gone. She took my good arm and led me deeper into the room, to where Piper stood. I could see the tanks clearly now. They were the same height as those I’d seen before, reaching a few feet above my head, but each one was fifteen feet wide. I thought of what the Confessor had said to me in the silo: our recent experiments in mass tanks. They filled the room, two rows of huge vats. Enough, I figured, to tank the whole town, eventually. For now, all but the nearest three tanks were empty, encasing nothing but air.
The tank closest to us had been drained. A few inches of fluid pooled at its base, around the open plug set into the floor. A rope ladder, tied to the gangway above, stuck to the tank’s damp side before coiling in the liquid at the bottom.
I stepped farther into the room, gripping Elsa’s arm more tightly.
The next tank was full of liquid. But the children’s bodies didn’t float, like the Omegas in tanks I’d seen before. They were piled at the base of the tank, six deep. The tubes that had pierced their mouths and wrists still stretched out of the liquid’s surface, but they were tangled, and some had pulled loose and dangled at large in the fluid. The surface of the liquid was utterly still; it didn’t vibrate with the orderly hum of the Electric. And without the Electric, each tank had become nothing more than a glass crypt. The children were all drowned.
“The fire didn’t do this,” I said. I knew, before Piper spoke, what he would say.
“Half the machines had been smashed,” Piper said, “and the wires cut.” I looked where he was pointing. At the far end of the room, a huge metal box had been pulled open, its wire innards exposed and slashed. The pipes that ran from the wall to the tanks, and along the ceiling above them, had been shattered, too. One of the pipes was leaking, viscous liquid dripping to the ground.
“I sent men here as soon as the town was secured,” Piper went on. “They found it like this. The Council’s soldiers must’ve done it as soon as they realized they were under attack. They must have had orders not to let the machines fall into our hands.”
Elsa interrupted him. “That’s not why they did it. That might have been part of it, sure. But you know as well as I do that this was a punishment.” She looked back at the tanks. “They broke the machines and they let the children drown, because we fought back.”
I couldn’t look away from the slumped bodies. It was hard to differentiate individual children among the mass of limbs. Most of their eyes were open, their mouths wide in underwater screams. I couldn’t bear to think about their final minutes, but I couldn’t look away. What price had we paid, to free New Hobart? But we hadn’t paid the price. These children had.
“I found the way to open the plug and drain the first tank,” Elsa said. Her sleeve on my arm was wet. I looked down at her. Her whole shirt was soaked, and her trousers, too, were wet to the knees. She led me to the far end of the room. There, laid out on a sheet, were the bodies she had pulled from the first tank. They lay there, drenched, like seaweed dumped on a beach by the sea.
“I’ve got the first twelve kids out,” she said. “But I’ve got more work to do. There are sixty kids or more in here.”
And sixty more again, in Alpha homes, where parents would have gone to wake their children the morning after the battle and found them in their beds, blue-lipped and drowned in air.
Zach had done this. Sickness twisted my guts, bile rising at the back of my throat. When I was a child, and had hidden my visions so that Zach and I could not be split, he had outwitted me by declaring himself the Omega. He’d known me well, my clever brother: I protected him, and took the branding and exile that I could not bear to see inflicted on him. Even back then, he’d been willing to risk hurting himself in order to be rid of me. Ordering the killing of the children, even knowing that Alpha children would die, too, was the same gesture, on a grand scale. His declaration, and the General’s, that no cost was too