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The Fire Sermon
Francesca Haig


BORN AS TWINSRAISED AS ENEMIESBOUND BY DEATHCass is born a few minutes after her brother, Zach. Both infants are perfect, but only one is a blessing; only one is an Alpha.The other child must be cast out. But with no discernible difference, other than their genders, their parents cannot tell which baby is tainted.Perfect twins. So rare, they are almost a myth. But sooner or later the Omega will slip up. It will eventually show its true self. The polluted cannot help themselves.Then its face can be branded. Then it can be sent away.























Copyright (#ulink_7803e6f6-927d-5386-9edf-2678c2325cc0)


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 2015

Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover illustration and title typography created by Alexandra Allden

Other cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (additional figure and tree features)

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: 9780007563050

Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007563074

Version: 2016-03-10




Praise for Francesca Haig (#ulink_1758d154-1ad8-5304-9764-1dd57c739c04)


‘This terrific set-up spools out into a high-tension tale of mistrust and dependency, injustice and optimism, told with poetic intensity’

Daily Mail

‘Haig’s post-apocalyptic world is colourfully fleshed out, and the conclusion asks us to consider who, really, is the Other’

Washington Post

‘It holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’

Guardian

‘Words like “masterpiece” and “instant classic” are cliché, but in the case of Francesca Haig’s astounding The Fire Sermon, they’re the only words to use. It’s a breath-taking, passionate, absolutely sensational work of imagination, perfectly structured, beautifully written, populated with fabulous characters and packed with intrigue, violence, compassion and underlined by a very important human message that is always present without ever becoming homily. The Fire Sermon is completely without equal – it leaves Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight blah blah-yawn twitching in the dust’

Starburst Magazine

‘A hell of a ride. I would recommend it to anyone I can, regardless of age’

JAMES OSWALD

‘This book is a thought-provoking whirlwind of a story, with a fab lead character, grisly politics and brave adventure. I loved it!’

JESSIE BURTON




Dedication (#ulink_ef3b35af-9572-5eab-b4e2-7f277eb9e30c)


This book is dedicated, with love and admiration, to my brother, Peter, and my sister, Clara. Knowing how much they mean to me, it should come as no surprise that my first novel is about siblings.


Contents

Cover (#ufa3f2766-8a37-5fa7-8dea-9dff6598c34a)

Title Page (#u1ae988c2-340b-5df8-81af-d74597cc5b0f)

Copyright (#u34a61941-e9f6-505e-928e-b10f705ae6b3)

Praise (#ud352f81d-7b00-51c4-986a-7481487a9d99)

Dedication (#uc922ecd6-8439-5f8b-adeb-69f0852c4459)

Chapter 1 (#u7472a1d7-6583-5bcf-a5e3-d6d4e9d3aaf7)

Chapter 2 (#u56190231-442e-5921-b479-75ca612cdb33)

Chapter 3 (#uc1a991df-4a75-505a-b1b0-c7adbe05df30)

Chapter 4 (#uf2244046-8f44-5cfd-aabe-978087533640)

Chapter 5 (#u301adb32-47bf-5ec8-b18c-5f88e370c454)

Chapter 6 (#u4bf8ff28-acd1-5f94-bd8e-a1f9e38cba3b)

Chapter 7 (#ua8c7f2f5-6a6c-52fb-aa3a-9f6d63cac298)

Chapter 8 (#ub6b4ac34-b323-50d5-a6ae-67708f34bda9)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

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)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Read an Extract of The Map of Bones (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_9409b783-86fb-5c60-ae3e-8809702aafc6)


I’d always thought they would come for me at night, but it was the hottest part of the day when the six men rode onto the plain. It was harvest time; the whole settlement had been up early, and would be working late. Decent harvests were never guaranteed on the blighted land permitted to Omegas. Last season, heavy rains had released deeply buried blast-ash in the earth. The root vegetables had come up tiny, or not at all. A whole field of potatoes grew downwards - we found them, blind-eyed and shrunken, five feet under the mucky surface. A boy drowned digging for them. The pit was only a few yards deep but the clay wall gave way and he never came up. I’d thought of moving on, but all the valleys were rain-clogged, and no settlement welcomed strangers in a hungry season.

So I’d stayed through the bleak year. The others swapped stories about the drought, when the crops had failed three years in a row. I’d only been a child, then, but even I remembered seeing the carcasses of starved cattle, sailing the dust-fields on rafts of their own bones. But that was more than a decade ago. This won’t be as bad as the drought years, we said to one another, as if repetition would make it true. The next spring, we watched the stalks in the wheat fields carefully. The early crops came up strong, and the long, engorged carrots we dug that year were the source of much giggling amongst the younger teenagers. From my own small plot I harvested a fat sack of garlic which I carried to market in my arms like a baby. All spring I watched the wheat in the shared fields growing sturdy and tall. The lavender behind my cottage was giddy with bees and, inside, my shelves were loaded with food.

It was mid-harvest when they came. I felt it first. Had been feeling it, if I were honest with myself, for months. But now I sensed it clearly, a sudden alertness that I could never explain to anybody who wasn’t a seer. It was a feeling of something shifting: like a cloud moving across the sun, or the wind changing direction. I straightened, scythe in hand, and looked south. By the time the shouts came, from the far end of the settlement, I was already running. As the cry went up and the six mounted men galloped into sight, the others ran too – it wasn’t uncommon for Alphas to raid Omega settlements, stealing anything of value. But I knew what they were after. I knew, too, that there was little point in running. That I was six months too late to heed my mother’s warning. Even as I ducked the fence and sprinted toward the boulder-strewn edge of the settlement, I knew they would get me.

They barely slowed to grab me. One simply scooped me up as I ran, snatching the earth from under my feet. He knocked the scythe from my hand with a blow to my wrist and threw me face-down across the front of the saddle. When I kicked out, it only seemed to spur the horse to greater speed. The jarring, as I bounced on my ribs and guts, was more painful than the blow had been. A strong hand was on my back, and I could feel the man’s body over mine as he leaned forward, pressing the horse onwards. I opened my eyes, but shut them again swiftly when I was greeted by the upside-down view of the hoof-whipped ground bolting by.

Just when we seemed to be slowing and I dared to open my eyes again, I felt the insistent tip of a blade at my back.

‘We’re under orders not to kill you,’ he said. ‘Not even to knock you out, your twin said. But anything short of that, we won’t hesitate, if you give us any trouble. I’ll start by slicing a finger off, and you’d better believe I wouldn’t even stop riding to do it. Understand, Cassandra?’

I tried to say yes, managed a breathless grunt.

We rode on. From the endless jolting and the hanging upside down, I was sick twice – the second time on his leather boot, I noted with some satisfaction. Cursing, he stopped his mount and hauled me upright, looping a rope around my body so that my arms were bound at my sides. Sitting in front of him, the pressure in my head was eased as the blood flowed back down to my body. The rope cut into my arms but at least it held me steady, grasped firmly by the man at my back. We travelled that way for the rest of the day. At nightfall, when the dark was slipping over the horizon like a noose, we stopped briefly and dismounted to eat. Another of the men offered me bread but I could manage only a few sips from the water flask, the water warm and musty. Then I was again hoisted up, in front of a different man now, his black beard prickling the back of my neck. He pulled a sack over my head, but in the darkness it made little difference.

I sensed the city in the distance, long before the clang of hoofs beneath us indicated that we’d reached paved roads. Through the sacking covering my face, glints of light began to show. I could feel the presence of people all about me – more even than at Haven on market day. Thousands of them, I guessed. The road steepened as we rode on, slowly now, the hoofs noisy on cobbles. Then we halted, and I was passed, almost tossed, down to another man, who dragged me, stumbling, for several minutes, pausing often while doors were unlocked. Each time we moved on, I heard the doors being locked again behind us. Each scrape of a bolt sliding back was like another blow.

Finally, I was pushed down onto a soft surface. I heard a rasp of metal behind me, a knife sliding from a sheath. Before I had time to cry out, the rope around my body fell away, slit. Hands fumbled at my neck, and the sack was ripped from my head, the rough hessian grazing my nose. I was on a low bed, in a small room. A cell. There was no window. The man who’d untied me was already locking the metal door behind him.

Slumped on the bed, the taste of mud and vomit in my mouth, I finally allowed myself to cry. Partly for myself, and partly for my twin; for what he’d become.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_d208167a-8947-5530-9d64-bc8f9969597e)


The next morning, as usual, I woke from dreams of fire.

As the months passed, the moments after such dreams were the only times I was grateful to wake to the confines of the cell. The room’s greyness, the familiarity of its implacable walls, were the opposite of the vast and savage excess of the blast I dreamed of nightly.

There were no written tales or pictures of the blast. What was the point of writing it, or drawing it, when it was etched on every surface? Even now, more than four hundred years after it had destroyed everything, it was still visible in every tumbled cliff, scorched plain, and ash-clogged river. Every face. It had become the only story the earth could tell, so who else would record it? A history written in ashes, in bones. Before the blast, they say there’d been sermons about fire, about the end of the world. The fire itself gave the last sermon; after that there were no more.

Most who survived were deafened and blinded. Many others found themselves alone – if they told their stories, it was only to the wind. And even if they had companions, no survivor could ever properly describe the moment it happened: the new colour of the sky, the roar of sound that ended everything. Struggling to describe it, the survivors would have found themselves, like me, stranded in that space where words ran out and sound began.

The blast shattered time. In an instant, it cleaved time irrevocably into Before and After. Now, hundreds of years later, in the After, no survivors remained, no testimonies. Only seers like me could glimpse it, momentarily, in the instant before waking, or when it ambushed us in the half-second of a blink: the flash, the horizon burning up like paper.

The only tales of the blast were sung by the bards. When I was a child, the bard who passed through the village each autumn sang of other nations, across the sea, sending the flame down from the sky, and of the radiation and the Long Winter that had followed. I must have been eight or nine when, at Haven market, Zach and I heard an older bard with frost-grey hair singing the same tune but with different words. The chorus about the Long Winter was the same, but she made no mention of other nations. Each verse she sang just described the fire, and how it had consumed everything.

When I’d pulled our father’s hand and asked him, he’d shrugged. There were lots of versions of the song, he said. What difference did it make? If there’d once been other lands, across the sea, there were no longer, as far as any sailor had lived to tell. The occasional rumours of Elsewhere, countries over the sea, were only rumours – no more to be believed than the rumours about an island where Omegas lived free of Alpha oppression. To be overheard speculating about such things was to invite public flogging, or to end up in the stocks, like the Omega we’d once seen outside Haven, pinned under the scathing sun until his tongue was a scaled blue lizard protruding from his mouth, while two bored Council soldiers kept watch, kicking him from time to time to ensure he was still alive.

Don’t ask questions, our father said; not about the Before, not about Elsewhere, not about the island. People in the Before asked too many questions, probed too far, and look what that got them. This is the world now, or all we’ll ever know of it: bounded by the sea to the north, west, and south; the deadlands to the east. And it made no difference where the blast came from. All that mattered was that it came. It was all so long ago, as unknowable as the Before that it had destroyed, and from which only rumours and ruins remained.

*

In my first months in the cell, I was granted the occasional gift of sky. Every few weeks, in the company of other imprisoned Omegas, I was escorted on to the ramparts for some exercise and a few moments of fresh air. We were taken in groups of three, with at least as many guards. They watched us carefully, keeping us not only apart but also well away from the crenellations that overlooked the city below. The first outing, I’d learned not to try to approach the other prisoners, let alone to speak. As the guards escorted us up from the cells, one of them had grumbled about the slow pace of the pale-haired prisoner, hopping on one leg. ‘I’d be quicker if you hadn’t taken away my cane,’ she’d pointed out. They didn’t respond, and she’d rolled her eyes at me. It wasn’t even a smile, but it was the first hint of warmth I’d seen since entering the Keeping Rooms. When we reached the ramparts, I’d tried to sidle close enough to her to attempt a whisper. I was still ten feet from her when the guards tackled me against the wall so hard that my shoulder-blades were bruised against the stone. As they hustled me back down to the cell one of them spat at me. ‘Don’t talk to the others,’ he said. ‘Don’t even look at them, do you hear?’ With my arms held behind my back, I couldn’t wipe his spittle from my cheek. Its warmth was a foul intimacy. I never saw the woman again.

A month or more later was my third outing to the ramparts, and the last for any of us. I was standing by the door, letting my eyes accustom to the glint of sun on polished stone. Two guards stood to my right, chatting quietly. Twenty feet to my left, another guard leaned against the wall, watching a male Omega. He’d been in the Keeping Rooms longer than me, I guessed. His skin, which must once have been dark, was now a dirty grey. More telling were the twitchy motions of his hands, and the way he kept moving his lips, as if they didn’t fit over his gums. The whole time we’d been up there, he had walked backwards and forth on the same small patch of stones, dragging his twisted right leg. Despite the interdiction on speaking to one another, I could periodically hear his muttered counting: Two hundred and forty-seven. Two hundred and forty-eight.

Everyone knew that many seers went mad – that over years the visions burned our minds away. The visions were flame, and we were the wick. This man wasn’t a seer, but it didn’t surprise me that anyone held for long enough in the Keeping Rooms would go mad. What chance, then, for me, contending with the visions at the same time as the unrelenting walls of my cell? In a year or two, I thought, that might be me, counting out my footsteps as if the neatness of numbers could impose some order on a broken mind.

Between me and the pacing man was another prisoner, perhaps a few years older than me, a one-armed woman with dark hair and a cheerful face. It was the second time we’d been taken to the ramparts together. I walked as close to the edge of the ramparts as the guards would allow, and stared beyond the sandstone crenellations as I tried to contrive some way that I might speak or signal to her. I couldn’t get close enough to the edge to get a proper look at the city that unfolded beneath the mountainside fort. The horizon was curtailed by the ramparts, beyond which I could see only the hills, painted grey with distance.

I realised the counting had stopped. By the time I’d turned around to see what had changed, the older Omega had already rushed at the woman and gripped her neck between his hands. With only one arm she couldn’t fight hard enough or cry out quickly enough. The guards reached them while I was still yards away, and in seconds they’d pulled him off her, but it was too late.

I’d closed my eyes to block the sight of her body, face down on the flagstones, head turned sideways at an impossible angle. But for a seer there’s no refuge behind closed eyelids. In my shuddering mind I saw what else happened at precisely the moment that she died: a hundred feet above us, inside the fort, a glass of wine dropped, sharding red over a marble floor. A man in a velvet jacket fell backwards, scrambled for a second to his knees, and died, his hands to his neck.

After that, there were no more trips to the ramparts. Sometimes I thought I could hear the mad Omega shouting and thrashing the walls, but it was only a dull thud, a throb in the night. I never knew whether I was really hearing it, or just sensing it.

