The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

I looked up at Piper, but his face was as blank as mine.

  “You didn’t find anything about this in Joe’s papers?” he said.

  I shook my head and stepped inside.

  I’d expected some new horror, but what greeted us in the half-dark room was familiar. I knew by the smell, even before I saw the shape of the tanks, lit only by the flashing lights above them. The air of the room was thick with the too-sweet stench of the tank liquid, overlaid with a sour taint of dust and decades.

  There were ten tanks, in two neat rows. The glass was smeared with grime. From the metal ring that encased the base of each tank, a rash of orange rust crept up the glass.

  In most of the tanks, a figure floated. I’d thought that Sally was old, but these figures had passed beyond old age and back into a kind of fleshy babyhood. They curled in the water, their bloated skin puffy. Their flesh was loose on them, and it was pale and wet as the skin under a freshly peeled scab. Their noses and ears seemed too large, as if these had kept growing while the rest of their bodies wasted.

  They were all men. If they’d once had hair, it had gone now, the skin bare even where their eyebrows and eyelashes should have been. Their fingernails were so long that they dragged on the base of the tanks, tangled like the dangling roots of the swamp trees near New Hobart. The nails on their toes had browned and curled tightly. One of the men had his eyes slightly open, but they revealed only whiteness. It was impossible to tell whether his eyes were rolled back, or whether all the years of immersion had bleached his irises.

  When we’d sailed to the island, Kip and I had seen jellyfish floating in the dark water. The men in the tanks reminded me of those: the formlessness, and the puffy, sodden texture of their flesh.

  Piper moved closer to the tanks. His mouth was twisted, his nostrils narrowed—his whole face distorted with disgust.

  “Are they alive?” he asked.

  I looked more closely. In the front row of tanks, nearest the door, there were still tubes in the men’s noses and wrists. The flesh had grown around the tubes so that it was hard to tell where the skin ended and the tubes began. I pressed my face to the glass and stared at one of the men’s wrists, where a fleshy tuber protruded, swallowing the first few inches of the tube. The machines above the tanks still thrummed, and the man vibrated, nearly imperceptibly, with the machine’s pulse.

  In the back row of the tanks, however, the machines had been dismantled, and the tubes stripped away. Two of them still held men, but they floated utterly motionless, the surface of the liquid undisturbed by the electric hum.

  I pointed to them. “These ones are dead,” I said. “The liquid’s kept them from rotting, but the Council must’ve taken the machines apart, to see how they worked.”

  The last three tanks in the back row were empty, their lids open. The liquid had been drained—only a few inches remained, a sticky puddle at the floor of each tank. Over the lip of one of the tanks, two tubes hung limply.

  “And these ones?” Piper gestured his head at the front row, below the intact machines.

  “Not dead,” I said. “But not alive, either. There’s nothing there—just their bodies.”

  “Are they really from the Before?”

  I didn’t need to tell him. The scene in front of us was its own answer. The ancient tanks; the flesh that had grown over the tubes; the skin bleached of color, steeped in centuries of silence.

  “Who did this to them?” Piper said. “I thought this started with Zach. Why would somebody tank these people in the Before? They didn’t even have twins—not proper ones like we do.”

  I shook my head. “I think they did it to themselves.”

  I should have known that the idea for the tanks would have its origin here. The Council, or perhaps Zach himself, had found this and replicated it. In Zach’s hands, these ten tanks had spawned thousands of others. The ten glass tanks in this room had begun something that would be the end of all Omegas. Where Piper and I saw a ghoulish and futile exercise, Zach and the General had seen an opportunity.

  I walked to the side wall. A plaque was mounted there. Rust from the wall had corroded it, but when I raised the lamp I could see that somebody in recent years had scraped clean the words engraved in the center, so that they were legible.

