It wasn’t hope that had driven me to my feet. I knew Kip had died. I had seen the damage to him—nobody could survive that fall. I’d heard the sound of his landing, so wet that it had swallowed its own echo. And I’d seen the Confessor’s body, too, the breath wrung from it like water from a rag.
So it was anger that ran through me now, not hope. I had seen what his years in the tank had done to him. The thought of him being returned to the tanks now was a horror so heavy that it choked words in my throat.
When I’d freed him from the tank beneath Wyndham and we were scrambling away from Wyndham, on the cliff above the river, he’d told me that he would jump to his death rather than be caught and taken back to the tanks. Months later, in the silo, that was what he’d done. I was the seer, but Kip had made his own prophecy, and kept it.
Now Zach had taken even that from him.
Ω
We had to wait a few more hours for the night’s exodus of soldiers through the western door to the camp outside. When it came, it felt like the Ark exhaling slowly. I was impatient, but now that I knew what waited for me on the lowest level, my terror had taken on new shapes. I kept thinking of Xander’s words to me, when I’d mentioned Kip: It’s not finished.
When all seemed quiet in the corridors below us, we crawled along the tunnels, clambering down from level to level. This time, when we passed above the emptied rooms of Section A, I knew what to expect, and I clamped my teeth together and vowed not to cry out when the blast visions came. We had come too far now to be caught by a careless cry, to be flushed out like rats by some soldier on a night patrol. When the blast tore through my mind, I braced my body against the walls of the pipe and thought of Kip. When the flames released me, my tongue was bleeding from where I’d bitten it, but I had not made a sound.
The pipe traced the final staircase to the Ark’s lowest level, below the rooms we’d explored the night before. The door at the base of the stairs was closed, and the lock looked intact, but in the ventilation pipe we passed unimpeded over the doorway. Beyond it, the Electric still hummed noisily, but the only light visible was an ambient green glow, leaking through the grate ahead. I pressed my face to it and looked down.
A single huge room occupied nearly the entire level, pillars supporting the high ceiling. Like the rooms above, it had been stripped back to its concrete bones: the walls were chipped and scarred, wires protruding from the wall and floor. But where the rooms above had been left bare, this vast chamber had been filled again, with row after row of tanks. Those that I could see, in the rows closest to us, were empty. The glow that suffused the room came from above the tanks, where panels blinked with tiny green lights.
The tanks in the central rows were big enough for one person, while the tanks lined up at each side were massive—the size of the tanks we’d found in New Hobart. As I’d seen there, and in the tank room beneath Wyndham, raised gangways ran beside each row, to allow access to the tanks from above. Suspended over the tanks was a network of pipes and wires; amid them, running along the center of the ceiling, loomed a huge pipe, several yards wide. It rumbled with the sound of the impatient river.
On my elbows, I dragged myself forward to the next grate, which was directly above one of the gangways. I had to kindle the lantern again to give me enough light to undo the screws. My knife was already blunted, and my hands were shaky with exhaustion and anger, but there was less rust on these bolts, and within minutes the grate was free. I lifted it carefully into the pipe, slid it out of the way, and dropped to the gangway just a few feet below.
I’d tried to land gently, but at the sound of my feet hitting the metal, footsteps echoed near the middle of the room. In the dim light, and through the ranks of glass, I couldn’t see him, but I knew that he’d seen me.
chapter 36
Zach was twenty yards away, and sidling to the far door when I finally spotted him. He stopped the instant that Piper landed beside me. Before Piper’s boots had sounded on the gangway, his arm was already drawn back, knife poised to throw. He held the blade so delicately, between thumb and one finger, but I’d seen him kill enough times to know that there’d be nothing delicate about the impact if he launched the knife at Zach’s throat.
“Kill me, and you kill her, too,” Zach said, his voice a breathless yell.
“If you raise the alarm, I’m dead anyway,” said Piper. “Tortured, too, and Cass’ll be tanked. She and I both know what choice we’d make, if it comes to that.” I know that Piper was remembering the same thing that I was: the moment outside New Hobart, when the battle had turned against us, and his knife had been pointed at me. We’d never discussed it. We’d never needed to.
“Don’t think about running,” Piper went on. “Even if you dodge my knife, she won’t.”
“Hell on earth, put out the lantern, at least,” Zach shouted at me. “There’s hydrogen sulfide in some of these pipes—you’ll blow your hand off.”
I didn’t understand all of Zach’s words, but the panic in his eyes, as they darted from the lantern to the pipes above us, was real enough. I lifted the lantern’s shutter and blew out the flame, returning us to the dim green glow of the machine’s lights.
“You can point your knife at me all you like,” Zach called up to Piper. “But you’ll never get out of the Ark.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I know about the blast machine, and Elsewhere.”
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
“You said to me, years ago, in the Keeping Rooms, that you wanted to do something with your life. You said you wanted to change the world. You could have done that, with what you found here. Not the blast machine. The other things: you could have ended the twinning. You know it’s possible. Elsewhere did it.”
“And make us all into freaks, like the two of you? That’s what it does, you know, ending the twinning. It doesn’t free us of Omegas after all. It makes us all into Omegas.”
