The sun was down. The last thing Mausami remembered was lying down for a nap. Peter and the others were probably in the other hut, deciding what to do. The baby was moving again, flipping around inside her. She lay with her eyes closed and let the sensation fill her. Standing the Watch: it seemed like years ago. A different life. That was what happened, she knew, when a person had a baby. This strange new being grew inside you and by the time it was all over, you were someone different, too.

Suddenly she realized: she wasn’t alone.

Amy was sitting on the bunk next to hers. Spooky, the way she could make herself invisible like that. Mausami rolled to face her, tucking her knees to her chest as the baby went thump-thump inside her.

“Hey,” Maus said, and yawned. “I guess I took a little nap there.”

Everybody was always talking that way around Amy, stating the obvious, filling the silence of the girl’s half of the conversation. It was a little unnerving, the way she looked at you with that intense gaze, as if she were reading your thoughts. Which was when Mausami realized what the girl was really looking at.

“Oh. I get it,” she said. “You want to feel it?”

Amy cocked her head, uncertain.

“You can if you want. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Amy rose, taking a place on the edge of Mausami’s cot. Mausami held her hand and guided it to the curve of her belly. The girl’s hand was warm and a little damp; the tips of her fingers were surprisingly soft, not like Mausami’s, which were callused from years of the bow.

“Just wait a minute. He was flipping around in there a second ago.”

A bright flicker of movement. Amy drew her hand away quickly, startled.

“You feel that?” Amy’s eyes were wide with pleasant shock. “It’s okay, that’s what they do. Here—” She took Amy’s hand and pressed it to her belly once more. At once the baby flipped and kicked. “Whoa, that was a strong one.”

Amy was smiling too now. How strange and wonderful, Mausami thought, in the midst of everything, all that had happened, to feel a baby moving inside her. A new life, a new person, coming into the world.

Mausami heard it then. Two words.

He’s here.

She yanked her hand away, scurrying up the cot so she was sitting with her back pushed to the wall. The girl was looking at her with a penetrating stare, her eyes filling Maus’s vision like two shining beams.

“How did you do that?” She was shaking; she thought she might be ill.

He’s in the dream. With Babcock. With the Many.

“Who’s here, Amy?”

Theo. Theo is here.

Chapter Fifty-One

FIFTY-ONE