  HERE THE SURVIVING MEMBERS OF THE ARK’S INTERIM ­GOVERNMENT ARE PRESERVED, IN THE HOPE THAT IF ­HUMANITY HAS SURVIVED ELSEWHERE, WE MAY BE FOUND, AND AWAKENED, TO SHARE THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR TIME, AND TO PASS IT ON TO NEWER GENERATIONS.

  “The knowledge of our time?” I said. And I found myself laughing—a hacking laughter that my body threw up as a final defense against what I was seeing. “Waiting, all this time, for humanity to find them. When they knew, all along, about the survivors above them.”

  I moved to join Piper, back by the tanks.

  “They must’ve realized, in the end,” I went on, “that nobody was coming to find them. They’d heard the message from Elsewhere, but nothing else. All those years. Decades.” I wrinkled my nose as I stared at the bodies. Despite the bloatedness, the men had no deformations. No extra limbs, or missing eyes. Each of the floating men a piece of pickled perfection. They were saving themselves—but not for us. I stood next to Piper, his single arm touching the glass beside my own raised hands. To these men, Piper and I would have been no more than abominations.

  He was staring at the nearest man’s wrist, where tube had become flesh, or flesh had become tube.

  “If they’re alive,” Piper said, “should we try to wake them? Talk to them? Hell on earth, if these are really people from the Ark, from the Before, then think what they could tell us. More about Elsewhere, for one thing.”

  “The Council’s already tried that,” I said, gesturing at the three empty tanks. “But I could’ve saved them the effort: these men can’t tell us anything.” Stepping closer to the glass, I watched the white eyes of the floating man. I pressed my hands to the tank, but I could feel nothing but the glass against my palms. When I’d seen the unconscious Omegas in the tanks beneath Wyndham, I’d felt a spark of presence within each of them. That was what had made their suspended state so appalling: knowing that trapped within each stranded body was a mind. But the man who drifted in front of me now was simply a sack of flesh, with no consciousness to animate it.

  “They’re not dead,” I said, “but there’s nothing left of them.”

  These were not people, any more than driftwood was a tree.

  We left them there, in the tanks they’d built for themselves. The smell clung to us long after we’d gone.

  We moved through more half-emptied rooms and echoing corridors. We were at the southern end of Section A when the blast came again. Just ahead of me, Piper had entered a large room. When I followed him, the memory of flames radiated from the doorway in a blast so total that my eyes rolled back in my head. I reeled backward, and I must have cried out, because I felt Piper grab me round the waist as I fell, and then everything went. It didn’t go black—it just went. The world was ripped away by flame, and I was unconscious before Piper had lowered me to the ground.

  Ω

  When I woke, I was lying on the concrete floor. I put my hand to my face and felt the furring of dust, where it had stuck to my sweaty skin.

  Another flash of light erupted behind my eyes.

  “I can’t handle this now,” I said, shaking my head as if that would make it stop.

  “Calm down,” he said. “Listen to me.”

  “Don’t tell me how to handle it,” I barked at him. “It’s the end of the world, and it’s happening in my head. Again and again. You have no idea what it’s like.” The only person who did know was Xander. And Lucia, before the water took her. These were the only ones who would understand me now: the dead and the mad.

  “What if it’s not what you think it is?” Piper said quietly.

  I stared at him. “You’re not the one
who has to live with it every day. You think you can do a better job of dealing with it or understanding it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “I’m just asking you to think about it.” He bent close to me. “Why do you see the past in that one vision and not in any of the others?”

  It was hard to concentrate on his question, with the flames still burning in the edges of my mind, and the earth and the river above bearing down on me.

  “I do have other visions of the past, sometimes.” I sat up. “Impressions of it, anyway.” I couldn’t always disentangle my visions from my dreams or my memories, and time was capricious in all of them. In the taboo town, on the mountaintop, I’d felt the lives and deaths of four hundred years ago hanging over the town like a fog. And when Piper had told me about the massacre on the island, a week or more after it had happened, I’d seen it unfolding. At other times, I saw distant events at the same time as they happened. I’d learned too well that if I witnessed a death then my visions would probably force me to witness the twin’s death at the same moment.