Inside my cell, it was almost never dark. A glass ball suspended in the ceiling gave off a pale light. It was lit constantly, and emitted off a slight buzz, so low that I sometimes wondered whether it was just a ringing in my own ears. For the first few days I watched it nervously, waiting for it to burn out and leave me in total darkness. But this was no candle, not even an oil lamp. The light it gave off was different: cooler, and unwavering. Its sterile light only faltered every few weeks, when it would flicker for several seconds and disappear, leaving me in a formless black world. But it never lasted more than one or two minutes. Each time the light would return, blinking a couple of times, like somebody waking from sleep, before resuming its vigil. I came to welcome these intermittent breakdowns. They were the only interruptions from the light’s ceaseless glare.

This must be the Electric, I supposed. I’d heard the stories: it was like a kind of magic, the key to most of the technology from the Before. Whatever it had been, though, it was supposed to be gone now. Any machines not already destroyed in the blast had been done away with in the purges that followed, when the survivors had destroyed all traces of the technology that had brought the world to ash. All remnants of the Before were taboo, but none more than the machines. And while the penalties for breaking the taboo were brutal, the law was mainly policed by fear alone. The danger was inscribed on the surface of our scorched world, and on the twisted bodies of the Omegas. We needed no reminders.

But here was a machine, a piece of the Electric, hanging from the ceiling of my cell. Not anything terrifying or powerful, like the things people whispered about. Not a weapon, or a bomb, or even a carriage that could move without a horse. Just this glass bulb, the size of my fist, blaring light at the top of my cell. I couldn’t stop staring at it, the knot of extreme brightness at its core, sharply white, as though a spark from the blast itself were captured there. I stared at it for so long that when I closed my eyes the bright shape of it was etched on my eyelids’ darkness. I was fascinated, and appalled, wincing beneath the light in those first days as though it might explode.

When I watched the light, it wasn’t only the taboo that scared me – it was what this act of witness meant for me. If word got out that the Council was breaking the taboo, there’d be another purge. The terror of the blast, and the machines that had wrought it, was still too real, too visceral, for people to tolerate. I knew the light was a life sentence: now I’d seen it, I’d never be allowed out.

More than anything else, I missed the sky. A narrow vent, just below the ceiling, let in fresh air from somewhere, but never even a glimpse of sunlight. I calculated time’s passage by the arrival of food trays twice a day through the slot in the base of the door. As the months since that last visit to the ramparts receded, I found I could recall the sky in the abstract, but couldn’t properly picture it. I thought of the stories of the Long Winter, after the blast, when the air had been so thick with ash that nobody saw the sky for years and years. They say there were children born in that time who never saw the sky at all. I wondered whether they’d believed in it; whether imagining the sky had become an act of faith for them, as it now was for me.

Counting days was the only way I could cling to any sense of time, but as the tally grew it became its own torture. I wasn’t counting down towards any prospect of release: the numbers only climbed, and with them the sense of suspension, of floating in an indefinite world of darkness and isolation. After the visits to the ramparts were stopped, the only regular milestone was The Confessor coming each fortnight to interrogate me about my visions. She told me that the other Omegas saw no one. Thinking of The Confessor, I didn’t know if I should envy or pity them.

*

They say the twins started to appear in the second and third generations of the After. In the Long Winter there were no twins – barely any births at all, and fewer who survived. They were the years of melted bodies and failed, unrecognisable infants. So few lived, and fewer still could breed, so that it seemed unlikely humans would carry on at all.

At first, in the struggle to repopulate, the onslaught of twins must have been greeted with joy. So many babies, and so many of them normal. There was always one boy and one girl, with one from each pair perfect. Not just well formed, but strong, robust. But soon the fatal symmetry became evident; the price to be paid for each perfect baby was its twin. They came in many different forms: limbs missing, or atrophied, or occasionally multiplied. Absent eyes, extra eyes, or eyes sealed shut. These were the Omegas, the shadow counterparts to the Alphas. The Alphas called them mutants, said they were the poison that Alphas cast out, even in the womb. The stain of the blast that, while it couldn’t be removed, had at least been displaced onto the lesser twin. The Omegas carried the burden of the mutations, leaving the Alphas unencumbered.

Not entirely unencumbered, though. While the difference between twins was visible, the link between them was not. But it nonetheless asserted itself, every time, in the most unanswerable way. It made no difference that nobody could understand how it worked. At first, they might have dismissed it as coincidence. But gradually, disbelief was overruled by fact, by the evidence of bodies. The twins came in pairs, and they died in pairs. Wherever they were, and no matter how far apart, whenever someone died, their twin died too.

Extreme pain, too, or serious illness, would affect both twins. A high fever in one twin would soon peak in the other; if one twin was knocked out, the other would lose consciousness as well, wherever he or she was. Minor injur-ies or sickness didn’t seem to bridge the divide, but severe pain would see one twin wake, screaming, from the other twin’s wound.

When it became clear that Omegas were infertile, it was assumed for a while that they would die out. That they were only a temporary blight, a readjustment after the blast. But each generation since then was the same: all twins, always one Alpha and one Omega. Only Alphas could produce children, but each child they produced came with its Omega twin.

When Zach and I were born, a perfect match, our parents must have counted and recounted: limbs, fingers, toes. The complete set. They would have been disbelieving, though; nobody dodged the split between Alpha and Omega. Nobody. It wasn’t unheard of for an Omega to have a deformation that only became apparent later: one leg that refused to grow in tandem with the other; deafness that passed unnoticed in infancy; an arm that turned out to be stunted or weak. But there were also rumours, all over, about those few whose difference never showed itself physically: the boy who seemed normal until he screamed and ran from the cottage minutes before the roof-beam’s sudden collapse; the girl who wept over the shepherd’s dog a week before the cart from the next village ran it down. These were the Omegas whose mutation was invisible: the seers. They were rare – only one in every few thousand, if that. Everybody knew of the seer who came to the market each month at Haven, the big town downstream. Although Omegas weren’t permitted at the Alpha market, he’d been tolerated for years, lurking at the back of the stalls, behind the stacked crates and the mounds of spoiled vegetables. By the time I first went to the market he was old, but still plying his trade, charging a bronze coin in exchange for predicting next season’s weather to farmers, or telling a merchant’s daughter whom she’d end up marrying. But he was always odd: he muttered to himself steadily, an unending incantation. Once, when Zach and I walked past with Dad, the seer shouted, ‘Fire. Forever fire.’ The stallholders nearby didn’t even flinch – evidently such outbursts were common. That was the fate of most seers: the blast burned its way through their minds, as they were forced to relive it.

I don’t know when I first realised my own difference, but I was old enough to know that it had to be hidden. In the early years, I was as oblivious as my parents. What child doesn’t wake, screaming, from a bad dream? It took a long time for me to understand that there was something different about my dreams. The consistency of my dreams of the blast. The way that I’d dream of a storm that wouldn’t arrive until the following night. How the details and scenes in my dreams extended far beyond my own experience of the village, its forty or so stone houses clustered around the central green with its stone-rimmed well. All I had ever known was this shallow valley, the houses and the wooden barns grouped a hundred feet from the river, high enough up to avoid the floods that drenched the fields with rich silt each winter. But my dreams thronged with unfamiliar landscapes and strange faces. Forts that loomed ten times the height of our own small house with its rough-sanded floors and low, beamed ceilings. Cities with streets wider than the river itself, and swollen with crowds.

By the time I was old enough to wonder at this, I was old enough to know that Zach was sleeping through each night, undisturbed. In the cot that we shared, I taught myself to lie in silence, to calm my frenzied breathing. When the visions came in the daytime, especially the roaring flash of the blast, I learned not to cry out. The first time Dad took us downstream to Haven, I recognised the jostling market square from my dreams, but when I saw Zach hang back and grip Dad’s hand, I imitated my brother’s dumbfounded stare.

So our parents waited. Like all parents, they’d made only a single cot for us, expecting to send one child away as soon as we’d been split and weaned. When, at three, we remained stubbornly unsplit, our father built a pair of larger beds. Although our neighbour, Mick, was known throughout the valley for his skill at carpentry, this time Dad didn’t ask for his help. He built the beds himself, almost furtively, in the small walled yard outside the kitchen window. In the years that followed, whenever my lopsided, ill-made bed creaked I remembered the expression on Dad’s face when he’d dragged the beds into the room, setting them as far apart as the narrow walls would allow.

Mum and Dad hardly spoke to us, anymore. Those were the drought years, when everything was rationed, and it seemed to me that even words had become scarce. In our valley, where the low-lying fields were usually flooded every winter, the river thinned to an apathetic trickle, the exposed riverbed on each side cracked like old pottery. Even in our well-off village, there was nothing to spare. Our harvests were poor the first two years, and in the third year without rain the crops failed altogether, and we lived off hoarded coins. The dried-up fields were scoured by dust. Some of the livestock died – there was no animal feed to buy, even for those with coins. There were stories of people starving, further east. The Council sent patrols through all the villages, to protect against Omega raids. That was the summer they erected the wall around Haven, and most of the larger Alpha towns. But the only Omegas I glimpsed in those years, passing our village on the way to the refuges, looked too thin and weary to threaten anyone.

Even when the drought had broken, the Council patrols continued. Mum and Dad’s vigilance didn’t change, either. The slightest difference between me and Zach was anticipated, seized on, and dissected. When we both came down with the winter fever, I overheard my parents’ long discussion about who had sickened first. I must have been six or seven. Through the floor of our bedroom I could hear, from the kitchen below, my father’s loud insistence that I’d looked flushed the night before, a good ten hours before both Zach and I had woken with our fevers peaking in perfect unison.

That was when I realised that Dad’s wariness around us was distrust, not habitual gruffness; that Mum’s constant watchfulness was something other than maternal devotion. Zach used to follow Dad around all day, from the well to the field to the barn. As we grew older, and Dad became prickly and wary with us, he began to shoo Zach away, shouting at him to get back to the house. Still Zach would find excuses to tail him when he could. If Dad was gathering fallen wood from the copse upstream, Zach would drag me there too, to search for mushrooms. If Dad was harvesting in the maize field, Zach would find a sudden enthusiasm for fixing the broken gate to the next paddock. He kept a safe distance, but trailed our father like an oddly misplaced shadow.

At night I clenched my eyes shut when Mum and Dad would talk about us, as if that would block out the voices that seeped through the floorboards. In the bed against the opposite wall I could hear Zach shift slightly, and the unhurried rhythm of his breathing. I didn’t know if he was asleep, or just pretending.

*

‘You’ve seen something new.’

I scanned the cell’s grey ceiling to avoid The Confessor’s eyes. Her questions were always like this: phrased blankly, as statements, as if she already knew everything. Of course, I could never be sure that she didn’t. I knew, myself, what it was to catch glimpses of other people’s thoughts, or to be woken by memories that weren’t my own. But The Confessor wasn’t just a seer; she used her power knowingly. Each time she came to the cell, I could feel her mind circling mine. I’d always refused to talk to her, but I was never sure how much I succeeded in concealing.

‘Just the blast. The same.’

She unclasped and reclasped her hands. ‘Tell me something you haven’t told me twenty times before.’

‘There’s nothing. Just the blast.’

I searched her face, but it revealed nothing of what she knew. I’m out of practice, I thought. Too long in the cell, cut off from people. And anyway, The Confessor was inscrutable. I tried to concentrate. Her face was nearly as pale as mine had become over the long months in the cell. The brand was somehow more conspicuous on her face than on others’, because the rest of her features were so imperturbable. Her skin as smooth as a polished river pebble, except for the tight redness of the brand, puckering at the centre of her forehead. It was hard to tell her age. If you just glanced at her, you might think her the same age as me and Zach. To me, however, she seemed decades older: it was the intensity of her stare, the powers that it barely concealed.

‘Zach wants you to help me.’

‘Then tell him to come himself. Tell him to see me.’

The Confessor laughed. ‘The guards told me you screamed his name for the first few weeks. Even now, after three months in here, you really think he’s going to come?’

‘He’ll come,’ I said. ‘He’ll come eventually.’

‘You seem certain of that,’ she said. She cocked her head slightly. ‘Are you certain that you want him to?’

I would never explain to her that it wasn’t a matter of wanting, any more than a river wants to move downstream. How could I explain to her that he needed me, even though I was the one in the cell?

I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t even know what you want,’ I said. ‘What you think I can do.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re like me, Cass. Which means I know what you’re capable of, even if you won’t admit it.’

I tried a strategic concession. ‘It’s been more frequent. The blast.’

‘Unfortunately I doubt that you can have much valuable information to give us about something that happened four hundred years ago.’

I could feel her mind probing at the edges of mine. It was like unfamiliar hands on my body. I tried to emulate her inscrutability, to close my mind.

The Confessor sat back. ‘Tell me about the island.’

She’d spoken quietly, but I had to hide my shock that I had been infiltrated so easily. I’d only begun to see the island in the last few weeks, since the final trip to the ramparts. The first few times I dreamed of it, I’d doubted myself, wondered if those glimpses of sea and sky were a fantasy rather than a vision. Just a daydream of open space, to counteract the contraction of my daily reality into those four grey walls, the narrow bed, the single chair. But the visions came too regularly, and were too detailed and consistent. I knew that what I had seen was real, just as I knew that I could never speak of it. Now, in the overbearing silence of the room, my own breathing sounded loud.

‘I’ve seen it too, you know,’ she said. ‘You will tell me.’

When her mind probed mine, I was laid bare. It was like watching Dad skin a rabbit: the moment when he’d peel back the skin, leaving all the inner workings exposed.

I tried to seal my mind around images of the island: the city concealed in its caldera, houses clambering on one another up the steep sides. The water, merciless grey, stretching in all directions, pocked by outcrops of sharp stone. I could see it all, as I’d seen it many nights in dreams. I tried to think of myself as holding its secret inside my mouth, the same way the island nursed the secret city, nestled in the crater.

Standing, I said, ‘There is no island.’

The Confessor stood too. ‘You’d better hope not.’

*

As we grew older the scrutiny of our parents was matched only by that of Zach himself. To him, every day we weren’t split was another day he was branded by the suspicion of being an Omega, another day he was prevented from assuming his rightful place in Alpha society. So, unsplit, the two of us lingered at the margins of village life. When other children went to school, we studied together at the kitchen table. When other children played together by the river, we played only with each other, or followed the others at a distance, copying their games. Keeping far enough away to avoid the other children shouting or throwing stones at us, Zach and I could only hear fragments of the rhymes they sang. Later, at home, we would try to echo them, filling in the gaps with our own invented words and lines. We existed in our own small orbit of suspicion. To the rest of the village, we were objects of curiosity and, later, outright hostility. After a while, the whispers of the neighbours ceased being whispers, and became shouts: ‘Poison.Freak.Imposter.’ They didn’t know which one of us was dangerous, so they despised us equally. Each time another set of twins was born in the village, and then split, our unsplit state became more conspicuous. Our neighbours’ Omega son, Oscar, whose left leg ended at the knee, was sent away at nine months old to be cared for by Omega relatives. We often passed the remaining twin, little Meg, playing alone in the fenced yard of their house.

