The Fire Sermon (13 page)

In the pipe I measured time only by the urgency of breath. In the first few moments I was exhilarated by the speed with which we dropped, dragged downward by the unhesitating liquid. Then the longing for air overtook every other consideration, even the fear of that closed space, or the sharp ridges of the pipe’s joints jolting me at each curve. Then, suddenly, a different kind of darkness, and our falling was no longer contained but in the open air. It must have been more than twenty feet from the pipe’s abrupt end down to the deep pool in which we landed, but even as I was falling, the bliss of air was greater than any fear. Landing, there was the double jolt of pain and relief to feel my body pummel into the boy’s. When I surfaced, I could see the silhouette of his head, just a few feet away. His whole body jerked with each frantic stroke of his arm, but he was managing to keep his face above the surface.

It was light enough to see, but only barely. I could make out the huge cavern around us, distantly lit by a large opening in the domed roof. High in the rock face on one side, several large pipes protruded, including the one from which we had burst. Some flowed loudly, others dripping intermittently into the deep pool below, where the boy and I trod water. Upstream the river was quickly concealed by increasing darkness, but fifty feet downstream the cavern opened up and the river flowed out to the daylight.

“Will they come after us?” He spoke for the first time. Despite his breathlessness, I was taken aback at how normal his voice sounded. It didn’t seem to match the figure I’d seen floating in the tank, or the tube I’d pulled from his mouth so recently. He continued: “If they saw us, will they risk it?”

I nodded, then realized he could scarcely see me. “They’ll know we lived, or me at least. Because of my twin.”

“They have him, too?”

“Something like that.” I looked back up at the drooling mouths of the pipes above. “They’ll be coming—if not by the pipes, then by another route. They know this place; they built those pipes.”

He was already swimming awkwardly toward the bank of the pool, toward the cave mouth and the light. “Stop,” I said. “They’ll be too fast, and they’ll be looking for us downstream.”

“So we’ll head away from the river—come on.”

“No—there’s too many of them, and they’re too fast. They’ll be here in minutes.”

He was in the shallows already. He stood up, water to his waist, looking back at me. His thin torso was glowing pale in the cavern’s dark. “I’m not going back. I won’t stay with you to be caught.”

“I know. But there’s another way.”

He stopped. “You know this place?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t explain to him the kind of knowing that it was: the way that the river’s shape was present in my mind, or how I felt the tug of its currents and divergences. Here in this cavern, where our voices echoed back at us, strangely distorted, I wondered if my seer mind worked in the same way: bouncing some silent signal off the world around me, sensing out its paths and crannies.

“They’ll expect us to leave the cave, head downstream,” I said. “But if we go upstream, there’s another way—caves leading through the mountain, and another branch of the river.”

He looked doubtfully upstream where, away from the light, the river seemed to emerge from nowhere, deep in the black, cracked walls of the cavern.

“You’re sure?”

I took a slow breath, closed my eyes, wondered how to convince him of something that felt so nebulous, even to me. The sound of a splash startled my eyes open, to find that he’d pushed off from the shallows toward me already.

“You’ve got me this far,” he said.

I trod water while I waited for him to reach me, and gazed up at the fissure in the roof, and the narrow shaft of light that it cast down, illuminating the water in front of me. That’s when I saw the bones, in that one brightened strip in the murky water. I could see the bottom of the pool, and the collection of bones that littered it. One skull stared back at me from a single central eye socket; the bones of a hand reached up to us like a deathly beggar. Another skull lay upside down, a jawless container partly filled with sand. It was tiny—half the size of the other one. A baby’s skull.

The boy heard my strangled yelp, followed my gaze. For a moment I thought he might be sick.

“Hell,” he said. “We’re not the first people to be flushed out of those tanks.”

“No. Just the first living ones.” I was struggling to tread water while keeping my legs drawn up as high as possible, recoiling from what lurked below us. As soon as he reached me we swam upstream; he nearly kept up, though his one-armed swimming was lurching and breathless. As we reached the top of the cavern the river surface was churning where the river surged through some fissure deep below. The darkness at this end of the cavern was less total than it had seemed at first, and we could discern a muted glow of light some feet beneath the surface. I looked at him. “You can swim well enough?”

