The Map of Bones
Francesca Haig
‘Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their ‘weaker’ Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’ GuardianThe second book in Francesca Haig’s incredible Fire Sermon series.The Omega resistance has been brutally attacked, its members dead or in hiding.The Alpha Council’s plan for permanently containing the Omegas has begun.But all is not entirely lost: the Council’s seer, The Confessor, is dead, killed by her twin’s sacrifice.Cass is left haunted by visions of the past, while her brother Zach’s cruelty and obsession pushes her to the edge, and threatens to destroy everything she hopes for.As the country moves closer to all-out civil war, Cass will learn that to change the future she will need to uncover the past. But nothing can prepare her for what she discovers: a deeply buried secret that raises the stakes higher than ever before.
Copyright (#ulink_fa68d237-ea5f-5479-bc2b-aa77849fd50e)
HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016
Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2016
Jacket design by Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Wendy Stevenson / Arcangel Images (front cover, skull).
Jacket photography © Johnny Ring. Branding iron made by Nick Moran at London Forge. All other images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com).
Author photograph © Andrew North.
Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007563098
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007563111
Version: 2016-08-04
Dedication (#ulink_3181c784-f3a3-595c-a063-ed2382e6e5fb)
This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents, Alan and Sally, who shared with me their enduring passion for words.
Contents
Cover (#ub279c46a-30ea-5a2b-b157-2f8de3db4681)
Title Page (#ud5226de3-8d22-5204-8504-385d3aa044ff)
Copyright (#u61d5ae14-dd8f-5d35-8ee3-f21d850ce578)
Dedication (#u8c573bc4-2992-569e-b7b4-5321049ba0f0)
Prologue (#u0fdcb671-7c01-5520-a1d1-1d33dbd8c26a)
Chapter 1 (#u5e0e8877-a687-5cbe-a8ba-c9a4444d92ce)
Chapter 2 (#u1c2f8c09-8088-5e3f-905d-be28b550e9d3)
Chapter 3 (#u1c3092b5-6cee-5d63-8fc2-64686d0fdb5d)
Chapter 4 (#u6fae08a3-26ba-5cf0-9211-e49b340ccc2b)
Chapter 5 (#u8318faf1-1162-5c53-827c-dc62f66a2a6e)
Chapter 6 (#uc61360f9-8b21-5651-aa42-400a42646ba0)
Chapter 7 (#ud3036844-6565-55d7-92fe-31f4bf002e24)
Chapter 8 (#ud1731f7a-e240-50ad-a64d-a3f4dd556c6a)
Chapter 9 (#u85ed5aee-a970-51b9-a155-f286ca4c8d49)
Chapter 10 (#ua0ae21b3-eb76-5797-86b2-258b447b5d0c)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Francesca Haig (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_12b42261-d0ce-5dda-ae48-1d334cb17529)
Each time he came to me in dreams, I saw him as I’d seen him the first time: floating. He was a silhouette, blurred by the tank’s thick glass, and by the viscous fluid in which he was submerged. I could see only glimpses: his head slumped against his shoulder; the curve of his cheek. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was him, the same way that I would know the weight of his arm across my body, or the sound of his breath in the darkness.
Kip’s torso curled forwards, his legs hanging. His suspended body was a question mark that I couldn’t answer.
I would have preferred anything to those dreams – even the memory of his jump. That came to me often enough in the daytime: his half-shrug, before he leapt. The long fall. How the silo floor was the mortar that made his bones a pestle, grinding his own flesh.
When I dreamed of him in the tank it was a different kind of horror. Not the spreading blood on the silo floor, but something worse: the immaculate torture of the tubes and wires. I had freed him from the tank myself, months ago. But ever since I’d watched him die in the silo, my dreams encased him once again within the glass.
The dream shifted. Kip was gone, and I was watching Zach sleeping. One of his hands was thrust out towards me. I could see the gnawed skin around his fingernails; I could see his jaw, roughened by stubble.
When we were very small we’d shared a cot, and slept each night curled together. Even when we were older, and he’d begun to fear and despise me, our bodies never unlearnt that habit of closeness. When we’d outgrown our shared cot, I would roll over in my own bed and watch how he, sleeping on the far side of the room, would roll too.
Now I stared again at Zach’s sleeping face. There was nothing on it to show what he had done. I was the branded one, but his face should have worn some kind of mark. How could he have built the tanks, and ordered the massacre on the island, and still sleep like that, open-mouthed and oblivious? Awake, he had never been still. I remembered his hands, always moving, tying invisible knots in the air. Now he was motionless. Only his eyes were twitching as they followed the movements of his own dreams. At his neck, a vein pulsed, keeping count of his heart’s beats. My own, too – they were the same thing. When his stopped, so would mine. He had betrayed me at every opportunity, but our shared death was the one promise that he couldn’t break.
He opened his eyes.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said.
I had fled from him all the way to the island, and back to the deadlands of the east, but here he was, my twin, staring at me across the silence of my dream. It was as if a rope bound me to him, and the further we ran from each other, the more we felt it tighten.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said again.
‘I want to stop you,’ I said. Once I would have said I wanted to save him. Perhaps there was no difference.
‘You can’t,’ he said. There was no triumph in his voice – just a certainty, hard as teeth.
‘What did I do to you?’ I said to him. ‘What have you done to us?’
Zach didn’t answer – the flames did instead. The blast came, its white flash ripping through the dream. It stole the world and replaced it with fire.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_cf66940f-e4f4-571c-9f2a-bddca0adea79)
I woke from flames, a scream bursting from me into the darkening air. When I reached out for Kip, I found only the blanket, chalky with ash. Each day that I tried to adjust to his absence, I’d wake to find my forgetful body rolling towards his warmth.
I lay back in the echo of my own scream. I dreamed of the blast more often now. It came to me in sleep, and sometimes when I was awake. I understood more than ever why so many seers went mad. Being a seer was like walking on a frozen lake: each vision was a crack in the ice underfoot. There were many days when I felt sure I would plunge through the brittle surface of my own sanity.
‘You’re sweating,’ said Piper.
My breath was fast and loud, and refused to be slowed.
‘It’s not hot. Do you feel feverish?’
‘She can’t talk yet,’ said Zoe from the other side of the fire. ‘She’ll stop carrying on in a minute.’
‘She’s running a fever,’ Piper said, his hand on my forehead. He reacted like this whenever I had a vision. At my side quickly, crowding me with his questions before the visions had even had a chance to dissipate.
‘I’m not sick.’ I sat up, brushing his hand away, and wiped my face. ‘It’s just the blast again.’
No matter how many times I’d endured the vision, there was no preparing for it, and no lessening its impact. It made my senses bleed into one another. The sound of it was absolute blackness; the colour a white that shrieked in my ears. The heat went beyond pain: it was total. The size of the flames was beyond any measure: the horizon was consumed, the world snatched away in an instant of flame that lasted forever.
Zoe stood and stepped over the crumbs of the fire to pass me the water flask.
‘It’s happening more often, isn’t it,’ Piper said.
I took the flask from Zoe. ‘Have you been counting?’ I said to Piper. He didn’t reply, but kept watching me as I drank.
Until that night, I knew I hadn’t screamed for weeks. I’d worked so hard at it. Avoiding sleep; taming my convulsive breath when a vision came; clenching my jaw until my teeth felt as though they would grind each other down to dust. But Piper had noticed anyway.
‘You’ve been watching me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, not flinching from my stare. ‘I do what I have to do, for the resistance. It’s your job to endure the visions. And it’s mine to decide how we can use them.’
It was me who broke the gaze, rolling away from him.
For weeks our world had been made of ash. Even after we’d left the deadlands, the wind still blew from the east, loading the sky with a burden of black dust. When I rode behind Piper or Zoe, I saw how it settled even in the elaborate contours of their ears.
If I’d cried, my tears would have run black. But I had no time for tears. And who would I cry for? Kip? The dead of the island? All who were trapped in New Hobart? Those still suspended, out of time, in the tanks? There were too many, and my tears were no good to them.
I learned that the past is barbed. Memories snagged at my skin, relentless as the thorn bushes that grew by the deadlands’ black river. Even when I tried to recall a happy time – sitting with Kip on the windowsill, on the island, or laughing with Elsa and Nina in the kitchen at New Hobart – my mind would end up at the same point: the silo floor. Those final minutes: The Confessor, and what she had revealed about Kip’s past; Kip’s jump, and his body on the concrete below me.
I found myself envying Kip’s amnesia. So I taught myself not to remember. I clung to the present, the horse beneath me, its solidity and warmth. Leaning with Piper over a map sketched in the dust, to calculate our next destination. The indecipherable messages left in the ash by the lizards that dragged their bellies across the ruined earth.
When I was thirteen and freshly branded, I’d stared at the healing wound in the mirror and said to myself: This is what I am. Now I did the same with this new life. I tried to learn to occupy it, as I’d learned to inhabit my branded body. This is my life, I said to myself, each morning, when Zoe shook my shoulder to wake me for my shift as lookout, or when Piper kicked dirt over the fire and said it was time to move again. This is my life now.
After our raid on the silo, the whole Wyndham region was so thick with Council patrols that before we could travel back to the west we had to head south, picking our way through the deadlands, that vast canker on the earth.
Eventually we had to let the horses go – unlike us, they couldn’t survive on lizard flesh and grubs, and there was no grass where we travelled. Zoe had suggested eating them, but I was relieved when Piper pointed out that they were as thin as us. He was right: their backbones were sharpened like the peaked spines of lizards. When Zoe untied them they galloped off to the west on legs that were nothing more than splints of bone. Whether they were fleeing us, or just trying to get away from the deadlands, I didn’t know.
I’d thought I knew the damage that the blast had wrought. But those weeks showed me the wreckage anew. I saw the skin of the earth peeled back like an eyelid, leaving scorched stone and dust. After the blast, they say most of the world was like that: broken. I’d heard bards singing about the Long Winter, when ash had shrouded the sky for years, and nothing would grow. Now, hundreds of years later, the deadlands had retreated to the east, but from our time out there, I understood more of the fear and rage that had driven the purges, when the survivors had destroyed any of the machines that were left after the blast. The taboo surrounding the remnants of the machines wasn’t simply a law – it was an instinct. Any rumours or stories of what machines had once been able to do, in the Before, was overshadowed by the evidence of the machines’ ultimate achievement: fire and ash. The Council’s strict penalties for breaking the taboo never had to be enforced – it was a law upheld by our own revulsion; we shuddered away from the fragments of machines that still surfaced, occasionally, in the dust.
People shuddered away from us, too, we Omegas in our blast-marked bodies. It was the same fear of the blast and its contagion that had led the Alphas to cast us out. To them, our bodies were deadlands of flesh: infertile and broken. The imperfect twins, we carried the stain of the blast in us, as surely as the scorched earth of the east. They chased us far away from where they lived and farmed, to scratch an existence from the blighted land.
Piper, Zoe and I had emerged from the east like blackened ghosts. The first time we washed, the water downstream ran black. Even afterwards, the skin between my fingers was stained grey. Piper and Zoe’s dark skin took on a greyish tone that wouldn’t wash away – it was the pallor of hunger and exhaustion. The deadlands weren’t something that could easily be left behind. When we headed west, we were still shaking ash from our blankets each night when we unpacked them, and still coughing up ash in the morning.
*
Piper and I sat near the entrance to the cave, watching the sun shrug off the night. More than a month earlier, on the way to the silo, we’d slept in the same hidden cave, and perched on the same flat rock. Next to my knee, the stone still bore the scuff-marks from where Piper had sharpened his knife all those weeks ago.
I looked at Piper. The slash on his single arm had healed to a pink streak, the scar tissue raised and waxy, puckered where stitches had held the wound closed. At my neck, the wound from The Confessor’s knife had finally healed, too. In the deadlands, it had been an open wound, edged with ash. Was the ash still there, inside me, specks of black sealed beneath the scar’s carapace?
Piper held out a piece of rabbit meat skewered on the blade of his knife. It was left over from the night before, coated with cold fat, congealed into grey strings. I shook my head and turned away.
‘You need to eat,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us three more weeks to get to the Sunken Shore. Even longer to get to the west coast, if we’re going to search for the ships.’
All of our conversations began and ended at the ships. Their names had become like charms: The Rosalind. The Evelyn. And if the hazards of the unknown seas didn’t sink the ships, then sometimes I felt that the weight of our expectations would. They were everything, now. We’d managed to rid the Council of The Confessor, and of the machine that she was using to keep track of all Omegas – but it wasn’t enough, especially after the massacre on the island. We might have slowed down the Council, and cost them two of their most powerful weapons, but the tanks were patient. I’d seen them myself, in visions and in the awful solidity of reality. Row after row of glass tanks, each one a pristine hell.
That was the Council’s plan for all of us. And if we didn’t have a plan of our own, a goal to work for, then we were just scrapping in the dust, and there’d be no end to it. We might forestall the tanks for a while, but no better than that. Once, the island had been our destination. That had ended in blood and smoke. So now we were seeking the ships that Piper had sent out from the island, months before, in search of Elsewhere.
There were times when it felt more like a wish than a plan.
It would be four months at the next full moon since the ships sailed. ‘It’s a hell of a long time to be at sea,’ Piper said as we sat on the rock.
I had no reassurance to offer him, so I stayed silent. It wasn’t just a question of whether or not Elsewhere was out there. The real question was what it could offer us, if it existed. What its inhabitants might know, or do, that we couldn’t. Elsewhere couldn’t just be another island, just a place to hide from the Council. That might offer us a respite, but it would be no solution, any more than the island was. There had to be more than that: a real alternative.
If the ships found Elsewhere, they’d have to make their way back through the treacherous sea. If they survived, and if they weren’t caught attempting to return to the captured island, then they should be returning to a rendezvous point at Cape Bleak, on the north-west coast.
It felt like such a tenuous chance: if piled on if, each hope feeling flimsier than the last, while Zach’s tanks were solid, multiplying with each day that passed.
Piper knew better, by now, than to push against my silences. He kept staring at the sunrise, and went on. ‘When we’ve sent out ships in the past, some of them made it back to the island, months later, with nothing to show for the journey but damaged hulls and crews sick with scurvy. And two ships never came back.’ He was quiet for a moment, but his face betrayed no emotion. ‘It’s not just a question of distance, or even storms. Some of our sailors have come back with stories of things we can barely imagine. A few years back, one of our best captains, Hobb, led three ships north. They were gone for more than two months. It was nearing winter, when Hobb got back – and there were only two ships by then. The winter storms we’re used to on the west coast are bad enough – we didn’t even make crossings to the island in winter, if we could help it. But further north, Hobb told us the entire sea up there had started to freeze solid. The ice crushed one of the ships, just like that.’ He opened his hand wide, then closed his fist. ‘The whole crew was lost.’ He paused again. Both of us were looking at the frost stiffening the grass. Winter was on its way.
‘After all this time,’ he said, ‘do you still believe that The Rosalind and The Evelyn could be out there?’
‘I’m not sure about belief,’ I said. ‘But I hope they are.’
‘And that’s enough for you?’ he said.
I shrugged. What would ‘enough’ mean, anyway? Enough for what? Enough to keep going, I supposed. I’d learned not to ask for more than that. Enough to get me to fold my blanket at the end of each day’s rest, stuff it back into my rucksack, and follow Piper and Zoe once more onto the plain for another night of walking.
Piper held out the meat again. I turned away.
‘You need to stop this,’ he said.
He still spoke as he always had: as if the world was his to command. If I’d closed my eyes, I could imagine he was still giving orders in the island’s Assembly Hall, rather than squatting on a rock, his clothes torn and stained. There were times that I admired his self-assurance: its audacity, in the face of a world that did its best to show us that we were worthless. At other times, it baffled me. I’d caught myself watching how he moved. The last few weeks had left him thinner, his skin stretched a little too tightly over his cheekbones, but it hadn’t changed the defiant jut of his jaw, or the spread of his shoulders, unafraid to occupy space. It was as though his body spoke a language that mine could never learn.
‘Stop what?’ I said, avoiding his gaze.
‘You know what I mean. You’re not eating. You barely sleep, or talk.’
‘I’m keeping up with you and Zoe, aren’t I?’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that you’re not yourself anymore.’
‘And since when are you an expert in what I’m like? You hardly know me.’ My voice was loud in the morning stillness.
