The Refuge Song (31 page)

Zach rushed at the ladder, but Piper tackled him, grappling him to the ground. If Zach said anything, I didn't listen. I turned back to Kip, and bent low over his face.

He gave two exhalations, each one a tiny benediction of warm air on my cheek. The third breath wasn't a breath at all—just an opening of his mouth. His eyes stayed closed, and I was glad.

I turned my face to the side, cheek pressed against his chest. I didn't pretend, even to myself, that I was comforting him. I knew there was nothing left inside him. If there was any comfort in that last embrace, it was all for me.

I held his spent body and looked at his closed eyes and his slim fingers. I slipped my palm under the back of his neck and let my hand take on the familiar weight of his head. He took no more breaths. For the first time since the silo, I cried.

Ω

I stood and looked back down at the Confessor, in her tank. She had sunk to the bottom, her neck arched backward. Her eyes were open but her face was expressionless. In death, she was no more inscrutable than she had been in life. Zach sat leaning against her tank, head thrown back, not hiding his tears.

“You'll never get out of here,” he said. Piper let him stand, but kept his knife pointed at Zach's back. “All the entrances are guarded,” Zach went on. “You'll be caught. He'll end up back in the tank. And we'll drag them back to life again.”

“It's not life,” I said. I stepped carefully over Kip's body on the gangway, and back to where I'd left the lantern. The matches were in my pocket. I fumbled at the first attempt, the match scraping limply and then snapping. The second time, the flame flared and caught.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Zach, as I lit the lantern's wick. “I've told you already. It's not safe.”

This time I laughed out loud. “Safe” had become nothing more than a syllable. What could it mean, here in the Ark, in this maze of bones in which Kip lay dead and the empty tanks waited?

“What are you doing?” Zach said again as I lifted the bright lantern. The river's churning in the pipes seemed to grow louder in my head. Piper stood behind Zach, keeping his knife trained on him.

I weighted the lantern carefully in my hand while I looked down at Zach.

“When we were split,” I said, “I took the branding and the exile for you. You knew I'd do it, to protect you. And I've been protecting you, one way or another, ever since then. That ends now.” I raised the lantern high. “There'll be no more tanks here. And you're not getting the last pieces of the blast machine either.”

I stared right into Zach's eyes. “You think you know me?” I said. “You don't know me at all.”

I glanced to Piper. We knew each other well enough, I prayed, for him to see what was coming.

“Run,” I said.

I threw the lantern. Not at Zach, or even at the tanks. But at the ceiling, where the smaller pipes clung to the bottom of the huge central water pipe.

The air above us shattered into sound and light. The blast knocked me onto my back, hand raised to shield my face. Piper had dived to the side when he saw the lantern's trajectory. Zach was slower to react
and was propelled backward by the explosion, crashing into one of the tanks.

After the wave of heat there was a shriek of scraping glass, and the two empty tanks closest to the blast collapsed into themselves. A third tank stayed upright, but the glass had become opaque, a lacework of fissures. I looked up at the central pipe. Where the blast had hit and the smaller pipes had ruptured, a dark hairline crack was visible. Water dripped through it. The drops were speeding up, keeping time with my pulse.

Zach scrabbled back to his feet. The broken glass had left a small cut on his temple, and his face was white with dust. “That's it?” I could hardly hear him, my ears still echoing from the explosion. “You've managed to break three tanks. That's your grand gesture?”

When the pipe burst open, the water drowned his laughter. The river had come to claim us.

chapter 37

Zach was knocked backward and swept toward the door. He grabbed at the door handle and staggered to his feet, gasping. It took him only seconds to jab at the metal panel, and then a green light flashed and the tumblers slid back. As soon as he began to push the door open, the force of the water tore it from his grasp and slammed it against the wall of the corridor. He looked back at me one more time, but the water was already approaching his waist. A whole section of the overhead pipe tore loose, smashing two more tanks as it fell. The green lights on all the panels began to flash, a synchronized blinking that set the whole room shimmering, green stars on black water. Then the lights turned red, and disappeared, so that the only light came from beyond the door though which Zach had run.

There was nothing else to do. Our footsteps on the metal gangway were almost drowned out by the torrent of water. By the time we reached the missing grille, the water was already grasping at our feet.
Somewhere behind us, I knew that the dark water would be scooping up Kip's body. I didn't look back. I hauled myself into the tunnel, and heard the banging as Piper followed me.

