Click.
Interlude
“Any word?” asked Kirillion, scratching his beard.
Over the horizon the sunlit clouds were darkening; night approached and soon Bowie would be waking to take his shift. Linwood had left a note in his room not to bother, to take the night off. Find some other hole to crawl into and jerk off. That wasn’t being entirely fair; he did spend at least half the time asleep.
Linwood stared from the watchtower at the crawling darkness and allowed it in. He’d seen every permutation the sand could make from up here, a million times over; a lifetime wasted searching for something so elusive it may not even exist. And even if it did: so what? So what if the latest find was the Ark? What life did he have left to live now?
He sat and scanned the console while his back fought against the restrictions of the seat. I just want to lie down, he thought.
The gate of the lift crashed shut behind Kirillion. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“A report came in not half-an-hour ago, actually.”
“Well, spill it,” ordered Kirillion as he took an adjacent seat. He reached out and grabbed a cup of potato vodka spiked with water.
“Found some bikes, bla bla. Barrick very excited, that is until they found some kind of hoverbike, bla bla. Walker, Caia and Annora went exploring in a hatch they found, bla bla bla.”
“A hatch?”
“They radioed back, said they were exploring what looked like a replica of level one, municipal.”
“Caia, eh? So it was a dome.” Kirillion sipped, the ends of his moustache dipping into the liquid. Hair almost completely white, but still thick. Light that up and you got yourself a watchtower beacon. And for a moment Linwood ran with that fantasy.
“Sounds like.” Linwood stood, releasing the pressure along his spine and sighing as all the little bubbles of pain popped like balloons.
“Maybe you’ll get to go home after all,” said Kirillion. “Should we toast?” He rose the cup and smiled and all Linwood wanted to do was hit it out of his hands, or maybe smash it into his face. “Now, now… no need to look at me like that.”
“I’ll look at you however I damn well like, especially when you’re getting so much enjoyment from it.”
“How long have we been out here? When exactly did you stop liking me?” Kirillion laughed. “That’s alright,” and he relaxed in his chair, swiping the air. “One way or another our sojourn will soon be over. You’ll either die of alcohol poisoning, or get yourself a nice little apartment, maybe a nice little program to run, maybe even get that back of yours fixed. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“I’ve given up on hope.” Linwood cradled a cup of his own. He swished the contents around and looked down as if he could foresee the future within. “In fact, one more false hope and I think I may just lock the door and throw away the key, drink myself to oblivion.”
“Someone else’ll just replace you. And I’ll have to start over from scratch building up a rapport. No-one else could replace our lifetime of friendship. I’d just be so devastated to lose you,” Kirillion laughed, standing. He entered the lift. “The moment Caia manages to get a message to us, let me know.”
Ark
The final words of the dead man were spoken and then silence filled the room. More than silence; the dearth of his words cooled the room further, with the weight of all that had happened here chilling the spirit. All those lost lives. Annora sensed the cold within and the cold without battling for supremacy, but she wasn’t present for it. She was distant, numb to her fingertips and her soul; visualising the clouds open and a shower of fireballs from an orange sky burn down, torching the air and the flesh it touched. Saw a circular black mass of disintegrating bodies, folding to ash. Tears stung. Saw vapour trails rise and feed a cancer sky. She wanted to scream into the silence; give voice to the screams that would never have come. To give them a voice. A final word.
She sat and crossed her legs, head in hands.
Caia flung the device onto the skeleton as though it suddenly burned her hand, and began exploring the rest of the room.
“Poor guy,” said Walker, himself leaning against a console. “To lose everything in an instant like that.” He shook his head and vapour trails blew from his nostrils.
“I don’t know how he handled it,” said Annora. “I’d lose it. All those people just gone in a flash with no chance to say goodbye.”
“I wonder if that’s what happened to us. Why there are so few of us.”
“You mean?” Annora looked up. “Other settlements destroyed the same way?”
“Makes sense. If it can happen here, it could happen everywhere.”
“It could happen at Sanctum.” She swallowed.
“We don’t know that.”
“You just said...”
“Ignore what I said. Sanctum is safe. Well-maintained. Whatever happened here was probably a random malfunction. One in a million. Or they simply didn’t look after it like they should have.”
“They had a whole team and they couldn’t stop it. You think Linwood would have it under control?”
“It’s...” Walker began to pace. “I’m sure it’s fine. Sanctum gets its power from the solar dome, right? Probably two completely different systems. This place was bigger. Needed a bigger power source.”
“Then why the secrecy about level six?”
“No secrecy, Annora. Just a need-to-know basis. It is dangerous. Look at this place,” he said, waving his hand. “Okay? Probable risk of falling. Who knows how big this place is without turning on the lights.”
“I...” Kirillion killed Ziyad to hide his secret. She looked down at her boots, beyond them, flitting her eyes left and right.
“Anyway. We need to decide what to do next. We can make our report and worry about the implications later.”
“I don’t trust Linwood, or Kirillion,” she said. She breathed out and her shoulders slumped.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“They’re hiding something from us. Something big. Maybe this is part of it, I don’t know.”
