The Refuge Song (27 page)

We peered down the tunnel, a steel tube, not vertical but steeply angled. It was night where we stood, but the darkness seemed merciful compared to the total blackness of that hole below.

“I'm glad that we're following Heaton, at least,” I said. “It's like he's showing us the way.”

“He was trying to get out,” Piper pointed out. “We're doing the exact opposite of what he wanted to do.”

I ignored his words, instead sized up the breadth of his shoulders.

“It's too small for you,” I said.

“You're not going down there by yourself.”

He took off his rucksack and set it on the ground, and knelt at the edge of the tunnel. And although I didn't say it to him, I was relieved that I wasn't going to be offering myself to the darkness alone.

The tube was too narrow even for me to wear my rucksack. We stuffed our pockets with matches and jerky, and filled the oil lamp. I looped the strap of the water flask over my shoulder, and we hid the bags in the shelter of a nearby rock.

Piper lit the lamp. “I'll go first,” he said.

“That won't work. I need to feel the way.”

I took the lamp, though it wasn't my eyes that would guide me but my faltering mind, edging forward, sensing the spaces, the gaps, the obstacles.

“Are you ready?” I said.

He smiled. “Of course I'm ready,” he said. “I'm following a seer, who's following a dead stranger's failed escape attempt from hundreds of years ago, into an underground ruin full of Council soldiers. What could possibly go wrong?”

chapter 32

I'd been in cramped spaces before. The tunnels through which Kip and I had escaped from Wyndham had been dark and low-ceilinged. And the chute that had expelled us from the tank room had been airless and dark—but we'd had no time to prepare, to dwell in our fear. Nothing had compared to this: the slow descent into a chute so narrow that I had to keep my arms stretched out in front of me, because there was no room for them at my sides. When I tried to look back to see Piper, my face was pressed against the metal. All I could make out was the shape of my own body, and the tunnel's metal walls reflecting back the lamplight. Ahead of me, beyond the lamp's small sphere of light, there was a wall of absolute darkness, receding inch by inch as we crawled our way farther down.

Turning around would be impossible. I tried not to think about how we would manage if the way ahead were blocked. With the chute descending so steeply, it was hard to see how we could ever reverse our
way up it. I could hear Piper behind me; his breaths, and the scrape that the knives on his belt made on the chute's roof. It quickly grew warmer, as we descended—the Ark was its own climate, unrelated to the chilled night we'd left behind on the surface. My sweat mixed with the dust of the tunnel to make a sticky paste. With my slippery hands, I couldn't get a purchase on the smooth walls, so I was sliding as much as crawling. I began to sense the river above us. We couldn't hear it, but I could feel its ceaseless flow, adding to the sense of weight crushing me.

The tunnel was growing even narrower. I was sure I could feel it constricting my chest. I tried to calm myself, but my body refused to be placated. Each breath shorter than the last, until my breathing was a fever dance.

The tunnel distorted Piper's voice into unfamiliar shapes.

“Cass, I need you to stay calm,” he said. His voice was steady, although his chest must have been even more tightly squashed than mine.

My words were short, each one the length of a racing breath. “I. Can't.” I said. “Can't. Breathe.”

“I've followed you in here. You're the only one who knows the way. I need you to do this.”

If he'd tried to order me, I might have sunk further into panic. But he said he needed my help, and I knew it was true. We would both die, if I didn't pull myself together. Zoe and Zach, too. It would all be over, and nobody would ever find our bodies. We would be beneath the earth, but forever unburied.

I thought again of Kip, and his unclaimed body.

I shook the idea from my mind, and began moving again. There could be no darkness in the tunnel ahead of me that would be harder than the memory of him. I shuffled onward, bracing my hands against the tunnel's rounded sides.

Twice the chute bent at a sharp angle, so that we had to wiggle painfully around a tight corner, the first time leaving us crawling horizontally for a respite, before another bend returned us to near vertical. Three times the tunnel branched, and I tried to fathom the way. I clenched my eyes and let my mind grope ahead, waiting until I could feel the route opening before us. It was like tossing a stone down a well and waiting for the sound. Piper asked no questions, and didn't complain while I hesitated. He just waited until I was sure enough to move on. Ahead of me, beyond the lamp's feeble glow, it was so dark that in the end I kept my eyes closed, to allow me to concentrate without scanning the tunnel walls for hints that weren't there. The one reassurance that I had was that I could sense nobody anywhere near us. I could still feel the thrum of people to our east, in the deeper sections of the Ark, but the spaces below us, although bleak and black, were at least empty of breath and voices. I knew better than to trust these senses entirely—places had always been easier for me to feel than people, and both required intense concentration. My mind's giddy slippage between past, present and future had always added another dimension of risk. But here, in the tightly enclosed spaces of the Ark, the presence of people seemed to echo, while other sections of the warren were heavy with undisturbed air.

