The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Two

I'm proud—albeit baffled—to say it was I who kept the peace this time around. The cellar is now silent save for rustling paper, scraping jars, and Dan's sporadic muttering, whiplashing between wake and dream. Allie has the gutted electronics spread out before her like a cadaver, her features sharp in the lantern's arctic light. The rest of us peer out the dark corners, and wait.

"We can do this if we just stick to the numbers."

I don't know what made me so sure of myself in those moments after the tantum translated the Whelk's message. Immediately the cellar was crackling with voices. That breath of conditional hope might have been enough to ignite our low smolder, turn the cellar into a combustion chamber again, everyone suddenly aware that there was now nothing in between the tantum's deliverance and our own—or at least our best chance at it. I guess I saw the future flash before my eyes, as cheesy as that sounds—and I could either hate it, or grab on.

I got to my feet and stood over the lantern.

"No matter what happens," I said, "the numbers won't lie to us. Priority one: keep everyone alive. Best way to do that is get rescued, right? And we've got the Whelk sayin' they'll do it—but only if Jack don't die on us. So you've estimated you got what—four days more?"

Jack nodded.

"You're the limitin' factor then, ain'tcha?" I scrawled the elements of an emerging equation onto a page of Pete's sketchbook, our lives balancing on arrow points, souls on a scale. "You know, like they say in chemistry class? We ain't bothered for water, Lissy counted up enough food for two weeks if we stretch it, and the air—well, ain't possible to know how much longer we can breathe it before it makes us sick, but it's the thing we got the least control over. Faster we're outta here, the better."

I ripped out the sheets of paper detailing our needs, limitations, and supplies in my chicken-scratch handwriting, all variables dependent and independent, and duct taped them to the wall. It felt weird to think that was what all my half-assed schoolwork had come down to: fudging my way through metaphoric stoichiometry in a root cellar. Somehow I didn't think this was the "real world" application my teachers had in mind.

"Makin' contact'll be the trouble," Daddy prompted as I stalled.

"Yeah. Okay. So we've got what—a bunch of cellphones that don't work and a jury-rigged radio?" I said, recovering. "Allie, you can, like, send out a radio broadcast from all this, right? One good enough for the Whelk to pick up?"

I turned to the genius. She glanced from me to the electronic rat's nest in front her and gave a resolute nod.

"I'll make it work," she said, fingers already combing through the mess.

"That's the plan, then?" Lyle crossed his arms. "We all twiddle our thumbs as Al tinkers with the radio? One person workin', nine just waitin' to die?"

"It's better than ten, like before," I countered.

Then came my best idea.

I tore out a sheet of paper for each person; on my own, I wrote the number eight (I considered seven, but I was setting an example). Passing around Pete's markers, I told everyone to write a number between one and ten on their paper.

"Zero is dead, ten is feelin' fantastic. If all our numbers go down, then we'll know the fallout's gettin' to us, right? Plus, writin' instead of talkin', maybe we'll breathe less. Just think of it like a thermometer or somethin'. Trust the numbers."

And they listened.