I knew it wasn’t fair to snap at him. What he’d said was true enough. I’d been eating less, even now we were out of the deadlands and the hunting was good. I ate just enough to stay well, to travel fast. On frosty days, when it was my turn to sleep, I cast the blanket off my shoulders and offered myself up to the cold.
I couldn’t explain any of this to Piper or Zoe. It would mean talking about Kip. His name, that single syllable, caught in my throat like a fish bone.
His past, too, stopped me at the brink of words. I couldn’t speak about it. Since the silo, when The Confessor had told me what Kip had been like before the tank, I carried her news with me everywhere. I was good at secrets. I’d hidden my seer visions from my family for thirteen years before Zach exposed me. I’d concealed my visions of the island from The Confessor for the four years of my captivity in the Keeping Rooms. On the island, I’d hidden my twin’s identity from Piper and the Assembly for weeks. Now I concealed what I knew about Kip. The knowledge that he had tormented The Confessor as a child, and delighted when she was branded and sent away. That he’d tried, as an adult, to track her down and pay to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
How could he be such a stranger to me, when I could identify each of his vertebrae under my fingertips, and I knew the precise curve of his hip bones against my own?
But at the end, in the silo, he’d made the choice to die, to save me. These days, it seemed that was the only gift we had to offer one another: the gift of our own deaths.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_1d0c478f-2452-56d6-86a0-35a74aa91e0b)
Halfway to the Sunken Shore, Zoe led us to a safehouse at the edge of the plains. Nothing moved in the cottage but the wind, banging the front door, which had been left open.
‘Did they run, or were they taken?’ I asked, as we walked through the empty rooms.
‘Either way, they left in a hurry,’ said Zoe. In the kitchen, a jug lay in pieces on the floor. Two bowls sat unwashed on the table, velveted with green mould.
Piper was bending to look at the door latch. ‘The door was kicked in, from outside.’ He stood. ‘We have to leave now.’
And even though I’d looked forward to a night of sleeping indoors, I was glad to leave those rooms where all noise was muted by dust. We retreated into the long grass that grew right up to the house itself, and didn’t make camp until we’d walked all day, and half the night.
Zoe was kneeling over a rabbit that she’d caught the day before, skinning it while Piper and I lit a fire.
‘It’s worse than we thought,’ said Piper, leaning forward to blow on the timid flame. ‘Half the network must’ve been infiltrated.’
It wasn’t the first ruined safehouse that we’d seen. On the way to the silo we’d come across another safehouse, where nothing remained but blackened beams, still smoking. The Council had taken prisoners on the island, and the resistance’s secrets were being wrung from them.
As Zoe and Piper took stock of what we knew, I sat in silence. It wasn’t that they excluded me from conversations – rather that their talks were full of shorthand references to people, places and information that they shared, and that I had never encountered.
‘No point in going past Evan’s place,’ Piper said. ‘If they took Hannah alive, then they’ll have got him too.’
Zoe didn’t look up from the rabbit. She stretched it out on its back, grasped its back legs with one hand, and ran her knife down the line of exposed white fur. The stomach fell open like two hands parting.
‘Wouldn’t they pick up Jess, first?’ she said.
‘No. She never dealt with Hannah directly – she should be safe. But Evan was Hannah’s contact. If she’s taken, Evan’s done for.’
The resistance network on the mainland had been larger and more intricate than I’d ever realised. At how many other safehouses did broken doors now swing onto empty rooms, the latches smashed? The network was like a woollen jumper with several loose threads, each one threatening to unravel the entire thing.
‘Depends how long Hannah held out for,’ Zoe said. ‘She might’ve bought him some time to get clear. Julia lasted three days when they took her.’
‘Hannah’s not as strong as Julia – we can’t assume she managed to last that long.’
‘Sally had no contact with Hannah, either. And some of the western cells should still be intact,’ Zoe went on. ‘They reported straight to you – there were no links with the eastern network.’
I spoke up. ‘I never realised how much of the resistance was going on here, on the mainland.’
‘You thought the island was the only thing that mattered?’ Zoe said.
I shrugged. ‘That was the main thing, wasn’t it?’
Piper pursed his lips. ‘The thing about the island – it mattered that it existed. It was a symbol – not just for the resistance, but for the Council too. It was a signal that there could be a different way. But it was never going to be big enough for all of us. Even in those final months, we were having to turn down some requests from refugees – until we’d built up our capacity. Added to the fleet, sorted out the supply situation.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘It was never going to be the final answer.’
Zoe interrupted him. ‘Most people on the island did nothing. They felt like great rebels just for living out there, but that was it. They might have joined the guards or done a few shifts in the lookout posts, but not many of them were actually actively contributing – coming to the mainland to help with rescues; running the safehouse network; monitoring the Council’s movements. Even some of those in the Assembly with Piper – they were happy enough to sit about in the Assembly Hall, looking at maps and talking about strategy, but you wouldn’t catch half of them making the crossing. The mainland was where the hard work still happened – but once they’d made it to the island, most people never came back.’
‘I wouldn’t have put it like that, but Zoe’s right,’ Piper said. ‘A lot of people on the island were complacent. They thought being there was enough. It was those on the mainland, or working the courier ships between the two, who did most of it. Zoe did more than most, and she’s never even been to the island.’
I looked up quickly. ‘Really? I was sure that you had,’ I said.
‘They never wanted any Alphas setting foot on the place – even I understood why.’ Zoe was hunched over the rabbit. She pulled the fur from the flesh as if peeling off a glove. ‘Why did you think I’d been there?’
‘I guess because you dream about the sea all the time.’
I didn’t realise I knew it, until I heard myself say it. In all those nights that we’d slept close to one another, I’d shared her dreams, the same way I’d shared her water flask or her blanket. And her dreams were all of the ocean. Perhaps that’s why it hadn’t struck me before: I was used to it, after my years of dreaming of the island. Used to the sea’s restlessness, and its shifting register of greys, blacks and blues. In Zoe’s dreams, though, there hadn’t been any island, nor any land at all: just the churning sea.
One minute Zoe was squatting by the fire, the rabbit’s flaccid body in her hands; the next her knife was at my stomach.
‘You’ve been snooping in my dreams?’
‘Stand down,’ said Piper. He didn’t shout, but it was a command nonetheless.
The blade didn’t budge. Her other hand had grasped a handful of my hair, her knuckles jabbing against my skull, holding me in place. The blade had gone straight through my jumper and shirt, and was pressed flat against my stomach; I felt its cold indentation on my skin. My head was twisted back and to the side. I could see the rabbit on the ground where she’d dropped it, its wrung neck and open eyes.
‘What the hell have you been doing?’ she said. As she leaned closer the blade became more insistent. ‘What did you see?’
‘Zoe,’ warned Piper. He wrapped his arm around her neck, but he didn’t fight her – just held her, and waited.
‘What did you see?’ she repeated.
‘I told you. Just the sea. Lots of waves. I’m sorry – I can’t control it. I didn’t even realise until just now.’ I couldn’t explain to her how it worked. How my awareness of her dreams wasn’t an eavesdropping, any more than I’d eavesdropped on the sea while on the island. It was just there, a background noise.
‘You said it didn’t work like that,’ she said, her breath hot on my face. ‘You said you couldn’t read minds.’
‘I can’t. It’s not like that. I just get impressions, sometimes. I don’t mean to.’
She shoved me backwards. When I’d steadied myself, I put my hand to my stomach. It came away red.
‘It’s rabbit blood,’ Piper said.
‘This time,’ said Zoe.
‘If it makes any difference,’ I said, ‘you know what I dream about.’
‘Everyone within ten miles knows what you dream about, the way you scream and carry on.’ She tossed the knife down next to the half-skinned rabbit. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to poke around in my head.’
I knew how it felt – I would never forget the sense of violation that The Confessor’s interrogations had left me with. How my whole mind had felt sullied by her probings.
‘I’m sorry,’ I called after her, as she walked away towards the river.
‘Let her go,’ said Piper. ‘Are you OK? Show me your stomach,’ he said, reaching out to lift my jumper.
I swiped his hand away.
‘What was that about?’ I said, staring after Zoe.
He picked up the rabbit and shook the dirt from its flesh. ‘She shouldn’t have done that – I’ll talk to her.’
‘I don’t need you to talk to her for me. I just want to know what’s going on. Why did she react like that? Why is she like this?’
‘It’s not easy for her,’ he said.
‘Who has it been easy for? Not for me, that’s for sure. Not for you, or any of us.’
‘Just give her some space,’ he said.
I waved at the plain surrounding us, the pale grass stretching for miles, and the sky so big that it seemed to have encroached on the earth itself. ‘Space? There’s nothing here but space. She doesn’t have to be in my face every moment.’
I got no answer but the rasping of the grass in the wind, scratching at the underside of the sky, and the moistened scrape of Piper’s knife on the rabbit’s flesh as he finished the skinning.
Zoe didn’t come back until after dawn. She ate in silence, and slept on the far side of Piper, instead of her usual spot between us.
I thought of what she’d said earlier: once they’d made it to the island, most people never came back. Is it Piper she’s thinking of, I wondered, when the sea floods her sleeping mind? The sea that he crossed for the island, leaving her on her own, after all that she’d given up to be with him.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_9e734998-37e9-58d5-9220-9d73f978bf64)
I’d first heard Piper and Zoe mention Sally, and the Sunken Shore, when we were still in the deadlands. They were meant to be resting, but I could hear their raised voices from the lookout spot. It was dawn; I’d volunteered to take the first watch, but when I heard them arguing I left the lookout post and headed back to the fire.
‘I never wanted to drag Sally into this,’ Zoe said.
‘Who?’ I said.
They both turned to face me. It was the same movement, doubled. And the same expression: the same angle to their eyebrows, the same appraising eyes. Even when they were arguing, I felt like an intruder.
Piper answered me. ‘We need a base, with someone we can trust. The safehouse network’s crumbling. Sally will give us shelter, so we can start to muster the resistance and send people to Cape Bleak to seek the ships. Outfit new ships, if we need.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ said Zoe, still ignoring me and addressing only Piper. ‘We can’t get Sally involved. We can’t ask her. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘Zoe told you about how we got by, as kids, after we were split?’
I nodded. They’d been raised in the east, where people used to let twins stay together a little longer. Piper had been ten when he’d been branded and exiled. She’d run away to follow him. The two of them had survived by stealing, working, and hiding, with some help from sympathetic Omegas along the way, before they’d finally joined the resistance.
‘Sally was one of the people who helped us,’ he said. ‘The first one. When we were really young, and needed it most.’
It was hard to imagine Zoe and Piper needing help. But I reminded myself of how young they’d been – even younger than I’d been when my family sent me away.
‘She took us in,’ said Zoe. ‘Taught us everything. And she had a lot to teach. She was old when we found our way to her, but years before that she’d been one of the resistance’s best agents, working in Wyndham.’
‘In Wyndham?’ I thought I must have misheard. No Omegas were allowed to live in an Alpha town – let alone in Wyndham, the Council’s hub.
‘She was an infiltrator,’ said Piper.
I looked from Zoe to Piper, and back again. ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said.
‘That was the idea,’ Zoe said impatiently.
‘It was the resistance’s most covert project,’ Piper said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible these days. This was back when the Council was less strict about branding, especially out east. We’re talking about fifty years ago, at least. The resistance had managed to recruit a few unbranded Omegas, with deformations minor enough that they could be disguised, or hidden. For Sally, it was a malformed foot. She could jam it into a normal shoe, and she trained herself to walk straight on it. It hurt her like crazy, but she got away with it for more than two years. There were three infiltrators, right inside the Council chambers. Not as Councillors, but as advisors or assistants. They were right in the thick of it.
‘The Council hated infiltrators more than anything.’ Piper smiled. ‘It wasn’t even the information that they managed to find out. It was the fact that they managed to do it – pass themselves off as Alphas, sometimes for years. Proof that we’re not that different, after all.’
‘Sally was the best of any of them,’ Zoe said. ‘Half of the current resistance was built on the information she got out of the Council.’ When she spoke of Sally, Zoe had none of her usual sarcasm, or the raised eyebrow that could sharpen a single word into a weapon. ‘But she’s ancient now,’ she went on. ‘She can hardly walk. Hadn’t worked for the resistance for years, even by the time we came to her. Too risky, apart from anything else. She was top of the Council’s wanted list for a long time, and they knew what she looked like. I don’t want to get her involved.’
‘We’re all involved, whether we want to be or not,’ said Piper. ‘The Council will come for her, soon enough. They won’t care that she’s old, or frail.’
‘She’s managed to stay hidden from them for all these years,’ Zoe said. ‘We can’t drag her into this.’
He paused, and then spoke more quietly to her. ‘You know she’d never turn us away,’ he said.
‘That’s why it’s not fair to go to her.’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t have any other options. Not after what I did on the island.’
I could see it again: the blood thickening between the stones of the courtyard.
‘The Council would never have spared the island if you’d handed Cass and Kip over to The Confessor,’ Zoe said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But we can’t assume that the rest of the resistance will understand that. You saw how they reacted at the time. When that many people are killed, people cast around for someone to blame. We can’t know how they’re going to take it when we reappear, especially not with Cass. We don’t know if it will be safe for her. If we’re going to reconnect with the resistance, we need to start with somebody we know we can trust.’
She turned away from me again, and looked only to Piper. ‘Sally’s been through enough,’ she said.
‘She’d want us to go to her,’ he said.
‘You brave enough to try telling her what she’d want?’ said Zoe, with a slow smile. Piper smiled back at her. He was like her reflection.
*
At each settlement we passed on the journey to the Sunken Shore, we did our best to spread the word about the Council’s plans for tanking Omegas. Above all, we tried to warn them away from turning themselves in to refuges. These huge, secure camps were supposed to be the Council’s protection for struggling Omegas – a place where any Omega would be given food and shelter, in exchange for their labour. They were a last resort for Omegas, and a reassurance for the Alphas themselves. A guarantee that however much they might restrict Omegas to blighted land, and however high they raised their tithes, we would not take them with us into starvation. But for years now, those who entered the refuge gates had not been allowed to leave. The refuges were expanding rapidly, and had become nothing more than tank complexes.
But time and again, when we tried to pass on this news at settlements, we were met with silence. Wary stares and crossed arms. I remembered how Kip and I had started the fire outside New Hobart: how it had taken on its own momentum as it built and spread. Spreading the word of the Council’s tanks was more like trying to light a fire in rain, with sodden green twigs. It wasn’t the kind of tale you could just share with a stranger in a tavern, as if it were no more than gossip about a neighbour. We could only risk raising the topic with those who were sympathetic to the resistance – and who would admit to that, after the massacre on the island? The Council, after years of denying that the island existed, was now spreading the word of the island’s defeat. The blood on its streets had rendered it safe: a cautionary tale, rather than a threat.
And the cautionary tale was working. People were warier than ever. When we approached settlements, people straightened in the fields and watched us coming, their hands firmly on their pitchforks and spades. We ventured into Drury, a large Omega town, but both times we entered taverns the noisy conversations stopped, as if the sound were a lamp suddenly extinguished. At every table, people turned to the door to assess us. Their loud conversations never resumed – whispers and mutterings replaced them. Some people would push back their chairs and leave as soon as they saw Zoe’s unbranded face. Who in the taverns within would dare to discuss the resistance with three ragged strangers, let alone a group that included an Alpha and a seer?
The most frustrating encounters weren’t with those who refused to talk to us, but those who seemed to believe us, but still did nothing. In two of the settlements, people listened to our story, and seemed to understand how it made sense of the Alpha’s treatment of us. That the tanks were the endpoint to which the Council’s policies of the last few years had been heading. But the question we heard, again and again, was What are we supposed to do about it? Nobody wanted to shoulder the new burden of this news. They had enough burdens already. We saw it, everywhere we went: the lean faces, the bones of eye sockets thrust forward as though trying to escape the skin. The settlements where shanties and lean-tos propped one another up. The people with teeth and gums stained a livid red, from chewing areca nut to distract from their hunger. What did we expect these people to do with the news we told them?
Two days after we’d found the abandoned safehouse, and my fight with Zoe, Piper left at dawn to scout a small Omega town further west on the plain. He returned before noon, sweat darkening the front of his shirt despite the cold.
