The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

If I hadn’t already seen the baby skeletons in the grotto beneath the Council fort at Wyndham, I might have allowed myself to hope that these were the skeletons of some kind of small animals. But denial was a luxury I couldn’t permit myself, and when I forced myself to look closely, it was clear that the small skulls were human, each one tiny enough to sit in my palm.

  “Look,” Piper said. He placed the lantern on the shelf, picked up one of the skulls, and held it out to me.

  I took it. It weighed almost nothing, eggshell-light, and had turned a yellow brown. When I turned it over in my hand, I saw what Piper had noticed: the three eye sockets. I balanced it gently back among the other bones, its three eyes looking out.

  “These were some of the involuntary subjects, then, from Topside,” Piper said.

  In the next room the shelves were larger, and the jars they held were the size of small barrels. At the bottom of each jar were two skeletons, two skulls. These must have been among the earliest of the twins. I bent to stare through the clouded glass into the closest jar. The two skulls had rolled together. One of the tiny jawbones had fallen open, as if mid-cry. The rest of the bones were all dislodged, piled loosely like kindling set for a fire.

  Most of the labels were perished to nothing, or blackened with fungus. On some, though, we could still make out words:

  Pair 4 (Secondary twin: Hyperdontia)

  7 (Secondary twin: Polycephalic)

  One of the skulls had row after row of teeth overlapping. In another jar, the larger of the two skulls sported four eye sockets, and two noses.

  I tried to picture these people, the Ark dwellers, labeling the jars. Attaching convoluted names to Omegas, as if these labels would make our bodies less unruly. Seeking out all the ways in which we diverged from them. Cutting open the children; assembling and reassembling them; counting their bones.

  The back wall of the next room was constructed entirely of drawers, floor to ceiling. I pulled one open. It was deeper than I could have imagined; it slid out more than a yard, and would have slid further if I hadn’t been stopped by the rattle of loose bones. Staring up at me was a skull, still rocking slightly.

  Each of the drawers we opened was the same. I was beginning to feel that the whole Ark was constructed not of steel and concrete but of bones.

  Piper saw me blanching, and pushed shut the drawer that I was holding.

  “These bones don’t tell us anything,” he said. “Why are there no papers? No records?”

  “The Council’s cleared it out.”

  There was nothing here to show us how the Ark dwellers had managed to undo the fatal bond. If that information still existed, it had been taken or destroyed by Zach and the General.

  Piper kicked the drawer nearest to him. Something inside it dislodged and clanged against the steel.

  “There are still more levels to search,” I said, trying to keep the hopelessness from my voice. “And they haven’t finished with the Ark yet. There’s a reason the soldiers are still here.”

  We trawled those dusty rooms for hours. Walls with a tracery of rust and damp. A baby’s skull the exact weight of a nightmare. A bench with bones laid out like a shop display.

  Ω

  Now, in the corridors below us, the soldiers were moving. I could feel them, just as I could feel the river moving above us. It was an awareness that was neither hearing nor sight, but was no less vivid. Once or twice, noises did penetrate from below. The clank of metal on metal; a distant shout. I was afraid to lead us down there, but hours of searching the two upper levels had revealed nothing but mildew and bones. The Council, or somebody before them, had taken everything that could be of any use. And the soldiers themselves had long ago abandoned these higher levels—the dust confirmed that.

  I dragged a chair beneath one of the ventilation grilles in the ceiling, and Piper stepped up onto it and used his knife to unscrew the metal grate. The rust had done its work, so it took him a while, but when the grille was laid on the floor we hauled ourselves through the gap and back into the network of tunnels.

  There were grates every few yards, so as we crawled along the tunnels that traced the corridors, we could peer down periodically and catch glimpses of the empty rooms and corridors that we passed. I guided us to where the tunnel sloped down, following a flight of stairs to the next level, and then I extinguished the lantern, so that our own light wouldn’t betray us. From then on, we could see only when the Electric flashed on, the grilles casting stripes of light in the tunnel, allowing us to look down to the concrete floors below.