  “I know it’s not straightforward,” Piper said. “But almost all of your visions—the real ones—they’re of the future, not the past. Why would the blast be different?”

  I shook my head. “The blast isn’t just the past, though. It doesn’t fit into time like other things do.” Piper had ridden through the ash drifts of the deadlands beside me. He of all people should know that the blast had never ended. In our crooked bodies and our blighted world, we lived it every day.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve always assumed that your blast visions are flashbacks. But what if you stop trying to justify why they’re different from your other visions, and consider that they might be just the same?” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “Why else would the visions of the blast be happening more and more often? Not just for you, but for Xander, too. Even for Lucia, before she died.” He paused. I could hear the river above us, and the hum of the Electric. My own pulse pounding in my head, urgent as running footsteps. “Something’s coming, Cass. What if it’s not the past you’re seeing, when you see the blast? What if it’s the future?”

  “No,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me: high and quavering.

  “That’s the Pandora Project that they were working on here in Section A—it’s not about finding Elsewhere, or splitting the twins. It’s the blast. The machines to do it again.”

  “No.” It was a shout, a plea. I wanted to hush him—I felt as if his words themselves might unleash the flames. If he’d seen what I’d seen—if he’d witnessed the world burn, again and again—he couldn’t have knelt there and offered the suggestion as if it were a thing that could be contained.

  There was something else stirring in me, alongside my raw terror. It was recognition. The yes of my whole body, seeing the blasts at last for what they were: visions, not memories.

  It was going to happen again.

  chapter 35

  We sat together on the floor amid the gritty dust, the dander of the concrete that had been sawn away. There was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t tell if it was the ringing that my blast visions sometimes left me with, or just the hum of the Electric.

  I stared at the concrete wall. I was grateful to focus on one simple thing, among a world in which everything was its own opposite. Zach was my twin, and also my enemy. I had loved Kip but he was also a stranger. The blast was the past, but also the future. Xander was mad, but his words would come true: Forever fire.

  “I’ve feared it,” Piper said, “ever since I saw how the blast was coming to you more and more. But I still don’t understand it. They can’t use the blast machines against us. The casualties would be just as high on their own side. It’s the one blessing of the twinning: it makes mass killing pointless. There’s nowhere here that wouldn’t be a disaster—for them as much as us. If they could deal with us that way, they would’ve done it a long time ago. That’s why they’ve never bothered with the weapons that they had in the Before.”

  “They’re bothering now,” I said.

  “But why? Why go to all this effort to create another blast, when they can never use it against us?”

  I looked up at him, and the awful weight of words settled on me. I didn’t want to tell him what I knew. He had enough burdens. But I couldn’t carry this alone.

  “They’re not going to use the blast on us. They’re going to use it on Elsewhere.”

  I gestured at the room, and the others that led off it, most of them meticulously emptied. “They know that Elsewhere is out there—maybe they’ve even found out where it is. And they know that Elsewhere can undo the twinning, and that we’ve been seeking it, too. If they think Elsewhere could become a threat to their rule, they won’t hesitate to use the blast.”

  I remembered again the General, the lizard stillness of her eyes when she’d smiled. And Zach, the anger that coursed through him like the river through the pipes above us.

  “I was wrong again,” I said. The steel and concrete walls threw my words back at me as echoes. “I’ve had visions of the blast my whole life, and I’ve been wrong that whole time. Everything I see gets twisted.” I rubbed my hands to my eyes as though I could polish my visions into focus, somehow scour them clear.

  “You found Joe’s papers,” Piper said. “You found the way into the Ark. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

  “I thought we were going to find the answer down here,” I said flatly.

  “We did,” Piper said. “It just wasn’t the answer that we wanted.”

