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The Forever Ship
Francesca Haig


‘Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their ‘weaker’ Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’ GuardianPaloma’s arrival, with news of Elsewhere and the possibility of a world free of the fatal bond between twins, has given Cass and the resistance a hope worth fighting for.But they are facing a Council more powerful and ruthless than Cass could ever have imagined, willing to unleash weapons from the long-buried past to maintain their power over Alphas and Omegas alike.As the stunning Fire Sermon trilogy comes to a close, a struggle has begun not only for the future of Elsewhere but for the future of the whole world. And what started with fire may end with fire.























Copyright (#ulink_6da2a3fc-47d7-5560-b6ef-8db5bebb0c81)


HarperVoyager

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2017

Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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, downloaded, 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: 9780007563166

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780007563159

Version: 2017-12-14




Dedication (#ulink_b6179f4f-11f3-526b-a9f1-f0e1a51b8c5a)


This book is dedicated to Paul de Tores,

braver and funnier than any character from a book.


Contents

Cover (#uc0b2a060-d15e-5756-af87-7e31f2afde58)

Title Page (#u14b33e12-0fc2-5a7a-b07e-fdc4f962796a)

Copyright (#ub8c5130b-f3b8-5fcf-868b-7f4db4df5432)

Dedication (#u9d1105a9-3878-5f6c-96e0-24af37f2e2cc)

Prologue (#ufc2b1a34-3a06-5186-abec-2aa07f603131)

Part 1 (#u574d6288-fe19-549b-a7d4-adb108dcc75c)

Chapter 1 (#udb25e929-d8e9-596e-9a9f-0059cad735ee)

Chapter 2 (#u7cd6f215-51e5-5ffd-a086-80757ea27f60)

Chapter 3 (#ufbee44e2-f906-585b-aa06-be2722c76b61)

Part 2 (#ud2d7d73a-4407-53ea-b440-8d7e2ee70fd4)

Chapter 4 (#u0f7ad619-6da5-5952-acfe-5be1490f5854)

Chapter 5 (#u50277c1a-9163-596d-89b4-43eb8dfa8776)

Chapter 6 (#u10e03544-8b50-5c9f-b1ba-33182d879527)

Chapter 7 (#u6a9fc158-7696-5063-bcd1-8fee265211c0)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

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)

Part 3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Francesca Haig (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE (#ulink_5f1c3ae1-23bc-52a3-b313-7dc960116fb6)


And so it did end in fire, after all: the flame bursting from its white centre. The blast opening like an eye. I’d seen that shape in my visions so many times that the explosion felt like coming home.

*

The water sealed over the boat’s wake, erasing all trace of us. The sea had always been good at keeping secrets.

There was a song that bards used to sing, about ghosts. I’d heard it when Zach and I were children. Leonard and Eva had sung it, too, the night we met them. In the song, a man had strangled his lover and then been haunted by her ghost. He’d fled across the river to escape her, because ghosts can’t travel over water.

As I sat in the prow of the boat, I knew better.



PART 1 (#ulink_ec17fbf9-f6ee-5f32-89f3-81118a759503)




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_23bca142-dbce-52b0-bd6f-5d3ac1cc5600)


‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Paloma said.

‘Like what?’ I said.

I turned my face back to the fire, squinting against the smoke. I couldn’t deny that I’d been staring. I watched her all the time. Sometimes I woke and half expected that she would be gone – that she had never come at all, or that she’d been nothing but a shape we had conjured out of our longing for Elsewhere.

But she had come: pale, like somebody seen through mist. Not the blondeness of Crispin, or of Elsa, who had hair with gold in it, and pink-flushed skin. Paloma’s hair was so blonde it was nearly grey, like driftwood – as if she’d washed up on the beach instead of sailing here on The Rosalind. Her skin had a bleached-straw whiteness, and her eyes were light blue – barely a colour at all.

‘Like I’m some kind of ghost,’ Paloma said. She leaned forward to prod the fire.

I met her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

She swept her hand in the air, brushing away my apology. ‘It’s not your fault. You all do it.’

She was right. After we’d found The Rosalind, in the few days I’d spent aboard I’d seen how even the sailors who’d travelled with Paloma for months still paused in their conversations when she passed them on the deck, and followed her movements from the corners of their eyes as they worked on the ship’s repairs. Piper and Zoe stared at her too. And since we’d left the ship, and headed inland towards New Hobart, I found myself watching her all the time. She was a rumour made flesh. A person from Elsewhere. A person without a twin. Both of those ideas were so outlandish that it felt strange, sometimes, to see her picking out fish bones that had stuck between her teeth, or trimming her fingernails with her dagger. These were everyday things, and I wasn’t prepared for her to be so real.

‘We’re just curious,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said, her accent making unfamiliar shapes from the familiar words.

She had her own curiosity, too. As we spoke she stared at Piper and Zoe. A short distance from the fire, they were patching a water flask, using a glue that Zoe had made by rendering pine resin over the fire until the whole clearing was sharp with the stink of pine pitch. Paloma watched as Zoe stretched the leather of the flask flat on the ground, while Piper applied the patch.

‘When I see those two together—’ she gestured to Piper and Zoe ‘—it’s like something from a bard’s song come to life. An old story, so old you can’t be sure it was ever real.’

We were sitting together on the ground, close to the fire, looking at each other across a gulf that was wider than the miles of sea that lay between here and her homeland. Untwinned and twinned, each of us had stepped out of the other’s myth.

The first days of our journey inland had been hard, the snow thick on the mountain passes and turning to grey slush as we descended. Now the Spine Mountains were behind us, the snow had sunk into the ground. The days were starting earlier, and at night the sun refused to go down, lurking for hours on the horizon before sinking beyond the mountains in a red haze. Spring was coming.

When I was a child, I used to long for spring. It meant an end to the cold, and to the annual floods that swallowed the low-lying fields. It meant summer was nearly here: there would be swimming in the river with Zach, and long days out of the house, and away from the scrutiny of our parents.

Now, though, there were so many changes, so quickly. The tanks. The bomb. Elsewhere. Paloma. This spring’s dawning – wildflowers returning colour to the land, thistles forcing their prickly stalks above the earth – brought with it only fear of what would follow.

Paloma was still watching Zoe and Piper.

‘My grandmother claimed to have seen twins,’ Paloma said.

‘In Elsewhere?’ I asked.

‘It’s not called Elsewhere,’ she snapped. She’d already corrected me several times – I knew that in her homeland they called it the Scattered Islands – but it was hard to adjust a lifetime of habit. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘nobody’s had a twin there for hundreds of years. Except for way off on some of the Northern Isles. Our expeditions only found them a century ago, so they didn’t get the treatment until then. There are people from there who say they can remember twins. My grandmother was born up there. She said her mother had a twin. But I don’t even know if that’s true.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘My grandmother was always a bit of a storyteller.’

*

There were only the four of us now, heading south-east towards New Hobart: me, Piper, Zoe and Paloma. Thomas and his crew had remained on the coast with The Rosalind, to continue the repairs and to keep her away from the Council fleet’s patrols.

Each night, around the fire, we brought our questions to Paloma, like offerings. She did her best to answer, but whenever we asked her about how they ended the twinning, she ran out of words.

‘I don’t know the details of how it works,’ she said. ‘The doctors are in charge of all of that stuff. Nobody else is allowed to deal with it. The doctors come around and give out the medicine: an injection for all new babies, and a booster at twelve for anyone on the outer islands, where the radiation’s worse.’

‘And here we are—’ she looked down at her right leg, missing from just below the knee ‘—all of us, with something like this. No more twins. And nobody like you.’ She gestured to Zoe. There was naked curiosity in her eyes as she stared at Zoe, and her unmarred body, Alpha. The end of the twinning came with a price, as the dwellers of Elsewhere and the Ark had discovered. Without the twins, every single person shared in the mutations brought about by the blast. No more of the intact bodies that the Alphas prized above all.

