntie.”

Her eyes grew suddenly wide. “Of course you don’t!” She chuckled to herself, then broke into a spasm of coughing. Peter rose to help her, but she waved him back down. “Go on, sit,” she croaked. “My voice just gets rusty is all it is.” She took a moment to settle herself, clearing her throat with a wet harrumph. “That’s what you have to find out. Everybody got something to find out in they lives, and this is your one thing.”

“Michael says she’s a hundred years old.”

The old woman nodded. “Best look out then. A older woman. Careful this Amy don’t boss you around too much.”

He was getting nowhere. Talking to Auntie was always a challenge, but he’d never seen her quite like this, so weirdly cheerful. She hadn’t even offered him tea.

“Auntie, you said something else the other night,” he pressed. “Something about chance. A chance.”

“Reckon I might have. Sounds like something I’d say.”

“Is she?”

Her pale lips curled into a frown. “I’d say that depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

Before Peter could speak, the woman continued: “Oh, don’t be looking like that, all woebegone like you are. Feeling lost is just a part of it.” She pushed away from the table and rose stiffly to her feet. “Come on with you then. Got something to show you. Might help you make up your mind.”

He followed her down the hall to her bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the space was cluttered but clean, everything in its place. Pushed against the wall was an old four-poster bed, the mattress sagging in a manner that told him the ticking was just loose straw; beside it was a wooden chair bearing a lantern. He saw that the top of the dresser, the room’s only other piece of furniture, was decorated with a collection of apparently random objects: an old glass bottle with the words Coca-Cola written in faded lettering of elaborate script; a metal tin that, when he picked it up, made a sound suggesting pins; the jawbone of some small animal; a pyramidal pile of flat, smooth stones.

“Those my worry things,” said Auntie.

Now that they were standing together in the cramped room, Peter felt her smallness; the crown of her white head reached barely to his shoulder.

“That’s what my mama called them. Keep your worry things nearby, she always said.” She gestured with a crooked finger toward the bureau. “Don’t remember where most of it comes from, excepting the picture, of course. Brought that with me on the train.”

The picture was positioned in the center of the bureau top. Peter lifted it from its place and tipped it toward the window to catch the light of the spots. The photo was too small for the frame, which was tarnished and pitted; Peter supposed the frame had come later. Two figures were standing on a flight of stairs that ascended to the door of a brick house, the man behind and above the woman, his arms wrapping her waist as she leaned her weight against him. They were dressed for the cold, in bunchy coats; Peter could see a dusting of snow on the pavement in the foreground. The tones had been bleached by the years so that everything was a muted tan color, but he could tell that they were both dark-skinned, like Auntie, with Jaxon hair; the woman’s was cut nearly as short as the man’s. She wore a long scarf around her neck and was smiling straight into the camera; the man was looking away with an expression that seemed to Peter like three-quarters of a laugh-a laugh the camera had stopped. It was a haunting image, full of hope and promise, and Peter sensed, in the man’s misdirected attention and the woman’s smile and the way his arms enfolded her, pulling her into his body, the presence of a secret the two of them shared; and then, as more of its details came into focus-the way the woman’s body curved and the thickness of her, beneath her coat-he realized what this secret was. It was a picture not of two people but three; the woman was pregnant.

“Monroe and Anita,” said Auntie. “Those were their names. That there’s our house, 2121 West Laveer.”

Peter touched the glass over the woman’s belly. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Course it’s me. Who you think it was?”

Peter returned the picture to its place on her dresser. He wished he had something like that, to remember his parents by. With Theo it was different; he could still see his brother’s face and hear his voice, and when he thought of Theo now, the image that came to his mind was from their time together at the power station, the day before they’d left. Theo’s tired, troubled eyes as he sat on Peter’s cot to examine his ankle and then, as he lifted his gaze, an expectant smile of challenge. The swelling’s down. Think you can ride? But Peter knew that over time, even just a few months’ worth, this memory would fade, like all the others-like the colors of Auntie’s photograph. First the sound of Theo’s voice would be lost, and then the picture itself, the details dissolving into visual static until all that remained was an empty space where his brother had been.