‘She must miss her twin,’ I said to Zach as we walked by, watching Meg chewing listlessly on the head of a small wooden horse.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I bet she’s devastated that she doesn’t have to share her life with a freak anymore.’

‘He must miss his family too.’

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, repeating the familiar line from one of the Council posters. ‘Anyway, you know what happens to parents who try to hang on to their Omega kids.’

I’d heard the stories. The Council showed no mercy to the occasional parent who resisted the split and tried to keep both twins. It was the same for those rare Alphas who were found to be in a relationship with an Omega. There were rumours of public floggings, and worse. But most parents relinquished their Omega babies readily, eager to be rid of their deformed offspring. The Council taught that prolonged proximity to Omegas was dangerous. The neighbours’ hisses of poison revealed both disdain and fear. Omegas needed to be cast out of Alpha society, just as the poison was cast out of the Alpha twin in the womb. Was that the one thing Omegas are spared, I wondered? Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.

I knew my time to be sent away was coming, and that my secrecy was only deferring the inevitable. I’d even begun to wonder whether my current existence – the perpetual scrutiny of my parents and the rest of the village – was any better than the exile that was bound to follow. Zach was the one person who understood my odd, liminal life, because he shared it. But I felt his dark, calm eyes on me all the time.

In search of less watchful company, I’d caught three of the red beetles that always flocked by the well. I kept them in a jar on the windowsill, had enjoyed seeing them crawl about, and hearing the muted clatter of their wings against the glass. A week later I found the largest one pinned to the wooden sill, one wing gone, making an endless circle on the pivot of its guts.

‘It was an experiment,’ said Zach. ‘I wanted to test how long it could live like that.’

I told our parents. ‘He’s just bored,’ my mother said. ‘It’s driving him crazy, the two of you not being in school like you should be.’ But the unspoken truth continued to circle, like the beetle stuck on the pin: only one of us would ever be allowed to go to school.

I squashed the beetle myself, with the heel of my shoe, to put an end to its circular torment. That night, I took the jar and the two remaining beetles with me to the well. When I removed the lid and tipped the jar on its side, they were reluctant to venture out. I coaxed them out with a blade of grass, transferring them carefully to the stone rim on which I sat. One attempted a short flight, landing on my bare leg. I let it sit there for a while before blowing it gently back into flight.

Zach saw the empty jar that night, beside my bed. Neither of us said anything.

*

About a year later, gathering firewood by the river on a still afternoon, I made my mistake. I was walking just behind Zach when I sensed something: a part-glimpse of a vision, intruding between the real world and my sight. I dashed to catch up with him, knocked him out of the way before the branch had even begun to fall. It was an instinctive response, the kind I’d grown used to repressing. Later I would wonder whether it was fear for his safety that led to my lapse, or just exhaustion under the constant scrutiny. Either way, he was safe, sprawled beneath me on the path, by the time the massive bough creaked and fell, snagging and tearing off other branches on the way down, to land finally where Zach had stood earlier.

When his eyes met mine I was amazed at the relief in them.

‘It wouldn’t have done much damage,’ I said.

‘I know.’ He helped me up, brushed some leaves off the side of my dress.

‘I saw it.’ I was speaking too quickly. ‘Saw it starting to fall, I mean.’

‘You don’t need to explain,’ he said. ‘And I should thank you, for getting me out of the way.’ For the first time in years, he was smiling at me in the unguarded, wide-mouthed way that I remembered from our early childhood. I knew him too well to be glad.

He insisted on adding my own bundle of firewood to his, carrying the whole load all the way back to the village. ‘I owe you,’ he said.

In the weeks that followed we passed most of the time together, the same as always, but he was less rough in our games. He waited for me on the walk to the well. When we took the shortcut across the field, he called behind to warn me when he came across a patch of stinging nettles. My hair went unpulled, my possessions undisturbed.

Zach’s new knowledge allowed me some respite from his daily cruelties, but it wasn’t enough to declare us split. For that, he needed proof – years of impassioned but futile assertions on his part had taught him that. He waited a while for me to slip up again and reveal myself, but for nearly a whole year more I managed to hold my secret. The visions had grown stronger, but I’d trained myself not to react, not to cry out at the flashes of flame that punctuated my nights, or at the images of distant places that drifted into my waking thoughts. I spent more time alone, venturing far upstream, even as far as the deep gorge leading away from the river, where the abandoned silos were hidden. Zach no longer followed me when I went off by myself.

I never entered the silos, of course. All such remnants were taboo. Our broken world was scattered with these ruins, but it was against the law to enter them, just as it was forbidden to own any relics. I’d heard rumours that some desperate Omegas had been known to raid the wreckage, searching out usable fragments. But what would be left to salvage after all these centuries? The blast had levelled most cities. And even if there were anything salvageable in the taboo towns now, centuries later, who would dare to take it, knowing the penalty? More frightening than the law were the rumours of what those remnants could hold. The radiation, said to shelter like a nest of wasps in such relics. The contaminating presence of the past. If the Before was mentioned at all, it was in hushed voices, with a mixture of awe and disgust.

Zach and I used to dare each other to get close to the silos. Always braver than me, once he ran right up to the closest one and placed a hand on the curved concrete wall before running back to me, giddy with pride and fear. But these days I was always alone, and would sit for hours under a tree that overlooked the silos. The three huge, tubular buildings were more intact than many such ruins – they’d been shielded by the gorge that surrounded them, and by the fourth silo, which must have taken the brunt of the blast. It had collapsed entirely, leaving only its circular base. Twisted metal spars rose out of the dust like the grasping fingers of a world buried alive. But I was grateful for the silos, despite their ugliness – they guaranteed that nobody else would go near the place, so I could at least count on solitude. And unlike the walls of Haven, or the larger of the villages nearby, there were no Council posters flapping at the wind: Vigilance against Contamination from Omegas. Alpha Unity: Support Increased Tithes for Omegas. Since the drought years, everything seemed scarcer except for new Council posters.

I wondered, sometimes, whether I was drawn to the ruins because I recognised myself in them. We Omegas, in our brokenness, were like those taboo ruins: dangerous. Contaminating. Reminders of the blast and what it had wrought.

Although Zach no longer came with me to the silos, or on my other wanderings, I knew he was still observing me more intently than ever. When I came back from the silos, tired from the long walk, he’d smile at me in his watchful way, ask politely about my day. He knew where I’d been, but never told our parents, although they would have been furious. But he left me alone. He was like a snake, drawing back before the strike.

The first time he tried to expose me, he took my favourite doll, Scarlett, the one in the red dress that Mum had sewn. When Zach and I had first been given separate beds, I’d hung on to that doll for comfort at night. Even at twelve, I always slept with Scarlett under one arm, the coarse, plaited wool of her hair reassuringly scratchy against my skin. Then one morning she was gone.

When I asked about Scarlett at breakfast, Zach was buoyant with triumph. ‘It’s hidden, outside the village. I took it while Cass was asleep.’ He turned to our parents. ‘If she finds where I buried it, she has to be a seer. It’ll be proof.’ Our mother chided him, and put a hand on my shoulder, but all day I saw how my parents watched me even more carefully than usual.

I cried, as I had planned. Seeing the hopeful alertness of my parents made it easy. How keen they were to solve the riddle that Zach and I had become, even if it meant being rid of me. In the evening, I pulled from the small toybox an unfamiliar-looking doll with awkwardly chopped short hair and a simple white smock. That night, tucked under my left arm, Scarlett was returned from the toybox exile that I’d imposed on her a week before, when I’d swapped her red dress onto an unfavoured doll, and hacked off her long hair.

From then on Scarlett remained secret, in full view, on my bed. I never bothered to go to the lightning-charred willow downstream and dig up the doll in the red dress that Zach had buried there.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_e39a08c5-134c-51e1-8e4c-ed951b76ac0a)


Downstairs, Mum and Dad were fighting again, the sound of their argument drifting up through the floorboards, insidious as smoke.

‘It’s more of a problem every day,’ Dad said.

Mum’s voice was quieter. ‘They’re not “a problem” – they’re our children.’

‘One of them is,’ he replied. A pot clattered loudly on the table. ‘The other one’s dangerous. Poison. We just don’t know which one.’

Zach hated to let me see him cry, but the dregs of the candle threw out enough light for me to see the slight shuddering of his back under the blanket. I slipped out from under my quilt. The floorboards creaked slightly as I took the two steps to the edge of Zach’s bed.

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ I whispered, putting a hand on his back. ‘He doesn’t mean to hurt you when he says things like that.’

He sat up, shrugging off my hand. I was surprised to see he didn’t even try to wipe away the tears. ‘I’m not hurt by him,’ he said. ‘What he says, it’s all true. You want to pat me on the back, comfort me, act like you’re the caring one? It’s not them hurting me. Not even the other kids, the ones who throw stones. See all of this?’ The sweep of his hand took in the sounds from the kitchen below, as well as his own tear-streaked face. ‘It’s all your fault. You’re the problem, Cass, not them. You’re the reason we’re stuck in this limbo.’

I was suddenly aware of the cold boards underfoot, and the night air on my bare arms.

‘You want to show you really care about me?’ he said. ‘Then tell them the truth. You could end it right away.’

‘Do you really want me sent away? It’s me. I’m not some strange creature. Forget what the Council says about contamination. It’s just me. You know me.’

‘You keep saying that. Why should I think I know you? You’ve never been honest with me. You never told me the truth. You made me figure it out for myself.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I said. Even admitting as much to him, alone in our room, was risky.

‘Because you didn’t trust me. You want to make out that we’re so close. But you’re the one who’s lied this whole time. You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth. All these years, you left me to wonder. To fear that it might be me who was the freak. And now you think I should trust you?’

I retreated to my bed. He was still staring at me. Could things ever have been different, if I’d trusted him with the truth? Could we have found a way to share the secret, to make our way together? Had he caught his distrust from me? Maybe that was the poison I’d been carrying – not the contamination of the blast that all Omegas bore, but the secret.

A tear had settled on the top of his upper lip. It glinted gold in the candlelight.

I didn’t want him to see the matching tear on my face. I reached out to the table and snuffed the flame.

‘It’s got to end,’ he whispered into the darkness. It was half a plea, half a threat.

*

His impatience to expose me grew with our father’s illness. Dad fell sick when we’d just turned thirteen. As with the previous year, there was no mention of our birthday – our age had become an increasingly shameful reminder of our unsplit state. That night, Zach had whispered across the bedroom: ‘You know what day it was today?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said. It was only a whisper, so it was hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic.

Two days later, Dad collapsed. Dad, who had always seemed as robust and solid as the huge oak cross-beam that ran the length of the kitchen ceiling. He hauled buckets of water up the well faster than anyone else in the village, and when Zach and I were smaller he could carry us both at once. He still could, I thought, except that he rarely touched us now. Then, in the middle of the paddock on a hot day, he stumbled to his knees. From where I sat, shelling peas on the stone wall at the front of our yard, I heard the shouts of the others working near him in the field.

That night, after the neighbours had carried him back to the cottage, our mother sent for Dad’s twin, Alice, from the Omega settlement up on the plain. Zach himself went with Mick in the bullock cart to fetch her, returning the next day with our aunt lying in the hay on the back of the cart. We’d never met her before, and looking at her, the only similarity I could see between her and Dad was the fever that currently slickened their flesh. She was thin, with long hair, darker than Dad’s. The coarse, brown fabric of her dress had been mended many times and was now flecked with hay. Beneath the strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead we could make out the brand: Omega.

We cared for her as much as we could, but it was clear from the start that she hadn’t long. We couldn’t allow her in the house, of course, but even her presence in the shed was enough to enrage Zach. On the second day his fury climaxed. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he shouted. ‘She’s disgusting. How can she be here, with us running around after her like servants? She’s killing him. And it’s dangerous for all of us, having her so close.’

Mum didn’t bother to hush him, but said calmly, ‘She’d be killing him more quickly if we’d left her in her own filthy hut.’

This silenced Zach. He wanted Alice gone, but not at the expense of admitting to Mum what he had told me in bed the night before: what he’d seen at the settlement when he collected Alice. Her small, tidy cottage; the whitewashed walls; the posies of dried herbs hanging above the hearth, just as they hung above ours.

Mum continued, ‘If we save her, we save him.’

It was only at night, when the candle was out and no voices could be heard from Mum and Dad’s room, that Zach would tell me about what he’d seen at the settlement. He told me that other Omegas at the settlement had tried to stop them from taking Alice away – that they’d wanted to keep caring for her there. But no Omega would dare to argue with an Alpha, and Mick had brandished his whip until they backed away.

‘Isn’t it cruel, though, to take her from her family?’ I whispered.

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ Zach recited.

‘Not children, obviously, but people she loves. Friends, or maybe a husband.’

‘A husband?’ He let the word hang. Officially Omegas weren’t allowed to marry, but everyone knew that they still did, although the Council wouldn’t recognise any such unions.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘She didn’t live with anyone,’ he said. ‘It was just a few other freaks from her settlement, claiming they knew what was best for her.’

We’d barely seen Omegas before, let alone spent time in close quarters with one. Little Oscar next door had been sent away as soon as he was branded and weaned. The few Omegas who passed through the area rarely stayed more than a night, camping just downstream of the village. They were itinerants, on the way to try their luck at one of the larger Omega settlements in the south. Or, in years when the harvest had been poor, there’d be Omegas who’d given up on farming the half-blighted land they were permitted to settle on, and were heading to one of the refuges near Wyndham. The refuges were the Council’s concession to the fatal bond between twins. Omegas couldn’t be allowed to starve to death and take their twins with them, so there were refuges near all large towns, where Omegas would be taken in, and fed and housed by the Council. Few Omegas went willingly, though – it was a place of last resort, for the starving or sick. The refuges were workhouses, and those who sought their help had to repay the Council’s generosity with labour, working on the farms within the refuge complex until the Council judged the debt repaid. Few Omegas were willing to trade their freedom for the safety of three meals a day.

I’d gone out with Mum, once, to give some food-scraps to one group on their way to the refuge near Wyndham. It was dark, and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mum had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travellers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mum’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.

Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mum threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

She met his eyes clearly. ‘It’s the fever. I have the fever – your father too, now.’

He scowled. ‘But before that – what’s wrong with you?’

Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place, but neatly clipped and clean.

Zach was impatient. ‘What? What is it?’

‘Don’t they teach you to count at your school?’

I said what Zach would not. ‘We don’t go to school. We can’t – we’ve not been split.’

He interrupted quickly: ‘But we can count. We learn at home – numbers, writing, all sorts of things.’ His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

‘That’s my problem, sweetheart,’ said Alice. ‘My toes don’t add up.’ She looked at Zach’s deflated face, and stopped her grinning. ‘I suppose there’s more,’ she said, almost kindly. ‘You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped – my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead-end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.’ She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?’ He didn’t answer. She went on: ‘And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?’

Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. ‘There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumour, a lie.’

‘Then why do you look so scared?’

I answered this time. ‘On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burnt-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumours of the island.’

‘He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,’ Zach added, looking at the door again.

‘And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,’ I said, ‘where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.’

