When the last drainage pump stops, Alban Rook puts his hand against its housing and feels no vibration. Behind him, floodwater lifts the blanket hanging beneath his wife’s bunk. Irena Voss died during the night. He has already wrapped her, but now he must move her before the water reaches the knot beneath her shoulders. He wants to bury her under the vault’s single living olive tree. More privately, he needs to finish one act of care without turning it into evidence that his forty years here have succeeded.
Before her death, Irena pushed his offered baptismal cup back into his hands. Then she made him bring soil from the upper chamber so she could feel it between her fingers. She requested that ground for her burial, signed permission for him to leave her behind if necessary, and folded the permission into her notebook. Alban enclosed both inside the waterproof inner wrapping of her shroud. He remembers her tapping the folded paper until he looked at it. Now he threads straps beneath her body without opening the wrapping.
He carries her on a narrow stretcher through the Processional Level. Fourteen concrete doorways separate the dormitory from the service shaft; above each inspection plate hangs a wooden cross he fastened years ago. He begins the Stations of the Cross at the first. His breathing mask muffles the words. Each pause leaves him standing in water that climbs a little farther up his legs.
At the third doorway, the stretcher catches beneath an irrigation pipe. Alban kneels to release it and hears a familiar knocking from the dormitory. His lamp finds a body shifting against a bunk frame. He used to sleep beyond that frame; he knows which loose joint makes the sound. He pulls Irena free so sharply that her head shifts inside the wrapping, then stops and supports it with his palm. The water reaches his elbow while he adjusts the strap.
The procession continues through rooms that force him to turn her sideways. In the kitchen, a floating spoon strikes his mask. At the cultivation doorway, bean flowers brush the shroud. He reaches for the pollination brush in his sleeve before remembering there will be nobody to harvest anything. He leaves the flowers untouched.
Here the prayers falter. When a familiar passage would let him speak as though Irena shared his expectation of resurrection, he stops. He says only her name, then the next Station. Silence spends air as surely as speech.
At the twelfth doorway, a submerged bunk frame rolls against his knees. Alban braces Irena’s stretcher on an open seed drawer and pushes the frame away. Its edge tears a pocket from his jacket. Packets of beans spread across the water, their labels darkening. He catches one, then lets it go to keep both hands beneath his wife.
He completes the fourteenth Station at the shaft. Twelve minutes remain in his cylinder. The ladder admits his shoulders but not the stretcher.
Alban tries it diagonally. The handles strike concrete. He tries lifting Irena higher, and the stretcher jams across the opening while water presses against his chest. For several breaths he holds her there, unable to climb or turn. Then he lowers her onto the shaft’s bottom steps.
The permission is inside the closed shroud. He could expose it, but he does not need to read it again. Irena gave him leave to survive her. He presses his forehead against the wrapping, then begins undoing the stretcher straps.
He cuts the remaining seed packets from his harness to clear its fastening points. Using the ladder to hold himself upright, he secures Irena against his back. Her weight pulls him down onto one knee. He shortens the lower strap, rises, and takes the first rung just as the stretcher floats off the steps.
The climb becomes a sequence of grips. At a projecting pipe coupling, Irena’s shoulder catches and pins him against the ladder. He cannot squeeze forward. He descends one rung into the rising water, turns his body until her weight hangs painfully from one strap, and lifts her past the obstruction. The shroud scrapes concrete but remains closed.
At the upper hatch, he cannot raise both himself and Irena over the lip. He loops a strap around a rung, suspends her below him, and climbs out alone. For a moment she hangs in the shaft while the ladder trembles beneath her. Then Alban lies flat on the chamber floor and hauls her upward, a hand’s breadth at a time. He drags her clear before his strength gives out.
The olive chamber smells of damp earth, not fresh air. No fan has restarted. The tree stands beneath its clouded daylight pane, alive and fruitless. Alban leaves his mask on.
He opens the outer shroud only far enough to retrieve the dry notebook. He places it on a raised stone ledge, weighted with Irena’s spectacles, without adding a miraculous explanation beneath her final entry: flowers, no pods.
The grave he prepared while she was still alive is shallow. Its remaining soil must be loosened around roots he will not cut. He lowers Irena into it, then covers her with both hands. Between each breath from the cylinder, he moves another double handful. When the regulator begins resisting, one corner of cloth remains exposed. He crawls to the loose soil beside the trunk and pushes it over her.
He gives her no baptism and makes no promise on her behalf. He says, “Irena Voss,” clearly enough for the empty chamber to hear.
The cylinder stops supplying air. Alban stays beside the grave, his fingers resting in the earth he has moved. Below him, water reaches the fourteenth cross and lifts it from its nail. By the time it touches the shaft ceiling, there is nobody left to count the doorways.
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