The Fire Sermon (12 page)

Still facing me, his hand groped along the wall behind him and found the door handle. He had to turn to unlock it but spun back to face me as he pulled it open. He was still staring as he stepped backward into shadow and pulled the door closed. I heard the key rummaging for the lock, then the heavy tumbler sliding across.

I counted, too, picturing him pressed against the door, making his way through the numbers in unison with me.
Forty-nine, fifty
. I realized I was crying, but whether from fear or sadness I didn’t know.
Seventy-six, seventy-seven.
He’ll be rushing, I thought, with his habitual impatience, but then making himself slow down, not wanting to burst out too soon and force my hand. And already, I knew, he’d be planning: where to position the guards, how to seal the city. He’d come after me, like I’d always known he would.

Ninety-nine
. The lock moved slowly, but its age gave it away with a rusted squeal.

The Confessor would have seen through my plan, of course. But Zach sprinted straight to the point from which the rope hung. Half of his body was hanging over the edge, peering down at the prop rope, when I slipped out from behind the door, ran inside, and locked it behind me.

chapter 8

I felt strangely calm. Behind me, through the heavy door, I could hear Zach’s shouts. He was kicking the door, too, but it was solidly braced in its frame and emitted only dulled thuds.

At first, as I ran, I was just tracing the route along which Zach had led me. Then, at a point that I couldn’t quite pin down, I was guided by a different kind of memory. My body was a compass needle, faithfully seeking the tank room, which I could feel more strongly than ever. It was my greatest fear, but it was also my destination. I had to see it, to witness it in the flesh if I were ever to help those people, or even to spread the word. It was also the last place he would search for me. It was in the depths of the fort, far below any of the exits that a fugitive might be expected to seek. More important, if Zach had any suspicion that I knew about it, his most closely guarded secret, I’d have been tanked long ago.

Zach’s heavy bundle of keys, which I’d snatched from the rampart door after locking it, jangled as I ran. At each locked door I closed my eyes and let instinct lead me to the right key. Locking each door behind me, I was heading down again, but into a different wing from the Keeping Rooms. Even so, I hated to feel the fort closing above me once more, to feel the distance between me and that momentary taste of sky and light.

There was a long corridor, narrower than the grander corridors above. It was made narrower still by the network of pipes that ran along its sides. From the low roof hung glass balls, emitting the same sterile, pale light that had illuminated my cell. At the corridor’s end, down a short flight of steps, was the final door. My mind was so attuned to this place that I didn’t even have to hesitate to choose the key.

In my visions the tank room had been silent. Entering it now I was disarmed by the noise: the constant whirring of the machinery and the sounds that water makes in the dark. Beneath it all, underfoot, the thrum of the river. I’d sensed the river throughout my years in the cell, but here it was audible, insistent.

Despite the eeriness of the place, its familiarity was weirdly comforting: apart from the noise, it was just as I’d seen it. Along the long wall of the chamber, the tanks stood. From each emerged a number of tubes, tracing to control panels above. When I pressed my palm against the glass of the nearest tank, I was surprised by its warmth. In the half-light I strained to make out a shape inside the viscous fluid. Something within was moving in time with the machine’s pulse. I knew what it would be but squinted to see, hoping to be wrong.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shapes began to materialize, not just in this tank but also along the whole row of tanks nearest to me. A young woman floated with her back to me, her three arms all raised as if reaching for the top of the liquid. A man curled in a fetal position near the base of his tank, his handless arms crossed over his knees. An old woman floated at a strange angle, her single eye closed beneath her brand. All of them were naked, and each body pulsed, barely perceptibly, in time with the machine’s rhythm. The chamber was so long that the door at the far end was indistinct. The tanks went on and on, the horror endlessly repeated down the row.

I didn’t know where the machine ended and the Electric began, or whether they were one and the same, but I knew that this alien sight was technology, and taboo. What sinister magic was in it, which permitted it to trap these people in this underwater sleep? The taboo might be a law, but it began in the gut: the nauseous recoil that churned my stomach when I looked at this web of wires and metal. The machines had ended the world. And as a seer, I’d seen the blast more directly than anyone: the pure destruction of that shear of hot light. Even spending the last four years beneath the electric light of my cell hadn’t done away with my instinctive terror at the sight of these wires, tubes, and panels. I became aware of the sweat on my body, the shaking in my legs. This rumbling, many-parted machine was like a slumbering beast.

