Chapter 218 The Prisoner in the Subterranean
POV: Ash | Fell's facility sublevel
The chamber is underground and it has been underground since Fell moved us here after the coalition's first breach attempt three weeks ago, which means we have been in the sublevel for three weeks, which means we have been without natural light for three weeks, which is something my body has catalogued the same way it catalogued everything in the other facilities, which is as a condition to be managed rather than a complaint to be made, because complaining about conditions in facilities does not change conditions in facilities.
There are four of us. Myself, two younger hybrids whose names are Wren and Dax, and a girl about my age named Petra who was transferred from one of the burned facilities three weeks before they burned it and who has the specific quality of someone who has been in the system longer than me and who has reached a different relationship with it, which is the relationship of someone who has stopped expecting anything from it and who is therefore never disappointed.
I have not stopped expecting things. This is the fundamental difference between Petra and me, I think, and it is a difference I cannot fully explain because the expectation I have is not rational given the evidence, which is that Callum's coalition broke into this building and found us not here and has not come back, and three facilities burned without us being in them, and we are in a sublevel under an abandoned hospital with a man who is coming increasingly to inhabit the specific quality of someone whose relationship with reality is shifting.
The expectation is Callum. This is its specific content. Callum will come. This is what I told Wren on the first day of the sublevel and the fifth day and the twelfth day and I am telling Wren today, which is three weeks in, while Fell is in the next room with the preservation chamber and his logs and his specific monologue, which has been increasing in length and decreasing in coherence over the three weeks.
At noon the chamber goes wrong.
It is not a sound or a visual event. It is a change in the quality of the room, the specific quality of something that was present and is not, like a note that has been playing at the edge of hearing stopping. I do not know how to describe it more precisely than that. Something that was there is not there anymore, and the not-there has the quality of a severance rather than a natural ending, the difference between a thread being cut and a thread running out.
Wren looks at me. Dax, who has been sitting against the wall with his knees pulled up, straightens.
From the next room I hear Fell. His voice has the quality it has had increasingly over the past week, the quality of urgency exceeding his capacity to manage it, the quality of someone whose composure is structural rather than genuine and who is discovering that structure has limits.
He is saying something about vitals. Dropping. The word losing appears several times in the specific repetitive way that people use words when they are trying to manage something by naming it.
I look at the door between us and the next room and I think about Callum and the specific weight of three weeks of telling Wren Callum will come.
"He'll come," I say to Wren, because I am saying it to myself as much as to Wren and because it is still true even if I cannot demonstrate that it is true. "He knows where we are. He's coming."
The facility shakes.
Not the sublevel specifically, the building above us, the specific vibration that comes through the ceiling and the floor and the walls of something large happening above and outside. It is not an earthquake and it is not equipment and it has the quality of something moving, something coming closer.
Fell's footsteps in the next room change, the specific change from the pacing of someone managing a situation to the footsteps of someone who has decided to move.
The sound of the preservation chamber's portable housing being activated comes through the wall, the hum of the unit shifting to battery power, the sound of equipment being prepared to move.
He is grabbing Lucia's chamber and running.