The Refuge Song (26 page)

That surreal chase seemed to last forever: the horse frantic, bucking and shying, and us gaining on him only slowly. The soldier upside down, his head dragging, bouncing and for several seconds, even tangling between the horse's back legs. When we finally drew even, the horse was crazy-eyed, its dark coat striped with sweat. Piper grabbed the reins, and the horse recoiled as if trying to shake its head free of its own neck. Its hoofs clattered on the ice as it danced on the spot.

There had been a time when I would have screamed at Piper, and asked why the soldier and his twin had needed to die. Now I said nothing. If we were captured, the Ark and Elsewhere would slip further from the grasp of the resistance. Zach and the General would win, and the tanks would be fed.

Piper jumped down and freed the soldier's body from the stirrup. I dismounted and looped all three reins together, pinioning them with a heavy rock. We dragged the body from the road to the cover of the shallow ditch; I knelt with Piper there, helping to scoop snow over the stiffening corpse. The blood was black where it pooled beneath the man's neck, and pink at the edges of the spreading stain.

I felt more than ever the truth of what Zach had said on the road outside New Hobart. I was poison. He was right. Even to glimpse me now, a hooded figure in the snow, meant death. My journeys in the last few months had left a map of bones laid across the land.

If I was a prophet, I foretold only death, and I fulfilled my own prophecies. Ever since the silo, I'd been struggling to recognize the Kip I
knew in the person the Confessor had described. Now, for the first time, I wondered if he would recognize me.

Piper held out his hand, appraising the snow that still fell on it.

“It'll cover the tracks, at least. It should buy us some time—more time than if he'd raised the alarm tonight. They won't find the body before daylight, even if they realize he's missing by then. But we have to leave the road, now.”

We led the dead man's horse with us when we left. He was still skittish and nervy, jerking at his reins, and Piper and I were both exhausted. By midnight we reached the forest, and there we tethered the horses and Piper took the first watch as I slept for a few hours. I woke to a vision of the blast, and couldn't reconcile the extremes—my body shaking with cold and my mind shimmering with flames.

Piper was watching me, but in the slightly distracted way that I'd grown used to in these last few days, since Zoe had left. He seemed a long way away—always scanning the distance beyond the horizon of my face.

He'd never accused me of driving Zoe away. He didn't need to. I saw myself through her eyes, now. I was both in my body and aware of it. Aware of how I shook when a vision came. How when I dreamed of the tanks, I woke with my mouth wide, greedy for air, as if I'd just surfaced from the tank's cloying liquid. I heard, as if for the first time, the noises I made when I had a vision of the blast. The strangled screams that never expected to be heard, because there was nobody left to hear, and no world left to hear in.

“Where do you think Zoe's gone?” I said to him.

“There's a place out east, where she used to think of building somewhere for her and Lucia. It's harsh country, right on the edge of the deadlands, but it's a long way away from all of this.” He didn't have to explain what he meant.

Once, I would have argued with him, said that I didn't think Zoe would give up on the resistance. But after the mistakes that I'd made, I had no right to claim that I knew her. Or to ask anything more of her than she had already given.

“Do you think she's coming back?” I asked him.

He didn't answer.

chapter 31

I felt the river before I felt the Ark. We'd emerged from the forest onto the open grasslands, and I could sense the water's movement within the stillness of the plain. Piper pointed to the east, and the mountain range that squatted across the horizon. From the Ark painting, I could recognize the distinctive peak of Broken Mountain, and the plateau of Mount Alsop.

Within a few hours of riding, I began to feel the Ark itself. It was an aberration in the earth. Ahead of us, beneath the plain, I could sense the obstinate hardness that was neither soil nor stone. And within this buried carapace was air, where earth should be.

I could feel, too, the soldiers massed there. I heard Xander's voice:
noises in the maze of bones.
The whole Ark hummed. If I'd had any doubts that the Council had discovered the Ark, I had none now. It was a hive, ready to swarm.

A few miles from the river, we tethered the horses in a copse. I was
reluctant to leave them like that: there was no water other than a few shallow puddles, half-frozen, and I didn't know how long we would be gone for. But it was too risky to set them free, where they could be noticed by the soldiers. “And we might need them again,” said Piper. I noted the
might
; we were both thinking the same thing:
If we come back.

We moved, hunching, through the long grass. Ahead, the plain rose to a broad hill, where trees fought the boulders and stones for a patch of earth. The river curved around the hill from the west. The winter hadn't caught this river—its dark water was too deep and too fast to freeze.

“Do we need to cross it?” Piper asked, eyeing the flow warily.

I shook my head, and pointed at the hill. “The Ark's on this side, under there.” I could feel it more clearly than ever. There was metal beneath the hill—I tasted its iron tang. Doors and passageways, a tracery of metal and air under the earth.

I led Piper a little way up the base of the hill, among the trees, toward the point where I could feel one of the passages climb to meet the air. The trace of metal was strong here—I could sense the doors, iron slabs set into the slope.