  The lights were off when we heard the soldiers coming. Two of them, from the sound of the footsteps, accompanied by the noisy rattling of a handcart. They rounded the corner, the lantern mounted on the cart swinging from side to side and throwing seasick shadows on the corridor walls.

  I froze, and tried not to panic at how the steel tube amplified even the sound of my breath.

  There was a jolt as the cart scraped against the wall, and one of the men swore.

  “Go steady. That’s not hay you’re pushing.”

  They were almost below us now. I could see the sweat on the balding head of the older soldier, as he paused to steady the cart.

  The second man grunted. “Hot as hell down here. Can’t blame me for being in a hurry to get outside.”

  I squinted, trying to make out what was inside the cart itself, but all I could see was a bundle of wires, and the glint of metal.

  “You tip the cart and break this stuff and neither of us is going anywhere,” the bald man said. “You saw what happened to Cliff.”

  The younger man said nothing, but slowed his pace. “Won’t be sorry to see the back of this place,” he said.

  “You’re not staying on with the technicians?”

  The younger man shook his head. “I’ll be working on the installation at the new bunker, once this is all sorted.”

  They had moved out of sight, but not out of earshot. I didn’t dare to follow them—the sound of our crawling, only a yard above their heads, was too great a risk.

  The older man spoke. “You won’t have too long to wait. Two weeks, if all goes smoothly, they were saying in the mess tent yesterday. But three’s more like it, I reckon.”

  “Three at least,” his companion said. I had to strain to catch his words as the men drew farther away. “Unless they start having us pull night shifts. Going to be a bitch of a job, clearing those last few rooms. The corridors down there are only just wide enough for the mobile generators. Some of it’s going to have to be taken apart on site.”

  For a while longer we could hear the rattle of the cart, and then nothing. After that we moved even more slowly and flinched at each accidental thud of our knees and elbows on the echoing metal tunnel. A lone soldier passed below us, and then another pair with a cart, but they moved too fast for us to see any detail through the grates. Sometimes fragments of conversation reached us, from soldiers we couldn’t even see, the sound garbled by the pipes. Back to the comms room . . . Without the batteries. . . If it’s fish again tonight I swear . . . Check under the converter rig . . .

  After an hour or more I noted that they had all begun to head in the same direction: outward, toward the stairs that led to the western door.

  We forced ourselves to wait another hour. Counting the seconds helped to keep my mind off the heat and the hunger, and the pain of my knees and elbows from dragging myself through the tunnels.

  When an hour had passed without soldiers, and I could sense no movement in the area around us, I relit the lamp. There was no quiet way to leave the tunnels. I managed to blunt my knife scraping at the rusted bolts, and in the end I had to shuffle forward so that Piper could dislodge the final screw with several blows from his elbow, sending the panel crashing down to the concrete floor six feet below. Here, where the soldiers had been working and walking, there wasn’t even a layer of dus
t to muffle the clang.

  Piper dropped quickly after the grate, and I followed, half convinced that I was lowering myself into an ambush. But there was only Piper, knife in hand, slightly hunched in the low-roofed corridor.

  “Help me put the panel back,” I whispered.

  “If they didn’t come at that noise, there’s no point whispering,” he replied, but he did as I said, taking the other side of the grille and helping me to rest it back into position. A soldier would have needed to look closely to see that it was no longer fixed in place.

  Night must have come to the surface, where the soldiers guarded the entrances on the hill above us. My hunger reminded me, too, how long we’d spent in the Ark, and Piper and I ate some of the jerky, which my pockets had not protected from the dust. As we chewed, we walked in silence along the narrow corridors inspecting the many rooms leading off it. Some were empty; others contained furniture, but all the shelves had been stripped, and the drawers sat open and bare.

