Then I heard it again. The crack of something striking the wall outside. I stood up and opened the door. When Dash had brought me here the lights in the cavern had been turned up high, filling the small space with light, but now they were lower, as if to create the illusion of night. I looked around. I was alone. Confused I turned to go back in, but then I heard the sound again, and saw a stone bounce off the side of the prefab. Then I noticed a girl seated against the cavern wall a little way behind me.
She was small and slim and dark and dressed in the same green overalls I had been given. She stared at me as if wondering whether I was worth talking to.
‘Did you want something?’ I asked at last.
She stood up and dusted off her hands. ‘You’re the girl from outside, right? The one that arrived this morning?’
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
She took a step forward, regarding me appraisingly. Although she was a couple of years younger than me, she moved with confidence.
‘They given you the orientation yet?’
‘What orientation?’
She laughed. ‘I’ll take that as a no. How’s your hut?’
I looked at the prefab. ‘Good,’ I said.
‘Interesting they put you all the way out here.’
‘I didn’t realise I was out anywhere.’
She smiled. She had a long, slightly hooked nose that gave her face an odd sort of distinction. ‘Oh, you’re out here all right.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Meena,’ she said. ‘It’s Sanskrit for fish.’
I stared at her, her combative manner making it difficult to tell whether she was showing off or making a joke. ‘I’m Callie,’ I said at last, a little cautiously.
‘I know.’
‘Where is everybody?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s night.’ Perhaps I looked confused, because she laughed. ‘The ants sleep at night.’
‘Ants?’
‘This place doesn’t remind you of an ant farm? All the busy little workers doing their jobs. And all of it completely fake.’
‘But you’re not asleep?’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘Why would I be asleep when there’s so much going on?’
Her manner was so deadpan that it took me a few moments to realise she was joking. I laughed, but her expression didn’t change.
‘What did they show you?’
‘Not much. The dining hall, the lab.’
She looked at me, and I saw it again, that flash of something dangerous. ‘You want to see some more?’
I hesitated. ‘Sure,’ I said.
She led me back the way Dash had brought me, then through a door into another tunnel that led to a smaller cavern, in which crates of food and other materials were stored on pallets. Like the cavern that held the mess, this one was long and low, but at the far end the floor fell away into a depression filled with a jumble of slippery limestone and shifting piles of rock. Meena moved sure-footedly across the broken stone to the bottom of the depression. I followed, one hand outstretched to steady myself.
At the bottom of the depression an outcrop obscured a small opening by the floor. It was perhaps a metre across, but low, the top of it less than half a metre high. Reaching into her pocket Meena took out a light and clipped it to her head. Then she knelt down and slipped into the opening. Just as she was about to disappear she looked back and gave me a contemptuous look.
‘You’re not chicken, are you?’
Although the air in the cavern was still, I could feel a faint movement of cool air from the opening. ‘Where’s it go?’
‘You’ll see,’ she said, and with a scrabble of rock she slipped from view.
For a few seconds I stood staring after her. Then, not at all sure I was making the right decision, I knelt down and slid in after her.
Almost at once I realised just how big a difference the lights in the caves made, because as soon as I was inside it was almost pitch-black. Up ahead I could see Meena’s light, but otherwise the darkness was absolute.
In the caverns it had been possible to forget I was deep underground, but in the darkness of that narrow space I was uncomfortably aware of the vast weight of rock above me. I took a breath to steady myself, to push down the panic, but even so I found myself crawling faster, scrabbling forward toward Meena and the light.
I was breathing fast by the time I reached her. Perhaps she guessed my fear, because she turned to look at me, and in the glow of her lamp I saw her smile again. Angry, as much at myself for my fear as at Meena, I kept crawling.
After another forty or fifty metres of crawling or wriggling on our bellies the ceiling began to rise, gradually at first, then enough that it was possible to walk bent over. Now the ceiling was higher I felt calmer, but I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it: although it was easier walking than wriggling along, the ceiling was rough, its surface covered with low-hanging bumps of flowstone. In the dancing glow of Meena’s light it was all too easy to miss or misjudge the size of the down-crops, and the knocks on the head or the ear were painful.
We walked this way for several hundred metres, the passage widening as we went without growing any higher, but then almost at once the ceiling rose and the floor dropped away in front of us. Using one hand to slow herself, Meena skidded down, coming to a halt on a narrow ledge. I slid down after her but misjudged the slipperiness of the floor and hit the ledge too fast, so Meena had to grab me to stop me pitching over into the darkness that opened in front of us. A little shocked, I shook her off, meaning to snarl at her for dragging me down here like this but before I could Meena produced a small device and, holding it up, flooded the space with light.
I gasped. We were standing in a huge chamber, its far side so distant the light did not reach it. Overhead the ceiling lifted away in a rainfall of pale stalactites in which minerals glittered in the light of Meena’s lamp. But the ceiling was less striking than what lay beneath us. A few metres below the ledge on which we stood stretched a huge body of water, its surface still and black.
