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 thin
gs 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.
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