But Peter’s father had seen the ocean: his father, the great Demetrius Jaxon, Head of the Household, and Peter’s uncle Willem, First Captain of the Watch. Together they’d led the Long Rides farther than anyone had ever gone, since before the Day. Eastward, toward the morning sun, and west to the horizon line and farther still, into the empty cities of the Time Before. Always his father returned with stories of the great and terrible sights he’d seen, but none was more wondrous than the ocean, in a place he called the Long Beach. Imagine, Peter’s father told the two of them—for Theo was there as well, the two Jaxon brothers sitting at the kitchen table of their small house in the hour of their father’s return, raptly listening, drinking his words like water—imagine a place where the ground simply stopped, and beyond that place an endless tumbling blueness, like the sky turned upside down. And sunk down in it, the rusting ribs of great ships, a thousand thousand of them, like a whole drowned city of man’s creation, jutting from the ocean’s waters as far as the eye could see. Their father was not a man of words; he communicated only with the most sparing phrases and parceled his affections the same way, letting a hand on a shoulder or a well-timed frown or, in moments of approval, a terse nod from the chin do most of his speaking for him. But the stories of the Long Rides brought out the voice in him. Standing on the ocean’s edge, his father said, you could feel the bigness of the world itself, how quiet and empty it was, how alone, with no man or woman to look at it or say its name through all the years and years.
Peter was fourteen when his father returned from the sea. Like all the Jaxon males, including his older brother, Theo, Peter had apprenticed to the Watch, hoping someday to join his father and uncle on the Long Rides. But this never happened. The following summer, the scouting party was ambushed in a place his father called Milagro, deep in the eastern deserts. Three souls lost, including Uncle Willem, and there were no more Long Rides after that. People said that it was his father’s fault, that he had gone too far, taken too many chances, and for what? None of the other Colonies had been heard from in years; the last, Taos Colony, had fallen almost eighty years ago. Their final transmission, back before the Separation of the Trades and the One Law, when radio was still permitted, said their power plant was failing, the lights were going out. Surely they’d been overrun like all the others. What was Demo Jaxon hoping to accomplish, leaving the safety of the lights for months at a time? What did he hope to find, out there in the dark? There were those who still spoke of the Day of Return, when the Army would come back to find them, but never in all his travels had Demo Jaxon found the Army; the Army was no more. So many men dead now, to learn what they already knew.
And it was true that from the day Peter’s father returned from the last Long Ride, there was something different about him. A great weary sadness, as if he’d leapt abruptly forward in age. It was as if a part of him had been left in the desert with Willem, whom Peter knew his father loved most of all, more than Peter or Theo or even their mother. His father stepped down from the Household, passing his seat to Theo; he began to ride alone, leaving with the herds at first light, returning just minutes before Second Evening Bell. He never told anyone where he went, as far as Peter knew. When he asked his mother, all she could say was that his father was in his own time now. When he was ready, he would return to them.
The morning of his father’s final ride, Peter—a runner of the Watch by this time—was standing on the catwalk near Main Gate when he saw his father preparing to leave. The lights had just gone down; Morning Bell was about to sound. It had been a quiet night, without sign, and for an hour before dawn, a light snow had fallen. The day broke slowly, gray and cold. As the herd was gathering at the gate, Peter’s father appeared on his mount, the great roan mare he always rode, headed down the trace. The horse was called Diamond because of the marking on her brow, an orphaned splash of white beneath the swishing mask of her long forelock; not an especially fast mount, his father always said, but loyal and tireless, and quick when you needed her to be quick. Now, watching his father holding her reins, standing at the rear of the herd while he waited for the gate to open, Peter saw Diamond do a little quickstep, tamping down the snow. Jets of steam puffed from her nostrils, swirling like a wreath of smoke around her long, self-possessing face. His father bent low and stroked the side of her neck; Peter saw his lips moving as he whispered something, some gentle encouragement, into her ear.
When Peter thought of that morning, five years ago, he still wondered if his father had known he was there, observing him from the snow-slickened catwalk. But he had never lifted his eyes to find him, nor had Peter done anything to alert his father to his presence. Watching him as he spoke to Diamond, stroking the side of her neck with his calming hand, Peter had thought of his mother’s words, and knew them to be true. His father was in his own time now. Always, in the last moments before Morning Bell, Demo Jaxon would retrieve his compass from his waist pouch and open it once to examine it, then snap it closed as he called his head count to the Watch: “One out!” he would call, in his deep, barrel-chested voice. “One back!” the gatekeeper would reply. Always the same ritual, meticulously observed. But not that morning. It was only after the gates had opened and his father had passed, taking Diamond down the power station road, away from the grazing fields, that Peter realized his father had carried no bow, that the sheath at his belt was empty.
That night, Second Bell rang without him. As Peter would soon learn, his father had taken water at the power station midday and was last seen heading out under the turbines, into open desert. It was generally held that a mother could not stand for one of her own children, nor a wife for a husband; though nothing was written, the job of the Mercy had naturally fallen to a chain of fathers and brothers and eldest sons, performing this duty since the Day. So it was that Theo had stood for their father, as Peter now stood for Theo—just as someone, perhaps a son of his own, would stand for Peter should that day come.
