off, blundering past him to crouch against the wall, my head squeezed between my forearms.
When the vision had receded I was able to stand once again, but white spots still blurred my sight, and the smell of scorching was thick in my nostrils.
“Keep going,” I said to Piper, waving him forward, and shaking my head to try to clear it. I kept one hand on the wall to steady myself as we walked further down the corridor. There was a noise here that had been absent from the rest of the Ark. I closed my eyes to listen to it: the hiss of water. I’d felt the river above us ever since we’d entered the Ark, but now I could hear it too. As well as the ventilation tunnels, huge water pipes traced the ceiling, and they rumbled with the river’s black current.
Room after room was empty. Not empty in the same way as the upper levels that we’d wandered, where the stark gray walls appeared always to have been bare. The rooms in Section A had been hollowed, stripped of their contents. The walls themselves were half removed, whole panels missing, the wiring and tubes exposed. Elsewhere the wires had been cut, close to the walls. Copper tendrils sprouted from the frayed stumps.
The blast recurred in my head, aftershocks stuttering like the lights in the Ark’s upper levels. I clenched my teeth together and tried to concentrate on the wreckage of these rooms. There were so many of them: huge chambers, and small rooms that branched off them. All had been stripped.
There was no trail of smashed equipment like the one Kip and I had left behind in the silo when we’d tried to break the machines. There were no machines here, broken or otherwise, except a few trailing wires. Where things had been removed from the walls, they’d been carefully excised: neat saw marks on the concrete showed where whole structures had been excavated. All that remained were labels on doors or walls, for things that were no longer there:
COOLANT PUMP (3)
CONDENSATE OUTLET
VALVE PRESSURE (AUX)
“The Council haven’t destroyed anything,” I said. “They’re just moving it to somewhere else.” I thought of the new bunker that the soldier had mentioned a few hours earlier.
They hadn’t quite finished stripping Section A yet. Farther into the warren of rooms, we found some that had not been cleared, or not entirely. Wall panels were still intact, each one crowded with dials and buttons. Several had constellations of lights, too, flashing green or orange. In some of the rooms, the dismantling was halfway completed, panels removed and their workings exposed. A parchment lay on the floor, a detailed drawing mirroring the panel nearby, with each wire and socket numbered. Beside it sat a handcart, half-loaded with the disassembled machines, each item tagged with a numbered label. When I examined the diagram on the floor, I could make nothing of it: only numbers, and the odd unfamiliar word: Launch coordinates. Manual override. The complexity of the machines was overwhelming—it was clear that shifting the equipment had been the work of years. It was like dismantling and relocating an entire beach, with each grain of sand meticulously labeled.
The next room, though it was only small, hummed with noise. The open door wore an engraved placard:
H2S PROJECT
CLASSIFIED
ACCESS RESTRICTED—CERTIFIED H2S TECHNICIANS ONLY
I looked up at Piper, but his face was as blank as mine.
“You didn’t find anything about this in Joe’s papers?” he said.
I shook my head and stepped inside.
I’d expected some new horror, but what greeted us in the half-dark room was familiar. I knew by the smell, even before I saw the shape of the tanks, lit only by the flashing lights above them. The air of the room was thick with the too-sweet stench of the tank liquid, overlaid with a sour taint of dust and decades.
There were ten tanks, in two neat rows. The glass was smeared with grime. From the metal ring that encased the base of each tank, a rash of orange rust crept up the glass.
In most of the tanks, a figure floated. I’d thought that Sally was old, but these figures had passed beyond old age and back into a kind of fleshy babyhood. They curled in the water, their bloated skin puffy. Their flesh was loose on them, and it was pale and wet as the skin under a freshly peeled scab. Their noses and ears seemed too large, as if these had kept growing while the rest