me. By the time we got to the next flight of stairs, the water was at my hips.
It didn’t matter how fast we ran. Somewhere in the Ark, Zach was running, too, and if he didn’t make it, nor would I. But he knew these corridors, and could head straight for the main doors. If any guards remained at the exits, after the river’s bursting, Zach wouldn’t need to fear them.
We ran. The lights on the upper levels weren’t lit, and the blackness was thickened by the sound of rising water. It caught up with us in the top level—when the river reached the main corridor, sparks sprayed from the ceiling, with a sizzling sound like hot steel plunged into water. In the instant of light, I saw a skull bob past my feet. A boat of bone. Then the darkness returned. I tried to concentrate on finding the main ventilation tunnel, but the messy and insistent currents of the water changed the way the corridors tugged at my mind. We ran through Section F, its silent rooms now noisy with water. At one point I led us the wrong way, and we had to backtrack twenty yards, against the current. We were almost swimming now, the water at our chests, the cold so extreme that my lungs clenched, refusing air. The sounds of Piper behind me grew fainter; with only one arm to pull himself through the water, he was dropping behind.
If the water’s current had not been heading in the right direction down that final corridor, we would never have reached the open ventilation hatch leading to the main shaft. My feet could no longer touch the ground, and I was propelled by the water rather than my own flailing movements. But when I gripped the sides of the open hatch and tried to pull myself up, the current was no longer an ally. It refused to let me go, dragging me so mercilessly that when I finally managed to pull myself through the hatch, my legs scraped against it and left filings of flesh on the steel edge.
Here, in the narrower space, I had the ladder to hang on to, though my frozen hands kept slipping from the rungs. Piper grabbed from below, clutching my foot for a moment before he, too, found the rungs.
When we pulled ourselves into the control room, with the wheel of blades above us, the water followed. Each time a spark from above illuminated the room, I could see how the water had crept farther up the walls. One of the sealed hatches on the side of the room gave way, the dislodged door crashing into my hip as the water burst through.
The gap between the blades and the water had shrunk to only a few feet, the water at our waists. The dwindling space amplified the sounds, and our breathing was loud, each breath the quick rasp of a handsaw through wood.
There was no time to worry about the Electric or the sharpened fan—the death offered by the water was certain, unlike the blades. Piper knelt so that I could clamber onto his knee, just as I’d once seen him kneel to help Zoe. He steadied me while I groped up through the darkness to find the blades with my hands. The lights stayed off, and the blades stayed still. Even the sparks had finished flaring now—perhaps the river had done what four hundred years had not, and drowned the Electric for good.
Piper had nobody to lift him. The first two times he jumped, I heard the splash that followed as he fell back down. Kneeling at the edge of the hole that I could not see, I tried to gauge how fast the water was rising, and how much air was left. How many breaths remained to us, and whether I would wait for him if he fell another time.
It was a calculation I never had to complete. The third time he jumped, his hand thudded on the rim of the concrete floor. I grasped his forearm with both of my hands, throwing myself flat against the ground to counteract his greater weight. Our skin was slippery and numb with the water. As he heaved himself upward, his whole arm shook. His hand was a vise, squeezing my wrist so tightly that my skin was crushed between our bones. My newly healed right wrist remembered its pain; when I gasped, the sound was lost in the hiss of water beneath