Today the doctor finds her kneeling beside the fountain. Here the girls dump buckets of snow that island and melt into gray water for them to drink or wash their dishes and clothes. She splashes her face clean, rubs away what dirties her. She cups handfuls and handfuls to her face. Water was sacred in the Sanctuary, and the old women were always talking about how it cleaned more than your skin, and even wetting your hands, your face, could chase away something that spoiled you. The doctor hopes so. “Do you miss him?” she says.
Clark’s face drips. The fountain’s surface settles into a rippling mirror. A skylight wavers to life, a silver-shaped diamond that overwhelms her own reflection, her face a mere pale smudge, barely recognizable, barely her. The doctor thinks she sees what Clark sees. A thing. When Clark widens her eyes, the thing widens its eyes. And when she opens her mouth, the thing seems to snarl and spring fangs.
The doctor dashes a hand through the water, and when the image calms this time, it looks a little more like Clark.
“There’s a lot of men I miss,” Clark says, “but my brother most of all.”
“You’re not to blame for—”
“Shut up. Just shut up and leave me be. You might think you’re their mother, but you’re not mine.”
Chapter 49
IT TAKES ANOTHER hour, but Simon and Ella backtrack and discover where they took a wrong turn and follow the proper sewer channel and crawl into the Dome’s basement and discover there the thousands of oak and plastic barrels Danica promised. “Barrels and barrels and barrels,” she said. “More than I’ve ever counted. And far more valuable than any wine. Enough to share. Enough to remedy the Sanctuary’s drought for many months. But my husband bathes in it instead.” This is what Lewis alerted them to in his letter—a vast storeroom of water.
The smell—of mildew—is a new one. Breathing is a little like drinking. Some of the barrels sweat and drip. Simon runs a hand across one and licks his palm. “Son of a bitch.”
Ella says they need to hurry. Dawn can’t be far off.
They heft one from a stack—wobbling under its weight and nearly dropping it with a crash—and then hitch it with two lengths of rope drawn from his backpack. They curl the ropes around a pillar and stand on the opposite side and keep their grip tight when they hand-over-hand lower the barrel into the dark.
They climb down after it and drag the grate back into place. They do the best they can to secure the entry, threading the grate with a thin length of chain that they then knot around some piping below and anchor with a padlock. “Make sure there is no escape,” Danica told them. “The Dome should be watertight.”
They untie the barrel and tip it on its side. It sloshes and mutters and Simon imagines taking a knife to it, sucking out a drink to ease his dry mouth. With one hand they hold their lanterns and with the other they roll the barrel awkwardly along the sewer walkway, constantly readjusting their course.
By the time they return to the museum, they are both covered in grime and sweat, bloodied, burned, red-faced. Simon drags the grate back over the sewer entry and then drags a box over the grate and sits down on it and puts his head in his hands and says, “Thank God that’s done with.”
“Oh no,” Ella says.
He looks at her through his fingers. “What?”
He is always the one making mistakes. Falling off the ladder and breaking his arm, allowing Danica to surprise him with the dagger, climbing into the prison instead of the Dome. A small part of him relishes the idea of Ella making an error—until he notices the way she backs away from him with tiny steps and worry creasing her face. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”
“What?”
“I forgot my bat. At Slade’s.”
He lets his hands fall with relief. “I’ll steal you another one.”
“You don’t understand.” Her cheeks bunch up. Her eyes glimmer with tears. She explains how Slade toyed with it when he searched the museum, threatened her with it. “He knows it’s mine. He’ll know I’ve been there. He’ll come for me.”
Once again Simon stands in the sewer at the bottom of a ladder. He has not had enough sleep. He has not had any breakfast. He felt excited and driven before, but that has given way to exhausted fearfulness. He studies the tunnels branching all around him. He feels about this place—the Sanctuary—as he feels about the human mind. It seems contained, limited, and yet constantly opens into new corridors and closets, an endless vault, much of it dark.
Ella gives him a nudge. “Are you going or am I going?”
“I’m going.”
Slowly he begins to climb. His feet ring against the rungs. His lantern dangles from his bad hand, a clumsy grip, and rust crumbles against the palm of the other as he pulls himself up. He reaches the top and threads his fingers through the grate, ready to shove it aside, when a key sounds in a lock and the door to the room opens.
He keeps his fingers where they are but swings the other arm out, bringing the lantern up against the sewer’s ceiling, hoping to shield its light. Slade does not carry a lantern of his own, but the room nonetheless brightens, the residue of the hallway. The footsteps, slow, heavy, grind dust into the concrete. Simon’s fingers must be visible, white and rounding the grates like some cellar fungus, and he imagines a boot coming down on them, mashing them into the metal, clipping through bone. He fights the compulsion to pull back.
A foot clunks down on the grate—rust rains down on Simon—and because he turns his face away, he is for a moment unsure whether his fingers remain uninjured. And then the grate shifts again, loosened of weight, and the footsteps continue to the other side of the room.
Simon already knows who it is, but he wants to see. He presses his face up against the grate to study Slade, a massive slab of a man. He wears his black uniform. The back of his head is lined with fleshy rolls. If he spots the bat, wherever it might be, Simon knows it is only a matter of seconds before he checks the grate.