“You’d rather that people are stuck with the fatal bond, instead?” said Piper.
Zach waved his arm dismissively. “We found a way around that,” he said. “I found a way to be free of you after all, with the tanks. We don’t need Elsewhere. For four hundred years, we’ve managed to preserve humanity. Proper humanity. It survived the blast itself, and the Long Winter, and four hundred years of deadlands and droughts and everything else we’ve had to contend with. And after all that, Elsewhere would end it, if you drag them into this. Just when we’ve found a way to be free of Omegas, Elsewhere could make us all into freaks.”
I shook my head. “And you honestly think there’s more humanity in what you’re suggesting? Making another blast, and destroying Elsewhere, rather than ending the twinning and accepting that there’ll be mutations?”
“If you really think that being an Omega is nothing to be ashamed of,” Zach hissed, “then why did you hide it? Why did you lie for so long, right through our childhoods, and work so hard at pretending to be one of us?”
“Because I wanted to stay with my family,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes from his. “I wanted to stay with you.”
“No,” he said. “You wanted to pass yourself off as an Alpha. To take what was mine.”
With Zach, that was where it always ended up. We’d been talking about the blast, about the future of whole lands, the fate of everyone, both here and in Elsewhere. But if I followed his arguments deep enough, we always ended up at the same place: him as a frightened, resentful child, afraid that he would never get to claim his birthright. That people would think he was the freak, and not me.
It seemed such a little thing for the fate of our world to rest on. But I could feel it in him, the source of everything. If you stripped away the tanks and the Council and Ark and the blast machine, there he’d be: my brother, a small boy, angry and afraid.
Piper interrupted my thoughts. “Are you stupid enough to think that the blast can
be contained?” he said to Zach. “That if you unleash it on Elsewhere, it won’t hurt us here as well?”
Zach shook his head impatiently. “They’re a long way away.”
“You haven’t found them yet,” I said. It was a prayer as much as a statement.
“We will,” he said. “And we’ll find them before the resistance does. We know they’re out there. We know what they can do, and what they’ve done.”
“Then let them do it,” I said. “What does it matter, what they do across the oceans?”
Zach’s nostrils were pinched as he inhaled. “They’re seeking us. Even if you and the resistance never manage to find them, they’re still seeking us. They sent a message. We found it here. Just a single message, a few words that reached here hundreds of years ago. It came through too late for the Ark builders—it was right at the end, when things were falling apart for them down here. They couldn’t even reply, let alone seek out Elsewhere. But they kept the message. We know Elsewhere’s out there. And we know they’ve still got machines. They were able to send that message, all those years ago. And they’d already ended the twinning, even then.”
“You can’t do this,” I said.
He laughed at me. “Can’t? We already have. We’ve nearly finished moving the blast machine. Everything else that I’ve found, over the years, I’ve had to piece together, bit by bit. Nothing was ever complete; nothing ever worked, and we were always short of fuel. But everything we’ve found here has been protected so carefully, documented so thoroughly. You’ve seen what we’ve managed to do with the tanks. We’ll do it with the blast machine, too. Maybe not perfectly—it’s harder without the Confessor.” A pause. He swallowed. The mention of the Confessor seemed to have troubled him more than Piper’s knife, still cocked toward him. “She had a talent for the machines,” he went on eventually. “It was incredible to watch—she understood them like nobody else. Taught me more than you can imagine. But even without her, you can’t stop us. She oversaw most of the work before she died, and my best people are finishing it. We’ve already got most of what we need out of this place.
“You might have found your way here. I wondered if you would—we knew those papers were at large, and you’re like a tick I can’t shake off. But you’re no more than that. You can’t stop us.” He turned to Piper. “You could kill me now, and her with me, and it still wouldn’t stop the blast, or the tanks. You think the General’s going to stop any of this if I’m gone? She’s the one who ordered us to set up more tanks here. Room for five thousand Omegas on this level alone.” He gave a smile. “It’s the perfect place for them, now the blast machine’s been moved from here. And it’s not like they’re going to need a view.”
I felt suddenly very weary, and tired of listening to him.
“Take me to Kip,” I said.
I saw how the tendons in his neck tensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I climbed down the ladder from the gangway. Now that I was among the tanks, the curved glass and the dim light distorted the space in the room, as if the air itself was bulbous and thickened.
I walked past Zach without a word, leaving Piper to guard him. I headed to where Zach had been coming from, when we’d first entered the room. I knew what he had been doing, here alone at night, while the soldiers retreated to their camps and watch posts. And I knew already what I would find.
Near the center of the room, among the rows of empty tanks, stood two that were filled. I pressed my face against the glass of the tank closest to me.
It was like the first time I saw him.
Except it wasn’t. Years before, when they’d cut off Kip’s arm to make him pass for an Omega, they’d stitched him up so carefully that even I had never seen the scar. There had been no such delicacy this time. His whole torso had been bound with scars, like a stuffed joint of meat held tightly by twine. A wide scar curved from his back around to his stomach; another one ran straight down the middle of his chest. Along the side of his head, roughly healed stitches pulled at the skin, so tightly that his left ear was stretched out of shape. I didn’t realize that I’d reached out to press it flat until my fingers hit the glass.
