shaky with exhaustion and anger, but there was less rust on these bolts, and within minutes the grate was free. I lifted it carefully into the pipe, slid it out of the way, and dropped to the gangway just a few feet below.
I’d tried to land gently, but at the sound of my feet hitting the metal, footsteps echoed near the middle of the room. In the dim light, and through the ranks of glass, I couldn’t see him, but I knew that he’d seen me.
chapter 36
Zach was twenty yards away, and sidling to the far door when I finally spotted him. He stopped the instant that Piper landed beside me. Before Piper’s boots had sounded on the gangway, his arm was already drawn back, knife poised to throw. He held the blade so delicately, between thumb and one finger, but I’d seen him kill enough times to know that there’d be nothing delicate about the impact if he launched the knife at Zach’s throat.
“Kill me, and you kill her, too,” Zach said, his voice a breathless yell.
“If you raise the alarm, I’m dead anyway,” said Piper. “Tortured, too, and Cass’ll be tanked. She and I both know what choice we’d make, if it comes to that.” I know that Piper was remembering the same thing that I was: the moment outside New Hobart, when the battle had turned against us, and his knife had been pointed at me. We’d never discussed it. We’d never needed to.
“Don’t think about running,” Piper went on. “Even if you dodge my knife, she won’t.”
“Hell on earth, put out the lantern, at least,” Zach shouted at me. “There’s hydrogen sulfide in some of these pipes—you’ll blow your hand off.”
I didn’t understand all of Zach’s words, but the panic in his eyes, as they darted from the lantern to the pipes above us, was real enough. I lifted the lantern’s shutter and blew out the flame, returning us to the dim green glow of the machine’s lights.
“You can point your knife at me all you like,” Zach called up to Piper. “But you’ll never get out of the Ark.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I know about the blast machine, and Elsewhere.”
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
“You said to me, years ago, in the Keeping Rooms, that you wanted to do something with your life. You said you wanted to change the world. You could have done that, with what you found here. Not the blast machine. The other things: you could have ended the twinning. You know it’s possible. Elsewhere did it.”
“And make us all into freaks, like the two of you? That’s what it does, you know, ending the twinning. It doesn’t free us of Omegas after all. It makes us all into Omegas.”
“You’d rather that people are stuck with the fatal bond, instead?” said Piper.
Zach waved his arm dismissively. “We found a way around that,” he said. “I found a way to be free of you after all, with the tanks. We don’t need Elsewhere. For four hundred years, we’ve managed to preserve humanity. Proper humanity. It survived the blast itself, and the Long Winter, and four hundred years of deadlands and droughts and everything else we’ve had to contend with. And after all that, Elsewhere would end it, if you drag them into this. Just when we’ve found a way to be free of Omegas, Elsewhere could make us all into freaks.”
I shook my head. “And you honestly think there’s more humanity in what you’re suggesting? Making another blast, and destroying Elsewhere, rather than ending the twinning and accepting that there’ll be mutations?”
“If you really think that being an Omega is nothing to be ashamed of,” Zach hissed, “then why did you hide it? Why did you lie for so long, right through our childhoods, and work so hard at pretending to be one of us?”
“Because I wanted to stay with my family,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes from his. “I wanted to stay with you.”
“No,” he said. “You wanted to pass yourself off as an Alpha. To take what was mine.”
With Zach, that was where it always ended up. We’d been talking about the blast, about the future of whole lands, the fate of everyone, both here and in Elsewhere. But if I followed his arguments deep enough, we always ended up at the same place: him as a frightened, resentful child, afraid that he would never get to claim his birthright. That people would think he