Lucinda shakes her head. “No. I promise you. This is not your fault. It’s mine and I will fix it. I’ll tell them everything. I’ll give them so many names that our names won’t mean a thing. Okay?”
Joon-gi nods, then after a second he rises and grabs his bag. “The basement rooms’ power runs off a generator now. I installed it, it’s disaster-proof. Even if the whole island grid goes down that generator won’t stop. If you want me to do this, I need to disable it,” he explains.
“Is that hard?”
Joon-gi shakes his head. “Not hard, just far.” He notes Lucinda’s frown of concern. “I can get the whole thing powered down in ten, twenty minutes tops. Will she be okay in there for that long? Is it quick enough?”
He watches calculated thoughts whir across Lucinda’s face, her jaw clenched tight. “Yes. Yes, she will.”
And with that Lucinda leans forward and squeezes his hand, her eyes locking with his, a promise in them.
Joon-gi watches her set off across the lawns back to the main house. Then he hitches his bag onto his shoulders and begins to run as fast as his legs can pump down to the beach.
CHAPTER 42
NINA
A fter a few minutes Nina stands, but she is still dizzy, her eyes still itching, her throat still burning. She has no idea how long antidotes take to work or if it even has worked. Or perhaps certain damage has already been done. She has no way of knowing. All she knows is that she needs to keep moving. She needs to get to a hospital. She needs help. And she knows the only way out is through.
On the screen above her a new message has appeared.
Congratulations, Nina!
You have completed The Waste Land. Proceed to the
next room to begin the Four Quartets.
Nina cannot pull her blurry eyes from the screen, fear trickling through every vein of her body.
She had thought it was nearly over. She’d expected as many rooms as there are parts to the poem. But she has completed those parts and there is still more.
There can’t be many more rooms down here, she tells herself, there simply can’t unless the building goes farther down again.
The next room or the one after must be it. She’ll be finished soon; it will be over soon.
She stretches her arms over her head and cricks her neck. Her body aches and throbs in so many ways, she can’t focus on one particular sensation over another. The dizziness comes in waves that threaten to engulf her then subside. It will all be over soon, she tells herself, it has to be.
—
NINA WATCHES AS THE DOOR to the room opens, the vestibule beyond coming into view, curving around a corner, lit in that familiar pinkish tone.
She takes a burning breath and heads out.
As she turns the corner her blood runs cold: a white flight of stairs leads down.
The house does go on, how far she does not know. But there is a limit to the physics of any house, she tells herself, and reality is not elastic. Nina has been down here awhile now, though, and she doesn’t quite believe the truth of that thought anymore.
She takes the stairs down. They lead directly into another room, the stairwell door sealing behind her.
—
THIS ROOM IS THE LARGEST yet. Nina takes it in, eyes stinging. Its massive floor is covered entirely with a thick layer of gray ash.
The door out of this room is different from all the others: it’s a real door, a wooden one.
Half delirious, Nina wonders if it leads straight back outside. If beyond it lie the gardens and the beach and the sky. But of course she must be far underground now; there is no way that door leads out to the grass of the lawns. And yet she can’t help thinking that a wooden door might signal an end to all this.
In some part of her exhausted mind, she wonders if she chose the correct syringe, if she should still feel this bad. But she pushes the thought away.