“Now, I know it’s under here someplace,” Auntie was saying.

She had lowered herself to her knees, pulling the skirt of the bed aside to look beneath it. With a grunt she reached under the bed and withdrew a box, sliding it across the floor. “Help me up, Peter.”

He took her by an elbow and eased her to her feet, then lifted the box from the floor. An ordinary cardboard shoe box, with a hinged lid and a flap that sealed it tight.

“Go on now.” Auntie was sitting on the edge of the bed, her naked feet dangling like a Little’s, skimming the floor. “Open it.”

He did as she’d said. The box was full of folded paper-he had already figured that out. But not just paper, he saw. Maps.

The box was full of maps.

Carefully he lifted the first one free of the box. Its surface was worn smooth, so brittle at its creases he worried that it might dissolve in his hands. At the top were the words AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF AMERICA, LOS ANGELES BASIN AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

“These were my father’s. The ones he used on the Long Rides.”

He gently withdrew the others, placing each on top of the bureau. SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL FOREST. LAS VEGAS STREET ATLAS. SOUTHERN NEVADA AND ENVIRONS. LONG BEACH, SAN PEDRO AND THE PORT OF LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA DESERT REGION, MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE. And, at the bottom, its folded edges squeezed against the sides of the box: FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, MAP OF THE CENTRAL QUARANTINE ZONE.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

“Your mother brought them to me. Before she died.” Auntie was still watching him from the bed, her hands resting in her lap. “That woman knew you better than you know yourself. Give them to him when he’s ready, she said.”

A familiar sadness washed over him. “I’m sorry, Auntie,” he said after a moment. “You’ve made a mistake. She must have meant Theo.”

But she shook her head. “No, Peter.” She smiled a toothless smile; her vaporous cloud of hair, backlit by the spots pouring down outside the windows, seemed to glow around her face-a halo of hair and light. “It was you. She told me to give them to you.”

Later Peter would think: how strange it was. How, standing in the quiet of Auntie’s room, among her things of the past, he had felt time opening before him, like the pages of a book. He thought of his mother’s final hours-of her hands, and the close heat of the bedroom where Peter had cared for her; of her sudden struggle for breath, and the last imploring words she’d spoken. Take care of your brother, Theo. He’s not strong, like you. Her intentions had seemed so clear. And yet as Peter searched this moment, the memory began to shift, his mother’s words forming a new shape and emphasis and, with that, a different meaning entirely.

Take care of your brother Theo.

His thoughts were broken by a burst of knocking from the porch.

“Auntie, are you expecting anyone?”

The old woman frowned. “At this hour?”

Peter quickly returned the maps to the box and slid them beneath the bed. It wasn’t until he reached the front door and saw Michael standing behind the screen that he wondered why he’d done this. Michael eased himself into the room, darting a glance past Peter to the old woman, who was standing behind him, her arms folded disapprovingly over her chest.

“Hey, Auntie,” he said breathlessly.

“Hey yourself, rude boy. You come knocking at my door in the middle of the night, I expect a how-do-you-do.”

“Sorry.” His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. “How are you this evening, Auntie?”

She nodded. “I’m expecting I’m all right.”

Michael directed his attention to Peter again, lowering his voice confidentially. “Could I speak to you? Outside?”

Peter stepped onto the porch behind Michael, in time to see Dale Levine appearing out of the shadows.

“Tell him what you told me,” said Michael.

“Dale? What is it?”

“Look,” the man said, glancing around nervously, “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, and I have to get back to the Wall. But if you’re planning on getting Alicia and Caleb out of here, I’d do it at first light. I can help you at the gate.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

It was Michael who answered. “The guns, Peter. They’re going to get the guns.”

FORTY-ONE

In the Infirmary, Sara Fisher, First Nurse, was waiting with the girl.

Amy, Sara thought. Her name was Amy. This impossible girl, this one-hundred-year-old girl, was named Amy. Is that you? she’d asked her. Is that your name? Are you Amy?

Yes, her eyes said. She might have actually smiled. How long since she had heard the sound of her name? That’s me. I’m Amy.

