Chapters (40)
- The Jane Tucker School for the Blind
- Ten Years On
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- The Blind Train
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- Safer Rooms
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- Dedication
- AFTERWORD/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- BY JOSH MALERMAN
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Malorie cries. She doesn’t want to but she can’t stop it. She imagines Gary sitting across a table from a younger man, promising the man money or gold or whatever is still worth something out in the new world, if only the rube play the part of a census man. Write all these notes down for me, son, and deliver it to Cabin Three of Camp Yadin. Can you do that for me? Can you sneak these two names like worms for a fish through the front door of Cabin Three at Camp Yadin?
Big fish in there. Big to me.
“No way,” Malorie says. “There’s just no way. This isn’t real. This isn’t possible. This is not happening.”
But, beyond the desk, her parents’ names are still visible on the spilled pages.
Sam and Mary Walsh.
Not Gary’s hand.
And something else, too. Another page, having risen to the top of the pile, as the papers went fluttering through the office. As if this particular page were trying to survive, too. A description of a mode of travel, yes, another impossibility, the proof Malorie needs to officially deny any and all of this.
The Blind Train.
Ah, yes. The man who claimed to be from the census mentioned a train.
One that heads north.
Malorie feels hot. Like someone is watching her. Has been watching her. Like the walls of the new world are closing in.
No to all of this. Absolutely no. It’s too inviting, all too perfectly arranged for her to gather her teens and leave the relative tranquility of this place they call home and have called home for ten years. She can sense the worm lowering into the water. Can feel the hunger, wanting to taste it. It’s easy to imagine Gary waiting for her on a platform in the dark.
Her parents are dead. They’ve been dead for seventeen years.
Malorie picks up the page that describes the train. She begins to read it, then lets it fall to the floor.
No.
No way.
She’s not leaving this camp. The camp that has kept them safe. The place where Tom and Olympia have grown from children into adults, immensely intelligent teens who can hear all the way to the gates of the camp and who are happy without even knowing why. She will not jeopardize their lives for closure in her own.
She makes for the office door, momentarily assured with her decision to ignore the whole thing. The names on that page. The existence of a census at all.
She looks down once more to the pages on the floor.