Because if the person wasn’t dead, if they’d been taken up, they always came home. It might be three days or five or even a week, but never longer than that. Most were Watchers, taken on scavenging parties or trips to the power station, or else riders with the herd or the Heavy Duty crews, who went outside to log or do repairs or drag garbage to the dump. Even in broad daylight, people were killed or taken; you were never really safe as long as the virals had shade to move in. The youngest homecomer that Peter knew of had been the little Boyes girl—Sharon? Shari?—nine years old when she was taken up on Dark Night. The rest of her family had been killed outright, either in the quake itself or the attack that followed; with no one left to stand for her, it had been Peter’s uncle Willem, as First Captain, who had done this awful job. Many, like the Boyes girl, were fully taken up by the time they returned; others appeared in the midst of their quickening, sick and shuddering, tearing the clothing from their bodies as they staggered into view. The ones furthest along were the most dangerous; more than one father or son or uncle had been killed in this manner. But generally they offered no resistance. Most just stood there at the gate, blinking into the spotlights, waiting for the shot. Peter supposed that some part of them still remembered being human well enough to want to die.
His father never returned, which meant he was dead, killed by the virals out in the Darklands, at a place called Milagro. Their father had claimed he’d seen a Walker there, a solitary figure darting in the moonlit shadows, just before the virals attacked. But by that time, with the Household and even Old Chou having turned against the Long Rides, and Peter’s father in disgrace, having resigned to pursue his mysterious, solitary expeditions without the Wall—moving in the expanding orbit that even then had seemed to Peter a rehearsal for something final—no one had believed him. A claim as bold as that: surely it was just Demo Jaxon’s desire to continue the rides that made him claim something so absurd. The last Walker to come in had been the Colonel, almost thirty years ago, and he was an old man now. With his great white beard and wind-bit
face, brown and thickened as tanned hide, he seemed nearly as old as Old Chou, or even Auntie herself, Last of the First. A single Walker, after all these years? Impossible.
Even Peter hadn’t known what to believe, until six days ago.
Now, standing on the catwalk in the fading light, Peter found himself wishing his mother were still alive, as he often did, to talk about these things. She’d taken sick just a season after their father’s final ride, the onset of her illness so gradual that Peter had at first failed to notice the raspy cough from deep in her chest, how thin she was becoming. As a nurse, she had probably understood only too well what was happening, how the cancer that took so many had made its lethal home inside her, but had chosen to hide this information from Peter and Theo as long as she could. By the end not much was left of her but a shell of flesh on bone, fighting for a single taste of breath. A good death, everyone agreed, to die at home in bed as Prudence Jaxon had. But Peter had been at her side through the final hours and knew how terrible it had been for her, how much she’d suffered. No, there was no such thing as a good death.
The sun was folding into the horizon now, laying the last of its golden road across the valley below. The sky had turned a deep blue-black, drinking up the darkness that was spilling from the east. Peter felt the temperature drop, a quick, decisive notch of cooling; for a moment everything seemed held in a thrumming stillness. The men and women of the night shift were ascending the ladders now—Ian Patal and Ben Chou and Galen Strauss and Sunny Greenberg and all the rest, fifteen in sum, crosses and longbows slung over their backs—calling out to one another as they thumped and clanged down the catwalks to the firing posts, Alicia barking orders from below, sending the runners scurrying. A small comfort, but real enough, the sound of Alicia’s voice; it was she who had stood by Peter through all the nights of waiting, leaving him be but never venturing far, so that he’d know she was there. And should Theo return, it would be Alicia who would ride down the Wall with Peter, to do what needed to be done.
Peter drew in a deep breath of evening air and held it. The stars, he knew, would soon be out. Auntie had spoken often of the stars, as his father had—spread out over the sky like glowing grains of sand, more stars than all the souls who had ever lived, their numbers impossible to count. Whenever his father had spoken of them, telling the stories of the Long Rides and the sights he’d seen, the light of the stars had been in his eyes.
But Peter was not to see the stars tonight. The bell commenced to ring again, two hard peals, and Peter heard Soo Ramirez calling from below: “Clear the gate! Clear the gate for Second Bell!” A deep, bone-shaking shudder below him as the weights engaged; with a shriek of metal, the doors, twenty meters tall and half a meter thick, began to slide from their walled pockets. As he lifted his cross from the platform, Peter made a silent wish that morning would find it unfired. And then the lights came on.
TWENTY
Log of the Watch
Summer 92
Day 41: No sign.
Day 42: No sign.
Day 43: 23:06: Single viral sighted at 200 m, FP 3. No approach.
Day 44: No sign.
Day 45: 02:00: Pod of 3 at FP 6. One target breaks off and attempts the Wall. Arrows released from FP 5 + 6. Target retreats. No further contact.
Day 46: No sign.
Day 47: 01:15: Runner Kip Darrell reports movement at fireline NW between FP 9 and FP 10, unconfirmed by Watch on station, officially logged as no sign.
Day 48: 21:40: Pod of 3 at FP 1, 200 m. One target makes approach to 100 m but retreats without engagement.