‘The Judge is dead,’ he said. ‘It’s all over the town.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ I said. The Judge had been ruling the Council for almost as long as I could remember, but he’d been under the control of Zach and his allies for years. ‘If he’s just a puppet, what difference does it make if he’s finally died?’
‘It’s not good news if his death only clears the way for someone more extreme,’ said Zoe.
‘It’s worse than that,’ Piper said. He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Zoe took it and opened it. I squatted on the grass next to her to read it, trying not to think about her knife at my guts, two nights before.
‘Council leader killed by Omega terrorists,’ the headline read. In smaller print, underneath, it continued: ‘Terrorists from the self-styled Omega “resistance” movement yesterday assassinated the twin of long-serving Council leader, The Judge.’
I looked up at Piper. ‘Is it possible?’
He shook his head. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Zach and his cronies have had The Judge’s twin locked up for half a decade – that’s how they’ve been controlling him ever since. It’s all a set-up. They’ve just decided they don’t need him anymore.’
‘So what’s changed? You always said they needed him because people wanted the Council led by someone who seemed to be moderate.’
‘Not now. Listen.’ He grabbed the poster and read from it out loud:
‘In his fourteen years as Council leader, The Judge was a staunch protector of Omegas. This latest outrage by Omega agitators raises pressing security concerns for those serving on the Council –’
‘As if they haven’t all had their twins locked up for years, if not tanked,’ scoffed Zoe.
Piper kept reading. ‘–and indeed for all Alphas. This attack on the very head of our government is further proof that the growing threat of Omega dissidents endangers both Alphas and Omegas. The General, reluctantly stepping forward to fill The Judge’s role, expressed her sadness at his untimely demise. “Through this cowardly act, these terrorists have robbed the Omegas of a steadfast ally, and have demonstrated the ruthlessness and brutality of those who claim to be agitating for Omega ‘self-determination’, and who are willing to kill their own kind in order to undermine the work of the Council.”
‘They’ve killed two birds with one stone,’ he said, tossing the paper on to the grass. ‘They’ve got rid of him, finally, and by pinning it on us, they’ve stoked the anti-Omega sentiments, strengthened their own argument against the moderates.’
‘So it’s The General in charge now,’ I said.
‘Reluctantly stepping forward, my arse,’ said Zoe. ‘She’s been pushing for this for years. And The Reformer and The Ringmaster will be neck deep in the whole scheme.’
None of the Councillors went by their real names. In the past, they’d chosen their Council names to disguise their identities and protect themselves from attacks on their twins. These days, when nearly all the Councillors kept their twins imprisoned in the Keeping Rooms, if not in the tanks, the elaborate names were just pageantry. Each of the names was a statement, a way of announcing to the world their agenda.
The General; The Ringmaster; The Reformer. I remembered the trifecta of faces from Piper’s chart on the island: the three young Councillors who were the real power in Wyndham. The Ringmaster, his smile half-hidden by his mass of dark curls. The General’s angular face, her cheekbones unforgiving. And Zach, The Reformer, my twin. His face frozen in the artist’s pen-strokes. The person who I knew best, and not at all.
‘The three of them have already been running things for years, really,’ Piper said. ‘But it’s a bad sign, that they felt able to get rid of The Judge once and for all. They’re confident enough of their support that they don’t even need to hide behind him anymore.’
‘More than that,’ Zoe said. ‘You’ve heard it, everywhere we go – the unease after the numbers who died at the island. I’d bet that even some Alphas were a bit restive about the killings. A stunt like this with The Judge shores up their own support – makes it seem as if it’s a righteous battle, against an Omega resistance that’s ruthlessly aggressive. Justifies their own brutal tactics.’
It was a network of fear, expertly manipulated by the Council. Not only the Omegas’ fears, but the fears of the Alphas too. I had seen how they cringed away from us, how they viewed us as walking reminders of the blast, our deformed bodies a poisonous residue. The fact that my mutation wasn’t visible didn’t make any difference: the Omega brand on my face had been enough to provoke spits and insults from Alphas who’d passed through my settlement when I was a teenager. Alphas had always shunned us, even in good times. Then came the drought years, when I was a child, and even Alphas had gone hungry. And the year the harvests failed, when I was at the settlement. People turn on one another when they’re hungry and afraid, and the Council had made sure that it was the Omegas that they blamed. This lie about The Judge’s death was just the latest part of the narrative that the Council had been constructing for years: that it was us against them.
I picked up the paper, still warm from being crushed in Piper’s pocket. ‘It’s all accelerating, isn’t it. The Council’s got everyone running scared. Alphas and Omegas both.’
‘They don’t have The Confessor anymore,’ he said. ‘Or her machine. Don’t forget what we’ve achieved.’
I closed my eyes. The one thing I ought to have been grateful for – the fact that Zach no longer had The Confessor’s cruel brilliance at his disposal – I couldn’t even think of without losing my breath, the raw pain of it like a boot to the guts. Her death was Kip’s death.
‘How much do you know about The General?’ I asked them.
‘Not enough,’ said Zoe. ‘We’ve been monitoring her since she came on the scene. But it’s been decades since infiltrators were able to penetrate the Council fort. It’s harder than ever to get into Wyndham, let alone close to the Council.’
‘What we do know is all bad news,’ Piper said. ‘She’s militantly anti-Omega, just like The Ringmaster and The Reformer.’
It still jarred, to hear Zach spoken of by his Council name. In the silo, The Confessor had said, I had another name once. I wondered if my twin ever thought of himself as Zach anymore. I suspected not – he would have wanted to leave it behind, along with the unsplit childhood that he’d been forced to share with me.
‘The General’s better established than either of them,’ Piper went on. ‘They all started young, not that it’s unusual in the Council. That place is a snake pit – plenty of Councillors don’t live long. But The General’s the sharpest of the lot, politically. She got her start working for The Commander. The rumour was that she got her place by poisoning him.’
I remembered The Commander’s death being announced when I was still living in the settlement. Untimely, the Council’s bulletin had said. Timely enough for The General, it seemed.
‘The General’s never disputed those stories,’ Piper said. ‘True or not, it suits her to be feared. Every time she’s come up against opposition, it’s ended badly – and never for her. Scandals, disgrace, backstabbings – sometimes literally. One by one, everyone who’s opposed her has been silenced, or driven out. The only reason The Judge lasted as long as he did was because he was useful to her and the other two – a popular figurehead for them to use.’
‘Why her, as the new leader,’ I said, ‘and not The Ringmaster, or Zach?’
Piper was squatting, his elbow on his knee. ‘The Ringmaster came to the Council via the army,’ he said. ‘He’s got a huge following amongst the soldiers, but he’s less of a political operator than the other two. They need him – he’s been there longer, and he’s got the common touch, and the loyalty of the soldiers, who see him as one of their own. But the word is that he’s less radical. Don’t get me wrong – he’s still notorious. He runs the army, for one thing, so when it comes to enforcing Council rule, he’s been the driving force for years. But although he’s brutal, he’s not the one driving the big reforms. Most of the worst changes – pushing the settlements further and further from decent land; the tithe increases – they seem to have originated with The General. And the tightening up of registrations came from The Reformer. Probably The Confessor too, working behind the scenes with him.’
‘And what do you know about how Zach fits in to it all?’
‘Less than you, probably,’ Piper said.
Once, I would have agreed with him. I would have argued that I knew Zach better than anyone. Now, there was a distance between us that I couldn’t breach. Between us lay The Confessor’s body, and Kip’s. All the silent people floating in those round glass tanks.
Piper continued. ‘The Reformer’s always seemed like an outsider – it comes from being split late, and not raised in Wyndham like the other two. But he had The Confessor, and that made him hugely powerful. I think the tanks are his pet project – and the database, too. He’s never been smooth, like The General is – she can charm as well as intimidate. The Reformer’s just as ruthless, though, in his own way.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ I said.
Piper nodded. ‘But now that he’s lost The Confessor, allegiances might have shifted.’
I remembered how Zach had let me escape, after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths. I could still hear the waver in his voice, as he’d shouted at me to go before the soldiers arrived. If they find out you were involved, that’ll be it for me. Was it The General or The Ringmaster he feared? Or both? Before the silo, I might have convinced myself that, on some level, Zach had wanted me set free. But whatever part of me could have believed that had been left on the silo floor, along with Kip.
‘We need to get to Sally’s quickly,’ Piper said. ‘We don’t have a choice. From there, we start mustering the resistance, seeking the ships. They’ve wiped out the island; they’ve got rid of The Judge; they’re dismantling the resistance network, bit by bit.’
The sky above us, sulky with clouds, took on a new and pressing weight, and I felt that the three of us were very small. Just three people on the wind-scoured plain, against all the Council’s machinations. Each night, as we trudged through the long grass, there were more and more tanks being readied in the refuges. Who knew how many they’d tanked already. And more people were arriving at the refuges every day.
I couldn’t claim that I understood Zach anymore, but I knew enough to know this: it would never be enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all tanked.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_69127102-dfd4-55b3-b1ff-4bc403eb415d)
The next night, well after midnight, I began to sense something. I was jittery, and found myself scanning the darkness around us as we walked. Once, when Zach and I were little, wasps had made a nest in the eaves of our house, right outside our bedroom. For days, until Dad found the nest, a buzzing and scraping had kept us awake, lying in our small beds and whispering of ghosts. What I felt now was like that: a high-pitched buzz at the edge of my hearing, a message that I couldn’t interpret, but that soured the night air.
Then we passed the first sign for the refuge. We were about halfway between Wyndham and the southern coast, skirting the wagon road. But we passed close enough to the road to see the sign, and crept nearer to read it. The wooden board was painted in large white letters:
Your Council welcomes you to Refuge 9 – 6 miles south.
Securing our mutual wellbeing.
Safety and plenty, earned by fair labour.
Refuges: sheltering you in difficult times.
It was illegal for Omegas to attend schools, but many managed to scrape together the basics of reading, learning at home, as I had, or in illicit schools. I wondered how many of the Omegas who passed the refuge’s sign could read it at all, and how many of those would believe its message.
‘In difficult times,’ Piper scoffed. ‘No mention of the fact that it’s their tithes, or pushing Omegas out to blighted land, that make the times so hard.’
‘Or that if the difficult times pass, it makes no difference,’ added Zoe. ‘Once people are in there, they’re in for good.’
We all knew what that meant: the Omegas floating in the nearly-death of the tanks. Trapped in the horrifying safety of those glass bellies, while their Alpha counterparts lived on unencumbered.
We kept clear of the road, following it from a distance amongst the cover of gullies and trees. As we approached the refuge I found myself slowing, my movements sluggish as we drew closer to the source of my disquiet. By dawn, when the refuge itself came into view, walking towards it felt as though I was wading upstream through a river. In the growing light, we crept as close as we dared, until we were peering down at the refuge from a copse at the top of a rise only a hundred feet away.
The refuge was bigger than I could have imagined – it was the size of a small town. The wall surrounding it was higher even than the wall the Council erected around New Hobart. More than fifteen feet high, it was built of brick rather than wood, with tangled strands of wire along the top like nests thrown together by monstrous birds. Within the wall, we could glimpse the tops of buildings, a jumble of different structures.
Piper pointed to where a huge building loomed on the western edge. It took up at least half of the refuge, and its walls still had the yellow tinge of fresh-cut pine, bright against the weathered grey wood of the other buildings.
‘No windows,’ Zoe said.
It was only a few syllables, but we all knew what it meant. Within that building, row upon row of tanks waited. Some would be empty, and some still under construction. But the sickness loitering deep in my gut left me in no doubt: many had already been filled. Hundreds of lives submerged in that thick, viscous liquid. The cloying sweetness of that fluid, creeping into their eyes and ears, their noses, their mouths. The silencing of lives, with nothing to hear but the hum of machines.
Almost all of the refuge’s sprawling complex was entombed within the walls. But at the eastern edge was a section of farmed land, surrounded by a wooden fence. It was too high to climb easily, and the posts were too closely spaced for a person to slip through, but there was room enough to show the crops in their orderly lines, and the workers there, busy with hoes amongst the beets and marrows. Perhaps twenty of them, all Omegas, bent over their work. The marrows had grown fat – each one larger than the last few meals that Piper, Zoe and I had eaten.
‘They’re not all tanked, at least,’ Zoe said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘That’s what, six acres of crops?’ Piper said. ‘Look at the size of the place – especially with that new building. Our records on the island showed that thousands of people have turned themselves in at the refuges each year. More than ever, lately, since the bad harvest and the tithe increases. This refuge alone would have upwards of five thousand people. No way they’re being fed from those fields – it’d barely be enough to feed the guards.’
‘It’s a display,’ I said. ‘Like a minstrel show, a pretty picture of what people think a refuge is. But it’s all for show, to keep people coming.’
There was something else about the refuge that unsettled me. I searched and searched for it, until I realised that it was an absence, not a presence. It was the almost total lack of sound. Piper had said that there were thousands of people within those walls. I thought of the sound of the New Hobart market, or of the island’s streets. The constant noise of the children at Elsa’s holding house. But the only sounds reaching us from the refuge were the strikes of the workers’ hoes on the frost-hardened earth. There was no background hum of voices, and I could sense no movement within the buildings. I recalled the tank chamber I’d seen at Wyndham, where the only sound had been the buzz of the Electric. All those throats stoppered with tubes like corks in bottles.
There was movement on the road that led east past the refuge. It wasn’t mounted soldiers – just three walkers, moving slowly, and laden with packs.
As they drew closer, we could see they were Omegas. The shorter of the men had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other man limped heavily, one twisted leg gnarled like driftwood. Between them walked a child. I’d have guessed he was no older than seven or eight, although he was so thin that his age was hard to tell. He looked down as he walked, guided only by his hand held tightly by the tall man.
Their heads looked too large on their thin bodies. But it was their packs that pained me most. Those bundles, tightly wrapped, would have been carefully chosen. A few treasured possessions, and all the things they thought they’d need, in the new life they’d embarked upon. The taller of the men had a shovel across his shoulders. From the other man’s pack hung two cooking pans, clattering with each step.
‘We need to stop them,’ I said. ‘Tell them what’s waiting for them in there.’
‘It’s too late,’ Piper said. ‘The guards would see us. It would all be over.’
‘And even if we could get to them without being seen, what could we say?’ Zoe said. ‘They’d think we’re mad. Look at us.’ I looked from Zoe to Piper, and down at myself. We were dirty and half-starved. Our clothes were ragged, and had never shed the grey stain of the deadlands.
‘Why would they trust us?’ Piper said. ‘And what can we offer them? Once, we could have offered them safety on the island, or at least the resistance network. Now, the island’s gone, and the network’s collapsing by the day.’
‘It’s still better than the tanks,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But they won’t. How could we even begin to explain the tanks to them?’
A gate in the stone wall opened. Three Council soldiers in red tunics stepped forward, to await the new arrivals. They stood casually, arms crossed, waiting. And I was struck once again by the ruthless efficiency of Zach’s plan. The tithes did the work for him, driving the desperate Omegas to the very refuges that their tithes had helped to build. Inside, the tanks would swallow them, and they would never emerge.
To the east, in the field behind the wooden palings, I saw a sudden movement. One of the workers was waving. He had run close to the fence and was waving frantically to the travellers on the road. He swung both arms back the way the walkers had come. There was no mistaking his meaning: Away. Away. There was such a gulf between the violence of the action, and the silence in which it was conducted. I didn’t know whether he was a mute, or whether he was just trying to avoid the notice of the guards. The other workers in the field were watching him – a woman took a few steps towards him, perhaps to help him, perhaps to stop him signalling. Either way, she froze, looking over her shoulder.
A soldier was running from the wooden building behind the fields. He tackled the waving man quickly, felling him with a blow to the back of the head. By the time a second guard had reached them, the Omega was on the ground. They dragged his motionless body back to the building and out of sight. Three other soldiers emerged into the field, one walking along the inside of the fence, staring at the remaining workers, who bent quickly back to their tasks. From a distance the whole thing had been like a shadowplay, unfolding quickly and in silence.
