Mausami Patal

Mausami Patal enters the expedition at the moment it is about to move on, carrying a pack and a cross and refusing to let the group’s plans leave her behind. She believes Theo Jaxon may still be alive, and her pregnancy gives that belief an intimate urgency: she wants to find him and tell him about their child.

Joining Peter’s party

At dawn, Peter Jaxon’s group gathers near the Storehouse. Peter turns at the sound of footsteps, initially readying his blade, but recognizes Mausami emerging from the undergrowth. She has tracked the party from the Storehouse and urges them to hurry. Her arrival is not a request for permission or a tentative offer to help. When Alicia Donadio starts to address her, Mausami cuts her off and makes clear that she is going.

She directs her question to Peter: does he believe his brother is dead? Peter answers no, and Mausami says she shares that belief. Their agreement binds her decision to the group’s existing search for Theo, even though her reason is also deeply personal. Peter turns to Alicia, who watches the two of them with exasperation; the exchange briefly brings the party’s practical readiness into tension with Mausami’s insistence that she belongs on the journey.

Pregnancy and the search for Theo

As Mausami looks at Peter, her hand moves unconsciously toward her belly. Peter understands the gesture as evidence of her pregnancy, and the recognition comes to him with the force of something already known. Mausami explains that she never had the chance to tell Theo and still wants to. The child is therefore not incidental to her pursuit: finding Theo would allow her to share news that their separation has kept from him.

The scene gives Mausami a clear objective without turning certainty into knowledge. She does not claim to know where Theo is or what has happened to him. Instead, she and Peter hold to the same belief that he may be alive, and that shared conviction supplies the immediate basis for her joining the party. Her hope is active: she has followed the group and arrives equipped to continue rather than wait behind.

Life with the group

In a later account written in the first person, the narrator records taking Mausami’s blood pressure while inventorying recovered medical supplies. Some supplies are unusable, but the narrator has found bandages, splints, and a blood-pressure cuff. Mausami’s reading is 120/80, and the narrator asks her to return each day for another reading and to drink plenty of water. Mausami agrees, while noting that the extra water makes her need the bathroom frequently.

This small exchange places her pregnancy within the expedition’s ordinary routines of care. The group is improvising with limited but useful equipment, and Mausami’s health becomes something the narrator monitors alongside the practical work of survival. The scene does not elaborate on the pregnancy’s medical course; it establishes only the check, the reading, and the requested daily follow-up.

A lead through Amy’s dream

Mausami’s search takes on a new dimension when Amy Harper Bellafonte communicates that Theo is present in the dream with Babcock and the Many. The information is presented in the narrator’s account as a sudden recognition of who is there, followed by the question of whom Amy can see and her answer that Theo is present. It does not explain Theo’s exact condition or location, but it gives Mausami and the others a concrete reason to think he remains reachable through the dream.

Across these moments, Mausami moves from following Peter’s party to sustaining a search shaped by two forms of hope: her belief that Theo is alive and her wish to tell him they have a child. The dream’s identification of Theo does not resolve the separation, but it changes the search from a shared conviction into one with a newly disclosed lead.