Alice shrugged. ‘Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumour. Just a lie.’

‘It is – is a lie, I mean,’ hissed Zach. ‘You need to shut up – you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.’

‘They haven’t found it yet.’

‘Because it doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘It’s just an idea.’

‘Maybe that’s enough,’ she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.

He stood. ‘I’m going to check on Dad.’

I nodded, pressed the cool flannel again to my aunt’s head. ‘Dad’ll be just the same – unconscious, I mean,’ I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.

With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the centre of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognise some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.

*

Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.

I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.

After a while, he said, ‘I saw him fall, you know.’

I should have realised, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.

‘I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,’ he went on. ‘I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.’ Zach spat out a splinter of hay. ‘He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face first, so I couldn’t see him for the wheat.’

‘I’m sorry. It must have been scary.’

‘Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.’ He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’

There was no point lying to him, so I just nodded.

‘Can’t you do anything?’ he said. He grabbed my hand. Amongst everything that had happened over those last few days – Dad’s collapse, and Alice’s arrival – the strangest of all was Zach reaching out for my hand, something he’d not done since we were tiny.

When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.

I squeezed his hand. ‘What could I do?’

‘Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair – she’s killing him.’

‘It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.’

‘It’s not fair,’ he said again.

‘Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.’

‘It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas – we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.’

I couldn’t argue with him about the illness – it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. ‘It’s not her fault,’ I offered. ‘And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.’

He dropped my hand. ‘You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.’

‘Of course I care.’

‘Then do something,’ he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I said. I knew that seers were rumoured to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world – only perceive it in crooked ways.

‘I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ he whispered. ‘If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.’

It made no difference whether I believed him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I repeated.

‘What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?’

I reached once more for his hand. ‘He’s my dad too.’

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, snatching his hand away.

*

Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and I were in the shed, asleep, Alice’s jagged breath grating on our dreams. I woke suddenly. I shook Zach and said, without thinking of hiding my vision, ‘Go to Dad. Go now.’ He was gone before he could even accuse me of anything, his footsteps racing on the gravel path to the cottage. I stood to go too: nearby, my father was dying. But Alice opened her eyes, briefly at first, and then for longer. I didn’t want her to be alone, in the cramped darkness of an unfamiliar shed. So I stayed.

They were buried together the next day, though the gravestone bore only his name. Mum had burned Alice’s nightdress, along with the sheets from both fever-sweated beds. The sole tangible proof that Alice had existed was hanging on a piece of twine around my neck, under my dress: a large brass key. The night she died, when Alice had woken briefly and seen that she was alone with me, she’d taken the key from her neck and passed it to me.

‘Behind my cottage, buried under the lavender, there’s a chest. Things that will help you when you go there.’ She entered another coughing fit.

I handed it back, loath to receive another uninvited gift from this woman. ‘How do you know it will be me?’

She coughed again. ‘I don’t, Cass. I just hope it is.’

‘Why?’ I, more than Zach, had cared for this woman, this reeking stranger. Why would she now wish this upon me?

She pressed the key again into my resisting hand. ‘Because your brother, he’s so full of fear – he’ll never cope if it’s him.’

‘He’s not afraid of things – and he’s strong.’ I wasn’t sure if I was coming to his defence, or my own. ‘He’s just angry, I suppose.’

Alice laughed, a rasp that differed only slightly from her usual coughing. ‘Oh, he’s angry all right. But it’s all the same thing.’ She waved my hand away impatiently as I tried to pass back the key.

In the end, I took it. I kept the key hidden, but it still felt like an admission, if only to myself. Looking at Zach’s face as we stood in the graveyard, squinting in the relentless sun, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Since Dad’s death, I’d felt something shift in Zach’s mind. The change in his thoughts felt like a rusted lock that finally gives way: the same decisiveness, the same satisfaction.

With Dad gone, our house was filled with waiting. I began to dream about the brand. In my dream that first night, I placed my hand again on Alice’s head, and felt her scar burning into the flesh of my own palm.

*

Only a month after the burial, I came home to find the local Councilman there. It was late summer, the hay freshly cut and sharp underfoot as I walked across the fields. On the path up from the river I saw the blurring of the sky above our cottage, and wondered why the fire was lit on such a hot day.

They were waiting for me inside. The moment I saw the black iron handle sticking out of the fire, I heard again the hiss of branded flesh that had sounded in my recent dreams, and I turned to run. It was my mother who grabbed me, hard, by the arm.

‘You know the Councilman, Cass, from downstream.’

I didn’t struggle, but kept my eyes fixed on the brand in the fire. The shape at its end, glowing in the coals, was smaller than I’d pictured it in my dreams. It occurred to me that it was made for use on infants.

‘Thirteen years now, Cassandra, we’ve waited for you and your brother to be split,’ said the Councilman. He reminded me of my father; his big hands. ‘It’s too long. One of you where you shouldn’t be, and one missing out on school. We can’t have an Omega here, contaminating the village. It’s dangerous, especially for the other twin. You each need to take your proper place.’

‘This is our proper place: here. This is our home.’ I was shouting, but Mum interrupted me quickly.

‘Zach told us, Cass.’

The Councilman took over. ‘Your twin came to see me.’

Zach had been standing behind the Councilman, head slightly bowed. Now he looked up at me. I don’t know what I’d expected to see in his eyes: triumph, I suppose. Perhaps contrition. Instead he looked as he so often did: wary, watchful. Afraid, even, but my own fear dragged my eyes back to the brand, from its long black handle down to the shape at the end, a serpentine curve in the coals.

‘How do you know he’s not lying?’ I asked the Councilman.

He laughed. ‘Why would he lie about this? Zach’s shown courage.’ He stepped up to the fireplace and lifted the brand. Methodically, he knocked it twice against the iron grill to shake loose the ash that clung to it.

‘Courage?’ I threw off my mother’s grasp.

The Councilman stepped back from the fire, the brand held high. To my surprise, Mum didn’t grab me again, or make any move to stop me as I backed away. It was the Councilman who moved, quicker than I would have imagined, given his size. He grabbed Zach by the neck and pressed him against the wall beside the hearth. In the Councilman’s other hand, raised above Zach’s face, the brand was smoking slightly.

I shook my head, as if trying to shake the world into some sort of sense. My eyes met Zach’s. Even with the brand so close to his face that its shadow fell across his eyes, I could now see the smirk of triumph. And I admired him, as I always had: my twin; my brave, clever twin. He’d managed to surprise me after all. Could I bring myself to surprise him? Call his bluff and play along, let him be branded and exiled?

I almost could have brought myself to do it, if I hadn’t detected, beneath his triumph, that splinter of terror, insistent as the brand itself. My own face was screwed up against the sizzling heat that I could sense in front of his.

‘He lied. It’s me. I’m the seer.’ I forced my voice into calmness. ‘He knew I’d tell you the truth.’

The Councilman pulled back the brand, but didn’t release Zach.

‘Why not tell us, if you knew it was her?’

‘I tried, for years. Nobody believed me,’ Zach said, his voice half-crushed by the Councilman’s hand at his throat. ‘I couldn’t prove it. I could never catch her out.’

‘And how do we know we can believe her now?’

In the end it was a relief for me to tell it all: how the flashes of vision came to me at night, at first, and later even when I was awake. How the blast tore open my sleep with its roar of light. How I sometimes knew things before they happened: the falling branch, the doll, the brand itself. My mother and the Councilman listened carefully. Only Zach, knowing it already, was impatient.

Finally the Councilman spoke. ‘You’ve given us all quite the runaround, girl. If it wasn’t for your brother, you might have kept on playing us for fools.’ He plunged the brand back into the coals with such force that it sparked against the metal grating. ‘Did you think you were different from the rest of the filthy Omegas?’ He hadn’t let go of the handle of the brand. ‘Better than them, just because you’re a seer?’ He pulled the brand again from the fire. ‘See this?’ He had me now by the throat. The brand, only inches away, singed a few strands of my hair. The smell and the heat forced my eyes shut. ‘See this?’ he said again, waving the brand before my clenched eyes. ‘This is what you are.’

I didn’t cry out when he pressed it to my forehead, though I heard Zach give a grunt of pain. My hand was at my chest, clutching the key that hung there. I squeezed it so tightly that later, upstairs, I saw that it had left its imprint on my flesh.




CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_98b046c0-3242-58fa-9f8a-8876750f874e)


They let me stay for four days, until the burn had begun to heal. It was Zach who rubbed balm on my forehead. He winced as he did it, whether from pain or disgust I didn’t know.

‘Hold still.’ His tongue emerged from the corner of his mouth as he peered close to clean the wound. He’d always done that when he concentrated. I was extra aware of these small things, now, knowing that I wouldn’t see them anymore.

He dabbed again. He was very gentle, but I couldn’t help but flinch as he touched the raw skin.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Not sorry for exposing me – sorry only for the blistered flesh.

‘It’ll get better in a few weeks. But I’ll be gone by then. You’re not sorry about that.’

He put down the cloth and looked out the window. ‘It couldn’t stay the same. It couldn’t be the two of us, any longer. It’s not right.’

‘You realise you’re going to be by yourself, now.’

He shook his head. ‘You kept me by myself. I can go to school now. I’ll have the others.’

‘The ones who throw rocks at us when we pass by the school? It was me who cleaned up the wound when Nick landed that rock right above your eye. Who’s going to mop up your blood once they’ve sent me away?’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He smiled at me. For the first time I could remember, he was perfectly serene. ‘They only threw rocks because of you. Because you made us both into a freak show. Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again.’

It was refreshing, in a way, to be able to speak openly after all the subterfuge. For those few days before I left, we were more comfortable together than we had been for years.

‘You didn’t see it coming?’ he asked, on my last night, when he’d blown out the candle on the table between our beds.

‘I saw the brand. I felt it burning.’

‘But you didn’t know how I’d do it? That I’d declare myself the Omega?’

‘I guess I only got a glimpse of what would happen in the end. That it would be me.’

‘But it might have been me. If you hadn’t said.’

‘Maybe.’ I shifted again. The only bearable way to lie was on my back, so that the burn didn’t touch the pillow. ‘In my dreams, it was always me branded.’ Did that mean that staying silent had never been an option? Had he known so surely that I would speak up? And what if I hadn’t?

I left at dawn the next day. Zach’s happiness was barely disguised, and didn’t surprise me, though I was saddened to see how my mother rushed the farewell. She avoided looking at my face, as she had ever since the branding. I’d seen it only once myself, sneaking into Mum’s room to meet my new face in the small mirror there. The burn was still raised and blistered, but despite the inflammation surrounding it, the mark was clear. I remembered the Councilman’s words, and repeated them to myself: ‘This is what I am.’ Holding my finger just above the scorched flesh I traced the shape: the incomplete circle, like an inverted horseshoe, with a short horizontal line spreading out at each end. ‘This is what I am,’ I said again.

What surprised me, when I left, was my own relief. Although the pain of my brand was still sharp, and although Mum pushed a parcel of food into my arms when I tried to embrace her, there was something liberating about leaving behind those years of hiding. When Zach said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ I nearly laughed out loud.

‘You mean: take care of you.’

He looked straight at me, not averting his eyes from my brand the way our mother did. ‘Yes.’

I thought that maybe, for the first time in years, we were being honest with each other.

Of course, I cried. I was thirteen years old and I had never been parted from my family before. The furthest I’d ever been from Zach was the day he journeyed to collect Alice. I wondered if it would have been easier if I’d been branded as a child. I would have been raised in an Omega settlement, never known what it was to be with my family, with my twin. I might even have had friends, though never having experienced any closeness apart from with Zach, I didn’t really know what that might mean. At least, I thought, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore.

I was wrong. I was hardly even out of the village when I passed a group of children my own age. Although Zach and I had not been able to attend the school, we knew all the local children, had even played with them in the early years, before our strange togetherness became a public problem. Zach had always carried himself with confidence, and insisted he would fight anyone who said he wasn’t an Alpha. But as the years passed, parents began to warn their children away from the unsplit twins, so we’d relied more and more on each other for company, even as Zach’s resentment at our isolation grew. During the last few years the other children had not just avoided us, but had openly taunted us, hurling rocks and insults if our parents were out of sight.

The four children, three boys and a girl, had been riding on a pair of old donkeys, taking turns to race each other on their comically awkward mounts. I heard them from a distance, and saw them shortly afterwards. I kept my head down and kept to the side of the narrow road, but word of our split had spread quickly, and when they grew close enough to see my brand they were filled with the excitement of seeing the news confirmed.

They surrounded me. Nick, the tallest of the boys, spoke first, while the others looked with undisguised disgust at my brand.

‘Looks like Zach can finally come to school.’

Nick hadn’t spoken to either of us for years, other than to shout slurs, but it seemed my branding had immediately returned Zach to favour.

Another of the boys spoke: ‘Your kind don’t belong here.’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back towards the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: ‘freak’; ‘dead-end’; ‘poison’.

My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, ‘Stop them. Please.’

Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly on to the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. ‘That’s our water,’ Ruth said. ‘From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.’

They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.

For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos, but pushed onwards, further south than I’d ever been.

It had taken Zach more than half a day in the cart to reach the Omega settlement when he collected Alice. For me, on foot, avoiding the roads, my footsteps never quite keeping time with the throbbing of my head, it took nearly three days. Several times a day I stopped to bathe my forehead in the river, and to tear off some bread from the parcel Mum had given me. I slept on the riverbank, glad of the midsummer warmth. On the second morning I re-joined the road, where it curved away from the river to climb up the valley. Although I was still afraid of encountering people, it was for a different reason. I was in Omega country now.

The landscape itself was different. The Alphas had always claimed the best land for their own. The valley where I’d been raised was good farming country, the soil plush with river-silt. Up here there was no valley to shield the land from the harsh light, which glared from the rocky soil. The grass, where it grew at all, was brittle and pale, and the roadside was covered with brambles. Their barbed leaves glistened with spiderwebs, a thick mist that did not lift. There was some other strangeness, too, that I couldn’t work out until I looked about to refill my flask, and realised that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hear the river. Its noise had been the backdrop to my entire life, and I knew it intimately: the surge of the high water in flood season, the heavy buzz of insects that drifted over the still pools in summer. The river had always provided the spine of my mental map of the area: upstream from the village was south, past the gorge and the silos that Zach and I used to dare each other to approach. Further upstream lay Wyndham, the biggest city and the Council’s base. I’d never been that far, but had heard stories of its size and wealth. Even the refuge outside Wyndham, Mum had told me, was bigger than any town I’d seen. Downstream led north, through the fields, larger villages. A day’s walk downriver was Haven, the market-town where Dad used to take us when we were smaller. Beyond Haven, the shallow rapids took the river beyond my knowledge.

Now, in Omega country, I was still confident that I could find my way – I could usually sense the landscape, just as I could sense emotions and events. But without the river, I felt cut loose, turning about on this unfamiliar plain. There was only one road and I followed it as my mother had told me. I left it only once, following some tell-tale birds to a small spring that bubbled from a crack in the rock, from which I drank quickly before scrambling back to the barren road.

