inked, to form shapes and designs that I could not decipher. The largest grouping of papers, though, contained only numbers: column after column, zeroes in rows like blind eyes staring back at me. A few of the columns were labeled, but the words meant nothing to me: Curie (Ci); Roentgen (R); Radiation Absorbed Dose (RAD). I remembered how the Confessor had spoken about the machines, using words that I’d never heard before. Generators. Algorithms. She had managed to become fluent in the language of the machines. To the rest of us, these words were just strings of letters.
“These don’t tell us anything,” Piper said, throwing down another page of impenetrable numbers.
“They do,” I said. “They confirm that the people in the Ark could do things that we can’t. We know they were capable of preventing the twinning, even if they chose not to do it. If we could find the Ark, piece together more information, and get our best people working on this, we could do it. It could take years and years. Generations, maybe. But think of what Zach and the Council have been able to do, with the tanks.”
“You think that’s something to aspire to?” The Ringmaster’s words were like a whip, snapping at the air between us.
“You’re deliberately misinterpreting me,” I said. “You know what I meant. The tanks are hellish—but they show that we can do things with machines that we couldn’t even imagine.”
“We don’t need to imagine it,” said Piper. “We have to live with it.”
“The machines have done terrible things,” I said, my voice rising. “But we’ve lived in fear of them for so long, we haven’t considered the possibility that they could also do amazing things.”
“You’re sounding more and more like your brother,” the Ringmaster said.
“You know me better than that,” I said. “The technology from the Ark can fix the twinning. If we find it, then we could change everything.”
“But can we? Find it, I mean,” Piper said. “None of this counts for anything if we can’t do that. If you’re right, and the Council’s found it, then your brother’s probably been there. He could be there now, for all we know. Can’t that help to lead you there?”
I exhaled heavily. “Not so far. I’ve looked and looked, and there’s nothing like a map, or even the names of any locations. And I’ve tried and tried to feel it.”
They were all watching me.
“You found your way to the island—even from hundreds of miles away,” the Ringmaster said.
“I know,” I snapped. “But I’m not a machine. I’d been hearing about the island all my life, and dreaming about it for years. I’d never even imagined this Ark.”
There had been moments, during those long days and nights among the papers, that I’d thought I could start to feel something—some kind of pull toward the Ark. But to my erratic seer visions, the Ark was nothing more than a scent carried to me on the wind—enough to make me raise my head and sniff, but not enough to draw me in a specific direction. “Being a seer doesn’t work the way you want it to,” I said to the Ringmaster. “It never has. Do you think, if I could control it, I’d be waking up screaming every day from the visions of the blast?”
I was grateful when Zoe changed the subject. “Xander said he’d heard noises in the Ark. You haven’t found anything to suggest that those people could have bred and survived?”
I shook my head. “Not for four hundred years, down there.” The last document that I’d found was dated Year 58. By then, things were already falling apart. In whole sections of the Ark the Electric had broken. They were living in darkness and damp. Almost all of them were old, and the madness had been spreading like the damp. “They couldn’t have clung on much longer. Xander said it used to feel quiet, and now that’s changed. People rattling the bones. The original Ark dwellers didn’t survive. If Xander says he can feel people again in the Ark, it’s more proof that the Council’s found it.”
“Then why haven’t they acted on it?” Simon said. “If the Council knows it’s possible to end the twinning, and probably know how, why aren’t they doing it? They hate being bonded to us, even more than we do to them. They tried experiments and breeding programs for decades—Sally and the other infiltrators confirmed that, when they were working inside the Council. And that was decades ago.