So there it was. His father had known, and probably his mother too. A familiar panic rose within him. He didn’t want to think about this, he didn’t.

“Michael?”

He took a deep breath to calm himself. One more secret for him to carry. But he would do what he always did, pushing the information down inside himself as far as it could go.

“So,” said Michael, “how exactly do you build a radio?”

Radio wasn’t the problem, Elton explained; it was the mountain that was the problem.

The original beacon had run off an antenna that stood at the peak of the mountain; an insulated cable, five kilometers long, had run the length of the power trunk to connect it to the transmitter in the Lighthouse. All taken down and destroyed by the One Law. Without the antenna, they were hopelessly blocked to the east, and any signal they might have picked up would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic interference from the battery stack.

That left two choices: go to the Household and ask for permission to run an antenna up the mountain; or say nothing and try to boost the signal somehow.

It was, in the end, no contest. Michael couldn’t ask for permission without explaining the reason, which meant telling the Household about the batteries; and to tell them about the batteries was simply out of the question, because then everyone would know, and once that happened, the rest wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t just the batteries that Michael was in charge of; it was the glue of hope that held the place together. You couldn’t just tell people they had no chance. The only thing to do was find somebody still alive out there—find them with a radio, which would mean they had power and therefore light—before he said another word to anyone. And if he found nothing, if the world really was empty, then what would happen would happen anyway; it was better if nobody knew.