Our whole time in the Ark, I'd been able to feel the river above us. Now, as we crawled, heaving ourselves up the incline of the tunnel to the next level, I could feel the river below us, too, filling every space it could find.

We reached the next level just before the water, but I knew that our cramped progress through the tunnels would be too slow to save us. When we got to the grate that we'd dislodged the day before, I dropped back down to the corridor. Here, the lights were still on, but soon water was clutching at my ankles. The cold of the river was sharp, even through my boots. Then the ceiling lights spat blue sparks, and went out. In the dark, Piper was only a sound of splashing beside me. By the time we got to the next flight of stairs, the water was at my hips.

It didn't matter how fast we ran. Somewhere in the Ark, Zach was running, too, and if he didn't make it, nor would I. But he knew these corridors, and could head straight for the main doors. If any guards remained at the exits, after the river's bursting, Zach wouldn't need to fear them.

We ran. The lights on the upper levels weren't lit, and the blackness was thickened by the sound of rising water. It caught up with us in the top level—when the river reached the main corridor, sparks sprayed from the ceiling, with a sizzling sound like hot steel plunged into water. In the instant of light, I saw a skull bob past my feet. A boat of bone. Then the darkness returned. I tried to concentrate on finding the main ventilation tunnel, but the messy and insistent currents of the water changed the way the corridors tugged at my mind. We ran through Section F, its silent rooms now noisy with water. At one point I led us the wrong way, and we had to backtrack twenty yards, against the current.
We were almost swimming now, the water at our chests, the cold so extreme that my lungs clenched, refusing air. The sounds of Piper behind me grew fainter; with only one arm to pull himself through the water, he was dropping behind.

If the water's current had not been heading in the right direction down that final corridor, we would never have reached the open ventilation hatch leading to the main shaft. My feet could no longer touch the ground, and I was propelled by the water rather than my own flailing movements. But when I gripped the sides of the open hatch and tried to pull myself up, the current was no longer an ally. It refused to let me go, dragging me so mercilessly that when I finally managed to pull myself through the hatch, my legs scraped against it and left filings of flesh on the steel edge.

Here, in the narrower space, I had the ladder to hang on to, though my frozen hands kept slipping from the rungs. Piper grabbed from below, clutching my foot for a moment before he, too, found the rungs.

When we pulled ourselves into the control room, with the wheel of blades above us, the water followed. Each time a spark from above illuminated the room, I could see how the water had crept farther up the walls. One of the sealed hatches on the side of the room gave way, the dislodged door crashing into my hip as the water burst through.

The gap between the blades and the water had shrunk to only a few feet, the water at our waists. The dwindling space amplified the sounds, and our breathing was loud, each breath the quick rasp of a handsaw through wood.

There was no time to worry about the Electric or the sharpened fan—the death offered by the water was certain, unlike the blades. Piper knelt so that I could clamber onto his knee, just as I'd once seen him kneel to help Zoe. He steadied me while I groped up through the darkness to find the blades with my hands. The lights stayed off, and the
blades stayed still. Even the sparks had finished flaring now—perhaps the river had done what four hundred years had not, and drowned the Electric for good.

Piper had nobody to lift him. The first two times he jumped, I heard the splash that followed as he fell back down. Kneeling at the edge of the hole that I could not see, I tried to gauge how fast the water was rising, and how much air was left. How many breaths remained to us, and whether I would wait for him if he fell another time.

It was a calculation I never had to complete. The third time he jumped, his hand thudded on the rim of the concrete floor. I grasped his forearm with both of my hands, throwing myself flat against the ground to counteract his greater weight. Our skin was slippery and numb with the water. As he heaved himself upward, his whole arm shook. His hand was a vise, squeezing my wrist so tightly that my skin was crushed between our bones. My newly healed right wrist remembered its pain; when I gasped, the sound was lost in the hiss of water beneath us.

He made it through the gap. We didn't speak—there was no time, and not enough air in the small space, with the river whispering at us from below. In minutes, it would pass the fan and join us in this final chamber. I clambered into the tunnel. No time for hesitation now, and no choices to make. Only water below us, and air above. I braced my wet boots against the outsides of the tunnel and reached my arms in front of me. The steepest sections, though far from vertical, still took all my strength. Each jerky movement gained only a few inches, and often my hands or feet slipped on the rounded piping. My body's giddy shaking produced no warmth, and I was utterly depleted as I negotiated the turns in the tunnel, forcing my body around the tight corners. The only comfort was the sound of Piper behind me. Then another sound began to follow me up the tunnel: the creeping of water. It was quiet at first—just a dampening of the echoes as our knees and elbows bumped
against the steel. But within minutes every movement of Piper's legs was a splash. Before, I had been relieved that the tunnel wasn't vertical. Now I realized what it meant. Even I, higher than Piper, would never be able to stay afloat, or to keep up with the water and let it carry me upward—the angled pipe would trap me.

