The End Is Now

The following day, Tracy grabbed breakfast from the mess hall and found three founders at a table in the corner. She joined them. No one spoke. Between bites of bread and canned ham, she watched the bustle of strangers weaving through the tables and chairs, introducing themselves to one another, glancing around at their surroundings, and trying to cope with their imprisonment. Their salvation.

The buzz of voices and spoons clicking against porcelain was shattered for a brief moment by an awful release of laughter. Tracy searched for the offender, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She watched Igor chew his bread, his eyes lifeless, focused beyond the mountain’s walls, and knew he was thinking the same thing: They were in a room crowded with ghosts. There was no stopping what they would have to do. And for the first time, Tracy understood all that John had endured those past years. She remembered the way he would glance around in a restaurant, his eyes haunted, the color draining suddenly from his face. Looking for an exit, she used to think. Looking for some way out if it all goes to shit.

But no—he had been doing this, scanning the people, the bodies all around him. How could he search for an exit when there was none?

Tracy saw her sister and Remy emerge from the serving line, trays in hand. She started to wave them over, then caught herself. When she saw her sister among all those walking dead, she realized what she had to do. She put down her bread and left her tray behind. She needed to find Dmitry. To see if it was possible.

* * *

A new Order was required, a new book of instructions. The ten founders and the five they chose would have the rest of their lives to sort out the details, to leave precise instructions. Tracy had already decided she wouldn’t go with them. If John were there, maybe it could work, but she couldn’t pair off with one of the men in their group.

First she had her own orders to write, her own instructions. This included how to open the great crypt gates, in case there was no one else. She spent her days and nights in the workshop command room, helping Dmitry with the pod, pestering him with questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The cryo-chamber had been designed for one person. And once they’d realized what it was, it had gone untested. Tracy squeezed inside for a dry fit while Dmitry modified the plumbing.

“Maybe one head over here and the other down there? Legs’ll have to go like this.”

Dmitry muttered under his breath. He wrestled a piece of tubing onto a small splitter, was having trouble making it fit.

“You need help?” Tracy asked.

“I got it,” he said.

“What if . . . something happens to you all and there are no descendants? What if there’s no one here to open it?”

“Already working on that,” Dmitry said. “The antenna that taps into the mesh network. I can rig it up so when their timer shuts off, the pod will open. So if it’s twenty years from now or twenty thousand, as long as this place has power—” He finally got the tube onto the fitting. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. I have time.”

Tracy hoped he was right. She wanted to believe him.

“So what do you think it’ll feel like?” she asked. “You think it’ll be . . . immediate? Like shutting your eyes at night, and then suddenly the alarm goes off in the morning? Or will it be dream after dream after dream?”

“I don’t know.” Dmitry shook his head. He started to say something, then turned quietly back to his work.

“What?” Tracy asked. “Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

“It’s . . . nothing.” He set the tubing aside and crossed his arms. Then he turned to her. “Why do you think nobody is fighting for their place in there?” He nodded to the machine.

Tracy hadn’t considered that. “Because I asked first?” she guessed.

“Because that thing is a coffin. People have been putting their loved ones in there for years. Nobody wakes up.”

“So this is a bad idea?”

Dmitry shrugged. “I think maybe the people who do this, it isn’t for the ones inside the box.”

Tracy lay back in that steel cylinder and considered this, the selfishness of it all. Giving life without asking. Taking life to save some other. “For the last two days,” she said, “all I’ve thought about is what a mistake all this was.” She closed her eyes. “Completely pointless. All for nothing.”

“That is life,” Dmitry said. Tracy opened her eyes to see him waving a tool in the air and staring up at the ceiling. “We do not go out in glory. We leave no mark. What you did was right. What they did was wrong. They’re the reason we’re in this mess, not you.”

Tracy didn’t feel like arguing. What was the point? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And maybe that’s what Dmitry was trying to tell her.