Paloma spoke of Elsewhere’s doctors in the same way that many here spoke of the Council: with a mixture of awe and fear. ‘There isn’t a central government – just a loose confederacy of councils from the different islands. But all the islands get the medicine from the doctors on Blackwater. And I think even the Confederacy obeys the doctors, really. They’re the ones who ended the plague of twins, and keep it from coming back.’

‘And other machines?’ Piper asked. ‘The Electric?’

She shook her head. ‘We had purges, too, like you did here.’ We’d told her about the taboo: the fear that had grown out of the blast, as surely as the mutations of the survivors’ bodies. We knew little about the blast, but we knew that it had been created by machines. Those few machines that survived the blast were destroyed in the purges. Even now, four hundred years later, people shuddered away from any remnants of machines from the Before.

‘At home,’ Paloma continued, ‘they call it the Scouring. All the machines that couldn’t heal us, or serve us – that was the law. Most of it was gone already, in the blast, or went to ruin without the power. They ran on fuel that we don’t have. People used to dig it from the earth – a kind of oil. But in the blast …’ She shrugged and raised both hands, empty. ‘Everything that could burn, burned. The oilfields kept burning for more than eight years. And there’s a coal seam north of Blackwater that they say burned underground for more than fifty. They say there was nothing they could do to stop it.’

‘And now?’ Piper said.

‘There’s not a lot of machines left. The comms machines stopped working a long time ago. Maybe the Confederacy didn’t bother to keep them going – not after centuries of transmitting messages, and hearing nothing back. The only ones who have machines these days are the doctors. They work on things like this—’ she looked again at her leg, the false limb neat in its socket. ‘And they do what they can against the plagues that come most winters.’

‘How many people are there, living in Elsewhere?’ Zoe asked.

‘Counting the Northern Isles? About a million. Hard to know exactly. Like I said, it’s hundreds of islands, some of them days’ sailing from Blackwater – and for the Northern Isles or the Southern Archipelago it’s a voyage lasting weeks.’

She tugged the blanket that we were sharing a little closer to her side, and leaned forward to take off her false leg. It unfastened just below her knee with a firm click. Her trousers were rolled to her knees, and the tip of a pole protruded through the skin, like a steel bone emerging from the flesh, onto which the false leg fitted. There was scarring around the pole, but not the thick battle-scarring of Piper’s arm and hand; instead, it was a neat line, pink on her white flesh. The scar wasn’t raised; so smooth that if you ran a finger over it, I doubted that you would be able to feel it. It made me think of Kip, and how cunningly his scar had been hidden, so that even my curious hands had never discovered it.

The first few times Paloma had taken her leg off, and laid it near her on the ground, I’d found it disconcerting. I’d seen limbs severed before, and the sight of the leg tossed onto the ground made me wince at memories of the battle on the island, or of the wreckage of bodies in the snow outside New Hobart. But there was a sterile neatness to her false leg: no blood, no hair, no toenails. Just the precisely contoured surface.

She saw me looking at it. ‘You can touch it. I don’t mind.’

I leaned forward and picked it up. It looked like flesh but was hard and cold to the touch. It was lighter, too, than flesh would be.

‘Does it hurt?’ I asked, looking at the steel pole below her knee.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It did when they fitted it. It was a big operation. My parents took me to Blackwater, where the doctors are. We knew there were risks. But it’s been worth it. I can walk more easily. The old false leg, the one I used to strap on, used to hurt me. I’d get ulcers here—’ she touched the end of her stump.

It felt strange holding her limb. If I were to toss it on the fire she would feel nothing. It was less a part of her than Zach’s body was a part of mine.

*

That night I dreamed of him. Zach stood facing me. It was dark, barely light enough to see, so I reached out a hand to his face. When I trailed my thumb across his forehead, I felt a burn: a blistered shape, hot and fat with fluid, precisely where my own brand sat. I could smell the cooked flesh.

‘It hurts,’ he said, flinching from my touch.

‘I know,’ I said.

I woke, my hand on my forehead, where the Omega brand had left its mark, a puckered, pinking scar. I could still remember how it had felt, the day that Zach had finally exposed me as the Omega twin, and watched me being branded. In the twenty-something years of my life, I’d learned a little of the vocabulary of pain. The pain of a burn has a unique urgency, the whole body recoiling against it, the same way a finger jerks back from a hot skillet. When I remembered the branding, I could still feel the Councilman’s hand on my neck, holding me in place as he forced the brand against my forehead.

All through that day’s travelling, I thought of Zach, and the brand he had worn in my dream. It had felt so real – I could feel the blister’s texture under my fingertips.

‘Better than your usual nightmares, at least,’ Zoe said, when I told her what I’d dreamed. ‘Zach being branded makes a nice change from the end of the world.’

I laughed, but I knew that the two were connected: Zach’s branded face, and the blast he was trying to unleash.

*

When Paloma talked of Elsewhere, there was so much that I couldn’t recognise. The twinless people. The scattering of islands, spread over hundreds of miles. The mysterious doctors, and their medicines. But there was one thing that was all too familiar: the blast.

She didn’t call it that – instead, she called it the bomb. But she spoke of it in the same way that it was spoken of here: the same silences, and the same gaps, where words faltered on the brink of the flames.

‘It wasn’t just the fire,’ she said. ‘It was the force of the explosion – that’s what they say. Entire islands just disappeared: the bomb shattered them. My mum showed me an old map – there are whole islands on it that just aren’t there now.’

The bomb had made the map into nothing but a story: a careful rendering of islands that didn’t exist any more. Merely outlines on paper, meaning nothing in our scorched world.

‘They say that there was a wave, afterwards,’ she said. ‘So high that any low-lying islands that had survived the bomb were swept clean. Nothing left at all.’ She exhaled slowly. ‘Imagine that: surviving the bomb somehow, and thinking that you might be OK, and then seeing the sea coming for you.’

She was quiet for a few moments.

‘Some survived both, though – the fire and the water. Not many, and for years it was nearly impossible to keep going. Not just the darkness, and the lack of food – all the babies were horribly sick. Even if they managed to live, they could barely walk when they grew up, let alone farm, or fish. And all the fish were dead, anyway. For months after the bomb, and after the wave, the dead fish were washing up. Piles of them, rotting on the beaches, and floating in the shallows.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘It’s funny – in all the stories that come down to us, that’s one of the things they always mention: the stink of all those fish. You’d think, after the bomb and the wave and everything that had happened, that somehow it wouldn’t matter – but so many of the stories mention it. How the world stank of dead fish, for months.’

Paloma told us stories of how, when the fish finally came back, they’d changed. They had bulbous growths on them, or more fins, more eyes. Some that had been striped or silver were pure white after the blast, as if even underwater they’d been bleached by the flash of the bomb.

And on land, too, the children were born into new bodies, in shapes that their parents didn’t recognise. Babies who looked half-formed, and refused to live. Then came what Paloma called the plague of twins: the doubling, the flawless babies paired with those who carried the burden of the mutations. The ones who were born together, and died together.

‘Nobody could believe it, at first,’ she said. ‘Even when they knew it was real, nobody fully understood how it worked, despite all the doctors’ research. But it only lasted a few generations. Then the doctors found a way to treat it, eventually, and it was over: no more twins.’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Finished.’ It seemed such a casual thing – a single word, to describe the end of everything that we knew.

Late into each night, we swapped stories; we told her about the deadlands, the stretch of land to the east, where nothing grows, and nothing moves but lizards and the drifts of ash. She told us about a place called thestrike zone, an area to the south-east of Blackwater, where most of the islands had disappeared altogether. ‘And not even the birds will land on the few islands that are still there,’ she said. ‘On the Southern Archipelago, closest to the strike zone, the mutations are worse than anywhere else. Some of them can’t have children, even after the injections.’

‘Have you ever been there?’ Zoe said. ‘To the strike zone?’

Paloma shook her head. ‘But my father anchored off there once, when he went out that way, crewing on a seadoghunting ship. There were no fish in the water around it, and an oily sheen to the surface. Dad and the others rowed ashore for a few hours, just to look. In the south of the island there was a crater, miles and miles wide. He said it might have been a dried-up lake, or it might be from where a bomb hit. The ground was covered with grey sand.

