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