Before we reached the doors we saw the first soldiers. A covered wagon, pulled by four horses, flanked by eight more riders. Piper and I dropped to a crouch in the snow. The grass was long enough to hide us, but each time one of the soldiers turned to scan the plain I found myself holding my breath. When they passed the curve in the road they were less than thirty yards from us. Close enough that I could see the red beard of the soldier driving the cart, and the rip in the tunic of the last rider, where his sword's hilt had worn away the fabric.

Then they had passed us. We watched them approach the scar in the hillside where the door must once have been. But there was no door now: just a gouged space, forty yards across, in the earth. At some stage in the last four hundred years, the hill of scree and boulders had
engulfed the doorway that I could sense, and claimed it as its own. By the looks of it, it hadn't been easy for the Council to excavate. To the side was a mound of earth and rocks, some of the boulders as large as a horse. Trees, too, had been uprooted and dragged there, roots groping at the air. The detritus of centuries. In front of the opening, a line of soldiers waited: at least ten of them, a tongue of red peeking from the hill's open mouth.

For an hour or more we watched the entrance. Soldiers came and went to the wagon, and in and out of the dark chasm, but the watching guards didn't move from their posts. They weren't alone, either. Piper pointed out to me the bowman waiting on the hill, twenty yards above the door. She was nearly concealed by the boulders among which she perched. If Piper hadn't told me what to look for, I might have mistaken the protruding tip of her bow for a sapling. But it moved slightly, when she turned to survey the hill below her. Anyone who stepped from the long grass of the plain would be dead before they got within fifty yards of the door.

Parting the grass with both hands, I scraped the snow clear, closed my eyes, and pressed my cheek against the iced ground, and tried to get a feel for the overall shape of the Ark that lay below. It took me a few moments to work out why it felt familiar. Then I recognized it: it was like the island, but inverted. Where the island had been a cone rising from the sea, this was an upside-down cone, tunneling down to a central point. The outer corridors, at the surface level, traced a rough circle, several miles in diameter. Within this ring, narrower and deeper, a network of rooms and corridors burrowed. A nest of circular corridors, ever smaller and more deeply sunken. Even the outer ring of the Ark wasn't close to the surface. In front of us, beyond the buried door, a passageway dropped steeply to join the outer corridor. And there was a symmetry to the Ark's layout, I realized, as my mind fumbled its way through the
stone and steel. The passageway to the surface was repeated, at equal lengths around the Ark's circular rim.

“Remember what the papers said,” I whispered to Piper. “The radiation measurements were taken from
Ark Entrance 1
. There are other entrances. I can feel three more, around the outer circle. One at each of the compass points, more or less.”

For the rest of the day we edged around the rock-strewn hill, crouching in the deep grass. Three times I sensed a passageway climbing to meet the air. But each time, when we crept close enough, we were greeted by the same sight: guards, swords, and bows. In front of the western door was a cluster of tents—enough to quarter at least a hundred soldiers.

The southern door, closest to the river, had been spared the hill's advances, and instead of a messy excavation, a steel structure was visible, at ground level, although rusted. It was circular, more a hatch than a door, and was the height of two men. It looked as though the Council had blasted it open, somehow: a hole was torn in the center of the hatch, edged by sharpened spurs of metal, reaching inward like monstrous teeth.

When we'd retreated out of sight of the door, Piper exhaled slowly, closing his eyes for a moment. “We'll have to come back, with troops. Even with Zoe, we could never have taken one of those entrances. And even if we did, we'd only be trapped as soon as we entered.” He kicked at the snow. There was no time for this. No time to make the risky journey back to New Hobart, and to return again. No time for another battle, and more blood. How much luck, and how much time, did we have left? The Council's soldiers in the Ark were excavating more knowledge, more power, every day—and each day, the refuges swelled with more Omegas.

Piper sat on one of the boulders, and gave a desolate laugh. “That poor bastard, Heaton, died trying to get out of this place, and here we are, struggling to get back in.”

At Heaton's name, my head jerked upward.

“There's one more entrance.”

He sighed. “Is there any point? They're not going to have left a door unguarded.”

“It's not like others. It's not a door,” I said. “It was what you said about Heaton that reminded me. Remember what the Ringmaster found in that report, about the guy who'd killed Heaton when he tried to get out?”

Piper nodded. I'd told him and Zoe about the Ringmaster's discovery, and the conclusion to Heaton's story.

“It said something about where it happened,” I went on. “Something about him being killed while trying to get into a
ventilation shaft
. I didn't know what it meant—didn't really think about it. But it means he wasn't trying to get out through one of the main doors. It makes sense—they'd have been carefully guarded. He was trying to escape another way.”

“This
ventilation shaft
—so a kind of underground chimney?”

“I guess so. They must have needed to get fresh air down there, somehow.” A chimney was what it felt like, now that I trained my seeking onto it: a passage to the surface, both smaller and steeper than the main entrances.

“Is it big enough for a person to get through?” asked Piper. “And is it safe?”

“Heaton thought so.”

“That didn't work out so well for him.”

“Not because he was wrong about the shaft, though,” I said. “Only because they caught him doing it.”

“Then wouldn't they have done something to seal it up, if they caught him trying to get out that way?”

