my wrist, when we’d argued in the tithe collector’s rooms.
I jerked away, stepping backward. He looked down at his hand as though it were a stranger’s. The disgust on his face mirrored that on my own.
He stepped back into the dark of the courtyard and was gone. When I turned back to the dormitory, hand pressed to my face, Piper was still busy with the papers and had noticed nothing.
That night, after Piper had gone, it wasn’t the Ringmaster I thought of, but Heaton. It was true—I had said that I wanted to know. And it was also true that his death had probably been quicker and less painful than a slow death on the surface, poisoned with radiation, and starving. But as I lay in bed, I wished I could have left Heaton’s story unfinished. I wanted to be able to imagine him climbing upward, throwing open a hatch for the final time, seeing the light filtered through the sky’s veil of ash, and stepping out into the world.
chapter 28
Piper came back at dawn. I was already awake, and had been most of the night—a vision of the blast had ripped me from sleep not long after midnight, and I’d been lying there, trying to douse the flames that still smoldered in my mind. When I heard the footsteps in the courtyard I reached for the knife beneath my pillow.
“It’s me,” he said, letting the door slam against the wall as he opened it. His eyes were swollen, the skin beneath them darkened.
“Did you sleep at all?” I said, as I sat up and swung my legs to the ground.
“I think I can find it,” he said. “The Ark. Look here.”
He tried to pass me a sheet of paper, but I waved him away as I pulled on my sweater.
“At least let me get dressed,” I said. “The Ark’s been there for four hundred years. It’s not going anywhere.”
It was so cold that I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders over my clothes, as I squatted to look at the papers he laid out on the floor.
“Here,” he said, sliding a page across to me. It wasn’t dated, but the neat printing marked it as being from the Ark’s early years. It was one of the expedition logs, recording radiation levels on the surface.
“Look at the first column,” he said.
The heading read: Radiation readings (Bq) taken at mile intervals from the Ark (Entrance 1). Below it, the numbers unfurled: West 1; W. 2; W. 3; and so on down the page.
“But then the readings just stop,” Piper said “W. sixty-one is the last one. But in this sheet”—he passed me a second sheet, similarly barred with columns of numbers—“another expedition goes east, and they get much further. Up to E. two hundred forty.”
“So? They had to turn back earlier when they headed west. Maybe they got as far as they planned; maybe they ran into some kind of trouble. Met some hostile survivors and had to leg it.”
He shook his head. “They weren’t in a hurry—they were taking measurements on the way back as well—look at the third column.” He looked up at me. “They stopped because they hit the coast.”
“OK.” I paused and wiped the sleep from my eyes. “But even if that’s what happened, how much does that help us? It places the Ark about sixty miles inland. But which part of the coast? That’s a strip more than six hundred miles long.”
“Look—here.” He rifled through the papers he’d arranged, and passed me a sheet. “The bit at the bottom, about the water.”
It was one of the Ark’s regular status reports, with updates on supplies, outbreaks of illness, and issues with the underground structure itself.
Yr. 3, August 9. INFRASTRUCTURE/RESOURCE BRIEFING (MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE).
Potable water: tanked supplies should, at current rates, last a further 26 months (shorter than anticipated, due to the rupture of Tank 7 during the detonations) after which we will be relying on the external water supply. The filtration system for the external supply is functioning, but while the removal of ash and residue has substantially reduced radiation levels (to well below prefiltration readings taken by Surface Expedition 4), it remains significantly higher than . . .
I looked up at him. “They had access to drinking water. So they’re near some kind of stream or river?”
“There were more than a thousand people there. It’d have to have been a decent-size water source.”
“OK—so we’re talking about a river, passing sixty miles or so from the coast. It