  The small room at the end of the corridor was different. Instead of furniture, the walls were covered with machines, metal boxes built into the walls. Dust had settled on the buttons and dials, but it was nowhere near as thick as in the upper levels. Some of the machine casings were opened, and partly dismantled. From one panel, a tangle of wires spilled, reminding me of the man I’d seen during the battle of New Hobart, his guts unspooling from his sliced stomach.

  The lights came on. I moved to one of the walls and tried to read what I could of the labels, but the words meant nothing to me: Satellite 4. Triangulate. Radio Rec 2.

  Next to me, Piper ran his hand along the smooth front of a piece of black glass, his finger leaving a line in the dust.

  The voice that filled the room was at once too loud, and too distant. Piper spun, pushing me between him and the door as he pulled out his knife. But the noise didn’t come from the door, or from any single place. It seemed to echo throughout the room, from all sides at once.

  My hand, too, was on my knife. But there was no soldier to aim at, or to cower from. I couldn’t match the evidence of my ears to what I could see: the empty room. And what I could feel: the absence of any living person, other than the two of us, frozen by the doorway.

  The voice stopped and started, like Xander when he hurled himself again and again at the locked door of language. In between the fragments of words, there were bursts of noise. A crackling like a fire catching on dry hay.

  . . . is a recorded transmiss . . . from the Confederacy of the Scattered Islands . . . in the detonations, and suffered direct strikes on. . . survivors, but the southern and western regions remain uninhabitable . . . despite massive loss of life. . . agriculture reestablished, and progress in . . . the plague of twins successfully treated, except in outlying islands . . . ­mutations widespread but varying in severity . . . latitude, and . . . please respond . . . se respond . . .

  . . . is a recorded transmiss . . . from the Confederacy of the Scattered Islands . . . in the detonations . . .

  Six times we listened to it. The same words, and the same blasts of raw noise. Then the lights went out again, and the darkness extinguished the sound.

  I had thought the Electric was like a ghost, trapped in the wires of the Ark. But this was the real ghost: a voice from Elsewhere, captured here in this airless room. Somehow, through the miles and the years and the machines, this message had come through.

  My heart battered at my ribs like a fist. Piper and I didn’t speak. What was there to say? I felt as though language itself had taken on a new gravity, as if I had understood, for the first time, the power of words. That string of broken words, spat out by the machine, came from Elsewhere. Each word was a new blast, reshaping our world.

  For the next hour, each time the Electric returned, we explored the machines in that room. But all we succeeded in doing was starting and stopping the voice, by pressing the panel that Piper had touched. The rest of the machines yielded nothing to our frantic fingers. Many were half-disassembled; all were coated in dust. And there was nothing else to find: no papers, no maps. Nothing more tangible than the voice.

  Even as we searched, I knew that it was futile. If these machines were still working, and if they were capable of receiving any further messages from Elsewhere, there would be soldiers here night and day. The Council had searched this room more thoroughly than we ever could. The only thing that the machines could do now was to regurgitate that single message. We had found all that there was to find, and it was enough. It proved that Elsewhere had survived, and that they had ended the twinning. And it proved that the Council knew it, too.

  chapter 34

  It was hard to keep track of time down there, where sunlight was a memory, and even the air was heavy with dust. But we knew that the soldiers must return, and that when they did we’d have to retreat back to the ventilation tunnels, or to the upper levels. I knew also that the Ark had not revealed all its secrets to us. Elsewhere has survived, but we still had to find it. Undoing the twinning was possible, but we still needed to know how. So we left the room of the sporadic voice, and I led Piper down the eastern corridor, and down the stairs.

