He awoke with a start, his heart thumping, the dream dispersing at once, leaving in its wake a vague but poignant impression of panic, like the echo of a scream. He lay motionless, reassembling his sense of where and when he was. He arched his neck to look out the window over his bunk and saw the lights shining. His mouth was bone dry, his tongue swollen and fibrous-feeling; he’d dreamed of being thirsty because he was. He fumbled for the canteen on the floor beside his cot, lifted the spout to his mouth, and drank.
Caleb was sleeping in the bunk beside him. Peter counted four other men in the room, snoring piles in the shadows. All had come in without his once awakening. How long since he’d slept like that?
Now, lying in the dark, he felt the first stirring of antsiness, a low-grade hum of physical impatience that seemed to have taken up a permanent residence in his chest since his return up the mountain. The obvious course was to report for duty on the catwalk. But Soo had made it clear that she wouldn’t have him on the Watch until at least a few days had gone by.
He decided to go see Auntie. He hadn’t told her about Theo yet. Probably she knew, but still he wanted her to hear the news from him, even if the information was repeated.
Sometimes it was possible to forget all about her, over in her little house in the glade. Oh, Auntie, people would say when her name came up, as if they’d only just remembered her existence. And the truth was, the old woman got on surprisingly well without much help. Peter or Theo would chop wood for her, or do small repairs on her house, and Sara might assist her at the Storehouse. But her needs were few, as she kept a large vegetable and herb patch in the sunlit plot behind her house, which she still managed to tend with virtually no aid from anyone. With the exception of her gardening, which she performed from a seated position on a stool, she spent most of her days inside her house, among her papers and mementos, her mind adrift in the past. She wore three different pairs of eyeglasses on a tangle of lanyards around her neck, alternating between them for whatever task she was attending and, except in winter, went barefoot everywhere she walked. By all accounts, Auntie was close to a hundred. She had married, or so it was said, not once but twice, but because she could never have children of her own, her life span seemed a natural marvel without purpose, like a horse that could count by stamping its hooves. No one could quite figure out how she’d survived Dark Night; her house had weathered the quake with very little damage, and in the morning they had discovered her sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of her famously awful tea, as if nothing had happened at all. “Maybe they just don’t want my old blood” was all she’d said.
The night had cooled; the windows of Auntie’s cottage were glowing faintly as Peter approached. She claimed never to sleep, that day and night were all the same to her, and in fact Peter could not recall a time when he’d failed to find her up and working. He knocked at the door and opened it a crack.
“Auntie? It’s Peter.”
From deep within he heard a shuffling of paper and the scrape of a chair on the old wood floor. “Peter, come in, come in.”
He stepped into the room. The only light came from a lantern in the kitchen, a hammered-on shack attached to the rear of the house. The space was densely cluttered but neat, the arrangement of furniture and other objects—books in towering piles, jars of stones and old coins, various knickknacks he couldn’t even identify—appearing not merely considered but possessing the intrinsic orderliness of having occupied their current position for decades, like trees in a forest. In the doorway to the kitchen, the old woman appeared, waving him in.
“You’re just in time. I’ve made some tea.”
Auntie had always “just made tea.” She brewed it from a mixture of miscellaneous herbaceous jetsam, some of which she grew and some of which she merely picked along the paths. She had been known, out walking, to make a slow, long bend to the ground to pluck out a nameless weed and pop it straight into her mouth. But drinking Auntie’s tea was simply the price one paid for her company.
“Thanks,” Peter said, “I’d be glad to take some.”
She was fussing with her glasses, picking out the right pair. She found them and slid them onto her weathered, nut-brown face—her head possessed a slightly shrunken appearance, as if the physical reductions of advanced age had moved from the top down—and located him with her eyes, smiling her toothless smile, as if then and only then had she become convinced that he was whom she believed him to be. She was clothed, as always, in a loose, scoop-necked frock of quilted fabrics, bits and pieces harvested from any number of other dresses over the years. What was left of her hair formed a vaporous tangle of white that seemed not so much to grow from her head as float in its vicinity, and her cheeks were sprayed by spots that were neither freckles nor moles but something in between.
“Come into the kitchen with you then.”
