Around them, the Colony was eerily quiet, everyone still stunned by the events of the early hours of the morning. Peter wondered if this was the silence that came after something, or before. If it was the silence of blame being tallied. Alicia wasn’t wrong; people were frightened.

“About the girl,” Peter said. “There’s something I should have told you.”

The lockup was an old public bathroom in the trailer park on the east side of town. As they made their approach, Peter and Alicia heard a swell of voices on the air. They picked up the pace as they moved through the maze of tipping hulks—most had long since been stripped for parts—and arrived to find a small crowd at the entrance, about a dozen men and women gathered tightly around a single Watcher, Dale Levine.

“What the hell is going on?” Peter whispered.

Alicia’s face was grim. “It’s started,” she said. “That’s what.”

Dale was not a small man, but at that moment, he seemed so. Facing the crowd, he looked like a cornered animal. He was a little hard of hearing and had a habit of turning his head slightly to the right in order to point his good ear at whoever was talking to him, giving him a slightly distracted air. But he didn’t seem distracted now.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Dale was saying, “I don’t know anything you don’t.”

The person he was addressing was Sam Chou, Old Chou’s nephew—a thoroughly unassuming man whom Peter had heard speak only a few times in his life. His wife was Other Sandy; between them they had five children, three in the Sanctuary. As Peter and Alicia moved to the edge of the group, he realized what he was seeing: these were parents. Just like Ian, everyone standing outside the lockup had a child, or more than one. Patrick and Emily Phillips. Hodd and Lisa Greenberg. Grace Molyneau and Belle Ramirez and Hannah Fisher Patal.

“That boy opened the gate.”

“So what do you want me to do about it? Ask your uncle if you want to know more.”

Sam pointed his voice to the high windows of the lockup. “Do you hear me, Caleb Jones? We all know what you did!”

“Come on, Sam. Leave the poor kid alone.”

Another man moved forward: Milo Darrell. Like his brother, Finn, Milo was a wrench, with a wrench’s solid build and taciturn demeanor: tall and slope-shouldered, with a woolly beard and unkempt hair that fell in a tangle to his eyes. Behind him, dwarfed by his height, was his wife, Penny.

“You’ve got a kid, too, Dale,” Milo said. “How can you just stand there?”

One of the three J’s, Peter realized. Little June Levine. Dale’s face, Peter saw, had gone a little white.