My hands were shaking, too. I’d thought the tanks had been vivid in my visions, but seeing them like this was worse. The tubes that violated the bodies, emerging at the mouth and the wrist. Tubes like puppet strings, suspending the bodies from the top of the tanks. If I could get out, if I could spread the word, surely even most Alphas would be horrified at this? And if I could indeed count on my visions, then somewhere outside was the island, where I might find those who would believe me, even help me.

Making the horror all the more uncanny was the weird orderliness of the scene: the neatly laid out rows of tanks; the perfect accord of the chests rising and falling to the machine’s perpetual lullaby. Despite the variety of deformations on display in the tanks, there was a ghastly uniformity about their comatose state. I walked along the row, paused, leaned my face against the glass of a tank, letting myself be calmed by the pulsing semidarkness.

A shudder ran through the glass, shocking me back into alertness. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a face, pressed against the glass on which I was leaning. The boy who had drifted to the front of his tank had eerily pale skin, his veins clearly outlined. His light brown hair floated up from his head, and his mouth was partly open around the tube. Only one thing disturbed the near-stillness of the tableau: his eyes, wide open and alert.

I jumped back, my small cry lost almost immediately in the thick dampness and rhythmic hum of the room. Averting my eyes from the boy’s stare, I looked down, but seeing that, like the others, he was naked, I fixed my eyes determinedly on his face. Despite his brand, his thin face reminded me of Zach. Later, I wondered whether that was why the boy had seemed so familiar.

I grasped at the thought that his open eyes must be empty, that they couldn’t possibly signify consciousness. Some of the other tanked figures had open eyes, but they were no less absent for it. I stepped slightly to the side. If his eyes hadn’t followed me I might have continued, all the way back to the door at the far end of the room, and beyond. Part of me was disappointed when I saw his dark eyes track my progress. At the same time, I knew that having witnessed that small movement of his eyes was a promise that I couldn’t break.

The tank’s lid seemed to be its only entry point, at least three feet above my head. At that level a platform ran around the wall, reached by a ladder at the far corner of the room. I took several steps toward it, then looked frantically behind me to try to reassure the boy that I wasn’t leaving. In the gloom it was already too late—he’d become a blur in the tank. I ran, counting tanks as I went and trying not to think about their occupants, or about the empty tank that I passed at the end of the row. Climbing the ladder, I cringed at the sound my footsteps unleashed on the metal steps. On the ledge I counted my way back along the tanks. At the twelfth tank I reached over for the metal handle and found that the lid lifted to the side without resistance.

From above I could barely make out his drifting hair, now two feet below me. As I leaned down over the tank, the fluid smelled repulsively sweet. With my face turned up, away from the saccharine stench, I reached into the warm liquid, groped around, grasped something solid and gave a tentative tug. There was a slight resistance before what I was grasping came away in my hand. For an awful instant I imagined his fluid-soaked body somehow falling apart in my hands, but when I looked down I was both relieved and horrified to find that I was holding a pliable rubber tube. When I sought out his face I saw that the tube was now stripped from his mouth.

I plunged my hand back into the fluid and flinched when it was grasped, firmly, by his. Gripping the ledge’s rail tightly with my other hand, I braced for his pull. At first he was light, the fluid taking his weight. As his head and chest breached the surface, however, he took on a tangible weight and I couldn’t lift him further. His wrist, below the hand that I held, was pierced by another of the tubes. I reached out for his other arm but could see, now that his torso had emerged, that the left arm wasn’t there. Without the thick warp of the tank’s glass between us, he looked older: perhaps my own age, though in his wasted state it was hard to tell.

For a moment we stayed like that, hand in hand. Then he turned his head and bared his teeth, and for an instant I thought he was going to bite me. Just as I was about to snatch my hand away, he grasped the tube in his wrist with his teeth and, with one jerk of his head, ripped it free.