He followed her shuffling, barefooted progress down the narrow hallway to the rear of the house. The space was small, crowded by an oak table that left barely enough room to maneuver and oppressive with the heat of the stove and the steam that rose from a battered aluminum teapot resting atop it. Peter felt his pores opening with sweat. While Auntie went about her pouring, Peter raised the sash of the room’s lone window, allowing a breeze to trickle in, and took a chair. Auntie carried the pot to the table, where she placed it on an iron trivet; at the sink, she primed the pump and rinsed out a pair of mugs, which she brought to the table also.
“And to what do I owe this come-by, Peter?”
“I’m afraid I have some news. About Theo.”
But the old woman waved this away. “Oh,” she said, “I know all about that.”
Auntie sat across from him, straightening her dress on her bony shoulders as she stretched out her legs beneath her, and poured the tea into cups through a strainer. It had a thin, yellow color, like urine, and left behind in the strainer small, disturbingly biological bits of green and brown, like smashed insects.
“How it happen?”
Peter sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“I ain’t got nothing but time for stories, Peter. As long as you care to tell them, I got ears to hear by. Go on now, tea’s ready. No point letting it get cold.”
Peter took a scalding sip. It tasted vaguely like dirt, leaving behind an aftertaste of such bitterness it didn’t even seem like food. He managed a respectful swallow. On the table at his elbow was her book, the one she was always writing in. Her memory book, she called it: a fat, hand-stitched volume wrapped in lambskin, the pages covered with the tiny print she wrote in, using a crow feather and homemade ink. She made her own paper as well, boiling sawdust into pulp and forming sheets on squares of old window screens. Peter knew she was hard at work when he saw pages of this material stiffening on a line behind her house.
“How’s the writing going, Auntie?”
“It never ends.” She offered a wrinkled smile. “So much to put down, and me with nothing but time on my hands. What all that happened. The world from before. The train that brought us here in the fire. Terrence and Mazie and all those ones. All of it, I just write it down as it comes to me. I figure if there weren’t no one to do it but one old lady, then that’s what they’ll get. Someday someone will want to know what happened here, in this place.”
“You think so?”
“Peter, I know so.” She sipped, smacking her colorless lips, and frowned at the flavor. “I reckon that needs more dandelion than I put in it.” She pointed her eyes at Peter again, squinting through her glasses. “But you didn’t ask that, did you? What all do I write in there, wasn’t it?”
Her mind was like this: doubling back, forming strange connections, dipping into the past. She spoke often of Terrence, who had ridden with her on the train. Sometimes he seemed to be her brother, sometimes her cousin. There were others. Mazie Chou. A boy named Vincent Gum, a girl named Sharise. Lucy and Rex Fisher. But these wanderings through time could be interrupted, at any moment, by intervals of startling lucidity.
“Have you written about Theo?”
“Theo?”
“My brother.”
Auntie’s eyes drifted a moment. “He told me he was going down to the station. When he coming back?”
So, she didn’t know. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten, the news blending in her mind with other such stories.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Peter said. “That’s what I came to tell you. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t go being sorry now,” she said. “The things you don’t know would fill a book. That’s a joke now, ain’t it? A book. Go on now. Drink your tea.”
Peter decided not to press. What good would it do the old woman to hear about one more person dying? He took another sip of the bitter liquid. If anything, it actually tasted worse. He felt a little burble of nausea.
“That the birch bark you feeling. For the digestion.”
“It’s good, really.”
“No it ain’t. But it does the trick all right. Clean you out like a white tornado.”
Peter remembered his other news then. “I meant to tell you, Auntie. I saw the stars.”
At this, the old woman brightened. “Well, there you go.” She quickly touched the back of his hand with the tip of a weathered finger. “There’s something good to talk about. Tell me now, how they look to you?”
His thoughts returned to that moment on the roof, lying on the concrete next to Lish. The stars so thick above their faces it was as if he could brush them with his hand. It seemed like something that had happened years ago, the final minutes of a life he’d left behind.
“It’s hard to put into words, Auntie. I never knew.”
“Well, ain’t that a thing.” Her eyes, pointed to the wall behind his head, seemed to twinkle, as if with remembered starlight. “I ain’t seen them since I was a girl. Your father used to come in just like you’re doing now and tell me all about them. I saw them, Auntie, he’d say, and I’d say to him, How they doing, Demo? How those stars of mine? And the two of us would have a nice visit about them, just like we’re doing now.” She sipped her tea and returned her mug to the table. “Why you looking so surprised?”
