touching the glass beside my own raised hands. To these men, Piper and I would have been no more than abominations.
He was staring at the nearest man’s wrist, where tube had become flesh, or flesh had become tube.
“If they’re alive,” Piper said, “should we try to wake them? Talk to them? Hell on earth, if these are really people from the Ark, from the Before, then think what they could tell us. More about Elsewhere, for one thing.”
“The Council’s already tried that,” I said, gesturing at the three empty tanks. “But I could’ve saved them the effort: these men can’t tell us anything.” Stepping closer to the glass, I watched the white eyes of the floating man. I pressed my hands to the tank, but I could feel nothing but the glass against my palms. When I’d seen the unconscious Omegas in the tanks beneath Wyndham, I’d felt a spark of presence within each of them. That was what had made their suspended state so appalling: knowing that trapped within each stranded body was a mind. But the man who drifted in front of me now was simply a sack of flesh, with no consciousness to animate it.
“They’re not dead,” I said, “but there’s nothing left of them.”
These were not people, any more than driftwood was a tree.
We left them there, in the tanks they’d built for themselves. The smell clung to us long after we’d gone.
We moved through more half-emptied rooms and echoing corridors. We were at the southern end of Section A when the blast came again. Just ahead of me, Piper had entered a large room. When I followed him, the memory of flames radiated from the doorway in a blast so total that my eyes rolled back in my head. I reeled backward, and I must have cried out, because I felt Piper grab me round the waist as I fell, and then everything went. It didn’t go black—it just went. The world was ripped away by flame, and I was unconscious before Piper had lowered me to the ground.
Ω
When I woke, I was lying on the concrete floor. I put my hand to my face and felt the furring of dust, where it had stuck to my sweaty skin.
Another flash of light erupted behind my eyes.
“I can’t handle this now,” I said, shaking my head as if that would make it stop.
“Calm down,” he said. “Listen to me.”
“Don’t tell me how to handle it,” I barked at him. “It’s the end of the world, and it’s happening in my head. Again and again. You have no idea what it’s like.” The only person who did know was Xander. And Lucia, before the water took her. These were the only ones who would understand me now: the dead and the mad.
“What if it’s not what you think it is?” Piper said quietly.
I stared at him. “You’re not the one who has to live with it every day. You think you can do a better job of dealing with it or understanding it?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I’m just asking you to think about it.” He bent close to me. “Why do you see the past in that one vision and not in any of the others?”
It was hard to concentrate on his question, with the flames still burning in the edges of my mind, and the earth and the river above bearing down on me.
“I do have other visions of the past, sometimes.” I sat up. “Impressions of it, anyway.” I couldn’t always disentangle my visions from my dreams or my memories, and time was capricious in all of them. In the taboo town, on the mountaintop, I’d felt the lives and deaths of four hundred years ago hanging over the town like a fog. And when Piper had told me about the massacre on the island, a week or more after it had happened, I’d seen it unfolding. At other times, I saw distant events at the same time as they happened. I’d learned too well that if I witnessed a death then my visions would probably force me to witness the twin’s death at the same moment.
“I know it’s not straightforward,” Piper said. “But almost all of your visions—the real ones—they’re of the future, not the past. Why would the blast be different?”
I shook my head. “The blast isn’t just the past, though. It doesn’t fit into time like other things do.” Piper had ridden through the ash drifts of the deadlands beside