Ball still stashed in her pouch (why couldn’t she just leave the damn thing at home?), she heard footsteps ascending behind her and turned to see Jimmy Molyneau climbing off the ladder onto Firing Platform Nine. Of course it would be Jimmy. Probably he had come to gloat, or apologize, or some awkward combination of the two. Though he was hardly one to talk, Soo thought bitterly, not showing up at First Bell.
Jimmy? she said. Where the hell have you been?
· · ·
The night was inhabited by dreams. In the houses and barracks, in the Sanctuary and Infirmary, dreams moved through the dozing souls of First Colony, alighting here and there, like wafting spirits.
Some, like Sanjay Patal, had a secret dream, one they’d been having all their lives. Sometimes they were aware of this dream and sometimes they were not; the dream was like an underground river, constantly flowing, that might from time to time rise to the surface, briefly washing their daylight hours with its presence, as if they were walking in two worlds at the same time. Some dreamed of a woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. Others, like the Colonel, dreamed of a girl, alone in the dark. Some of these dreams became nightmares—what Sanjay did not remember, had never remembered, was the part of the dream that involved the knife—and sometimes the dream wasn’t like a dream at all; it was more real than reality itself, it sent the dreamer stumbling helplessly into the night.
Where did they come from? What were they made of? Were they dreams or were they something more—intimations of a hidden reality, an invisible plane of existence that revealed itself only at night? Why did they feel like memories, and not just memories—someone else’s memories? And why, on this night, did the entire population of First Colony seem to lapse into this dreamer’s world?
In the Sanctuary, one of the three J’s, Little Jane Ramirez, daughter of Belle and Rey Ramirez—the same Rey Ramirez who, having found himself suddenly and terrifyingly alone at the power station, and troubled by dark urges he could neither contain nor express, was, at that moment, cooking himself to a crisp on the electrified fence—was dreaming of a bear. Jane had just turned four years old. The bears she knew were the ones in books and in stories Teacher told—large, mild creatures of the forest whose hairy bulk and gentle faces were the seat of a benign animal wisdom—and that was true of the bear in her dream, at least at the beginning. Jane had never seen an actual bear, but she had seen a viral. She was among the Littles of the Sanctuary who had actually beheld the viral Arlo Wilson with her own eyes. She had been rising from her cot, which was positioned in the last row, farthest from the door—she was thirsty and had meant to ask Teacher for a cup of water—when he had burst through the window in a great shattering of glass and metal and wood, landing practically on top of her. She had thought at first it was a man, because it seemed like a man, with a man’s displacement and presence. But he wasn’t wearing any clothes, and there was something different about him, especially his eyes and mouth, and the way he seemed to glow. He was looking at her in a sad way—his sadness seemed suggestively bearlike—and Jane was about to ask him what was wrong and why he glowed like that when she heard a cry behind her and turned to see Teacher racing toward them. She passed over Jane like a cloud, the blade she kept hidden in a sheath beneath her billowing skirt clutched in her outstretched hand, one arm raised over her head to bring it down upon him like a hammer. The next part Jane did not see—she had dropped to the floor and begun to scramble away—but she heard a soft cry and a ripping sound and the thud of something falling. This was followed by more yelling—“Over here!” someone was saying, “look over here!”—and then more screams and shouts and a general commotion of grown-ups, of mothers and fathers coming in and out, and the next thing Jane knew she was being pulled from under her cot and whisked with all the other Littles up the stairs by a woman who was crying. (Only later did she realize that this woman was her mother.)
Nobody had explained these confusing events, nor