For a second, I wished we'd stayed down there, in the base of the Ark with the tanks, and taken the quick death that the flood had promised us. I could have gone to Kip's body, and been with him at the end. Worse to die slowly here, and to have to listen to Piper drowning below me. To hear his death, and Zoe's death nestled within it. I would die in this tunnel, cramped so tightly that I couldn't so much as wrap my arms around myself in the final moments. No consolation but the grip of the steel.

It seemed strange, after all my dreams of fire, that it should end like this: death by water.

My pulse became a cry that only I could hear:
Zach. Kip. Zach. Kip.

Two flecks of white appeared before my eyes. Was I dying now? Was my body so numb with cold that the water had overtaken me before I could even realize? Or had Zach, somewhere else in the Ark, succumbed to the water?

But the lights stayed steady. They were not spots on my vision, not the last flares of consciousness. They were stars.

chapter 38

In those last few hundred yards, with the night sky in my sight, we climbed higher than the river's level, and the water stopped pursuing us up the tunnel. There were no more splashes from behind me as Piper crawled—just the dulled thuds of metal set in concrete.

The moonlight outside couldn't penetrate the tunnel properly, but the darkness around me changed. I could see the seams of the metal, where the sections of pipe had been joined. Above us, at the rim of the opening, I saw the silhouette of the long grass swiping at the air, blown by a wind that I'd never expected to feel again.

After all that had happened in the Ark, it was strange to find the surface world unchanged. Snow lay on the boulders, and the wind scudded clouds in front of the stars. Unconcerned by floods, Arks, or blasts, the moon continued its progress across the sky. But as I slumped on my hands and knees in the snow, I could still hear the rumble of the river beneath us as it forced its new course through the Ark.

We were soaked, and the cold night air felt like an attack. When I looked down at my hands, they were blurred with tremors. Piper had dropped to his knees on the grass. I stared beyond him at the earth's dark mouth, and thought of everything that had been drowned when I unleashed the river. The ghost voice of Elsewhere. The remnants of the blast machine that Zach had not yet salvaged. The thousands of tanks, awash now with all the Ark's old bones. And Kip, free of the tank and of his broken body.

The next hours passed in a haze of cold. As we retrieved our rucksacks, there was shouting to the east, where the nearest door to the Ark lay. Lamps were moving in the distance. We ran, skidding among the boulders in their shrouds of snow. When we were off the hill and back in the long grass of the plain, we kept running. Even when there were no sounds of pursuit, we kept moving. To stop and sleep in the snow, in our soaking clothes, would be to die. The cuffs of my soaked trousers hardened with ice, clipping at my ankles with each step. The sun rose and revealed my blue-white skin. By the time we reached the copse and found the horses, new snow was falling. I knew I should be glad that it would cover our trail, but pursuit seemed a less immediate concern than the cold. I rode slumped forward, pressed to the warmth of my horse's neck. Piper rode beside me, leading the horse of the soldier we'd killed on the road on the way to the Ark. It seemed a long time ago—so much had changed during those few days and nights underground.

When I slowed, and half-slipped from the horse, Piper shouted at me to keep moving. He rode close and shook my shoulder. I tried to brush him away, but my hands were so cold that I could no longer move my fingers. My body had become nothing more than an encumbrance, a block of chilled flesh that my horse hauled.

Some time shortly after dawn, when we were beyond the plains and back in wooded country, Piper led me to a shallow cave, and tethered the
horses when my fingers refused to grasp the reins. Inside the stone shelter, we stripped off our ice-stiffened clothes and huddled in our underwear under the dry blanket. His skin next to mine was no comfort—we were as cold as each other. There was a rawness to the cold, as though not just our clothes but our skin had been stripped away. I put my frozen fingers, one at a time, in my mouth, to coax them back to life. When the warmth returned, it brought pain with it, the blood forcing its way back into flesh. Could Zach feel it, too? I wondered. How close to death would I have to be, before Zach's body would begin to tremor in unison with mine? I closed my eyes against the world and slipped into sleep.

I dreamed of the coast. I'd shared Zoe's dreams of the indifferent waves many times, when she was with us. But this was different. Instead of a featureless expanse of ocean, I saw a white cliff, standing bulwark between the land and sea. I saw a sail that scooped up the wind. Sea spray on wood.