It was over in moments, the soldiers’ response so efficient that I didn’t think that the new arrivals even saw the disturbance. Their heads were still down, and they were walking steadily towards the soldiers waiting at the gate, just fifty feet away. Even if they had seen the man’s warning, would it have saved them if they’d turned and run? The guards could have overtaken them in no time, even on foot. Perhaps the warning had been futile – but I admired it nonetheless, and winced to think of what would be happening to the waving man now.
The two men and the boy reached the gate. They paused there, in a brief conversation with the guards. One of the guards held out his hand for the shovel that the tall Omega carried; he handed it over. The three of them stepped forward and the soldiers began to drag the gates closed. The taller of the Omega men turned back to stare along the plain. He couldn’t even see me, but I found myself raising my hand, and I echoed the frantic wave of the farming man. Away. Away. It was pointless – my body’s instinct, as futile and as unstoppable as a drowner’s underwater gasp for air. The gates were already closing, and the man turned away and stepped into the refuge. The gates clashed shut behind him.
We could not save them. Already more would be on their way. In settlements nearby, they would be weighing the decision, and thinking of what they might pack. Closing the doors of houses to which they would never return. And this was only a single refuge – all over the land there were more, each one being equipped with its tanks. Piper’s map, on the island, had shown nearly fifty refuges. Each one, now, a complex of living death. I couldn’t look away from the new building. It would have been intimidating even if I didn’t know what it contained. Now that I did, the building was a monument to horror. Only when Piper nudged me, and began to pull me deeper into the copse, did my lungs stutter back into breath, a juddering intake of air.
*
A few miles from the refuge, Piper thought he saw a movement through the scrub to the east. But by the time he got there he could find only some trampled grass, and no trail to follow in the dry terrain. The next day, when Zoe was taking the watch while Piper and I slept in the cover of a hollow, she heard a chaffinch’s call, and woke us both, whispering that early winter was the wrong season for a chaffinch to sing, and that it could have been a whistle, a signal. I drew my knife while I waited for her and Piper to circle the perimeter of our camp, but they found nothing. We struck camp early that day, leaving before sundown and avoiding open ground, even when night had come.
At midnight, we crossed a valley pierced by the remains of metal poles from the Before. Bent but not felled by the blast, they curved above us, forty-foot ribs of rust, as though we were traversing the carcass of some vast monster, long dead. A jostling wind had blown all night, making it hard to speak; here in the valley the wind was noisier than ever as it shredded against the poles.
We were just beginning the climb from the valley’s base when the man sprang from behind one of the rusted posts. He grabbed me by the hair, and before I could scream he had spun me around, his other hand pressing a knife to my throat.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.
I dragged my eyes from the hilt of his blade. Piper and Zoe had been just a few steps behind me. Both had their knives out now, poised to throw.
‘Let her go, or you die here,’ said Piper.
‘Have your people stand down,’ the man said to me. He spoke calmly, as if Zoe and Piper, bristling with knives, were barely a concern to him.
Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘We’re not her people.’
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he told her.
The knife at my throat sat precisely where The Confessor’s knife had left its scar. Would that thickened strip of skin slow the blade, if he cut me? I craned my head to the side to try to see his face. I could make out only his dark hair, not tightly curled like Piper’s or Zoe’s, but massed in loose whorls. It reached his jaw, tickling the side of my cheek. He ignored me, except for his attentive knife. Slowly I turned my head further. Each movement pressed my neck more firmly into the knife blade, but at last I could see his eyes, fixed on Piper and Zoe. He was older than us, though still probably under thirty. I’d seen his face somewhere before, though the memory felt insubstantial.
Piper worked it out before I did.
‘You think we don’t know who you are?’ he said. ‘You’re The Ringmaster.’
I knew, now, where I’d seen him: in a sketch on the island. Those few marks on a page had become flesh. The full lips, and the smile lines outside each eye. From up close, as he clasped me tightly, each one was a ridge of moonlight on his darkened face.
‘Stand down,’ The Ringmaster said again, ‘or I’ll kill her.’
Three figures stepped from the darkness behind Zoe and Piper. Two of them held swords; the third a bow. I could hear the creak of the bowstring, pulled taut, the arrow pointed at Piper’s back. He didn’t turn, though Zoe pivoted to face the soldiers.
‘And if we do stand down, what’s to stop you killing her then?’ Piper asked evenly. ‘Or all of us?’
‘I won’t kill her unless I have to. I came to talk. Why do you think I came without a big squadron? I’ve taken a risk to find you, talk to you.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Again, Piper’s bored, impatient tone, as he might sound when chatting in a tavern with a tiresome companion. But I could see the tendons in his hand drawn wire-tight, and the careful angle of his wrist, as he held the knife poised above his shoulder. The blade itself was a tiny dart of silver in the moonlight. If I hadn’t seen those knives in action, I might have thought it looked beautiful.
‘I need to talk to the seer about her twin,’ The Ringmaster said.
‘And do you always start a conversation with a knife to the throat?’ asked Piper.
‘We both know this is no ordinary conversation.’ The Ringmaster, behind me, was perfectly still, but I saw the tiny movements of his soldiers. The light moving on the blade of one man’s sword, as he inched closer to Piper; the tremor of the archer’s bow as the arrow was pulled back further.
‘I won’t talk to you while you’re threatening us,’ I said. With each word I felt his knife, rigid against my neck.
‘And you need to understand that I’m not a man who makes idle threats.’ He raised the blade, so that my chin was forced upwards. I could feel the pulse of my neck against the steel. The blade had been cold at first, but was warming now. Zoe was moving, very gradually, so that she stood back-to-back with Piper, facing the soldiers behind him. The soldier with the bow was only a few feet from her, one eye narrowed as he squinted down the line of the arrow at her chest.
When Piper moved, everything seemed to unfold very slowly. I saw how he released the blade, his arm extending, one finger pointing at The Ringmaster like a denunciation. Zoe launched at the same time, her two knives hurled at the archer as she dived to the side. For an instant the three blades were in flight, and the arrow too, slicing through the air where Zoe had stood a moment before.
The Ringmaster swiped Piper’s knife from the sky with his own blade. The noises came in quick succession: the clash of his blade against Piper’s; a shout from the archer as Zoe’s knife hit him, and the clang as her second blade struck one of the poles. The arrow had passed my left shoulder and been lost to the darkness.
‘Hold,’ The Ringmaster shouted at his men. I clutched at my neck, where his knife had sat, and waited for the pain and the gush of loosened blood, its hot spurt through my fingers. It never came. There was just the old scar, and my pulse thrashing underneath my own grip.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2c502650-6673-5ef2-b550-af46a986e83c)
For several seconds we were all motionless. The Ringmaster crouched in front of me, his knife pointed at Piper, who held his own dagger only an inch or two from The Ringmaster’s. Zoe, with two more throwing knives drawn, stood with her back to Piper. Beyond her, the archer was grimacing, clutching the knife lodged by his collarbone. The other two soldiers had moved in, swords outstretched, just beyond the reach of Zoe’s vigilant blades.
I groped for the knife at my belt, but steel scraped on steel as The Ringmaster sheathed his blade. ‘Stand down,’ he said, with a toss of his head at his soldiers. They dropped back, the injured man swearing. I couldn’t see his blood but I could smell it: the unmistakable raw-liver stench that reminded me of skinned rabbits, and of the bodies on the island.
‘I think we understand one another,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘I came to talk, but you know now that if it comes to blades, I’ll stand my own.’
‘Touch her again and I’ll cut out your tongue,’ said Piper. ‘You won’t be talking then.’
He moved past The Ringmaster and grabbed me, drawing me back to where Zoe stood. Her knives were lowered but not sheathed.
‘Leave us,’ The Ringmaster shouted to his soldiers, with an impatient wave. They withdrew until the darkness and distance hooded their faces, and I could no longer hear the wounded archer’s laboured breathing.
‘You’re OK?’ Piper said to me.
My hand was still at my neck.
‘He could’ve slit my throat,’ I whispered, ‘when you threw the knife.’
‘He was never going to kill you,’ Piper replied. ‘Not if it was so important to him to talk to you. It was a ploy.’ He spoke up now, so that The Ringmaster could hear him. ‘Just posturing, to impress upon us what a big man he is.’
I looked up at Piper and wondered what it must be like to be so certain of everything.
Zoe was surveying the valley. ‘Where are the rest of your soldiers?’ she said to The Ringmaster.
‘I told you – I brought only my scouts. Do you have any idea what would happen if word got out that I’d met with you?’
I turned. His men were watching us warily from twenty yards away. The swordsmen still had their blades drawn. The injured man had dropped his bow and leaned against one of the bent metal poles, but then jerked upright again as though the touch of the taboo remnant was more painful than the dagger in his flesh.
‘How did you find us?’ I swung back around to face The Ringmaster. ‘The Council’s been searching for months. Why you, and why now?’
‘Your brother, him and The General, think their machines allow them to keep track of everything. Maybe it worked well enough when they had The Confessor and her visions to help out. They never had time for old-fashioned methods. They could’ve learned a lot from the older Councillors, or some of the senior soldiers, if they’d taken the time to listen, like I did. I’ve been paying urchins in half the settlements from Wyndham to the coast, for years. When you need updates from the ground, a greedy local kid with the promise of a silver coin is worth more than any machine. Sometimes it’s a waste of money – often enough they bring me nothing but rumours, false alarms. But every now and again you get lucky. There was an unconfirmed sighting of you at Drury. Then someone came to me, said three strangers had been seen in Windrush. The interesting bit was that there was an Alpha girl with two Omegas. I’ve had my scouts tracking you for four days.’
‘Why?’ Piper interrupted him.
‘Because we have things in common.’
Piper laughed, the sound somehow louder in the darkness. ‘Us? Look at yourself.’
The Ringmaster might have travelled away from Wyndham, but he still had the plush appearance of a Councillor. Somewhere, not far from here, would be a tent, carried and erected by his soldiers, and outfitted with clean bedding. While we’d travelled on foot, thigh-deep in drifts of ash, or footsore over rocky hills, he would have ridden. His men probably fetched him water to wash in – his face and hands showed none of the grime that marked the three of us. And by the look of his rounded cheeks, he’d never had to pick the grubs off a mushroom that was his only meal at the end of a long night of walking, or spend ten minutes scraping the last scraps of flesh from a lizard’s thorny carcass. Our hunger was a garment that we could not remove, and as I looked at his well-fed face, I joined in with Piper’s laughter. Zoe, behind me, spat on the ground.
‘I know why you’re laughing,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘But we have more in common than you know. We want the same thing.’
It was Zoe’s turn to laugh. ‘If you knew what I’d like to see done to you and the other bastards on the Council, you wouldn’t be saying that.’
‘I’ve told you already – you’re making a mistake if you assume we’re all the same.’
Piper spoke. ‘You’re all happy to sleep in feather beds while Omegas suffer. What difference does it make to us if you bicker amongst yourselves about the best ways to screw us over? You kill one another, periodically, but things don’t get any better for us.’
‘Things have changed.’
‘Let me guess,’ Piper said. ‘You care about Omegas, all of a sudden?’
‘No. Not at all.’ His honesty stopped even Zoe, who’d been on the point of interrupting him.
The Ringmaster continued, making no pretence of shame. ‘I care about Alphas. I want to do what’s best for them. That’s my job, just as yours is to act in the best interests of your own people.’
‘I’m not in charge of the Assembly anymore,’ Piper said. He gestured at himself – his ragged clothes, his dirty face. ‘Do I look like the leader of the resistance to you?’
The Ringmaster ignored him. ‘What The Reformer and The General are doing now, or trying to do, is a risk to all of us – Alphas and Omegas alike.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Don’t play coy with me,’ he said. ‘You escaped from Wyndham fort through the tank rooms. You know they’re resurrecting the machines, the Electric. And I suspect you know more than you’d admit about The Confessor’s database, too – I’ve never swallowed The Reformer’s story that it was The Confessor’s twin, alone, who killed her.’
I said nothing.
‘For years I worked closely with The General, and The Reformer too,’ he said. ‘I was even willing to tolerate his closeness with The Confessor.’ There was a curl of distaste in his upper lip. ‘She was useful, at least. But there came a stage when our agendas diverged. It’s become clear to me that your twin and The General no longer give any credence to the taboo. They pay lip service to it – they know that’s what the public demands. But they’re pushing at it. Always pushing.
‘They’ve been working as secretively as they can, but they can’t do it all alone. Over the past year or more, some of the soldiers from their personal squadrons have come to me. They’ve seen the things they’re guarding: the tanks. The database. I rose up through the army, unlike The Reformer or The General, for all that she’s taken a soldier’s name for herself. I understand the soldiers, the ordinary people. I know how deep the taboo runs. Your twin and The General are so enthralled by their ideas, they’ve underestimated how much most people hate and fear the machines.’
‘More than they fear the Omegas?’ I asked.
‘It’s all the same thing,’ he said. ‘People know that. The machines caused the blast, caused the twinning, and the Omegas.’
That was how he saw us: as an aberration – a horror to be listed along with the blast. A problem to be solved.
He went on. ‘When The Confessor was killed, and her database trashed, I hoped that might be the end of it. But your brother’s and The General’s enthusiasm for the machines is unabated. It’s already gone too far. The Judge was the last one on the Council with the power to openly oppose them. Even when they had his twin, towards the end, he still stood firm on the taboo, because he knew the public wouldn’t stand for it if he didn’t. So they killed his twin, and him, as soon as they figured they didn’t need him anymore.’
‘What about the others on the Council?’ Piper said. ‘Do they know what The Reformer and The General are doing? What they’re planning?’
‘Not many. Most have given their tacit approval: they’re not looking too closely. They’re happy to benefit if it works, and they don’t want to be implicated if it all goes wrong.’
What a luxury it would be, I thought, to choose ignorance. To shrug off the burden of knowledge.
‘Then there are those with no choice,’ he said. ‘Those who didn’t get to their own twins before The Reformer and The General did.’
‘What about your twin?’ I asked.
‘I have her,’ he said. ‘Not in the Keeping Rooms, but under guard, with soldiers I can trust.’
I tensed my neck muscles against the shudder that rose in me. There were still nights when I dreamed I was back in the cell at the Keeping Rooms, the formless days passing, and me trapped forever, a prisoner of time.
‘You think that’s better than the Keeping Rooms?’
‘It’s safer,’ he said. ‘For her and me. The way things are at the moment, I don’t think I could protect her in Wyndham. Not even in the Keeping Rooms.’
‘Why have you sought us out?’ I said.
‘For the last few years, since I realised the extent of their obsession with the machines, I’ve been trying to gather information, learn as much as I can about their plans. I’ve tried using other seers. There’s only a handful of them. Their powers vary so much – some are of no practical use, and most of them are broken.’ He said it so offhandedly, as though when the madness claimed us, a seer was no more than a cartwheel with a broken spar, or a rusted bucket.
‘You, though.’ He turned back to me. ‘From what I hear, you could be of some use. And if you’re working with the resistance,’ he nodded at Piper and Zoe, ‘then there’s even more to be gained from some kind of cooperation.’
‘I’ve told you,’ Piper said, enunciating each syllable slowly. ‘I’m not in charge anymore.’
‘You don’t want to work to stop the tanks, then?’
‘What is it that you think you want from us?’ I interrupted.
The four of us were circling one another, a wary dance amongst the poles, while his soldiers watched from a distance.
‘I need your help,’ he said, ‘to stop your twin and The General, and their pursuit of the machines.’
It seemed absurd. He was a Councillor, soldiers and money at his command, and powerful beyond what any of us, ragged, thin and exhausted, could imagine.
‘You want help?’ Piper said. ‘Then ask your Council cronies.’
The Ringmaster laughed. ‘You really think we’re one big happy family, sitting around the Council chamber backslapping one another?’ He turned from Piper to me. ‘When you were in the Keeping Rooms, who did you think The Reformer was protecting you from? A Councillor’s greatest enemies are those closest to him – those with the most to gain if he slips from power. Look at what happened to The Judge.’
‘Why would we help you manoeuvre against them?’ Piper said. ‘You’ve only come to us because you’re being edged out of power, and you’re desperate.’
‘Edged out of power?’ The Ringmaster met Piper’s gaze. ‘You’d know how that feels.’
I interrupted him. ‘You chose to work with them, before the machines drove you apart. Why would we work with somebody who hates Omegas?’
