us.
He made it through the gap. We didn’t speak—there was no time, and not enough air in the small space, with the river whispering at us from below. In minutes, it would pass the fan and join us in this final chamber. I clambered into the tunnel. No time for hesitation now, and no choices to make. Only water below us, and air above. I braced my wet boots against the outsides of the tunnel and reached my arms in front of me. The steepest sections, though far from vertical, still took all my strength. Each jerky movement gained only a few inches, and often my hands or feet slipped on the rounded piping. My body’s giddy shaking produced no warmth, and I was utterly depleted as I negotiated the turns in the tunnel, forcing my body around the tight corners. The only comfort was the sound of Piper behind me. Then another sound began to follow me up the tunnel: the creeping of water. It was quiet at first—just a dampening of the echoes as our knees and elbows bumped against the steel. But within minutes every movement of Piper’s legs was a splash. Before, I had been relieved that the tunnel wasn’t vertical. Now I realized what it meant. Even I, higher than Piper, would never be able to stay afloat, or to keep up with the water and let it carry me upward—the angled pipe would trap me.
For a second, I wished we’d stayed down there, in the base of the Ark with the tanks, and taken the quick death that the flood had promised us. I could have gone to Kip’s body, and been with him at the end. Worse to die slowly here, and to have to listen to Piper drowning below me. To hear his death, and Zoe’s death nestled within it. I would die in this tunnel, cramped so tightly that I couldn’t so much as wrap my arms around myself in the final moments. No consolation but the grip of the steel.
It seemed strange, after all my dreams of fire, that it should end like this: death by water.
My pulse became a cry that only I could hear: Zach. Kip. Zach. Kip.
Two flecks of white appeared before my eyes. Was I dying now? Was my body so numb with cold that the water had overtaken me before I could even realize? Or had Zach, somewhere else in the Ark, succumbed to the water?
But the lights stayed steady. They were not spots on my vision, not the last flares of consciousness. They were stars.
chapter 38
In those last few hundred yards, with the night sky in my sight, we climbed higher than the river’s level, and the water stopped pursuing us up the tunnel. There were no more splashes from behind me as Piper crawled—just the dulled thuds of metal set in concrete.
The moonlight outside couldn’t penetrate the tunnel properly, but the darkness around me changed. I could see the seams of the metal, where the sections of pipe had been joined. Above us, at the rim of the opening, I saw the silhouette of the long grass swiping at the air, blown by a wind that I’d never expected to feel again.
After all that had happened in the Ark, it was strange to find the surface world unchanged. Snow lay on the boulders, and the wind scudded clouds in front of the stars. Unconcerned by floods, Arks, or blasts, the moon continued its progress across the sky. But as I slumped on my hands and knees in the snow, I could still hear the rumble of the river beneath us as it forced its new course through the Ark.
We were soaked, and the cold night air felt like an attack. When I looked down at my hands, they were blurred with tremors. Piper had dropped to his knees on the grass. I stared beyond him at the earth’s dark mouth, and thought of everything that had been drowned when I unleashed the river. The ghost voice of Elsewhere. The remnants of the blast machine that Zach had not yet salvaged. The thousands of tanks, awash now with all the Ark’s old bones. And Kip, free of the tank and of his broken body.
The next hours passed in a haze of cold. As we retrieved our rucksacks, there was shouting to the east, where the nearest door to the Ark lay. Lamps were moving in the distance. We ran, skidding among the boulders in