I'd never seen those white cliffs before. But their strangeness was nothing compared to what the ship carried.

I woke, shouting of Elsewhere.

Piper turned from the cave entrance, where he'd been hunched over a small fire.

“You were with me at New Hobart,” he said, when I'd thrown on my clothes and told him what I'd seen. “Zach showed us the figureheads. There was no mistaking them—I know every ship in my fleet. They had Hobb and the crews—the General mentioned Hobb by name.
The Rosalind
and
The Evelyn
are taken, Cass.”

I couldn't argue with him. I couldn't even give him details about the ship that I had seen. A white sail, against a white cliff, and the sulky-mouthed curve of the horizon. But I knew we had to go there. And when I described the white cliff to him, he nodded.

“Sounds like Cape Bleak, sure enough. But there are no ships left
to come in. We need to go back to New Hobart, and tell Simon and the Ringmaster what we found in the Ark. Now we know the Council's plans for the blast, we need to consolidate the resistance if we're going to fight back. And what about the others in New Hobart? What about the Ringmaster's threat?”

I'd been thinking of it, too—Elsa, Sally, and Xander at the Ringmaster's mercy. “We did what the Ringmaster would've wanted, in the end,” I said. “If his network of spies brings him any news of us, it'll be that we destroyed the Ark, and whatever machines remained there. Even he could ask no more of us than that. He won't betray us while he thinks we can help him work against the machines.”

I squeezed my fingernails into my palms. Since I'd found out that Zach was rebuilding the blast machine, time had felt finite—it was running out, like the air above us when we were in the flooding Ark. I might have slowed Zach's plans, by drowning the last pieces of the blast machine and destroying the huge chamber of tanks, but it was still not enough. Elsewhere existed, and if Zach and the General found it before us, it would burn.

“A ship's coming,” I went on. “I don't know what ship it is, or how it will come. But I know it's got something to do with Elsewhere. I felt it.” There were no words to explain what I had sensed, when the ship had sailed into my vision. The knowledge, as immovable as the cave wall behind me, that the ship carried with it a trace of Elsewhere. Something beneath those full sails that was so entirely alien that it both fascinated and repulsed me.

“It's coming, and soon,” I said. “And we have to find it before the Council does, or any chance we have will be lost. There isn't time to go back to New Hobart.” I stood up. “And I'm not asking for your permission. I'm going, with or without you.”

He was staring at his scarred knuckles. How many times had he un
leashed his blades from those fingers, I wondered? How many lives had that hand taken? Would he stop me, if I tried to walk away?

His face was grave. “If we're going to stop the Council, the resistance is going to need you more than ever. You nearly got us both killed in the Ark. You can't just go off now, taking more risks.”

“You say the resistance needs me,” I said. “That's why you spared me, on the island. But if the resistance needs me, it's because my visions are valuable. So listen to me.”

When he spoke, his voice had dropped low. “The resistance has needed me, too.” A pause. “Needed me to do things. To make decisions. To be certain, even when I haven't had much certainty left.”

He looked up at me, the flames lighting the underside of his face, leaving his eyes in darkness. Outside, the snow had stopped, and the night was hushed.

I remembered what he'd said to Leonard, months ago:
There are different kinds of courage
. I'd seen Piper fight, and I'd seen him stand before the assembled troops and rally them to battle. But it would take a different kind of courage, now, for him to choose to follow me.

“If I set off now,” I said, “I might be able to cross the western ridge while the snow holds off.”

“I'm coming with you,” he said.

“I'm glad,” I said. And it wasn't until I spoke the words that I knew they were true.

Ω

In the long days of riding westward, my mind kept returning to those final moments in the ventilation pipe. How I had reached for Kip's and Zach's names, instinctive as breath.

I thought often of Zoe, too, though Piper never spoke of her. All that we knew of her was that she lived. And although I found myself missing
the click of her knife on her nails, I thought she was better off, wherever she was, not knowing the news that Piper and I had dredged up from the Ark. Zoe had enough burdens already.

At night, I dreamed of the blast, and of the cliff that waited for the ship. There were no more visions of Kip in the tanks, and that was a mercy. But the blast dreams took on a new potency, now that I knew their true significance.

“I used to think my visions were letting me down,” I said to Piper one night, after the blast had left my sleep in ashes. “Because they were unclear, or inconsistent. That they were failing me somehow. Now I know it was me failing them. I only saw what I wanted to see.”

