The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,245

and stumbling down the steps into the spotlit yard, his mind still caught in the flow of words in his head—she misses you she misses you—his vision wavering through the tears that were rising to his eyes.

THIRTY-FOUR

For Mausami Patal, the night began in the Sanctuary.

She was sitting alone in the Big Room, trying to teach herself to knit. All the cots and cribs had been taken out; the children had bedded down upstairs. The broken window was boarded up, the glass swept away, the room and all its surfaces washed down with spirits. The smell would linger for days.

It wasn’t anyplace she should have been. The aroma of alcohol was so strong it was making her eyes tear up. Poor Arlo, Maus thought. And Hollis, having to kill his brother like that, though it was lucky that he had. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he’d missed. And of course Arlo wasn’t really Arlo anymore, just as Theo, if he was still alive out there, wasn’t Theo. The virus took the soul, the person you loved, away.

The chair where she sat was an old nursing rocker she’d found in the storage closet. She’d positioned a small table beside it; resting on this was a lantern, giving her enough light to work by. Leigh had instructed her in the basic stitches, which had seemed easy enough when she’d started, but somewhere along the way she had taken a wrong turn. The stitches weren’t coming out even, not at all, and her left thumb, when she tried to draw the yarn around the needle, as Leigh had demonstrated, kept getting in the way. Here she was, a woman who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power. She’d gotten so distracted that twice the ball of yarn in her lap had dropped to the floor to roll across the room, and by the time she’d gotten it rolled back up, she’d forgotten where she was and had to start over.

Part of her simply couldn’t absorb the notion that Theo was gone. She had planned to tell him about the baby on the ride, their first night at the station. With its warren of rooms and heavy walls and doors that sealed, it was easy to find an occasion to be alone there. A fact that, as long as she was being honest with herself, was the reason the whole situation existed in the first place.

Pairing with Galen: why had she done it? Cruel in a way, because he wasn’t a bad person; it was hardly his fault that she didn’t love him, or even much like him, not anymore. A bluff. That’s what it had been. To jar Theo out of his gloom. And when she’d said to him that night on the Wall, Maybe I just will marry Galen Strauss, and Theo had said, All right, if that’s what you want, I only want you to be happy, the bluff had hardened into something else, something she had to do, to prove that he was wrong. Wrong about her, wrong about himself, wrong about everything. You had to try. You had to act. You had to get on with things and make do. A feat of stubbornness, that’s what it was, marrying Galen Strauss, and all for Theo Jaxon.

For a time, most of that summer and into the fall, she had tried to make the marriage work. She had hoped she could will the right emotions into being, and for a while she had almost done it, simply because the sheer fact of her existence seemed to make Galen so happy. They were both Watch, so it wasn’t like they saw each other all that much or kept any kind of regular hours; it proved, in fact, pretty easy to avoid him, because he was on the day shift most of the time, a subtle but unmistakable comment on the fact that he had come up last in his grade, and with his eyes the way they were, no good in the dark. Sometimes when he looked at her, squinting like he did, she wondered if in fact she was the girl he really loved at all. Maybe it was some other