“If he'd succeeded, perhaps. But as it is, maybe not. He didn't manage, after all. From their perspective, their system worked: nobody es
caped. And think about the name:
ventilation shaft
. It was part of how they got the air down there. Not an easy thing to seal up, especially with everything else they had on their plates.”

“And you don't think the Council found it, sealed it up?”

“Only if they know it's there,” I said.

It wasn't only the Council sealing it up that I worried about—it was the centuries, and the shifting of earth and roots that had buried three of the four main doors.

Those external doors were tightly guarded, but they stood miles apart. We positioned ourselves halfway between the eastern and northern doors, and waited for darkness before emerging from the deep grass of the plain. Before we crossed the rough road that snaked around the hill, Piper told me to jump from stone to stone, so that we left no footprints in the exposed snow where carts and soldiers would pass.

Across the road and up among the boulders of the hill itself, we were directly above the Ark, and in the middle of the Council's four watch posts. Now that the Ark lay beneath us, I could feel it more clearly. The size and the depth of it were astounding—all the more so because the hillside gave no sign of what lay below. My awareness of the empty spaces beneath me was so strong that I found myself stepping tentatively on the snow, mistrusting the ground, even though I knew it was solid for hundreds of feet before the Ark hollowed it out. And while parts of the Ark hummed with activity, there were whole sections in which I could sense nothing but gaps in the earth, air beneath the soil.

It wasn't easy, scrambling up the huge hill, negotiating the boulders and scrub by moonlight. Without my seer-sense guiding me, I doubt we'd ever have found the hatch. It looked like no more than a dip in the earth, just another hollow in the tussocked ground between the boulders and trees. But I could feel the opening, the absence of earth
beneath it, like the covered pit trap on the path to Sally's house, though infinitely deeper. I knelt and looked more closely, parting the grass to expose a glimpse of rust, more orange than the dirt around it.

We scraped the snow to one side and pulled up the grass. Fibrous and sharp, it left slits on my fingers, and came out clotted with soil and moss at the base. When we'd cleared a round patch, it revealed the hatch. It was a circle barely two feet across, set deep in a metal rim. The lid wasn't solid, but a steel grid, still partly obscured by soil. Around its edge, four steel poles emerged from the earth, each of them ending in a jagged gnarl of rust just above the ground.

“It must have had some kind of structure over it, once. A cover, or something,” Piper said.

Whatever it was, it was gone now, whether in the blast itself, or in the centuries that followed.

I bent to the hatch. It looked tiny to me—barely the width of my shoulders. It must have looked even smaller to Piper, his back twice as broad as mine.

“Hell on earth, Cass. How big do you think this Heaton guy was?”

“There are other tunnels near here, too.” I could sense them—air tunnels running from the surface to the Ark's core, as if the hill beneath us had been pierced with a skewer, like a cake being tested for readiness.

“Bigger than this one?”

I shook my head. “A fraction of the size.” From what I could feel they would be barely a few inches across. “And think what it said on that bit of paper:
principal ventilation shaft
. This is the biggest one.”

Piper was probing the edge of the hatch with his dagger, dislodging a trail of dirt and moss. When he'd traced the entire circle, I reached for the hatch, hooked my fingers through the gaps in the grid, and pulled. It didn't move, though it gave a reluctant creak.

Piper worked his way around the edge again. Curls of rust settled
in the snow, staining it a lurid orange. He muttered about blunting his dagger, but persevered, both of us gritting our teeth against the screech of steel on rust.

He nodded to me, shaking his blade clean, I tried again. Nothing. But when he reached down and pulled with me, his hand between the two of mine, the hatch gave a final rasp and came away.

We dragged the hatch to the side and let it drop onto the snow, but the tunnel mouth was still concealed from us by what looked at first like a layer of dirt. Piper reached down and prodded it with the tip of his dagger. The blade sank into the dirt, more than an inch deep. When he swept the knife sideways it left a trail behind it, revealing a fine mesh beneath the dust. It was a filter, sieving the air and catching the particles big enough to slip through the steel lattice above. When I ran my blade around the edge, the thin wire mesh barely resisted, and I was able to pick it up, a disc of dust and netting, the dust shearing away as I lifted the mesh. It didn't fall far, though—after we'd removed that first filter, we had to slice away at least four more layers, each a few inches deeper than the last, the final one set several feet below the surface. Piper had to hold on to my belt as I lay on the ground to cut away the last layer, my whole torso hanging down the tunnel.

He hauled me back up, and I tossed the final filter down beside the hatch. The filters, crafted more finely than anything I'd seen, were so weightless that they didn't even dent the snow. Each strand of metal mesh was spiderweb thin. A membrane between the Ark and the world.

The dust and dirt that we'd dislodged were layers of sediment probably undisturbed for centuries. If we'd sifted through each filter, we might have traced the years through their remnants. On top, the snow of this winter, and the familiar dust of every day: dirt and grass seeds. Beneath it, the dust of the bleak years, when the recovery was tenuous, tentative. Perhaps the first fragments of plants, as they began to regenerate. Under
that, the dogged ash of the Long Winter, thick enough to darken the skies for years. And, last of all, the ash of the blast itself. Fragments of buildings and bones.