Page 44 (2/2)

That child’s EQUAL SHARE shall upon his release from the SANCTUARY revert to the HOUSEHOLD of which he is a part, to be carried with him at the time of his MARRIAGE

Children in the SANCTUARY are to know nothing of the world in its present for any mention of the VIRALS, the duties of the WATCH, and the event known as the GREAT VIRAL CATACLYSM Any person found to knowingly provide such information to any MINOR CHILD is subject to the penalty of PUTTING WITHOUT THE WALLS

RIGHTS OF WALKERS

WALKERS, or souls not of the FIRST FAMILIES, are fully endoith EQUAL SHARES, not to be deprived of such shares by any person, with the exception of unmarried males who choose to dithin the BARRACKS under the shares of their TRADES

LAW OF QUARANTINE

Any soul, whether FIRST FAMILY or WALKER, who comes into direct physical contact with a VIRAL must be quarantined for a period of no fewer than 30 days

Any soul, whether quarantined or at liberty, who exhibits sy but not limited to SEIZURES, VOMITING, AVERSION TO LIGHT, CHANGES IN EYE COLORATION, BLOOD HUNGER, or SPONTANEOUS DISROBING, may be subject to immediate confinement and/or MERCIFUL EXECUTION by the WATCH

Any soul who opens the gates, whether wholly or in part, by accident or design, alone or in the company of others, between SECOND EVENING BELL and FIRST MORNING BELL is subject to the penalty of PUTTING WITHOUT THE WALLS

Any soul ns, operates, or encourages the operation of a RADIO or other SIGNALING DEVICE is subject to the penalty of PUTTING WITHOUT THE WALLS

Any soul who co another soul, such act to be defined as deliberately causing the physical death of another without sufficient provocation of infection, is subject to the penalty of PUTTING WITHOUT THE WALLS

THUS ENACTED AND RATIFIED IN THE YEAR OF OUR WAITING,

17 AV

Devin Danforth Chou

Federal Eional Administrator of the Central Quarantine Zone

HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

Terrence Jaxon

Lucy Fisher Jaxon

Porter Curtis

Liam Molyneau

Sonia Patal Levine

Christian Boyes

Willa Norris Darrell

FIRST FAMILIES

Chapter NINETEEN

On a fading su, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon-son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Fanatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood-took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother

He enty-one years old, Full Watch, tall though he did not think of hi teeth and skin the color of late honey He had his old; his hair, which was Jaxon hair, coarse and dark, was pulled away froht, nutlike knob at the base of his skull with a single leather loop A web of shallow creases fanned froht; there was, at the ray He wore a pair of scavenged gaps, motley-patched at the knees and seat, and, cinched at his slender waist, a jersey of soft wool, beneath which he could feel the day’s scri his skin He had taken the gaps froo, at Share; they had cost hiained Walt Fisher down froaps, but that’s how Walt did things, the price was never the price-and were too long in the legs by a hand, gathering in bunches at the tops of his feet, shod in sandals of cut canvas and old tire; he alore sandals in the heat of the year or else went barefoot, reserving his one pair of decent boots for winter Resting at an angle against the edge of the rampart was his weapon, a crossbow; at his waist, in its sheath of soft leather, a blade

Peter Jaxon, twenty-one, ar the Wall as his brother had done, and his father, and his father before hi to serve the Mercy

It was the sixty-third of su and dry under wide blue skies, the air fresh with the scents of juniper and Jeffrey pine The sun stood two hands; First Evening Bell had sounded froht shift to the Wall and calling in the herd from Upper Field The platfor the catwalk that ringed the top of the Wall-was known as Firing Platform One Usually it was reserved to the First Captain of the Watch, Soo Raht, as for each of the last six nights, it was Peter’s alone Fivenet of cabled steel To Peter’s left, rising another thirty ht asserid, diht, suspended over the nets, was the crane with its block and tackle and ropes This Peter would use to lower himself to the base of the Wall, should his brother return

Behind hi cloud of noise and smells and activity, lay the Colony itself, its houses and stables and fields and greenhouses and glens This was the place where Peter had lived his whole life Even now, facing away to watch the herd come home, he could hold each meter of it in his mind, a mental inventory in three di Path froate to Old Town, past the Ar metal and the shaded recesses of West Glade, where Auntie lived; the fields with their rows of corn and beans, the backs of the workers bent low over the black earth, tilling and hoeing; the broad, se days and open s of the Household were held; the Sanctuary, with its ringing bell-tower and bricked-in s and coils of concertina wire, barricades that so in the courtyard; the pens and barns and grazing fields and coops, alive with the sound and sreenhouses, their interiors obscured by a fog of hued bounty of the Storehouse, where Walter Fisher presided over the stalls of clothes and tools and food and fuel; the blocks of houses in various states of repair, fro abandoned to those that, like Peter’s, had been continuously occupied since The Day; the orchard and buzzing apiary and old trailer park, where nobody lived anymore, and, beyond it, past the last houses of the North Quarter and the Big Shed, at the base of the cutout between the north and east walls in a zone of perpetual cooling shade, the battery stack, three gray bulks of hu on the sunken wheels of the semi-trailers that had pulled them up the mountain in the Time Before