‘Because I can offer your people a better life than the tanks. The refuge system has worked well for decades, as a humane way of dealing with the Omega problem. Maintained by tithes, it’s a workable solution. Without your brother and The General, things could continue the way they used to.’
‘That’s why I could never work with you,’ I said. ‘There isn’t an Omega problem. Only those problems that the Council’s created for us: the tithes. Pushing us further and further out, to land where nothing will grow. The branding, and all the other restrictions that make it nearly impossible to live.’
‘That’s all immaterial now. We both know the only thing that matters is stopping the tanks.’
‘Then why didn’t you just come with more soldiers,’ I said, ‘and take me back to Wyndham? With me as your prisoner, you know you could force Zach to do whatever you like.’
‘I would have, if I’d thought it would do me any good. Thought about killing you, too, to take him out altogether.’ He was as unapologetic as his blade itself, whose indentation I could still feel on my throat. ‘A few months ago, it might have worked. But it’s bigger than your brother, now. He allied himself too closely to The Confessor. Now she’s gone, it’s weakened his standing. The General’s been around for longer than him; she’s better established on the Council. When the two of them killed The Judge, she grabbed power, and she’s not going to let it go. If I threaten The Reformer, or even kill him, it’s not going to put a stop to this. And if The General even suspected that we were using you as a hostage to control your twin, she’d kill him herself.’
Before I escaped from Wyndham, Zach had said to me: I’ve started something, and I need to finish it. But he was caught up now, as if trapped in the workings of one of his own machines.
‘Anyway,’ The Ringmaster went on, ‘you’re more use to me out here, as a contact with the resistance.’
‘I won’t be used.’
I was thinking of Piper, and what he’d said to me, just a few days ago: It’s your job to endure the visions. And it’s mine to decide how we can use them. I was tired of men who saw me as a tool to be wielded.
‘We could benefit each other,’ said The Ringmaster. ‘We want the same thing.’
‘No we don’t.’ This accusation cut me more than his blade had done. ‘You want to be rid of us, just like Zach does – you just disapprove of his methods.’
‘Perhaps our goals diverge eventually, but right now, we both want to stop what’s happening with the tanks. So the question is, how important is that to you?’
‘I won’t help you.’
Piper talked over me. ‘If we were to help you, what could you offer us in exchange?’
‘Information. The kind of insider details that could help the resistance to stop the tankings. The General and The Reformer might be freezing me out, but I still have access that you could only dream of.’
‘Information alone’s no good to us, if we can’t even act on it,’ I said. ‘There might have been a time when secret information-gathering and hiding away was enough. But our people have bled and died on the island. If you want to stop the tankings, you need to rally those soldiers loyal to you, and help us.’
‘You ask too much,’ he said. ‘If I take arms against your brother and The General, it’s open war. People will die – yours as well as mine.’
‘People have already died,’ I said. ‘And more are going to be tanked – all Omegas, eventually. It’s worse than death.’
‘I’m willing to help you stop it. Why won’t you do the same?’ His voice was persuasive – I could imagine him holding forth in the Council Hall. ‘These machines are powerful in ways we can’t even understand. Who knows what the tanking could do to us?’
He was looking me in the eyes and I knew his concern was real. But I also knew that he only feared for the Alphas. His ‘us’ didn’t include the Omegas in the tanks. We were nothing more than the background noise. And I reminded myself, too, that he controlled much of the army. I thought of the soldiers I’d seen in New Hobart, whipping an Omega prisoner until the flesh of his back split like overripe fruit. I thought of the soldiers who had attacked the island. Had they reported to him, followed his orders?
‘You should be against the tanks because it’s wrong to torture people by keeping them underwater and half-dead,’ I said. ‘Because it’s an unspeakable crime. Not because of your fear of what the machines could do. Not because of the taboo.’
‘I’m not without compassion,’ he said. ‘Stopping the machines benefits Omegas too. Your people, more than anyone else, are victims of what the machines wrought.’ He looked pointedly at Piper’s left shoulder. ‘I’m not one of the idiots who swallows the Council line about Omegas as evil deviants. I understand that you’re more to be pitied than hated.’
‘We don’t want your pity, or need it,’ said Piper. ‘We need your help. Your swords, and your soldiers.’
‘We both know that can’t happen.’
‘Then we have nothing further to talk about,’ I said.
He scanned my face. I didn’t look away.
‘You’ll change your mind,’ he said. ‘When you do, come to me.’
He made to turn away, but I called after him.
‘You want us to trust you,’ I said, ‘but you haven’t even told us your real name.’
‘You know my name,’ he said.
‘Not your Council name. Your real name.’
‘I already told you.’ His voice was granite – it yielded nothing. ‘What would it change, if I told you the name my parents gave to me? Why would that be any truer than the name I chose for myself?’
I refused to be dismissed by him. ‘Why choose The Ringmaster then?’ I said.
He raised his chin slightly, appraising me.
‘When I was a child,’ he said, ‘a minstrel show came through our town. They put on a hell of a show: not just bards, but jugglers and acrobats too. A horse that danced on its hind legs to the music, and a man who’d trained snakes to crawl all over his body. It felt like half the town turned out to watch. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. But when everyone else was oohing and aahing at the dancing horse, and the man who walked on stilts, I was watching the man who introduced them. I saw how he got us hyped up for each act, and how he jumped in to cut an act short if it wasn’t grabbing us. He orchestrated the whole thing. The performers were impressive enough, in their own way, but the Ringmaster was the one running the show. He had the audience performing like that dancing horse, by the end, and they filled his hat with coins without thinking twice.
He bent closer, as if he were telling me a secret. ‘I never wanted to be the man on stilts, or the snake-charmer. I wanted to be the Ringmaster: the one who makes things happen. That’s what I am now. You’d do well to remember it.’
He stepped back, and began to walk away to where his soldiers waited, barely visible in the darkness.
‘Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now,’ Zoe shouted at his back.
‘That’s what your twin would do,’ he said, turning to me. ‘The Reformer would have a knife in my back before I got three paces away.’ He gave a grin – the quick twist of the mouth, a flash of teeth like the glint of a blade. ‘I suppose it’s a question of how alike you are.’
And it was a kind of courage, to turn his back on us and take those steps. His soldiers were too far away to help him. His death would be a matter of moments. I knew exactly how Piper would draw back his arm. The precise movement with which he would throw the knife: his arm straightening; the knife not tossed but released, unwavering, to bury itself in the back of The Ringmaster’s neck.
‘Don’t do it.’ I grabbed Piper’s raised arm, his muscles taut beneath my fingertips. He didn’t shift when I wrapped my hands around his forearm. His knife was poised, his eyes following The Ringmaster’s path amongst the broken ghosts of poles. Next to him, Zoe had a knife raised too, assessing the soldiers waiting beyond The Ringmaster.
‘Give me one good reason why he should live,’ said Piper.
‘No.’
He looked down at me, as if hearing me for the first time.
‘I’m not going to play that game,’ I went on. ‘It’s the same thing you asked me on the island, when the others wanted me dead. I won’t do it – trading lives, weighing lives against others.’
‘He’s a risk to us, now,’ Piper said. ‘It’s not safe to let him live. And he’s a Councillor, for crying out loud. A terrible man.’
All of that was true, but I still didn’t release Piper’s arm.
‘The world’s full of terrible people. But he came to talk, not to harm us. What gives us the right to kill him, and his twin?’
In the silence that followed, The Ringmaster’s words rang in my head: I suppose it’s a question of how alike you are.
The Ringmaster had almost reached his soldiers when Piper shook free of my arm and strode after him.
‘Wait,’ Piper commanded.
The soldiers rushed to surround The Ringmaster, who had turned back to face Piper. The swordsmen had their weapons raised. Even the archer, his right hand still clutching the knife hilt buried in his shoulder, had drawn a dagger from his belt and raised it towards Piper with his shaking left hand.
‘You have something of ours,’ Piper said, leaning forward and calmly pulling Zoe’s blade from the archer’s flesh. The man inhaled sharply and gave a strangled curse, but under The Ringmaster’s impassive gaze he didn’t retaliate, just pressed his hand tighter against the wound. Fresh blood surged between his fingers and spilled down his knuckles.
The Ringmaster nodded once at Piper, then looked beyond him to me.
‘When you change your mind, come to me,’ he said. Then he turned and walked away, calling his soldiers to follow him.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_0ad13f78-c742-5888-a12f-e43ef5d5dec0)
‘You need to learn to fight,’ Zoe said the next morning. Piper was on lookout, and Zoe and I were supposed to be resting, but our encounter with The Ringmaster had left us both edgy.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘Nobody’s suggesting that you’re going to become some kind of super-assassin,’ she said. ‘But Piper and I haven’t got time to save you every five minutes.’
‘I don’t want to kill.’ I remembered the blood smell from the battle of the island, and how each death had been doubled for me, my visions showing me not just those slain in the battle, but also their twins, ambushed by their own deaths.
‘You don’t have a choice,’ she said. ‘People like The Ringmaster – they’re going to keep coming for you. You need to be able to defend yourself. And I can’t always be here. Piper either.’
‘I hate the idea of it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to kill. Not even Council soldiers. What about their twins?’
‘You think I enjoy it?’ said Zoe quietly.
I was silent for a few moments. Finally, I said, ‘I won’t fight unless I’m being attacked.’
‘Only a few times a week, then, the way you’re going lately.’
When she raised one eyebrow like that, she reminded me of Kip.
‘Get out your knife,’ she said.
From its sheath at my belt, I pulled the dagger that Piper had given to me on the island. It was about as long as my forearm, the blade sharp on both sides, and narrowing to a vicious point. The hilt was wrapped in leather, wound tightly and sweat-darkened to almost black.
‘Could I learn to throw it, like you and Piper?’
She laughed, taking the dagger from me. ‘You’d be more likely to take your own ear off. This isn’t a throwing knife, anyway – not balanced right.’ She spun it casually between her forefinger and thumb. ‘And I’m not giving you any of my knives. But you can learn some basics, so you won’t be completely useless if we’re not around to save you.’
I looked up at her. Despite our arguments, it was hard to imagine her not being around. Her sarcastic asides were as familiar to me now as her wide shoulders, her restless hands. When we sat around the fire at night, the flick of her blade on her fingernails was as normal as the cicadas’ rasping.
‘Are you thinking of leaving?’
She shook her head but dodged my eyes.
‘Tell me the truth,’ I said.
‘Just concentrate,’ she said. ‘You need to learn this stuff.’ She tossed my dagger on the ground. ‘You won’t need that for now. And forget about high-kicks or backflips or any of that dramatic-looking stuff. Most of the time it’s grappling, close and ugly. There’s nothing pretty about fighting.’
‘I know that,’ I said. I’d seen it on the island: the clumsiness of desperation. Swords slipping in bloodied hands. Bodies that became slashed sacks, emptied of blood.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then we can get started.’
For the first few hours, she wouldn’t let me use my blade at all. Instead, she showed me how to use my elbows and knees to strike in close quarters. She showed me how to drive my elbow backwards into the guts of an attacker holding me from behind, and how to throw my head back and upwards to connect with his nose. She taught me how to bring my knee up to bury it sharply in an assailant’s groin, and how to throw my whole body weight behind the sideways jab of an elbow to the jaw.
‘Don’t hit at somebody,’ she said, ‘or you’ll make no impact. Hit through them. You have to follow through. Aim for a spot six inches under the skin.’
I was sweaty and tired by the time she let me try with the knife. Even then, at first she didn’t teach me anything but defence: how to block a strike with my blade, shielding my hand with the hilt. How to stand side-on so that I presented a smaller target, and to keep my knees bent, legs wide, so that I couldn’t easily be knocked over.
Then she got to the blade itself. How to strike without signalling it beforehand. How to go for the arteries between groin and thigh. How to make a low slash at the stomach, and how to twist the blade on the way out.
‘I don’t want to know this,’ I said, grimacing.
‘You’re enjoying it,’ she said. ‘For once you’re not slouching around. You haven’t looked this animated in weeks.’
I wondered if it were true. There was a satisfaction in the mastery of each move, in feeling the actions become familiar. But at the same time I was repulsed by the idea of gutting anyone. Could actions and their consequences be so neatly separated? The movements permitted no uncertainty, and no ambiguity: you did them. That was it. All morning we’d repeated them, again and again. It was comforting, in the same way that biting my nails was comforting: a mindless action that gave some respite from thought. But when I bit my nails, all I ended up with was my own fingers raw-tipped and sore. The routines Zoe was teaching me would leave a body sundered, robbed of blood. Somewhere a twin, too, would bleed out, and it would be my hand dealing that double death.
Zoe resumed the fighting stance, waiting for me to mirror her.
‘There’s no point if you don’t practise,’ she said. ‘It needs to be so that your knife’s in your hand before you realise you need it. It needs to feel seamless – so it comes to you without thinking.’
I’d seen how she and Piper moved, and fought – their bodies fluid, not responding to their thoughts but becoming their thoughts. It was true what she’d said – There’s nothing pretty aboutfighting – and I knew that however striking Zoe’s and Piper’s movements, the results were the same: blood, death. Flies swarming on sticky bodies. But I still found myself admiring the certainty of their bodies as they inscribed their answers on the world with a blade.
It was past noon when we stopped.
‘Enough,’ she said, when I clumsily blocked her final parry. ‘You’re tired. That’s how stupid mistakes happen.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, as I slipped my knife back into my belt. I smiled at her.
She shrugged. ‘It’s in my interests to give you a better chance of getting yourself out of trouble, for a change.’ She was already walking away. She was a door, forever slamming shut in my face.
‘Why are you like this?’ I called after her. ‘Why do you always have to cut me down and stalk off?’
She looked back at me.
‘What do you want from me?’ she said. ‘You want me to hold your hand, and braid your hair? Have we not given you enough, me and Piper?’
I couldn’t answer. More than once, she’d proved that she was willing to risk her life to protect me. It seemed petty to complain that she didn’t also give me her friendship.
‘I didn’t mean to see your dreams,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it. You don’t know what it’s like, being a seer.’
‘You’re not the first seer,’ she said, and she walked away. ‘I doubt you’ll be the last.’
*
It was dawn, two days later, when the bards came. We’d made camp just a few hours before, at a spot Zoe and Piper knew. It was a forested hill overlooking the road, with a spring nearby. Since The Ringmaster’s ambush we’d been edgy, flinching at every sound. To make it worse, for two days it hadn’t stopped raining. My blanket was a sodden load, dragging my rucksack until the straps chafed at my shoulders. The rain had thinned to a drizzle when we arrived, but everything was soaked and there was no chance of a fire. Piper took the first lookout shift. He spotted them in the tentative dawn light – two travellers making their way along the main road, in the opposite direction from where we’d come. He called us over. I’d been wrapped in a blanket in the shelter of the trees, and Zoe had just returned from a hunt, two freshly-dead rabbits swinging from her belt.
The newcomers were still only small figures on the road when we heard the music. As they drew closer, through the thinning fog we could see that one of them was thrumming her fingers on the drum hanging by her side, sounding out the rhythm of their steps. The other one, a bearded man with a staff, held a mouth organ to his lips with one hand, exploring fragments of a tune as they walked.
When they reached the point where the road curved away, they broke with it, instead heading up the hill through the longer grass, towards the woods where we sheltered.
‘We need to leave,’ said Zoe, already shoving her flask back into her bag.
‘How do they know the spot?’ I asked.
‘The same way that I do,’ Piper said. ‘From travelling this road many times before. They’re bards – they’re always on the road. This is the only spring for miles – they’re heading right for it.’
‘Pack your things,’ Zoe said to me.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘We could talk to them, at least. Tell them what we know.’
‘When are you going to learn that we need to be more cautious?’ Zoe said.
‘In case word gets out?’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do? We’ve been trying to spread the word ever since we left the deadlands, and we’re getting nowhere.’
‘It’s one thing for word to get out about the refuges,’ Piper said. ‘Another for word to get out about us, and where we are. If it had been Zach, and not The Ringmaster, who found us the other day, we’d all be in cells by now, or worse. I’m trying to protect you, and keep us all alive. We don’t know who we can trust.’
‘You saw what happened at the refuge,’ I said. ‘And there are more people turning themselves in every day, thinking it’s a haven. We could stop them, if we could spread the word about what really happens there.’
