The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  It seemed impossible that anything could still work down here. But he was right—the blades were dustless. And now I looked more closely, I saw how the dust in the rest of the small room was thinner by the edge of the hole, and banked deeper at the edges of the room, as if blown away from that central point.

  “It’s been four hundred years,” I said. “More, probably. You read what it said in all those papers: things stopped working.”

  “Not completely,” he said. And I remembered the occasional faltering of the electric light in my cell in the Keeping Rooms. Had it been like that, in the Ark—just a gradual stuttering in and out of darkness? “And we don’t understand how their machines worked,” he went on. “Just wait, for a while at least. If it starts up while you’re climbing through, it’ll cut you clean in half.”

  We moved away from the blades and sat in the dust by the wall. It was an odd kind of vigil, watching this machine to see if it might spring back to life. We hardly spoke. It was stuffy, and sound moved strangely in the small room, muffled by the dust.

  “It won’t change anything, even if we see it move,” I said. “We still have to get through it.”

  “Let’s just see what we’re dealing with,” he said.

  We’d been waiting for the wheel to turn, but the light came first. Without noise or warning, the room was lit, as thought the darkness were a curtain that had been snatched away. I cowered, my back to the wall. Piper leaped to his feet, his drawn blade sweeping from side to side as he scanned the room. It was painfully bright, after the subdued glow of the lamp. The lights were different from the one in my Keeping Room cell, which had hung on wires. These were set into the ceiling itself, in lines of solid glowing white. There were glowing panels in the walls, too, so we cast no shadows. We had left our shadows on the surface, along with the fresh air and the sky.

  Second after the lights came on, the noise began: a grinding sound like broken glass underfoot. The blades began to turn. Slowly, at first, but within seconds the wheel whirred faster than I could ever have imagined. It became impossible to distinguish the individual blades, and the chamber beyond disappeared entirely from view, the blades converging into a single spinning mass. My hair was blown back from my face, and I raised my arm to shield my eyes as the fan whipped the dust into a frenzy.

  Piper shielded his face too, his gaze shifting from the lights to the spinning blades and back again. I remembered that he’d never seen the Electric before. I’d lived beneath its artificial light for four years in the Keeping Rooms, and seen the intricate machinery of the Tank Rooms and the Confessor’s database. But all of this would be new to him. The white sheen of the lights. The sounds: not just the noisy buzz of the fan, but the low hum of the lights themselves, a burr as insistent as dragonfly wings. After a few moments he’d slipped his knife back into his belt, but his knees stayed bent, ready to move quickly, and he kept his arm raised, fist braced, as though the Electric could be parried with punches.

  “Amazing,” he said to me over the fan’s whirr. “After all these centuries.”

  I stared up again at the lights. Piper was right—there was awe amid my horror. I dared to lean forward, closer to the fan, my face pummeled by the air that the blades threw upward. The illusion of wind, down here where no wind could ever reach.

  I couldn’t stop myself from picturing what would have happened had I been lowering myself through at the instant the blades started up. It would at least have been quick, I thought. A slicing so swift that there would be no time for pain. And Zach, somewhere, would have died just as quickly. Perhaps in a Council meeting, or while inspecting the tanks in one of his new buildings at a refuge. He would suddenly have dropped to the floor, a puppet with the strings cut.

  The brightness and the sound lasted for several minutes, although time was uncertain in that bunkered world. Then the lights blinked twice and failed completely, and the lamp became our only bulwark against the darkness. For a few moments more the blades continued to spin, but without the manic propulsion that we’d just witnessed. Instead, there were several revolutions, each one slower than the last, before the wheel settled into stillness.

  “We still have to get through it,” I said.

  “I know.” Piper held the lamp out over the blades, their sharpened edges glinting.

  I wished he hadn’t realized the wheel still turned. We were going to have to submit to the blades’ mercy anyway. It had been easier before Piper had stripped away the illusion of safety.

  He swung the lamp around the chamber. “There’s nothing here that we could use to jam it,” he said. He was right—no furniture, no panels that looked as though they could be prized loose and jammed between the blades and the hole’s edge.

  “We can’t just lower ourselves through,” he said. “We have to jump. The faster we get through it, the smaller the risk.”

  Together we ventured again to the hole’s rim. At the edge, where the spaces between the blades were widest, each gap was still barely two feet wide. Narrow enough that we’d have to jump with absolute precision to avoid hitting the blades. A painful knock at best. Sliced flesh at worst. And that was if the blades stayed motionless. If the Electric came back while we were passing through, there was no best or worst scenario—only one outcome.

  We waited a while longer, to see whether there was any pattern to the outbursts of the Electric. It must have been about an hour that we sat there, and in that time the lights came on three more times, heralding the fan’s spinning too. But there was no pattern that we could detect. The first two times were close together—only minutes separated them. The third came after a long period of darkness, and lasted only a few seconds, barely long enough for the wheel to achieve full speed.

  The Electric was a ghost, trapped in the wires of the Ark. Its erratic presence added a new dimension of terror to the place, and making me wince at each new flaring of light and sound.

  A few seconds after the last flickers of lights had left us, the blades were slowing.

