The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,170

walls. He paused, letting his eyes adjust. He was facing an open door. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.

He stepped into the stars.

It hit him in the lungs first, shoving the breath from his chest. A feeling of pure physical panic, as if he’d stepped onto nothing, onto the night sky itself. His knees bent beneath him, his free hand scrabbled at the air, searching for something to hold on to, to give himself a feeling of form and weight, the working dimensions of the world around him. The sky above was a vault of blackness—and everywhere, the stars!

“Peter, breathe,” Alicia said.

She was standing beside him. He realized that her hand was resting on his shoulder. In the dark Alicia’s voice seemed to come from very close and far away at once. He did as she said, letting deep gulps of night air fill his chest. Bit by bit his eyes adjusted. Now he could make out the edge of the roof, spilling into nothingness. They were in the southwest corner, he realized, near the exhaust port.

“So what do you think?”

For a long, quiet moment, he let his eyes roam the sky. The longer he looked, the more stars appeared to him, pushing through the blackness. These were the stars his father had spoken of, the stars his father had seen on the Long Rides.

“Does Theo know?”

Alicia laughed. “Does Theo know what?”

“The hatch. The guns.” Peter shrugged helplessly. “All of it.”

“I never showed him, if that’s what you mean. I’m guessing Zander does, since he knows every inch of this place. But he’s never said a word to me about it.”

His eyes searched out her face. She seemed different somehow, in the dark: the same Alicia he had always known, but also someone new. He understood what she had done. She’d saved it for him.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t go thinking this means we’re friends or anything. If Arlo had woken up first, it’d be him standing here.”

That wasn’t true, and he knew it. “Even so,” he said.

She led him to the edge of the roof. They were facing north, across the valley. Not a breath of wind was blowing. On the far side, the shape of the mountains was etched into the sky as a dark bulk pushed up against a shimmering rim of stars. They took positions, lying side by side with their bellies pressed against the concrete, still warm with the heat of the day.

“Here,” Alicia said, reaching into her pouch. “You’ll want one of these.”

A night scope. She showed him how to fix it to the top of the rifle and adjust the gain. Peter placed his eye to the viewfinder and saw a landscape of shrubs and rocks, all washed in a pale green light, with a pair of hatched crosshairs bisecting his view. At the bottom of the scope he saw a readout: 212 METERS. The numbers rose and fell as he swept the rifle back and forth. Amazing.

“You think they’re still alive?”

Alicia took a moment to answer. “I don’t know. Probably not. It can’t hurt to wait, though.” She paused again; there wasn’t much else to say on the subject. Then: “You think I was too hard on Maus today?”

The question surprised him. As long as he’d known her, Alicia had never been one to second-guess herself.

“Not the way it worked out. You did the right thing.”

“She’s a loss. You can’t say she isn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. You said it yourself. Maus knows the rules as well as anyone.”

“I’d rather keep her than Galen.” She groaned. “Flyers. That guy. What the hell could she see in him?”

Peter lifted his face from the scope. The sky was so thick with stars it was as if he could reach out and brush them with his hand. He’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It made him think of the oceans, the names in the book like the words of a song—Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic—and about his father, standing on the edge of the sea. Maybe the stars were what Auntie meant when she spoke of God. The old God, from the Time Before. The God of Heavens who watched the World.

“Do you ever … ” Alicia began. “I don’t know, think about it?”

Peter shifted to face her. Her eye was still pressed to her scope. “Think about what?”

Alicia gave a nervous laugh—a sound he’d never heard her make. “You’re going to make me say it? Pairing, Peter. Having Littles.”

He had; of course he had. Almost everybody