By the time I saw the settlement, night was lowering on the plain, and the first lamps had been lit in the windows. The cluster of houses was smaller than my village, but substantial enough that there could be no doubt. A huddle of low buildings, surrounded by a spread of fields, where the recently harvested crops were bald in patches and interrupted by large boulders. I pulled back the shawl that covered my head, waving away the flies that made busy with the still-seeping burn. This is what I am, I reminded myself, one hand on the key that hung at my neck. But as I approached, a small figure on the wide and broken road, I wished that Zach were by my side. A stupid thought, I reprimanded myself. Nonetheless, he had been like the sound of the river to me: always there.




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_43c3b017-bcd4-55cd-8e41-793bdc650fce)


In the years that followed, I was grateful at least for Alice’s cottage, and the stash of bronze coins that I’d found in the buried chest beneath the lavender. After six years at the settlement there were few coins left, but the money had allowed me to eke out the leanest months of the bad season, to pay the Council’s tithe collectors (who came without fail, regardless of the success or failure of crops), and to help some of those who might otherwise have gone hungry. Little Oscar, from my parents’ village, was there, being raised by his relatives in a cottage near my own. He’d been sent away much too young to remember me, but whenever I saw him it felt like a link with the village, and with those that I’d left behind. But although the others at the settlement still referred to the cottage as ‘Alice’s place’, I gradually began to feel established there.

The other Omegas had grown used to me, too, though they tended to keep their distance. I understood their wariness: arriving there, newly branded at thirteen, meant that I would never quite be seen as one of them. That was compounded by the fact that I was a seer. Once or twice I overheard mutterings about my absence of any visible mutation. Easy enough for her, I heard my neighbour Claire say to her wife, Nessa, when I offered to help them with the rethatching of their roof. It’s not like she’s had to struggle like the rest of us. Another time, at work in my garden, I heard Nessa warning Claire to steer clear of me. I don’t want her sitting in my kitchen. We’ve got enough troubles without a neighbour who can read your mind. There was no point trying to explain to her that it didn’t work like that – that being a seer was a series of impressions, not a neat narrative, and that I was more likely to catch a glimpse of a town ten miles east, or of the blast itself, than to be privy to Nessa’s thoughts. I kept silent, went on picking the snails from my broad-bean stems, and pretended I’d heard nothing. I’d learned, by then, that if Omegas were seen as dangerous, seers were doubly so. I found myself spending more time alone than I had at the village, where I’d had Zach’s company, however grudging.

I’d been surprised to find books at Alice’s cottage. Omegas weren’t allowed to go to school, so most couldn’t read. But in the buried chest, along with the coins, were two notebooks of handwritten recipes, and one of songs, some of which I’d heard bards sing in our village. For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw. Even in our relatively well-off village, books were a rarity: reading was for making out instructions on a seed packet bought at market, or reading in the Village Book the names of the two travelling Omegas who had been fined and whipped for stealing a sheep. In the settlement, where few could read and fewer would admit to it, books were an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

I didn’t tell anyone about Alice’s books, but I read and re-read them so many times that the pages began to come away from the spines as I turned them, as if the books existed in a perpetual autumn. In the evenings, when we’d all finished working in the fields and I went home to the cottage, I’d spend hours in Alice’s kitchen, following her compact, scrawled guidance for adding rosemary to a loaf of bread, or the easiest way to peel a clove of garlic. When I first followed her instructions, and learned to crush the garlic with the flat of my knife so that the clove slipped from its dry husk like a sweet from its wrapper, I felt closer to Alice than to any of the others in the settlement.

In those quiet evenings, I thought often of my mother, and of Zach. At first, Mum wrote to me a few times a year, her letters carried by Alpha traders who wouldn’t even dismount at the settlement to drop them, instead tossing them from their saddle bags. Two years after I arrived at the settlement, she wrote that Zach had an apprenticeship at the Council, at Wyndham. Over the next year or so, more news filtered through: that Zach provided good service. That he grew in power. Then, after five years in the settlement, Mum wrote that Zach’s master had died, and Zach had taken over his post. We were only eighteen, but most Councillors started young. They died young too – the rivalries and factions within the Council were legendary. The Judge, who’d been in charge as long as I could remember, was a rare exception, as old as my parents. Most of the others were young. Stories reached us, even in the settlement, of the rise and fall of various Councillors. In the brutal world of the Council fort at Wyndham, it seemed, ruthlessness and ambition counted for more than experience. It didn’t surprise me that Zach had been drawn to it, or that he should have done well. I tried to picture him in the splendour of the Council chambers. I thought of his smile of triumph when he’d exposed me, and what he’d said afterwards: Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again. And while I feared for him, I didn’t envy him, even in the year the harvest failed and we went hungry in the settlement.

By that stage Mum’s letters were rare – a year or more between them – and for news of the rest of the world I had to rely on the gossip picked up at the Omega market to the west, or shared by the itinerants who passed through our settlement. Along with their small bundles of possessions, they carried with them stories. Those heading west were seeking better land to farm, as the bleak land closer to the deadlands in the east barely produced enough to pay the Council tithes, let alone to live on. But those coming from the west spoke of Council crack-downs: Omegas forced out of long-held settlements, where the land was now deemed too good for them; Alpha raiders who stole and destroyed crops. More and more people forced to seek out the refuges. Rumours of harsher treatment of Omegas came steadily. Even in our settlement, which had decent land compared to many, we were feeling the impact of the ever-higher tithes demanded by the Council collectors. Twice, too, Alpha raiders had attacked us. The first time they came, they’d beaten Ben, whose cottage was at the edge of the settlement. They’d taken everything they could carry, including the coins he’d put aside for the next month’s tithes. The second time they came was after the failed harvest; not finding anything to steal, they’d contented themselves with setting fire to the barn. When I suggested to my neighbours that we should report it to the Council, they rolled their eyes.

‘So they can send some soldiers out to burn down the rest of the settlement?’ said Claire.

‘You lived too long in that Alpha village, Cass,’ added Nessa. ‘You still haven’t got it.’

I was learning, though, with each story of brutality that found its way to the settlement. There were other rumours, too, though these were rare, and were shared more furtively: murmurings about Omega resistance, and whispers about the island. But watching my neighbours’ resignation as we rebuilt the barn, these ideas seemed far-fetched. The Council had ruled for hundreds of years; the idea that there could be any place free of their control was nothing but wishful thinking.

And why bother with the resistance, anyway? The fatal bond between twins was our safety net. Ever since the drought years there’d been more and more restrictions on Omegas, but at the same time as we griped about tithes, or the limitation of settlements to ever poorer land, we knew that the Council would ultimately protect us. That was what the refuges were for – and after the failed harvest, more and more Omegas considered them. That winter had left my bones straining towards the outside of my skin. It had worn us all down to bones and teeth, and finally one couple from our settlement left for the refuge near Wyndham. We couldn’t persuade them to stay, to gamble on the promise of new crops in spring. They’d had enough. So the whole settlement stood together in the dawn light, watching them lock up their cottage, before trudging off down the rock-strewn road.

‘Don’t know why they’re bothering to lock up,’ said Nessa. ‘They won’t be coming back.’

‘At least they’ll be fed,’ Claire replied. ‘Only fair that they should have to work for it.’

‘For a while, sure. But these days they’re saying that once you’re in, you’re in for good.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s their choice to go.’ I looked again at the retreating figures. The meagre packs they carried looked bigger on their wasted bodies. What choice did they really have?

‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘You can’t tell me you’d rather there were no refuges. At least we know the Council wouldn’t let us starve.’

‘Not wouldn’t.’ Ben, the oldest at the settlement, joined in. ‘They would if they could get away with it. But could not. There’s a difference.’

*

In spring, when the new crops had come in and the hunger was receding, my mother arrived in a bullock cart. When Ben showed her to my cottage, I didn’t quite know how to greet her. She looked the same, which only made me more aware of how much I must have changed. Not just the inevitable growth of six years, but the fact that I’d lived as an Omega for that time. That had changed me more than the hunger ever could. I’d encountered a few Alphas since coming to the settlement – the Council’s tithe-collectors; the shady merchants who sometimes came to the Omega market. Even amongst Alphas there were the outcast and the poor, passing through the Omega settlements in search of something better. All of them looked at us with contempt, if they met our eyes at all. I’d heard the names they called us: freak, dead-end. More hurtful than the words was their manner, the small movements that revealed their contempt, and their fear of Omega contamination. Even the most ragged of the Alpha merchants, those who stooped to trade with Omegas, would wince at the touch of an Omega hand when passing a coin.

Although I’d been branded an Omega when I left the village, I hadn’t really known what it meant. I remembered how hurt I’d been when my mother hadn’t hugged me goodbye. Now, as she stood awkwardly in my small kitchen, I knew better even than to reach out to her.

We sat opposite each other at my kitchen table.

‘I just came to give you this,’ she said, passing me a gold coin. Zach, she said, had sent her six of them, each one worth half a year’s harvest.

The coin warmed quickly in my hand as I turned it over, then back again. ‘Why give this to me?’

‘You’re going to need it.’

I gestured at the cottage around us, at the vines, heavy with figs, visible through the small window. ‘I don’t need it. I’m doing fine. And you’ve never cared, before.’

She leaned forward, spoke quietly. ‘You can’t stay here.’

I dropped the coin on the table. It spun noisily for a few seconds, settled with a clunk on the scratched wood. ‘What do you mean? Wasn’t it enough for you to drive me out of the village?’

Mum shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But you have to take the money and go. Soon. It’s Zach.’

I sighed. ‘It’s always Zach.’

‘He’s powerful, now. That means he has enemies. People are talking – about him, about what he’s done at the Council.’

‘What he’s done? We’re nineteen. He’s only been on the Council for a year.’

‘You’ve heard of The General?’

‘Everyone’s heard of The General.’ Omegas in particular. Each time a new anti-Omega policy was rumoured, it was her name people were whispering at the market. When the tithe-collectors had demanded higher rates from us over the last two years, it was always based on The General’s latest ‘reforms’.

‘She’s only a year older than you and Zach, if that. People make enemies on the Council, Cass. Most Councillors don’t live long.’ Nor did their twins, though she didn’t need to state it. ‘You know what Zach’s like. Driven. Ambitious. He’s going by the name The Reformer now. He has followers, works with important people. It won’t be long before somebody tries to get to you.’

‘No.’ I shoved the coin across the table to her. ‘I won’t leave. And even if he has enemies, he wouldn’t let them get to me. He’d keep me safe.’

She reached across the table, as if to take my hand, but stopped herself. How long had it been, I wondered, since anyone had touched me with tenderness?

‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

I looked blankly at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve heard of the Keeping Rooms.’

This was one of the many stories that had blown through the settlement, like the tumbleweeds that snagged and rolled across the plain. Whispers that somewhere beneath the Council chambers at Wyndham was a secret prison where Councillors would keep their Omega twins. It was called the Keeping Rooms: an underground complex where Omegas were locked indefinitely, so that their powerful counterparts wouldn’t be vulnerable to any attack on their Omega twins.

‘That? It’s just a rumour. And even if it were true, Zach would never do it. He wouldn’t. I know him best.’

‘No. You’re closest to him. It’s not the same thing. He’ll come for you, Cass. He’ll lock you away, to protect himself.’

I shook my head. ‘He wouldn’t do it.’

Was I trying to convince her, or myself? Either way, she didn’t argue with me. We both knew that I wouldn’t leave.

Before going, Mum reached down from the cart and pressed the coin into my hand again. I felt it in my palm as the cart receded into the distance. And I didn’t spend it; not to run, or even to buy food. I kept it with me, as I’d once kept the key from Alice, and I thought of Zach whenever I held it.

It was Zach who’d taught me to repress my visions, as a child. His need to expose me had made me vigilant about not acknowledging or revealing anything of what I knew. Now I was doing it again, and again it was for him. I refused to countenance the scenes that came to me, just before waking, or during the moments in the field when I paused to splash water from my flask onto my face. I placed my trust in him, rather than in my visions. He wouldn’t do it, I repeated to myself. I thought of how gently he’d bathed my wound, after the branding. I remembered the days, months and years that the two of us, viewed with suspicion by the rest of the village, had spent together. And while I clearly recalled his hostility, his many cruelties, I knew also that he had depended on me as closely as I had depended on him.

So I worked, harder than ever before. When the harvest came, always the busiest time of year, my hands were calloused by the scythe, and the wheat chaff worked its way under my fingernails until they bled. I tried to concentrate on the immediate sounds: the rasp of the scythe, the thuds of the bundled wheat being tossed down, the shouts of the other workers. Every day I worked late, until the reluctant night finally arrived, and I made my way back to the cottage in the dark.

And it worked. I’d almost convinced myself that they weren’t coming at all, until they arrived and I realised that the approach of the armed riders was as familiar as the scythe in my hand or the path between the fields that led to the cottage.

As the rider hoisted me upwards, I caught a hint of gold below. The coin had fallen from my pocket to the ground, and was quickly lost in the hoof-churned mud.




CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_32d6e4ca-5471-5bc0-aa18-76c9eaa1eb06)


By the time Zach came to my cell, I’d counted one hundred and eighteen days. Two hundred and thirty-six meal trays. Eight visits from The Confessor.

His footsteps were as unmistakable to me as the sound of his voice, or the particular rhythm of his breath while sleeping. In the moments it took him to open the lock, it felt as if all the years without him were unspooling again. I’d sprung up at the sound of his footsteps, but by the time he’d opened the door I’d forced myself to resume my seat on the bed.

He stood for a while in the doorway. When I looked at him, I saw double: the man in front of me, and the boy he evoked. He was tall, now, and he wore his dark hair longer, swept behind his ears. His face had filled out, softening the sharp angles of his cheekbones and chin. I’d remembered that in summer he used to have freckles – a scattering of them across his nose, like the first handful of dust thrown on to a coffin. There was no sign of them now, his skin only a few degrees less pale than my own cell-blanched flesh.

He stepped in and locked the door behind him, slipping the keys into his pocket.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he said.

I didn’t dare to speak, not wanting my voice to betray how much I’d hated him, or how much I’d missed him.

Zach went on. ‘Don’t you want me to tell you why I had to do it?’

‘I know why you’ve done it.’

He gave a half-laugh. ‘I’d almost forgotten how hard you can be to talk to.’

‘It’s not my job to make this easy for you.’

He began to pace. His voice stayed calm, his words coming with the same measured rate as his footsteps. ‘You can’t let me have anything, can you? Not even the explanation. I knew what I wanted to say to you. I’d practised it. But here you are, the same as always, claiming to know everything.’

‘I can’t let you have anything?’ I echoed. ‘You got everything. You got to stay. You got Mum.’ My voice cracked on her name.

‘It was too late,’ he said, halting his pacing. ‘Alice had already killed Dad. And you’d already poisoned everything. It was like you’d contaminated me – all those years of being unsplit. The others never accepted me. Not properly. It should have been the life I’d wanted.’ He held his empty hands out, fingers splayed. ‘But you’d already ruined everything.’

