The Refuge Song (28 page)

We waited a while longer, to see whether there was any pattern to the outbursts of the Electric. It must have been about an hour that we sat there, and in that time the lights came on three more times, heralding the fan's spinning too. But there was no pattern that we could detect. The first two times were close together—only minutes separated them. The third came after a long period of darkness, and lasted only a few seconds, barely long enough for the wheel to achieve full speed.

The Electric was a ghost, trapped in the wires of the Ark. Its erratic presence added a new dimension of terror to the place, and making me wince at each new flaring of light and sound.

A few seconds after the last flickers of lights had left us, the blades were slowing.

“Now,” I said. I stepped to the edge of the hole again. Everything seemed hazy, my eyes still readjusting to the lamp-lit half dark.

“I'll go first,” he said. “If something goes wrong, on my way through, you go back up.”

Back up to what? If he died, Zoe would be dead, too. She would never come back, would never be found. The thought of making that cramped ascent, with Piper's body below me and Zoe's somewhere above, was worse than the thought of the fan itself.

“We'll do it at the same time,” I said.

He looked at me, then nodded. We stood on opposite sides of the hole.

“It's only a short drop,” he said. But we both knew it wasn't the drop that was making the sweat prickle my forehead. It was what we had to pass through, before we landed.

“You can't feel anything?” he asked. “Any sense of when it might start up again?”

I shook my head. “I didn't even realize it still went around at all.”

“Fine,” he said. “We'll jump on three. Do you want to count?”

“Do you have a lucky number?” I said.

He gave a quiet laugh. “Let's not rely on my luck.”

So I counted to three. I cringed away from the final syllable, but
three
came anyway, and we jumped.

I didn't get it quite right—my left knee clipped a blade's edge as I dropped through, propelling the next blade into my right shoulder. Piper, the lamp still in his hand, was a blur of light dropping opposite me. And there we both were, on the floor below. Piper exhaled, and I heard myself laughing, even as I was inspecting my shoulder for blood. Our smiles were quashed by the sound of the fan starting up again.

The wheel began spinning close above our heads. Directly under it, where we crouched, the force of the movement was overwhelming, gusting air pushing us to the ground.

“If we'd waited a few more seconds,” Piper shouted over the noise. “If my lucky number had been ten, we'd be landing in pieces.”

“Maybe you're not so unlucky after all,” I yelled back, crawling to the wall, where the wind's buffeting was less forceful.

We scanned the room. Like the one above, the walls were packed with wires, tubes, and buttons—more than the previous room, in fact. The labels on the engraved plates were once again a frustrating mixture of the familiar and the incomprehensible:
VENT DUCT LEVEL 4
;
RE
ROUTE VIA DECONTAMINATION SLUICE
. On three of the four walls there were large metal hatches, each one sealed with a black material, cracked and perished.

“Which one of these is the right way?” asked Piper. He pulled at some of the black edging. It crumbled in his hand. I could see him sizing up the hatches. “Hell on earth,” he shouted in my ear. “I thought we'd finished with tunnels.”

“We have,” I said. “Look.”

The lights failed at that instant, throwing us back into lamplit gloom.

“OK,” I said, into the merciful quiet. “Listen, then.” I stepped back the way I'd come a moment before, and stamped gently. The dust on the ground subdued the sound slightly, but the clang was still audible. Something shifted beneath my foot: a loose panel in the steel floor.

Piper brought the lamp across, and we knelt together. As we swept the dust aside from the concealed hatch, writing appeared, engraved in the metal of the panel itself.

EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE ACCESS ONLY.

DEACTIVATE INTAKE VALVES WHILE HATCH OPEN.

FOLLOW DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES WHEN LEAVING CONTROL ROOM.

“Does this count as an emergency?” Piper asked with a sideways smile.

The floor panel was rimmed in the same black material as the wall hatches, perished and crumbly to the touch. When Piper pulled at the handle, the whole hatch came smoothly away. The tunnel below was wider than any of the other chutes we'd seen so far. Mounted on one side was a steel ladder.

Thirty or forty yards down the ladder, my feet struck another hatch.
I paused for a while, to be sure that I could still feel no movement in the corridor below us. There was nothing but dust, and the residual hum of the Electric. Nonetheless, I moved as quietly as I could, placing the lantern carefully on the floor while I reached down to shift the hatch and push it to the side.

I lowered myself through the opening, dropping the final few feet to the ground. Piper followed. We were in the Ark.

chapter 33

Here, at last, we'd been returned to an environment that was on a human scale. Not that it was hospitable: hard gray floors and low ceilings, and a long corridor receding into darkness in both directions. Every few yards a grille was set into the ceiling, and above them I could feel the network of ventilation tunnels that we had just left. Where we walked, in the main corridor, the lamp illuminated only a few square yards at a time. There, a steel door, open. Here, a corner, all the straight lines softened by dust. There, when Piper swung the light around, another door, opening onto another corridor, another shade of darkness.

Months before, when Zoe, Kip, and I had passed through the taboo city on the mountain pass, my mind had been jostled by the clamor of the dead. There was none of that here. I wondered if it was because the people of that city had died suddenly, when the blast came—ripped from their lives without warning. In the Ark, there was a different heaviness in the air, choking with silence. A slower dying. Years, then decades,
of darkness and creeping and steel doors above them. An unease heavier than the hundreds of feet of stone and earth and river above us.

