The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  He didn’t really have an answer. What passed between them wasn’t love—the subject had never come up—but it was also more than physical attraction. It fell into the gray space between the two, neither one thing nor the other, and that was where the problem lay. Being with Lore reminded him of what he couldn’t have.

  Her face fell. “Well, shit. And I was so damn fond of you, Lieutenant.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  She sighed, looking away. “I guess it’s not like this could have lasted. I just wish I’d thought to dump you first.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let things go so far.”

  “Believe me, it’ll pass.” She lifted her face toward the ceiling and took a long, steadying breath, then touched a tear away. “Fuck it all, Peter. See what you made me do?”

  He felt awful. He hadn’t planned this; up until a minute ago, he’d expected that the two of them would just drift in the current of whatever-this-was until they lost interest or new people came along.

  Lore asked, “This isn’t about Michael, is it? Because I told you, that’s over.”

  “I don’t know.” He paused, shrugged. “Okay, maybe a little. He’s going to find out if we keep this up.”

  “So he finds out—so what?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  She wiped her eyes and gave a quiet, bitter laugh. “Your loyalty is admirable, but trust me, I’m the last thing on Michael’s mind. He’d probably thank you for taking me off his hands.”

  “That’s not true.”

  She shrugged. “You’re only saying that because you’re being nice. Which is maybe why I like you so much. But you don’t have to lie—we both know what we’re doing. I keep telling myself I’ll get him out of my system, but of course I never do. You know what kills me? He can’t even tell me the truth. That goddamn redhead. What is it with her?”

  For a moment Peter felt lost. “Are you talking about … Lish?”

  Lore looked at him sharply. “Peter, don’t be dense. What do you think he’s doing out in that stupid boat of his? Three years since she’s gone, and he still can’t get her out of his head. Maybe if she were still around, I’d stand a chance. But you can’t compete with a ghost.”

  It took Peter another moment to process this. A mere minute ago he wouldn’t have said that Michael even liked Alicia; the two used to quarrel like a couple of cats over a clothesline. But underneath, Peter knew, they were not so unlike—the same cores of strength, the same resolve, the same stubborn refusal to be told no when an idea stuck in their teeth. And, of course, a long history was there. Was that what Michael’s boat was all about? That it was his way of mourning the loss of her? They’d all done it in their own fashion. For a time, Peter had been angry with her. She had abandoned them without explanation, not even saying goodbye. But a lot had changed; the world had changed. Mostly what he felt was a pure ache of loneliness, a cold, empty place in his heart where Alicia had once stood.

  “As for you,” Lore said, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist, “I don’t know who she is, but she’s a lucky girl.”

  There was no point in denying it. “I really am sorry.”

  “So you’ve said.” With a pained smile, Lore clapped her palms on her knees. “Well, I’ve got my oil. A girl could hardly ask for more. Do me a favor and feel like shit, okay? You don’t have to drag it out or anything. A week or two is fine.”

  “I feel like shit now.”

  “Good.” She leaned forward and took his mouth with a deep kiss that tasted of tears, then pulled abruptly away. “One for the road. See you around, Lieutenant.”

  The sun was just rising as Peter made his way up the stairs to the top of the dam. His hangover had settled in for the long haul, and a day spent swinging a hammer on a blazing rooftop wasn’t going to improve it any. He could have done with an extra hour of sleep, but after his conversation with Lore, he wanted to clear his head before reporting to the jobsite.

  The breaking day met him when he reached the top, softened by a low-hanging stratum of clouds that would burn off within the hour. Since Peter’s resignation from the Expeditionary, the dam had become a site of totemic importance in his mind. In the days leading up to his fateful departure for the Homeland, he had brought his nephew here. Nothing especially noteworthy had occurred. They had taken in the view and talked about Peter’s journeys with the Expeditionary and about Caleb’s parents, Theo and Maus, then gone down to the impoundment to swim, something Caleb had never done before. An ordinary outing, yet by the end of that day, something had changed. A door had opened in Peter’s heart. He had not understood it at the time, but on the far side of this door lay a new way of being, one in which he would assume the responsibilities of being the boy’s father.

