Gavin was the worst. He complained constantly about the shifts Katie assigned him, how they interfered with his duties to the church. If she had known he would turn out so devout, she would never have chosen him, but she couldn’t let him go now. He was still the best knifeman in the group, and Morgan and Lear looked up to him almost as much as they did Jonathan. (More, perhaps, Katie’s mind often remarked, and she shuddered, feeling that nothing good could come of that.) This in turn swayed Alain and Howell, who followed wherever the majority led. Virginia remained Katie’s staunch ally, but even this felt like a failure to Katie, that she had been able to retain the loyalty of the one woman in the group, but not the men. She didn’t know whether it was sexism or not, but either way, she thought that William Tear would have been disappointed. Sooner or later, she knew, Gavin was going to challenge her for leadership of Jonathan’s guard, and Katie had no idea how she would fight off such a challenge. Jonathan himself would back her, but Katie shouldn’t need Jonathan to intercede; that would only confirm her lack of authority. The problem went round and round in her head, but she could see no answer that didn’t include throwing Gavin out of the guard.
Of course, all of these disagreements had to be hushed up outside their circle. To the Town, the seven of them were merely Jonathan’s friends, and one of them was with him at all times. At night, a member of the guard slept on the spare bed they had moved into Jonathan’s living room. There was much grumbling about night duty, and Katie knew that most of them—Gavin and his people, at least—thought she was being alarmist. Katie didn’t care. There was still no sign of the violence that William Tear had foreseen, but she didn’t doubt that it was coming, and she was determined to spot it far in the distance. She had made Tear a promise, and that promise seemed to mean infinitely more now that he was dead. Some days she still felt as though she and the others were children, merely playing at adult business, but they had no alternative. There was no one else.
She knew that Row Finn had completed two expeditions with Jen Devlin’s team of mountaineers and that, a month ago, he had left on a third. As Row’s friend, she also knew that he was no more interested in exploring than she was. But it was only from Jonathan that she learned what Row was seeking up there in the mountains: sapphire, the same sapphire that lay around Jonathan’s neck. Everyone had found small chunks of the stuff from time to time; it seemed to underlie the bedrock of the Town. But in the mountains, the sapphire was much easier to get to, much easier to chip out in large, unbroken pieces. Jonathan knew this, and so Katie knew it as well, but she didn’t understand precisely what Row would want with that sapphire, or what he meant to do with it if he could bring some back. She did know Row well enough to know that if there was something of value in the world, he would certainly want it for himself, and so in the past two years she had found herself looking at her old friend with something worse than regret: suspicion.
When Row was not off exploring mountains, he went to church every day. He was popular there, so popular that sometimes Paul Annescott let him give sermons. Katie had listened in a couple of times, though she was forced to do so from a stand of oaks across the road; Row’s sermons were so popular that people spilled out the back door and onto the porch. Katie would listen, biting her nails, while Row’s voice boomed through the packed doorway, talking about chosen people, people who were better and more deserving. He did have an excellent voice for a preacher, even Katie had to admit, deep and imbued with emotion that Katie suspected was wholly ersatz. There was an undertone of ruthlessness in Row’s sermons that Katie was not sure others would catch; after all, she had once known him better than anyone. He had always been a consummate actor; the question was how much of the boy had filtered into the man. From Gavin, Katie knew that the church accepted Row’s trips to the mountains as a pilgrimage, forty days’ wandering in the wilderness or some such thing, and this, too, made her uneasy. Row would enjoy the parallel with Christ; always, he had felt cheated by his lack of status in town. If Row wanted to gull his church, Katie would shed no tears for them, but the idea of so many gullible people at any one man’s beck and call seemed inherently dangerous.
To Jonathan?
She didn’t know. In some ways, Jonathan was the biggest mystery of all. Katie often wondered why he should need a guard, when he knew so much more, saw so much more, than the rest of them. Sometimes it felt as though their guard was entirely for show, but Katie didn’t know who they were trying to fool. Sometimes she even wondered whether William Tear had had any plan at all, or whether he had assembled them and trained them simply on a whim. Katie had the ability to kill a man with her bare hands, but how did that benefit anyone, when she couldn’t even see the enemy she was fighting?
“What’s wrong with this place?” she demanded of Jonathan one day, on their way to the library. People waved and smiled at them, but even Katie could feel the great vacancy behind these greetings, sensed the smiles melting the moment they turned away. Something in the Town had become twisted, and until Katie could find the end of the thread, there was no way to unravel it.
“They forgot,” Jonathan replied. “They forgot the very first lesson of the Crossing.”
“Which is what?” Katie hated when Jonathan talked about the Crossing. He knew plenty about it, more than anyone else their ages, but he would only parcel out the information in tiny nuggets.
“We take care of each other.” Jonathan shook his head. “Even the original members of the Blue Horizon seem to have forgotten.”
“Not Mum!” Katie snapped. “She knows.”
“Much good it does.”