The rider is at first mistaken for a ranger, one of their own. Then the sentries glass her and see her horse is unarmored, plainly saddled, its tack unlike the jeweled black leather guards that run along the muzzles and flanks of their stable. Her body is caked with dust the same dun color as her doeskin leggings. She is small, her feet barely reaching the stirrups, but confident in her posture so that the horse seems a rocking extension of her. She slows to a trot at the clearing that surrounds the Sanctuary, just outside the gates, where the ground is raked of weeds and scorched black.
It is then that one of the sentries hurls down his torch. The wood in the iron brazier crackles to life. The blaze that signals alarm, the blaze that will draw every eye in the Sanctuary to the wall with wonder and fear.
No one has been seen outside the Sanctuary for decades. Its citizens have long been told that they are the last human survivors, that the rest of the world has perished. Something Clark has never wanted to believe. Years ago, she remembers touring through the museum and pausing to study an exhibition on space. There was a faded, wall-size photograph of the moon’s surface and a man standing upon it in a thick white suit with a glass-visored helmet. Lewis appeared beside her. They’d known each other growing up, never friends. For years, in fact, she made games out of teasing and torturing the thin, sickly boy—one time hog-tying him and hanging him from a balcony, another time pegging him in the ear with a stone fired from a slingshot so that to this day its tip is torn. But that was fifteen years ago, and though she has never apologized, that has not stopped Lewis from nodding to her in the streets, standing beside her quietly that day at the museum. So many people feared him, but she saw him only as a wiser, longer version of that same sickly boy.
“Why did they do it?” she asked him.
“For the same reason humans always explore. To satisfy their curiosity. And to see what they might exploit.” He pointed to a squat metal device with insectile legs and a broad dish wrapped in gold foil. He explained it was a transmitter, a way of yelling into space. “They hoped there was something else alive out there.”
“Did they ever find it?”
“No.”
“Do you think they would have?”
His voice was cold and clean, each word delivered as if printed on tin. “In the sky spin trillions of galaxies. In each of those galaxies spin trillions of stars. Orbiting these stars are trillions of planets. It is impossibly stupid and self-absorbed, within that mathematical construct, to believe that life could exist in only one case, on our tiny rock of a planet.”
There was a time, Clark knows, a time long before she was born, when her great-great-great-grandparents were children, when mobs of people would appear regularly before the gates, sometimes begging and sometimes trying to battle their way in. Some of these strangers gave up and wandered away. Many remained stubbornly in place or tried to scale the wall until downed by a rifle, which in those days the sentries still carried. And a few, so the stories go, built catapults and tried to hurl the dead into the Sanctuary—poisoned, bloated bodies that split open when they impacted the wall but never crested it. But that was a long time ago, and over the years survivors appeared less and less frequently, finally trickling away, vanishing altogether, the last one spotted sixty years ago.
Now a rider has come. At first the girl seems at a loss, much like the sentries. Her horse snorts and stamps its hooves and spins in circles, while she twists in her saddle, staring up at the wall, trying to make sense of it, its height and expanse and jumbled design a bewildering sight. She wears a broad-rimmed hat and pulls it off now to set on her saddle horn. This reveals a pale line across her forehead—and the dirtied face of a teenager beneath it, maybe sixteen, eighteen. Her hair is dark and cut shoulder length, a wild tangle of burrs and twigs. And though her eyes appear sunken with shadow, they are not. They are black. Totally black. Outer-space black even on the brightest day.
The fire in the brazier crackles and smoke continues to billow upward like the rain-laden cloud they have all been praying for. Clark can almost hear the whispers and gasps and mutters come fluttering up from the Sanctuary as everyone wonders what is the matter, what has been seen. Several sentries have gathered over the gates. One of them has his bow drawn and Clark puts a hand to the arrow and lowers it now. “No,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”
The girl does not call out to them and they do not call out to her. Clark is mute with wonder. They all are. This is not a moment they have prepared for. The girl is the equivalent of a ghost wandering a cemetery, something to fear as well as celebrate, because finally there is proof—that’s what this is, proof—that there is something else out there.
Then comes the thunder of many horses, the rangers returning. A storm of dust accompanies them.
The girl’s horse startles one way, then the other, uncertain where to turn—and the girl, too, whips her face back and forth between the wall and the fast-approaching rangers. She tightens her body and seems ready at one point to jab her heels and fly for the forest, but she remains.
The rangers slow as they approach her and then split their column and surround her in a half ring. Several draw and notch arrows. Behind the girl is the wall and before her their mounts. Whether it is her black-eyed gaze or her spectral emergence from the Dead Lands, several of the men are disturbed enough to mutter the word witch.
Reed drags off his hat and neckerchief. He has what Clark has always thought of as a fox face—sharp, cunning, the corner of his mouth often hiked up in amusement. So different than he appears now, his expression slack-jawed, fearful. Not the leader he needs to be in a moment like this, with the other rangers shivering their arrows in panic.
“Hands up,” Reed says. “I said, hands up!”
Slowly the girl lifts her arms.
“Where have you come from? Who are you?”