It was impossible to guess how far we'd descended—surely, I thought, it must be hundreds of feet? It was so warm down here, and damp, that the snowy grass above us felt like it belonged to a different time, and a different world.

I'd felt the way before us widening, but the end of the tunnel caught me by surprise. When I reached forward there was no further chute for me to grab, and I slithered out and fell a few feet onto a floor. I wasn't hurt, though I gasped and called out to warn Piper. The dust on the floor was more than an inch deep, and I'd landed hands and face first. I stuck my tongue out, grimacing, and tried to spit out the clumpy mixture of
dust and saliva. One of the glass panels in the lantern had smashed when I fell, but the lantern itself still burned. I looked down for the broken pieces, but they had been lost in the dust. When I turned, Piper's arm emerged from the chute. He swung himself neatly down to land on his feet, dust rising and settling.

I didn't realize how afraid Piper must have been until I saw the relief on his face, lit from below by my swinging lamp. He was jubilant, his teeth catching the light as he beamed.

“Don't move,” I said.

He looked down and saw what I meant. The tube had spat us out into a round chamber, perhaps fifteen yards wide. At its center was a circular hole, several times wider than the chute from which we'd emerged. If Piper had taken one step backward, he'd have fallen over the edge.

“You can't sense any soldiers near here?” he said.

I shook my head. “Nobody,” I said. They're deeper. We're not in the main bit of the Ark yet—these chambers aren't built for people. It's just the air passage.”

We kept our voices down, nonetheless. Piper took the lamp and lowered it. The hole in the floor wasn't empty. From a central axis, flat blades radiated, like the spokes of a wheel. Each blade was six feet long, and more than a foot wide. They were like the sails of a windmill, but rendered in unforgiving metal, and laid on their side.

Piper nudged the nearest one with his boot and the whole structure creaked into motion, executing a slow half turn.

“I bet it used to spin by itself, when the Electric was still working,” I said.

“Heaton was going to climb up through that, while it was spinning?”

“He was a smart man. He must have known how to stop it, at least for long enough to get through.”

Piper prodded one of the blades with his boot.

“It must be another part of the air filter system,” I said. “To get fresh air down here, and to keep the blast ash out. There's a reason they didn't get mutations down here, or twins. Look at all of this stuff.” I gestured at the walls, which crawled with wires and thick tubes. At foot-long intervals along the walls were circular holes as big as a hand. Some had tubes feeding out of them, others were open, like screaming mouths. There were labels affixed to the wall beneath each one, engraved on metal plates, but when I wiped the dust from them they were still unintelligible:
VAC. EXTRACT 471. RECIRC. 2 (INTAKE). EXHAUST VALVE.

I had expected to find machines inside the Ark. I hadn't realized that the Ark itself was a kind of machine: its very structure was a contraption, rigged to allow life to exist so far underground. There was so much between the Ark and the world above. For those who'd built this place, it wasn't enough to bury themselves several hundred yards under the ground. They'd mistrusted even the air, and put it through an obstacle course before it could reach them. Survivors on the surface had contended with the blighted world, without the shelter of hatches, filters, or sealed tunnels, while the Ark dwellers had sheltered below them, hidden.

Piper was squatting at the edge of the hole, peering down through the gaps between the blades.

“It's not a long drop,” he said.

The floor of the room beneath us was visible, probably only five or six feet below the blades. Between each pair of blades there was a gap just about wide enough to climb through.

“I'll go first,” I said, turning my back to the hole so I could lower myself. “Then you can pass down the lantern.” I was on all fours, about to drop my legs over the edge, when Piper hissed.

“Stop. Look at the dust.”

I looked down, but could see nothing remarkable about the fine gray silt that coated the concrete. My hands were buried in it knuckle-deep.

“Not there—on the blades.”

I knelt, turning to look at the blades behind me.

“There isn't any on the blades,” I said.

“Exactly.”

He reached down to me, jerked me upright.

“This wheel thing—it still turns—and regularly enough to keep the dust off.”

