The gloom of thick clouds pushes a gentle but steady slap of wind that chills me enough to lean into the rail of the boat and close my eyes. I trace shadows of Nefandus behind my eyes, listening to the beat of the engine and the everlasting slosh of the swells. I think about how close we came to dying, our blood turned to rivers to be drunk, and the whole night plays again and again. Every few minutes my mind shifts back to Maze, to what we’re doing now. And to the fact that Gala touched me. And I touched her. And what she would let me do.
Eventually my imagination tires me enough to fade in and out of consciousness, only opening my eyes when I feel a surge of heat. And there above, bleeding between the gray mass every time is the sun. It looks brightly at me for just an instant, relieving the chill, and then it disappears again. I crane my neck to see the tower, and there it is: a perfectly straight cut slicing from the flatness of the ocean, only the base of it really visible, the needle-nothingness of its limitless height lost to haze, and then I bring my vision back down to the metal of the boat. Gala sits on the wheel, locked in some steel fortress built of thought. My eyes move across to the other boat—Maze and Garren, side by side. They’re close enough that I see their mouths moving. Talking still, even after all this time on the boat. And when my mind spins through what secrets they must be sharing, what closeness he must be developing with her, I force my thoughts back to Gala. To how attractive she actually is, when I really think about it. Legs that are carved to climb the rocky coast, to hunt along the endless crags for anything of value, scraps of the ancient world, clues as to what belief really does to people. By the time I’m imagining the assassins, the ones sent down from the After Sky to kill the Fathers, the ones corrupted by the fortunes of the Deadlands, I decide there is nothing to do now but rest. Because my body feels exhausted still, despite the long sleep of yesterday. As if all that’s happened has been a month’s trial, not a day’s.
The first thing I notice when I wake up is the heat. The clouds are gone, and all I see above is the blue and the bright white circle of warmth. There’s no more chill. And before I can look to see it, I hear the first shout. Then another one, subdued, but laced with accusation, and then the words come softly in, but not enough of them that I know what’s being said. A quiet argument that only occasionally bleeds out.
Sitting upright I realize there’s no hum—the engines are dead. There next to me, bobbing up and down only a foot away, is the other boat. Its silver hull dips and rises, riding soft swells. Then I see them—Garren, curled hands bracing himself against the top of the seat, looking out at the tower. Gala leans in close, trying to whisper. Forcing some conversation on—making him talk to her about something he’s trying to ignore. When I turn to see Maze in the back of the boat, she’s got her head down. Her long black hair flutters with the breeze, and her eyes are buried in something she’s holding. A paper.
“Hey,” I say. She looks at me and smiles quickly, then glances anxiously up again at the argument. Without another word, she stands on the rail and hops over to my boat and sits next to me.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
She holds the paper so I can see it, and I see a long snaking line, dotted in some places, and the tiniest markings and shadings. Some of the shapes I recognize as trees, and when I see, all the way on the corner of the map—a circle, surrounded by nothing, far out in the blank half of the drawing that must represent the sea—I know it’s a map.
“Is that the tower?” I ask, my finger striking the small circle.
“Yeah,” she says. And again she turns, distracted as the volume of the clamor rises briefly and then dies to hushed whispers again. I look over and see Garren looking at Gala, putting his hand on her shoulder, boring deep into her, trying to calm her.
“Why are they fighting?” I ask.
“It’s something about the tattoo,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, and just that quickly, it floods back into me—that I told Gala about Maze’s tattoo. But Maze smiles, like she’s happy despite the fighting, despite the fact that I spilled what she confided in me. My eyes drift down her leg, and there, her pants rolled up, I see the tip of it—the black line erupting from the curve.
“She saw it, mine, and flipped out on him,” she says. And I know, as she stares and smiles at me, that Gala covered for me. Played it like an accidental discovery. A way to dig into him like I’ve tried to dig into Maze. And then, before I can focus on what they’re arguing about, or if Maze thinks I had something to do with it, she redirects my attention to the map.
“Look at this line,” she says. And there, where she runs her finger away from the circle representing the tower, there’s a faint dotted line, perfectly straight except two spots where it cuts in sharp ninety-degree turns. It runs across the ocean and into the loopy curls of what must represent the coast. I ask her what it is, and before she answers, I already work through it—that it must be some sea lane, the best path to get to the tower. It’s when she tells me that I realize my guess is off in one big way.
“It’s a tunnel,” she says.
“Underwater?”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“Where’s this from?” I ask.
“The map? He said it’s one of three they’ve found. All of them the same. The same line leading out to the circle.”
“But where did it come from? How does he know it’s a tunnel?”
“They steal from the Fathers too—they even kill them when they have to.”