‘I had nothing,’ I said. ‘There were days in the settlement when we were all going hungry. But you couldn’t even let me have that. You’ve got me locked away here, and you still think you’re hard done by?’

‘I don’t have a choice, Cass.’

‘Why are you trying to convince me? You want me to absolve you? Tell you I understand?’

‘You said you did understand.’

‘I said I know why you’ve done it. I know what your reasoning was. You’ve made enemies, now that you’re a big player in the Council. You think they could use me to get at you. That doesn’t make it right to lock me away.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘Since when have you cared what I want or think?’

He was angry now. ‘Everything’s always depended on you. My whole life was on hold – it couldn’t start until you were gone.’

‘It had started. We had a life.’ I thought, as I so often did, of those years we spent together, the two of us existing at the margins of the village. ‘You just wanted a different one.’

‘No. I wanted my life. Mine. You made it impossible. And now I’m on my way to achieving something big. I can’t let you get in the way.’

‘So you’re ruining my life, to protect yours.’

‘There’s only one life between us – that’s what you don’t realise. You’ve always acted as if we can both have what we want. That’s not how the world works.’

‘So change it. You said you want to be a big, important person and change the world. It didn’t occur to you that we were changing the world, every day we weren’t split?’

He fell quiet. After a few minutes he came and sat beside me, sighing slightly as he slumped back. When he drew his knees up in front of him, they were much higher than mine. The hair on his arms was thicker and darker than I remembered, not tinged blond from the sun as it used to be. Our bodies had changed so much in the years since I’d seen him, but these new bodies slipped automatically back into the same old symmetry: sitting side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, just as we used to sit on my bed in the village.

I whispered to him, like we used to do back then, when our parents were arguing downstairs. ‘You don’t have to be this person, Zach.’

He stood up, taking the bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘I wouldn’t have to be, if it weren’t for you. If you hadn’t made everything so hard right from the start.’

In the months of waiting for him to come to the cell, I’d thought carefully about what I would say, and I’d promised myself I’d stay calm. But as he moved toward the door, my intentions abandoned me. The prospect of being left alone again in the cell loomed in front of me, and I felt too full of blood, until my whole body was a pulse, racing. I ran at him, grabbed at the keys he held.

He was half a head taller than me; stronger, too, after my six lean years in the settlement and the months of stagnation in the cell. With one arm stretched out, hand splayed about my neck, he kept me away from him with barely a struggle. I knew, even as I clawed and kicked at him, that it was pointless. If I were to succeed in knocking him out, or breaking his arm, I’d only find myself as incapacitated as him. But in my mind I wasn’t fighting him; I was fighting the very walls of the cell, and the concrete floor, and the indifference of the hours that came and went while I festered in that room. I threw my whole weight against him, until the bones of his hand were rasping against my jawbone as he held me at arm’s length. Still he didn’t relent, even when I felt the flesh of his forearm snag and rip under my nails.

He leaned forward so that I could hear his whisper over my own frantic breath.

‘I should almost be grateful to you. The others on the Council, they might talk about the risk posed by Omegas. The threat of contamination. But they haven’t lived it, not like I have. They don’t know how dangerous you can be.’

I was aware of my own shaking; it was only when he let his arm fall that I saw that he was shaking too. We stood like that for a long time. The space between us was quaking with our panted breaths, noisy as the night before a summer storm, when the air broils and the cicadas hiss and the whole world rattles and waits.

‘Please. Don’t do this, Zach.’ As I begged, I remembered how he’d begged me to reveal myself as the Omega, that night in the bedroom when we were children. Was this how he’d felt then?

He said nothing, just turned away. As he left, and locked the door behind him, I looked down at my still-juddering fists and saw his blood, bleeding from under the nails of my right hand.

*

The Confessor had taken to bringing a map with her. Dispensing with any preliminaries, she would lock the door behind her, spread the map out on my bed, and then look up at me. ‘Show me where the island is.’ Sometimes she’d circle particular areas with a finger. ‘We know it’s off the west or south-west coasts. We’re getting closer – we will find them.’

‘Then what do you need me for?’

‘Because your brother isn’t known for his patience.’

I tried to laugh. ‘What are you going to do? Torture me? Threaten to kill me? Any serious pain and you’re torturing Zach.’

The Confessor leaned in. ‘You think there’s nothing worse than what we’ve already done to you? You have no idea how lucky you are. And you’re only going to keep being lucky if you make yourself useful to us.’ She thrust the map forwards again. The intensity of her gaze felt physical. It was as searing as the branding iron on my forehead all those years ago.

‘Like you make yourself useful, working for them? A performing freak for your Alpha masters?’

She leaned forward, ever so slowly, until her face was so close to mine that I could see the tiny hairs on her cheeks, fine and pale as corn-silk. Her nostrils flared slightly as she took a deep, slow breath, and then another.

‘Are you so sure that they’re in charge of me?’ she whispered.

She groped more deeply into my mind. When we were children, Zach and I had levered up a large, flat stone. It had revealed all the worms and grubs underneath, ripped from darkness into light, squirming white in their fleshy nakedness. Now, under The Confessor’s gaze, I was no more than those grubs. There was nothing of me that she couldn’t see, couldn’t take.

I’d learned, after the initial shock, to clench my mind closed, like an eye. Like a fist. To block her out as I struggled to preserve anything of myself. I knew I had to keep the island safe from her. But, selfishly, I found myself just as worried about protecting those few personal memories that I treasured.

The autumn afternoon when Zach and I were practising our writing in the yard behind the house. While the chickens pecked and scuffled around us, we had squatted, sticks in hand, and scratched our clumsy letters in the dust. He wrote my name, and I wrote his.

The long days by the river, when the other children were in school, and Zach and I would pass each other the treasures we turned up in our aimless wanderings. He showed me the stone with the snail fossil etched into it. I brought to him an opened river-oyster shell, its inside like the blinded milky eye of an Omega beggar I’d seen on the road to Haven.

And the memory of all those nights, when we would pass stories and whispers between the beds, just as we swapped those riverside treasures during the day. Lying in the dark, hearing the rain’s muted spatter on the thatch, Zach offered me the story of how the bullocks in the neighbour’s field had charged at him when he took the shortcut to the well, and how he’d had to climb a tree to escape being trampled. I told him how I’d seen the other children rigging up a new swing from the oak in the schoolyard, when I’d peered over the wall we were never allowed to cross.

‘We have our own swing,’ he’d said.

It was true, though it wasn’t a proper swing – just a spot we’d found, upstream, where a willow grew so close to the water that you could grasp the low draped branches and swing out above the river. On hot days, we’d compete to see who could swing furthest out, dropping triumphant into the river below.

There were more recent memories, too, from the settlement. The evenings when I’d sit in front of my small fire and read Alice’s book of recipes, or her collection of songs, and picture her sitting in the same spot, years earlier, and writing them.

And later, the warmth on the coin from my mother’s hand, when she’d passed it to me in her attempt to warn me about Zach. It was a small thing to treasure: not even a touch – just the second-hand warmth of a coin that she’d held. But it was all I had of her, from those last few years, and it was mine.

All these things were now exposed to The Confessor’s dispassionate gaze. To her, they were no more than clutter in a drawer that she was rifling through, in search of something more valuable. Each time she moved on, she left me scrabbling to reassemble the disarranged mess of my mind.

When The Confessor stood and left, taking the map with her, I knew I should have been pleased that I’d managed to keep her from the island. But in concentrating on concealing those, I was forced to leave so much else exposed. These memories, these scraps of the life I’d lived before the cell, she just picked up, turned over, and cast aside. And although they were insignificant to her, nothing she’d touched was untarnished. After each visit, I felt I had fewer memories for her to peruse.

*

The next day, Zach came. His visits were rarer these days, and when he did come, he usually avoided my eyes, fidgeting with his keys instead. He hardly spoke, responding with shrugs to most of my questions. But every few weeks I’d hear the key in the lock, the door scrape along the floor, and in he’d come, my twin, my jailer, to sit at the far end of my bed. I didn’t know why he came, any more than I knew why I was always glad when I heard his footsteps in the corridor.

‘You need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just tell her what you see. Or let her in.’

‘Into my mind, you mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t sound so horrified. You’re like her, after all.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t do what she does. I don’t poke around in other people’s minds. And she can stay the hell out of mine – it’s the only thing I’ve got here.’ I didn’t know how to express to him what it was like when she tried to probe my mind. How it left me feeling sullied, unsafe even in my own head.

He gave a sigh that turned into a laugh. ‘I’d be impressed that you’ve held her out this long, except that I already knew how stubborn you are.’

‘Then you should know it’s not going to change. I won’t help you.’

‘You need to, Cass.’ He leaned close to me. For a moment I thought he might take my hand, as he had all those years ago when our father was dying and he’d begged for my help. His pupils flared and contracted in their own uneven pulse. When he was this close to me, I could see the bloodied flakes of skin on his lower lip. I remembered how he used to chew his lip when Mum and Dad were fighting downstairs, or when the other children in the village were taunting us.

‘What are you scared of?’ I whispered. ‘Are you afraid of The Confessor?’

He stood. ‘There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.’ He slapped at the wall. His open palm left a mark on the dusty concrete. ‘Worse things happening to some of the Omegas kept here. It’s only because you’re a seer that you get to live like this.’ Stretching his neck backwards, he dragged his hands down his face, took a few breaths with his eyes closed. ‘I told her you’d be useful.’

‘You want me to be grateful? For this?’ I gestured at the cell around us. The walls had become a vice around my life, everything crushed down to these few square yards of greyness. And my mind, too, had started to feel cell-like: enclosed and murky. Worst of all was the grim indifference of time, which kept passing, while I was stuck here in this endless half-life of meal trays and relentless light.

‘You don’t know the care I take of you. Everything you eat –’ he gestured to the tray on the floor ‘– I have somebody taste it first. Every jug of water. Everything.’

‘I’m touched by your concern for me,’ I said. ‘But as I recall, when I was living my own life, in the settlement, I didn’t even have to worry about people trying to poison me.’

‘Your own life? You weren’t so keen on “your own life” all those years that you were trying to claim mine.’

‘I wasn’t trying to claim anything. I just didn’t want to be sent away, any more than you did.’ Silence. ‘If you’d just let me on the ramparts occasionally, like when I was first here. Or to talk to some of the other prisoners. Just to be able to talk to someone else.’

He shook his head. ‘You know I can’t. You saw what happened on the ramparts that time. It could have been you who that madman attacked.’ He looked at me with what could have been tenderness. ‘The whole point of having you here is to keep you safe.’

‘If we were allowed to talk to one another, that wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have gone mad. Why would the other Omegas here ever hurt me? They’re in the same situation as I am. Why deny us company?’

‘Because of who their twins are.’

‘Their twins are your friends, your Council cronies.’

‘You’re so naïve, Cass. They’re the people I work with, work for – not my friends. You think some of them wouldn’t like to get their own twins to finish you off, to get at me?’

‘Then where does it end? By your logic, we should all spend our lives in padded cells, Alphas and Omegas alike.’

‘It’s not just me,’ he said. ‘It’s always happened: using those who are close to people to manipulate them. Even in the Before. If they needed to control somebody, they could kidnap their husband, child, lover. The only difference in the After is that, now, it’s more direct. In the Before, you had to watch your back. Now, we all have two backs to watch. It’s that simple.’

‘It’s only simple because you reduce having a twin to a liability. You’re paranoid.’

‘And you’re wilfully naïve.’

‘Is that why you come down here?’ I asked him as he stood and unlocked the door. ‘Because you can’t trust anybody else up there, in the Council?’

‘That would imply I could trust you,’ he said, pulling the door shut behind him. I heard the key turn.

*

I calculated that it must have been at least a year since I’d seen the sky. In the artificially lit world of the Keeping Rooms, even my dreams changed; my day-time visions too. When I’d first started to have visions of the island, I’d wondered if they were just a fantasy to alleviate the horror of my confinement. Now that new, darker visions began to intrude, for a long time I thought they might just be morbid imaginings, that the horror of my long isolation had seeped into my dreams. As my tally of days in the Keeping Rooms crept upwards, I was growing distrustful of my own mind. But what I saw was too alien, and too consistent, for me to believe that I’d come up with it myself. The details, too, were so vivid that I was convinced I couldn’t have created them: the glass tanks, real right down to the dust on the rubber seals at the base. The wires and panels above the tanks, each panel speckled by tiny lights, red or green. The tubes, flesh-coloured and rubbery, emerging from the top of each tank.

How could I have invented such a sight, when I couldn’t even decipher what it was? All that I knew for sure was that it was taboo, like the glass ball of light in my cell. The tubes and wires that I saw surrounding the tanks matched the stories of the Before, and all its Electric alchemy. The lights, too, were the same unnatural spark as the light in my cell. Each light, unwavering, was a dot of pure colour, without heat. This was a machine – but a machine for what? It was both messier and more awesome than the whispers about the Before had led me to believe. The tangle of wires and tubes looked disordered, improvised. But the whole, the pulsating mass of connections, lights, and tanks, was so huge and so complex that it couldn’t help be impressive, despite the shudder it provoked in me.

At first, the tanks were all that the visions showed me. Then, floating within the tanks, I saw the bodies, suspended in a viscous liquid that seemed to slow everything until even the waving of their hair was lethargic. From each drooping mouth, a tube. But the eyes were the worst. Most had their eyes closed, but even those few with open eyes wore entirely blank expressions, their eyes utterly empty. These were the ruins of people. I thought of Zach’s words, when I’d complained about the cell: There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.

I sensed the tanks most acutely when Zach came, though he did this rarely now. The tank room was like a smell that clung to him. Even as I heard his key in the lock I could feel the faces looming into sight. After he left, they crowded me for hours with their closed eyes and open mouths. They were all Omegas, all suspended in the timelessness of those glass vats. As the months passed, even as Zach’s visits grew rarer, my awareness of the tank room became near-constant. Far from being abstract, it felt not only real but close. It became so pressing a physical presence that I felt as if I could navigate by it: the sure pull of that room, perhaps only hundreds of feet away, had become my compass point. Just as the river had once been the basis of my mental map of the valley where I grew up, now my imagination’s map of the fort was oriented by two locations: the cell, and the tank room. Beneath it all, the river was still there. I could sense it running deep underfoot, its ceaseless movement taunting me with my own stagnation.

*

One day The Confessor unlocked the door, but didn’t step inside the cell.

‘Get up,’ she said, holding the door open.

I hadn’t been out of the cell for more than a year. I wondered if she was taunting me. In the last few months, I’d sometimes begun to fear I was going mad. Looking through the open door, I distrusted even the strip of corridor I could make out. To my space-starved eyes, the concrete passageway seemed as far-fetched as a mountain vista under sunlight.

‘Hurry up. I’m going to show you something. We don’t have long.’

Even with three armed soldiers standing by, and The Confessor watching me impatiently, I couldn’t hide my excitement as we stepped through the door.

