The Passage (74 page)

“Yes, I’m sure. It has to be inside her then.”

“Inside her
body?”

“It should be near the surface. Probably just under the skin. Look for a scar.”

Sara considered this. “Well, I’m not doing it in front of a crowd. Peter and Michael, both of you turn around. Lish, get over here. I might need you.”

Peter used this moment to step to the curtain and peek through. Ben and Galen were still outside, blurred figures facing away on the far side of the windows. He wondered how much longer they had. Surely someone else would come, Sanjay or Old Chou or Jimmy.

“Okay, you can look now.”

The girl was sitting on the edge of the bed, her head bent forward at the neck. “Michael was right; I didn’t have to look very long.” Sara lifted the tangle of the girl’s hair to show them: a distinct white line at the base of her neck, no more than a couple of centimeters long. Above it was the telltale bulge of some foreign object.

“You can feel the edges.” Sara pressed her fingers against it to demonstrate. “Unless there’s more to it, I think it should come out clean.”

Peter asked, “Will it hurt?”

Sara nodded. “It’ll be quick, though. After last night it should feel like nothing. Like removing a big splinter.”

Peter sat on the cot and spoke to the girl. “Sara needs to remove something from under your skin. A kind of radio. Is that okay?”

He saw a flicker of apprehension in her face. Then she nodded.

“Just be careful,” said Peter.

Sara went to the storage cabinet and returned with a basin, a scalpel, and a bottle of spirits. She wet a cloth and cleaned the area. Then, positioned behind the girl once more, holding her hair away, she took the scalpel from the basin.

“This will sting.”

With a stroke of the scalpel’s blade she traced the line of the scar. If the girl felt any pain, she made no indication. A single bead of blood appeared at the wound, running down the long line of the girl’s neck to disappear into her gown. Sara dabbed the wound with the cloth and angled her head toward the basin.

“Somebody hand me those tweezers. Don’t touch the tines.”

Alicia was the one to do this. Sara eased the ends of the tweezers through the jacketlike opening in the girl’s skin, holding the blood-tinged cloth below it. So intense was Peter’s focus that he could feel—actually feel in the tips of his fingers—the moment when the ends of the tweezers caught hold of the object. With a slow pulling motion, Sara drew it free, a dark shadow emerging, and placed it on the cloth. She held it up for Michael to see.

“Is this what you’re looking for?”

Resting on the bed of cloth was a small, oblong-shaped disk, made of some shiny metal. A fringe of tiny wires, like hairs, beaded at the tips, encircled its edges. Altogether it looked to Peter like some kind of flattened spider.

“That’s a radio?” Alicia said.

Michael was frowning, his brow furrowed. “I’m not sure,” he confessed.

“You’re not sure? How is it you could make the phone ring but you don’t know what this is?”

Michael rubbed the object with a clean rag and held it to the light. “Well, it’s some kind of transmitter. That’s what these wires are probably for.”

“So what’s it doing inside her?” Alicia asked. “Who could have done something like that?”

“Maybe we should ask
her
what it is,” Michael said.

But when he held the object out to show her, lying on its bed of bloodstained cloth, the girl responded with a look of puzzlement. Its very existence in her neck seemed as mysterious to her as it was to them.

“You think the Army put it in there?” Peter asked.

“It could be,” Michael said. “It was broadcasting on a military frequency.”

“But you can’t tell by looking at it.”

“Peter, I don’t even know what it’s transmitting. It could be reciting the alphabet for all I know.”

Alicia frowned. “Why would it be reciting the alphabet?”

Michael let this pass without comment. He looked at Peter again. “That’s all I can tell you. If you want to know more, I’ll have to open it.”

“Then open it,” said Peter.

THIRTY-ONE

Sanjay Patal had left the Infirmary intending to find Old Chou. There were things that needed to be decided, things to be discussed. Sam and Milo, for starters—that was a wrinkle Sanjay hadn’t planned on—and what to do about Caleb, and the girl.

The girl. Something about her eyes.

But as he moved away from the Infirmary, into the afternoon, an unexpected heaviness came over him. He supposed it was only natural—up half the night and then a morning like the one he’d had, so much to do and say and worry over, so many things to consider. People often joked about the Household, that it wasn’t a real job, one of the trades, Watch or HD or Ag—it had been Theo Jaxon who had dubbed it “the plumbing committee,” a joke that had cruelly stuck—but that was because they didn’t know the half of it, the responsibility. It weighed on a person; it was a load you carried and never quite put down. Sanjay was forty-five years old, which wasn’t young, but as he moved down the gravel path, he felt much older.

At this time of day, Old Chou would be in the apiary—never mind that the gates were closed; the bees would care nothing about that. But the thought of the long walk over there, under the high, hot sun of midday, and whom Sanjay might encounter along the way and be forced to talk to, filled him with a sudden weariness like a gray mist in his brain. He decided it then: he had to get off his feet. Old Chou would keep. And almost before he knew it, Sanjay found himself moving at a slow trudge through the shadowed glade in the direction of his house, then stepping through the door (he listened for the sounds of Gloria elsewhere in the house, detecting nothing), climbing the creaking stairs under the eaves with their cobwebby corners, and lying down in bed. He was tired, so tired. Who knew how long it had been since he had let himself take a nap in the middle of the day.