My mind reels back to Father Gold’s office, and then the row of hanging Fathers on the cliff. I start to wonder if it’s a lie—Garren’s theory about the After Sky assassins, that they’re the ones who really hanged them all. And instead it’s a cover because he doesn’t know how loyal we might really be after a lifetime of living in the Fatherhood. I tell her my idea and she says no—they only kill them when something goes wrong—when a break-in gets messed up and someone, a Father, tries to follow them back to the Resistance camp. My mind pictures the ruined camp we left behind, the dead bodies drifting in the sea and the ones being pushed underground.
I ask her again how he knows it’s a tunnel, how he could possibly know that if the Fathers, the ones he stole it from, didn’t.
“Look at the line,” she says, and softly, her arm brushes me as she traces it again. She goes slowly, her fingers following straight, and then, when she hits one of the sharp turns, she retraces it several times until it sinks in for me.
“Because of the angles?” I ask.
“No boat needs—no boat can turn like that. And it wouldn’t need to. If you could just ride out there over the ocean, this wouldn’t make sense.”
I offer an excuse, my first instinct, that maybe it’s just the way the ocean is, that there are dangers we don’t know about and it’s only a rough estimate of the lane a boat might take.
“There’s this though—look,” she says. And then, she puts the paper up close to my face and points to the small symbol, right near the coast, where the line from the tower ends. It’s rough and washed out, but I can tell. It’s the tattoo. The line rising up into the half-circle, digging down into the cross of the horizon.
“Look here,” she says when she’s convinced I’ve seen enough to believe the tiny symbol on the paper is the same as on her leg. She pushes down her sock enough so I can see the whole tattoo against her olive skin. The sun lights it perfectly and the lines are so stark that I want to trace them along her ankle. And then, without thinking, I do. My hand extends, without a moment’s hesitation of fear or anxiety, and I touch her. My finger slides along the smooth shape, and then down to the point where the line of what has to be the tower intersects with the horizon.
“See how it widens out, how it goes under the line of the Earth,” she says, uncaring that my hand is resting on her leg. And I stare, half in a trance to be touching her, but mostly dumbfounded that I never figured out the symbol before—that it must be the tower, against the backdrop of the sky—and just
as she says, where the tower hits the ground, rather than ending, it digs in below the surface of the horizon.
“It goes underground,” I finally say, pulling back.
“It—he thinks it symbolizes the tunnel. That the tunnel is the way out,” she says. Quickly, she checks again on the fight, but it seems to be over now, only soft whispers reaching us from the other boat. Mostly Gala’s voice.
“That’s where we’re going?” I ask.
She nods and I tell her what Gala thinks. That it’s all bullshit—and that the tower is just a solid metal pole, some kind of ancient antenna from the pre-Wipe world. Some benign structure of the ancient computers. Maze doesn’t reply, as if she’s considered the same thing herself.
“Wills—he told me he had the same dreams I did.”
“What dreams?”
“You know I’ve never had any proof for the Ark. Never found anything. Just my suspicions about the tower—that it was built after the Wipe, after the old world died. And the mirror confirmed that for me—that the tower’s alive. But I never knew how to justify what I believed about the Ark. That there was a record somewhere, about what the world was really like before everything fell apart. It only came in my dreams. That was all.”
I let what she’s said—that the tower is alive, sink in. Finally, I ask her again.
“He’s had a dream about the Ark too? The same thing?”
“Yeah—only he doesn’t think they’re dreams.”
“What?” I say, making my own jumps ahead of where she’s leading me. Trying to fit things together before she comes out and makes it plain.
“He thinks they’re memories.”
I let the implication wash over me and settle—what it would mean. That she’s from there. That he’s from there. Orphan—the word goes through my head over and over. The emptiness of Maze’s past, the void of her history, just like the world before the Wipe. All void except for the dream. And finally, after an eternity of silence, her watching me for the thing to make sense all on its own, I say it. I ask if she thinks it could really be true. That he—that they both—were once somewhere near the Ark. Up somewhere in the tower.
“Nothing else makes sense, does it?” she says. And then she tells me that Garren never told anyone about his dreams, how he kept them to himself, but searched, used the Resistance secretly to accumulate evidence—enough that he could act. And how finding her—finding Maze—is enough. Suddenly the argument in the other boat makes sense—that Gala’s not really mad about Garren concealing the truth about the tattoos. Or his secret beliefs in the great conspiracy of the world—it must be that she’s realizing the whole thing was a front—that the Resistance was serving as a means for him to follow his gut instincts, to collect enough evidence to put a boat out onto the water and go. And that it took a massacre to finally make him admit it.
“But it can’t be—how would you have gotten out? How would you end up in the Fatherhood and him in the Resistance? Why would you be anywhere right now but still in the tower?”
“In a few hours, we’ll start to find out,” she says. Her eyes go back to the map and she tells me where we are in relation to the symbol where the tunnel starts on the coast. A long way south of it, just barely on the map.
“So he lied to all of them—this isn’t a reconnaissance mission. We’re not going back to the camp,” I say.
“We are. We didn’t bring enough supplies to make it all the way out to the tower, even if the tunnel is real.”