Sara wished she had some clothing for the girl, instead of the gown. It didn’t seem right for a girl who had a name not to have clothing to wear, and a pair of shoes. Sara should have thought of that before returning to the Infirmary. The girl was shorter than she was, lighter-boned and slimmer-hipped, but Sara had a pair of gaps she liked to ride in, snug at the waist and seat, that would fit the girl well enough if she cinched them tight. She needed a bath, too, and a haircut.

Sara didn’t question anything Michael had told her. Michael was Michael, that’s what everyone said, meaning he was too smart by half-too smart for his own good. But the one thing he wasn’t, not ever, was wrong. There would come a time, Sara supposed, when this would happen-a person couldn’t be right all the time-and she wondered what would become of her brother on that day. The ceaseless effort he applied to being right, to fixing every problem, would suddenly collapse inside him. It made Sara think of a game they had played as Littles, building towers of blocks and then pulling them away from the lower tiers, one by one, daring the whole thing to fall; and when it fell, it happened swiftly, all at once. She wondered if that’s what would happen to Michael, if there would be any part left standing. He would need her then, as he had needed her that morning in the shed when they’d found their parents-the day when Sara had failed him.

Sara had meant it, when she’d told Peter she wasn’t afraid of the girl. She had been, at first. But as the hours and then days had moved by, the two of them locked away, she’d begun to feel something new. In the girl’s watchful and mysterious presence-silent and unmoving, and yet not-she’d begun to feel a quality of reassurance, even of hope. A feeling that she was not alone, but even more: that the world was not alone. As if they were all waking from a long night of terrible dreams to step back into life.

Dawn would soon come. The attack of the night before had evidently not repeated; Sara would have heard the shouts. It was as if the night were holding the last of its breath, waiting for what would come next. Because what Sara hadn’t told Peter, or anyone at all, was what had occurred in the Infirmary in the moments just before the lights had gone out. The girl had suddenly sat bolt upright on her cot. Sara, exhausted, had just lain down to sleep; she was roused by a sound she realized was coming from the girl. A low moaning, a single continuous note, rising at the back of her throat. What is it? Sara said, rising quickly to go to her. What’s wrong? Are you hurt, has something hurt you? But the girl gave no reply. Her eyes were very wide, and yet she seemed not to see Sara at all. Sara had sensed that something was happening outside-the room was strangely dark, there were shouts coming from the Wall, the sounds of a commotion, voices calling and feet racing past-but while this seemed important, a fact worthy of her attention, Sara could not look away; whatever was going on outside was being waged here also, in this room, in the vacancy of the girl’s eyes and the tautness of her face and throat and in the mournful melody that she was playing from somewhere deep within her. Things continued this way for some unknown numbers of minutes-two minutes and fifty-six seconds, according to Michael, though it felt like an eternity-and then, as quickly and alarmingly as it had begun, it was over; the girl fell silent. She lay back down on the cot, pulling her knees to her chest, and that had been the end of it.

Sara, sitting at the desk in the outer room, was remembering this, wondering if she should have told Peter about it, when her attention was taken by a sound of voices on the porch. She lifted her face toward the window. Ben was still sitting at the rail, facing away-Sara had carried out a chair for him-the end of his cross visible where it protruded from his lap; whomever he was speaking to was standing below him, Sara’s view obscured by the angle. What are you doing there? she heard Ben say, his voice gathering into a tone of warning. Don’t you know there’s a curfew?

And as Sara rose to her feet, to see whom Ben was speaking to, she saw Ben rising also, sweeping his cross before him.

Peter and Michael, moving through the trailer park, darting from shadow to shadow: they made their final approach to the lockup in the cover of the trees.

No guard.

Peter gently pushed open the door, which stood ajar. As he stepped inside, he saw a body pushed against the far wall, its arms and legs bound, just as Alicia, moving from his left, dropped the cross she was pointing at his back.

“Where the hell have you been?” she said.

Caleb was standing behind her, holding the blade.

“A long story. I’ll tell you on the way.” He gestured toward the body on the floor, which he now recognized as Galen Strauss. “I see you decided to get started without me. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing he’ll remember when he wakes up.”

“Ian knows about the guns,” said Michael.

Alicia nodded. “So I figured.”

