As Peter waited in the quiet, a sudden weariness came over him, and with it a memory: of a night, long ago, when he had come into the Infirmary and seen his mother watching over one of her patients—just as he was doing now. He couldn’t remember who this person was or if, in fact, the memory was several memories, folded over one another. It could have been one night or many. But on the night he recalled, he had stepped through the curtain and found his mother sitting in a chair by one of the cots, her head tipped to the side, and knew she was asleep. The person on the cot was a child, a small form hidden in darkness; the only light came from a candle on a tray by the bed. He moved forward, not speaking; no one else was in the room. His mother stirred, tilting her face toward him. She was young, and healthy, and he was glad, so glad, to see her again.
Take care of your brother, Theo.
—Mama, he said. I’m Peter.
He’s not strong, like you.
He was jarred by voices outside and the clatter of the opening door. Sara strode into the ward, the lantern swinging from her hand.
“Peter? Is everything okay?”
He blinked into the sudden blaze. It took him a moment to reassemble his sense of where he was. He had slept only a minute, and yet it felt like longer. Already the memory, and the dream it had produced, were gone.
“I was just … I don’t know.” Why was he apologizing? “I think I must have dozed off.”
Sara was busying herself with the lantern, moving a wheeled tray to the side of the cot, where the girl was sitting up, an alert and watchful expression on her face.
“How’d you talk Dale into letting you in?”
“Oh, Dale’s all right.”
Sara sat on the girl’s cot and opened her kit to reveal what she’d brought: flatbread, an apple, a wedge of cheese.
“Hungry?”
The girl ate quickly, polishing off her meal with darting bites: first the bread and then the cheese, which she sniffed suspiciously before tasting, and finally the apple, right down to the core. When it was gone she wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing juice over her cheeks.
“Well, I guess that settles it,” Sara declared. “Not the best table manners I’ve ever seen, but your appetite is normal enough. I’m going to check your dressing, okay?”
Sara untied the gown, drawing it aside to expose the girl’s bandaged shoulder while leaving the rest covered. With a pair of shears, she snipped the cloth away. Where the bolt had entered, tearing skin and muscle and bone, all that remained was a small pink depression. It reminded Peter of a baby’s flesh, that soft freshness of new skin.
“All my patients should heal so fast. No point in leaving those stitches in, I guess. Turn around so I can do the back.”
The girl complied, swiveling on the cot; Sara took up a pair of tweezers and began pulling the sutures from the exit wound, dropping them one by one into a metal basin.
“Does anybody else know about this?” Peter asked.
“About the way she heals? I don’t think so.”
“So nobody else has been in to see her since this afternoon.”
She clipped off the final stitch. “Just Jimmy.” She pulled the girl’s gown back over her shoulder. “There you go, all set.”
“Jimmy? What did he want?”
“I don’t know, I assume Sanjay sent him.” Sara shifted on the cot to look at Peter. “It was kind of strange, actually. I never heard him come in, I just looked up and there he was, standing in the doorway with this … look on his face.”
“A look?”
“I don’t know how else to describe it. I told him she hadn’t said anything, and then he left. But that was hours ago.”
Peter felt suddenly rattled. What did she mean by a look? What had Jimmy seen?
Sara took up her tweezers again. “Okay, your turn.”
Peter was about to say, My turn for what? But then he remembered: his elbow. The bandage had long since worn down to a filthy rag. He guessed the cut was healed by now; he hadn’t looked at it for days.
He sat on one of the empty cots. Sara took a place beside him and unwrapped the bandage, releasing a sour odor of stale skin.
“Did you bother keeping this thing clean at all?”
“I guess I forgot.”
She took hold of the arm, bending closely with the tweezers. Peter was aware of the girl’s eyes, intently watching them.
“Any news from Michael?” He felt a jab of pain as she tugged the first suture. “Ow, be careful.”
“It would help if you held still.” Sara repositioned his arm, not looking at him, and resumed her work. “I stopped by the Lighthouse on the way back from the house. He’s still working. Elton’s helping him.”
“Elton? Is that so smart?”
“Don’t worry, we can trust him.” Her eyes flicked upward with a troubled glance. “Funny how we’re all talking like that, all of a sudden. Who can trust who.” She gave his arm a pat. “There, move it around a little.”
Balling his hand into a fist, he pumped his arm back and forth. “Good as new.”
Sara had stepped to the pump to clean her tools. She turned and faced him, drying her hands on a rag.
“Honestly, Peter. Sometimes I worry about you.”
He realized that he was still holding his arm away from his body. He awkwardly dropped it to his side. “I’m fine.”
She raised her eyebrows doubtfully but said nothing. That one night after the music, Arlo and his guitar and everybody drinking shine; something had come over him, a sudden, almost physical loneliness, but then, the moment he kissed her, a puncturing jab of guilt. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, nor that she had failed to make her interest less than plain. Alicia was right, what she’d said on the roof of the power station. Sara was the obvious choice for him. But he couldn’t will himself to feel something he didn’t. There was a part of him that simply didn’t feel alive enough to deserve her, to offer in kind what she was offering him.
