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She irl was holding his arrip, immovable Not words, not spoken words The words were in hishis arm; their faces were inches apart

"What did you-?"

She misses you sheaway His heart was pounding in his chest like a great caged anilass cabinet, sending the contents spilling off the shelves behind hiure at the periphery of his vision For a moment his mind came mercifully into a wider focus Dale Levine

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Peter sed, trying to answer Dale was standing at the curtain, wearing a look of confusion, his ele point in the unfolding scene He shifted his face toward the girl, as still seated on the cot with the basin at her feet, then looked at Peter again

"She’s awake? I thought she was dying"

Peter found his voice at last "You can’ttell anyone"

"Flyers, Peter Does Jimmy know about this?"

"I mean it" He knew suddenly that if he didn’t leave the room at once he would dissolve "You can’t"

Then he turned, brushing past Dale, practically knocking hih the curtain and out the door and stu down the steps into the spotlit yard, his ht in the floords in his head-she h the tears that were rising to his eyes

Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

For Mausa alone in the Big Roo to teach herself to knit All the cots and cribs had been taken out; the children had bedded down upstairs The broken as boarded up, the glass swept away, the room and all its surfaces washed doith spirits The ser for days

It wasn’t anyplace she should have been The aro 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 ould 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 s her enough light to work by Leigh had instructed her in the basic stitches, which had see the way she had taken a wrong turn The stitches weren’t co out even, not at all, and her left thuh had de 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 sixa pair of baby booties seeotten so distracted that twice the ball of yarn in her lap had dropped to the floor to roll across the roootten it rolled back up, she’d forgotten where she was and had to start over

Part of her sione She had planned to tell hiht 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 glooht on the Wall, Maybe I just will ht, if that’s what you want, I only want you to be happy, the bluff had hardened into so she had to do, to prove that he rong Wrong about her, wrong about hi 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,Galen Strauss, and all for Theo Jaxon

For a time, most of that sue work She had hoped she could will the right e, 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 ular 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 corade, and with his eyes the way they were, no good in the dark So like he did, she wondered if in fact she was the girl he really loved at all Maybe it was some other woman he saw, one he had made up in his mind

She’d found a way to almost never let him near her

Almost: because you couldn’t not lie with your husband Is he tender with you? her mother had asked her Is he kind? Does he care about what’s happening to you? That’s all I want to know But Galen was too happy to be tender I can’t believe it! his face and body said I can’t believe you’re mine! Which she wasn’t; while Galen huffed and puffed above her in the dark, Mausami was miles away The harder he tried to be a husband, the less she felt like a wife to him, until-and this was the bad part, the part that didn’t see hi she could close her eyes and simply wish him off the face of the earth Which onlyhim even more

How could he not know the baby wasn’t his? Could the ed the nu up her breakfast into the compost pile, she’d told him three periods, when it was really two Three and it was Galen’s baby; two and it was not Galen had conant; she had refused him on some pretense, she couldn’t even remember what No, it was all perfectly clear to Mausami, the when and who She had been down at the station when it happened; Theo was there, and Alicia, and Dale Levine The four of theo-to in the control rooone to bed, and the next thing she knew, she and Theo were sitting alone together, the first tian to cry, surprised at how much she wanted to and by the sheer volume of her tears, and Theo had taken her in his arms to co how sorry they were, and after that it had taken all of about thirty seconds They never stood a chance

She’d barely seen hi, and life returned to norh it wasn’t normal, not at all She was a person with a secret It lay like a war happiness Even Galen see the lines of Well, I’lad to see your(Her response, wholly absurd and nothing that could be acted upon, was a friendly desire to tell hiood news) She didn’t knoould happen; she didn’t think about it at all When she ht It wasn’t like she was anything close to regular; she’d always been that way, it came and went as it pleased All she could think about was the next trip down to the station, when she could ain She saw hi assembly, but that wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the time and place to touch or even talk She would have to wait But even this, the waiting, the torturous crawl of days-the date of their next departure for the station was plainly listed on the duty roster, where anyone could see it-was part of her happiness, the blur of love

Then sheup into the conant Why hadn’t she anticipated this? How had this eventuality escaped her attentions? Because the one thing Theo Jaxon wouldn’t as a baby Maybe under the right circumstances she could have won hiht had cooing to have a baby Her baby, Theo’s baby, their baby together A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea A baby was a fact It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world o on living

Maybe the thing Theo Jaxon needed most of all was a baby

That’s what Mausami would have told him down at the station, in the little rooined the scene unfolding a nuood, the worst of all being the one in which she lost her nerve and said nothing (The second worst: Theo guessed, her courage failed her anyway, and she told him it was Galen’s) What she hoped was that she’d see a light in his eyes coo A baby, he would say Our baby What should we do? What people always do, she would have told hiain, and in this zone of sheltering safety she would know that everything would be all right, and together they would ride back to face Galen-to face everyone-together

But now this would never happen The story she had told herself was just that, a story

She heard footsteps co down the hall behind her A heavy, loose-liet a moment’s peace? But it wasn’t his fault, she re was Galen’s fault

"What are you doing down here, Maus? I’ve been all over"