He was asleep almost before he’d finished asking himself this question.

He awoke sometime later with a savagely sour taste in his mouth and a rush of blood in his ears. He felt not so much awake as ejected bodily from sleep; his mind felt beaten clean. Flyers, how he’d slept. He lay motionless, savoring the feeling, floating in it. He realized he’d heard voices downstairs, Gloria’s and someone else’s, deeper, a man’s; he thought it might be Jimmy or Ian or maybe Galen, but as he lay and listened he realized more time had passed, and the voices had gone away. How nice it was, simply to lie there. Nice and a little strange, because in fact it seemed to him that he should have gotten up some time ago; night was falling, he could see this through the window, the whiteness of the summer sky pinkening with dusk, and there were things to do. Jimmy would want to know about the power station, and who should ride down in the morning (though Sanjay couldn’t, at that moment, recall precisely why this had to be decided), and there was still the question of the boy, Caleb, whom everyone called Hightop for some reason, it had something to do with his shoes. So many things like this. And yet the longer he lay there, the more these concerns seemed distant and indistinct, as if they applied to someone else.

“Sanjay?”

Gloria was standing in the doorway. Her presence touched him less as a person than as a voice: a disembodied voice, calling his name in the dark.

“Why are you in bed?”

He thought: I don’t know. How strange I don’t know why I’m lying in this bed.

“It’s late, Sanjay. People are looking for you.”

“I was … napping.”

“Napping?”

“Yes, Gloria. Napping. Taking a nap.”

His wife appeared above him, the image of her smooth round face floating bodiless in the gray sea of his vision. “Why are you holding the blanket like that?”

“Like what? How am I holding it?”

“I don’t know. Look for yourself.”

The effort, imagined in advance, seemed huge, nothing he wished to attempt. And yet somehow he managed it, tipping his head forward from the sweat-moistened pillow to troll the length of his body. It appeared that in his sleep he had pulled the blanket from their bed and twisted it into the form of rope, which he was now holding across his waist, clutching it tightly with his hands.

“Sanjay, what’s the matter with you? Why are you talking like that?”

Her face was still above him and yet he could not seem to focus on it, to bring it fully into view. “I’m fine. I was just tired.”

“But you’re not tired anymore.”

“No. I don’t think so. But perhaps I will sleep some more.”

“Jimmy was here. He wants to know what to do about the station.”

The station. What about the station?

“What should I tell him if he comes back?”

He remembered then. Somebody had to go down to the station to secure it, from whatever it was that might be happening there.

“Galen,” he said.

“Galen? What about him?”

But her question touched him only vaguely. His eyes had closed again, the image of Gloria’s face shifting before him, resolving, replaced by another: the face of a girl, so small. Her eyes. Something about her eyes.

“What about Galen, Sanjay?”

“It would be good for him, don’t you think?” he heard a voice saying, for one part of him was still there in the room while the other part, the dreaming part, was not. “Tell him to send Galen.”

THIRTY-TWO

The hours passed and night came on.

They’d heard no word yet from Michael. After the three of them had slipped out the back of the Infirmary, the group had separated: Michael to the Lighthouse, Alicia and Peter to the trailer park, to watch over Caleb from one of the empty hulks, in case Sam and Milo returned. Sara was still inside with the girl. For the time being, the only thing to do was wait.

The trailer where they hid was two rows away from the lockup, far enough that they could go undetected but still with a view of the door. It was said the trailers had been left by the Builders, who had used them to house the workers who had built the walls and lights; as far as Peter knew, no one else had ever lived there. Most of the paneling had been stripped away to get at the pipes and wires, and all the fixtures and appliances had been taken out, chopped up and dispersed. There was a space in the back where a mattress had sat on a platform, separated by a flexible, sliding door on a track, and a couple of sleeping cubbies tucked into the walls; a tiny table was situated at the other end with a pair of benches facing each other. These were covered in cracked vinyl, the gaps in the fabric disgorging a brittle foam that crumbled to dust when you touched it.

Alicia had brought a deck of cards to pass the time. Between hands of go-to, she would shift restlessly on the bench, glancing out the window toward the lockup. Dale and Sunny were gone, replaced by Gar Phillips and Hollis Wilson, who evidently had decided not to stand down after all. Sometime in the late afternoon, Kip Darrell had appeared, bearing a tray of food. Otherwise they’d seen no one.

Peter dealt a fresh hand. Alicia turned away from the window, took her cards from off the table, and looked at them quickly, frowning.

“Flyers. Why’d you give me such junk?”

She sorted her cards while Peter did the same, and led with a red jack. Peter matched the suit and countered with the eight of spades.

“Go to.”

He had no more spades; he drew from the deck. Alicia was gazing out the window again.

“Stop it, will you?” he said. “You’re making me nervous.”

Alicia said nothing. It took Peter four draws to match the suit; his hands were now hopelessly full of cards. He played a deuce and watched while Alicia played out the two of hearts, rolling the suit, and ran with four cards in a row, flipping on a queen to bring him back to spades.

He drew again. She was long in spades, he could feel it, but there was nothing he could do. She had him completely boxed. He played a six and watched while she dealt out a sequence of cards, flipping to diamonds on a nine, and emptied the rest of her hand.

“You always do that, you know,” she said, as she was scooping up the cards. “Play out your weakest suit first.”