  Ω

  There was one more level of the Ark still underneath us, unexplored, but I was beginning to feel the first stirrings of movement in the outer corridors, where they led to the surface doors. A shifting in the air, disturbing the dust. Then noises, reaching us through the pipes. We left the brightly lit lower levels and sprinted up the stairs to where we’d left the ventilation grille unscrewed. The first soldiers passed below us just as we’d hoisted ourselves back into the pipe and were replacing the hatch. But they were too noisy and busy, pushing their empty handcarts, to note the muted scrape of metal, or the hushed breath coming from somewhere above them. When they’d passed, we moved again, dragging our exhausted bodies toward the upper layers of the Ark. Five more groups of soldiers passed below us. Their discussions were at once familiar and unfamiliar: the everyday chatter of bored soldiers mixed with the strange language of the Ark.

  Not likely, unless the betavoltaic batteries go, too . . . Two more trolleys coming from the western door, to meet the next wagon . . . Been there since the blast—what’s the rush? . . . Under the coolant pipes. Couldn’t shift the casing without a drill.

  One word, though, made me jerk my head so sharply that it hit the roof of the pipe. Reformer. I heard, too, Piper’s intake of breath behind me. Motionless, I listened. There were no soldiers within sight, but the voices and footsteps came from somewhere nearby.

  Said he wants to inspect it himself, so get it cleared. You know what he’s like.

  The voices were gone.

  Somewhere in the Ark my brother waited. The last time I’d seen him had been on the road outside New Hobart, the knees of my trousers still wet from where I’d knelt to shroud the bodies of the drowned children. I remembered the sight of Louisa’s small teeth, rounded like gravestones.

  For a long time, as Piper and I crawled our way back to the upper levels, I thought about what we’d heard the soldier say: You know what he’s like. Did it apply to me, anymore? Could I claim to know Zach now, after all that he’d done? And did he know me?

  More than a decade ago, he’d relied on his knowledge of me to have me exposed and branded. When he declared himself the Omega, he’d known that I would step forward. He’d known me well enough to be sure that I wouldn’t let him be branded and sent away. He had made our closeness into a weapon, and turned it on me. And I had allow
ed him to do it when I’d chosen to protect him, whatever it had cost me. Now, the man waiting somewhere in the Ark wasn’t even Zach anymore—he was the Reformer. Was I a different person, too?

  When Piper and I reached the abandoned upper levels we lowered ourselves from the pipe into the dusty rooms near Section F. Among the jars of bones, we sat and ate more of the jerky, and drank most of the water. I’d thought that rest would be impossible, after all that we had seen and learned since entering the Ark, but it had been at least two nights since we’d last slept. We found a small room, free of bones, and slept.

  Instead of the blast, I dreamed of Kip. His body was blurred by the glass and by the liquid in which it floated. But the hazy silhouette was enough—I would know his body anywhere.

  I woke and I knew, with a certainty that nested in my flesh like frostbite, that these visions of Kip in the tank were not from the past, any more than the blast visions were. On the road outside New Hobart, Zach had told me that he had something of mine. When he’d tossed the figureheads onto the ground in front of me, I’d thought he’d been talking about the ships, and their crews. But I understood now what he’d meant.

  “He’s here,” I said. “In the Ark.”

  “We know that already,” Piper said, his voice still groggy with sleep. “You heard what the soldiers said.”

  “Not Zach,” I said. “Kip.”

  Piper pushed himself up, leaning on his elbow. Dust from the ground had caught in his hair, and in the stubble on his chin. When he spoke his voice was patient.

  “You’re tired. What we’ve learned is a lot to take in. For anyone, and especially for you.”

  I threw off his pity like an unwelcome embrace.

  “I’m not mad. I’ve been seeing it, ever since he died. I thought it was just memories from when I found him under Wyndham. But you were right—that’s not how it works.” I thought of how vivid it was, when I saw Kip in the tank, and of how the sight ambushed me even when I slept. “It’s a vision, not a memory. If even the blast is the future, then this is too. They have Kip. And he’s in a tank again, or will be.”