  “Now,” I said. I stepped to the edge of the hole again. Everything seemed hazy, my eyes still readjusting to the lamp-lit half dark.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “If something goes wrong, on my way through, you go back up.”

  Back up to what? If he died, Zoe would be dead, too. She would never come back, would never be found. The thought of making that cramped ascent, with Piper’s body below me and Zoe’s somewhere above, was worse than the thought of the fan itself.

  “We’ll do it at the same time,” I said.

  He looked at me, then nodded. We stood on opposite sides of the hole.

  “It’s only a short drop,” he said. But we both knew it wasn’t the drop that was making the sweat prickle my forehead. It was what we had to pass through, before we landed.

  “You can’t feel anything?” he asked. “Any sense of when it might start up again?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t even realize it still went around at all.”

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ll jump on three. Do you want to count?”

  “Do you have a lucky number?” I said.

  He gave a quiet laugh. “Let’s not rely on my luck.”

  So I counted to three. I cringed away from the final syllable, but three came anyway, and we jumped.

  I didn’t get it quite right—my left knee clipped a blade’s edge as I dropped through, propelling the next blade into my right shoulder. Piper, the lamp still in his hand, was a blur of light dropping opposite me. And there we both were, on the floor below. Piper exhaled, and I heard myself laughing, even as I was inspecting my shoulder for blood. Our smiles were quashed by the sound of the fan starting up again.

  The wheel began spinning close above our heads. Directly under it, where we crouched, the force of the movement was overwhelming, gusting air pushing us to the ground.

  “If we’d waited a few more second
s,” Piper shouted over the noise. “If my lucky number had been ten, we’d be landing in pieces.”

  “Maybe you’re not so unlucky after all,” I yelled back, crawling to the wall, where the wind’s buffeting was less forceful.

  We scanned the room. Like the one above, the walls were packed with wires, tubes, and buttons—more than the previous room, in fact. The labels on the engraved plates were once again a frustrating mixture of the familiar and the incomprehensible: VENT DUCT LEVEL 4; REROUTE VIA DECONTAMINATION SLUICE. On three of the four walls there were large metal hatches, each one sealed with a black material, cracked and perished.

  “Which one of these is the right way?” asked Piper. He pulled at some of the black edging. It crumbled in his hand. I could see him sizing up the hatches. “Hell on earth,” he shouted in my ear. “I thought we’d finished with tunnels.”

  “We have,” I said. “Look.”

  The lights failed at that instant, throwing us back into lamplit gloom.

  “OK,” I said, into the merciful quiet. “Listen, then.” I stepped back the way I’d come a moment before, and stamped gently. The dust on the ground subdued the sound slightly, but the clang was still audible. Something shifted beneath my foot: a loose panel in the steel floor.

  Piper brought the lamp across, and we knelt together. As we swept the dust aside from the concealed hatch, writing appeared, engraved in the metal of the panel itself.

  EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE ACCESS ONLY.

  DEACTIVATE INTAKE VALVES WHILE HATCH OPEN.

  FOLLOW DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES WHEN LEAVING CONTROL ROOM.

  “Does this count as an emergency?” Piper asked with a sideways smile.

  The floor panel was rimmed in the same black material as the wall hatches, perished and crumbly to the touch. When Piper pulled at the handle, the whole hatch came smoothly away. The tunnel below was wider than any of the other chutes we’d seen so far. Mounted on one side was a steel ladder.

  Thirty or forty yards down the ladder, my feet struck another hatch. I paused for a while, to be sure that I could still feel no movement in the corridor below us. There was nothing but dust, and the residual hum of the Electric. Nonetheless, I moved as quietly as I could, placing the lantern carefully on the floor while I reached down to shift the hatch and push it to the side.

  I lowered myself through the opening, dropping the final few feet to the ground. Piper followed. We were in the Ark.

  chapter 33

  Here, at last, we’d been returned to an environment that was on a human scale. Not that it was hospitable: hard gray floors and low ceilings, and a long corridor receding into darkness in both directions. Every few yards a grille was set into the ceiling, and above them I could feel the network of ventilation tunnels that we had just left. Where we walked, in the main corridor, the lamp illuminated only a few square yards at a time. There, a steel door, open. Here, a corner, all the straight lines softened by dust. There, when Piper swung the light around, another door, opening onto another corridor, another shade of darkness.

  Months before, when Zoe, Kip, and I had passed through the taboo city on the mountain pass, my mind had been jostled by the clamor of the dead. There was none of that here. I wondered if it was because the people of that city had died suddenly, when the blast came—ripped from their lives without warning. In the Ark, there was a different heaviness in the air, choking with silence. A slower dying. Years, then decades, of darkness and creeping and steel doors above them. An unease heavier than the hundreds of feet of stone and earth and river above us.

  “Grim, isn’t it,” said Piper, as he turned the lamp from side to side.

  There was no point answering. Every inch of the place declared its bleakness.

  “I thought it would be different,” he said. “More comfortable, I suppose. I thought they were the lucky ones—but I can’t imagine being stuck down here for long.”