‘He brought back a handful of it, in a jar, to show us. Mum said it was disgusting, made him throw it out before it frightened me and my sisters. But I went through the bin, that night, and found the jar. There was a tooth in it, and tiny pieces that might have been stone, or bone.’

*

Despite the hush in her voice when she told us stories of the strike zone, of the wave and the fire, Paloma nonetheless spoke of the blast as something long gone. It had been six days since we’d left the coast to head towards New Hobart, but our warnings about the Council, and the blast machine that they had dug up from the Ark, didn’t seem to have penetrated.

‘She still doesn’t understand,’ I said to Zoe and Piper. We were whispering, drawn apart from the fire where Paloma was resting. ‘She asked again, yesterday. She still wants to try to set up a meeting with the Council.’

Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘Might as well tie a bow around herself, if she wants to hand them Elsewhere like a gift.’

There was a sound in the scrub behind Zoe. She jumped, spinning away from me, a knife already drawn. Piper had echoed her movement, pushing me behind a tree as he crouched next to Zoe, knife raised.

Paloma gave a yelp, raising her hands as she stepped out of the cover of the trees.

Zoe stepped back, slipping her knife back into her belt.

‘Be careful creeping around like that,’ she said quietly. ‘You didn’t come all the way across the sea just to get yourself skewered.’

‘I heard what you were saying,’ Paloma said. Her chin was tilted at a bold angle, but her hands were clenched to stop their shaking. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘Nobody said you were,’ said Zoe. ‘But you need to understand what you’re dealing with.’

‘I’m not afraid of your Council,’ she insisted.

‘You should be,’ Piper said.

‘Let me meet with them,’ Paloma said. ‘If I explain the trade terms that the Confederacy’s willing to negotiate, they’ll see the benefits.’

‘You’re not listening,’ Zoe said. ‘The Council will—’

‘I’m an emissary,’ interrupted Paloma. ‘Empowered by the Confederacy to make contact, establish terms for trading negotiations and mutual cooperation.’ Her voice grew faster and higher, as she repeated herself. ‘I’m an emissary, on a peaceful expedition.’

‘Not here, you’re not,’ I said. ‘Here, you’re the enemy. They’ll hunt you down.’ I had known Zach since birth, but even I was afraid of what he had become. And I had seen how much he feared The General, who ruled the Council. Together, with the blast in their power, they would have no mercy towards Elsewhere. There was no if or perhaps or maybe about the flames that I’d seen in my visions. They were real, and they were coming.

I hadn’t thought it possible for Paloma to grow more pale, but now her lips seemed blue-tinged, the freckles standing out more conspicuously on her white face.

Piper threw down his dagger. He lifted his shirt, pulling it over his head and tossing it to the ground beside the knife.

‘Look,’ he said, turning his back on Paloma. He reached his single arm across his body to point over his left shoulder. There, on the brown skin below his shoulder blade, was a cluster of horizontal scars, white and raised. I had seen them before, during the months of travelling together, hunching together over streams to wash, but Piper wore so many scars that I hadn’t noted these ones in particular. I stared along with Paloma: these scars weren’t like the skirmish of scars on his hand and arm, or the nicks and scratches on his face. They were faded, and unlike the jagged slash that striped his shoulder, they had a uniformity to them, all of them parallel, perfectly straight.

‘That was a whipping I got when I was eight,’ he said. ‘A patrol came through our village, and Zoe and I had been playing a game with a few of the other kids. There was a song we used to sing: Jack was strong and Jack was brave—’

Zoe joined in, speaking the next words with him:

‘He sailed away to Elsewhere, across the mighty waves.’

‘It was just a kids’ song,’ Piper said. ‘But the soldiers heard it, and made an example of me. Of course it was me they chose. Even out east, back then, when it wasn’t so unusual to be split late, they were always going to pick the Omega for the whipping. I got ten strokes.’

I saw Zoe’s jaw tighten at the memory of their shared pain.

‘That was just for a mention of Elsewhere in a kids’ song,’ Piper said again. He picked up and pulled on his shirt, eyes fixed on Paloma. ‘If they find Elsewhere, they will have no mercy. Do you really think they’ll leave Elsewhere in peace, when they know what your medicines can do?’

‘You don’t know what the Council is like,’ said Zoe, stepping closer to Paloma and speaking in a voice that was gentler than I was used to hearing from her. ‘No matter what you do, or what you offer them, they’ll see Elsewhere’s very existence as a threat.’

Zoe was right. Elsewhere was everything that the Alphas feared. I had seen how our mutations repulsed them – heard the cries of freak and felt their spittle on my skin. I knew how hard they would fight to defend their own unmarred bodies. They ruled because they thought they were better than us. They were perfect, and we were broken, reflections in a warped mirror. That was how they saw it. To take away that difference, and their perfection, undermined everything they stood for. Especially now that they’d discovered how to eliminate the risks of the fatal bond: Omegas preserved in the Council’s tanks, trapped indefinitely in a hellish half-life, until each Alpha’s own life had run its course.

‘Even if we could put you on a boat tomorrow, and if Elsewhere never helped us – never shared the cure, or sought us out again,’ Zoe said, ‘the Council will keep seeking. They found the message from Elsewhere in the Ark. They know Elsewhere exists, and that it has the technology to end the twinning. We found you. Sooner or later, they will too. And they’ll destroy you all.’

Paloma had expected to return home at some point with news, a message. What message could she carry now, even if we could get her safely home? The only message that counted now was Xander’s warning: Forever fire.

‘Even if we had a ship fit for the journey,’ Piper said, ‘we can’t take you back, or warn Elsewhere, until the weather clears – you’ve seen for yourself what the storms are like.’

I saw Paloma’s lips tighten. She’d never discussed the storm that had almost sunk The Rosalind. But I’d seen the chunks hewn from the ship’s hull, and I knew that Paloma’s fellow emissary from Elsewhere had died, as well as two of Thomas’s sailors. There was a reason it had taken this long for contact to be made with Elsewhere: the sea didn’t deal in mercy. Zoe’s partner Lucia, too, had been lost to a storm, years earlier.

Piper went on, relentless. ‘Not to mention the ice sheets further north. And the spring northerlies would mean slow progress, battling the winds the whole way. Early summer will give us the best chance.’

‘We can’t force you to stay,’ I said to her. ‘Nor to try to help us. If you want to go, we’ll do our best to protect you until we can get a ship ready. Nobody would blame you, if you wanted just to go back, and forget everything you’ve learned here.’

‘Even if I wanted to run away,’ Paloma said, ‘it won’t make a difference.’ Her voice cracked. ‘There were forty of us on our ship when we spotted The Rosalind in the spit. Caleb and I were the ones chosen to come aboard as emissaries, but our captain and all the crew know where you are. Thomas gave them the coordinates. The Confederacy will send ships.’

She swallowed before she went on. ‘We spent two days moored alongside The Rosalind while her crew refilled their water barrels at a lake on the largest outcrop, and Thomas told us about the situation here: the twins; the Council; the Omegas. My captain, Rue, and her ship will have brought the news back to the Confederacy.’

The Rosalind’s mast, spotted in the distance amongst the uninhabited and bleak islands of a spit. Maps and words exchanged on a stony shore. Such a small thing, to change the shape of the world. But it couldn’t be undone.

‘They’ll have to wait until the ice sheets melt,’ Paloma said, ‘before they can send ships south. But they will come, and the spring winds will be with them, not against them. They’re coming. A ship, or a fleet. Maybe forty people, maybe hundreds. They might not all make it, but they won’t let it go, now that they know what’s here.’

For so long, that had been a fantasy: that ships from some distant place might reach our shores. Now it was the nightmare. They would come to us, and their world would burn.

‘Why will they be so keen to come?’ I asked.

She looked down, shaking her head.