She refused to tell me where she was taking me, or to respond at all to any of my questions. She walked briskly, a few steps ahead of me, the guards following closely behind. As it turned out, it wasn’t far: just to the end of the corridor, through another locked door, then down a flight of stairs to another row of doors.

‘We’re not going outside?’ I asked, facing the row of cell doors that mimicked my own: the grey steel; the narrow slot for meal trays near the base; the observation hatch at eye-level, which could be opened only from the corridor, not within.

‘This isn’t a picnic excursion,’ she said. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

She walked to the third door and slid open the hatch. Like the one in my cell, it clearly hadn’t been opened often – it slid awkwardly, shrieking with rust.

The Confessor stepped back. ‘Go on,’ she said, gesturing at the hatch.

I stepped towards the door, leaned closer to the opening. It was darker inside the cell, the single Electric light no match for the rows of them in the corridor. But even as my eyes were adjusting, I could see that the cell was just like mine. The same narrow bed, the same grey walls.

‘Look closer,’ said The Confessor, her breath warm on the back of my ear.

That’s when I saw the man. He was standing against the wall, in the darkest corner of the cell, watching the door warily.

‘Who are you?’ he said, stepping forward, eyes narrowing to see me more clearly. His voice was as rusty as the observation hatch, grating with disuse.

‘Don’t talk to him,’ said The Confessor. ‘Just watch.’

‘Who are you?’ he said, louder this time. He was perhaps ten years older than me. I hadn’t seen him before, on any of those early visits to the ramparts, but his long beard and his pale skin showed that he wasn’t new to the Keeping Rooms.

‘I’m Cass,’ I said.

‘There’s no point talking to him,’ said The Confessor. She sounded almost bored. ‘Just watch. It’ll happen soon. I’ve been feeling it coming for days.’

The man stepped forward again, only feet from the door now, so close that I could have reached out to him through the small opening. He was missing one hand, and his brand was visible through his matted hair.

‘Is there someone else there with you?’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen anyone for months. Not since they brought me here.’ He stepped closer, his hand raised.

Then he buckled. It was as sudden as that, his legs giving way like a sand embankment in heavy rain. His hands went to his stomach, and twice his whole body contracted. He made no noise; the only thing to emerge from his mouth was a stream of blood, black in the candlelight. He didn’t move again.

I had no chance to speak, or to respond at all, other than to jump back from the hatch when he fell. Before I could look in again, The Confessor had grabbed my arm, turned me to face her.

‘See? You think you’re safe here?’ She pushed me back against the door, the steel cold against my bare arms. ‘That man’s twin thought she was safe, because she had him locked up down here. But she made enough enemies on the Council that even the Keeping Rooms couldn’t protect her. They couldn’t get at him, so they had to take her out directly. They still managed it.’

I already knew. The horror of the man’s death was doubled for me. I’d seen it the moment the man fell: a woman lying on her stomach in a bed, her dark hair neatly plaited, and a knife in her back.

‘Did Zach do this?’

She shook her head dismissively. ‘Not this time. And that’s not important – what you need to realise is that even he can’t protect you, not necessarily. He’s in favour at the moment, sure, but his plans are ambitious. If the Council turns on him, they’ll find a way to get to one of you.’

Her face was so close to mine that I could see the individual eyelashes, and the vein that pulsed on her forehead, just to the left of her brand. I closed my eyes, but the darkness only filled with memories of the man on the floor behind me, the false tongue of blood hanging from his mouth. I couldn’t breathe.

She spoke very slowly. ‘You need to start helping Zach, and helping me. If he fails, if the other Councillors turn on him, they’ll get to one of you.’

‘I won’t help you,’ I said. I thought of the tank rooms, what Zach had done to those floating people. But those horrors seemed distant compared to the bleeding body on the floor behind me, and The Confessor’s implacable face close to mine.

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have nothing to tell you.’

I was wondering how much longer I could keep from crying in front of her, but she suddenly turned.

‘Put her back in her cell,’ she called over her shoulder to the guards as she walked away.

*

My world was reduced to the cell, the walls, the roof, the floor. The mercilessness of the door. I tried to picture the outside world: the morning sun throwing sharp shadows over the stubble of freshly cut wheat; the night sky infinitely wide above the river. But these had become concepts, rather than realities. They were as lost to me as the smell of rain, the feel of river-sand underfoot, the sound of birds announcing the dawn. All those things were less real, now, than the visions of the tank room, and of those bodies, sodden-fleshed and silent, floating amongst the tubes. The visions of the island had become rare, too. Those glimpses of open sea could no longer penetrate the cell. The tally of my days in the Keeping Rooms was growing until I felt the cell was crammed with them. It was as though the cell were slowly filling with water. I could barely breathe for the weight of lost weeks, months, and now years. Is this how it begins, I wondered, the madness that so often stalks seers? If it were going to happen, then the years of imprisonment could only accelerate the process. I’d heard my father describe the seer at Haven market as out of his mind. Now that turn of phrase felt like a literal description. The Confessor’s probing, and the visions of the tanks, were so all-consuming that there was no room left in my own mind for anything else, least of all myself.

Zach came to see me so rarely now – sometimes months passed between visits. When he did come, I could hardly speak to him. I noticed, though, how much his face had changed over my years in the Keeping Rooms. He was thinner, so his lips were now the only part of his face with any softness. I wondered if I’d changed too, and whether he would notice if I had.

‘You know it can’t go on like this,’ he said.

I nodded, but I felt as though I was underwater, his words muffled and distant. My cell’s cramped walls and low ceiling conspired to create echoes, doubling every noise so that any sounds were always just a little unsteady. Now the echo had started to feel like part of a broader blurring – everything was slipping out of focus.

‘If it were up to me,’ he went on, ‘I’d keep you here. But I’ve started something, and I need to finish it. I thought maybe I could keep you out of it, if you made yourself useful. But you won’t give her anything.’

He didn’t need to specify who ‘her’ was.

‘She won’t put up with it any longer.’ He spoke so low that I could barely hear him, as if he could hardly bear to hear his own admission of fear. He leaned forward so our faces were close. ‘If it were up to me, I’d keep you here,’ he said, louder now. I didn’t know why it mattered so much to him to convince me of this. I turned my head to the wall.

*

At first I didn’t know why the dreams of the empty tank terrified me so. I’d been seeing the tanks for three years now. They always sickened me, but they’d become familiar – my body no longer flinched in surprise when I saw them in a dream. I’d grown used to them, the same way I’d grown used to the brand on my own face. Why, then, when I dreamed of the empty tank, did I wake tangled in sheets wet with sudden-sprung sweat? The tank was empty – it should have been less horrifying than the occupied ones that normally plagued my nights. It just sat there, a glass belly waiting to be filled.

For the fourth night in a row, I dreamed of the same tank again. It sat in the same dull light; the wires and pipes clustered above it as they always had. The curve of the glass was the same, but something was acutely wrong. This time the glass curved not away from me, but around me. I could feel a tube in my own mouth, its rubbery intrusion into my windpipe, and the pain at the corner of my mouth where, protruding, the tube had eroded my skin. I couldn’t close my mouth, or keep out the liquid that now filled the tank, foully sweet. My eyes, too, couldn’t close. The viscous fluid blurred my vision, everything wavering and softened, as if seen through one of the heatwaves that hovered above the settlement’s fields on midsummer days.

When I woke, I screamed until my throat was gravelled and my voice couldn’t stick on any note, juddering and jerking between them. I screamed Zach’s name, until that single syllable took on strange shapes, became unrecognisable. In my first weeks in the Keeping Rooms I’d learned that screaming achieved nothing, brought nobody to the cell door, but I screamed nonetheless.

For six more nights I felt the tank fill around me, unable to move as the fluid took possession of my flesh, closing finally over my head, around the tubes that threaded into me at the throat and wrists. Each night, until I woke myself, screaming, I was suspended from the throat tube like a fish on a line.

I couldn’t eat. Each attempt to swallow reminded me of the tube down my throat, and I gagged and retched. I did what I could to avoid sleep, when the visions came most easily. At night, I paced the cell, counting footsteps until the numbers blurred. I took to pinching my arms and pulling hairs from my head, one at a time, trying to use the pain not just to keep myself awake, but to locate myself in my real body, and to keep at bay the tanked self of my dreams. Nothing worked. It was all unravelling: my body; my mind. Time itself was jumpy and fragmented now. Some days I slipped through hours like someone skidding, out of control, down a scree-slope. Other times I could have sworn that time stopped, and a single breath seemed to last a year. I thought of the mad seer at Haven market, and the mad Omega on the ramparts. This is how it happens, I thought. This is how my own mind deserts me.

In the end, I scratched a note into the meal tray with the edge of my blunted spoon. Zach: urgent – important vision. Will tell you (only you) in exchange for ten minutes outside, on the ramparts.

He sent The Confessor, as I’d known he would.

She sat in her usual chair, back to the door. The previous days must have left me looking ragged, but she made no comment on it. I wondered whether she even saw it, or whether her mental acuity meant she had no need for external observations. ‘Normally, you’re not so keen to share your visions. Quite the opposite. Which makes us curious, you see.’

‘If Zach’s so curious, send him. I won’t tell you.’

I’d known this would be the hardest part. I could feel The Confessor probing my mind, the way our mother used to pry open the shells of river-mussels, circling the seam, testing with the knife for the one weak spot from which to lever open the shell.

‘Closing your eyes won’t stop me, you know.’

I hadn’t even noticed I’d closed them until The Confessor spoke. I realised that my teeth, too, were clenched tight. I forced myself to look straight at her. ‘You’ll get nothing.’

‘Perhaps. Maybe you’re getting better at this. Or maybe there’s nothing there – no special vision, no helpful insight.’

‘Oh, so it’s a trap? What am I going to do? Shimmy down the walls on a rope made of bedsheets? Come on.’ I paused. It was hard to talk and brace my mind against The Confessor at the same time. ‘I just want to see the sky. If I’m going to tell you what I know, why shouldn’t I trade it for that?’

‘It’s not a trade if you’ve got nothing to offer us.’

‘It’s about the island,’ I blurted. I’d hoped not to give away even this much, but the terror of the tanks made me reckless.

‘I see. The island that you’ve insisted for the last four years doesn’t exist.’

I nodded, mute. While her expression didn’t change, I felt her mind, eager now, like the hands of an unwelcome suitor. I concentrated harder than ever, trying to open my mind without allowing her full access. I focused on giving away only a glimpse, just a fraction of a glimpse, enough to confirm the value of my visions without revealing anything that would be disastrous for the island, or for my own plans. I fixed my mind on a single image, the way a lone shaft of light would fall between the curtains of my kitchen at the settlement, illuminating only a fragment of the opposite wall. Just the town on the island, just one of its busy, steep streets. Close-up, no identifying features of the landscape. Just the town, its market-hub, the houses stacked on the rising ground. Just the town.

I heard The Confessor’s intake of breath.

‘Enough,’ I said. ‘Tell Zach what he has to do, and I’ll tell him everything.’

But it wasn’t enough. The probing continued, almost frenzied now. Once, at the settlement, I’d woken to find a raven had picked its way through a gap in the thatch and become trapped in my tiny bedroom, dashing from wall to wall in a cacophony of feathers until it found the open window. The Confessor’s presence in my head felt like that now: the same mixture of desperation and aggression.

I didn’t speak. Instead, for the first time, I tried to match The Confessor in her probing. I pictured my mother’s hands above the mussel-bowl. I tried to make my mind the knife. I’d always resisted doing this: visions had always been something I’d suffered, rather than used. The violation I’d felt in my sessions with The Confessor had made me even more unwilling to use my own mind that way. So I was surprised at how easily it came to me: like peeling back a curtain. And what I saw were just fragments, just like my dreams, but it was enough. I saw a place I hadn’t seen before. A huge, round chamber. There were no tanks this time. Only wires, like those in my visions of the tank room, but infinitely multiplied. They climbed the curved walls, which were stacked with metal boxes.

I felt The Confessor recoil. She stood so quickly the chair was knocked backwards, and she leaned over me. ‘Don’t try to play me at my own game.’

I tried to hide my shaking hands as I met her gaze. ‘Send me my twin.’

*

When he finally came, the next afternoon, he looked shocked at the state of me.

‘Are you sick? Has someone done something to you?’ He rushed to where I stood, grabbing my elbow and guiding me to the chair. ‘How did they do this? Nobody else can get in here, except The Confessor.’

‘Nobody has. It’s this place itself.’ I gestured at the cell. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to be blooming with health and joy. Anyway,’ I said, ‘you don’t look so great yourself.’ I still hadn’t got used to this new Zach, his face stripped back to bone, with dark circles spreading like stains from beneath his eyes.

‘Probably because I’ve been up most of the night trying to work out what you’re playing at.’

‘Why does it have to be complicated? I need to get outside, Zach. Just for a few moments. I’m going mad in here.’ It was no ploy to say this, even if I couldn’t let Zach know the true source of my terror. I was genuinely at the limit of my endurance, as my shattered appearance attested.

‘It’s too dangerous. You know that. You know I don’t keep you in here for fun.’

I shook my head. ‘Just think about how dangerous it is for you if I go mad. I could do anything.’

He just laughed. ‘Trust me – you’re not in a position to threaten me.’

‘I’m not threatening you. I’m offering you something – something that could really help you.’

‘And since when have you ever been interested in helping me?’

‘Since I started losing my mind in here. I need this. Just ten minutes in the light. To see the sky. It’s not a lot to ask, especially given what I can tell you.’

He shook his head. ‘I’d believe you if you’d ever given us anything useful before. The Confessor says you sit there like a wax doll in her sessions with you. You’ve never even admitted the island exists, and now you’re telling us you know something useful about it. So why trust you now?’

I sighed. ‘Fine. I lied to her about the island.’ He stood, walked quickly to the door. I spoke to his back. ‘I knew that’s what it would take to get you here. But I’m not lying about having something useful to tell you. I couldn’t tell her.’

‘Why? That’s her job, collecting information.’

‘Because it’s about her.’

He paused, hand still on the door, his other hand holding the hefty bunch of keys that he always carried.

‘That’s why it had to be you I told. It’s about her – what she’s planning to do to you.’

‘I’m not going to believe this crap,’ he spat. ‘She’s the one person here I can trust. More than you.’

I shrugged. ‘You don’t have to believe it. I’ll just tell you what I know, and it’s up to you whether you believe it or not.’

He stared at me for a few moments. I watched as he turned, inserted the key, opened the door. He still didn’t speak. Finally he stepped outside, leaving the door open behind him. ‘Ten minutes,’ he called back as he headed down the corridor. ‘Then we come back here, and you tell me everything.’




CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_bec1a019-9721-599b-9fb4-4f9e347645e9)


Later, when I tried to remember the moment of stepping outside the cell, I couldn’t. I’d just chased after Zach, blindly following him through the long corridor, through another locked door, and then up a flight of stairs. It was only at the top of the stairs, where three high windows let in the light, that I felt the enormity of it. I was at once shielding my wincing eyes and gaping at the window for more. Already the fog of the last few weeks was dispersing; my mind felt clearer than it had for months. It was as if the fort above the cells had been a physical weight, bearing down on me. As we made our way out of the depths of the fort, I was shedding the burden.

