Your One & Only(56)
Althea sat beside him. “I know he’s your brother. I understand that.”
Jack struggled to concentrate. Something fluttered in the back of his mind, light as insect wings. “Jonah said he was trying to find something called the Ark. Do you know what that is?”
Althea shook her head.
“He said it was human.”
“Samuel-299 would know. He’s spent lots of time in the Tunnels, and that’s where everything human is stored.”
“I can’t trust Sam,” Jack said.
“Then what do we do?”
Jack suddenly heard his mother’s voice in his head, saying, These things are for you. They belong to you. She’d been talking about the guitars he’d collected from the Tunnels, and the boxes full of papers and books she’d stolen, things she’d taken for him. Or it would have been stealing if anyone had cared that they were gone.
“Not everything is stored in the Tunnels,” Jack said. “I know where we need to go.”
Chapter Seventeen
ALTHEA
The cottage was dusty, and Althea felt cold in the damp room that had been Inga-296’s office. She wished she’d brought a sweater.
Althea would have been seven when they held the Binding Ceremony for the Inga. She’d heard the stories. That the Inga was crazy, that she’d locked herself away from the community, away from her sisters, surrounding herself with relics from the Tunnels. Jack had never been part of the story, and the image the other children conjured was terrifying—a woman with tangled hair and wild eyes, cut off from everyone, her mind lost. Nobody liked going in the Tunnels, and the idea of someone fracturing from spending so much time there only reinforced the pall of superstition that hung over the place.
What was called the Tunnels was actually a cavern running deep underground, entered through a cave to the north of Blue River.
Even as their time was ending, humans had poured their energy and resources into preserving the relics of human history. Althea admired their resolve and courage, if not their attachment to what amounted to little more than junk. In the face of not just their own individual deaths, but the end of all humanity, they wanted the world to survive. Years ago an earthquake had collapsed all but one wing of the Tunnels. Althea supposed her people could have excavated the buried items, but little of the faraway past interested them anymore. All that was left of the Tunnels was the section marked Art and Literature. The other sections listed in the catalogue—History, Science, Engineering, and Recreation, each with over a hundred subcategories—were entombed close by under mountains of pulverized rock. The electronics, transportation machines, reels of microfilm, government documents, weapons from long-dead wars, seeds of extinct plants, tissue from extinct animals, clay objects from the Stone Age and Mesopotamia, and a matchless treasury of other things, all gone. Except for the Sample Room, Vispera had no use for what survived.
Or at least, most of Vispera. From walls of boxes and piles of paper in disarray in the Inga’s office, it seemed she’d been consumed by the past. They’d come here to search for some clue of what Jonah was looking for, but it seemed an impossible task.
Althea worried Jack had left the hospital too soon. His pale face shone with sweat as he attempted to hide his discomfort, and his bruises had turned a dark, garish purple. Now they were hidden under the cotton of his shirt, but she’d seen them at the hospital while Samuel, with dazed eyes and methodical hands, had tended an unconscious Jack in the clinic.
Althea picked up another of the boxes and riffled through it, looking for anything that might refer to the Ark. None of the debris Inga-296 had collected from the Tunnels helped Althea understand the woman’s fascination with what the humans had left behind. From the things she was finding—old teacups, postcards, cartoon drawings, small ceramic statues and trinkets—it was all nonsense, a massive waste of human effort. If they’d focused on survival, on the real world instead of imagined stories—maybe they’d be alive now. She picked up a wooden box with a tiny latch, glanced inside, and set it aside.
“Wait,” Jack said, retrieving it from the floor. “I haven’t seen this in years.” He turned it around, holding it awkwardly in his cast-bound hand. With his good hand, he wound a key on the back, and then opened it again. A cylinder inside spun slowly, hitting tines. Sound spilled out, jangling Althea’s nerves. She covered her ears and almost told him to make it stop, but then she saw the way he was holding the box like what it contained was so important, even though she could see herself it was a trivial thing. The satin-smooth wood, maybe rosewood, was inlaid with mother-of-pearl in a pretty scroll design. The noise was altogether different. What she heard initially was a sharp trill. She closed her eyes and concentrated, remembering the way the music had changed when Jack played his guitar. In a few moments, a melody fell into place. She heard the way the notes melded together, spoke to each other, turned into something strange and pretty. The cylinder slowed, a note or two ushering forth, and then it stopped.
Althea thought the music might have made Jack sad. His head was down and the box had slid from his fingers to rest on his lap. But then he grinned at her unexpectedly, wound the key again, and offered his hand.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Dance with me.”
Althea let him pull her up.
Jack was clumsy, with his broken arm and a stiffness that suggested the pain he was in. And the music didn’t transport Althea in the same way Jack’s guitar had. It plunked along with a repetitive, childish strain. Also, in the dances she knew, she and the Carsons, Hassans, or whoever, were generally side by side. Jack held her waist and her hand, pulling her close to him in a kind of dance Althea had never experienced.