‘You assumed we could help you. Maybe you were right – we can do some things that you can’t. But we’re not some magical haven. We have our own problems. Plagues that pass through, most summers. Bandits raiding villages in the outer islands, pirates picking off ships. Failing harvests, especially closer to the strike zone.’

She looked up at me. ‘Do you really think we’ve sent ships out, year after year, because we want to help you?’ She paused, and spoke more quietly. ‘You were meant to have all the answers that we don’t have. We’re looking for help ourselves.’




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_f8e237e1-5662-55b2-baf5-dfdf7fe036c1)


Zoe gave a snort. ‘You could’ve saved yourself a long journey. There’s nothing here for Elsewhere but trouble.’

‘Stop calling it Elsewhere,’ Paloma yelled. ‘That’s not its name. And it’s not the place that you imagine. These are real people you’re talking about – my parents, my little sisters. My friends – everyone I’ve ever known. A million people. And you tell me they’re all going to burn, because of what we can offer you. Instead of finding friendship, cooperation, we’ll be turned into a new strike zone.’ She inhaled sharply. ‘It’s not your Elsewhere, some magical solution.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘It’s real. Real people live there.’

What she said was true: after all our hoping, Elsewhere didn’t exist. Not the place we’d imagined, where things would be easy, and all the answers would be waiting for us, like ripe figs begging to be plucked. That place didn’t exist. Instead we’d found the Scattered Islands, real places, infinitely more complex than our imaginings – and they could be destroyed before any of us had even seen them.

I looked across at Paloma. She was squinting against the wind, which had blown her hair across her eyes. Her eyelashes were pale, as if dusted with snow. Her arms were crossed, her hands clutching the fabric of her sleeves.

I had been thinking of her as a whole country. As the thing that changed everything. But as she stood there in the wind, shivering slightly, I saw that she was just a young woman, a long way from home, and very frightened.

Around the fire that night, when all of us had calmed down, the stories of Elsewhere spilled out of her. She described animals that I had never heard of, let alone seen: seadogs, huge swimming beasts, hunted for their rich layers of oily fat. Sleek in the water and cumbersome on land. Paloma took up a stick and drew a sketch in the sandy ground, though she ended up laughing at her own rendition: the beast was an elongated lump, whiskers at one end, fins splayed at the other.

‘They look ridiculous enough in real life,’ she said, ‘without my bad drawing.’ She scuffed the picture away with a sweep of her false leg.

There were other animals that she described: alks, beasts like huge cows but with tall, branching horns splaying from their heads. Snowfoxes, purest white. And trusses, birds so huge that if they spread their wings they would cast a shadow the length of a dinghy.

‘They’re supposed to be bad luck,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why. I love seeing them, when they come back from the Southern Archipelago after winter.’

I looked at the empty night sky, smeared with grey clouds. Since we’d left the screeching gulls of the coast, the only birds we’d seen were ravens, with their black hooked beaks and indifferent stares. Perhaps, before the blast, trusses had flown here as well.

Paloma’s words offered us a new world, waiting to be seen. But there was an urgency to the way she spoke, leaning towards the fire and almost gabbling as she rushed to tell it all. There was an urgency in our listening, too. I wanted to clutch at every word, hold them in my hands. I longed for paper and ink to write it all down. I couldn’t help feeling that every word she spoke about Elsewhere was a last testament, a record of all that she was about to lose.

*

I had thought the annihilating fire of the visions, of all the seers’ visions, could get no worse. But through Paloma I was learning a little of the reality of the Scattered Islands, and that knowledge polished the agony of the visions to a new, fierce gleam.

Paloma knew what I was. She had known by the time we met: Zoe must have told her already that I was a seer, and what that meant. It was different, though, for her to see what really happened when I had a vision. She’d witnessed this the first night after we found her. We’d been gathered around the fire on the beach, maps and charts laid out on the sand as Paloma showed us a map of the Scattered Islands, describing how the archipelago speckled the sea, so far to the north-west of us that our own maps became useless. She had placed her maps next to Thomas’s; to approximate the distance, she’d laid them several feet apart. In the gap between them, deadly sea. To comprehend the Scattered Islands, we were going to need new maps; a new scale.

Paloma had been speaking when the blast came: flames tearing through my head, and a white heat that stopped time. A fire so vast that it made everything impossible except fire.

When I’d stopped shaking, and could see again, Zoe was swearing as she patted at the smouldering edge of the map that I’d dropped in the coals of the campfire. Paloma was silent, her eyebrows drawn together as she stared.

Over the next few days, I’d tried to explain to her how the visions worked, and that I couldn’t read the future the way we could read a book. That, like the uncharted spaces between our maps and Paloma’s, the future was beyond my reach. All I got were flashes: glimpses of things that hadn’t happened yet. Awake or asleep, I had no control over when the visions came, ripping me out of the present and throwing me briefly into a future where I could not navigate. If the visions came when I was sleeping, it was hard to distinguish between them and ordinary dreams – no way of knowing whether what I had seen really was a foretelling of something to come, or just a nightmare.

The visions had sometimes been useful: warnings or clues, though rarely clear. Most, though, were nothing but a terror that ambushed me with flashes of fire. It had become worse since the Ark, and what we had found there. Now that we knew the Council had found the blast machines and was readying them to use against Elsewhere, the flames burned with an added urgency.

I didn’t tell Paloma what the visions did to seers, eventually. Lucia had been driven to the edge of madness, even before she drowned; Xander’s mind had been left a darkened room, lit only by flashes of fire.

I told Paloma none of that. But she saw, soon enough, how the blast visions burned language from my lips. How the flames left me shaking, my eyes rolled back in my head as if searching the sky for fire. I felt Paloma watching me, from behind the strands of white hair that blew across her face.

I watched myself just as carefully. Sometimes I felt there were only two certainties: the blast, and my own madness. I didn’t know which would come first.

‘Have you seen it?’ she said to me, sidling up to me at the campfire, a few days into our journey. ‘Have you seen them bombing my home?’

I couldn’t lie to her. I had seen the fire, and the crumbling of the world.

After that, she was never quite the same around me. We had all told her what would happen if the Council found Elsewhere, but I was the one who had seen her homeland burn, and when she chose to share a blanket with Zoe the next day, instead of me, and to look down hurriedly if our eyes should meet across the campfire, I didn’t blame her.

The first time I noticed what was happening between Zoe and Paloma was the morning when Zoe, without being asked, picked up the detached leg from where it lay beside Paloma’s blanket, and held it for a moment, in both hands, before handing it to Paloma. I almost missed it – it lasted only a second or two. Zoe’s hands, usually decisive, lingered for a moment, and those fingers, so quick to dispatch death with a knife, were soft against the false flesh.

After that, I watched more carefully. I came to understand that when Paloma stared at Zoe and Piper, it wasn’t the unspoken unison of their movements that she was staring at, any more – or Piper at all.

It was as natural and as unhurried as moss claiming a rock. They were both the moss; they were both the rock. We’d all seen it happening, but hardly realised it: Paloma’s blanket edging closer to Zoe’s at night. Zoe reaching to free a twig snared in Paloma’s hair.

No one spoke of it. Once or twice Piper and I exchanged a glance, or a smile, when we saw Paloma lean in towards Zoe, or when the two of them walked or rode together and Zoe’s laugh burst from her, louder than caution would usually allow.

There were many things Piper and I didn’t talk about, during those long nights and days of travelling. We didn’t mention the blast machine, Leonard’s broken neck, the drowned children. All the things that we didn’t want to conjure with language. But this, between Zoe and Paloma, was different: it was a bright bird that had come to land near us, and neither of us wanted to startle it away with words.

*

We seers are not all the same. Zoe had told me that Lucia had been good at predicting weather. The Confessor had had an aptitude for machines, allowing her to find her way through the wreckage of the taboo machines, and to create new and terrible ones. Xander, Piper had told me, used to have an instinct for whether somebody was lying or telling the truth. But whatever our particular aptitudes, all of us woke screaming from visions; all of us were busy patting down the fires that the blast ignited in our minds.