The room shuddered, the same way the lift carts shuddered. All that was missing was the clattering of a closing cage.
Bracing herself with her hands, Annora asked “Are we falling?” Her stomach pitched into her lungs.
“We have a job to do,” said Caia, hovering over a control panel. Outside the window intermittent lights trailed from low to high, low to high.
“What have you done?” asked Walker, standing beside her and studying the panel.
“What I have to do,” she said, taking a step back, withdrawing a hypodermic needle and plunging it into Walker’s neck. She depressed it. All this happened in an instant, then Walker fell to the ground, groaning, rubbing his head and looking incredulously up at Caia. And then he was out.
“What have you done?” shouted Annora, pushing her hands and feet against the floor and retreating, the dead body behind her forgotten. She screamed as her back bumped against it and an arm fell down beside her.
“He’ll be fine. He’ll wake up with a headache. You – however – won’t, because I need you.”
“What are you talking about?” she jumped to a standing position, torch in hand. “Why did you knock him out?”
“He’d only get in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
“What is this? Twenty questions?”
“It’s a hundred questions until you tell me what the fuck is going on!”
“You heard the man. Power is running out. We don’t have much time.”
“Much time for...”
“If you could shut up for one fucking second I’ll tell you!” Caia shouted, turning her back on Annora. She began scrolling through some readings on the console, shaking her head. “As you heard, this is the Ark. This is what we have been searching for this whole time.”
Annora wanted to ask how Caia knew this, but she kept her mouth closed.
“The Ark is a knowledge store. A
complete history of the human race; all the knowledge we have ever accrued, every answer to every question we could possibly ask. So you see, it’s quite important that we save it from destruction.”
“How do we do that?”
“It’s being protected from radiation by a shield generator, but it is eating the power. Once the power runs dry, degradation will begin. Over time, everything will be lost.”
The weight of the torch in Annora’s hand felt suddenly monumental, and she almost dropped it. Shaking her head, she approached Walker and knelt down beside him, touching his temple, and then his neck for a pulse.
“So we have no time. We can’t wait for another crew. Can’t even try and hook up another generator – even one of ours would run out of juice in no time. He’ll be fine.”
Annora felt the rise and fall of Walker’s chest as he breathed. “What makes you think you’re going to get away with this?”
“Don’t get dramatic on me we have no time to argue and I’d rather not have to knock you out too.” Caia stood above her, stance wide and chest puffed out. “I need your help.”
“Not really the way to go about it, is it?” said Annora, standing. They stood face to face at eye level. Annora was considerably slimmer than Caia, whose years of work had broadened her shoulders and sharpened her features. Caia sweated, despite the cold, and Annora realised a rising fever of anger had warmed her from the inside too. They both stood with fists clenched.
“Don’t,” said Caia. “It would be pointless.”
Annora unclenched her fists. “But satisfying.”
“Come on,” Caia turned for the glass chamber. “I need you inside. I’m going to control it from the outside, I just need you to collect the data.”
“From what? How?” She pressed her face close to the glass. “There’s nothing in there.” The chamber was a void with smooth metallic surfaces. Caia waved a hand in front of something and a door slid open. The light inside the chamber grew; the reflection now almost blinding as it bounced from surface to surface as though to eternity.
“If you get inside, I’ll talk you through it,” said Caia as she stood behind her. Annora felt her heat-presence near, like hands insisting on the small of her back. It was almost as bad as being physically touched. She looked at the glass chamber. A simultaneous desire to get away from Caia, as well as curiosity, pushed her towards the opening.
I wish Calix could see this. “You wouldn’t believe how deep we went and what we saw or what happened to this place.”
Walking into the light, she wanted to hold his hand, cross this barrier together. He should see this too – know the truth. See what Linwood and Kirillion have been hiding from them. But this can’t have been all Ziyad died for.
All. All?
This, if Caia’s words were true, could be everything. The answers for everything – who they were and how everything had ended up like this. If a death was worth it, shouldn’t it be this one?
No.
Knowledge should be shared, and while this kind of knowledge would be worth dying for, whoever wants it does not want to share it. They want to use it.
“Who are you working for?”
Her wrist was suddenly gripped by Caia, and her hand twisted and pulled behind her. One shove and Caia sent her toppling forward into the chamber. Even beneath the scarf the hairs on her neck shot up, their roots prickling and sending a shockwave of static throughout her epidermis. The tips of her fingers tingled like a mild pins-and-needles. The surfaces were warm to the touch as she scrambled to her feet, pushing up from the ground and planting hands on the walls.
The door closed.
She hit the glass with dull thuds. “Let me out!” To her own ears her words sounded distant, bereft of substance. She felt the tingling sensation spread up her arms. Her heartbeat was a drumbeat, all bass and quickening under her panicked breaths. She began to hyperventilate, hand on chest. “I can’t… breathe,” she said, down on one knee now and braced against the glass.
On the other side, Caia watched her closely, and shook her head. Annora could see a panic in her face too, but it didn’t stop her doing whatever it was she was doing on the console. “Just breathe,” she said, her voice echoing into the chamber.
