The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,229

there too.” Dale’s eyes darted to Peter. “Will you just get her out of here?”

Sunny, who so far had said nothing, moved farther into the room. “Dale, what are you doing? I thought you said Jimmy ordered another guard. Why are you taking orders from her?”

“Lish was just helping out.”

“Dale, she’s not a captain. She’s not even Watch.” The girl acknowledged Alicia with a quick, faintly embarrassed shrug. “No offense to you, Lish.”

“None taken.” Alicia gestured toward the cross the girl was holding at her side. “Tell me something. You any good with that thing?”

A falsely modest shrug. “Highest scores in my grade.”

“Well, I hope that’s true. Because it looks like you just got promoted.” Alicia turned to Caleb again. “You’ll be all right in here?”

The boy nodded.

“Just remember what I told you. I won’t be far.”

And with that, Alicia looked at Dale and Sunny one last time, using her eyes to communicate her meaning—Make no mistake, this is personal—and led Peter from the lockup.

TWENTY-NINE

Sanjay Patal, Head of the Household, might have said that it had all started years ago. It had started with the dreams.

Not about the girl: he’d never dreamed about her, of that he was certain. Or mostly certain. This Girl from Nowhere—that’s what everyone was calling her, even Old Chou; the phrase had, in the space of just a morning, become her name—had arrived in their midst full blown, like an apparition borne from the darkness as a being of flesh and blood. Her sheer impossibility refuted by the fact of her existence. He’d searched his mind but could find her nowhere in it, not in the part he knew as himself, as Sanjay Patal, nor in the other: the secret, dreaming part of him.

For the feeling had lain within him as long as Sanjay could remember. The feeling that was like a whole other person, a separate soul that dwelled within his own. A soul with a name and a voice that sang inside him, Be my one. I am yours and you are mine and together we are greater than the sum, the sum of our parts.

Since he was a Little in the Sanctuary, the dream had come to him. A dream of a long-gone world and a voice that sang inside him. It was, in its way, a dream like any other, made of sound and light and sensation. A dream of a fat woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. The woman shoving food into her wide, wobbling cave of a mouth, talking into her telephone, a curious object with a place to talk into and another to listen. Somehow he knew what this thing was, that it was a telephone, and in this manner Sanjay had come to understand that this wasn’t just a dream he was having. It was a vision. A vision of the Time Before. And the voice inside him singing its mysterious name: I am Babcock.

I am Babcock. We are Babcock.

Babcock. Babcock. Babcock.

He’d thought of Babcock, back then, as a kind of imaginary friend—no different, really, than a game of pretend, though the game did not end. Babcock was always with him, in the Big Room and the courtyard and taking his meals and climbing into his cot at night. The events of the dream had felt no different to him than the other dreams he had, the usual sorts of things, silly and childish, like taking a bath or playing on the tires or watching a squirrel eating nuts. Sometimes he dreamed those things and sometimes he dreamed about a fat woman in the Time Before, and there was no rhyme or reason to it.

He remembered a day, long ago, sitting in circle in the Big Room when Teacher had said, Let’s talk about what it means to be a friend. The children had just had lunch; he was full of the warm, sleepy feeling of having eaten a meal. The other Littles were laughing and fooling around though he was not, he wasn’t like that, he did as he was told, and then Teacher clapped her hands to silence them and because he was so good, the only one, she turned to him, her kind face wearing the expression of someone about to bestow a present, the wonderful present of her attention, and said, Tell us, Little Sanjay, who are your friends?

“Babcock,” he replied.

No thought was involved; the word had simply popped out on its own. At once he realized the scope of his error, saying