  That was one life, the one that people knew about. Peter Jaxon, retired officer of the Expeditionary turned carpenter and father, citizen of Kerrville, Texas. It was a life like anybody else’s, with its satisfactions and travails, its ups and downs and days both in and out, and he was glad to live it. Caleb had just turned ten. Unlike Peter, who at that age was already serving as a runner of the Watch, the boy was experiencing a childhood. He went to school, he played with his friends, he did his chores without much prodding and only occasional complaint, and every night after Peter tucked him in, he drifted into dreams on the cushioning knowledge that the next day would be just like the last. He was tall for his age, like a Jaxon; the little-boy softness had begun to leave his face. Every day he looked a little bit more like his father, Theo, though the subject of his parents never came up anymore. Not that Peter was avoiding it; the boy just didn’t ask. One evening, after Peter and Caleb had been living on their own for six months, the two of them were playing chess when the boy, hovering over his next move, said, simply, with no more weight than if he were inquiring about the weather, Would it be okay if I called you Dad? Peter was startled; he had failed to see this coming. Is that what you want to do? Peter asked, and the boy nodded. Uh-huh, he said. I think that would be good.

  As for his other life: Peter could not say quite what it was, only that it existed, and that it happened at night. His dreams of the farmstead included a range of days and events, but the tone was always the same: a feeling of belonging, of home. So vivid were these dreams that he awoke with the sensation that he had actually traveled to another place and time, as if his hours of waking and sleeping were two sides of the same coin, neither one more real than the other.

  What were these dreams? Where did they come from? Were they the product of his own mind, or was it possible that they derived from an outside source—even from Amy herself? Peter had told no one about the first night of the evacuation from Iowa when Amy had come to him. His reasons were many, but most of all he couldn’t be sure the whole thing had actually happened. He had entered the moment from deep sleep, Sara’s and Hollis’s daughter out cold on his lap, the two of them bundled up in the Iowa cold beneath a sky so drunk with stars he had felt himself to be floating among them, and there she was. They had not spoken, but they didn’t need to. The touch of their hands was enough. The moment had lasted forever and was over in a flash; the next thing Peter knew, Amy was gone.

  Had he dreamed that, too? The evidence said so. Everyone believed that Amy had died in the stadium, killed in the blast that had killed the Twelve. No trace of her had been found. And yet the moment had felt so real. Sometimes he was convinced that Amy was still out there; then the doubts would creep in. In the end, he kept these questions to himself.

  He stood awhile, watching the sun spread its light over the Texas hills. Below him, the face of the impoundment was as still and reflective as a mirror. Peter would have liked a swim to shake off his hangover, but he needed to fetch Caleb and take him to school before reporting to the jobsite. He wasn’t much of a carpenter—he’d really only ever learned to do one thing, which was be a soldier—but the work was regular and kept him close to home, and with so much construction going on, the Hous
ing Authority needed all the warm bodies they could get.

  Kerrville was busting at the seams; fifty thousand souls had made the journey from Iowa, more than doubling the population in just a couple of years. Absorbing so many hadn’t been easy and still wasn’t. Kerrville had been built on the principle of zero population growth; couples weren’t allowed to have more than two children without paying a hefty fine. If one did not survive to adulthood, they could have a third, but only if the child died before the age of ten.

  With the arrival of the Iowans, the whole concept had gone out the window. There had been food shortages, runs on fuel and medicine, sanitation problems—all the ills that went with too many people wedged into too little space, with more than enough resentment on both sides to go around. A hastily erected tent city had absorbed the first few waves, but as more arrived, this temporary encampment had quickly descended into squalor. While many of the Iowans, after a lifetime of enforced labor, had struggled to adjust to a life in which not every decision was made for them—a common expression was “lazy as a Homelander”—others had gone in the opposite direction: violating curfew, filling Dunk’s whorehouses and gambling halls, drinking and stealing and fighting and generally running amok. The only part of the population that seemed happy was the trade, which was making money hand over fist, operating a black market in everything from food to bandages to hammers.