‘It’s incredible,’ I said in a small voice.
Meena just nodded.
‘How did you find it?’
She shrugged. ‘I have a lot of time on my hands down here.’
I looked at her. ‘There are more places like this?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘How deep is it?’
‘I don’t know. But watch this.’
Reaching into her pocket she took out a plastic tube and with a practised flick cracked it so it flared into light. She threw it outward and it hit the water with a splash, its green glow turning down through the water, on and on until finally it winked into darkness again. Beneath me I could hear the ripples from the splash echoing as they hit the edge of the lake.
‘There must be millions of litres of water here,’ I said.
‘Or more,’ Meena said. ‘And that’s not all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘One of the reasons they chose this area to build the Ark is that the water down here is isolated from the main aquifers under the continent. This water is millions of years old.’
I looked out at the lake, trying to take in what she was saying. It seemed incredible to me that this place could have stood here, undisturbed, for such an impossible span of time.
‘They use this water for the facility?’
Meena shook her head. ‘Not this reservoir. But others like it.’
‘So nobody else comes here?’
Meena shook her head.
‘But they don’t mind if you do?’
‘They don’t know. But even if they did they’re too busy stocking their Ark.’
Surprised by the sudden contempt in her voice I glanced at her, but she didn’t turn around, just stood staring out over the water.
<
br /> ‘How far do the caves go?’ I asked when she didn’t continue.
She lifted the light and nodded toward an opening on the other side of the lake. ‘I don’t know. Kilometres.’
‘And you’re allowed to go exploring whenever you like?’
‘They’re all so afraid of my father they wouldn’t stop me even if they wanted to.’
‘Your father . . .’ I began, but before I could finish I realised she meant Dr Omelas.
‘You mean you hadn’t noticed the family resemblance?’ she asked sarcastically.
As she spoke I wondered how I hadn’t realised. Despite the lack of physical resemblance, she had her father’s intelligence and ferocity.
‘We should get back,’ she said, turning around toward the tunnel. As darkness filled the cave again it suddenly occurred to me that she wasn’t being flip or funny or even rude, particularly, but that she was angry. Painfully, desperately, unbearably angry.
18
The next morning I was woken by a guard with a message instructing me to report to Dr Omelas’ lab. After my night with Meena I was tired, but I dressed and followed her through the tunnels.
Dr Omelas was nowhere to be seen when we arrived. Instead Dash was waiting with Dan and Brahmi.
‘We need to run a few more tests,’ Dash said.
Immediately wary, I tensed.
‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she said.
I nodded, still uneasy, but Dash only smiled. ‘I’ll be back in a little while. Dr Omelas wants to speak to you again.’
‘Come on,’ Dan said once she was gone. ‘This won’t take long.’
They took blood and, after a local anaesthetic and an apology from Dan, a sample of marrow from my hip. Then they placed me in a scanner and let it whirr around me, all the while chatting and laughing, so that by the time Dash returned I had forgotten my anxiety.
Dr Omelas was seated at his desk when we entered. ‘So, Callie,’ he said, ‘I know you’ve told us some of your story but I need to know more.’
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps we could start at the beginning. With your father and his work.’
‘I don’t know a lot about it,’ I said. ‘He Changed when I was ten.’
‘But before he Changed he gave you a vaccine he’d been working on?’
‘He did.’
‘But you know nothing of the makeup of that vaccine?’
I shook my head. ‘But it seems to have made me immune to the Change.’
Dr Omelas leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled. As he considered my words he tapped his index fingers together thoughtfully.
‘We have the data your father was working with here and we’re reviewing it. What interests me, though, is the fact each of you seems to have responded differently to the vaccine. Your father wasn’t rendered immune, was he?’
‘No, not completely. Or not at all,’ I said. ‘Because he had Changed, but he didn’t Change in the same way others do. Or I don’t think he did.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The version of him I met, it wasn’t him, or not really. It was some kind of . . . of copy.’
Dr Omelas regarded me carefully. ‘And he told you this?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Or not at first. I found a nest full of pods with . . . people in them. Growing in them. After that I realised he’d been lying to me and he wasn’t really my father, he was one of those . . . those things. A copy.’
Dr Omelas didn’t reply.
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘I do. We call them replicants. Our best guess is that once the biology of a planet has been entirely colonised the Change uses the replication process to reproduce.’
‘So they replace us?’
Dr Omelas nodded. ‘But the copy of your father, it told you it wasn’t part of the group mind like the others?’
‘No. Or not completely.’
‘And it had his memories?’
I nodded.
Dr Omelas made a small sound of amazement. ‘Fascinating.’
‘You’ve seen this before?’
‘Changed individuals or replicants with autonomy? No. But we’ve understood for a long time that the Change absorbs memories and can recreate these memories in the replicants. I can only suppose that the presence of the vaccine in your father’s system disrupted the replication process somehow, meaning the replicated version of him was never fully integrated into the group mind. It’s impossible to know for sure without actually examining him, but during metamorphosis the brain develops receptors, connecting it to the group mind at a quantum level. So perhaps the development of the receptors was affected by the vaccine, and that mutation was reproduced when he was replicated.’