“Maybe you saw what you needed to see.”

I kept staring at the night sky.

“Maybe you had enough to deal with,” he went on. “If you'd known all along about the blast, it would have been too much. Perhaps you would've gone mad. Or given up.”

Sometimes I thought my madness was an Ark, buried deep within me. I could feel it, even if he couldn't. Soon enough it would be found.

Ω

Our escape from the Ark, drenched and nearly frozen, had left me with a fever. For three days I'd been sweat-soaked and shivery, my neck swollen and my throat inflamed. Piper wouldn't admit it, but he was unwell too—his skin was clammy and he'd picked up a wheezing cough. When we crossed the high pass over the mountains, the snow drifts were so deep in places that we had to dismount and lead the horses. By the time we were on the far side of the pass, my teeth were chattering loudly and Piper could no longer conceal his own body's shaking.

We both knew we could not continue like this much longer. When we came across the small settlement clustered by the stream, it was after
midnight, and there were no lamps visible in the windows. We decided to tether the horses in the woods upstream, and risk sneaking into the barn at the settlement's edge. We climbed up to the loft, and lay in the mounded hay. I ignored the itching and spiking of the hay, and burrowed deep for warmth. Beside me, Piper was trying to silence his cough. I was both cold and hot at once, my swollen neck pulsing with pain. We didn't sleep so much as pass out.

Our sickness had made us careless—we didn't take lookout shifts, and woke at dawn to the sound of the barn door slamming open below us.

I heard the chink of metal as Piper slipped a knife from his belt. But nobody came up the ladder, and the sounds from below were the unhurried noises of daily work. A barrow was wheeled inside, and then came thuds of wood on wood. I was lying facedown, and I moved slowly to scrape aside the hay, uncovering cracks in the rough floor to peer through. Below, the barn door stood open, admitting the first hints of dawn, and a woman with a single eye was loading a barrow with logs of wood from a pile in the corner.

That's when I heard the whistling. The chilled air blurred the notes at the edges, but I knew the tune immediately: Leonard's song. She was whistling the chorus, pausing between lines as she bent to grab another armful of wood, and huffing in the cold so that half the notes were more breath than tune. But it was clear enough, and in my mind I matched the words to the notes as they reached me on the lazy wind:

Oh you'll never be tired, you'll never be cold

And you'll never ever, ever grow old,

And the only price you'll have to pay

Is to give your life away.

Like me, Piper was smiling. I closed my eyes and found his hand. Here, at least a hundred miles northwest of where we'd last seen Leonard alive, the song had found its way. It wasn't much—just a scattering of notes, hanging for a moment in the air. The song had seemed such a slight thing to carry the message of the tanks—but it was spreading.

We slipped from the hayloft as soon as the woman had gone, and ran from the settlement in the hesitant dawn light. I was thinking of Leonard—the chill of his dead flesh, and the broken guitar around his neck. I'd seen enough of death, these last few months, to know its absoluteness. I'd seen the dead bodies on the island, and at the battle of New Hobart. I'd seen Kip on the silo floor, each angle of his body wrong, and seen him again, his double-death, preserved in the tank. There was nothing romantic in death, and nothing that would bring those dead back: not tanks, not tears, and not songs. But having heard Leonard's music in the barn, I was assured that at least some part of him had slipped that noose.

Ω

It took two more weeks to reach Cape Bleak. The snow had melted, and our fevers receded. The spare horse meant we could rotate mounts, and we made good progress, even though we had to travel at night once we'd reached Alpha country. For more than a week we passed through hills richly populated with villages and towns. We moved through the darkness, unseen, and I didn't feel afraid, even when Piper told me that we were passing within miles of the biggest Council squadron in the west. I'd seen the Ark, and knew its secrets. I passed through the blast each time I slept. Little else could scare me now. And the half-heard song from the hayloft sustained me, and helped to heal my sick body, more than any of the sinewy hares that Piper caught.

Eventually the land grew scrappy again, gnarled by the coastal winds, and there were no more Alphas to avoid. Then we came within sight of the sea. Inhospitable cliffs cut away into the ocean. I knew them at once for the cliffs I had dreamed of. White as sliced flesh, before the blood springs to the wound.

There I dreamed of the sea. When I woke, I knew that the waves that had broken on the edges of my sleep were not my own dreams. I sat up quickly, almost expecting to find Zoe there, sleeping beside me as if she'd never gone. But there was only Piper's back as he sat looking out from the cave's entrance, watching the sun set over the water.