‘And you think two strangers can do it better than us?’ Piper said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We need people who travel without raising suspicion. Who draw a crowd to hear them wherever they go. People who can make the news catch on, so it starts to spread by itself.’ An Omega bard could count on a welcome at any Omega settlement, and an Alpha bard could expect to be hosted at any Alpha village. Bards were the roaming memory of the world. They sang the stories that would otherwise be buried along with their subjects. Their songs traced the love stories of individuals, and the bloodlines of families, and the history of whole villages, towns, or regions. And they sang imaginary tales as well: great battles and fantastical happenings. They played on feast days, and at burials, and their songs were a currency accepted all over the land.
‘Nobody’s listening to us,’ I said. ‘They listen to bards. And you know how it works. Songs spread like fire, or plague.’
‘They’re not exactly positive things,’ Zoe pointed out.
‘They’re powerful things,’ I said.
Piper was watching me carefully.
‘Even if we can trust the bards, it would be a lot to ask of them,’ he said.
‘Give them the choice,’ I said.
Neither Zoe nor Piper spoke, but they’d stopped their packing. The music was drawing nearer. I looked back down the hill to the pair approaching. The bearded man wasn’t leaning on his staff; instead, he swung it loosely in front of him, back and forth, sweeping the air for obstacles. He was blind.
When they reached the edge of the woods, Piper called a greeting to them. The music stopped, the sounds of the forest suddenly loud in the new silence.
‘Who’s there?’ called the woman.
‘Fellow travellers,’ said Piper.
They stepped into the clearing. She was younger than us, her red hair plaited and reaching all the way down her back. I couldn’t see her mutation, though she was branded.
‘You heading north, to Pullman market?’ the man asked. He still held the mouth organ in one hand, the staff in the other. His eyes weren’t closed – they were missing altogether. Below the brand on his forehead, the skin stretched uninterrupted across his eye sockets. His hands had extra fingers, unruly offshoots from every knuckle, like a sprouting potato. Seven fingers, at least, on each hand.
Piper avoided his question. ‘We’re leaving tonight, when it’s dark. You’ll have the clearing to yourselves.’
The man shrugged. ‘If you’re travelling at night, then I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t want to tell us where you’re headed.’
‘You’re travelling at night, too,’ I pointed out.
‘Night and day, at the moment,’ the woman said. ‘The market starts in two days. We were delayed at Abberley when the flooding swept the bridge.’
‘And I always travel in the dark, even if the sun’s shining.’ The man gestured to his sealed eye sockets. ‘So who am I to judge you for it?’
‘Our travel’s not your business,’ said Zoe. The woman stared at her, and kept staring, taking in Zoe’s unbranded face, her Alpha body. I wondered whether my scrutiny of the bards had been so obvious.
‘True enough,’ the man said, unflustered by Zoe’s tone.
He and the woman moved to the centre of the clearing. He didn’t take her arm, but guided himself with his staff. Watching him negotiate the unseen world reminded me of how it felt to be a seer. When I’d navigated the reef, or the caves under Wyndham, my mind had been groping the air for directions, reaching out before me just as the bard’s staff did.
He settled on a fallen log. ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘If you’re travelling at night, you’re avoiding the Council patrols. But you don’t move like Omegas.’
‘One of them’s not an Omega,’ said the woman, shooting another look at Zoe.
‘She’s with us,’ said Piper quickly.
‘It’s not just her.’ The blind man turned to face Piper. ‘It’s you, too.’
‘I’m an Omega,’ Piper said. ‘Our companion here is, too – your friend will tell you that. The other lady may not be an Omega, but she’s with us, and isn’t looking for any trouble.’
‘What did you mean, they don’t move like Omegas?’ I asked the man.
He swung his head to face me. ‘Without eyes, you get good at listening. I’m not talking about hearing the sound of a limp, or crutches. That’s the obvious stuff. But it’s more than that. It’s the way Omegas walk. Most of us sound a little slumped. We’ve all copped enough blows, missed enough meals, to keep our heads low. Most of us, you can hear it in our steps: we don’t step high, or wide. We drag our feet: a little bit of shuffling. A little bit of flinching. The two of them,’ he gestured towards Piper and Zoe, ‘they don’t sound like that.’
I was amazed that he could tell so much just from the sound of their movements, but I knew what he meant. I’d noted the same thing when I met Piper for the first time on the island: the unabashed way that he held himself. Most people on the island had begun to shed the diffidence that the mainland stamped on Omegas, but Piper wore none of it. Even now, thin and with the knees of his trousers blackened and fraying, he moved with the same loose-limbed confidence as he always had.
The man turned back to Piper. ‘You don’t move like an Omega, any more than the Alpha lady does. But if you’re on the road with an Alpha, I’m guessing your story’s not an ordinary one.’
‘You heard what they said: their story’s not our business,’ said the woman, pulling his arm. ‘We should go.’
‘Surely we’ve covered enough miles for a rest?’ he said, planting his staff in front of him.
‘Why are you so keen to stick around?’ Zoe asked him. ‘Most Omegas keep well clear of us. Of me, anyway.’
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I’m a bard. I collect stories, the way some people collect coins, or trinkets. It’s my trade. And even a blind man can see that there’s a story here.’
‘It’s a story we can’t share with just anybody,’ said Piper. ‘It’d mean trouble for us, as you well know.’
‘I’m not one to talk to Council patrols, if that’s what you mean,’ said the man. ‘Even a bard gets a hard time from the Council these days. They’re no friends of mine.’
‘There’s talk that the Council wants to stop Omegas from being bards at all,’ the woman added. ‘It’s all the travelling around that they don’t like. They like to keep tabs on us.’
‘I’d challenge the best of the Alpha bards to play as well as me,’ said the man, flourishing his extra fingers.
‘The soldiers would have your fingers off if they heard you say that,’ said the woman.
‘We’re not about to tell them,’ said Piper. ‘And if you can keep quiet about having seen us here, I don’t see why we can’t camp together for the day.’
The woman and Zoe still looked wary, but the blind man smiled.
‘Then let’s make camp. I could use a rest. I’m Leonard, by the way. And this is Eva.’
‘I won’t tell you our names,’ said Piper. ‘But I won’t lie to you, at least, and give false names.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Leonard said. Eva sat next to him and began pulling their things from her rucksack. She had some nuggets of coal wrapped in waxed paper and still dry.
‘Fine,’ said Zoe. ‘But we need to cook quickly – we’re still too close to the road to risk a fire once this fog’s cleared.’
While Piper stoked the fire and Zoe sat sharpening her knives, I joined Leonard on the log.
‘You said the others didn’t move like Omegas.’ I tried to keep my voice low enough that the others wouldn’t hear. ‘What about me?’
‘You neither,’ he said.
‘But I don’t feel like them. They’ve always been so –’ I paused. ‘So sure. So certain about everything.’
‘I didn’t say you were like them. I just said you didn’t walk like other Omegas.’ He shrugged. ‘Girl, you’re hardly here.’
‘What do you mean?’
He paused, and gave a laugh. ‘You walk like you think the earth begrudges you a space to plant your feet.’
I thought of the moment after Kip’s death, when Zach had found me slumped on the platform at the top of the silo. The air had been so heavy. If Zach hadn’t begged me to run, to save his own skin, I doubted I’d have managed to drag myself upright and leave. All these weeks and all these miles later, I hadn’t realised that I was still hauling the weight of the sky with each step.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_2302597a-8bfe-51a8-99b8-ec209a08c8e8)
We ate the rabbits, as well as some foraged mushrooms and greens that Eva pulled from her bag.
‘Are you a seer as well?’ I asked her while we ate.
She snorted. ‘Hardly.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a seer. ‘I just couldn’t see your mutation.’
Leonard’s face had turned serious.
‘She has the most feared mutation of all,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t spotted it already.’
There was a long pause. I scanned Eva again but could see nothing unusual. What could be more feared than being a seer, with its promise of madness?
Leonard leaned forward, and gave a stage whisper. ‘Red hair.’
Our laughter startled two blackbirds, that took off, screeching.
‘Look more closely,’ Eva said. She turned her head to the side and lifted her thick braid. There, nestled into the back of her neck, was a second mouth. She opened it briefly, baring two crooked teeth.
‘Only shame is that I can’t sing out of it,’ she said, letting her braid drop. ‘Then I wouldn’t need Leonard for the harmonies, and I wouldn’t have to put up with his grumbling.’
When the fire was extinguished and the sun risen, Leonard cleaned his hands carefully before he took up his guitar.
‘Can’t get rabbit grease on the strings,’ he said, weaving his handkerchief between his clustered fingers.
‘If you’re going to be making a racket, I’d better keep watch,’ said Zoe. ‘If anything comes along the road, we’ll need to see them before they hear us.’ She looked up at the tree above her. Piper dropped to kneel on one knee and she climbed, without speaking, on to his bent leg, balanced for a moment with a hand on his shoulder, and then jumped up to grasp the branch. She swung herself upwards, feet pointed and body tucked. I could see what Leonard had meant, when he’d talked about the way she and Piper moved. The ease with which they inhabited their bodies.
When I envied Zoe, though, it wasn’t her unbranded face I coveted, or her confidence. Not even her freedom from the visions that shredded my mind. It was the way that she and Piper moved together, without even speaking. The closeness that didn’t require words. There’d been a time when Zach and I had been like that, long before we were split, and before he’d turned against me. But after all that had happened since, the intimacy of that shared childhood seemed as distant as the island. It was a place to which we could never return.
Eva took up her drum, and Leonard’s right hand plucked at the strings, tickling the music out of the instrument, while the fingers of his left hand moved more slowly.
He’d been right, I knew, when he’d told me that he’d heard my hesitant footsteps. I’d been taunting my body with cold and hunger. Avoiding every consolation, because there would be no consolation for the dead I’d left in my wake. But this music was a pleasure that I couldn’t dodge. Like the ash that had plagued us in the east, the music would not be denied. I leaned back against a tree and allowed myself to listen.
It was more noise than we’d permitted ourselves for weeks. Our lives had become so muted. We crept at night, wincing at the breaking of twigs beneath our boots. We hid from patrols, and talked often in whispers. We were at risk, every moment, until it began to feel as though sound itself had become something we had to ration. Now, even the most flippant of the bards’ songs felt like a small act of defiance: to hear the music ringing out. To permit ourselves something more than bare survival.
Some of the songs were slow and sad; others were raucous, the notes sizzling and jumping like corn kernels in a hot pan. Several had lyrics bawdy enough to set us all laughing. And when I glanced away from the fire, I saw that even Zoe’s feet, hanging from the branch high in the tree, were swinging in time with the music.
‘Did your twin have the talent for music as well?’ I asked Leonard, when he and Eva stopped for a drink.
He shrugged. ‘All I have of her is a name on my registration papers. That and the town where we were born.’ He fished the worn sheet of paper from his bag and waved it at me, laughing. ‘They can’t make up their minds, the Council. Can’t do enough to keep us separate, but then they make us carry our twins around in our pockets, everywhere we go.’ He traced the paper as if he would feel the word under his fingertip. ‘Elise, it says. That’s what Eva tells me – she can read a little. But that’s my twin’s name, on there somewhere.’
‘And you don’t remember anything about her at all?’
He shrugged again. ‘I was a baby when they sent me away. That’s all I know of her: those marks on paper, that I can’t even see.’
I thought again of Zach. What did I have of him, now? I had been thirteen when I was branded and sent away. Not long enough for me, and too long for him. During my years in the Keeping Rooms, he’d come to see me, but only rarely. When I’d last seen him, in the silo after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths, he’d seemed fevered, frantic. He had been hissing, cut loose, like the electric wires that Kip and I had slashed.
When the next song started, my mind was still lingering in the silo with Zach, hearing again the tremor of terror in his voice when he’d told me to run. Eva had swapped her drum for a flute, so it was only Leonard’s voice tracing the words. It was mid-morning, the sun through the trees casting stripes on the clearing. It took me a moment to realise what Leonard was singing about.
They came in dark ships
They came at night
They laid The Confessor’s kiss
On each islander’s throat with a knife.
Piper stood up. To my left, Zoe dropped quietly from the lookout tree to the ground. She moved closer to where we sat in a circle around the ashes.
‘I heard they didn’t kill them all,’ Piper said.
Leonard stopped singing, but his fingers on the guitar never hesitated, the tune continuing to unfurl from his hands.
‘Is that what you heard?’ he said. The music played on. ‘Well, songs always exaggerate.’
He went back to the song.
They said there was no island
They said it wasn’t true
But they came for the island in their dark ships
And they’re coming next for you.
‘You’d want to be careful who’s listening, when you sing that song,’ said Zoe. ‘You could bring down trouble.’
Leonard smiled. ‘And you haven’t got trouble already, the three of you?’
‘Who told you about the island?’ said Piper.
‘The Council themselves are putting the word out,’ Leonard said. ‘Spreading the news that they found the island, crushed the resistance.’
‘That song you’re singing is hardly the Council’s version, though,’ said Piper. ‘What do you know of what happened there?’
‘People talk to bards,’ he said. ‘They tell us things.’ He strummed a few more chords. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t need to be told about the island. I’m guessing you know more than I do about what happened there.’
Piper was silent. I knew that he was remembering. I’d seen it too. Not only seen it, but heard the shouts and whimpers. Smelled the butcher’s block scent of the streets.
‘No song can describe it,’ said Piper. ‘Let alone change it.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Leonard. ‘But a song can at least tell people about it. Tell them what the Council did to those people. Warn them what the Council’s capable of.’
‘And scare them away from getting involved with the resistance?’ Zoe said.
‘Perhaps,’ said Leonard. ‘That’s why the Council’s telling their version. I like to think my version might do something different – perhaps help people to realise why the resistance is so necessary. All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.’
‘If we gave you another story to tell,’ I said, ‘you know it could be dangerous for you.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Eva said.
Piper and Zoe didn’t say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.
The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard’s guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn’t tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we’d destroyed with The Confessor.
When we’d finished, there was a long silence.
‘There’s good news in there too,’ Leonard said quietly. ‘About The Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from round there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumour that she’d been killed. But I hadn’t dared to believe it.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, looking away from him. I didn’t want to see Leonard’s answering smile. He didn’t know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.
‘And the rest of it – about the tanks. Is it really true?’ said Eva.
Leonard answered her before we could.
‘It’s all true. Hell on earth, it’s too far-fetched to make up.’ He rubbed at his absent eyes. ‘It explains everything. Why the Council’s been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They’re pushing us toward the refuges.’
‘And do you think you could put it in a song?’ I said.
He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. ‘There’s a song in your story, that’s for sure, though it won’t be a pretty one,’ he said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.
‘Like Cass said: it’ll be dangerous, spreading the word,’ said Piper.
Leonard nodded. ‘True enough. But it’s dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn’t spread.’
‘It’s a lot to ask of you,’ I said.
‘You’re not asking it of me,’ Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke – his words were grave and quiet. ‘But you told me what you know. And now that I’ve heard it, I have an obligation.’
*
For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me: No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this? But mainly they didn’t talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He’d pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.
Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading and rearranging. When Piper relieved me at the lookout post, I fell asleep listening to Leonard’s singing, the gravelled edge of his deep voice.
When I woke later, the moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Leonard was still playing. I walked down to the spring. The music followed me all the way to the water, which might be why Zoe didn’t hear me coming. I saw her standing close to where the stream burst from the rock, about twenty feet ahead of me. She was leaning against a tree, one arm wrapped loosely around it, her head resting on the trunk as she tilted her face upwards. She swayed slightly to the music that filtered through the trees. Her eyes were closed.
I’d seen Zoe naked, when we washed at rivers. I’d seen her asleep. I’d even shared her dreams, her sleeping mind a window onto the sea. But I’d never seen her as unguarded as at that moment. I turned away, as if I’d seen something shameful, and began to retreat. She opened her eyes.
‘Are you spying on me?’
‘Just fetching water,’ I said, lifting the empty water flask like a flag of surrender.
She turned back to the spring. When she spoke, she didn’t look at me. ‘There used to be a bard who came through our parents’ village, a few times a year. She played the violin like nobody you’ve ever seen. Piper and I were only tiny, then – we used to sneak out after bedtime to listen.’
She said nothing more. I hesitated before speaking – I was remembering her blade at my stomach, after she’d learned that I’d seen her dreams.