Peter explained the plan. First to the Infirmary to get Sara and the girl, then to the stables, for mounts. Just before First Bell, Dale, on the Wall, would call sign. In all the confusion, they should be able to slip out the gate, just as the sun was rising, and make their way down to the power station. From there they could figure out what to do.

“You know, I think I misjudged Dale,” Alicia said. “He’s got more stones than I thought.” She looked at Michael. “You too, Circuit. I wouldn’t have figured you as someone ready to storm the lockup.”

The four of them stepped out. Dawn was fast approaching; Peter didn’t think they had more than a few minutes. They moved in quick silence toward the Infirmary and circled around to the west wall of the Sanctuary, giving them cover and a clear view of the building.

The porch was empty; the door stood open. Through the front windows came a flicker of lamplight. Then they heard a scream.

Sara.

Peter got there first. The outer room was empty. Nothing was disturbed except the chair at the front desk, which was lying on its side. From the ward Peter heard a groan. As the others entered behind him, he raced down the hallway and tore through the curtain.

Amy was huddled at the base of the far wall, her arms folded over her head as if to ward off a blow. Sara was on her knees, her face covered in blood.

The room was full of bodies.

The others had burst in behind him. Michael rushed to his sister’s side.

“Sara!”

She tried to speak, opening her bloodied lips, but no sound came. Peter dropped to his knees beside Amy. She appeared uninjured, but at his touch she flinched, pulling farther away, waving her arms protectively.

“It’s okay,” he was saying, “it’s okay,” but it wasn’t okay. What had happened here? Who had killed these men? Had they slaughtered one another?

“It’s Ben Chou,” Alicia said. She was kneeling by one of the bodies. “Those two are Milo and Sam. The other one is Jacob Curtis.”

Ben had been taken on a blade. Milo, face-down in a spreading puddle of blood, had been killed by a blow to the head; Sam appeared to have gone down the same way, his skull caved in from the side.

Jacob was lying at the foot of Amy’s cot, the bolt from Ben’s cross jutting from his throat. A bit of blood was still bubbling from his lips; his eyes were open, wearing a look of surprise. In his outstretched hand he was clutching a length of iron pipe, smeared with blood and brain, white flecks among the red, clinging to its surface.

“Holy shit!” Caleb said. “Holy shit, they’re all dead!”

Everything about the scene had taken on a horrifying vividness. The bodies on the floor, the pooling blood. Jacob with the pipe in his hand. Michael was helping Sara to her feet. Amy was still cowering against the wall.

“It was Sam and Milo,” Sara croaked. Michael had helped his sister onto one of the cots. She spoke haltingly, through cracked and swollen lips, her teeth lined in crimson. “Ben and I tried to stop them. It was all… I don’t know. Sam was hitting me. Then someone else came in.”

“Was it Jacob?” Peter said. “He’s lying dead here, Sara.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

Alicia took Peter by the elbow. “It doesn’t matter what happened,” she said urgently. “No one will ever believe us. We have to go now.”

They couldn’t risk the gate; Alicia explained what she wanted everyone to do. The important thing was to keep out of sight of the Wall. Peter and Caleb would go to the Storehouse, for ropes and packs and shoes for Amy; Alicia would lead the others to the rendezvous.

They crept from the Infirmary and fanned out. The main door to the Storehouse stood ajar, the lock hanging on its hasp-an odd detail, but nothing they had time to worry about now. Caleb and Peter moved into the dim interior with its long rows of bins. That was where they found Old Chou and, beside him, Walter Fisher. They were hanging side by side from the rafters, the ropes tight around their necks, their bare feet suspended above a bin of crated books. Their skin had taken on a grayish cast; both men’s tongues were hanging from their mouths. They had evidently used the crates as a kind of stepladder, assembling them into a pile and then, once the ropes were in place, kicking them away. For a moment Peter and Caleb just stood there, looking at the two men, the improbable image they made.

“Fuck… me,” said Caleb.

Alicia was right, Peter knew. They had to go now. Whatever was happening was vast and terrible, a force to sweep over them all.

They assembled their supplies and stepped outside. Then Peter remembered the maps.

