was the freak, and not me.
It seemed such a little thing for the fate of our world to rest on. But I could feel it in him, the source of everything. If you stripped away the tanks and the Council and Ark and the blast machine, there he’d be: my brother, a small boy, angry and afraid.
Piper interrupted my thoughts. “Are you stupid enough to think that the blast can be contained?” he said to Zach. “That if you unleash it on Elsewhere, it won’t hurt us here as well?”
Zach shook his head impatiently. “They’re a long way away.”
“You haven’t found them yet,” I said. It was a prayer as much as a statement.
“We will,” he said. “And we’ll find them before the resistance does. We know they’re out there. We know what they can do, and what they’ve done.”
“Then let them do it,” I said. “What does it matter, what they do across the oceans?”
Zach’s nostrils were pinched as he inhaled. “They’re seeking us. Even if you and the resistance never manage to find them, they’re still seeking us. They sent a message. We found it here. Just a single message, a few words that reached here hundreds of years ago. It came through too late for the Ark builders—it was right at the end, when things were falling apart for them down here. They couldn’t even reply, let alone seek out Elsewhere. But they kept the message. We know Elsewhere’s out there. And we know they’ve still got machines. They were able to send that message, all those years ago. And they’d already ended the twinning, even then.”
“You can’t do this,” I said.
He laughed at me. “Can’t? We already have. We’ve nearly finished moving the blast machine. Everything else that I’ve found, over the years, I’ve had to piece together, bit by bit. Nothing was ever complete; nothing ever worked, and we were always short of fuel. But everything we’ve found here has been protected so carefully, documented so thoroughly. You’ve seen what we’ve managed to do with the tanks. We’ll do it with the blast machine, too. Maybe not perfectly—it’s harder without the Confessor.” A pause. He swallowed. The mention of the Confessor seemed to have troubled him more than Piper’s knife, still cocked toward him. “She had a talent for the machines,” he went on eventually. “It was incredible to watch—she understood them like nobody else. Taught me more than you can imagine. But even without her, you can’t stop us. She oversaw most of the work before she died, and my best people are finishing it. We’ve already got most of what we need out of this place.
“You might have found your way here. I wondered if you would—we knew those papers were at large, and you’re like a tick I can’t shake off. But you’re no more than that. You can’t stop us.” He turned to Piper. “You could kill me now, and her with me, and it still wouldn’t stop the blast, or the tanks. You think the General’s going to stop any of this if I’m gone? She’s the one who ordered us to set up more tanks here. Room for five thousand Omegas on this level alone.” He gave a smile. “It’s the perfect place for them, now the blast machine’s been moved from here. And it’s not like they’re going to need a view.”
I felt suddenly very weary, and tired of listening to him.
“Take me to Kip,” I said.
I saw how the tendons in his neck tensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I climbed down the ladder from the gangway. Now that I was among the tanks, the curved glass and the dim light distorted the space in the room, as if the air itself was bulbous and thickened.
I walked past Zach without a word, leaving Piper to guard him. I headed to where Zach had been coming from, when we’d first entered the room. I knew what he had been doing, here alone at night, while the soldiers retreated to their camps and watch posts. And I knew already what I would find.
Near the center of the room, among the rows of empty tanks, stood two that were filled. I pressed my face against the glass of the tank closest to me.
It was like the first time I saw him.
Except it wasn’t. Years before, when they’d cut off Kip’s arm to make him pass for an Omega, they’d stitched him up so carefully that even I