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