Galen Strauss

Galen Strauss is a Watch officer whose marriage to Mausami Patal, his worsening blindness, and his eventual transformation into a viral form a story of devotion that cannot secure the love it seeks. Though he knows Mausami loves Theo Jaxon and eventually understands that her baby is Theo’s, Galen continues to hope he can make a family with her. His final journey away from the Colony ends in a disappearance no one can explain; when his body is later found, Mausami insists that the former husband she deceived be buried and remembered as a man.

Identity and place in the Colony

Galen is a member of the Watch and, by the time disorder spreads through the First Colony, its Second Captain. He has poor eyesight that is widely recognized but not fully understood by those around him. His marriage to Mausami makes him part of the Strauss family, although he had come last in his grade and was usually assigned day shifts: his vision was already a practical limitation on night duty. His rise to captaincy brings responsibility rather than security, placing him in command as the Colony’s institutions and relationships begin to fracture.

Peter Jaxon regards Galen as likable but insubstantial, an impression encouraged by his distracted manner and squint. That judgment is not the whole of him. Galen’s pride makes him conceal how much he cannot see, while his attachment to Mausami leads him to keep trying to make a marriage work even when he recognizes that her affections lie elsewhere. The gap between the man Peter thinks he is and the courage Mausami later remembers becomes central to his posthumous reassessment.

Marriage, pregnancy, and divided loyalties

Mausami had grown up alongside Theo in the Sanctuary and entered the Watch with him. Theo hoped they might eventually pair, but when Mausami married Galen, he accepted her choice while privately grieving it. Peter understood that Theo wanted Mausami to be happy, yet noticed that Theo did not look at him when he said he was fine with the marriage. Their history means that Galen’s marriage begins under the shadow of a love Mausami has not relinquished.

Mausami later becomes pregnant by Theo, not Galen. She had married Galen partly as a bluff intended to provoke Theo out of his gloom; when Theo accepted the possibility that she would marry someone else, the bluff hardened into a decision she felt obliged to carry through. For much of the summer and fall, she tried to make herself feel the right way about Galen. Their shifts rarely matched, which made it easy for her to avoid him, and his worsening eyesight contributed to his being assigned daytime work. She sometimes wondered whether his devotion was directed toward her as she was or toward an imagined version of her.

Galen’s happiness in the marriage makes Mausami’s distance harder, not easier. He is eager to be her husband, while she increasingly feels absent from the relationship and comes to resent his persistence. She recognizes that his kindness and love do not make her love him in return. When she learns she is pregnant, she tells him a version of the timing that makes the baby appear to be his. She knows Theo is the father: the conception followed a night at the power station when she and Theo were alone after Alicia and Dale Levine went to bed.

At the resupply gathering, Alicia Donadio announces Mausami’s pregnancy, and the news momentarily silences the group. Arlo Wilson responds with a grin, while Mausami’s embarrassment turns quickly to anger at the person who disclosed it. Theo, who is present, tells her he cannot let her ride. The announcement makes public what Galen will later have to reckon with privately: the child is not his, and Mausami’s pregnancy cannot repair their marriage.

Blindness and the station assignment

Galen knows that the baby is Theo’s. Finn Darrell had learned that Mausami and Theo were together at the station and told Galen what he had discovered. Galen nevertheless receives Mausami’s claim without exposing the truth. For a moment, he hopes a baby might bring them closer; instead, he anticipates that the lie will remain between them and that they may come to despise one another. His sorrow is complicated rather than simply accusatory: he still loves Mausami and wishes the child were his.

The physical decline that Galen conceals becomes more severe. His field of vision contracts to less than two meters; beyond it, forms dissolve into indistinct shapes and halos. Glasses from the Storehouse do not help and give him headaches, so he stops trying them. He can orient himself by voices, but misses things and knows others may mistake his impairment for stupidity. In reality, he is going blind from acute glaucoma, and every day makes the world less navigable.

After Arlo is gone and the state of the power station is uncertain, Galen is told to go down and secure it. He says he can handle the assignment, though the prospect frightens him. He has left the mountain only a few times and remembers the deserted buildings and infected outside the walls. As a Second Captain, he feels the obligation of command; as a man losing his sight, he understands that the trip may be beyond his abilities. The two roles pull against each other as he prepares to leave.

The Night of Blades and Stars

On the night of the killings known as the Night of Blades and Stars, Galen is on Firing Platform Ten, while Soo Ramirez is at Platform Nine. His vision is so limited that he witnesses events from afar as indistinct movement. The narration makes his impairment consequential to what the Colony can know: a person with better eyesight might have seen more clearly, but Galen cannot identify what happens, and the events on the platform remain unknown to everyone beyond those directly involved. His position turns blindness from a concealed private condition into a limit on the community’s knowledge.

In the aftermath, Galen is caught between the Colony’s demands and his own fear. When the crowd turns against people associated with the Lighthouse and throws Mar Curtis and Elton over the Wall, the killings expose how quickly public anger can overwhelm ordinary authority. Ian then orders Galen to retrieve twelve crates of guns hidden behind a wall in a Storehouse room. Ian says that the Walker matters little to him, but Galen’s wife is Galen’s responsibility; Galen is to bring back the weapons.

Galen leads a party of five: Emily Darrell and Dale Levine ride with him, followed by Hodd Greenberg and Cort Ramirez. It is his first command outside the Wall, but he has little confidence in the party or the mission. As they pass through Banning, he catches only fragments of the ruined town and worries about the dangers beyond the Colony’s defenses. His thoughts return to Mausami and the baby. He no longer feels the same anger; he acknowledges that he may still love her, wonders whether she and the child are safe, and hopes he might be able to tell them so if he finds them.

Near the Eastern Road ramp, Galen’s vision worsens further, with motes of light filling what remains of it. He turns to speak to Dale and discovers that the other riders have vanished. Then, from beneath the overpass, he hears a soft, wet tearing sound. The narrative does not show what happens next. Galen disappears, leaving the station mission unfinished and his fate uncertain to those who remain in the Colony.

Death, memory, and recognition

Galen’s body is eventually found in a barn at the farmstead, where a viral has been killed by a shotgun. Theo and Mausami cannot explain the shot: each believes the other may have fired it, but the gun lay beyond their reach, and footprints suggest a third, unseen person may have been there. When Alicia Donadio and Peter examine the body, its face has regained a recognizable human appearance. Alicia identifies him as Galen, resolving the question of whose body they have found but not why he came there, whether he sought Mausami or the baby, or whether he meant to say goodbye.

Mausami refuses to let the others burn him. Although he had become a viral, she says he had once been her husband and deserved burial. On the second day at the farmstead, the gathered survivors take turns telling stories about Galen—small recollections of something funny, loyal, or kind. The ritual changes the meaning of the body before them: they recognize that the person they are burying was a man, not merely a viral.

Mausami is the last to speak. Holding baby Caleb, she says that Galen was braver than people thought and that he had been nearly blind, though pride kept him from admitting how bad his sight had become. She apologizes for deceiving him about the child. She believes he wanted to be a father and may have come looking for that chance; she wishes he had lived long enough to have it. Her words do not erase the harm of the lie or turn their marriage into a happy one. Instead, they give Galen a more complete memorial: a man capable of love and courage, whose limitations and hopes had been poorly understood while he was alive.