Annora’s heart beat so quickly it began to hurt. The arm she had braced against the glass began to tighten its muscles. She bit her lip, groaned, pulled the arm down into her side and slid into a sitting position with her back to the glass; a curtain of damp hair fell across her eyes and shielded them from the stinging light. Caia was speaking but she couldn’t hear her over the sound of her own moans and the mild timpani that had begun, a susurration that seemed to vibrate through the glass and through the floor, entering her body. Her jaw locked and a wave of darkness assaulted her. Her eyes opened, closed, opened, closed; breaths now rhythmic and every two seconds, gulping air. She thought of Calix and fought to keep her eyes open; thought of Sanctum and imagined two black spectres floating around its halls and murdering children, then remembered Caia and the black spectre’s numbers grew until Sanctum swarmed with them. Thought of the sand, the precious sky and ground between which all that oxygen resided: oxygen that – she felt – was diminishing within the chamber and her lungs. She’d never known such fear; even the very first time that Sanctum had vanished from the rear viewport of the crawler and there was no going back, she was finally exploring an expanse with no discernible features for miles and miles in all directions – that feeling of isolation that only Calix’s sweet face had been able to temper, glancing at him every now and then to remind herself she wasn’t alone, and wasn’t experiencing this alone, either. Her heart had skipped beats like untrained fingers on piano keys, each skip culminating to the next, and the next, until they had all begun to roll together and she’d felt so desperate for fresh air that Calix had put his arm under her and helped her to the top of the crawler. They’d stared back at the empty horizon, rising and falling on the sand waves, until the horizon had disappeared into the night.
This was so much worse than that, and she was alone.
She thought back to the time on the top of the crawler, gasping for air, and tried to imagine Calix’s arm around her instructing her to take deep breaths, “Slow and easy. Long, deep breaths.” But she couldn’t. Needles pierced her sides and stung on each intake, chest so tight each breath was a struggle. Light became a tunnel as the darkness encroached upon her periphery, and then extinguished it altogether.
Truth
“Static.” Barrick turned the volume down on the radio, dimming the white noise so it was barely discernible.
“At what point should we go check?” asked Ardelia.
“It’s not like they’re not responding,” replied Barrick, reclining in his chair. “They can’t respond, any more than we can talk to them.”
Calix sipped water from his cup. “They’re probably only a level or two down. If this place was previously occupied there must be so much good stuff in the living quarters. Unless of course it was abandoned and they took everything with them when they left.”
Ardelia paced. “Must’ve found something, being gone this long.” Half her face was covered by hair and the other half hidden in the shade caused by her hair and the reserve lighting. The crawler’s power was depleting; lit solely now by the solar energy extracted during the day, which was shared with the excavator.
Barrick’s face seemed particularly craggy in the din. “They’ll have no idea of the time. Down there, it could still be daylight and they wouldn’t know. So Cal,” he bit into a stick of celery and pointed it at Calix. “You and Annora. What’s the deal there, eh?”
It may have been dark but he could sense Ardelia’s eyes flicker towards him, even if she didn’t stop pacing. “No deal. And none of your business.”
Barrick shrugged. “You two, you’re thick as they come. Always have been. You saying nothing’s ever happened?”
“She’s as good as my sister, Barrick,” said Calix, raising his voice.
“Well...” said Ardelia. “Is she?”
“Brother, sister, cousins. Don’t you know that means shit round here?” Barrick smiled.
“I know you’re too old for her.”
“Ouch,” said Ardelia.
“You too,” said Calix, glancing her way. “For me.”
“Thick... as... they... come.” Barrick stood, but Calix refused to lift his head. He just stared at Barrick’s boots. “You really got a lot to learn, kid.” Barrick turned on his heels.
Fuck you.
Ardelia merged with the darkness as she headed for her alcove.
Fuck you, too.
Calix inhaled through clenched teeth and wished the painkillers from the municipal level were here, now, to get rid of the stinging pain in his side. It flared at night, it seemed; made worse by inactivity or the lack of other senses. He pushed against his rib-cage with his fingers, arched his back, and stood.
“Asshole.”
Barrick turned. “Let it go, kid.”
“You don’t talk about Annora. You don’t talk about me. You don’t know half of what you think you know.”
“Is that right?” Barrick stepped forward, the lines in his face clearer, deeper. His crow’s feet wrinkled with amusement. He still wore his padded jacket, covered in red dust, and it made his already broad shoulders thicker, wider; paired against Calix’s still-growing body.
“Do you know what we’re looking for?”
Barrick shook his head.
“Do you know what this place was? What happened to the world? Where we even are on this planet?”
“Do you?”
“No, no-one does. Or if they do, they’re hiding it. So don’t act as though you’re so special, like you know it all.”
“Really pressed your button there, didn’t I, Cal?” He smiled.
“I’m not laughing.”
“No, you’re not. You’re deadly serious.”
Calix’s jaw began to ache. He could punch Barrick, smack that smile right off his face, but he fancied holding on to the teeth he had. Or he could tell him.
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