The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  Piper sat on one of the boulders, and gave a desolate laugh. “That poor bastard, Heaton, died trying to get out of this place, and here we are, struggling to get back in.”

  At Heaton’s name, my head jerked upward.

  “There’s one more entrance.”

  He sighed. “Is there any point? They’re not going to have left a door unguarded.”

  “It’s not like others. It’s not a door,” I said. “It was what you said about Heaton that reminded me. Remember what the Ringmaster found in that report, about the guy who’d killed Heaton when he tried to get out?”

  Piper nodded. I’d told him and Zoe about the Ringmaster’s discovery, and the conclusion to Heaton’s story.

  “It said something about where it happened,” I went on. “Something about him being killed while trying to get into a ventilation shaft. I didn’t know what it meant—didn’t really think about it. But it means he wasn’t trying to get out through one of the main doors. It makes sense—they’d have been carefully guarded. He was trying to escape another way.”

  “This ventilation shaft—so a kind of underground chimney?”

  “I guess so. They must have needed to get fresh air down there, somehow.” A chimney was what it felt like, now that I trained my seeking onto it: a passage to the surface, both smaller and steeper than the main entrances.

  “Is it big enough for a person to get through?” asked Piper. “And is it safe?”

  “Heaton thought so.”

  “That didn’t work out so well for him.”

  “Not because he was wrong about the shaft, though,” I said. “Only because they caught him doing it.”

  “Then wouldn’t they have done something to seal it up, if they caught him trying to get out that way?”

  “If he’d succeeded, perhaps. But as it is, maybe not. He didn’t manage, after all. From their perspective, their system worked: nobody escaped. And think about the name: ventilation shaft. It was part of how they got the air down there. Not an easy thing to seal up, especially with everything else they had on their plates.”

  “And you don’t think the Council found it, sealed it up?”

  “Only if they know it’s there,” I said.

  It wasn’t only the Council sealing it up that I worried about—it was the centuries, and the shifting of earth and roots that had buried three of the four main doors.

  Those external doors were tightly guarded, but they stood miles apart. We positioned ourselves halfway between the eastern and northern doors, and waited for darkness before emerging from the deep grass of the plain. Before we crossed the rough road that snaked around the hill, Piper told me to jump from stone to stone, so that we left no footprints in the exposed snow where carts and soldiers would pass.

  Across the road and up among the boulders of the hill itself, we were directly above the Ark, and in the middle of the Council’s four watch posts. Now that the Ark lay beneath us, I could feel it more clearly. The size and the depth of it were astounding—all the more so because the hillside gave no sign of what lay below. My awareness of the empty spaces beneath me was so strong that I found myself stepping tentatively on the snow, mistrusting the ground, even though I knew it was solid for hundreds of feet before the Ark hollowed it out. And while parts of the Ark hummed with activity, there were whole sections in which I could sense nothing but gaps in the earth, air beneath the soil.

  It wasn’t easy, scrambling up the huge hill, negotiating the boulders and scrub by moonlight. Without my seer-sense guiding me, I doubt we’d ever have found the hatch. It looked like no more than a dip in the earth, just another hollow in the tussocked ground between the boulders and trees. But I could feel the opening, the absence of earth beneath it, like the covered pit trap on the path to Sally’s house, though infinitely deeper. I knelt and looked more closely, parting the grass to expose a glimpse of rust, more orange than the dirt around it.

  We scraped the snow to one side and pulled up the grass. Fibrous and sharp, it left slits on my fingers, and came out clotted with soil and moss at the base. When we’d cleared a round patch, it revealed the hatch. It was a circle barely two feet across, set deep in a metal rim. The lid wasn’t solid, but a steel grid, still partly obscured by soil. Around its edge, four steel poles emerged from the earth, each of them ending in a jagged gnarl of rust just above the ground.

  “It must have had some kind of structure over it, once. A cover, or something,” Piper said.

  Whatever it was, it was gone now, whether in the blast itself, or in the centuries that followed.

  I bent to the hatch. It looked tiny to me—barely the width of my shoulders. It must have looked even smaller to Piper, his back twice as broad as mine.

  “Hell on earth, Cass. How big do you think this Heaton guy was?”

  “There are other tunnels near here, too.” I could sense them—air tunnels running from the surface to the Ark’s core, as if the hill beneath us had been pierced with a skewer, like a cake being tested for readiness.

  “Bigger than this one?”

  I shook my head. “A fraction of the size.” From what I could feel they would be barely a few inches across. “And think what it said on that bit of paper: principal ventilation shaft. This is the biggest one.”

  Piper was probing the edge of the hatch with his dagger, dislodging a trail of dirt and moss. When he’d traced the entire circle, I reached for the hatch, hooked my fingers through the gaps in the grid, and pulled. It didn’t move, though it gave a reluctant creak.

  Piper worked his way around the edge again. Curls of rust settled in the snow, staining it a lurid orange. He muttered about blunting his dagger, but persevered, both of us gritting our teeth against the screech of steel on rust.

  He nodded to me, shaking his blade clean, I tried again. Nothing. But when he reached down and pulled with me, his hand between the two of mine, the hatch gave a final rasp and came away.

  We dragged the hatch to the side and let it drop onto the snow, but the tunnel mouth was still concealed from us by what looked at first like a layer of dirt. Piper reached down and prodded it with the tip of his dagger. The blade sank into the dirt, more than an inch deep. When he swept the knife sideways it left a trail behind it, revealing a fine mesh beneath the dust. It was a filter, sieving the air and catching the particles big enough to slip through the steel lattice above. When I ran my blade around the edge, the thin wire mesh barely resisted, and I was able to pick it up, a disc of dust and netting, the dust shearing away as I lifted the mesh. It didn’t fall far, though—after we’d removed that first filter, we had to slice away at least four more layers, each a few inches deeper than the last, the final one set several feet below the surface. Piper had to hold on to my belt as I lay on the ground to cut away the last layer, my whole torso hanging down the tunnel.

  He hauled me back up, and I tossed the final filter down beside the hatch. The filters, crafted more finely than anything I’d seen, were so weightless that they didn’t even dent the snow. Each strand of metal mesh was spiderweb thin. A membrane between the Ark and the world.

  The dust and dirt that we’d dislodged were layers of sediment probably undisturbed for centuries. If we’d sifted through each filter, we might have traced the years through their remnants. On top, the snow of this winter, and the familiar dust of every day: dirt and grass seeds. Beneath it, the dust of the bleak years, when the recovery was tenuous, tentative. Perhaps the first fragments of plants, as they began to regenerate. Under that, the dogged ash of the Long Winter, thick enough to darken the skies for years. And, last of all, the ash of the blast itself. Fragments of buildings and bones.

  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 her
e, 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.”