He looked back at the deep pool into which we had dropped. “Now you ask me?”

Here, the current was strong enough that we had to hold fast to a jutting rock to stay in place. Over the water’s sound other noises could now be heard: a clanging in the pipes above and, from the cavern’s opening downstream, the clatter of hooves on shale. I hated the idea of diving under, closer to the bones. But at the moment the distant shapes of men on horseback appeared in the lightened opening, the boy and I took our deep breaths and committed ourselves once again to the water.

Whereas in the pipe we’d been propelled by the force of water, here we had to fight against it. The gap through which the river surged was several feet down, and when I first encountered the full force of the current surging through I was forced back with it. It took a hysteria of kicking and thrashing to enter the narrow tunnel that led toward the light. The opposing current forced me upward against the tunnel’s roof so that as I thrashed my way upstream I was scraped mercilessly by the jagged rock above. I had to drag my eyes open against the onslaught of water. Then the rock roof above me was gone, I had burst into a pool of light, and a few kicks took me to the surface.

He wasn’t there. Looking down, I could make out nothing in the dark from which I’d emerged. I cursed myself as I turned from side to side, treading water, scanning the small cavern. How could I have thought he would get through in his weakened state, with his flailing, ungainly swimming? I’d concentrated so hard on my intangible senses, the instincts that led me to this second cavern, that I’d failed to use my eyes. I hadn’t taken in how frail he was, reborn pale and wasted from the tank, with his single emaciated arm. I waited, treading water. This grotto was similar to the first, but whereas that cavern had an opening, a cave mouth leading to the world beyond, this one was enclosed on all sides. The only light glanced in from a slanted opening some sixty feet above. Punctuating the silence, heavy drops fell into the pool from the stalactites above. The drips kept count of the passing seconds as I waited. Surely he couldn’t have held his breath this long. Surely that bony chest couldn’t contain enough air to last all this time.

He scared me when he surfaced, so sudden and urgently, barely three feet from me. As he devoured the air in noisy gasps, I caught in his face the same desperation I’d seen through the glass of the tank. He was still coughing and cursing as we dragged ourselves up onto the rock ledge that ran around one side of the cave. It was littered with sharp stones, but it was a blessing to be free of the current’s constant tow. I hadn’t realized how cold the water was until I finally hauled myself clear of it. He’d managed to clamber out, though awkwardly, and as we slumped next to each other on the stones I noticed that his panting body, like mine, bore many marks of our journey. He caught me noting the grazes and cuts on his back and shoulders. I was reminded of his nakedness and turned quickly away.

As we lay there, each gazing up at the light beaming in through the cave’s domed roof, I was acutely aware not of his body but my own. After four years in the Keeping Rooms, I’d lost track of my body as an object, a thing visible to others. When I was captured, I’d been nineteen. Four years later, were these breasts the same? My face, which I’d not seen in all that time? My pale skin felt, suddenly, a strange costume. He was the naked one, but I felt oddly exposed.

I didn’t have time to indulge these musings. He’d closed his eyes, but I shook his shoulder gently. “They don’t know about this place,” I said, “and they’ll be searching downstream at first. But they could find it. We have to move.” I pulled off my shoes, drained them of water before putting them on again.

“Please tell me your escape route doesn’t involve any more stunts like that last one?”

I smiled, shook my head. “No more swimming. For now, anyway.” I was up. “But I hope you don’t mind caves.”

In fact, it was he who led the way. Although he moved unsteadily, his eyes were better than mine in the darkness. I’d found the cave, groping along the ledge until it was reduced to a bare foothold, then scrabbling up a few feet to where the entrance was concealed by a jutting flake of rock. Before I entered I closed my eyes, rested my forehead momentarily against the damp stone, groping down the passage with my mind.

“You can’t have been here before.”

