Justin Cronin - The Passage

“I mean it, Elton. If you’re going to sleep, go do it in back.”

The old man twitched to life, fingers tightening on the arms of his chair. He turned his blind, rigid face to Michael.

“Right. Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Did you solder it?”

“I’m going to. Seriously, Elton. You’re not alone in here. When was the last time you took a bath?”

The old man said nothing. Come to think of it, he didn’t look so great himself, not that the standards where Elton was concerned were all that high to begin with. Sweaty and washed out and somehow not there . While Michael watched, Elton drifted a slow hand toward the surface of the counter, his fingers tapping lightly in a searching way until they alighted on the headphones, though he didn’t pick them up.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m just saying you don’t look so great is all.”

“Are we lights up?”

“That was an hour ago. How asleep were you?”

Elton licked his lips with a heavy tongue. Flyers, what was it? Something in his teeth?

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I will go lie down.”

The old man lumbered to his feet and shuffled down the narrow hallway that connected the work area with the back of the hut. Michael heard the creek of springs as his big body hit the cot.

Well, at least he wasn’t in the room.

Michael turned his attention back to the work that lay before him. He’d been right about the thing in the girl’s neck. The transmitter was connected to a memory chip, but not any kind he’d ever seen, much smaller and without any obvious ports except for a pair of tiny gold brads. One was linked to the transmitter, the other to the filigree of beaded wires. So either the wires were an antenna array and the transmitter ran off the chip, which didn’t seem likely, or the wires themselves were sensors of some kind, the source of the data the chip was recording.

The only way to find out for sure was to read the data on the chip. And the only way to do that was to solder it hard to the mainframe’s memory board.

It was a risk. Michael was hard-soldering a piece of unknown circuitry to the control panel itself. Maybe the system wouldn’t see it. Maybe the system would crash and the lights would all go out. Probably the wisest course would be to wait until morning. But by this point he was moving forward on sheer momentum, his mind clamped onto the problem like a squirrel with a nut in his teeth; he couldn’t have waited if he wanted to.

He’d have to take the mainframe off-line first. This meant shutting down the controllers to run straight off the batteries. You could do this for a while but not for long; without the system to monitor the current, any fluctuation could flip a breaker. So once the mainframe was off-line, he’d have to work fast.

He took a deep breath and called up the system menu.

Shut down?

He clicked on: Y

The hard drive began to spin down. Michael darted from his chair and shot across the room to the breaker box.

None of the breakers moved.

He got quickly to work, pulling the motherboard free, placing it on the counter under the magnifier, taking up the hot iron in one hand and the strip of solder in the other. He touched it to the tip of the iron-a waft of smoke curling in the air above it-and watched as a single drop descended toward the open channel on the motherboard.

Bull’s-eye.

He tweezered the chip; he had one shot to get this right. Gripping his right wrist to keep it steady, he gently lowered the chip’s exposed contacts into the solder, freezing it in place for a count of ten while the bead of liquid solder cooled and stiffened around it.

Only then did he let himself breathe. He slid the board back into the panel, locked it in place, and booted the mainframe back up.

In the long minute that followed as the system came back online, the hard drive clicking and whirring, Michael Fisher closed his eyes and thought: Please .

And there it was. When he opened his eyes he saw it, sitting in the system directory. UNKNOWN DRIVE. He selected the image and watched as the window sprang open. Two partitions, A and B. The first was tiny, just a few kilobytes. But not B.

B was huge.

It contained two files, identical in size; one was probably a backup of the other. Two identical files of such immensity it simply boggled the mind. This chip: it was like the whole world was written inside it. Whoever had made this thing and put it inside the girl, that person was not like anyone he knew; they did not seem to be from a world he was part of. He wondered if he should maybe get Elton, ask him what he thought. But the snores coming from the back of the hut told him this would be a waste of his energy.

When Michael opened the file, as he did in due course, he did it almost furtively, one hand raised before his eyes, which were peeking through his fingers.

A lucky stroke: approaching the Infirmary, Peter saw a single Watcher standing guard. He marched straight up the steps.

“Evening, Dale.”

Dale’s cross hung loosely at his side. He sighed with exasperation, cocking his head a little, giving Peter his good ear. “You know I can’t let you in.”

Peter craned his neck to look past Dale through the front windows. A lantern was glowing on the desk.

“Sara inside?”

“She left a little while ago. Said she was getting something to eat.”

Peter held his ground, saying nothing more. It was a waiting game, he knew. He could see the indecision moving through Dale’s face. At last he huffed in surrender and stood aside.

“Flyers. Just be quick about it.”

Peter stepped through the door and moved back into the ward. The girl was curled on the cot, her knees tucked against her chest, facing away. At the sound of his entry, she made no movement; Peter guessed she was asleep.

He positioned a chair by the cot and sat with his chin in his hands. Under the tousle of her hair, he could see the mark on her neck where Sara had cut away the transmitter-a barely detectible line, almost completely healed.

She roused then, as if to meet his thoughts, and shifted on the cot to face him. The whites of her eyes were moist and full, shining in the lamplight that leaked through the curtain.

“Hey,” he said. His voice felt thick in his throat. “How are you feeling?”

Her hands were pressed together, buried to her slender wrists in the crevice between her knees. Everything about the way she held her body seemed conceived to make her appear smaller than she was.

“I came to thank you, for saving me.”

A quick tightening of her shoulders under the gown. You’re welcome .

How strange it was, speaking this way-strange because it wasn’t so strange. He had never heard the sound of the girl’s voice, and yet he did not feel this as a lack. There was something calming about it, as if she had put aside the noise of words.

“I don’t suppose you feel like talking,” Peter ventured. “Like maybe telling me your name? We could start with that, if you want.”

The girl said nothing, indicated nothing. Why would I tell you my name?

“Well, that’s okay,” Peter said. “I don’t mind. We can just sit here.”

Which was what he did; he sat with her, in the dark. After a time, a slackness came into the girl’s face. More minutes passed, and without any further acknowledgment of his presence, she closed her eyes again.

As Peter waited in the quiet, a sudden weariness came over him, and with it a memory: of a night, long ago, when he had come into the Infirmary and seen his mother watching over one of her patients-just as he was doing now. He couldn’t remember who this person was or if, in fact, the memory was several memories, folded over one another. It could have been one night or many. But on the night he recalled, he had stepped through the curtain and found his mother sitting in a chair by one of the cots, her head tipped to the side, and knew she was asleep. The person on the cot was a child, a small form hidden in darkness; the only light came from a candle on a tray by the bed. He moved forward, not speaking; no one else was in the room. His mother stirred, tilting her face toward him. She was young, and healthy, and he was glad, so glad, to see her again.