“As long as you’re here,” Sara said, “I’m going to go look in on Hightop. Make sure somebody remembered to feed him.”
“What do you hear?”
“I’ve been inside all day. You probably know more than I do.” When Peter said nothing, Sara shrugged. “I expect people are divided. There’s going to be a lot of anger about last night. The best thing would be for a little time to pass.”
“Sanjay better think twice about doing anything with him. Lish will never stand for it.”
Sara seemed to stiffen. She drew her kit from the floor and hung it on her shoulder again, not looking at him.
“What did I say?”
But she shook her head. “Forget it, Peter. Lish is not my problem.”
Then she was gone, the curtain shifting with her departure. Well, Peter thought, what to make of that? It was true that Alicia and Sara couldn’t have been two more different women, and nothing said they had to get along. Maybe it was simply the case that Sara blamed Alicia for Teacher’s death, which would hit Sara harder than most. It was sort of obvious, now that Peter considered it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.
The girl was looking at him again. She gave a quizzical lift of her eyebrows: What’s wrong?
“She’s just upset is all,” he said. “Worried.”
He thought it again: How strange it all was. It was as if he could hear her words in his head. Anybody who saw him talking like this would think he’d lost his mind.
Then the girl did something he hadn’t expected at all. Aroused by some unknown purpose, she rose from her cot and moved to the sink. She primed the pump, three hard pushes, and filled a basin with water. This she carried back to the cot where Peter sat. She placed it on the dusty floor at his feet and took a cloth from the cart and sat beside him, bending at the waist to dip the rag in the water. Then she took his arm in her hand and began to dab the place where the sutures had been with the moistened cloth.
He could feel her breath on him, breezing over his d
amp flesh. She had unfolded the cloth against her open hand to increase the surface area. Her gesture was more thorough now, not a cautious dabbing but a smooth, even stroking motion, rubbing the dirt and desiccated skin away. An ordinary kindness, to wash his skin, and yet completely surprising: it was full of sensation, of memory. His senses seemed to have gathered around it, the feel of the washcloth on his arm, her breath on his skin, like moths around a flame. As if he were a boy again, a boy who had fallen and scraped his elbow and run inside, and she was washing him clean.
She misses you.
Every nerve in his body seemed to jump. The girl was holding his arm in a firm grip, immovable. Not words, not spoken words. The words were in his mind. She was gripping his arm; their faces were inches apart.
“What did you—?”
She misses you she misses you she misses you.
He was on his feet, lurching away. His heart was pounding in his chest like a great caged animal. He had backed with his full weight into some kind of glass cabinet, sending the contents spilling off the shelves behind him. Someone had stepped through the curtain, a figure at the periphery of his vision. For a moment his mind came mercifully into a wider focus. Dale Levine.
“What the hell is going on in here?”
Peter swallowed, trying to answer. Dale was standing at the curtain, wearing a look of confusion, his emotions unable to coalesce around any single point in the unfolding scene. He shifted his face toward the girl, who was still seated on the cot with the basin at her feet, then looked at Peter again.
“She’s awake? I thought she was dying.”
Peter found his voice at last. “You can’t … tell anyone.”
“Flyers, Peter. Does Jimmy know about this?”
“I mean it.” He knew suddenly that if he didn’t leave the room at once he would dissolve. “You can’t.”
Then he turned, brushing past Dale, practically knocking him over; he was through the curtain and out the door and stumbling down the steps into the spotlit yard, his mind still caught in the flow of words in his head—she misses you she misses you—his vision wavering through the tears that were rising to his eyes.
THIRTY-FOUR
For Mausami Patal, the night began in the Sanctuary.
She was sitting alone in the Big Room, trying to teach herself to knit. All the cots and cribs had been taken out; the children had bedded down upstairs. The broken window was boarded up, the glass swept away, the room and all its surfaces washed down with spirits. The smell would linger for days.
It wasn’t anyplace she should have been. The aroma of alcohol was so strong it was making her eyes tear up. Poor Arlo, Maus thought. And Hollis, having to kill his brother like that, though it was lucky that he had. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he’d missed. And of course Arlo wasn’t really Arlo anymore, just as Theo, if he was still alive out there, wasn’t Theo. The virus took the soul, the person you loved, away.
The chair where she sat was an old nursing rocker she’d found in the storage closet. She’d positioned a small table beside it; resting on this was a lantern, giving her enough light to work by. Leigh had instructed her in the basic stitches, which had seemed easy enough when she’d started, but somewhere along the way she had taken a wrong turn. The stitches weren’t coming out even, not at all, and her left thumb, when she tried to draw the yarn around the needle, as Leigh had demonstrated, kept getting in the way. Here she was, a woman who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power. She’d gotten so distracted that twice the ball of yarn in her lap had dropped to the floor to roll across the room, and by the time she’d gotten it rolled back up, she’d forgotten where she was and had to start over.
Part of her simply couldn’t absorb the notion that Theo was gone. She had planned to tell him about the baby on the ride, their first night at the station. With its warren of rooms and heavy walls and doors that sealed, it was easy to find an occasion to be alone there. A fact that, as long as she was being honest with herself, was the reason the whole situation existed in the first place.