‘If you want to talk –’ I said, eventually.
‘You’re meant to be the expert on the future,’ she interrupted, striding towards me and grabbing the flask. ‘Concentrate on that. That’s what we need you for. Keep your nose out of my past.’ She knelt at the spring and wrenched the stopper out before filling the flask.
We stood facing each other. I watched the water drip from her wet hand, and I tried to come up with words that she couldn’t throw back at me.
Before I could speak, the music stopped suddenly. From up the hill, Piper was calling to us. Zoe strode past me and didn’t look back.
‘The song’s not finished yet,’ Leonard warned us, when we were gathered around him and Eva. A fog had descended with the darkness, and Piper had rekindled the fire. ‘It’ll change, too,’ he added, ‘as we travel, and as other bards take it up. If a song’s alive enough, it changes.’ I remembered the different versions of songs that I’d heard. The song about the blast, which changed from bard to bard, or from season to season.
Leonard began quietly, his fingers strumming a series of almost cheerful chords on the guitar. There was none of the intricate fingerpicking that had impressed me when he’d performed for us earlier. ‘I’ve kept it simple,’ he said, as if he could see me staring at his fingers. ‘If you want it to catch on, it has to be something that any bard could play, without fifteen fingers.’
As the tune went on, melancholy notes were slipped in like contraband, so that by the time they reached the chorus, the tune had soured. Eva’s melody parted from Leonard’s, her voice climbing to new and mournful highs, as his stayed steady and low. Their voices counterbalanced and resonated, until the space in between the notes was thick with longing.
There’s no refuge in the refuge,
No peace behind those gates.
No freedom once you turn to them
Just living death, where the tanks await.
They throw you in a cage of glass
Not living, and not dying.
Trapped inside a floating hell
Where none can hear you crying.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.
Oh, you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
They drive us to the blighted land
Then bleed us with their tithes,
And if you go to the refuge
They’ll take your very lives.
The taboo has been forsaken
Within the refuge walls.
The machines have been awakened
And the Council plans to tank us all.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.
Oh, you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
When Leonard and Eva had played for us in the morning, we’d whooped along with some of the fast jigs, and clapped after some of the pieces where Leonard’s fingers had been at their swiftest. But none of us clapped now. The last notes slipped away, between the trees that encircled us like a gathered crowd. Our silence was the song’s best testament.
I wanted to send something into the world that wasn’t fire, or blood, or blades. Too many of my actions in recent months were bloodstained. The song was different – it was something we had built, rather than destroyed. But I knew that it was still a risk. If Leonard was caught, the song would hang him as surely as any act of violent resistance would. If Council soldiers heard him sing, or traced the treason back to him, the song would wind itself around his neck sure as a noose, and it would be his dirge, and Eva’s. Their twins’, too.
‘It’s a brave thing that the two of you’re doing,’ I said to Leonard, as we were packing up the camp in the dark.
He scoffed. ‘People fought and bled, on the island. I’m just an old blind man with a guitar.’
‘There are different kinds of courage,’ said Piper, emptying a flask of water on the fire, to ensure no telltale embers remained.
We said farewell to Leonard and Eva when we reached the road. A quick pressing of hands in the dark, and they were gone, heading east while we went west. Leonard was playing his mouth organ again, but distance rapidly dampened the music.
Over the next few days I found myself humming the chorus as I sharpened my dagger, matching the blade’s rasp to the beats of the song. I whistled the tune as I gathered wood for the fire. It was only a song, but it took hold in my mind like the ragweed that used to take over my mother’s garden.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_31486f25-ae53-5c8c-aace-3ca018fcb9e5)
I’d never seen anything like the Sunken Shore. When we arrived, after five nights of walking, it was dawn. Below us, it looked as if the sea had crept gradually inwards, the land surrendering in messy increments. There was no clear point where the sea met the land, like in the steep cliffs that Kip and I had seen on the south-west coast, or even in the coves near the east coast’s Miller River. Instead there was only a jumble of peninsulas and spits, divided by inlets that grasped inland like the sea’s fingers. In some places, the land petered out into swampy shallows before giving in entirely to the sea. Elsewhere, low islands were humped with straggled grey-green growth that might have been grass or seaweed.
‘It’s low-tide now,’ Piper said to me. ‘Half of those islands will be under by noon. The shallows of the peninsulas too. If you get caught out on the wrong spit of land when the tide turns, you can find yourself in trouble.’
‘How does Sally live here? They haven’t allowed Omegas to live on the coast for years.’
‘See out there?’ Piper pointed to the farthest reaches of the broken coast, where the spits of land gave way to the water, a series of loosely linked islands barely keeping above the encroaching sea. ‘Right out there, on some of the bleaker spits, it’s too salty to farm and too swampy for good fishing, and paths are there one minute and gone in the next tide. You couldn’t pay Alphas to live out there. Nobody goes there. Sally’s been hiding out there for decades.’
‘It’s not just the landscape that keeps people away,’ Zoe said. ‘Look.’
She pointed out, further still. Beyond the scrappy spits of land, something in the water was glinting, reflecting the dawn back at itself. I narrowed my eyes and peered out. At first I thought it was some kind of fleet, masts massed in the sea. But they ignored the sea’s shifting and stayed perfectly motionless. Another glint of light. Glass.
It was a sunken city. Spires impaled the sea, the highest of them reaching thirty yards above the water. Others were barely glimpsed – just shapes at the surface with angles too precise to be rocks. The city went on and on, some spires standing alone, others clustered near to one another. Some seemed still to have glass in windows; most were just metal structures, cages of water and sky.
‘I took Sally’s boat out there once, years ago,’ Piper said. ‘It goes on for miles – the biggest of the Before cities that I’ve seen. Hard to imagine how many people must have lived there.’
I didn’t need to imagine. I could feel it, now that I was staring at the glass-sharpened sea. I could hear a submerged roar of presence, and absence. Did they die by fire, or water? Which came first?
We slept for the day on a promontory looking over the patchy welter of land and ocean. I dreamed of the blast, and when I woke I didn’t know where I was, or when. When Zoe came to rouse me for the last lookout shift before nightfall, I was already awake, sitting up with my blanket wrapped around me and my hands clutched together to quell their shaking. I was aware of her watching me as I walked to the lookout post. My movements felt jerky, and my ears still rang with the roar of the ravenous flames.
It was high tide, the sea had engulfed most of the furthest spits, leaving a network of tiny hillocks and rocks jutting out, so that the water was curdled by specks of land. The sunken city had disappeared altogether. Then, as the darkness advanced, I watched the tide retreat again. Lamps were lit in the Alpha villages on the slopes below us.
It wasn’t the underwater city that I was thinking of, as I watched the tide go out, the sea slinking away like a fox from a henhouse. I was thinking of Leonard’s passing comment that The Confessor had come from the Sunken Shore. Somewhere, only a few miles down the sloping coastline, was the place where she and Kip had grown up. She would have been sent away when they were split, but Kip had probably stayed on. This strange landscape would have been his home. As a child, he would have roamed these same hills. Perhaps he’d climbed up to this very viewpoint, and seen the tide go out, as I saw it now, more and more of the land being exposed to the moon’s gaze.
When it was full dark I woke Zoe and Piper.
‘Get up,’ I said.
Zoe gave a low groan as she stretched. Piper hadn’t even moved. I bent and yanked the blanket off him, throwing it down at his feet as I headed back to the lookout point.
We couldn’t risk a fire, within sight of the villages below, so we ate cold stew in the darkness. While Piper and Zoe packed up their things, I stood with my arms crossed, kicking at a tree root. Finally we moved off down the hill, towards the rich green slopes that edged the deepest inlets. We walked in silence. When, after a few hours, Piper offered me the water flask, I grabbed it without speaking.
‘What’s got you in such a foul mood?’ said Zoe.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
‘At least you’re making Zoe seem like a ray of sunshine in comparison,’ Piper said. ‘It’s a nice change.’
I didn’t say anything. I’d been gritting my teeth ever since we’d come within sight of the sea.
I remembered the day that Kip and I had first seen the ocean. We’d sat together, on the long grass overlooking the cliffs, and stared as the sea lapped at the edges of the world. And if he’d seen it before, he didn’t remember – it had been new to both of us.
Now I knew that the sea would have been a daily sight for him. He would have been used to it – probably didn’t even glance at it as he went about his daily business. The sea, which we’d sat and marvelled at together, would have been as familiar to him as the thatched roofs of his village.
It wasn’t only Kip that I had lost. Even the memories of what we had shared were being snatched from me, rendered false by what I’d learned about him.
Safest not to remember, I told myself, walking faster. Safest not to disturb the drowned city of my memories.
*
We had to navigate carefully through the unforgiving landscape. We weren’t only avoiding the Alpha villages, but also the inlets and fissures that penetrated even into the high slopes. Several times the route in front of us opened up into dark water, the gash of a crevasse. We walked all night, with only a brief rest at dawn. It was past noon when we left Alpha country and reached the edge of the straggling flatlands and the sea-mired spits. I stopped and looked back, one last time, at the Alpha villages behind us.
‘I heard it too,’ Zoe said, ‘when Leonard mentioned that The Confessor came from here.’
Piper was walking ahead of us, out of earshot. Zoe, one foot up on a rock, was waiting for me.
‘I figured you’d be curious, when we got here,’ she said.
‘It’s not just that,’ I said. I remembered her face at the campsite, when I’d caught her swaying with the music. I kept my eyes on the ground as we walked together. And for the first time, I ventured to say out loud what The Confessor had told me about Kip’s past. I needed to speak it. And I offered my secret to her like an apology, because I had intruded on her secret dreams.
I told her everything The Confessor had told me: how Kip had been cruel, and had delighted in having her branded and driven away. How, later, when he could afford it, he’d tracked her down and tried to arrange to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
I told Zoe how Kip’s past had tangled everything that I felt. When I looked at the Sunken Shore and tried to imagine his childhood, I couldn’t recognise him at all. Instead of recognising Kip, I was recognising Zach. Zach and Kip had shared the same resentment and anger at having a twin who was a seer and refused to be split. I’d been fleeing from Zach, but the more I thought of Kip’s past, the more I saw Zach in him. And The Confessor – I had feared her most of all, but when I’d heard about her childhood, I recognised my own story. She’d been branded and exiled, just like me.
Everything was backwards. Everything was doubled, a mirror facing a mirror so that the picture regressed infinitely, and no end was possible.
When I’d emptied myself of words, Zoe stopped walking, turning again to face me, blocking my way.
‘What did you hope I was going to say to you, when you told me this?’ she said.
I had no answer.
‘Did you think I was going to let you cry on my shoulder,’ she went on, ‘and tell you it was all OK?’
She grabbed me, shook me slightly.
‘What difference does it make?’ she said. ‘What does it matter what he was like? Or The Confessor? There isn’t time for you to indulge in all of this soul-searching. We’re trying to keep you alive, and not get killed ourselves. We can’t do it with you moping around. You’re slipping further into the visions, too. We’ve both seen it – how they get to you. How you scream and shake, when you see the blast.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve seen it happen before. You need to fight it. And you can’t do that if you’re obsessing over Kip. You’re still alive. He’s dead. And it sounds like he wasn’t such a great loss after all.’
I hit her, full in the face. I’d struck out at her once before, months ago, when she’d made a similarly disparaging comment about Kip. But that had been a chaotic grappling in the half dark. This was more precise: a single punch to the face. I didn’t know which of us was more surprised. Nonetheless, her instincts didn’t let her down: she ducked to the left, deflecting most of the blow, my fist grazing along her cheek and ear. Even so, my knuckle cracked against something hard – her cheekbone, or jawbone – and I heard myself yelp.
She didn’t strike back, just stood there, one hand raised to the side of her face.
‘You need to practise more,’ she said. She rubbed her cheek, opened her mouth wide to test the pain. A red mark was surfacing on her jaw. ‘And you’re still not following through enough.’
‘Shut up,’ I said.
‘Open and shut your fingers,’ she instructed, watching me as I winched my fist open and closed.
She took it and turned it over, methodically bending each finger. ‘It’s just bruised,’ she said, dropping my hand.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ I said. I shook my hand, half expecting to hear the rattle of bones knocked loose.
‘I’m glad to see you angry,’ she said, smiling. ‘Anything’s better than having you wandering around like a ghost.’
I thought of Leonard’s words to me. Girl, you’re hardly here.
‘Anyway, it’s not even me who you’re angry at,’ she said.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I shouldered past her to follow Piper, who was nearly out of sight.
She called after me. ‘You’re angry at Kip. And it doesn’t even have anything to do with his past. You’re angry at him because he jumped, and left you behind.’
*
We walked in silence for hours. The peninsula that Piper led us to was really a string of islands, linked tenuously by a thin strip of land. The tide was already beginning to creep up the sides of the isthmuses, leaving just a narrow passage from one island to the next. In mid afternoon we set out across the final strip of stones, the last island ahead of us. It loomed tall, even now that the sea had claimed its lowest reaches. The tide was almost at its highest; the only way to reach the island was across a slim thread of rocks, already slippery with spray.
Piper was still ahead of us, already half way to the island. I turned back to face Zoe, who was just behind me.
‘When are you going to tell him about Kip?’
‘Keep moving,’ she said. ‘This path’ll be underwater in a few more minutes.’
I didn’t move.
‘When are you going to tell him?’ I said again. A wave splashed my leg, a shock of cold.
‘I figure you’ll do it yourself, soon enough,’ she said, pushing past me and clambering onwards on the slippery rock.
I should have been relieved. But now the secret was once again mine, so was the responsibility. I’d have to tell him myself. And to say it out loud again felt like an incantation: as if each time I uttered the words, I made Kip’s past more real.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_90176e96-5d5f-5303-b357-66dccbeb3b33)
Piper and Zoe had paused on the brink of the final island. Piper blocked the way, crouching at the point where the isthmus met the wooded slope.
When I tried to edge past him, he stood and yanked at my jumper, pulling me back. ‘Wait,’ he said.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, shaking him off.
‘Look,’ he said, crouching again and peering at the path. I bent to see what he was so intent on.
He pointed out the strand of wire stretched across the width of the path, six inches above the ground. ‘Stay down,’ he said. Zoe, beside him, squatted on her heels. He leaned forward and tugged the wire.
The arrow passed a foot above our heads and disappeared into the sea. Piper stood, grinning. Somewhere on the island ahead of us, a bell was clanging. I looked back to the water. The arrow had not even left a ripple. If we’d been standing, it would have gone straight through us.
‘She’ll know we’re coming, at least,’ said Zoe. ‘But she won’t be happy that you wasted an arrow.’
Piper bent and pulled the wire again. Twice slowly, twice quickly, and slowly twice more. Up the hill, the bell sounded out the rhythm.
Three more times, as we crossed the island, Piper or Zoe halted us so that we could step over trip wires. Another time, I felt the trap even before Zoe warned me to step off the path. When I bent to examine the ground, I could sense a kind of insubstantiality to it: a confusion between air and earth. Crouching, I saw the layer of long willow twigs woven together and covered with leaves.
‘There’s a six-foot drop under there,’ Piper said. ‘Sharpened stakes planted at the bottom, too. Sally made Zoe and me dig it, when we were teenagers. Was a bitch of a job.’ He set off ahead of me. ‘Come on.’
It took us nearly an hour to cross the island, making our way up the forested slope and avoiding the traps. Eventually we ran out of land. The island had climbed to a peak at its southern edge, where a cliff dropped away to the sea in front of us. There was nothing beyond but the waves and the unlikely angles of the submerged city.
‘There,’ said Piper, pointing through the final trees. ‘Sally’s place.’
I could see nothing but the trees, their pale trunks blotched with brown like an old man’s hands. Then I saw the door. It was low, and half-concealed by the boulders that clustered at the cliff’s edge. It stood impossibly close to the end of the bluff – it looked like a doorway into nothingness, and was so faded and battered by the coastal winds that the wood was bleached to the same shade as the salt-parched grasses around it. It had been built to take advantage of the cover of the boulders, so that at least half of the building must have hung out over the edge of the cliff itself.
Zoe whistled, the same rhythm that Piper had sounded on the warning bell: two slow notes, two quick, and two slow.
