The Refuge Song (29 page)

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 dust 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 together 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:

H
2
S PROJECT

CLASSIFIED

ACCESS RESTRICTED—CERTIFIED H
2
S TECHNICIANS ONLY

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.