It was past half-day before Michael was able to reassemble the frame of mind to return to work on the radio. In all the excitement, he’d almost forgotten about it, but as he exited the Lighthouse in search of the spool he had dropped the night before, then found it lying undisturbed in the dust, the long wire arcing up to the top of the Wall, he was convinced anew of its importance. He spliced the wire to the copper filaments he’d left in place, returned to the Lighthouse, pulled the logbook down off the shelf to check the frequency, and clamped the headphones to his ears.

Two hours later, lit with adrenaline, his hair and jersey drenched with sweat, he found Peter in the barracks. Peter was sitting on a bunk, spinning a blade around his index finger. No one else was in the room; at the sound of Michael’s entry, Peter glanced up with only passing interest. He looked like something awful had happened, Michael thought. Like he wanted to use that blade on someone but couldn’t decide just who. And come to think of it, Michael wondered, where was everybody? Wasn’t it awful damn quiet around here? Nobody ever told him anything.

“What is it?” Peter said, and resumed his melancholy spinning. “Because whatever it is, I hope it’s good news.”

“Oh my God,” said Michael. He was struggling to get the words out. “You have to hear this.”

“Michael, do you have any idea what’s going on around this place? What do I have to hear?”

“Amy,” he said. “You have to hear Amy.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

THIRTY-NINE

In the Lighthouse, Michael took a seat at his terminal. The device they’d removed from the girl’s neck now lay in pieces on a leather mat beside Michael’s CRT.

“The power source,” Michael was saying, “now, that’s interesting. Very interesting.” With a pair of tweezers, he lifted a tiny metal capsule from inside the transmitter. “A battery, but not like anything I’ve seen. Given how long it’s been running, my guess is nuclear.”

Peter startled. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It wasn’t to her, apparently. And it’s been inside her a long time.”

“What’s long?” Peter looked at his friend, whose face glowed with excitement. So far he’d provided only the vaguest answers to Peter’s questions. “You mean like a year?”

Michael grinned mysteriously. “You don’t know the half of it. Just hang on a minute.” He directed Peter’s attention again to the object on the counter, using his tweezers to identify the parts. “So you’ve got a transmitter, a battery, and then—the rest. My first guess was a memory chip, but it was way too small to fit into any of the ports on the mainframe, so I had to solder it hard.”