‘Will we get to go on a pirate submarine?’ Will asked hopefully.
‘You don’t want to go on a pirate submarine,’ Spinner said. ‘Trust me.’
‘Why not?’ asked Will.
‘Imagine climbing inside a noisy hot tin can with a bunch of smelly pirates, then going to the bottom of the ocean and staying down there for weeks.’
‘Right,’ Will said, deciding that perhaps submarines were not so cool after all.
‘Where are we going to go?’ Annalie asked. ‘After this?’
Spinner sighed. ‘That’s a very good question. We can’t go home—even if Beckett’s guys hadn’t wrecked it, I’m sure they’re still watching the place.’
‘We could find a new home, couldn’t we?’ Will suggested. ‘I mean for all of us.’
‘I have a home,’ Essie said quickly. ‘But Pod and Blossom don’t.’
‘Well, you’re very welcome to stick with me,’ Spinner said kindly, ‘if that’s what you want to do. But I can’t promise you it’s going to be very comfortable. I’ve been on the run for months now, and there’s no sign that that’s going to change any time soon.’
‘We’ve got a place,’ Will said eagerly. ‘We found it. There’s an island, back in the Moon Islands. Me and Essie got marooned there, which kind of sucked, but it has this castle on it! And it’s deserted! And it would make an awesome hideout!’
‘It wouldn’t take much work to fix it up,’ Essie added. ‘You’d need to bring in some power—and some food—’
‘But there’s loads of space for everyone, and it’s quiet and secluded. It’d be a red-hot hideout,’ Will said.
Spinner raised his eyebrows. ‘Sounds intriguing. There are worse places to hide than the Moon Islands—as you know. But first we’ve got to get away from Sundia. And that might take some doing.’
‘The Sunfish is anchored in Kinle Bay,’ Will said. ‘We can just go. Right now.’
‘We might need some help chasing off that whale,’ Pod said.
‘What whale?’
‘Bad fish,’ Graham said disapprovingly. ‘Big teeth.’
Quickly they told Spinner the story of their action-packed journey to shore. Spinner listened in astonishment. ‘Feral dogs and temple whales? I’m amazed you made it here at all.’
‘You really think it was a temple whale?’ asked Annalie.
‘Must have been. I didn’t think there were any left.’
Blossom looked at Will triumphantly. Will ignored her. ‘So why don’t we just go?’ he said. ‘Get away before Beckett finds us.’
Spinner shook his head. ‘We’ll need some help organising safe passage, otherwise we could end up with the Sundian coastguard to deal with. And that could be even worse than the Admiralty.’
He looked around at the empty plates. ‘All finished? Who’d like a tour of the Ark?’
By daylight, the Ark rose up out of the desert with the vast heft of an ancient monument. But this one hadn’t been hewn from stone. It was a massive structure built with the strongest reinforced concrete, and it dated back to the time before the Flood. In those years, as the climate went dangerously out of control, ecosystems started collapsing and hundreds of species began to go extinct. A coalition of national governments, charities and some absurdly rich private investors had come together to build the Ark. It was a facility designed to house both living and preserved specimens of every kind of life: not just animals, but insects and plants, too. The Sundian desert had been chosen because it was geologically and climatically stable, and also extremely remote. Although the Sundians had not yet withdrawn into isolation at the time the Ark was built, there was already a strong religious element in its government and they agreed to accept the Ark on Sundian soil for religious reasons, rather than from a spirit of international cooperation. They believed that the sea god had risen from the cradle of life in the sea to create the land and everything on it, scattering himself across the world in multiple forms—male and female, plant and insect, mammal and reptile. That meant that protecting this creation was not just a practical imperative, it was a religious duty. So while the Ark was certainly a research station, to the Sundians it was also a kind of temple.
Above ground, the Ark contained a series of sky-lit galleries the size of football stadiums filled with trees and flowers, animals and birds, frogs and insects: mini ecosystems with their own climate-controlled environments, supported by a network of plant nurseries and animal breeding areas and insect hatcheries.
Spinner walked them past the huge spaces, letting them marvel at the sight of living things they had never glimpsed before. They saw deserts and rainforests, grasslands and forests, all filled root to tip with life.
‘This place is like the world’s most amazing zoo,’ Essie said.
‘It’s just a tiny sliver of what the world used to contain,’ Spinner said. ‘But it’s something.’
The soaring concrete galleries above the ground were only a part of the Ark. The complex extended for many kilometres underground as well. The first level below ground was the living quarters for the Ark’s extensive staff: the gardeners and botanists, veterinarians and animal breeders and scientists, maintenance and tradespeople, cooks and cleaners and medics. There were enough people living and working in the Ark to fill a small town. Below that, occupying another three levels, was an enormous archive. The archive was almost unimaginably vast. It contained everything from ancient ice cores to seed banks to cryogenically preserved specimens, as well as truly vast amounts of research data housed on servers that stretched for kilometres. It had been built to be self-sustaining and self-preserving, using all the very best long-term technology, in the hope that at some point in the future, some of these forms of life could be returned to the world.
Spinner took them down in a lift that seemed to take a very long time to travel between one level and the next. They stepped out into the cool darkness of the archive; as the lift doors opened, lights flicked on directly in front of them, hinting at many corridors,