With me, it was an instinct for places. I could feel them, even if I wasn’t there. It was all part of the same thing: the unreliability of time. Just as I could sometimes see things that hadn’t happened yet, I could sometimes sense places I hadn’t yet been. I’d found the tunnels that had led me from the Keeping Rooms, where Zach had imprisoned me; I’d found my way to the island; with Piper’s help, I’d found the Ark.

So I turned my mind, now, with all the concentration I could muster, to the blast machine. In the Ark, Piper and I had seen how the machinery had been painstakingly disassembled and taken away. One of the soldiers had referred to about the new bunker. So I searched. It felt strange to want to find this thing – to seek it out, when every sense in my body jarred at the thought of it. The residue alone, four hundred years later, was enough to keep the deadlands barren, and to make the Alphas shy in disgust from Omega bodies.

I sat up, while the others slept, and forced myself to seek the connections, follow where they led. I strained to trace the source of the visions that blazed in the night, the blast machine in its bunker. But I would instead find myself with eyes scrunched closed and teeth clenched, unable to get a steady trace of its location.

One morning, halfway between the coast and New Hobart, I woke with a certainty that the blast machine was to the north. I felt its pull, drawing me. I ran to Piper, breathless with the news. But by the next day, my sureness was gone: the tug that I had felt was shifting. I felt like a sail, snatched by capricious winds. By that night, I could have sworn that the blast machine was to the west. The next day, I had no sense of it at all. When Piper asked me, I muttered about time, and distance, and that the machine might still be in transit, in many parts.

‘Cass – stop.’ Piper cut me off mid-excuse. ‘I know all that. But I also know that you’ll find it eventually.’

‘Eventually’s too late,’ I said, looking ahead to where Paloma rode, Zoe walking beside her horse, her hand resting on Paloma’s foot. ‘We need to seek it out. It’s too important for us to just wait.’

Piper threw his arm wide. ‘Seek it where?’ he said. Behind us, the Spine Mountains, still snow-covered, cut off the horizon to the west. Ahead of us, plains and forests spread out to the east, until the morning haze blurred them with the sky. Where to begin?

‘We have Paloma to protect now,’ he said. ‘We can’t just run off on a whim. Once we’re back at New Hobart, we can give orders to our scouts – The Ringmaster’s network, too. We can put out word to report on any sign of unusual activity – any bunkers, any new installations. But without something to go on, we can’t just wander in search of the blast machine.’

I tried not to hear a criticism in his words: without something to go on. What did I offer, if I couldn’t even be relied on to harness my talent for locations? Many times I had felt useless compared to Piper and Zoe, as they fought and hunted and planned. My sense of places was one of the few things I’d been able to offer. Without it, was I still useful to the resistance? Useful enough that my life was worth more than the chance to kill Zach by killing me?

*

It was a hard journey. We’d started with only three horses for the four of us, and then lost one on Gallows Pass, where patches of ice still clung to the shale. Even though we’d dismounted and led the horses slowly, the grey horse had slipped and gone down thrashing, one of its front legs broken. Zoe was the only one who could get close enough to put it out of its misery. I watched how she spoke soothingly to it, right up to the moment that she slit its throat. We ate horse meat for five days, but our pace was slower with two of us walking. We had to travel at night whenever we were in Alpha territory, and Paloma’s false leg pained her if she walked for too long, so she rode one horse while the rest of us took turns on the other.

I was grateful whenever it was my turn to ride – I felt sluggish under the increasing onslaught of blast visions, each one an outburst of flame behind my eyes. One morning, a few days before we reached New Hobart, I woke from a vision with my whole head shrieking, a soreness in my temples and jaw that didn’t dissipate even as the vision dispersed. All day I found myself touching the tender spots on my face, wondering if my visions had somehow spread to my body now, as well as my mind.

We came within sight of New Hobart, two weeks after we’d left the coast and The Rosalind. We finally crested the western ridge at dawn, and there was the ring of torches around the town, and the troops massed at the gates and sentry posts. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved or afraid.

We were leading Paloma into a town held by The Ringmaster, until recently on the Council himself. I didn’t know how long our uneasy alliance with him would hold, or how he would respond to Paloma, and her news of the Scattered Islands. With The Ringmaster’s help, the resistance army had freed New Hobart from the Council occupation. But although Simon and what was left of our army were waiting for us in New Hobart, The Ringmaster had greater troop numbers, and the town was under his control.

Sally, Xander and Elsa were in there, too, at The Ringmaster’s mercy. He knew exactly what they meant to me – he’d made that clear before Piper and I left, when he’d threatened me not to betray him.

But we needed him. It wouldn’t be enough just to run, and hide, and keep Paloma away from the Council. We needed to outfit a fleet of ships; we needed money, and soldiers. We needed to strike back at the Council. Descending from the western ridge towards New Hobart with Piper, Zoe and Paloma, I knew that this thing was bigger than the four of us.

Despite the fortifications around the town, I was surprised to see signs of ordinary life continuing. Farmers were tilling the earth in fields to the city’s north and east, breaking the soil for planting when it was warm enough. Some of the houses beyond the town walls, on the open plains, had smoke coming from their chimneys. At intervals a mile or two beyond the walls, sentry posts encircled the town, and we saw two patrols making a slow lap of the perimeter, but New Hobart had once again spilled beyond its walls, and people were coming and going. I saw a hunchbacked silhouette in the driver’s seat of a wagon, heading for the western gate, and couldn’t help but smile. The Council’s laws prohibited Omegas from owning animals, so even that wagon, hitched to an ageing donkey, was a small act of defiance.

Nonetheless, for an hour or more we laid low and watched the sentry post on the western road. The soldiers wore red Council uniforms, but we could see the black armband that distinguished The Ringmaster’s men. Even then, we held back; only stepping out of cover after we’d watched a passing patrol of Omega troops, in their blue tunics, conferring with The Ringmaster’s soldiers.

When we rode up to the watch post, we were greeted calmly enough, though they didn’t conceal their stares as they took in Paloma. The Omega troops saluted Piper, while the Alphas gave grudging nods. Their matter-of-fact greeting felt strange. To them, we were just returning, as expected, after a few weeks, albeit with a pale stranger. They could not possibly know all that we had seen and learned in that time: the Ark. The blast. Elsewhere. They could not know that the whole world had changed in those weeks.

Word of our return had straight away been sent to The Ringmaster, and when the western gate was dragged open he was there to meet us, arms crossed over his chest, curly hair pulled back from his face. It had only been a month since we’d left this place, but he’d grown thinner, and older, in that time.

He was staring at Paloma. We waited what felt like a long time for him to speak. Then he turned away, dragging his eyes from Paloma to me.

‘Looks like you have a lot to tell me,’ he said.




CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_3e96d7a4-25ed-5863-b242-ad2d29e1cf61)


Debriefing would be intense, I knew. The Ringmaster had set up his command in the former Tithe Collector’s office, and that was where he took us, straight into the main hall. Simon, Piper’s long-standing adviser, was waiting for us there, and Sally too – as soon as we entered, she hobbled to Piper and Zoe and embraced each of them fiercely. Even I received a smile, though her eyes seized quickly on Paloma. Xander was there too, though he didn’t move, or even look at us when we entered. I moved closer to him, looking for some sign of recognition.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ said The Ringmaster, shutting the door and jerking his head towards the corner where Xander sat. ‘He’s quiet, these days, at least. He’s settled down a lot.’ The Ringmaster looked back at me, and added meaningfully, ‘Since you’ve been gone.’ He gestured to the seats around the big table. ‘Sit. Leave the boy where he is.’

For hours we were cloistered in that room, describing all that had happened since we’d left. Xander remained silent, never even glancing at Paloma. But The Ringmaster, Simon and Sally looked hard at Paloma and interrupted all of us, including Paloma, at every stage of our story, hurling questions, prodding and prompting for more and more details. Paloma was tired, and I could see her bristling at The Ringmaster’s repeated questions about the doctors and the untwinning. I was exhausted too, and longing to get to the holding house and see Elsa, but we answered their questions until I felt wrung out of words.

