Cell

Snow. Snow on the twenty-first of October. Was it the twenty-first? He'd lost track of the days. One thing he knew for sure was that the phoners would be dying out there, more every night. Joh

The question was, what had he found?

What had he saved?

Dieey.

Daddy?

Maybe.

Certainly the kid hadn't said anything even remotely resembling a word since then. He had been willing to walk with Clay . . . but he'd also been prone to wandering off in his own direction. When he did that, Clay had to grab him again, the way you grabbed a tot who tried to take off in a supermarket parking lot. Each time Clay did this he couldn't help thinking of a windup robot he'd had when he was a kid, and how it would always find its way into a corner and stand there marching its feet uselessly up and down until you turned it back toward the middle of the room again.

Joh

When they came to a road-reef they couldn't get around and Clay helped Joh

Not toilet-trained, but housebroken. Again, Clay was helpless not to think of dogs he had owned.

Only dogs did not wake up and scream for fifteen minutes in the middle of each night.

That first night they had stayed in a house not far from the Newfield Trading Post, and when the screaming started, Clay had thought Joh

Joh

He had dragged Joh

Now they were in the cozy caretaker's cottage next to the Springvale Logging Museum. There was plenty to eat, there was a woodstove, there was fresh water from the hand-pump. There was even a chemical toilet (although Joh

It had been quiet time, except for Joh

You'd need another cellphone, Jordan had said. And you'd need to take him to a place where there's coverage.

There was coverage here. Still coverage. He had the bars on the cell phone to prove it.

How much worse can it be? Tom had asked. And shrugged. But of course he could shrug, couldn't he? Joh

It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP, Jordan had said. They save to system.

Save to system. A phrase of some power.

But you'd have to wipe the phoner program first to make space for such a highly theoretical second reboot, and Jordan's idea—to hit Joh

"Save to system," Clay whispered. Outside the light was almost gone; the skirling snow looked more ghostly than ever.

The Pulse was different now, he was sure of that. He remembered the first phoners he'd come upon who were up at night, the ones at the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department. They had been fighting over the old pumper, but they had been doing more than that; they had been talking. Not just making phantom vocalizations that might have been words, talking. It hadn't been much, not brilliant cocktail-party chatter, but actual talk, just the same. Go away. You go. Hell you say. And the always popular Mynuck. Those two had been different from the original phoners—the phoners of the Raggedy Man Era—and Joh

The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was If you set a new version of the program against the one Joh