The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,231

was a Ramirez, after all—who, one morning over breakfast, in the days right after Demo Jaxon had disappeared, slipping out the gate when no one was looking without so much as a blade in his belt, had let it drop, then flat-out blurted the story, saying, I’m not sure you’re supposed to know.

Twelve crates of them, Gloria told him, her voice lowered confidentially, her face radiating the earnestness of an eager pupil. Down at the station, behind a wall that pulled away. Shiny new guns, Army guns, from a bunker Demo and Raj and the others had found. Was it important? Gloria wanted to know. Had she done the right thing, telling him? Her anxiety was all pretense; her voice said one thing, but her eyes told him the truth. She knew what the guns meant. Yes, he said, nodding equably. Yes, I think it may be. I think it’s best if we keep this to ourselves. Thank you, Gloria, for letting me know.

Sanjay had no illusions that he was the only one. He’d gone straight to Mimi that morning, explaining to her in no uncertain terms that she mustn’t tell anyone else. But surely a secret like that would be impossible to keep. Zander had to know; the station was his domain. Probably Old Chou too, since Demo told him everything. Sanjay didn’t think Soo knew, or Jimmy, or Dana, Willem’s girl. Sanjay had probed around the edges, never detecting a thing. But certainly there were others—Theo Jaxon, for one—and whom had they told? To whom had they, in confidence, as Gloria had that morning at breakfast, whispered, “I have a secret you should know”? So it wasn’t a question of whether the guns would come out, only when, and under what circumstances, and—a lesson he had learned that morning in the Sanctuary—who was friends with whom.

Which was why Sanjay had wanted Mausami off the Watch, away from Theo Jaxon.

Since the day she’d been born, Sanjay had known it about her: she was the reason for everything. True, there had been times, even recently, when Sanjay had found himself wishing for a son, sensing that this would have bestowed a completeness that his life would otherwise lack. But Gloria was simply not able; the usual miscarriages and false alarms, and her bleeding had faded away. Mausami had been born after a pregnancy that itself had seemed like yet one more disaster in the making—Gloria had spotted nearly the entire time—and a torturous, two-day labor that had seemed to Sanjay, forced to listen to her desperate moans from the outer room of the Infirmary, like nothing a person could possibly withstand.

And yet Gloria had prevailed. It was Prudence Jaxon, of all people, who had brought Sanjay’s daughter to him where he sat with his head in his hands, his mind wiped clean by the hours of waiting and the terrible sounds from the ward. He had by then given himself over to the idea that the child would die, and Gloria as well, leaving him alone; it was with complete incomprehension that he received the swaddled bundle, believing for a moment that what Prudence had actually handed him was his own dead baby. It’s a girl, Prudence was saying, a healthy girl. And even then it had taken a moment for the idea to sink in, for Sanjay to connect these words with this strange new thing he held in his arms. You have a daughter, Sanjay. And when he drew the swaddling aside and saw her face, so startling in its humanness, her tiny mouth and crown of dark hair and tender, bulging eyes, he knew that what he was feeling, for the first and only time in his life, was love.

And then he’d almost lost her. A bitter irony, for her to take up with Theo Jaxon, the son so like the father; Mausami had done her best to hide it from him, and Gloria too, to protect him from this knowledge. But Sanjay could see what was happening. So it had come to him with a feeling of rescue when, just as he was expecting to hear that she had decided to pair with Theo, Gloria had told him the news. After everything, Galen Strauss! It wasn’t that Galen was whom he would have chosen for his daughter—far from it. He would have preferred someone sturdier, like Hollis Wilson or Ben Chou. But Galen wasn’t Theo Jaxon, that was the important thing; he wasn’t any kind of