At first, I thought The Ringmaster had been right about Xander. I watched the younger seer in the corner: he sat unmoving where he was placed, mouth slightly open, a thread of drool dangling from his lip. No more muttering and yelling, rocking back and forth, moving his hands endlessly. But several times, during the hours that we were around that table, his whole body jerked, like somebody waking suddenly from a dream of falling. I was sure that he was still having visions, though he never cried out. He didn’t make a noise. Even Sally could raise no response from him, other than persuading him to open his mouth when she raised a mug of water to it.

I’d hoped that our news – aboutthe Ark, and The Rosalind’s return, might reassure Xander. That he might feel bolstered by the knowledge that he’d been right about both, and that he’d been listened to. Paloma was here to prove it. But he grew ever more distant, even as we spoke directly to him, or tried to. He sat slumped, eyes closed most of the time. When he opened his eyes, they stared, but not at us.

And I understood that our news, confirming the truth of his visions, was the worst thing we could have brought him.

I looked again at Xander. His head lolled awkwardly, as if he hadn’t even the energy to hold up his own neck. How long could he have been expected to stand in the face of the blast, its certain approach, and not disintegrate?

*

When the questions finally subsided and we were readying to leave, I hung back for a second, watching The Ringmaster’s guards lay out his meal on the table while Piper and the others were talking in the doorway. It was a grey afternoon, and The Ringmaster lit a lamp, changing the colour of the room to a sickly orange. I was gratified to see that despite the silver plate, the food laid out for him was no better than what the soldiers would be eating: a piece of flatbread no bigger than my hand, a handful of nuts, and some jerky.

He turned, the lamp still in his hand, and saw me watching him.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ I said.

‘Surely you should know the answers to most questions?’ he said.

I shook my head, irritated. ‘You know better than that. You know that’s not how it works.’

‘Go ahead then,’ he said. He picked up his fork, poked ruefully at his half-bare plate.

I took a deep breath. ‘You told me, when we first met, that you had your twin locked up. I want to know where she is.’

His face hardened. ‘She has nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Where is she?’ I repeated.

‘I told you all that you need to know, when we first met. She’s not tanked,’ he said. ‘I’ve never broken the taboo. I’m not a hypocrite.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re here, fighting alongside us, talking with us while we talk of freedom for Omegas. Where is she?’

‘She’s safe,’ he said. ‘Nowhere near here. You forget that I have my own garrisons, my own guards.’

I tried to form words, but I could almost feel the walls of the Keeping Rooms sealing around me again. Those days and days and years and years of darkness, when Zach had kept me in that cell. Wherever she was, The Ringmaster’s twin must be feeling the same airless despair. The same panic that crept in when time became stripped of meaning, and days and months were no longer anything but a burden.

‘How can you fight alongside us, and against the Council, when you think it’s fair to keep her locked up?’

He looked at me coolly. ‘I never said I think it’s fair,’ he said. ‘I think it’s necessary. If Zach or The General got their hands on my twin, I’d be dead. If she’s not secure, I’m not secure. Nor is New Hobart. Do you think, for a minute, that my troops would stay here to protect this town if I weren’t here?’

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to understand me,’ he said. His voice was a door shutting. ‘We want the same thing: an end to the tanks.’

‘Is that all you want?’ I said. ‘Is that really it? What are you doing here?’

My question sat between us for a long time, before he spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. His voice sounded exhausted. I thought that for the first time he was telling me the truth.

*

It had been many years since I’d felt that I had a home, if ever. My parents’ house, before they sent me away, was too full of scrutiny and suspicion to be a home. After my exile I’d found a kind of stability at the settlement, but my neighbours had kept their distance, and whispered about my visions. Then there had been the hell of the Keeping Rooms, and the breathless months on the run with Kip.

But that afternoon, when Elsa threw open the door of the holding house, being back with her felt as close to home as I had ever known. She rushed to greet me, almost toppling me, and my face was squashed into her shirt as she hugged me. For a few moments everything else receded.

‘I heard you got back into town this morning,’ she said, holding both my arms as she stepped back to look at me, then glancing pointedly at the sun behind me; it was already sinking towards the horizon.

‘I wanted to come here sooner,’ I said.

Elsa greeted Piper and Zoe; she welcomed Paloma too, though Elsa couldn’t hide her stares. She grumbled about rations as she bustled around the kitchen, but I saw how she touched Piper’s arm as she thrust a bundle of sheets at him, and how she pushed a hunk of bread into Paloma’s hands and made her sit down and take the weight off her false leg.

There were more comfortable accommodations at the Tithe Collector’s office, but none of us wanted to be there, close to The Ringmaster. I kept thinking about his words: I never said I think it’s fair. I think it’s necessary. What would happen when killing Zach became necessary? Would The Ringmaster even hesitate to kill me?

I was grateful when the others retreated to the front room, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Elsa. When I tried to explain to her everything that had happened, she didn’t interrupt me like The Ringmaster, Sally and Simon had. She just busied herself around me, chopping the carrots and stirring the pot over the fire, and not staring at me as I tried to find the words. I told the story backwards, starting with Paloma, and Elsewhere, and all that we’d learned about the end of twinning. When I came to describing the earlier part of my journey, and the Ark, the words came even more slowly. The meal of watery soup was ready, but Elsa didn’t hurry me; she hoisted the pot from the fire and placed it to the side. She sat quietly and waited, and I felt silence rising over me, like the water in the black corridors of the Ark.

I described finding Kip again, in the double prison of his smashed body and the tank. I told her how I had flooded the Ark, nearly killing myself and Zach and Piper, and burying Kip and The Confessor once and for all.

Elsa said nothing still, as she dished up the soup, but before she called the others in to eat, she squeezed my arm.

‘You found Kip,’ she said.

I nodded. It seemed a strange thing to be grateful for – those minutes in the Ark, with Kip’s dead body laid on the gangway in front of me. But Elsa, who had never been given back her husband’s body after the Council killed him, understood what those minutes had meant to me.

*

Later, Sally and Xander came to the kitchen as well. In the weeks we’d been away, they’d moved into the holding house, taking over the room next to Elsa’s at the front of the house, where Nina had lived before the Council killed her.

Sitting close to the fire, Xander was still silent. There were leaves in his hair, and the knees of his trousers were browned with dirt.

‘Where’s he been this afternoon?’ I asked Sally.

‘The Kissing Tree,’ Sally said.

I raised an eyebrow. The huge, hollowed-out stump in the burnt-out forest was all that remained of the hiding place where Elsa and her husband used to go when they were young. It was there that we’d found the documents for which he’d been tortured and killed: the papers that had helped to lead us to the Ark.

‘He just took off one day,’ Sally said, ‘when we were out setting snares. He went straight to it, like he knew what he was looking for. Crawled in without a word, and stayed there for hours. Since then, he goes most days.’ She shrugged. ‘It keeps him calm. I go with him if my legs are up to it, otherwise we send a guard.’

Of all the places in and around New Hobart, the Kissing Tree had the strongest link to the Ark, and to the blast machine. I wondered why the flames in Xander’s head weren’t enough, and why he made his daily pilgrimage to that place.

He wasn’t going to answer my questions. He sat without speaking, on the low stool by the fire. Beside him, Sally sat in Elsa’s chair by the window overlooking the courtyard. If anyone else had tried to claim that chair, Elsa would have jabbed at them with the broom handle, but it seemed that in the weeks we’d been away she and Sally had become friends. There was at least thirty years between them, and their lives could hardly have been more different. Elsa had spent her life caring for the children in the holding house; Sally had been a pioneer of the resistance, an infiltrator and an assassin. But I watched how Elsa filled her pipe and passed it to Sally without even looking – Sally took it without a word – and how the two of them settled into an easy silence.

I saw, too, how Elsa bent to prop a cushion behind Xander’s head, where it slumped against the wall. Again and again she wiped the drool that unspooled from his open mouth. Now that the holding house was empty, and its children dead, Elsa was always looking for something to do with her hands, and I knew that she was glad of Xander’s presence.