  I remembered too well, from my time in the Keeping Rooms, what conditions like this could do to a person. In those years in the cell, my nerves had been rubbed raw on all the hard surfaces, the locked doors, until each of my senses grated and jangled, and the low ceiling became a mockery of the unseen sky above.

  I led us westward, in the circuitous manner that the Ark’s geography permitted. Even here, out of the cramped ventilation tunnels, the dust was thick enough to mute the sound of our footsteps. Nobody had passed this way for a long time. I didn’t doubt that the Council would have explored the whole Ark, but I could sense that nobody moved or breathed within this layer of the structure. I didn’t even need to look into each room to be sure—their emptiness was as tangible to me as the dust. It was like picking up a water flask, and testing its weight—I had no need to unscrew the lid to know that it was empty.

  Doorways on both sides stood ajar. For now, though, we kept to the main corridor. At regular intervals it passed through thick steel doors. They looked imposing, with elaborate locks, steel tumblers and bars, but each of them was open. I examined one of the locks. There was no keyhole, only a metal cube near the tumblers, studded with buttons, each with a number engraved on it, 0 to 9. These cubes had been unscrewed from the door and hung now from their own exposed wires.

  Each time the sporadic bursts of the Electric unleashed the light, sound came with them. Above the insect buzz of the lights themselves came a whirring noise and occasional clanks from above, where air vents traced the corridors. When the lights went out, we were dropped into silence.

  “No wonder many of them went mad,” Piper said. “It gives me the creeps just being in here.”

  In some sections, water had penetrated the walls. The river above us had been kept at bay, but it had never stopped its stubborn groping downward. Mold spread from the ceiling, a mass of black fur, like the pelt of some huge animal stretched across the right-hand wall of the corridor. We peered into a room in which a fetid puddle covered the entire floor, fed by a slow drip of water from the ceiling. The drips fell at the pace of footsteps, and as we walked away I had to steel myself not to check over my shoulder that we weren’t being followed.

  Ω

  We stepped into a large room where the darkness seemed to push back against the edges of the lamp’s glow. There was a long table, neatly laid: knives and forks set out, along with plates, each one offering up their meal of dust. I ran my hand down the back of one of the chairs. It wasn’t wood, nor leather, nor any other material that I recognized. In the four centuries here, in this underground world, it hadn’t moldered or splintered. It was hard, but not cool under my touch in the way that metal would be.

  Except for the grime, it was an everyday scene—the sort of thing that I would have expected to encounter in a kitchen or an inn. Piper put the lamp on the table and picked up one of the forks, lichened with rust. It clattered when he let it drop back down on the tabletop. I leaned over to set it back into its place, parallel with the knife, then realized how ridiculous it was, re-laying this table for ghosts.

  The next door, like all the others, was open, the tumblers of the lock exposed. I brushed my hand across the front of the door and felt the engraving beneath my palm. When Piper raised the lamp, we could read it clearly, despite the dust still nested in the grooves of the engraved letters: SECTION F.

  “This is where they put the crazy ones, right?” Piper said.

  As I stepped through the doorway, something crumbled beneath my foot, with no more resistance than a dry cookie. At my gasp he swung the lantern around.

  My boot had crushed the thigh bone of a skeleton. The bones lay around my feet, just inside the door.

  Against the far wall, more skeletons lay. The lights came on in the corridor behind us, but the chamber we’d entered remained dark, and I recalled what it had said in the papers: Electricity (excluding ventilation) has been disconnected, to prioritize the needs of the rest of the population.

  I looked back a
t the bones by the door. How long had those locked in Section F waited by the locked door, in the darkness? Had they clawed at the door, screamed and begged for release? The metal of the door bore no marks, told no stories.

  Before we’d descended into the Ark, it was the soldiers and the unknown machines that I’d feared. I hadn’t realized how much horror could lie in something much simpler: a steel door and a cluster of bones.

  Ω

  We came across other bones soon. In a small room, a skeleton was curled on its side on a bunk bed, dust covering it like snow. Farther down the corridor, a scattering of bones lay on the floor. They looked as though they had been kicked aside. A few yards from the rest of the skeletons, a lone skull rested upside down, a bowl of teeth.

  “Did the Council soldiers do this?” I said.

  Piper knelt, examined the bones.

  “It’s recent, whoever it was—look at the color, where the bones’ve been broken.”

  I bent to see. Where the bones had snapped, the lantern revealed bright white, a cross section of clean bone contrasting with the browned surface.

  He moved off down the corridor, taking the light with him.

  The door marked SECTION G had jammed half-closed. We had to sidle in, the jutting tumblers of the lock catching at my shirt.

  There were no beds here. Instead, a row of benches was topped with tubes and handles, and basins set into the steel surface. I peered into one; it had a drainage hole at the bottom, with a dead spider next to it.

  Along the back of the room, shelves were crammed with huge jars, the glass clouded by centuries. Where a jar had crumbled or broken, a ring of sharpened dust remained.

  I drew near to the shelves. Once there might have been liquid inside the jars, preserving their contents like brine in my mother’s pickle jars. Or like the Council’s tanks. There was no liquid left now—just a dirty line of residue below each lid. At the bottom of every jar was a nest of tiny bones.