“Grim, isn't it,” said Piper, as he turned the lamp from side to side.

There was no point answering. Every inch of the place declared its bleakness.

“I thought it would be different,” he said. “More comfortable, I suppose. I thought they were the lucky ones—but I can't imagine being stuck down here for long.”

I remembered too well, from my time in the Keeping Rooms, what conditions like this could do to a person. In those years in the cell, my nerves had been rubbed raw on all the hard surfaces, the locked doors, until each of my senses grated and jangled, and the low ceiling became a mockery of the unseen sky above.

I led us westward, in the circuitous manner that the Ark's geography permitted. Even here, out of the cramped ventilation tunnels, the dust was thick enough to mute the sound of our footsteps. Nobody had passed this way for a long time. I didn't doubt that the Council would have explored the whole Ark, but I could sense that nobody moved or breathed within this layer of the structure. I didn't even need to look into each room to be sure—their emptiness was as tangible to me as the dust. It was like picking up a water flask, and testing its weight—I had no need to unscrew the lid to know that it was empty.

Doorways on both sides stood ajar. For now, though, we kept to the main corridor. At regular intervals it passed through thick steel doors. They looked imposing, with elaborate locks, steel tumblers and bars, but each of them was open. I examined one of the locks. There was no keyhole, only a metal cube near the tumblers, studded with buttons, each with a number engraved on it, 0 to 9. These cubes had been unscrewed from the door and hung now from their own exposed wires.

Each time the sporadic bursts of the Electric unleashed the light,
sound came with them. Above the insect buzz of the lights themselves came a whirring noise and occasional clanks from above, where air vents traced the corridors. When the lights went out, we were dropped into silence.

“No wonder many of them went mad,” Piper said. “It gives me the creeps just being in here.”

In some sections, water had penetrated the walls. The river above us had been kept at bay, but it had never stopped its stubborn groping downward. Mold spread from the ceiling, a mass of black fur, like the pelt of some huge animal stretched across the right-hand wall of the corridor. We peered into a room in which a fetid puddle covered the entire floor, fed by a slow drip of water from the ceiling. The drips fell at the pace of footsteps, and as we walked away I had to steel myself not to check over my shoulder that we weren't being followed.

Ω

We stepped into a large room where the darkness seemed to push back against the edges of the lamp's glow. There was a long table, neatly laid: knives and forks set out, along with plates, each one offering up their meal of dust. I ran my hand down the back of one of the chairs. It wasn't wood, nor leather, nor any other material that I recognized. In the four centuries here, in this underground world, it hadn't moldered or splintered. It was hard, but not cool under my touch in the way that metal would be.

Except for the grime, it was an everyday scene—the sort of thing that I would have expected to encounter in a kitchen or an inn. Piper put the lamp on the table and picked up one of the forks, lichened with rust. It clattered when he let it drop back down on the tabletop. I leaned over to set it back into its place, parallel with the knife, then realized how ridiculous it was, re-laying this table for ghosts.

The next door, like all the others, was open, the tumblers of the lock
exposed. I brushed my hand across the front of the door and felt the engraving beneath my palm. When Piper raised the lamp, we could read it clearly, despite the dust still nested in the grooves of the engraved letters:
SECTION F
.

“This is where they put the crazy ones, right?” Piper said.

As I stepped through the doorway, something crumbled beneath my foot, with no more resistance than a dry cookie. At my gasp he swung the lantern around.

My boot had crushed the thigh bone of a skeleton. The bones lay around my feet, just inside the door.

Against the far wall, more skeletons lay. The lights came on in the corridor behind us, but the chamber we'd entered remained dark, and I recalled what it had said in the papers:
Electricity (excluding ventilation)
has been disconnected, to prioritize the needs of the rest of the population.

I looked back at the bones by the door. How long had those locked in Section F waited by the locked door, in the darkness? Had they clawed at the door, screamed and begged for release? The metal of the door bore no marks, told no stories.

Before we'd descended into the Ark, it was the soldiers and the unknown machines that I'd feared. I hadn't realized how much horror could lie in something much simpler: a steel door and a cluster of bones.

Ω

We came across other bones soon. In a small room, a skeleton was curled on its side on a bunk bed, dust covering it like snow. Farther down the corridor, a scattering of bones lay on the floor. They looked as though they had been kicked aside. A few yards from the rest of the skeletons, a lone skull rested upside down, a bowl of teeth.

“Did the Council soldiers do this?” I said.

Piper knelt, examined the bones.

“It's recent, whoever it was—look at the color, where the bones've been broken.”

I bent to see. Where the bones had snapped, the lantern revealed bright white, a cross section of clean bone contrasting with the browned surface.

He moved off down the corridor, taking the light with him.

The door marked
SECTION G
had jammed half-closed. We had to sidle in, the jutting tumblers of the lock catching at my shirt.

There were no beds here. Instead, a row of benches was topped with tubes and handles, and basins set into the steel surface. I peered into one; it had a drainage hole at the bottom, with a dead spider next to it.

Along the back of the room, shelves were crammed with huge jars, the glass clouded by centuries. Where a jar had crumbled or broken, a ring of sharpened dust remained.

I drew near to the shelves. Once there might have been liquid inside the jars, preserving their contents like brine in my mother's pickle jars. Or like the Council's tanks. There was no liquid left now—just a dirty line of residue below each lid. At the bottom of every jar was a nest of tiny bones.

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.”