The woman who opened the door was the oldest person I’d ever seen. Her hair was sparse enough that I could see the curve of scalp beneath it. Around her neck, the skin was draped like a cowl. Even her nose looked tired, drooping at the tip like melted candle wax. I was fairly sure that her forehead bore no brand, but it was hard to tell: age had branded her now, her forehead cragged with wrinkles. The loose flesh of her eyelids hung so low over her eyes that I imagined they must disappear altogether when she smiled.
But she wasn’t smiling now. She was looking at us.
‘I hoped you wouldn’t come,’ she said.
‘Nice to see you too,’ said Zoe.
‘I knew you wouldn’t come unless you were desperate,’ the woman said. She came forward, a lurch in her step. Both legs were twisted, the joints gnarled and fused. She embraced Zoe first, and then Piper. Zoe closed her eyes when Sally held her. I tried to picture Zoe and Piper as they must have been when, ten years old and on the run, they first came to Sally. I wondered how much the old woman had seen them change. The world was a flint on which they had been sharpened.
‘This is the seer?’ Sally said.
‘This is Cass,’ said Piper.
‘I haven’t stayed safe all these years by bringing strangers into my home,’ she said.
She had to balance her speech with her breathing, so the words came slowly. Sometimes she paused between each syllable, the noisy breaths taking their time. Each breath a sigh.
‘You can trust me,’ I said.
She stared at me again. ‘We’ll see.’
We followed her inside the house. When she shut the door behind us, the whole building shook. I thought again of the cliff underneath us, and the sea clawing at the rocks.
‘Relax,’ said Piper. I hadn’t even realised that I was clutching the doorframe. ‘This place has been here for decades. It’s not going down the cliff tonight.’
‘Even under the weight of an uninvited guest,’ added Sally. She turned away and shuffled into the kitchen. Her footsteps on the floor were hollow – only wood between her and the cliff’s plunge. ‘Since you’re all here, I suppose I’d better get some food ready.’
As she busied herself at the table, I looked at the closed door by the stove. No noise came from within, but I could feel, like a draught on the back of my neck, another presence in the house.
‘Who else is here?’ I said.
‘Xander’s resting,’ Sally said. ‘He was up all last night.’
‘Xander?’ I said.
Sally raised an eyebrow at Piper.
‘You didn’t tell her about Xander?’
‘Not yet.’ He turned to me.
‘Remember I told you, on the island, that we’d had two other seers? And the younger one had been brought to the island before he was branded?’
I nodded.
‘Xander was useful for undercover work,’ Piper went on, ‘but we didn’t want to involve him in anything too important.’
‘Was he too young?’
‘You think we had the luxury of sparing the young ones that kind of responsibility?’ He laughed. ‘Some of our scouts on the mainland were barely in their teens. No – and it wasn’t even that Xander couldn’t be trusted, really. We never thought he’d deliberately betray us. But he was always volatile.’
‘It got worse, in the last few years,’ Zoe said. ‘But even before that, he was always jumpy. Skittish, like a horse that’s seen a snake.’
‘It was a shame,’ said Piper.
‘A shame for him, to be so troubled?’ I asked. ‘Or for you, that you couldn’t use him as you’d have liked?’
‘Can’t it be both?’ Piper said. ‘Anyway, he did what he could for us. We based him on the mainland. Even without his visions, it was useful to have someone unbranded who could pass for an Alpha. And sometimes his visions came in useful, too. But we had to bring him here, in the end. He couldn’t work anymore, and Sally said she’d take him.’
‘Why do you keep talking about him in the past tense? He’s here now, isn’t he?’
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Sally said, hobbling across the kitchen and opening the door to the room beyond.
*
A boy sat on the bed, his back to us. He had thick dark hair like Piper’s, tightly curled, but it was longer, and stood in high tufts, like the peaks of beaten egg whites. The window above the bed looked out over the water, and the boy didn’t turn away from it as we entered.
We moved closer. Piper sat next to him on the bed, ushering me to sit beside him.
Xander was perhaps sixteen. His face still had the softness of a child. Like Sally, he was unbranded. When Piper greeted him, he didn’t look at us, or respond at all. His eyes darted from side to side, as if following the flight of some invisible insect above our heads.
I wasn’t sure whether what I sensed about him was evident to everyone, or whether it was only seers that would feel it. The brokenness inside him. Sally had said that he was resting, but there was no rest here. Only terror. The frantic buzzing of Xander’s mind was like a wasp trapped in a jar.
Zoe hung back in the doorway. I saw her mouth tighten as she watched the fidgeting of Xander’s long fingers, ceaselessly kneading the air. And I remembered what she’d said to me, about how the visions affected me: I’ve seen it happen before.
Piper stilled one of Xander’s hands with his own.
‘It’s good to see you again, Xander.’
The boy opened his mouth, but no words came. In the silence, I could almost hear the discordant jangling of his mind.
‘Do you have any news for us?’ Piper asked.
Xander leaned forward, until his face was close to Piper’s. He spoke in a whisper. ‘Forever fire. Hot noise. Burning light.’ The words chased one another out.
‘He’s seeing the blast more than ever,’ Sally said. ‘Day and night, now.’
‘He never used to be as bad as this,’ Piper said. ‘What’s changed?’
‘Move over,’ I said to Piper.
‘Maze of bones,’ muttered Xander.
I looked up at Sally. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Search me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he talks almost normally. Other times, he comes up with stuff like that. The fire, most of the time. Sometimes stuff about bones.’
‘Noises in the maze of bones,’ Xander said.
His eyes had stilled a little, staring abstractedly at the corner of the ceiling. I placed my hands on the sides of his head, and stared into his eyes.
I didn’t want to force myself into his mind. I still remembered how it had felt when The Confessor had tried to probe my thoughts in the Keeping Rooms. After each session with her, my mind had felt like a dollhouse that had been picked up and shaken, everything scattered and rattling. I understood Zoe’s fury, when she learned that I’d stumbled into her dreams. But I had to admit that I was also curious about what I might discover from Xander. I was desperate to see if what he saw was the same as what I saw. To confirm, I hoped, that I was not alone in the visions of fire that my mind hurled at me. If I was searching for anything in the jumble of his mind, I suppose it was a glimpse of myself.
His eyes remained blank as I groped towards his thoughts. Occasionally his mouth seemed to be trying to form words, but they didn’t take shape. Stillborn, they stayed at his lips, empty shapes incapable of sound.
His mind was burnt out. Everything charred and gone, broken down to ashes and dust. This was what remained, after the flames had exploded too many times in his mind: ash, and smoke, and words sheared of their meanings, rattling loose in his head.
‘It’s the visions of the blast that’ve done this to him,’ I said.
It wasn’t the strangeness of his state that unsettled me, but its familiarity. I’d felt it myself, this madness, scratching around the edge of my mind like a rat in the rafters. It was always there. At times, particularly in the Keeping Rooms, or when the blast visions had become more and more frequent, it had been emboldened, almost crept into sight.
‘Flash. Fire. Forever fire,’ Xander blurted again. He didn’t say the words – they uttered him. As each word burst from him, he convulsed. He looked startled at the sounds emerging from his own mouth.
‘You know it happens to seers, eventually,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. I had lived with that knowledge for as long as I’d known what I was. But encountering the residue of Xander’s mind still left me with a chill in my guts, my fists curled so tightly that my nails cut into my palms.
He was rocking backwards and forwards now, his arms wrapped around his knees. I recognised, in his scrunched body, that futile attempt to hide from the visions, as if making yourself smaller would somehow spare you. I remembered curling like that myself, as a child, with my head tucked down towards my chest and my eyes clamped closed. It didn’t work, of course. Xander was right: Forever fire. It would never go away. The blast would haunt all of us seers, always. But why did it burst into our dreams more often now, enough to drive Xander to this?
‘Let him rest,’ Sally said, stepping forward and cupping Xander’s chin in her hand. She lifted the blanket that had fallen from him, and tucked it again around his shoulders.
As we were leaving, he opened his eyes and, for a moment, fixed them on me.
‘Lucia?’
I looked at Piper for an explanation. He’d glanced up at Zoe, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She crossed her arms in front of her. Her face shut down.
‘Lucia?’ said Xander again.
Piper looked up at me. ‘He must be able to tell you’re a seer. Lucia was a seer too.’
The older seer from the island, branded. She’d drowned, Piper had said. A shipwreck in a storm, on the way to the island.
‘Lucia’s gone,’ Piper said to Xander. ‘The ship went down more than a year ago. You know that already.’ His voice was too brisk, too loud: his attempt to sound casual was jarring.
We left Xander gazing out the window, watching the sea swap its colours with the sky. His hands twitched and twisted constantly. I thought of Leonard’s hands on his guitar strings. Xander’s hands were kept busy on the unseen instrument of his madness.
‘What will you do with him?’ I asked Sally, when she’d closed the door to the bedroom.
‘Do?’ She laughed. ‘You say it like I have choices. As if there’s anything I could do, other than just keep surviving. Keep him safe.’
Even from the next room, I found Xander’s presence exhausting. The churning of his mind, from behind the closed door, made me feel seasick. When Sally sent us out to gather firewood and mushrooms, I felt guilty at my own relief.
Piper and I knelt together at the base of one of the trees, where mushrooms clustered thickly. Zoe was gathering wood nearby. Piper spoke quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear.
‘You’ve seen Xander – what being a seer has done to him.’ He looked up at Zoe, twenty yards away, and dropped his voice even further. ‘It happened to Lucia too.’ At the mention of the dead seer’s name, his voice caught, his eyelids closed. For a single moment I felt as though we were standing on different islands, and the tide had swallowed the neck of land between them. ‘Towards the end,’ he added. Then he looked quickly back at me and went on. ‘Now you’re having more and more visions of the blast, too. So why hasn’t it happened to you yet?’
I had often wondered this myself. There were times when I’d felt my sanity coming loose like a bad tooth. When the flames erupted within me again and again, I had wondered how it was that I still managed to function. Now I’d seen how the words bubbled out of Xander like water from an overheated pan, and wondered how long it would take before my own visions brought me to the boil. Did I have years, or months? When it happened, would I know?
When I asked myself why it hadn’t happened already, I always came up with the same answer, though it wasn’t an answer that I could share with Piper: it was Zach. If there was some streak of certainty in me, something that held me together when the visions tried their best to tear me apart – then it had its roots in Zach. If there was a strength in me, it was my stubborn belief in him that had formed it. Zach had been the steady point in my life. Not a force for good – I’d seen too much of what he’d done to believe that. But a force, nonetheless. I knew there was no part of me that had not been shaped by him, or against him. And if I allowed myself to slip into madness, then I could neither stop him nor save him. It would all be over.
*
Back inside, we helped prepare the meal. Occasionally, from the bedroom, we could hear Xander hurling syllables at the night air. Bones and fire slipped under the door. He might be mad, but he saw clearly enough what the blast had made of our world. Bones and fire.
‘How long have you been living here?’ I asked Sally, as I helped her pluck the brace of pigeons that she’d thrown on to the table. With each tug at the feathers the greying flesh stretched, leaving a clammy film on my fingers.
‘Years. Decades. Time gets slippery, when you’re as old as me.’
It’s slippery for seers, too, I wanted to say. I was jerked between different times, without any say in it. After each vision I’d wake, gasping, as if the future were a lake I’d been dragged down into, before surfacing back in the present.
‘I’ve thought about leaving here, sometimes. It’s no place for an old woman. I used to be able to scramble down to the shore and do some fishing. These days I just set snares, and grow what I can. I never want to eat another potato, that’s for sure. But it’s safe here. The Council’s looking for a lame old woman. I figure this place isn’t going to be an obvious choice.’
‘And your twin?’
‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘And believe me, I’m even older than I look. If there’d been registrations when Alfie and I were split, no doubt the Council would have got to me that way. But things were different then. They didn’t have us all pinned down in their records, the way they do now. And wherever he is, my brother’s had the sense to lie low, take care of himself.’
She got up and crossed to the stove. When she passed Piper, her hand paused for a while on his broad shoulder. When he first came here, as a child, his hand would have been as small as hers. Smaller, probably. Now she had to stretch up to reach his shoulder, and her hand rested there like a moth on a bough.
When we ate, Xander sat at one end of the table, swinging his legs and staring at the ceiling. Piper carved the pigeons, severing the wings with a long, curved knife. Watching him, it was hard not to think of all the knives he’d wielded. The things he’d seen, and the things he’d done.
But the meal dragged me back to the room. Sally had stuffed the pigeons with sage and lemon, and the meat was soft and moist. It bore no resemblance to the meat we’d eaten on the road, cooked quickly over furtive fires, the outer flesh scorched and the middle still cold and springing with blood. We didn’t talk much, until there was nothing left but a forlorn cluster of bones, and the moon had climbed past the window to hang above us.
‘Piper told me about how you infiltrated the Council,’ I said to Sally. ‘But he didn’t tell me why you stopped.’
She was silent.
‘They were exposed,’ Zoe said. ‘Not Sally, but the two other infiltrators working with her.’
‘What happened to them?’ I said.
‘They were killed,’ said Piper abruptly, standing and beginning to gather the plates.
‘The Council killed them?’ I said.
Zoe’s lips thinned. ‘He didn’t say that.’
‘Zoe,’ cautioned Piper.
‘The Council would’ve killed them, eventually,’ said Sally. ‘Given how much they hated infiltrators, they would never have let them live, even when they’d finished torturing them for information. They didn’t get a chance, though, with Lachlan – he managed to poison himself first. We had capsules to take if we were caught. But they searched Eloise before she had a chance, and took her capsule away.’
‘So what happened to her?’
Piper stopped clearing away. He and Zoe were both staring at Sally. Sally looked straight at me.
‘I killed her,’ she said.
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_bd9efcf1-e333-5598-a2f1-052124f2f7b6)
‘Sally,’ said Piper quietly. ‘You don’t have to talk about this.’
‘I’m not ashamed,’ she said. ‘I know what they’d have done to her. It would have been worse than death – far worse – and they’d have killed her at the end of it anyway. We all knew the deal. We were the heart of the whole intelligence network – if we cracked, half the resistance would fall. All our contacts, all the safehouses, all the information we’d gathered and passed on over the years. It would have been disastrous. That’s why we had the capsules.’
She was still looking at me. I wanted to tell her that I understood. But it was clear that she didn’t need my understanding. She wasn’t looking for forgiveness, not from me or anyone else.
Sally’s choice had been harder even than Kip’s, perhaps, because it wasn’t her own death that she had to bestow. I thought, again, of Piper’s words to Leonard: There are different kinds of courage.
‘They were denounced in the main Council Hall,’ she said. ‘I was up in the gallery when it happened, talking to some Councillors. Lachlan and Eloise never had a chance: the soldiers were waiting to swoop. There were at least four soldiers to each of them. Lachy got to his capsule as soon as they had him cornered – he had it on a strap around his neck, like all of us. But after he started frothing and thrashing, they realised what had happened, and pinned Eloise down.’
Her voice was steady, but when she pushed her plate aside, the knife and fork clattered slightly with her hand’s tremor.
‘I was waiting for them to come for me,’ she said. ‘I’d slipped my own capsule into my mouth – had it in between my teeth, ready to bite down.’ I could see her tongue move to the side of her mouth, tasting the memory. ‘But it never happened. I was braced for it – if anyone had been watching me, they’d have seen that something was going on. But nobody was. Everyone was just staring at all the chaos down below. For a moment I just stood there, watching what was happening. Lachy was on the floor by then, thrashing around, blood coming out of his mouth. It’s not an easy death, poison. And there were four soldiers holding Eloise, arms pinned to her sides. I was staring down like everyone else. And I realised the soldiers weren’t coming for me. Whoever found out about Lachy and Eloise hadn’t discovered there were three of us.’
Piper placed his hand on her arm. ‘You don’t need to go through this all again.’
She gestured at me. ‘If she wants to throw her lot in with the resistance, she needs to know what happens. What it’s really like.’ She turned and looked squarely at me. ‘I killed her,’ she said again. ‘I threw my knife, got her in the chest. It would have been a quicker death than Lachy’s. But I couldn’t stay to watch. It’s only because of all the chaos, and because I was up on the gallery, that I managed to get out of there at all, and even then it meant going through a stained glass window and down a thirty foot drop.’
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