The Passage

So Sam was feeling a little bad now about the whole thing, bad and a little confounded, because it wasn’t like him to get so angry. It wasn’t like him at all. For a second there, outside the lockup, he really had believed it: somebody had to pay. It didn’t seem to matter that it was just a defenseless kid who probably thought someone on the catwalk had told him to open the gate. And the most extraordinary thing, really, was that in all that time, Sam hadn’t given much or even any thought to the girl, the Walker, who was the reason the whole thing had happened in the first place. Watching the lights of the spots playing on the eaves above his face, Sam wondered why this should be. My God, he thought, after all these years, a Walker. And not just a Walker-a young girl. Sam wasn’t one of those people who believed the Army was still coming-you’d have to be pretty stupid to think so after all these years-but a girl like that, it meant something. It meant somebody was still alive out there. Maybe a whole lot of somebodies. And when Sam considered this, he found himself strangely… uncomfortable with the idea. He couldn’t say quite why that was, except that the notion of this girl, this Girl from Nowhere, felt like a piece that didn’t fit. And what if all these somebodies just showed up out of the blue? What if she was the begi

Also awake was Michael Fisher. In the main, Michael viewed sleep as a waste of time. It was just another case of the body’s unreasonable demands upon the mind, and his dreams, when he cared to remember them, all seemed to be lightly retooled versions of his waking state-full of circuits and breakers and relays, a thousand problems to be solved, and he would awaken feeling less restored than rudely shot forward in time, with no discernible accomplishments to show for these lost hours.

But that was not the case tonight. Tonight, Michael Fisher was as awake as he’d ever been in his life. The contents of the chip, having disgorged itself into the mainframe-a veritable flood of data-was nothing less than a rewriting of the world. It was this new understanding that had inspired the risk Michael was now taking, ru

That left only one option. Take a spool up the far ladder, move down the catwalk until he was suspended over the cutout, anchor the end of the wire, drop it to the ground below, and descend once more to co

Michael knelt in the dirt, removed his wire cutters from the old canvas rucksack he used as a toolbag, and set to work, pulling the cable from its spool and stripping the plastic conduit away. At the same time he was listening for the clanging footsteps above his head that would signify a ru

Heights had always been a problem for Michael-he didn’t like so much as standing on a chair-a fact that, in his determined state, he had failed to figure in his calculations, and by the time he reached the top of the ladder, an ascent of twenty meters that felt like ten times that many, he was begi

He began to move down the catwalk, and by the time he was in position, he had begun to feel better-a lot better. His fear had receded, replaced by an invigorated sense of possibility. This was going to work. Platform Eight was still empty; whoever was supposed to be there would probably catch hell, but its vacancy gave Michael the opening he needed. He knelt on the catwalk and pulled the coil of wire from his rucksack. Constructed of a titanium alloy, the catwalk would make a serviceable conductor in its own right, adding its attractive electromagnetic properties to the wire’s; in essence, Michael was turning the whole perimeter into a giant ante

Amy, he thought. Who would have thought the Girl from Nowhere would have a name like Amy?

What Michael didn’t know was that Firing Platform Eight was empty because the Watcher on station, Dana Curtis, First Family and Household, was already lying dead at the base of the Wall. Jimmy had killed her right after he’d killed Soo Ramirez. Whom he honestly hadn’t meant to kill; he’d only wanted to tell her something. Goodbye? I’m sorry? I always loved you? But one thing had led to another in the strangely inevitable ma

Galen Strauss, approaching from the opposite direction, witnessed these events as if through the fat end of a telescope: a distant splash of color and movement, far beyond the range of his vision. If it had been anybody else on Platform Ten that night, someone whose eyesight was more robust, who was not going blind from acute glaucoma as Galen Strauss was, a clearer picture of events might have emerged. As it was, what occurred on Firing Platform Nine would never be known by anyone except those directly involved; and even they did not understand it.