Peter and Amy’s journey to the mountain

Peter and Amy’s journey to the mountain is both an escape from the garrison and a passage into an unknown future. Peter chooses to leave with Amy rather than accept the life and attachments awaiting him there; as they travel through winter wilderness, Amy’s wordless certainty leads them to a beacon, a singing voice, and Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, who reveals that she has been waiting for them.

The decision to leave

Peter’s departure follows a conversation in which he gives Hollis his blessing to join Sara and Michael on a convoy. Hollis admits that he loves Sara and feels he is no longer suited to the work ahead; Peter does not make him justify the choice. His generosity toward Hollis clarifies Peter’s own decision: he is willing to let his friend pursue a life with Sara, while he chooses a different road with Amy.

Major Greer, too, receives Peter’s decision as something expected. Greer has shown Peter drawings kept by a general, explaining that remembering someone lets part of them live on. Peter confirms that he will leave in the morning, though Greer asks whether all five will go or only Peter. The question frames the departure as a consequential separation from the group, not simply a change of route.

Peter prepares for cold and exposure with practical care. Before dawn, he packs blankets, extra socks, sleeping sacks, ponchos, a tarp, and rope, and takes an entrenching tool, a hand axe, and heavy parkas from the supply tent. He leaves while Hollis sleeps, without telling him, and finds Amy already waiting with a small pack. Sara is elsewhere, with Sancho and the others in the infirmary; Peter and Amy set out alone.

Leaving the garrison

Peter leads Greer’s large black gelding from the paddock and rigs the packs across its withers because a saddle will not work with two riders. The cold has stiffened his fingers by the time he lifts Amy onto the horse and climbs up after her. They keep to the shadows beneath the pickets and ride toward the gate as a thin snow begins to fall.

At the gate, Eustace, the lieutenant who had earlier alerted Peter to the raiding party’s return, tells him that the Major has ordered the sentry to let them pass. Greer has also sent a duffel bag, with instructions to take whatever they need. The provision is a quiet acknowledgment of Peter’s choice: the garrison will not hold him, even as the bag equips him to survive beyond it.

Amy asks whether it is time. Peter tells her it is. At the gate she looks up at the snow, flakes caught in her hair and lashes; Eustace helps Peter onto the horse, and the gate opens. Peter gives the barracks one last look, finding it quiet and unchanged, then rides out with Amy into the breaking day. The stillness behind them makes the departure feel less like a victory than a threshold crossed without ceremony.

The road through winter

By midday they have found the river again and ride beneath steady snowfall. Amy sleeps against Peter’s back, her pale wrists slack in his lap; he feels the warmth and measured rise and fall of her breathing while the horse’s breath streams behind it. The scene places their fragile bodily closeness against a landscape increasingly muffled by snow, with black birds calling faintly from the trees.

As he rides, Peter’s attention turns to the people and moments he has left behind. He remembers his mother asleep with her glasses on the table, and the knowledge that she would die; Theo at the station, holding Peter’s foot, and later beside Mausami on the farmstead porch as they watched the group leave. Auntie’s overheated kitchen and terrible tea return, as does the last night at the bunker, when everyone drank whiskey and laughed at something Caleb had done or said. He recalls Sara after the first snowfall, sitting in sunlight with a book and saying, “How beautiful it is here;” the memory ends on Alicia’s name. This sequence gathers the journey’s emotional cost into a roll call of particular people, places, and shared moments.

The pair follow a road that has nearly disappeared beneath the snow, marked only here and there by a rusted sign or weather-beaten guardrail. In a narrowing valley, cliffs rise on either side. At a fork, one route continues beside the river; the other crosses an arched bridge of exposed girders and climbs into the trees. Amy chooses the crossing.

The choice immediately presents a practical obstacle. The bridge’s wooden decking has rotted away, leaving roughly fifty meters of exposed beams; Peter thinks he and Amy might manage the crossing on foot, but the horse cannot. Snow reaches almost to the tops of his boots as they approach the bank. Amy remains certain, and the journey’s progress now depends on leaving behind the animal that carried them away from the garrison. Her direction repeatedly precedes Peter’s understanding: the route is not made safe by his planning, but opened by her certainty.

The beacon and the voice

Later, when Peter asks where the presence Amy senses might be, she closes her eyes and tells him it is everywhere, asking him to listen. He reaches outward with his mind but hears only wind. His hope collapses into the conviction that there is nothing there—until he hears a human voice. Someone, somewhere, is singing. The first sign that the wilderness is not empty arrives not as a visible settlement or an answer to Peter’s search, but as sound.

They see a beacon rising above the trees at the edge of a clearing. The surrounding signs of habitation are all remnants: ruined buildings and abandoned vehicles beneath the snow, and a broad debris-filled depression that appears to be the foundation of a vanished structure. Beside it stands a tall, cable-anchored metal tower. Its gray, spiked orb and petal-like panels are unfamiliar to Peter, but the lettering he uncovers on one strut identifies it as belonging to the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

The singing grows stronger as Peter follows Amy into the underbrush. Its phrases seem to come from all directions. In a small clearing, he finds a woman standing in the dooryard of a log house with lit windows and smoke curling from its chimney. She is shaking blankets from a line and gathering them into a basket, apparently absorbed in her work. Her wool cloak leaves her legs bare to the snow, and she wears rope sandals. The ordinary domestic task—taking in laundry—makes the sight of a settled, inhabited home more startling than the beacon itself.

As Peter and Amy approach, the woman’s song resolves into words from “All Through the Night.” Her voice is rich and full-throated, and she appears not to notice them until they are only a few meters away. Then she turns to Amy, asks whether they should tell Peter who she is, and Amy nods. The woman identifies herself as Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto and says she is the one who has been waiting for them.

The journey’s turning point

The arrival at the log house changes the meaning of the journey. Peter and Amy have left a known community for a cold, uncertain route; the ruined road and unusable bridge have tested their means of travel, and Peter has briefly believed that no one could be found. Amy’s perception directs them onward, while the distant song makes a human destination perceptible before it can be seen. The ending answers that search with a person rather than an explanation: Sister Lacey is alive, established in a home, and expecting them.

The chapter’s images sharpen the contrast between departure and arrival. Peter leaves a quiet barracks at dawn, carrying supplies against the cold; he reaches a lighted house where smoke rises and blankets hang drying. Along the way, memory keeps the absent group present—Hollis, Sara, Michael, Peter’s family, and Alicia—while Amy’s silent decisions draw him toward a new encounter. The journey therefore separates Peter from the garrison without erasing his attachments, and closes on the promise that the mountain wilderness contains a life and history still to be discovered.