I wished that I could say the same – but being in the same room as Xander filled my nostrils with the scent of smoke. He was all fire now, all the time. I thought I understood, perhaps, why he went each day to the Kissing Tree. The flames had been calling him for so long that he had no choice but to answer.

Elsa was mixing some herbs to help Xander sleep through the night. She showed me how, and I ground the dried valerian myself, felt the satisfying grate of the pestle against the mortar.

When Elsa poured in some poppy tincture, she raised the glass bottle to the window light, squinting to look closely while she poured. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Four drops only. No more.’

‘Two spoons of that stuff,’ Sally said, ‘with a little henbane thrown in, and you can knock someone out entirely. A little more, and you can kill them.’

The way she phrased it, it didn’t sound like a warning. It sounded like advice.

‘Shut up and help,’ said Elsa, manoeuvring around Sally with the bottle. ‘We’re not in the business of killing, in this house.’

I wished she were right. Perhaps it was true for her, and for Xander and Paloma. But I looked from Zoe, to Piper, to Sally, and down at my own hands. There was not one of us who was not in the business of killing.

*

That night we all slept together in the dormitory of the holding house: me, Piper, Paloma and Zoe. Zoe and Paloma had pushed two of the small beds together; it was as close to a declaration as we were going to get.

Both Piper and Zoe were too tall for the children’s beds, and seeing Piper’s calves and feet hanging over the edge of the bed made me laugh. But then Paloma said: ‘Why are all the beds in here so small?’ and my laugh halted, and we fell silent, until Zoe explained about the children that Zach and The General had tanked and then left to drown. Paloma sat on her bed and listened, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her shins. Every day with us a new lesson in cruelty.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Paloma said to me. ‘When they kill the children, they’re killing their own as well.’

There had been a time when the twinning had stopped Alphas and Omegas from killing one another. That time was long gone. It wasn’t the first time that humans had turned on each other, and themselves, like this. Whoever had unleashed the blast, four hundred years ago, must have known that they would destroy more than just their enemies. The risk of obliterating themselves, and the world, hadn’t been enough to stop the killing then. The twinning was never going to be enough to stop it now.

*

The Ringmaster came at dawn. He led me and Piper around the outskirts of the town, so that Piper could inspect the new fortifications. The encircling wall was topped with wire, and a walkway now ran along it, with slits for archers. The watchtowers were higher, and had been strengthened, squatting solidly against thick wooden buttresses. Beyond the wall, wide ditches ringed the town, and in each ditch sat rows of logs pierced with metal spikes, offering their metal barbs to the sky. There was an orderliness about them that belied their sole purpose: to impale and to kill. I thought of the horses I’d ridden, the soft skin of their underbellies, and turned away.

The Ringmaster had noticed my expression.

‘It’s not supposed to be pretty,’ he said. ‘The Council built the wall to keep the townsfolk in, not to repel an attack. We’d never have taken the town if it had been built to keep an attacking force out.’

‘And now?’

He pressed his lips together. ‘If we have to draw back behind the walls, the fortifications will buy us some time. If they throw everything at us, we’ll still struggle. We don’t have the supplies to withstand a long siege – rations are tight enough as it is. But the Council won’t leave Wyndham undefended. Anyway,’ he said, with the beginnings of a smile, ‘the new defences have kept the troops busy. Idle troops make trouble.’

He was right. And he was right about the fortifications, too. They were impressive. Even Piper had no criticisms to make, and nodded when The Ringmaster pointed out various features.

‘When will the Council attack, do you think?’ I said.

‘I don’t know.’ The Ringmaster glanced back up the hill towards the holding house, where we’d left Zoe and Paloma. ‘We struck some major blows – the defection of my army; freeing this town; the destruction of the Ark. But they’ll strike back eventually. Sooner rather than later, if they find out we’ve got somebody from Elsewhere here.’

There was such audacity in those words: somebody from Elsewhere here. Only weeks earlier, that phrase would have been unimaginable. ‘Paloma changes everything,’ I said.

‘She’ll change everything all right,’ he grunted. ‘Bring the Council down on us like never before. All for what?’

‘For a chance to end all of this,’ said Piper, waving his arm to include the walls and the trenches below us, and the ruthless metal spikes – all the careful architecture of death. ‘Once and for all.’

The Ringmaster shook his head. ‘Someone, a few hundred years ago, thought they’d come up with a clever way to end all of this too, with the blast. Your brother—’ he turned to me, his movement so sudden that Piper stepped forward, putting his body between us ‘—he and The General think the tanks are a great way to end it all. When are you going to stop thinking that machines are the answer?’

I was about to speak when a whistle came from the wall below us, and a flurry of shouts from the watchtower. The Ringmaster yanked his gaze from me, and he and Piper moved quickly, running through the narrow streets towards the eastern gate. I ran too; by the time we reached the gate, my breath was fast and jerky from keeping up with them.

The gate was open; I recognised the dwarf sentry whose arrival had been signalled, and who now rode up from the gate to meet us: Crispin, one of Piper’s soldiers from the island.

‘It’s an Alpha,’ he said as he dismounted. ‘They’re bringing him in now.’ Crispin was out of breath, and we all had to bend to hear him speak. ‘He came to the sentry post on the eastern road, wouldn’t give his name. Handed over his knife, willingly. We’ve searched him – no other weapons. But he says he’ll only speak to Cass.’

Behind him, three more Omega soldiers rode through the gate. Hemmed between them was a tall man, hooded.

The gate was heaved shut, the crossbar dropped into place with a weighty thud. The soldiers dismounted and dragged the hooded man to where we stood.

I knew it was him, even before one of the soldiers wrenched back his hood. He kept his head low, face all but buried in the scarf bundled around his neck. There was a bruise on his cheek, a cut on his temple, and his bottom lip was swollen and split.

I stared at Zach, and he stared back.

‘I had nowhere else to go,’ he said.



PART 2 (#ulink_177f65c0-ba84-5739-92d9-0057c85cd5fe)




CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_54736086-8ca1-50b4-b1e5-5fa8654735fe)


Piper charged at him – for a moment I thought he would punch him. But he just grabbed hold of Zach and, under the gaze of the soldiers, dragged him off the street and into the shadow of a narrow alley nearby. I followed with The Ringmaster and Crispin.

‘And put that hood back up, for crying out loud,’ Piper said, pushing Zach back against the wall. ‘You think there’s a soldier in this town who wouldn’t knife you if they knew who you are?’

Zach pulled his hood forward, but kept his eyes on me.

‘You need to take me in,’ he said. His words were slightly blurred by his swollen lip. I ran my tongue across my own lip, expecting to taste blood.

‘Did your men do this to him?’ I asked Crispin.

‘We weren’t overly gentle when we searched him,’ said Crispin. ‘But someone else had got to him first.’

Mixed with my shock at seeing Zach was an element of relief: the pains I’d felt a few nights earlier, in the thick of my visions, had been Zach’s pains, and not another step in my mind’s disintegration.

The Ringmaster dismissed Crispin with a jerk of his head, but before Crispin had reached the end of the alley, Piper called him back.

‘Not a word, do you understand? Not a word to anybody, if you value your life. You’ve seen nothing, heard nothing, and you don’t know who this man is. Clear?’

Crispin nodded.

‘And wake the second watch early,’ The Ringmaster added. ‘I want an extra squadron on the perimeter, and three more mounted patrols out, now.’

Crispin left at a trot.

Piper let go of Zach’s arm. There was nowhere for Zach to run, backed against the wall in the cramped alley, with me, Piper and The Ringmaster facing him.

‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ Zach said to me, his voice a hiss.

‘What I’ve done?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? Why are you here?’

‘The General’s trying to kill me, to get rid of you.’

‘And you’ve come to me for help?’ I said, incredulous.

‘Where else am I supposed to go?’