“He did?”
A quick frown of correction; but her eyes, still lit with an inner brightness, seemed to be laughing at him. “Why you think he wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know,” Peter managed. And it was true: he didn’t. But when Peter tried to imagine this scene—his father, the great Demetrius Jaxon, drinking tea with Auntie in her overheated kitchen, talking about the Long Rides—he somehow couldn’t. “I guess I never realized he told anyone else.”
She gave a little laugh. “Oh, your father and me, we talked. About a lot of things. About the stars.”
It was all so confusing. More than confusing: it was as if, in the space of just a few days—since the night the viral had been killed in the nets by Arlo Wilson—some fundamental precept of the world had changed, only nobody had told Peter what this change might be.
“Did he ever tell you … about a Walker, Auntie?”
The old woman sucked in her cheeks. “A Walker, you say? Now, I don’t recall anything about that. Theo see a Walker?”
He heard himself sigh. “Not Theo. My father.”
But she had given up listening; her eyes, pointed at the wall behind him, had gone far away again. “Now, Terrence, I believe he did tell me something about a Walker. Terrence and Lucy. She always was the littlest thing. It was Terrence who made her stop crying, you know. He always could do that.”
It was hopeless. Once Auntie went off like this, it could be hours, even days, before she came back to the present. He almost envied her, this power.
“Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?”
“That’s okay, Auntie. It can keep.”
She lifted her bony shoulders in a shrug. “You say so.” A silent moment passed. Then: “Tell me something. You believe in God almighty, Peter?”
The question caught him short. Though she’d spoken of God often, never had she asked him what he believed. And it was true that looking at the stars from the station roof, he’d felt something—a presence behind them, their vast immensity. As if the stars were watching him. But the moment, and the feeling it gave him, had slipped away. It would have been nice to believe in something like that, but in the end, he just couldn’t.
“Not really,” he admitted, and heard the gloom his voice. “I think it’s just a word people use.”
“Now, that’s a shame. A shame. Because the God I know about? He wouldn’t give us no chance.” Auntie took a final sip, smacking her lips. “Now you think on that some and then tell me about Theo and where he gone to.”
The conversation seemed to end there; Peter rose to go. He bent to kiss the top of her head.
“Thanks for the tea, Auntie.”
“Anytime. You come back and tell me your answer when it comes to you. We’ll talk about Theo then. Have us a good talk. And Peter?”
He turned in the kitchen doorway.
“Just so you know. She comin’.”
He was taken aback. “Who’s coming, Auntie?”
A teacherly frown. “You know who, boy. You known it since the day God dreamed you up.”
For a moment Peter said nothing, standing in the door.
“That’s all I’m saying now.” The old woman gave a dismissive wave, as if shooing a fly away. “You go on and come back when you ready.”
“Don’t write all night, Auntie,” Peter managed. “Try to get some sleep.”
A smile creased the old woman’s face. “I got eternity for that.”
He showed himself out, stepping into a breath of cool night air that brushed his face, chilling the sweat that had gathered beneath his jersey in the overheated kitchen. His stomach was still churning under the spell of the tea. He stood a moment, blinking into the lights. It was strange, what Auntie had said. But there was no way she could have known about the girl. The way the old woman’s mind worked, stories all piled on top of stories, the past and present all mixed together, she could have meant anyone. She could have been talking about someone who’d died years ago.
Which was just when Peter heard the shouts coming from Main Gate, and all hell began to break loose.
TWENTY-SIX
It had begun with the Colonel. That much everyone was able to ascertain in the first few hours.
No one could recall seeing the Colonel for days, not in the apiary or stables or on the catwalks, where he sometimes went at night. Peter certainly hadn’t seen him over the seven nights he’d stood, but he hadn’t thought this absence strange; the Colonel came and went according to his own mysterious designs and sometimes didn’t show his face for days.
What people did know, and this was reported first by Hollis but confirmed by others, was that the Colonel had appeared on the catwalk shortly after half-night, near Firing Platform Three. It had been a quiet night, without sign; the moon was down, the open ground beyond the walls bathed in the glow of the spots. Only a few people noticed him standing there, and no one thought anything about it. Hey, there’s the Colonel, people might have said. Old guy never could quite make himself stand down. Too bad there’s nothing doing tonight.
