Your One & Only(79)

Jack, getting nothing from Samuel-297, stormed in the direction of the blast. Althea pulled herself to her feet and caught up to him, grabbing his arm.

“What are you doing?”

“What if he survived?” he said, his eyes frenzied. “What if he needs help?”

“Jack, he’s gone.”

Just as she spoke, a tower of bookshelves fell before her with a crash. Volumes landed flaming to the ground, crackling and releasing snowy ash into the air. One landed at her feet and the pages contracted, wrinkling the words into a knot of flame.

Residue of the explosion—burnt cloth, particles of canvas, scraps of paper—showered them from above like rain. It floated and drifted lazily about their heads, bits of it glowing inside with smoldering ash. The ceiling heaved.

“Jack,” Althea said. “The cave.”

Jack looked up, bewildered, as if he’d forgotten they were inside the earth and it was preparing to swallow them whole. He looked back down at her, his eyes glancing to her forehead. “You’re hurt,” he said.

She reached up and felt blood.

“Jack, Samuel’s dead.” Her voice echoed in her ears. A piece of the cavern wall crumbled to the floor. Samuel-297 must have come to at some point, because she didn’t see him anymore. “We have to get out.”

Jack nodded curtly. He took her arm, and they hurried toward the entrance of the cave. The sounds of fire, shattering porcelain, and screeching metal emanated from within the murky fumes. The blast in the Ark had shaken the whole cave, and the initial damage was causing more, like the fall of titanic dominoes. Statues skittered along the floor, knocked over by a slab of buckling concrete. Hunks of rock fell like hail, breaking away from the wall and ceiling. A haze of dust and ash obscured her vision, and a thin, gritty powder sifted into her hair and eyes.

Althea looked back. The section of the cave from where they’d come had disappeared, lost in a collapse of ceiling, and the remaining cave felt like it was sagging, like it’d held on for too many centuries and now it had let go into crumbling fissures spreading throughout the floor and walls. The seams patterned the ground in twisting ribbons.

They stumbled from the cave and gasped in clean air while towering plumes of dust rose from the door to the Tunnels. Carson-312 stood nearby with the older generation of Altheas and Viktors. Althea searched the crowd for Jonah, but saw no sign of him.

Low thunder rumbled beneath their feet, and people screamed at the ground tumbling into itself. Althea staggered as Jack’s grip tightened on her arm, and she became aware that he was using her to hold himself up. When he folded, she went down with him. His forehead pressed to his knees. Under the open sky, beneath a blazing sun shadowed by sooty smoke, Althea wrapped her arms around Jack’s shoulders and rested her cheek on his smooth, dusty hair. She waited for the shudder of earth and bone to slow, finally, and cease.





Chapter Twenty-Four


JACK


Go, Sam had said.

He’d said it again as he held Jack in the Tunnels, an insistent whisper in his ear before Jack had left him to die. It was the voice Jack had known since he was child, a voice he heard while racing through trees into the jungle, trying to get away from the world Sam had made for him. A voice that read to him from textbooks and medical journals in unsure and halting efforts to be a father. It was a voice that, even when he’d failed to listen, he could never ignore.

Jack remembered how he used to think Sam was somehow taller than the other Samuels. It wasn’t true, of course, but Jack had felt the truth of it. Sam had always seemed large and imposing, and also safe. With his arms around Jack in the cave, Sam’s head had barely reached Jack’s shoulder, and the boy had felt Sam’s thin bones and narrow rib cage against his own.

Sam held him and whispered in his ear, Go, and followed that with another word, a word that flooded into Jack’s chest and sucked out all the oxygen.

Son, he’d said.

Son.

It was early evening. It’d been two days since the destruction of the Ark, two days since Sam was lost in a smoldering pile of rubble and ash. Two days since Jonah had disappeared, slipping away unnoticed by everyone in the ensuing chaos. Jack had found himself outside, a cool breeze on his face and Althea’s watchful eyes on him while the Tunnels caved in behind them, and he’d understood that two of the people he cared about most, regardless of what they’d done before, were gone. One he’d probably never see again, the other dead. He’d collapsed then, as completely as the walls of the Tunnels.

Now he was in a windowless room in the clinic, not a patient but a prisoner. He didn’t know where Althea was, didn’t know what was happening out in Vispera, and he’d exhausted any possibility of escape. When a clone came to bring food, five Viktors followed after, guarding the exit. None of them answered his questions or even spoke to him. The room was sealed tight, the lock unbreakable. He eventually broke down and slammed his fist into the door, which of course only resulted in bruised knuckles.

Jack crouched on his heels in the sterile room, all his energy focused on keeping still. He felt antsy, wanting to fidget and pace the floor. The clinic reminded him of the labs—cold and bleached, with speckled laminate floors and bright lights. But here he had no book to read or instrument to play. Once the futility of trying to escape was clear, there was no distraction but the frustration and worry gnawing at him. Images of the Binding Ceremony where they’d killed his mother flashed constantly through his mind, his mother’s screams replaced by Althea’s.