My mind turns to darker things.
“Or weapons,” I tell her.
“The plan is to check if there really is a door. If we can somehow open it.”
“Unless she’s changed his mind,” I say, looking back to the other boat.
“She can’t.” And Maze doesn’t explain why, or say anything else, and we sit in long silence, listening to the whispers and the occasional slapping of the swells against the hull. I watch her profile, reminding myself of my love for her, and cursing myself for having been stupid enough to think I could find Gala attractive when Maze is so close. But cold and crushing comes into my head her words—exactly what she said to me. We’re friends, and that’s all there ever will be. And for just a moment, I hate myself for feeling this way, for even knowing her at all.
“Let’s just hope we have enough gas to make it there,” she says finally.
“We didn’t bring enough?” I ask, and right away my mind jumps to what would happen if we ran out of gas on the water. I look all around, and although the map shows that we are along the coast, I can only make out the faintest line of land, a cresting and falling bump of dark gray.
“It took this long to figure out the dimensions of the map—to know just how far away the place actually is. And now that he’s got the idea—four more hours—he’s not so sure.”
I realize that either way it means we’ll have to walk back. Lug the boats on land. All to see if there’s a door. But I don’t mention a word of my anxiety, or even dwell on it anymore. My mind rests on new words—new proclamations of love—things I can do and say to make her change her mind. However long it takes, I realize, it’s all that’s left of me. And a surge of exhilaration lights through me. The stakes—the feeling that we could die at any time, that in all likelihood there’s a good chance we are going to die soon, but that before we do we’re going to learn a great deal more than anyone else has ever known about the world. That before us lie the secrets of history. My eyes trace up the tower to where its rise is so thin that I can hardly make out any line at all until haze blurs its thinness to nothing. I imagine inside that there are stairs like the skyscrapers in the Deadlands had, and how long it will take to climb them, if we made it all the way out through the tunnel. And before I can imagine the tunnel—some structure that seems more impossible than the tower itself, a pathway armored somehow from a billion crushing tons of water, waiting to collapse in on itself, I hear a shout. This time it’s Garren. Loud enough that I hear the words. It’s the choice that rests behind what he says that makes me shudder.
“Then you go back…”
Gala has no reply for him and she jumps, stomping, back into the boat with me and Maze. Then, after an awkward wait, Maze rises when Gala says a single word: Go. And like that, everyone’s back where they belong, and the rumble starts up again, droning engines racing in tandem, somewhere far out to the right of the rocky coast, and much too far left of the tower itself. And somewhere deep below us, so deep the image barely forms, I can see leaking, the walls of some buckling metal tunnel.
Chapter 13
We motor on for another hour in silence. A few times I move close enough to Gala to feel the energy rolling off of her—something like anger and distance that tells me not to say anything. The sky darkens and lightens and the ocean stays the same. Eventually my eyes catch the strip of land off to the left—somehow less obscure and clear enough that I make out the green of a tree line on top of a high cliff. Behind it rises a large mountain, sloping gently like the back of a whale. The top of the mountain looks bare, like the trees have run out, and its clean rocky dome is a desert of sand. I ask Gala how far we have to go, and how much gas we have left. When she tells me another few hours, I know that everything Maze hinted at must be true. Where we are going. That we will probably have to walk back. And it’s confirmed by the next words out of her mouth.
“This is a one-way ride,” she says. The anger spills out of her for just a moment, and then, to distract me from noticing it maybe, she asks how I’m feeling. If I’m feeling any better at all. And I know she must be referring to Maze, but I ignore her and say my leg’s much better. She tells me to have something to eat from the supply bag.
“No way back?” I ask.
She doesn’t say a word and I know that it means we’re fucked. I try to do the math in my head—how fast and far we’re traveling, how long that would be by foot. And then my eyes drift from the smooth surface of the swells back to distant crags and the high cliff and the fo
rest. The impossible terrain. No straight lines or easy flats. Something like a couple days. I ask her if I’m right. If we’re walking back. And then it comes out of her. All of what she’s been keeping in.
“He’s crazy and he’s a liar. And we’re stuck with him now.”
I want to ask why she didn’t turn back, why she’s going on. And part of me wishes we’d just go on forever—not turn back after testing the door. As if it will open, and we could just keep pushing forward, supplies or not. After all, it’s what Maze and I set out to do anyway—to get there at all costs. And it starts to make less and less sense to me that we’d turn back. To resupply, I remind myself. Because it’s too far and you never realized it. My eyes move to the supply bag in our boat. There’s another one in the other boat. Two small bags of life.
“How many days can we last?” I ask her.
“Enough to get home. Not much more,” she says. And then I know where part of her anger must be coming from—a big part of it. It’s that she’s starting to know he’s right. And Maze is right. And Sid was right. There is something out there—something old and something that wants us to believe a certain way. A certain way about our past and our future.
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