Pairing with Galen: why had she done it? Cruel in a way, because he wasn’t a bad person; it was hardly his fault that she didn’t love him, or even much like him, not anymore. A bluff. That’s what it had been. To jar Theo out of his gloom. And when she’d said to him that night on the Wall, Maybe I just will marry Galen Strauss, and Theo had said, All right, if that’s what you want, I only want you to be happy, the bluff had hardened into something else, something she had to do, to prove that he was wrong. Wrong about her, wrong about himself, wrong about everything. You had to try. You had to act. You had to get on with things and make do. A feat of stubbornness, that’s what it was, marrying Galen Strauss, and all for Theo Jaxon.
For a time, most of that summer and into the fall, she had tried to make the marriage work. She had hoped she could will the right emotions into being, and for a while she had almost done it, simply because the sheer fact of her existence seemed to make Galen so happy. They were both Watch, so it wasn’t like they saw each other all that much or kept any kind of regular hours; it proved, in fact, pretty easy to avoid him, because he was on the day shift most of the time, a subtle but unmistakable comment on the fact that he had come up last in his grade, and with his eyes the way they were, no good in the dark. Sometimes when he looked at her, squinting like he did, she wondered if in fact she was the girl he really loved at all. Maybe it was some other woman he saw, one he had made up in his mind.
She’d found a way to almost never let him near her.
Almost: because you couldn’t not lie with your husband. Is he tender with you? her mother had asked her. Is he kind? Does he care about what’s happening to you? That’s all I want to know. But Galen was too happy to be tender. I can’t believe it! his face and body said. I can’t believe you’re mine! Which she wasn’t; while Galen huffed and puffed above her in the dark, Mausami was miles away. The harder he tried to be a husband, the less she felt like a wife to him, until—and this was the bad part, the part that didn’t seem fair of her—she’d found herself actually disliking him. By the first snowfall she’d caught herself imagining she could close her eyes and simply wish him off the face of the earth. Which only made Galen try harder, and left her disliking him even more.
How could he not know the baby wasn’t his? Could the man not do basic math?
True, she’d fudged the numbers. The morning he’d caught her throwing up her breakfast into the compost pile, she’d told him three periods, when it was really two. Three and it was Galen’s baby; two and it was not. Galen had come to her only one time the month she’d gotten pregnant; she had refused him on some pretense, she couldn’t even remember what. No, it was all perfectly clear to Mausami, the when and who. She had been down at the station when it happened; Theo was there, and Alicia, and Dale Levine. The four of them had stayed up late playing hands of go-to in the control room, and then Alicia and Dale had gone to bed, and the next thing she knew, she and Theo were sitting alone together, the first time since her wedding. She began to cry, surprised at how much she wanted to and by the sheer volume of her tears, and Theo had taken her in his arms to comfort her, which was what she wanted too, both of them saying how sorry they were, and after that it had taken all of about thirty seconds. They never stood a chance.
She’d barely seen him after that. They’d ridden back the next morning, and life returned to normal—though it wasn’t normal, not at all. She was a person with a secret. It lay like a warm stone inside her, a private glowing happiness. Even Galen seemed to detect the change, remarking something along the lines of Well, I’m glad to see your mood has picked up. It’s nice to see you smiling. (Her response, wholly absurd and nothing that could be acted upon, was a friendly desire to tell him, so he could s
hare in her good news.) She didn’t know what would happen; she didn’t think about it at all. When she missed her period, she gave it scarcely any thought. It wasn’t like she was anything close to regular; she’d always been that way, it came and went as it pleased. All she could think about was the next trip down to the station, when she could make love to Theo Jaxon again. She saw him on the catwalk, of course, and at evening assembly, but that wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the time and place to touch or even talk. She would have to wait. But even this, the waiting, the torturous crawl of days—the date of their next departure for the station was plainly listed on the duty roster, where anyone could see it—was part of her happiness, the blur of love.
Then she missed another period, and Galen caught her throwing up into the compost pile.
Of course she was pregnant. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? How had this eventuality escaped her attentions? Because the one thing Theo Jaxon wouldn’t want was a baby. Maybe under the right circumstances she could have won him over to the idea. But not like this.
Then another thought had come to her, dawning with a simple clarity: a baby. She was going to have a baby. Her baby, Theo’s baby, their baby together. A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.
Maybe the thing Theo Jaxon needed most of all was a baby.
That’s what Mausami would have told him down at the station, in the little room of shelves that was now theirs. She had imagined the scene unfolding a number of ways, some good and some not so good, the worst of all being the one in which she lost her nerve and said nothing. (The second worst: Theo guessed, her courage failed her anyway, and she told him it was Galen’s.) What she hoped was that she’d see a light in his eyes come on. The light that had gone out, long ago. A baby, he would say. Our baby. What should we do? What people always do, she would have told him, and that was when he would take her in his arms again, and in this zone of sheltering safety she would know that everything would be all right, and together they would ride back to face Galen—to face everyone—together.
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