I followed North into the tunnel. This one sloped up and was even more slippery than the first, rock sliding on rock. More than once I lost my balance and landed on my hands. It was tempting to take off my shoes. Bare feet had to be better than no-traction Toms. But there was no way to know what I might step on, and so I left them on. When it got steep, North stopped to let me pass him, and somehow it was easier to stay balanced knowing that he was there to catch me if I fell.
We’d been climbing for a while when North’s phone made the sound I’d been dreading. The low battery whimper. We didn’t acknowledge it between us. We just kept climbing, shoes and hands on rock the only sound in the silence. There was no use saying what we both were thinking. If this was a dead end, we were done.
I slipped again, and this time the rock was wet beneath my hands. “There’s water on the rocks,” I said over my shoulder to North. I could feel him right on my heels. “It has to be coming from somewhere aboveground, right?”
“You’d think,” North said, his voice laced with the hope I felt. We kept climbing.
When the ground leveled out again, North caught my arm. “Wait,” he cautioned. “There could be a drop-off.” He shone his light on the floor and around us. My heart sank when I saw the solid walls. The tunnel we’d come through was the only way out.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to curse the voice that had told me not to be afraid when it knew this is where we’d end up. But right behind my anger was the realization that this was exactly the moment that voice had been trying to prepare me for. Fear not for I am with you. Not as some amulet to protect me from all harm, but as a refuge when there was nowhere left to turn.
You did what you came to do, whispered the voice. And instead of anger, instead of fear, I felt peace.
North was at the wall, combing the surface with his light. “Hey, come look at this,” he called. It was another drawing, etched in black in the shimmery stone. It was simple, just a circle and three lines, but it was so clearly the shape of a dove. I reached out my hand to touch it, moved beyond words by its presence. What was it doing here? Why a dove? It felt like a sign. A gift.
As I traced its simple shape with my fingertip, North’s phone finally went dead. Neither of us reacted. We’d been expecting it, after all. And for me, it was a relief not to be waiting anymore, dreading the moment the light would go out. Now that it had, we could get on with it.
North reached for me in the darkness, pulling me to him. His hands slid up my arms to my face, and though I couldn’t see him at all, in a weird way, I could. Not with my eyes, but with my memory, which felt more real somehow. More true. When he kissed me, I forgot everything else. The darkness, the stench, my thirst. Our fate. All I could feel were his lips on my lips, his body pressed against mine. All I could smell were his skin and his citrusy shampoo. All I could hear was his breath, and mine, hot and fast as we clung to each other, each wanting more of the other.
Then, out of nowhere, there was a cracking sound above us, so loud I thought the earth was breaking apart. We froze.
“Was that—?”
“Thunder,” North said.
My hand flew to the place where the dove was. All at once I understood why it was there.
“The miners,” I said breathlessly. “The ones who were trapped in the mine. They were here.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I saw it on Panopticon. The care packages the rescue workers sent down here, they were called doves. The hole they used was eventually widened to get the miners out.”
The thunder boomed again, even louder this time.
“The opening is above us,” I said. “We didn’t see it before because we never looked up.” I tilted my head back.
A raindrop hit my cheek.
I didn’t react, not right away. I waited for another one, and another, until the rain was spraying my face, and then I laughed.
“What is it?” North asked.
“It’s raining,” I said, pulling him into the icy spray.
“It’s raining,” he said, astonished. Then he laughed too.
It took us a couple of tries to get me up on his shoulders, but when we did, it was easy for me to feel the opening in the rock. It was a perfect, smooth circle, as wide as the manhole we’d come through. And a few inches into it, there was the frayed end of a rope.
35
“IT’S PRETTY EERIE, ISN’T IT?”
I’d been sitting on the balcony outside his apartment—our apartment, North kept correcting me—for hours, staring out at the forest of dark buildings. The utility companies had turned off the power grid at three o’clock, as soon as something called a “coronal mass ejection” left the sun’s surface and started hurtling toward ours. The geostorm was officially under way. They were expecting the huge mass of solar plasma to slam into Earth’s atmosphere a little after one a.m. It was 12:30 now.
The past twenty-two hours had been a total blur. The opening we found in the mine brought us up through a stone well and into the woods, about twenty yards from the electric fence around the Enfield Reservoir. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought it was as old as it was made to look. There wasn’t a sign commemorating the mine rescue that was accomplished there, or anything at all to suggest that the hole inside it led to anything. Which, I suppose, was the point. It was the Few’s escape route. Their secret way out.
Hershey had been waiting for us at North’s apartment, shaken, but mostly okay. We tried to convince her to come with us to New York, to leave Rudd and Theden behind, but she wanted to stay.
It was harder than I thought it’d be to say good-bye to her. Our relationship would always be complicated, but she was part of me somehow. Part of who I’d become. We clung to each other in the alley behind North’s apartment for a long time. When we finally let go, our shoulders were drenched in tears.
North and I crossed over the RFK Bridge a little after six a.m., just as the sun was rising over the East River. His apartment was on 47th Street, right in Times Square. After a greasy breakfast at the diner around the corner, we went upstairs and slept, North’s body curled around the back of mine, like two commas. The sun was setting when we woke up, still in our clothes. North reached over and twirled my hair. Looking at him, feeling the heel of his hand on my cheek, the hollow feeling inside of me began to recede. We were okay. We were more than okay. We were free.
We’d eaten SpaghettiOs, like he’d promised, for dinner, straight from the can, and now I was here, on the balcony, looking out at the dark city. Blackout blinds hung on the sliding glass door behind me to block out the neon lights, but tonight we wouldn’t need them. None of the billboards were lit. There wasn’t much of a moon, either. Just a faint yellow sliver. There were stars, though, a thick blanket of them in the cloudless black sky. I wondered how often people in Manhattan got to see stars. As often as people in Seattle, I imagined, which was pretty much never. Too much light pollution. There wasn’t any of that tonight. The entire East Coast was blacked out.