Mausami Patal–Theo Jaxon

Mausami Patal and Theo Jaxon’s relationship is a secret love carried forward by their child. Mausami marries Galen Strauss partly in an effort to provoke Theo into confronting his feelings, but the marriage cannot displace her attachment to Theo; when she becomes pregnant, she conceals the child’s paternity from Galen and imagines telling Theo. After learning of the night’s terrible events, she makes the pregnancy a reason to believe Theo is alive and resolves to leave the Sanctuary to find him.

A marriage shaped by Theo

Mausami’s marriage to Galen is bound up with her effort to reach Theo. She had planned to tell Theo about the baby during a journey to the station, where its enclosed rooms might give them a private moment. Looking back, she recognizes that her pairing with Galen had begun as a bluff: she wanted to jar Theo out of his gloom. When Theo accepted the possibility of her marrying Galen and said he wanted her to be happy, the bluff hardened into a stubborn decision. She wanted to prove him wrong about her, about himself, and about what their relationship could become.

For a time, through summer and into fall, Mausami tried to make the marriage work, hoping that she could will the right feelings into being. Their Watch duties and differing shifts made it easy to avoid one another. Galen was usually on day shift, a consequence of his low standing in his grade and his poor night vision. His happiness in the marriage did not bring Mausami closer to him: she increasingly wondered whether he loved her as she was or an imagined version of her. By the first snowfall, she found herself wishing she could simply wish him away, and his efforts to be a husband only deepened her dislike.

The secret of the pregnancy

Mausami knows the child is Theo’s, not Galen’s. When Galen caught her vomiting, she altered the dates she gave him, saying she had missed three periods when she had missed two. The distinction concealed the paternity: Galen had been with her only once during the relevant month, while Mausami knew precisely when she had conceived and with whom. She had refused Galen that one time, then later spent a night at the station with Theo, Alicia, and Dale Levine. After Alicia and Dale went to bed, Mausami and Theo were alone together for the first time since her wedding. She began crying, Theo comforted her, and the intimacy between them followed quickly.

She barely saw Theo after that night. They rode back the next morning and returned to their ordinary routines, but Mausami carried the pregnancy as a private happiness. Galen noticed that her mood had improved and that she smiled more. She even felt an absurd, friendly wish to share the good news with him, though she knew the child was not his. Her attention instead turned toward the next trip to the station and the chance to be with Theo again. The date was visible on the duty roster, and the long wait became part of the happiness she associated with him.

The child as a future

When Mausami understands that she is pregnant, her first fear is that Theo would not want a baby, especially under these circumstances. Then the meaning of the child changes for her. Love might remain an idea, but a baby would be a fact: a person with a mind and nature, whose existence would extend into a future. Mausami sees the child as a promise that life can continue, and wonders whether the prospect of a baby might be what Theo needs most.

She imagines telling him in the small room of shelves at the station. In the future she pictures, Theo recognizes the child as theirs, asks what they should do, and takes her in his arms. They return together to face Galen and everyone else. This imagined conversation joins the private pregnancy to a hoped-for reconciliation: she expects the child to make a shared life imaginable and to draw Theo back toward a future he has lost sight of. But she knows that this anticipated scene exists only in her mind; with Theo gone, the story she had been telling herself seems impossible.

From imagined reunion to a search

After a terrible night at the Sanctuary, Mausami passes a restless night and morning in a second-floor classroom among the Littles. She learns what has happened through Other Sandy, whose husband Sam arrived at first light. In that aftermath, her decision forms with sudden clarity: she is going to have Theo’s baby, and because the baby is Theo’s, she cannot believe Theo is dead. The conclusion is not confirmation that he has survived; it is the conviction that gives her a reason to search for him.

Mausami decides to find Theo and tell him about their child. She chooses the shift change just before Morning Bell as her opportunity to leave, when the transition can provide cover and daylight for the walk down the mountain. She plans to go by the cutout, whose limited sightlines offer concealment, and to equip herself from the Storehouse with a rope to descend the Wall, food and water, a cross and blade, sturdy boots, spare clothes, and a pack. The relationship that began in secrecy thus becomes a purpose that moves her beyond the Sanctuary: the child is both the proof of her bond with Theo and the future she intends to carry toward him.