  People had begun to openly talk about moving outside the wall. Peter supposed this to be just a matter of time; without a single viral sighting in three years, drac or dopey, the pressure was mounting on the Civilian Authority to open the gate. Among the populace, the events in the stadium had become a thousand different legends, no two exactly the same, but even the most hard-core doubters had begun to accept the idea that the threat was really over. Peter, of all people, should have been the first to agree.

  He turned to look out over the city. Nearly a hundred thousand souls: there was a time when this number would have knocked him flat. He had grown up in a town—a world—of fewer than a hundred people. At the gate, the transports had gathered to take workers down to the agricultural complex, chuffing diesel smoke into the morning air; from everywhere came the sounds and smells of life, the city rising, stretching its limbs. The problems were real but small when compared to the promise of the scene. The age of the viral was over; humankind was finally on the upswing. A continent stood for the taking, and Kerrville was the place where this new age would begin. So why did it seem so meager to him, so frail? Why, standing on the dam on an otherwise encouraging summer morning, did he feel this inward shiver of misgiving?

  Well, thought Peter, so be it. If being a parent taught you one thing, it was that you could worry all you wanted, but it wouldn’t change a thing. He had a lunch to pack and “be good”s to say and a day of honest, simple work to wrestle to the ground, and twenty-four hours from now, he’d start it all over again. Thirty, he mused. Today, I turn thirty years old. If anyone had asked him a decade ago if he’d live to see it, let alone be raising a son, he would have thought they were crazy. So maybe that was all that really mattered. Maybe just being alive, and having someone to love who loved you back, was enough.

  He had told Sara that he didn’t want a party, but of course the woman would do something. After all we’ve been through, thirty means something. Come by the house after work. It’ll just be the five of us. I promise it won’t be any big deal. He picked up Caleb at school and went home to wash, and a little after 1800 they arrived at Sara’s and Hollis’s apartment and stepped through the door and into the party that Peter had refused. Dozens of people were there, crammed into two tiny, airless rooms—neighbors and co-workers, parents of Caleb’s friends, men he had served with in the army, even Sister Peg, who, in her dour gray frock, was laughing and chatting away like everybody else. At the door Sara hugged him and wished him happy birthday, while Hollis put a drink in his hand and clapped him on the back. Caleb and Kate were giggling so fiercely they could barely contain themselves. “Did you know about this?” Peter asked Caleb. “And what about you, Kate?” “Of course we knew!” the boy exclaimed. “You should see your face, Dad!” “Well, you’re in big trouble,” Peter said, using his cross-dad voice, though he was laughing, too.

  There was food, drink, cake, even some presents, things people could make or scrounge, some of them jokes: socks, soap, a pocketknife, a deck of cards, a huge straw hat, which Peter put on so everybody could enjoy a laugh. From Sara and Hollis, a pocket compass, a reminder of their journeys together, though Hollis also slipped him a small steel flask. “Dunk’s latest, something special,” he said with a wink, “and don’t ask me how I got it. I still have friends in low places.”

  When the last presents had been opened, Sister Peg presented him with a large piece of paper rolled into a tube. Happy Birthday to Our Hero, it read, with the signatures—some legible, some not—of all the children in the orphanage. A lump rising in his throat, Peter put his arms around the old woman, surprising them both. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “Thank you one and all.”

  It was close to midnight when the party broke up. Caleb and Kate had fallen asleep on Sara and Hollis’s bed, the two of them piled together like a couple of puppies. Peter and Sara sat at the table while Hollis cleaned up.

  “Any word from Michael?” Peter asked her.

  “Not a peep.”

  “Are you worried?”

  She frowned sharply, then shrugged. “Michael’s Michael. I don’t get this thing with the boat, but he’s going to do what he wants to do. I sort of thought Lore might settle him down, but I guess that’s done.”