I hesitated. ‘My father’s vaccine. Do you think it could work on people who are already Changed? Make them . . . human again?’
Dr Omelas stared at me, and for a moment I was aware of something implacable in him. ‘Don’t fall for the Change’s tricks, Callie. It preys on weakness, confusion, uncertainty. The Changed are gone forever.’
At the end of the day I ate in the dining hall again, although this time I ate alone. As I took my tray to one of the tables I felt people watching me, and wondered how much of my story they knew. Was I simply a new arrival to them or was I something else, the girl who had been injected with a vaccine and travelled into the Zone without Changing? Despite my overalls I felt I stood out. I was an outsider.
When I had eaten I retired to my cabin and, stretching myself on the bed, stared at the ceiling. I was tired, vulnerable, and when a thought about Gracie crossed my mind, my eyes filled with tears.
I choked them back, but a minute or two later I heard the thump of a stone on the wall outside. Wiping my eyes I opened the door. Meena was leaning against the cavern wall outside.
‘Mealtime fun?’
I stared at her. ‘Not particularly.’
She laughed. ‘I saw the way they were watching you.’
I hesitated. I hadn’t seen her. Where had she been sitting? And why hadn’t she joined me?
‘You want to come caving again?’
‘Only if I get my own light.’
She laughed and reached into her overall pocket. ‘I wondered when you’d ask for one,’ she said, tossing a light and strap my way.
I turned it over in my hands. ‘So where are we going tonight?’
She grinned. ‘You’ll see.’
This time she led me into another shaft, one that ran upward in bumps. Unlike the tunnel we had taken the night before it was high and narrow, its floor scattered with small stones, and although it was just as dark, when our lights caught the walls they gleamed with lines of red and white.
Eventually the passage ended in a wide cavern, the floor of which was covered with limestone, smooth like a bowl, at the centre of which lay a jumble of stones.
‘There must have been a lake here at some point,’ Meena said, ‘and the way we just came was a stream that ran down from it into the lakes below.’
I stepped past her.
‘The colours on the wall are from the water?’
‘Minerals. They discolour the limestone.’
At the cavern’s far end a shower of smooth white stone snaked down the wall like a frozen waterfall. At the top, the mouth of another tunnel disappeared into darkness. ‘Is this where the water came from?’
‘Yes.’
‘So up there is what? The surface?’
‘Probably there was a sinkhole of some sort up there once. But it collapsed a long time ago. That’s why the water stopped.’
‘How far down are we?’ I asked, a little uneasy about the answer.
Meena glanced at the ceiling, then back down the way we’d come. ‘Fifty metres. Maybe more. Come look at this.’
&
nbsp; She led me to the far side of the cavern where a jumble of shapes was visible beneath the limestone. I kneeled down beside her and gasped. The shapes were heaps of bones and twisted skeletons scattered one on top of each other across the cavern floor, skulls and crisscrossed ribs and scapulas, all submerged in smooth limestone.
‘They must have fallen down the sinkhole,’ Meena said.
I glanced back up the tunnel. ‘Or been carried down by the water.’ Kneeling down I placed a hand on what looked like a huge hipbone. ‘What are they?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Meena said. ‘A couple are pretty definitely diprotodontids of some sort. The others look like other forms of megafauna from the same period.’ Kneeling beside me she placed a hand on the flat, heavy dome of a huge skull. ‘I think this is a protemnodon.’
I gave her a sceptical look. ‘Really?’
She laughed. ‘They were a kind of giant wallaby.’
‘How long have they been here?’
Meena stood up. ‘These species all became extinct when the ancestors of the Aborigines arrived in Australia, which means they’ve been here for 50,000 years or so.’
‘Humans wiped them out?’
Meena nodded. ‘Or perhaps we just hastened a process of extinction that was already underway.’
I didn’t reply. The ocean of time that separated these animals lives from our own made my own existence seem oddly insignificant, yet still, I felt a sort of sadness at the idea it was humans that had caused their disappearance. Or was it always like this? Species supplanting each other, over and over again? And if it was, was the Change just the next part of this process, a new species that would replace us as we had replaced so many others?
Behind me Meena placed a hand on my shoulder. I flinched but she didn’t pull back. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s something else I want you to see.’
She led me along the far side of the chamber, the white beam of her headlamp illuminating the wall and ceiling until we came to a recess in the wall. Spread out along it lay a line of bones, but unlike the ones down on the floor of the cavern they were not jumbled, instead they formed the shape of a large animal lying on its side. It must have been a metre and a half in length and a metre or more tall, its body sloping back from its massive forequarters like that of a hyena. Yet it was not its shoulders that were the most impressive but the blunt, brutal head, which lay turned in, as if in sleep.
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