Sally shook her head. “Four hundred years, and there’s not been as much as a rumor, let alone a sighting. They died down there.”
“Maze of bones,” muttered Xander from his seat by the window. “Fire, forever.”
Piper looked away from Xander to scrutinize my face. “Can you feel anything? He was leaning toward me, the tips of his fingertips resting on my knee. “Any sense, from the paper, of where Elsewhere could be? Or of where the Ark itself was?”
“It didn’t work when we tried this with Lucia, or Xander,” Zoe said.
“She’s not the same as them,” Piper said.
Zoe shifted irritably. I wondered whether she was thinking the same thing as me: not yet.
Once, back on the island, Piper had asked me to look at a map and see whether I could help him find Elsewhere. I’d come up with nothing. This time, though, it might be different. Back then, Elsewhere had been nothing but a hope. Now, in the form of this creased sheet of paper, we had some kind of proof that it existed, or at least that it once had. I picked up the page and closed my eyes.
I tried to think of flying. I couldn’t even begin to picture what the aircraft of the Before might have looked like, or how they could have worked, but I did my best to imagine myself soaring out beyond the edges of the land, and over the sea. I tried to see the island, as I remembered it, a blemish on the blankness of the sea. Then, farther, to the north, where I imagined the winter ice sheets that Piper had told me about. To the west and the south, where nothing but sea unfolded under me. I willed myself to feel it: the glimpse of another coast, coming into view below.
But I wasn’t flying; I was drowning. Water rose around me, closing over my face. When I opened my mouth to scream, I expected to taste the sharp salt of ocean, but instead, all I could taste was sweetness, a taste so saccharine and artificial that it tipped over into foulness. I would know that taste anywhere.
I couldn’t move. When I strained my eyes to the right, I could see a face next to mine. It was hard to make out through the viscous fluid. Hair floated over half the face. Then the liquid shifted, and the hair drifted to the side. It was Elsa.
I shouted. Piper’s hand on my arm brought me back to the room. When I looked down, my hands were shaking, the paper that they clutched fluttering like the wings of a moth.
“What did you see?” Zoe said.
I stood, moving slowly against the weight of the news that held me down.
“They’re going to tank them all,” I said. “Sealing the town was only the beginning. They’re going to tank everyone in New Hobart.”
“This isn’t about New Hobart,” said Piper. “Concentrate on Elsewhere. And the Ark.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I could feel it. I could see Elsa, underwater.”
Piper spoke gently. “You must have known it would come to that, ever since they captured the town. They were never going to just release them.”
He was right. The gradual tanking of those who turned themselves in to the refuges was never going to be enough for Zach. The city was already a prison. Soon it would be a ghost town, like the submerged city in the sea beyond the Sunken Shores.
“I know you’re worried about your friends there,” Piper said. “But we can’t free New Hobart. That would mean open war—a war that we can’t win. The only way we can help Elsa and the others is by finding the Ark, or finding Elsewhere. So you need to concentrate. This is bigger than New Hobart.”
“New Hobart,” Xander echoed.
We all turned. I hadn’t heard Xander cross the room to stand behind me.
“The soldiers are searching,” he said.
“In New Hobart?” I said.
“New Hobart,” he said again, but it was impossible to know whether it was a confirmation, or just an echo.
“Don’t worry,” Piper said. “They were looking for Cass. They didn’t find her—she got out.”
I remembered the posters that had been nailed up all over the town, with my face and Kip’s sketched on them.
“No,” said Xander. He spoke impatiently, as though we were children, or simpletons. He looked straight at me. “You’re not what they’re looking for.”
I felt my cheeks flush. “You’re right. It wasn’t me—or not only me. The Confessor was looking for Kip, most