I opened my eyes, looked back at him, shook my head.

“But you know where to go.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.

“I thought you must be a seer. Because you look perfect.” There was a pause. “I mean, not perfect, but—I meant, you’re branded, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with you.”

I stepped quickly into the dark of the cave, sparing us both. Although I could feel the pull of the tunnel’s general direction, in the absolute dark I had to feel my way along, crouching forward and bumping my head often on outcrops of stone. After I swore loudly at one such collision, he went in front, and we made better speed, with him calling out to warn me where the ceiling lowered. The darkness wasn’t always total—at several points the tunnel branched upward to tiny inlets of light, in antechambers off the main passage. After what felt like an hour or more, we stopped by one of these and sat leaning against one side of the narrow passage. By the pale gleam of light we could see the rough tool marks that pocked the walls.

“We might be the first people to come through here ever. I mean, since the Before.” I ran a hand over the pitted walls.

“This is from then? From the Before?”

I shook my head. “Older, even.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, old even for the Before.”

The dark was incomplete, but the silence wasn’t. The absence of noise in the tunnel was heavier than any silence I could remember.

“I should have said this earlier,” he said eventually, “but thank you. You didn’t have to get me out of that tank.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m glad you think so. I can’t imagine everyone would want a naked stranger slowing down their getaway.”

I laughed, disarmed. “We should do something about that.” Taking off the sodden woolen sweater I wore over my shirt and trousers, I passed it to him, then turned away pointlessly while he put it on. When I turned back he’d managed to pull the wide neck down to his waist and wear it as a kind of skirt, the sleeves hanging empty.

“We should get moving,” I said, standing up. I waited for him to go first and had to press against the wall as he squeezed past. “I don’t even know your name,” I called after him.

“The same goes for me, actually.”

“It’s Cass.”

“No—I meant my name. I don’t know it, either.” He was several feet in front of me now, moving into the narrow passage ahead. I followed him, and the conversation felt somehow easier in the cloaking darkness.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m not being secretive. I’d tell you my name if I knew it. Not much point hiding stuff from a seer anyway.”

“It’s not like that. I don’t read minds. I just—feel things, sometimes, sometimes about places, sometimes about people. But it’s not straightforward.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Most people aren’t that keen about me sensing stuff about them.”

“I thought maybe you could tell stuff about me—stuff I can’t remember.”

“And you really can’t remember anything?”

“Nothing before the tank.”

I stopped. “Not even your twin?”

“Nothing.”

chapter 10

In the tunnels we lost all sense of time. I knew only that it had been a long while since we’d last passed one of the light shafts, and far longer since I’d eaten or drunk. I tried to ignore the hunger and thirst, to focus on feeling my way and on dodging the low roof and narrow walls that regularly scraped the wounds on my back and arms. After years in my cell, even walking exhausted me. My breath was tight, my chest as cramped as the tunnels. The exhaustion was even worse for the boy, who stumbled regularly. The route, at least, was mainly uncomplicated, and the few times we encountered a junction I had to hesitate only briefly before choosing the path. We’d been heading slightly uphill for what felt like hours, and when the floor evened out slightly I suggested that we stop.

“I could use a sleep,” he agreed.

“But not for too long.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of us sleeping for hours in blissful comfort,” he said, brushing some stones from the ground beneath him. “Are you cold?”

“Not too much,” I lied. It had grown steadily colder as we made our way deeper into the tunnel.

We were lying close but not touching.

“What about scared?”

I thought for a minute. “Yes. Scared of them catching us, or of getting lost, stuck in here. But that wouldn’t be much worse than before.”

“You weren’t in one of those things, though? Not in a tank?”

“No. Just a room.” I pictured the tanks again. My years in the cell—the madness I had felt encroaching, the claustrophobia and the hopelessness—seemed small compared to what he had endured.

It was quiet for a while. “What about you?” I said. “Are you scared?”

“I can’t say I relish this cave business, but I don’t feel scared like I probably should. It feels so—new, I suppose. Just to be out.”