Day 49: No sign.
Day 50: 22:15: Pod of 6 at FP 7. Hunting small game, no approach. 23:05: Pod of 3 at FP 3. 2 males, 1 female. Full engagement, 1 KO. Kill at the nets made by Arlo Wilson, assist to Alicia Donadio, 2nd Capt. Body disposal referred to HD. Note to HD crew to repair split seam toehold at FP 6. Received by Finn Darrell for HD.
During this period: 6 contacts, 1 unconfirmed, 1 KO. No souls killed or taken.
Respectfully submitted to the Household,
S. C. Ramirez, First Captain
To the extent that any singular occurrence may be meaningfully placed within a local framework of events, the disappearance of Theo Jaxon, First Family and Household, a Second Captain of the Watch, could be said to have been set in motion twelve days prior, on the morning of the fifty-first of summer, after a night in which a viral had been killed in the nets by the Watcher Arlo Wilson.
The attack had come in the early evening from the south, near Firing Platform Three. Peter, stationed at his post on the opposite side of the Colony’s perimeter, had seen nothing; it wasn’t until the early-morning hours, as the resupply detail was assembling at the gate, that he received a full recounting.
The attack was in most ways typical, of the kind that occurred nearly every season, though most often in summer. A pod of three, two males and one large female; it was thought by Soo Ramirez—and others were in agreement—that this was probably the same pod that had been sighted twice over the previous five nights, prowling near the fireline. It often happened this way, in discrete stages, spread over several nights. A group of virals would appear at the edge of the lights, as if scouting the Colony’s defenses; this would be followed by a couple of nights of no sign; then they would appear again, closer this time, perhaps one breaking away to draw fire but always retreating; then, on a third night, an attack. The Wall was far too high for even the strongest viral to mount it in a single leap; the only way for them to ascend was along the metal seams between the plates, employing these slender cracks, caused by the inevitable shifting of the plates, as toeholds. The firing platforms, with their overhanging steel nets, were positioned at the tops of these seams. Any viral who made it this far was usually fogged by the lights, sluggish and disoriented; many simply retreated at this point. Those who didn’t would find themselves hanging in an inverted position under the nets, giving the Watcher on station ample opportunity to shoot them in the sweet spot with a crossbow or, failing this, to take them on a blade. Only rarely did a viral make it past the net—Peter had seen this occur only once during his five years on the Wall—but when one did, it invariably meant the Watcher was dead. After that, it was simply a question of how weakened the viral was by the lights and how long it took the Watch to bring him down, and how many people died before this happened.
That night, the pod had made a run straight for Platform Six; only one, a female—a detail Peter always found it curious to note, since the differences seemed so slight and served no purpose, as virals did not reproduce, as far as anybody was aware—had made it as far as the net. She was large, a good two meters; most distinctively, she possessed a single shock of white hair on her otherwise bald head. Whether this hair indicated that she had been old when she was taken up, or was a symptom of some biological change that had occurred in the years since then—the virals were thought to be immortal, or something close to it—was impossible to say; but no one Peter knew had ever seen a viral with hair before. Scrambling up the seam, a channel no wider than half a centimeter, she had quickly ascended to the underside of the platform. There she turned, leaping away from the Wall, into space, and grasped the outer edge of the net. All of this had unfolded in at most a couple of seconds. Suspended now, hanging twenty meters above the hardpan, she had rocked her body like a pendulum and, with a quick tucking motion, vaulted out and over the net, landing on her clawed feet on the platform, where Arlo Wilson had shoved his cross against her chest and shot her, point-blank through the sweet spot.
In the lifting morning light, Arlo related these events to Peter and the others with vigorously specific detail. Arlo, like all the Wilson men, liked nothing more than a good story. He was not a Captain, but he seemed like one: a large man with a heavy beard and powerful arms and a genial manner that communicated confident strength. He had a twin brother, Hollis, identical in all respects except that he kept his face clean-shaven; Arlo’s wife, Leigh, was a Jaxon, Peter’s a
nd Theo’s cousin, which made them cousins, too. Sometimes in the evenings, when he wasn’t standing the Watch, Arlo would sit under the lights in the Sunspot and play guitar for everyone, old folk tunes from a book left behind by the Builders, or go to the Sanctuary and play for the children as they readied for bed—funny, made-up songs about a pig named Edna who liked to wallow in the mud and eat clover all day. Now that Arlo had a Little of his own in the Sanctuary—a mewing bundle named Dora—it was generally assumed that he would serve at most a couple more years on the Wall before standing down to work some other, safer job.
That it was Arlo who had gotten credit for the kill was a matter of chance, as he himself was quick to point out. Any one of them could have been stationed at Platform Six; Soo liked to move people around so much you never knew where you might be on a given night. And yet there was more than luck involved, Peter knew, even if Arlo’s modesty prevented him from saying so. More than one Watcher had frozen in the moment, and Peter, who had never taken a viral close in like that—all his kills had been dozers, shot in broad daylight—couldn’t say for sure that it wouldn’t happen to him. So if there was luck involved, it was everyone’s good luck that it had been Arlo Wilson who had been there.
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