  Peter felt a stab of guilt; twelve hours ago he’d been in bed with the woman. “How are things at the hospital?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “It’s a madhouse. They’ve got me delivering babies. Lots and lots of babies. Jenny’s my assistant.”

  Sara was speaking of Gunnar Apgar’s sister, whom they’d found at the Homeland. Pregnant, Jenny had returned to Kerrville with the first batch of evacuees and arrived just in time to deliver. She’d gotten married a year ago to another Iowan, though Peter didn’t know if the man was actually the father. A lot of the time, these things were improvised.

  “She’s sorry she couldn’t make it,” Sara continued. “You’re sort of a big deal to her.”

  “I am?”

  “To lots of people, actually. I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me if I know you.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m sorry, didn’t you read that poster?”

  He shrugged, embarrassed, though part of him was pleased. “I’m just a carpenter. Not too good at it, either, if you want to know the truth.”

  Sara laughed. “Whatever you say.”

  The hour was long past curfew, but Peter knew how to avoid the patrols. Caleb’s eyes barely opened as he hoisted him onto his back and headed home. He had just tucked the boy into bed when he heard a knock on the door.

  “Peter Jaxon?”

  The man in the doorway was a military officer, with the epaulets of the Expeditionary on his shoulders.

  “It’s late. My boy’s asleep. What can I do for you, Captain?”

  He offered Peter a sealed piece of paper. “Have a good night, Mr. Jaxon.”

  Peter quietly closed the door, cut the wax with his new pocketknife, and opened the message.

  Mr. Jaxon:

  Might I ask you to pay me a call in my office on Wednesday at 0800? Arrangements have been made with your work supervisor to excuse your late arrival at the jobsite.

  Sincerely,

  Victoria Sanchez

  President, Texas Republic

  “Dad, why was there a soldier at the door?”

  Caleb had wandered into the room, rubbing his eyes with his fists. Peter read the message again. What could Sanchez want with him?

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “Are you in the Army again?”

  He looked at the b
oy. Ten years old. He was growing so fast.

  “Of course not,” he said, and put the note aside. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

  3

  Red Zone

  Ten Miles West of Kerrville, Texas

  July 101 A.V.

  Lucius Greer, the Man of Faith, took his position on the platform in the hour before dawn. His weapon: a bolt-action .308, meticulously restored, with a polished wooden stock and an optical site, its glass clouded by time but still usable. He was down to four rounds; he’d have to return to Kerrville soon, to trade for more. But on this morning of the fifty-eighth day, this was no concern. A single shot was all he’d need.

  A gentle mist had settled overnight in the glade. His trap—a bucket of crushed apples—was a hundred yards upwind, nestled in the tall grass. Sitting motionless, his legs folded under him and his rifle resting on his lap, Lucius lay in wait. He had no doubt that his quarry would make an appearance; the smell of fresh apples was irresistible.

  To pass the time, he offered a simple prayer: My God, Lord of the Universe, be my guide and solace, give me the strength and wisdom to do Your will in the days ahead, to know what is required of me, to be worthy of the charge You have placed in my care. Amen.

  Because something was coming; Lucius could feel it. He knew it the same as he knew his own heartbeat, the wind of breath in his chest, the carriage of his bones. The long arc of human history was headed toward the hour of its final test. When this hour would come there was no knowing, but come it surely would, and it would be a time for warriors. For men like Lucius Greer.

  Three years had passed since the liberation of the Homeland. The events of that night were still with him, indelible memories flashed upon his consciousness. The bedlam of the stadium, and the virals making their entrance; the insurgency’s unleashing of their firepower upon the redeyes and Alicia and Peter advancing on the stage, guns drawn, firing again and again; Amy in chains, a meager figure, and then the roar that rose from her throat as she’d released the power within herself; her body transforming, shedding its human shape, and then the snap of the chains as she freed herself and her bold leap, quick as lightning, upon the monstrous enemies; the chaos and confusion of battle, and Amy trapped beneath Martínez, Tenth of Twelve; the bright flash of destruction, and the absolute quiet of aftermath, the whole world arrested into stillness.