have explored the whole Ark, but I could sense that nobody moved or breathed within this layer of the structure. I didn’t even need to look into each room to be sure—their emptiness was as tangible to me as the dust. It was like picking up a water flask, and testing its weight—I had no need to unscrew the lid to know that it was empty.
Doorways on both sides stood ajar. For now, though, we kept to the main corridor. At regular intervals it passed through thick steel doors. They looked imposing, with elaborate locks, steel tumblers and bars, but each of them was open. I examined one of the locks. There was no keyhole, only a metal cube near the tumblers, studded with buttons, each with a number engraved on it, 0 to 9. These cubes had been unscrewed from the door and hung now from their own exposed wires.
Each time the sporadic bursts of the Electric unleashed the light, sound came with them. Above the insect buzz of the lights themselves came a whirring noise and occasional clanks from above, where air vents traced the corridors. When the lights went out, we were dropped into silence.
“No wonder many of them went mad,” Piper said. “It gives me the creeps just being in here.”
In some sections, water had penetrated the walls. The river above us had been kept at bay, but it had never stopped its stubborn groping downward. Mold spread from the ceiling, a mass of black fur, like the pelt of some huge animal stretched across the right-hand wall of the corridor. We peered into a room in which a fetid puddle covered the entire floor, fed by a slow drip of water from the ceiling. The drips fell at the pace of footsteps, and as we walked away I had to steel myself not to check over my shoulder that we weren’t being followed.
Ω
We stepped into a large room where the darkness seemed to push back against the edges of the lamp’s glow. There was a long table, neatly laid: knives and forks set out, along with plates, each one offering up their meal of dust. I ran my hand down the back of one of the chairs. It wasn’t wood, nor leather, nor any other material that I recognized. In the four centuries here, in this underground world, it hadn’t moldered or splintered. It was hard, but not cool under my touch in the way that metal would be.
Except for the grime, it was an everyday scene—the sort of thing that I would have expected to encounter in a kitchen or an inn. Piper put the lamp on the table and picked up one of the forks, lichened with rust. It clattered when he let it drop back down on the tabletop. I leaned over to set it back into its place, parallel with the knife, then realized how ridiculous it was, re-laying this table for ghosts.
The next door, like all the others, was open, the tumblers of the lock exposed. I brushed my hand across the front of the door and felt the engraving beneath my palm. When Piper raised the lamp, we could read it clearly, despite the dust still nested in the grooves of the engraved letters: SECTION F.
“This is where they put the crazy ones, right?” Piper said.
As I stepped through the doorway, something crumbled beneath my foot, with no more resistance than a dry cookie. At my gasp he swung the lantern around.
My boot had crushed the thigh bone of a skeleton. The bones lay around my feet, just inside the door.
Against the far wall, more skeletons lay. The lights came on in the corridor behind us, but the chamber we’d entered remained dark, and I recalled what it had said in the papers: Electricity (excluding ventilation) has been disconnected, to prioritize the needs of the rest of the population.
I looked back at the bones by the door. How long had those locked in Section F waited by the locked door, in the darkness? Had they clawed at the door, screamed and begged for release? The metal of the door bore no marks, told no stories.
Before we’d descended into the Ark, it was the soldiers and the unknown machines that I’d feared. I hadn’t realized how much horror could lie in something much simpler: a steel door and a cluster of bones.
Ω
We came across other bones soon. In a small room, a skeleton was curled on its side on a