SHE CRIED. SHE hated the weakness in that, but she felt so painfully alone and forgotten that she could not hold back the tears. They were not only tears of self-pity. She cried also for the friends she had lost, and the lovers . . . and the friend whom she loved more than anyone. She thought of Ramus constantly, trying to imagine him falling or broken at the bottom of the Great Divide. Those images would not come. What she saw was Ramus wandering these new landscapes, avoiding the Sentinels and exploring farther inland, dodging sentries, making his way deeper than even the Sentinels had gone. She tried not to see the agony in his eyes as the sickness ground him down. And when she imagined him writhing amongst strange grasses and plants she could not identify, dying of the sickness she had sent to him, she screamed the image away.

Perhaps he's closer than I think. She took a bite of one of the orange fruits and it was rotten on the inside. She threw it away, gagging. A Sentinel stood on the grille above her and stared down, blocking out most of the light, and when it saw the discarded fruit it reached beyond the pit and dropped in some more. Nomi let them fall to the ground. If they were not corrupted as they fell, they were when they struck.

“I'm sorry, Ramus,” she said. She realized it was the very first time she had thought those words, let alone uttered them.

HER SECOND MORNING in the pit, Nomi was woken by the sound of Sentinels calling in the distance. She kept her eyes closed in an effort to hang on to her dreams, but Beko fell away from her and his smile faded as the ground pulled him down. If he hits the ground in my dreams, he'll really die, she thought, but she opened her eyes because he was already dead.

There were no Sentinels above her. She could see deep blue sky through the heavy timber grating, with a few wispy clouds moving slowly from left to right. She inhaled but smelled only the pit, and she tried to recall the taste of unspoiled fruit, to drive her sickness down. Her skin was gritty with dust and dirt. She desperately needed to wash, and she hoped they would bring her a jug of water soon.

The Sentinels' call came in again, a hooting and bellowing the likes of which she had not heard before. It was so distant that she could have been mistaken, and she stood, opened her mouth and exhaled slowly, striving to hear more.

Next time the call came it was closer. Then closer still, the same collection of rising and falling notes, as though one call was echoing in from the distance.