The scars weren’t the only difference. This time, his eyes were closed, and they stayed that way. As I leaned toward him, the glass unyielding against my cheek, I knew that Kip was gone. Nothing of him remained but the wreckage of his body. It was a ship, dredged up from the ocean floor, but all the crew were lost.
In the next tank was the Confessor. She had none of Kip’s scars—her naked body was unmarked, except for where the tubes entered her wrists. I had feared her for years, but she was not frightening now. She was suspended with her knees curved up toward her chin, and she looked smaller than I’d have believed possible. I looked at her fingers, curled into fists, and I knew they would not open again.
“I had to keep her.” Zach had followed me, Piper and his knife staying close behind him. “There’s too much valuable stuff in there,” Zach said, gesturing at the Confessor’s tank. “The database relied on her mind, as much as on the machines. And she was the one who deciphered the blast machine, worked out how to get it out of here. She was my trump card. Without her, the General’s just taking over.” His voice had crept higher and higher. “Taking everything that I’ve been working for.”
I saw how Zach had moved between me and the Confessor’s tank.His hand was pressed against the glass, as though to shield her.
“Look how we both ended up,” I said to him.
“What are you talking about?” He didn’t even look up at me, his eyes still fixed on the Confessor.
“You couldn’t wait to push me out of your life,” I said. “And then look who you found yourself close to.”
“You’re not like her.”
I nodded. “But she was a seer, all the same. And she was probably the only person whose childhood comes close to my own.”
Once, I might have said that person was Zach. I knew better now. He’d been there, with me, but our experiences had been utterly different. We’d both been afraid, but they were different fears. I had feared being exposed and separated from him. He’d feared that I would never be sent away, that he would be stuck with me forever.
“It’s not only you,” I said. “I did it too, ended up with someone just like you. The Confessor told me about Kip’s past, just before he died. He was just like you.” I ignored the expression of disgust on Zach’s face as he glanced at Kip’s wasted, floating body. “I realize it now,” I went on. “Before he was tanked, he hated her, just like you hated me. He struggled to expose her, and to have her sent away. And then he came after her, later, to have her locked up.
“So we did the same thing, you see.” I shrugged. “Neither of us knew we were doing it, but in the end we both found ourselves closest to somebody just like each other.”
It was all a circle, as round as the tanks themselves. Zach and me, parted and brought back together. Kip, taken from the tank and returned to it. The blast that had been and would be again.
“You want to end the tanks,” he said. “But they’re the only thing keeping him and the Confessor alive.”
“They’re not alive,” I said. Kip’s body mightn’t have been bloated and faded like those of the tanked Ark dwellers in Section A, but it was just as empty of presence. “You might have managed to drag him and the Confessor halfway back from death, but that’s it. You knew they couldn’t be saved. You knew you were never going to be able to use her again. You kept them like this because you didn’t have the courage to let her go.”
“Don’t say that,” said Zach, his voice shrill now, his hand pressing harder against the glass of the Confessor’s tank, where she floated, oblivious. “It could change,” he said. “You could help me. If you worked with me, helped the doctors, we could find new ways to heal them. You can’t just give up on them.”
I
’d seen what being tanked had done to Kip, his mind hollowed of its memories. What could Zach possibly imagine would be salvaged from him and the Confessor after the fall, and this second tanking? Would he keep them preserved for decades, until they became like the tanked men I’d seen upstairs?
“You’re counting on me clinging to some kind of hope?” I said.
He was watching me minutely. Zach, who had done everything he could to teach me that hope was for other people, in other times.
I turned back to the glass of Kip’s tank. “It’s not about hope, or giving up on him,” I said to Zach so quietly that my words were barely more than a shape my lips made against the glass. “It’s about choice, and what he would want. He wouldn’t want this. Not ever.” I thought again of those grotesque figures, floating above us in Section A. “Not even the Confessor would have chosen this.”
I walked to the steel ladder, climbing to the gangway that ran at the level of the tank’s lids.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Piper said.
I kept climbing, until I stood above Kip.
I swung the lid aside and shared the tank’s sickly breath. When I’d first found Kip, beneath Wyndham, I’d been unable to lift him out. But that was after I’d spent four years in the Keeping Rooms. I was stronger now, and he was lighter than he had been even then. I wrapped both arms around his torso, feeling the raised ridges of his scars, and pulled.
As the liquid released him and he took on his own weight, I had to haul hard, but nothing could have made me let go. When I’d dragged him over the glass rim, I laid him on his back on the gangway. His face was slicked with the viscous liquid. Twice his arm moved, a random jerking, as if his hand were a fish thrown on a ship’s deck, thrashing. The liquid dripped from him through the metal grille of the gangway to land on the floor below. Fast, at first, in trickles and splashes, and then slowly, hitting the concrete floor one drip at a time. I tugged the tube from his wrist, and watched the hole fill with sluggish blood. From his mouth I pulled another tube, a second tongue.
The Refuge Song Page 34
