me. He of all people should know that the blast had never ended. In our crooked bodies and our blighted world, we lived it every day.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve always assumed that your blast visions are flashbacks. But what if you stop trying to justify why they’re different from your other visions, and consider that they might be just the same?” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “Why else would the visions of the blast be happening more and more often? Not just for you, but for Xander, too. Even for Lucia, before she died.” He paused. I could hear the river above us, and the hum of the Electric. My own pulse pounding in my head, urgent as running footsteps. “Something’s coming, Cass. What if it’s not the past you’re seeing, when you see the blast? What if it’s the future?”
“No,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me: high and quavering.
“That’s the Pandora Project that they were working on here in Section A—it’s not about finding Elsewhere, or splitting the twins. It’s the blast. The machines to do it again.”
“No.” It was a shout, a plea. I wanted to hush him—I felt as if his words themselves might unleash the flames. If he’d seen what I’d seen—if he’d witnessed the world burn, again and again—he couldn’t have knelt there and offered the suggestion as if it were a thing that could be contained.
There was something else stirring in me, alongside my raw terror. It was recognition. The yes of my whole body, seeing the blasts at last for what they were: visions, not memories.
It was going to happen again.
chapter 35
We sat together on the floor amid the gritty dust, the dander of the concrete that had been sawn away. There was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t tell if it was the ringing that my blast visions sometimes left me with, or just the hum of the Electric.
I stared at the concrete wall. I was grateful to focus on one simple thing, among a world in which everything was its own opposite. Zach was my twin, and also my enemy. I had loved Kip but he was also a stranger. The blast was the past, but also the future. Xander was mad, but his words would come true: Forever fire.
“I’ve feared it,” Piper said, “ever since I saw how the blast was coming to you more and more. But I still don’t understand it. They can’t use the blast machines against us. The casualties would be just as high on their own side. It’s the one blessing of the twinning: it makes mass killing pointless. There’s nowhere here that wouldn’t be a disaster—for them as much as us. If they could deal with us that way, they would’ve done it a long time ago. That’s why they’ve never bothered with the weapons that they had in the Before.”
“They’re bothering now,” I said.
“But why? Why go to all this effort to create another blast, when they can never use it against us?”
I looked up at him, and the awful weight of words settled on me. I didn’t want to tell him what I knew. He had enough burdens. But I couldn’t carry this alone.
“They’re not going to use the blast on us. They’re going to use it on Elsewhere.”
I gestured at the room, and the others that led off it, most of them meticulously emptied. “They know that Elsewhere is out there—maybe they’ve even found out where it is. And they know that Elsewhere can undo the twinning, and that we’ve been seeking it, too. If they think Elsewhere could become a threat to their rule, they won’t hesitate to use the blast.”
I remembered again the General, the lizard stillness of her eyes when she’d smiled. And Zach, the anger that coursed through him like the river through the pipes above us.
“I was wrong again,” I said. The steel and concrete walls threw my words back at me as echoes. “I’ve had visions of the blast my whole life, and I’ve been wrong that whole time. Everything I see gets twisted.” I rubbed my hands to my eyes as though I could polish my visions into focus, somehow scour them clear.
“You found Joe’s papers,” Piper said. “You found the way into the Ark. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
“I thought we were going to find the answer down here,” I said flatly.
“We did,” Piper said. “It just wasn’t the answer that we wanted.”
Ω
There was