Page 39 of Evolved
He nods.
“And we pretend we don’t get along,” I add. “We can’t pretend to be strangers because she has the codes for the satellites. At some point, they’ll know exactly who we are, and if we lie, then we’ll all be in more danger.”
He nods again.
“The best we can hope for is to pretend that we don’t like one another. Or at least that we’re indifferent.”
I think about the Mustache Man and Lavinia Hope—with any luck, Gran will have already made a deal with Mustache Man, and it will only be a matter of meeting with Lavinia Hope, offering her a position in the new government, getting her to step in line.
But anything could happen.
The world is chaos.
And we’re evolving to fit it.
“Do you think about leaving and going to find your family if they’re still out there?” I ask.
That I can understand completely.
If he left, I’d never stop worrying, never stop wondering.
“Maybe when this thing ends,” I say, “when the government is rebuilt in a way we can live with in, we’ll go to your home and find out.”
12|Our lucky day
OTTILIE
WE ENTERat the Rayburn building, but instead of going left, we turn right. That tunnel runs alongside a metro line, and for a while, we can even see the tracks through columns and gaps between the walls, but eventually, they separate, and we enter a different tunnel.
This one feels older.
Or maybe just more rudimentary, like walking down the inside of a massive pipe paved in bricks.
And it isn’t flooded, but judging by the water glistening in puddles and the thirty-or-forty-inch damp-line in the brickwalls, it was recently.
As we get closer to the Potomac River, the temperature lowers, and the sound of droplets echoes endlessly. Emergency lights sit in cages at intervals along the ceiling, but they must have been controlled by generators that have long since run out of gas.
Eventually, we hit a staircase that leads us down even deeper, and here there really is standing water, and the temperature gets colder again.
“Have you been here?” I ask Knox, my breath forming a fog that swirls in the light like ghosts.
“Not this one. But there’s an evacuation tunnel that goes under the river. This may connect to it somewhere.” He points his beam vaguely in the direction I think is probably north.
We don’t speak again until we get to a door which Knox pries open using his crowbar.
“You ready?” he asks.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
I turn off the flashlight, just in case, plunging us into darkness as he opens the door.
There’d a scrape that echoes colossally.
“Turn it on again,” he whispers.
I do gladly, chasing away the horror void to reveal an underground galley. The ceiling is twenty or thirty feet up, and the room is filled with office chairs and desks that look like they haven’t been used since the 1960s.