“Go ahead,” he told Caleb. “I’ll catch up.”

“They’ll already be there.”

“Just go. I’ll find you.”

The boy darted away. At Auntie’s house, Peter didn’t bother to knock; he stepped inside and moved straight to the bedroom. Auntie was asleep. He paused for a moment in the doorway, watching her breathe. The maps were where he’d left them, under the bed. He bent to retrieve them and slid the box into his pack.

“Peter?”

He froze. Auntie’s eyes were still closed. Her hands lay still at her sides.

“I was just lying here to rest some.”

“Auntie-”

“No time for goodbyes,” the old woman intoned. “You go on now, Peter. You’re in your own time now.”

By the time he reached the cutout, filaments of pink were rising from the east. Everyone was there. Alicia was climbing from under the trunk line, dusting herself off.

“Everybody ready?”

Footsteps behind them: Peter wheeled around, drawing his blade. But then he saw, stepping from the undergrowth, the figure of Mausami Patal. A cross was slung from one shoulder; she was wearing a pack.

“I tracked you from the Storehouse. We better hurry.”

“Maus-” Alicia began.

“Save your breath, Lish. I’m going.” Mausami focused her eyes on Peter. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Do you believe your brother’s dead?”

He felt as if he had been waiting for someone to ask him this very question. “No.”

“Neither do I.”

Her hand moved toward her belly, an unconscious gesture. Its meaning came upon him with such completeness it felt less like something discovered than remembered, as if he’d known all along.

“I never got the chance to tell him,” Mausami said. “I still want to.”

Peter turned to Alicia, who was studying the two of them with a look of exasperation.

“She comes.”

“Peter, this is not a good idea. Think about where we’re going.”

“Mausami’s blood now. It’s not a discussion.”

For a moment Alicia said nothing; she appeared to be at a loss for words.

“The hell with it,” she said finally. “We don’t have time to argue.”

Alicia went first, showing them the way. Sara followed, then Michael, then Caleb and Mausami, dropping into the tunnel one by one, leaving Peter to guard the rear.

Amy was the last. They’d found a jersey and a pair of gaps for her, and a pair of sandals. As she lowered herself through the hatch, her eyes found Peter’s with a sudden, beseeching force. Where are we going?

Colorado, he thought. The CQZ. They were just names on a map, bits of colored light on the screen of Michael’s CRT. The reality behind them, the hidden world of which they were a part, was nothing Peter could imagine. When they’d spoken of such a journey earlier that night-had it really been that same night, the four of them crowded into the Lighthouse?-Peter had envisioned a proper expedition: a large armed detail, carts of supplies, at least one scouting party, a meticulously plotted route. His father would spend whole seasons planning the Long Rides. Now here they were, fugitives on foot, scurrying away with little more than a pile of old maps and the blades on their belts. How could they possibly hope to get to such a place?

“I don’t really know,” he told her. “But if we don’t leave now, I think we’ll all die here.”

She ducked into the tunnel and was gone. Peter tightened the straps of his pack and scrambled in behind her, pulling the hatch closed over his head, sealing himself in darkness. The walls were cool and smelled of earth. The tunnel had been dug long ago, perhaps by the Builders themselves, to make it easier to service the trunk line; except for the Colonel, no one had used it for years. It was his secret route, Alicia had explained, the one he used to hunt. So at least one mystery was solved.

Twenty-five meters later, Peter emerged into a copse of mesquite. Everyone was waiting. The lights were down, revealing a gray dawn sky. Above them, the face of the mountain rose like a single slab of stone, a silent witness to all that had occurred. Peter heard the calls of the Watch from the top of the Wall, sounding off their posts for Morning Bell and the changing of the shift. Dale would be wondering what had happened to them, if he didn’t know already. Surely it wouldn’t be long before the bodies were found.

Alicia closed the hatch behind him and turned the wheel, then knelt to cover it with underbrush.

“They’ll come after us,” Peter said quietly, crouched beside her. “They’ll have horses. We can’t outrun them.”

“I know.” Her face was set. “It’s a question of who gets to the guns first.”

And with that Alicia rose, turned on her heels, and began to lead them down the mountain.