BACK INSIDE THE PASSAGEWAY, in the red darkness of that first night, Sandra had made her way out of the city. She and her friends had tried to avoid the war, but it was everywhere, and she alone had survived. She tried to flee along the dirt road, wondering if Leo had been telling the truth, wondering if the door had indeed been left open. But as she made her way, she felt a deep rumbling like an earthquake, and she knew immediately that it was too late. Somehow, she knew within herself that it was the sound of the door closing. She had heard that sound once before, when she had first come through the darkness. There would be no leaving, not that way.
Sandra felt older, as if the collapse of the Passageway was aging her. She turned, giving up on the gate, and headed back toward the city. The dirt path that led there already seemed narrower than it had been. The trees were closer and more brittle. The orange-red sky was lower—morning had arrived. The entire Passageway was contracting, becoming less, becoming only that which the dwindling population of people left in it needed.
Maybe the path had shortened because of so much death in the Passageway during Amos’s war that very day, or maybe there was some other reason, but whatever the case, Sandra made it to the city by that first evening. She kept walking, expecting to grow tired, but the tiredness never arrived. So she kept walking through the night, around the edge of the city. A fire raged so that even the night sky was orange, and she heard terrible screams and shouts and even something that sounded like celebrating, but she kept to the shadows. The only people she did see were running away in terror, fleeing into the forest, and they barely gave her a passing glance.
She kept walking, all day long.
By the time the light in the sky was beginning to dim, she’d arrived at the water, and she stood there at that strange confluence of water and forest and city. In the evening light, the city seemed less foreboding. Smoke still rose, but it rose into a pink-orange sky, and the shouts and screams had ended, as if peace had been found, or everyone had died. In the city’s center, every so often she could see down a long street to what looked like a massive tree growing in the middle of the city, taller than any building. It was black against the morning sky, and bare, and it made her shiver with cold or dread or something related to those things. What she didn’t realize was that the Tree, in its dying gasp, had shed itself of the building, and was now the tallest thing in that fading city.
She wasn’t sure where to go. She had seen the Wailers, she had seen the path they followed every night, and she knew the only other place to go was over the water or through it, but how? She sat down with her feet dangling over the edge of the street, the waves crashing against the city’s wall beneath her, and she watched the sky dim. Everything seemed to come from across the water—the wind, the waves, even the light. It was as if that place over the water was the sun, and she was in the far reaches of the solar system, the light and heat barely able to reach her.
When she didn’t know what else to do, she stood up and walked quietly along the water, the burning city to her left. She didn’t walk far before she saw a man sitting on the edge of the street, facing the river as she had not too long before. She stopped. He looked over at her.
“Hello,” he said, his feet swinging, and that’s when she saw the boat.
“Hi there,” Sandra said, walking slower, closer.
“How are you?”
She nodded. “I’m okay. No, actually, that’s not true at all. All my friends have died.”
The two of them remained there, silent, thinking on her words.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Everyone asks that,” he said, shaking his head, clearly marveling at the sameness of humanity. “Everyone.”
“Is that your boat?” she asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“What’s it for?”
“Crossing over.”
“Kinda small for that, don’t you think?” she asked.
“It does the job.”
“Did you . . . come over the water?”
At first he nodded, but uncertainty clouded his face. He squinted as if he wasn’t so sure. “I think so.”
“I thought only the dead can pass over the water,” she said.
“Well, there have been exceptions,” he said. “Some have left the earth without their bodies dying. Very few. Enoch. Elijah. A few others. But very few.”
She stood beside him, looking down at the boat. “Why, that boat has water in the bottom!”
“Yes, that’s right, it does.”
Sandra sat down beside him, there at the side of the street, and leaned forward hesitantly. She didn’t want to fall in.
“I’m lonely,” she said. “There’s nothing left for me here in this city, and I can’t leave through the gate. It’s been locked.”
He looked at her.
“I . . . would like to cross,” she said.
“Well, that is an unusual problem,” he said.
She laughed. “Yes, I suppose it is, seeing as I’m not dead.”
He chuckled. “That is usually the way of it. What’s your name?”
“Sandra,” she said shyly, holding out her hand, and they shook. “What’s your name?”
“Me? Oh, that’s not important.”
They sat there quietly for a long time.
“Do you think this boat could get us there?” she asked.
“I know it will take us where we need to go.”
When the two of them climbed down the rope ladder, one at a time, it strained under their weight and swayed back and forth like a snake dancing above a clay pot. When the two of them boarded the small rowboat, it dropped nearly a foot and water spilled in over one edge.
“Whoa!” Sandra said, hands clenched like vises on the sides of the shaking boat.
The man took the one oar he had and started rowing, first this side, then that, and the boat shifted side to side as he rowed. The water was suddenly perfectly calm, a sheet of glass, and the ripples they made spread out in every direction, stirring the water like angels’ wings. It was almost completely dark now, and the red-black of the sky shimmered on the water.
The boat began to sink ever so slightly as they moved forward. For every twenty feet they traveled, it sank a half inch. More water gathered in the bottom. Soon the liquid skin of the water was even with the sides of the boat.
“We’ll never make it,” Sandra said in a resigned tone. “We’re sinking.”
“It always seems that way, doesn’t it?” he said with a smile. He handed her a small wooden cup. It was plain, without any decoration. “You can use this if you want.”
She scooped the water out of the boat a cup at a time. There was nothing frantic in her movements, and it was enough to keep them level with the water. The water remained calm. It was like sailing on a mirror.
“If you get thirsty,” the man said, motioning toward the cup.
Sandra looked at it, filled it once again, but instead of dumping it outside the boat, this time she drank it.
It was like consuming light.