under their cots; as Hollis crossed the threshold, he detected a flurry of movement from the nearest row, as one of the three J’s, June or Jane or Juliet, rolled off her bed and scurried beneath it. The only light in the room came from the broken window, its shade ripped and hanging kitty-corner, still quivering with movement.
The viral was standing over Dora’s crib.
“Hey!” Mausami yelled. She waved her arms above her head. “Hey, look over here!”
Where was Leigh? Where was Teacher? The viral jerked its face toward the sound of Mausami’s voice. It blinked its eyes, tipping its head to the side on its long neck. A wet clicking sound rose from somewhere in the taut curve of its throat.
“Over here!” Hollis yelled, following Mausami’s lead and waving to draw the creature’s attention. “Yeah, look this way!”
The viral spun toward him, facing him squarely. Something was glinting at the base of its neck, some kind of jewelry. But there was no time to wonder about this; Hollis had his angle, his opening. Leigh entered the room then. She’d been sleeping in the office and heard nothing. As Leigh broke into a scream, Hollis aimed the crossbow and fired.
A good shot, a clean shot, dead center on the sweet spot: he felt its rightness, its perfection, the instant it leapt from the stock. And in the split second of the arrow’s flight, a distance of fewer than five meters, he knew. The glinting key on the lanyard; the look of mournful gratitude in the viral’s eyes. The thought came to Hollis fully formed, a single word that arrived on his lips at the same instant that the arrow—the merciful, awful, unrecallable arrow—struck home in the center of the viral’s chest.
“Arlo.”
Hollis had just killed his brother.
· · ·
Sara—though she did not remember this and never would—first learned about the Walker in a dream: a confusing and unpleasant dream in which she was a little girl again. She was making johnnycake. The kitchen where she worked—she was standing on a stool, beating the heavy batter in a wide, wooden bowl—was both the kitchen of the house where she lived and the kitchen in the Sanctuary, and it was snowing: a gentle snow that did not fall from the sky, because there was no sky, but seemed to appear out of the air before her face. Strange, the snow; it almost never snowed and certainly not indoors that Sara could recall, but she had more important things to worry about. It was the day of her release, Teacher would come for her soon, but without the johnnycake, she would have nothing to eat in the outside world; in the outside world, Teacher had explained to her, that was the only thing people ate.
Then there was a man. It was Gabe Curtis. He was sitting at the kitchen table before an empty plate. “Is it ready?” he asked Sara, and then, turning to the girl sitting next to him, said, “I always liked johnnycake.” Sara wondered, with vague alarm, who this girl was—she tried to look at her but somehow could not see her; wherever Sara looked for her was always the very spot the girl had just departed—and the fact reached her mind, slowly and then all at once, that she was in a new place now. She was in the room Teacher had brought her to, the place of the telling, and her parents were there, waiting; they were standing at the door. “Go with them, Sara,” Gabe said. “It’s time for you to go. Run and keep on running.” “But you’re dead,” said Sara, and when she looked at her parents, she saw that where their faces should have been were regions of blankness, as if she were viewing them through a current of water; something was wrong with their necks. There was a pounding sound now, without the room, and the sound of a voice, calling her name. “You’re all dead.”
Then she was awake. She had fallen asleep in a chair by the cold hearth. It was the door that had awakened her; someone was outside, calling her name. Where was Michael? What time was it?
“Sara! Open up!”
Caleb Jones? She opened the door as he was reaching to hit it again, his fist freezing in the air.
“We need a nurse.” The boy was breathing hard. “Someone’s been shot.”
She was instantly awake, reaching for her kit on the table by the door. “Who?”
“Lish brought her in.”
“Lish? Lish is shot?”
Caleb shook his