It seemed impossible that anything could still work down here. But he was right—the blades were dustless. And now I looked more closely, I saw how the dust in the rest of the small room was thinner by the edge of the hole, and banked deeper at the edges of the room, as if blown away from that central point.

“It's been four hundred years,” I said. “More, probably. You read what it said in all those papers: things stopped working.”

“Not completely,” he said. And I remembered the occasional faltering of the electric light in my cell in the Keeping Rooms. Had it been like that, in the Ark—just a gradual stuttering in and out of darkness? “And we don't understand how their machines worked,” he went on. “Just wait, for a while at least. If it starts up while you're climbing through, it'll cut you clean in half.”

We moved away from the blades and sat in the dust by the wall. It was an odd kind of vigil, watching this machine to see if it might spring back to life. We hardly spoke. It was stuffy, and sound moved strangely in the small room, muffled by the dust.

“It won't change anything, even if we see it move,” I said. “We still have to get through it.”

“Let's just see what we're dealing with,” he said.

We'd been waiting for the wheel to turn, but the light came first.
Without noise or warning, the room was lit, as thought the darkness were a curtain that had been snatched away. I cowered, my back to the wall. Piper leaped to his feet, his drawn blade sweeping from side to side as he scanned the room. It was painfully bright, after the subdued glow of the lamp. The lights were different from the one in my Keeping Room cell, which had hung on wires. These were set into the ceiling itself, in lines of solid glowing white. There were glowing panels in the walls, too, so we cast no shadows. We had left our shadows on the surface, along with the fresh air and the sky.

Second after the lights came on, the noise began: a grinding sound like broken glass underfoot. The blades began to turn. Slowly, at first, but within seconds the wheel whirred faster than I could ever have imagined. It became impossible to distinguish the individual blades, and the chamber beyond disappeared entirely from view, the blades converging into a single spinning mass. My hair was blown back from my face, and I raised my arm to shield my eyes as the fan whipped the dust into a frenzy.

Piper shielded his face too, his gaze shifting from the lights to the spinning blades and back again. I remembered that he'd never seen the Electric before. I'd lived beneath its artificial light for four years in the Keeping Rooms, and seen the intricate machinery of the Tank Rooms and the Confessor's database. But all of this would be new to him. The white sheen of the lights. The sounds: not just the noisy buzz of the fan, but the low hum of the lights themselves, a burr as insistent as dragonfly wings. After a few moments he'd slipped his knife back into his belt, but his knees stayed bent, ready to move quickly, and he kept his arm raised, fist braced, as though the Electric could be parried with punches.

“Amazing,” he said to me over the fan's whirr. “After all these centuries.”

I stared up again at the lights. Piper was right—there was awe amid
my horror. I dared to lean forward, closer to the fan, my face pummeled by the air that the blades threw upward. The illusion of wind, down here where no wind could ever reach.

I couldn't stop myself from picturing what would have happened had I been lowering myself through at the instant the blades started up. It would at least have been quick, I thought. A slicing so swift that there would be no time for pain. And Zach, somewhere, would have died just as quickly. Perhaps in a Council meeting, or while inspecting the tanks in one of his new buildings at a refuge. He would suddenly have dropped to the floor, a puppet with the strings cut.

The brightness and the sound lasted for several minutes, although time was uncertain in that bunkered world. Then the lights blinked twice and failed completely, and the lamp became our only bulwark against the darkness. For a few moments more the blades continued to spin, but without the manic propulsion that we'd just witnessed. Instead, there were several revolutions, each one slower than the last, before the wheel settled into stillness.

“We still have to get through it,” I said.

“I know.” Piper held the lamp out over the blades, their sharpened edges glinting.

I wished he hadn't realized the wheel still turned. We were going to have to submit to the blades' mercy anyway. It had been easier before Piper had stripped away the illusion of safety.

He swung the lamp around the chamber. “There's nothing here that we could use to jam it,” he said. He was right—no furniture, no panels that looked as though they could be prized loose and jammed between the blades and the hole's edge.

“We can't just lower ourselves through,” he said. “We have to jump. The faster we get through it, the smaller the risk.”

Together we ventured again to the hole's rim. At the edge, where the
spaces between the blades were widest, each gap was still barely two feet wide. Narrow enough that we'd have to jump with absolute precision to avoid hitting the blades. A painful knock at best. Sliced flesh at worst. And that was if the blades stayed motionless. If the Electric came back while we were passing through, there was no best or worst scenario—only one outcome.