The Fire Sermon Read online

  Making the horror all the more uncanny was the weird orderliness of the scene: the neatly laid out rows of tanks; the perfect accord of the chests rising and falling to the machine’s perpetual lullaby. Despite the variety of deformations on display in the tanks, there was a ghastly uniformity about their comatose state. I walked along the row, paused, leaned my face against the glass of a tank, letting myself be calmed by the pulsing semidarkness.

  A shudder ran through the glass, shocking me back into alertness. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a face, pressed against the glass on which I was leaning. The boy who had drifted to the front of his tank had eerily pale skin, his veins clearly outlined. His light brown hair floated up from his head, and his mouth was partly open around the tube. Only one thing disturbed the near-stillness of the tableau: his eyes, wide open and alert.

  I jumped back, my small cry lost almost immediately in the thick dampness and rhythmic hum of the room. Averting my eyes from the boy’s stare, I looked down, but seeing that, like the others, he was naked, I fixed my eyes determinedly on his face. Despite his brand, his thin face reminded me of Zach. Later, I wondered whether that was why the boy had seemed so familiar.

  I grasped at the thought that his open eyes must be empty, that they couldn’t possibly signify consciousness. Some of the other tanked figures had open eyes, but they were no less absent for it. I stepped slightly to the side. If his eyes hadn’t followed me I might have continued, all the way back to the door at the far end of the room, and beyond. Part of me was disappointed when I saw his dark eyes track my progress. At the same time, I knew that having witnessed that small movement of his eyes was a promise that I couldn’t break.

  The tank’s lid seemed to be its only entry point, at least three feet above my head. At that level a platform ran around the wall, reached by a ladder at the far corner of the room. I took several steps toward it, then looked frantically behind me to try to reassure the boy that I wasn’t leaving. In the gloom it was already too late—he’d become a blur in the tank. I ran, counting tanks as I went and trying not to think about their occupants, or about the empty tank that I passed at the end of the row. Climbing the ladder, I cringed at the sound my footsteps unleashed on the metal steps. On the ledge I counted my way back along the tanks. At the twelfth tank I reached over for the metal handle and found that the lid lifted to the side without resistance.

  From above I could barely make out his drifting hair, now two feet below me. As I leaned down over the tank, the fluid smelled repulsively sweet. With my face turned up, away from the saccharine stench, I reached into the warm liquid, groped around, grasped something solid and gave a tentative tug. There was a slight resistance before what I was grasping came away in my hand. For an awful instant I imagined his fluid-soaked body somehow falling apart in my hands, but when I looked down I was both relieved and horrified to find that I was holding a pliable rubber tube. When I sought out his face I saw that the tube was now stripped from his mouth.

  I plunged my hand back into the fluid and flinched when it was grasped, firmly, by his. Gripping the ledge’s rail tightly with my other hand, I braced for his pull. At first he was light, the fluid taking his weight. As his head and chest breached the surface, however, he took on a tangible weight and I couldn’t lift him further. His wrist, below the hand that I held, was pierced by another of the tubes. I reached out for his other arm but could see, now that his torso had emerged, that the left arm wasn’t there. Without the thick warp of the tank’s glass between us, he looked older: perhaps my own age, though in his wasted state it was hard to tell.

  For a moment we stayed like that, hand in hand. Then he turned his head and bared his teeth, and for an instant I thought he was going to bite me. Just as I was about to snatch my hand away, he grasped the tube in his wrist with his teeth and, with one jerk of his head, ripped it free.

  Blood flared briefly, mixing with the fluid that coated his arm. He looked up at me and we pulled in unison. Small as I was, my strength was more than his, and the liquid coated our grasp with a slick film. For perhaps twenty seconds he hung, half out of the water, before our hands slipped apart and he slumped back into the tank. He opened his mouth again as if to speak, but only a pink bubble of bloodied water appeared. He reached up for my hand again, but as he raised his eyes to meet mine, I let go, turned, and ran. When I glanced back at him, he’d already sunk beneath the surface.

  It took me only a few seconds to run back along the platform and down to where I’d seen the wrench, near the bottom of the ladder. Back on the main floor now, I counted along the tanks until I reached his. He was no longer moving. From his open mouth and wrist, where the tubes had entered him, there were staccato bursts of blood. The released tubes were tangled, tentacle-like, around him, and his eyes were now closed.

  It seemed that there was no sound at all when I swung the wrench into the glass. For a second nothing happened. Then, as if it had been holding its breath, the tank exhaled everything in a roar, a glass deluge that swept me backward and off my feet.

  The boy landed on me at the moment I hit the floor, and the impact drove me sharply down onto the glass fragments. Together we skidded back across the darkness, colliding with the opposite wall in a tangle of limbs and glass.

  The noise continued for longer than I’d believed possible, as the final huge panels of glass wrenched themselves free and the liquid heaved the broken pieces, shrieking, along the floor. The relief of quiet when the noise finally settled was short-lived; almost immediately an alarm sounded and the room was lit up. Strips in the ceiling gave off the same white glow as the light in my cell, but glaring many times brighter.

  It was the presence of the naked boy lying against me, as much as the lights and the siren, that made me clamber up. He stood, too, shakily, then fell back against the wall. I grabbed at his arm, pulling him upright. Even with the sound of footsteps pounding closer from the far end of the chamber, I noticed how strange it was to feel the flesh of another person, after the years in the Keeping Rooms.

  I was facing the door through which I’d entered, but it was from the other end of the chamber, behind a larger set of doors, that I heard the footsteps coming. Between the unyielding shrieks of the alarm I could hear them, and shouting voices. I turned to the boy, but he was on all fours, taking small, sputtering breaths between coughs. I couldn’t concentrate—there was too much noise: the alarm, the machinery’s hum, the approaching men. And underneath it all, the river. I tried to focus on the tug of the river on my mind. It pulled at me the same way that the currents had pulled at my body when I swam in the river as a child. I scanned the network of pipes that ran along the chamber, above the row of tanks. The smashed tank stood out like a missing tooth. At the far end of the row, some of the tanks were empty. Empty: not just of bodies but of liquid. There had to be some way of draining the tanks. Half leading, half dragging the boy back to the jagged crown of glass that ringed the base of the shattered tank, I saw that much of the base was a plug, a sealed pipe nearly as wide as the tank itself, sunk into the floor.

  I stepped over the vertical glass remnants to stand in the shallow puddle of liquid that remained. The boy had recoiled when I pulled him after me, but I ignored his resistance, yanking him hard so that we were crouched together in the center of what had been the tank. There were only two levers at the front of the tank, and when I stretched out over the sharp glass, I could reach the first of them. When I pulled it, a torrent of the sticky liquid was unleashed from a pipe suspended high above us, spraying down onto where we huddled. I closed my mouth tightly and tried to shield my eyes. The boy was on hands and knees now, knocked down by the inundation. I reached for the second lever, felt the glass scrape my arm. Through the glaze of liquid I could see the doors at the far end of the chamber begin to open. I felt the lever resist, resist, then give way, and then the world dropped away beneath us as we were flushed from the light.

  chapter 9

  Afterward, I thought about all
the things that could have gone wrong. If there’d been a grate. If the drainage system hadn’t led back to the river. If the airless pipe had continued any longer than it did, or if the final drop to the river had been from a greater height. It was always hard to distinguish between luck and intuition, and I was never certain if I’d sensed the escape route or simply stumbled upon it.

  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 notice
d 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.”