said. “You could help me. If you worked with me, helped the doctors, we could find new ways to heal them. You can’t just give up on them.”
I’d seen what being tanked had done to Kip, his mind hollowed of its memories. What could Zach possibly imagine would be salvaged from him and the Confessor after the fall, and this second tanking? Would he keep them preserved for decades, until they became like the tanked men I’d seen upstairs?
“You’re counting on me clinging to some kind of hope?” I said.
He was watching me minutely. Zach, who had done everything he could to teach me that hope was for other people, in other times.
I turned back to the glass of Kip’s tank. “It’s not about hope, or giving up on him,” I said to Zach so quietly that my words were barely more than a shape my lips made against the glass. “It’s about choice, and what he would want. He wouldn’t want this. Not ever.” I thought again of those grotesque figures, floating above us in Section A. “Not even the Confessor would have chosen this.”
I walked to the steel ladder, climbing to the gangway that ran at the level of the tank’s lids.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Piper said.
I kept climbing, until I stood above Kip.
I swung the lid aside and shared the tank’s sickly breath. When I’d first found Kip, beneath Wyndham, I’d been unable to lift him out. But that was after I’d spent four years in the Keeping Rooms. I was stronger now, and he was lighter than he had been even then. I wrapped both arms around his torso, feeling the raised ridges of his scars, and pulled.
As the liquid released him and he took on his own weight, I had to haul hard, but nothing could have made me let go. When I’d dragged him over the glass rim, I laid him on his back on the gangway. His face was slicked with the viscous liquid. Twice his arm moved, a random jerking, as if his hand were a fish thrown on a ship’s deck, thrashing. The liquid dripped from him through the metal grille of the gangway to land on the floor below. Fast, at first, in trickles and splashes, and then slowly, hitting the concrete floor one drip at a time. I tugged the tube from his wrist, and watched the hole fill with sluggish blood. From his mouth I pulled another tube, a second tongue.
Zach rushed at the ladder, but Piper tackled him, grappling him to the ground. If Zach said anything, I didn’t listen. I turned back to Kip, and bent low over his face.
He gave two exhalations, each one a tiny benediction of warm air on my cheek. The third breath wasn’t a breath at all—just an opening of his mouth. His eyes stayed closed, and I was glad.
I turned my face to the side, cheek pressed against his chest. I didn’t pretend, even to myself, that I was comforting him. I knew there was nothing left inside him. If there was any comfort in that last embrace, it was all for me.
I held his spent body and looked at his closed eyes and his slim fingers. I slipped my palm under the back of his neck and let my hand take on the familiar weight of his head. He took no more breaths. For the first time since the silo, I cried.
Ω
I stood and looked back down at the Confessor, in her tank. She had sunk to the bottom, her neck arched backward. Her eyes were open but her face was expressionless. In death, she was no more inscrutable than she had been in life. Zach sat leaning against her tank, head thrown back, not hiding his tears.
“You’ll never get out of here,” he said. Piper let him stand, but kept his knife pointed at Zach’s back. “All the entrances are guarded,” Zach went on. “You’ll be caught. He’ll end up back in the tank. And we’ll drag them back to life again.”
“It’s not life,” I said. I stepped carefully over Kip’s body on the gangway, and back to where I’d left the lantern. The matches were in my pocket. I fumbled at the first attempt, the match scraping limply and then snapping. The second time, the flame flared and caught.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Zach, as I lit the lantern’s wick. “I’ve told you already. It’s not safe.”