Blood flared briefly, mixing with the fluid that coated his arm. He looked up at me and we pulled in unison. Small as I was, my strength was more than his, and the liquid coated our grasp with a slick film. For perhaps twenty seconds he hung, half out of the water, before our hands slipped apart and he slumped back into the tank. He opened his mouth again as if to speak, but only a pink bubble of bloodied water appeared. He reached up for my hand again, but as he raised his eyes to meet mine, I let go, turned, and ran. When I glanced back at him, he’d already sunk beneath the surface.

It took me only a few seconds to run back along the platform and down to where I’d seen the wrench, near the bottom of the ladder. Back on the main floor now, I counted along the tanks until I reached his. He was no longer moving. From his open mouth and wrist, where the tubes had entered him, there were staccato bursts of blood. The released tubes were tangled, tentacle-like, around him, and his eyes were now closed.

It seemed that there was no sound at all when I swung the wrench into the glass. For a second nothing happened. Then, as if it had been holding its breath, the tank exhaled everything in a roar, a glass deluge that swept me backward and off my feet.

The boy landed on me at the moment I hit the floor, and the impact drove me sharply down onto the glass fragments. Together we skidded back across the darkness, colliding with the opposite wall in a tangle of limbs and glass.

The noise continued for longer than I’d believed possible, as the final huge panels of glass wrenched themselves free and the liquid heaved the broken pieces, shrieking, along the floor. The relief of quiet when the noise finally settled was short-lived; almost immediately an alarm sounded and the room was lit up. Strips in the ceiling gave off the same white glow as the light in my cell, but glaring many times brighter.

It was the presence of the naked boy lying against me, as much as the lights and the siren, that made me clamber up. He stood, too, shakily, then fell back against the wall. I grabbed at his arm, pulling him upright. Even with the sound of footsteps pounding closer from the far end of the chamber, I noticed how strange it was to feel the flesh of another person, after the years in the Keeping Rooms.

I was facing the door through which I’d entered, but it was from the other end of the chamber, behind a larger set of doors, that I heard the footsteps coming. Between the unyielding shrieks of the alarm I could hear them, and shouting voices. I turned to the boy, but he was on all fours, taking small, sputtering breaths between coughs. I couldn’t concentrate—there was too much noise: the alarm, the machinery’s hum, the approaching men. And underneath it all, the river. I tried to focus on the tug of the river on my mind. It pulled at me the same way that the currents had pulled at my body when I swam in the river as a child. I scanned the network of pipes that ran along the chamber, above the row of tanks. The smashed tank stood out like a missing tooth. At the far end of the row, some of the tanks were empty. Empty: not just of bodies but of liquid. There had to be some way of draining the tanks. Half leading, half dragging the boy back to the jagged crown of glass that ringed the base of the shattered tank, I saw that much of the base was a plug, a sealed pipe nearly as wide as the tank itself, sunk into the floor.

I stepped over the vertical glass remnants to stand in the shallow puddle of liquid that remained. The boy had recoiled when I pulled him after me, but I ignored his resistance, yanking him hard so that we were crouched together in the center of what had been the tank. There were only two levers at the front of the tank, and when I stretched out over the sharp glass, I could reach the first of them. When I pulled it, a torrent of the sticky liquid was unleashed from a pipe suspended high above us, spraying down onto where we huddled. I closed my mouth tightly and tried to shield my eyes. The boy was on hands and knees now, knocked down by the inundation. I reached for the second lever, felt the glass scrape my arm. Through the glaze of liquid I could see the doors at the far end of the chamber begin to open. I felt the lever resist, resist, then give way, and then the world dropped away beneath us as we were flushed from the light.

chapter 9

Afterward, I thought about all the things that could have gone wrong. If there’d been a grate. If the drainage system hadn’t led back to the river. If the airless pipe had continued any longer than it did, or if the final drop to the river had been from a greater height. It was always hard to distinguish between luck and intuition, and I was never certain if I’d sensed the escape route or simply stumbled upon it.