  At the base of the staircase, the door had been blasted open—only a margin of steel remained, hanging from the twisted hinges. A sign on the wall read SECTION A—RESTRICTED ACCESS (LEVEL 6A). Beyond the doorway, the lights in the corridors no longer flared on and off, but were constant and unflickering. It felt strange that the deepest levels of the Ark were the brightest. But the papers had shown that the Pandora Project had been kept going, even when the Ark residents were rationing the lights, and locking some people away in the dark. Here, in the belly of the Ark, the Electric was still working properly. There had been hints, in Joe’s papers, that the Ark had some fuels that wouldn’t fail: the nuclear power cells will outlast us all. But it was one thing to have read it on a moldering page, in words whose meanings had been buried along with the Ark, and another to see it here: the unflinching light that had endured all this time. It seemed a kind of magic, some witchery of machines.

  Piper had passed through the doorway. I paused for a moment behind him. The horrors of the Ark had been vivid enough by lamplight, and in the inconsistent electric lights that had flared on from time to time. Whatever was in Section A we would have to face without the mercy of darkness. I took two slow breaths before I followed Piper through the door.

  For an instant I thought I’d been hit on the head. The blast was so vivid, the explosion of light so forceful, that I screamed, stumbling forward and reeling into Piper, my hands clutched to my face. Piper’s lips were moving, but the snarl of flames in my head swallowed all other noise. He propped me upright but I shrugged him off, blundering past him to crouch against the wall, my head squeezed between my forearms.

  When the vision had receded I was able to stand once again, but white spots still blurred my sight, and the smell of scorching was thick in my nostrils.

  “Keep going,” I said to Piper, waving him forward, and shaking my head to try to clear it. I kept one hand on the wall to steady myself as we walked further down the corridor. There was a noise here that had been absent from the rest of the Ark. I closed my eyes to listen to it: the hiss of water. I’d felt the river above us ever since we’d entered the Ark, but now I could hear it too. As well as the ventilation tunnels, huge water pipes traced the ceiling, and they rumbled with the river’s black current.

  Room after room was empty. Not empty in the same way as the upper levels that we’d wandered, where the stark gray walls appeared always to have been bare. The rooms in Section A had been hollowed, stripped of their contents. The walls themselves were half removed, whole panels missing, the wiring and tubes exposed. Elsewhere the wires had been cut, close to the walls. Copper tendrils sprouted from the frayed stumps.

  The blast recurred in my head, aftershocks stuttering like the lights in the Ark’s upper levels. I clenched my teeth t
ogether and tried to concentrate on the wreckage of these rooms. There were so many of them: huge chambers, and small rooms that branched off them. All had been stripped.

  There was no trail of smashed equipment like the one Kip and I had left behind in the silo when we’d tried to break the machines. There were no machines here, broken or otherwise, except a few trailing wires. Where things had been removed from the walls, they’d been carefully excised: neat saw marks on the concrete showed where whole structures had been excavated. All that remained were labels on doors or walls, for things that were no longer there:

  COOLANT PUMP (3)

  CONDENSATE OUTLET

  VALVE PRESSURE (AUX)

  “The Council haven’t destroyed anything,” I said. “They’re just moving it to somewhere else.” I thought of the new bunker that the soldier had mentioned a few hours earlier.

  They hadn’t quite finished stripping Section A yet. Farther into the warren of rooms, we found some that had not been cleared, or not entirely. Wall panels were still intact, each one crowded with dials and buttons. Several had constellations of lights, too, flashing green or orange. In some of the rooms, the dismantling was halfway completed, panels removed and their workings exposed. A parchment lay on the floor, a detailed drawing mirroring the panel nearby, with each wire and socket numbered. Beside it sat a handcart, half-loaded with the disassembled machines, each item tagged with a numbered label. When I examined the diagram on the floor, I could make nothing of it: only numbers, and the odd unfamiliar word: Launch coordinates. Manual override. The complexity of the machines was overwhelming—it was clear that shifting the equipment had been the work of years. It was like dismantling and relocating an entire beach, with each grain of sand meticulously labeled.

  The next room, though it was only small, hummed with noise. The open door wore an engraved placard:

  H2S PROJECT

  CLASSIFIED

  ACCESS RESTRICTED—CERTIFIED H2S TECHNICIANS ONLY