“Nothing. No oranging at all, from what I could see. I’m telling you, it was weird. So I’m stuck on the tower, Zander’s at the bottom, maybe taken up and maybe not, but either way it’s going to get dark eventually. Zander, I yell, look, I’m coming down, one way or the other. I’m not armed, all I’ve got is the wrench, but maybe I can brain him with it and get away. I’ve also got to get the key from him somehow. I can’t see him from the ladder, so when I’m about three meters from the bottom I decide what the hell, I’m just going to jump. I’ve already tipped my hand, but I figure I’m dead anyway. I drop and come up with the wrench ready to swing. But it’s gone. Snatched right out of my hand. Zander’s right behind me. That’s when he says to me, Go back up.”

“Go back up?” This was Arlo.

Caleb nodded. “No kidding, that’s what he said. And if he was flipping, I still couldn’t tell. But he’s got the blade in one hand, the wrench in the other, there’s blood all over him, and without the key there’s no way I’m getting back inside the station. I ask him, What do you mean go back up, and he says, You’re safe if you go back up the tower. So that’s what I did.” The boy shrugged. “That’s where I was for the last three days, until I saw you on the Eastern Road.”

Peter looked at his brother; Theo’s expression indicated he didn’t know what to make of Caleb’s story either. What had Zander intended? Had he already been taken up or not? It had been many years, and not in living memory, since anyone had directly witnessed the effects of the infection’s early stages. But there were plenty of stories, from the early days especially, the time of the Walkers, of bizarre behaviors—not just the blood hunger and spontaneous disrobing that everyone knew to be a sign. Strange utterances, public speechmaking, manic feats of athleticism. One Walker, it was said, had broken into the Storehouse and actually eaten himself to death; another had killed all his children in their beds before setting himself aflame; a third had stripped naked, ascended to the catwalk in full view of the Watch, and recited, at the top of his lungs, both the entire Gettysburg Address—there was a copy of it hanging on the wall in one of the classrooms in the Sanctuary—and twenty-five verses of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” before hurling himself over, twenty meters to the hardpan.

“So what about the smokes?” Theo asked.