Ignoring me, Zach led me along another long corridor, unlocked a larger door, then paused. ‘I don’t know if you’re stupid enough to try anything, but don’t bother.’ I tried to disregard the light and fresh air streaming in from the partly opened door, and to concentrate on his words. ‘You know you can’t fight me. The other doors leading to the ramparts are locked. And stay close to me.’

He pushed the door fully open. Despite the pain from my glare-struck eyes, the fresh air itself was intoxicating. I took heaving breaths as I stepped out.

The long, narrow rampart was unchanged since those escorted visits four years ago, in the first months of my imprisonment. It was a terrace, perhaps sixty feet long, protruding halfway up the sheer face of the fort. In front of us, crenellations toothed the wall that overlooked the drop below. Behind us, the wall of the fort continued vertically, carved straight into the side of the mountain. I heard Zach locking the door from which we’d just emerged, in the centre of the rampart. At each end of the terrace, either side of us, identical doors were set in the wall, their solid wood criss-crossed by metal spars.

For a few moments I just stood there, head tilted slightly back, sun on my face. When I approached the battlements, Zach shifted to block my way.

I laughed. ‘Relax. You can’t blame me for wanting to see. My view’s been fairly limited for the last four years.’

He nodded, but stayed close to me as I reached the edge and leaned over the waist-high wall to see the city below.

‘I’ve never seen the city properly before,’ I said. ‘It was night when they brought me from the settlement, and I had something over my head. And when they used to let us up here, we were never allowed near the edge.’

From this height, Wyndham was like a jumble of buildings tossed down the slope. It was too chaotic to be beautiful, but its size alone was impressive. The city clambered up the mountainside, as high as the base of the fort, but also spread out into the flat of the plain, where roads faded into the hills and the blurred horizon. The river meandered into view from the south, curving around the base of the city before disappearing into the deep caverns of the mountain itself. Even from this high I could see movement: carts on the roads; washing draped from windows, patiently flapping in the breeze. So many people, so close to where I’d been, alone, for all those indistinguishable days and nights.

Zach had turned away from the city. I did the same, leaning back next to him against the low wall. On either side of us, merlons rose to above head-height.

‘You said before that you don’t trust anyone here, except The Confessor.’

He didn’t respond, looked down at his hands.

‘So why choose to live this way?’ I asked. ‘I’m here because I can’t leave. But you could; you could just walk away.’

‘Was this part of your bargain? That we have a little heart-to-heart? Because I didn’t agree to that.’ He turned around again, looking over Wyndham. ‘Anyway, it’s not that straightforward. There are things I need to do.’ In the clear light I could see how prominent the bones had become in his face. He exhaled. ‘I’ve started things here. They’re my projects. I have to finish them. It’s complicated.’

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

‘You’ve always been such an idealist. Things are simple for you.’ His voice matched the tiredness of his eyes.

‘It could be simple for you too. You could just leave – go back to the village, work the land with Mum.’

Before he’d even turned, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. ‘Work the land?’ he hissed. ‘Do you have any idea who I am, now? What I’ve achieved? And the village is the last place I’d ever go. Even after the split, I was never treated like the other Alphas. I thought it would get better, but it didn’t.’ His pointing finger jabbed towards me. ‘You did that, all those years you dodged the split. I can never go back there.’ He’d stepped away from me, stood halfway between me and the door.

Both hands on the wall behind me, I pushed upwards as I jumped, springing backwards to sit on the ledge and then scrambling to my feet. The movement was so quick that only by throwing my hands out to the merlons on either side was I able to catch myself from toppling back.

He lunged towards me, but hesitated as he saw how close I was to the edge. He raised both hands in front of him, helpless as a puppet. ‘That’s crazy. Get down, now. That’s crazy.’ His voice was high and strident.

I shook my head. ‘One more word and I jump. Shout for a guard, and I jump.’

He inhaled, put a finger to his lips. I wasn’t sure if he was hushing himself or me. ‘OK,’ he murmured. ‘OK.’ Again, I couldn’t tell who he was trying to reassure. ‘OK. But you wouldn’t do it. You’d never survive it.’

‘I know. And don’t pretend it’s me you’re worried about.’

‘Fine. Fair enough. But you couldn’t do it to me. You wouldn’t.’

‘You called my bluff once already, at the split. I protected you that time. I can’t do it again.’

He took a step forward; I edged back. Only my toes and the balls of my feet were on the wall now; my heels tremored over the emptiness below.

‘I’ll do it. There’s no reason for me to go on living, in that cell.’

‘I let you out – you’re out here now, aren’t you?’

I dared a glance over my shoulder, then turned back quickly, hoping my eyes didn’t reveal too much of my terror.

‘Here’s what’s going to happen.’ The stones on each side were warm and rough under my outstretched hands. I wondered if it was the last texture I’d feel. ‘Walk back, all the way to the door.’ He nodded, kept nodding as he walked slowly backwards, hands still raised.

One arm still on the stone merlon to my right, I lifted my shirt and jumper with my other hand to reveal the makeshift rope I’d wrapped around my waist at dawn. I smiled at the thought of my comment to The Confessor the day before. All day the knotted strips of sheet had been digging into my stomach, but I hadn’t dared to loosen it, already worried that the bulk beneath my clothes might be visible.

Unwinding the rope was a delicate task. At first I tried to keep one hand on the stone, but it was too difficult, the unwound loops dropping around my legs and threatening to tangle me. Finally I relented and used both hands. I’d edged forwards a little, but my heels were an inch, at most, from the brink. I kept my eyes on Zach. The white rope, slowly unfurling, trailed its way down the outer wall behind me.

I don’t know whether I saw him tense, or just sensed his intention, but before he’d taken a single rushed step forward I raised a hand.

‘Run at me and I jump, or we’ll both end up going over. It amounts to the same thing.’

He stopped. His breathing was harsh, heavy. ‘You’d seriously do it.’

It was a statement now, not a question. At least it spared me from giving an answer that I didn’t have. I just looked at him, and he retreated again to the far wall.

The whole rope was unwound now. The base of the merlon was far too thick for me to pass the rope around, but at the top it narrowed to a single stone’s thickness. To loop the rope around this, I had to turn sideways, my cheek pressed against the stone so that I could keep watching Zach while I reached upwards. To pass the rope from one hand to the other I had to wrap both arms around the merlon’s breadth in an awkward embrace. When it was done, I was reluctant to relinquish the tight hold on the stone.

‘You must be insane,’ called Zach. ‘The rope’ll never hold. You’ll fall and kill us both. And even if you do get down there alive, there’re guards all along the outer perimeter. It’s pointless.’

I looked at the rope. He had a point: to transform my sheet into any kind of length, I’d had to tear it into strips only two fingers thick. The knots looked shoddy, even to me. I knew I was light these days, but the rope was still uninspiring. And what Zach couldn’t see was that the rope hung only part of the way down the face of the fort beneath me; from its frayed end, there was still a drop of at least twenty feet to the stone terrace below.

‘Listen carefully,’ I told him. ‘You’re going to go out that same door. You’re going to lock it behind you. If I hear you shout for guards, I jump. If I hear you starting to unlock the door again, I jump. Even if I’m half-way down the rope and I see you peering down at me, I jump. You get behind that door and you count to one hundred before you even think about opening it, or making a sound. Got it?’

He bobbed his head. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said quietly.

‘Four years in a cell will do that.’ I wondered if this was the last time I’d see him. ‘You could change too, you know.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It’s your choice,’ I said. ‘Remember that. Now lock that door.’

Still facing me, his hand groped along the wall behind him and found the door handle. He had to turn to unlock it, but spun back to face me as he pulled it open. He was still staring as he stepped backwards into shadow and pulled the door closed. I heard the key rummaging for the lock, then the heavy tumbler sliding across.

I counted too, picturing him pressed against the door, making his way through the numbers in unison with me. Forty-nine, fifty. I realised I was crying, but whether from fear or sadness I didn’t know. Seventy-six, seventy-seven. He’ll be rushing, I thought, with his habitual impatience, but then making himself slow down, not wanting to burst out too soon and force my hand. And already, I knew, he’d be planning: where to position the guards, how to seal the city. He’d come after me, like I’d always known he would.

Ninety-nine. The lock moved slowly, but its age gave it away with a rusted squeal.

The Confessor would have seen through my plan, of course. But Zach sprinted straight to the point from which the rope hung. Half of his body was hanging over the edge, peering down at the prop rope, when I slipped out from behind the door, ran inside, and locked it behind me.




CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_250d10ce-788e-5b2f-befe-30678e8fe813)


I felt strangely calm. Behind me, through the heavy door, I could hear Zach’s shouts. He was kicking the door too, but it was solidly braced in its frame and emitted only dulled thuds.

At first, as I ran, I was just tracing the route along which Zach had led me. Then, at a point that I couldn’t quite pin down, I was guided by a different kind of memory. My body was a compass needle, faithfully seeking the tank room, which I could feel more strongly than ever. It was my greatest fear, but it was also my destination. I had to see it, to witness it in the flesh if I were ever to help those people, or even to spread the word. It was also the last place he would search for me. It was in the depths of the fort, far below any of the exits that a fugitive might be expected to seek. More importantly, if Zach had any suspicion that I knew about it, his most closely guarded secret, I’d have been tanked long ago.

Zach’s heavy bundle of keys, which I’d snatched from the rampart door after locking it, jangled as I ran. At each locked door I closed my eyes and let instinct lead me to the right key. Locking each door behind me, I was heading down again, but into a different wing from the Keeping Rooms. Even so, I hated to feel the fort closing above me once more, to feel the distance between me and that momentary taste of sky and light.

There was a long corridor, narrower than the grander corridors above. It was made narrower still by the network of pipes that ran along its sides. From the low roof hung glass balls, emitting the same sterile, pale light that had illuminated my cell. At the corridor’s end, down a short flight of steps, was the final door. My mind was so attuned to this place that I didn’t even have to hesitate to choose the key.

In my visions the tank room had been silent. Entering it now I was disarmed by the noise: the constant whirring of the machinery, and the sounds that water makes in the dark. Beneath it all, underfoot, the thrum of the river. I’d sensed the river throughout my years in the cell, but here it was audible, insistent.

Despite the eeriness of the place, its familiarity was weirdly comforting: apart from the noise, it was just as I’d seen it. Along the long wall of the chamber, the tanks stood. From each emerged a number of tubes, tracing to control panels above. When I pressed my palm against the glass of the nearest tank, I was surprised by its warmth. In the half-light I strained to make out a shape inside the viscous fluid. Something within was moving in time with the machine’s pulse. I knew what it would be, but squinted to see, hoping to be wrong.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shapes began to materialise, not just in this tank but along the whole row of tanks nearest to me. A young woman floated with her back to me, her three arms all raised as if reaching for the top of the liquid. A man curled in a foetal position near the base of his tank, his handless arms crossed over his knees. An old woman floated at a strange angle, her single eye closed beneath her brand. All of them were naked, and each body pulsed, barely perceptibly, in time with the machine’s rhythm. The chamber was so long that the door at the far end was indistinct. The tanks went on and on, the horror endlessly repeated down the row.

I didn’t know where the machine ended and the Electric began, or whether they were one and the same, but I knew that this alien sight was technology, and taboo. What sinister magic was in it, that permitted it to trap these people in this underwater sleep? The taboo might be a law, but it began in the gut: the nauseous recoil that churned my stomach when I looked at this web of wires and metal. The machines had ended the world. And as a seer, I’d seen the blast more directly than anyone: the pure destruction of that shear of hot light. Even spending the last four years beneath the Electric light of my cell hadn’t done away with my instinctive terror at the sight of these wires, tubes and panels. I became aware of the sweat on my body, the shaking in my legs. This rumbling, many-parted machine was like a slumbering beast.

My hands were shaking, too. I’d thought the tanks had been vivid in my visions, but seeing them like this was worse. The tubes that violated the bodies, emerging at the mouth and the wrist. Tubes like puppet strings, suspending the bodies from the top of the tanks. If I could get out, if I could spread the word, surely even most Alphas would be horrified at this? And if I could indeed count on my visions, then somewhere outside was the island, where I might find those who would believe me, even help me.

Making the horror all the more uncanny was the weird orderliness of the scene: the neatly laid-out rows of tanks; the perfect accord of the chests rising and falling to the machine’s perpetual lullaby. Despite the variety of deformations on display in the tanks, there was a ghastly uniformity about their comatose state. I walked along the row, paused, leant my face against the glass of a tank, letting myself be calmed by the pulsing semi-darkness.

A shudder ran through the glass, shocking me back into alertness. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a face, pressed against the glass on which I was leaning. The boy who had drifted to the front of his tank had eerily pale skin, his veins clearly outlined. His light brown hair floated up from his head, and his mouth was partly open around the tube. Only one thing disturbed the near-stillness of the tableau: his eyes, wide open and alert.

I jumped back, my small cry lost almost immediately in the thick dampness and rhythmic hum of the room. Averting my eyes from the boy’s stare, I looked down, but seeing that, like the others, he was naked, I fixed my eyes determinedly on his face. Despite his brand, his thin face reminded me of Zach. Later, I wondered whether that was why the boy had seemed so familiar.

I grasped at the thought that his open eyes must be empty, that they couldn’t possibly signify consciousness. Some of the other tanked figures had open eyes, but they were no less absent for it. I stepped slightly to the side. If his eyes hadn’t followed me I might have continued, all the way back to the door at the far end of the room, and beyond. Part of me was disappointed when I saw his dark eyes track my progress. At the same time, I knew that having witnessed that small movement of his eyes was a promise that I couldn’t break.

The tank’s lid seemed to be its only entry point, at least three feet above my head. At that level a platform ran around the wall, reached by a ladder at the far corner of the room. I took several steps towards it, then looked frantically behind me to try to reassure the boy that I wasn’t leaving. In the gloom it was already too late – he’d become a blur in the tank. I ran, counting tanks as I went, and trying not to think about their occupants, or about the empty tank that I passed at the end of the row. Climbing the ladder, I cringed at the sound my footsteps unleashed on the metal steps. On the ledge I counted my way back along the tanks. At the twelfth tank I reached over for the metal handle and found that the lid lifted to the side without resistance.

From above I could barely make out his drifting hair, now two feet below me. As I leaned down over the tank, the fluid smelled repulsively sweet. With my face turned up, away from the saccharine stench, I reached into the warm liquid, groped around, grasped something solid and gave a tentative tug. There was a slight resistance before what I was grasping came away in my hand. For an awful instant I imagined his fluid-soaked body somehow falling apart in my hands, but when I looked down I was both relieved and horrified to find that I was holding a pliable rubber tube. When I sought out his face I saw that the tube was now stripped from his mouth.




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