He looked from me to Piper and The Ringmaster and back again. I thought of the half-strangled rabbit I’d found once, thrashing around in one of Piper’s snares – the wire noose had snagged and failed to kill it. Zoe had leaned past me and swiftly broken its neck, but I’d seen the trapped animal’s eyes. Zach’s eyes were like that now.

‘Say it,’ I said.

‘What?’ Zach said. His eyes were still flicking from me to the others. ‘Say what?’

‘Admit it,’ I said. ‘Say that you need our help.’

‘You want to play games?’ Zach said. ‘There’s no time. They’re coming for me, and if you let them catch me, you’ll die.’

‘But so will you,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘And there are times I think that might be worth it.’

He stared at me for a long time. I felt the warmth of Piper, who stood close beside me; I heard the impatient breathing of The Ringmaster on my other side.

‘Fine,’ Zach said, his voice cracking. ‘Help me.’

*

On the way to the Tithe Collector’s office Piper gripped Zach’s arm and The Ringmaster flanked him. The hood was pulled so low over his face he could barely see, and once or twice he stumbled, but Piper hauled him onwards. The streets were getting busier: a woman was beating a mat out of an upstairs window; three soldiers were chatting in a doorway, scrambling to attention as they saw Piper and The Ringmaster approach. Outside the bakery a man was unloading flour from a barrel, and flour dust settled on the shoulders of Zach’s dark cloak as we passed. I couldn’t reconcile it: such an ordinary, everyday thing, when I felt as though Zach’s arrival had brought the whole world to a stop.

When we reached the partly-burnt building where the children had been tanked and then drowned, I looked back at Zach, and saw Piper’s knuckles standing out white, his fingers crushing Zach’s arm. If it hurt, Zach made no noise.

At the Tithe Collector’s office, The Ringmaster dismissed the guards with a sweep of his hand, and pulled the door of the main chamber shut behind us.

In that large room, I was no closer to Zach than I had been outside, but it somehow felt worse, and more intimate, to be sharing a room with him, away from the noise of the soldiers and the streets. I already shared too much with Zach. I didn’t want to share the same air, the same enclosed space.

‘Who knows you’re here?’ demanded Piper.

‘Nobody,’ Zach said. He pushed the hood back.

The last time I’d seen him had been in the Ark, but the space had been barely lit, and I’d never got close to him. Now I stared at his changed face. It wasn’t only the bruises and scabs that made it different. There were new lines under his eyes, and between his eyebrows, and a long-healed scar on his jaw. So much of his life was unknown to me, now. How far our stories had diverged since the days of our childhood, when I could have drawn a map of every freckle on his cheekbones.

The Ringmaster moved closer to Zach. They were the same height, but The Ringmaster was broader, stronger. Once, these two had sat together on the Council, living and working in luxury that I could barely imagine. Now they faced off across the bare room. It had once been the Council’s Tithe Collector’s office, so it was plusher than anything else in the Omega town, but it wore the marks of the last few months. One wall was patched where it had burned during the battle. A broken window had not been mended – just nailed shut with slats. The planks of the balcony outside, where the townspeople used to line up to pay their tithes, had been ripped up for firewood during the coldest weeks of winter. In the next room, where the Tithe Collector used to dine, the floor was covered with sleeping rolls for The Ringmaster’s personal guards.

‘You should never have come here,’ The Ringmaster said to Zach.

‘I don’t want this any more than you do,’ Zach replied. ‘You think I’d be here—’ he waved a hand at the shabby room ‘—if I had a choice?’

His shoulders slumped. ‘The General’s turned on me. She’s trying to kill me.’ He turned back to me. ‘You’ve gone too far now, done too much. Destroying the database. Warning the island that we were coming. Freeing New Hobart. Then trashing the Ark. You did too much,’ he said again, his voice rising, ‘and you found out too much. Until getting rid of you was worth the cost of getting rid of me.’

This was the kind of calculation that should have been familiar to him: he’d spent years weighing up the value of lives, and making choices he had no right to make. But he looked frantic, his voice swerving between rage and disbelief.

‘Didn’t you have anyone else you could turn to?’ I said. ‘You must have your own soldiers. Won’t they protect you?’

‘Against The General?’ he said.

I remembered her: the way she kept her head still while her eyes roamed indifferently over us. How even Zach had obeyed her every command.

Zach continued. ‘Ever since you took New Hobart, The General’s been trying to push me out. She tried to hide it at first, but I knew. She was manoeuvring in the Council, making sure she had the support she needed. Talking more and more about the threat posed by the resistance. By you, especially. Then you drowned the Ark, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. Six nights ago she came for me – sent her soldiers to my chambers before dawn. I wasn’t there – I had a source who tipped me off. I got out through the kitchens, a few hours before the raid, but even then I had to fight my way past a sentry. One of my own soldiers – he said he had orders not to let me leave the fort. Me.’ He closed his eyes and took two breaths. I didn’t know who the anger on his face was aimed at: his soldiers; The General; me.

‘You should have known this was coming,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’

‘And I should have trusted you instead?’ Zach shot back. ‘You, who proved yourself so loyal, so trustworthy?’

‘I’ve been loyal to the principles the Council was supposed to uphold. The taboo. Protecting our people from the machines.’

Zach shrugged impatiently. ‘Everything I’ve done has been for the protection of our people. You’re clinging to superstition, harping on about the taboo. Machines aren’t the real threat – the Omegas are.’

‘The taboo exists for a reason,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘The machines ended the world. They caused the Omegas.’

‘We can harness the machines to help us,’ Zach said. ‘Everything I’ve done – the machines, the tanks – it’s all to protect us from the burden of the Omegas.’

‘And the blast?’ I asked. ‘Are you really stupid enough to think that can be harnessed? That the blast will protect you as well?’

‘If need be,’ Zach said. ‘If that’s what it takes, against the threat of Elsewhere.’

‘You disgust me,’ I said, each word a hiss.

I could not look at him without thinking of the tanks. The blast. The stink of death that came off him, like a rabbit carcass claimed by flies.

‘Then at last you might begin to understand how I’ve always felt about you,’ he said.

I pulled back my fist and swung at him. It wasn’t an impulsive jab; I thought carefully about everything Zoe had taught me. I focused on his right cheekbone, and when I punched I made sure I punched through rather than at it, and I threw my whole weight behind the blow.

He saw me draw my fist back, but he didn’t believe I would really do it. When my knuckles connected with his face, his whole head snapped backwards. Mine did too, the jerk of pain sharp enough that my teeth clashed together as my head recoiled.

I was still staggering slightly as I tried to punch him again, but Piper held me back, his arm tight around my waist, lifting me off my feet. My knuckles were red, but the ache in them was nothing compared to the pain beneath my eye.

Zach had one hand pressed to his face, his other hand raised at me, palm first.

‘You’re insane,’ he said. ‘If you attack me, you’re attacking yourself.’

Piper released me, and I stood close to Zach.

‘You’re the mad one,’ I said. ‘You’re disgusting. You look down on us, think that we’re less than you. But the things that you’ve done—’ I spat at the ground beside him. ‘You’re a monster. A freak.’

He lowered his hand. The skin was already purpling, his eye clenched shut against the hurt.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think of me,’ he said. ‘I’m not here to win you over. It doesn’t make any difference that you hate me.’ He had regained control of his breath now. His voice was measured, his gaze cool. ‘If you don’t take me in, I’m dead. You too. Do you want that?’ He paused. ‘You want it all to be over?’

If he’d asked me that question a few months ago, my answer might have been different. They had been the bleak days, when I’d wandered through the world like a half-dead thing, lost without Kip. But I had found my way back. I had found Kip’s body and set it free, and I had chosen to live. I knew that I would choose it again, now, even if it meant protecting Zach.

I kept my gaze on Zach as I spoke to Piper. ‘I want him shackled, and locked up,’ I said.

The Ringmaster called for the shackles. When his soldiers brought them, I helped Piper with the chain myself, looping it tight around both Zach’s wrists. When my skin touched his, I forced myself not to flinch.

*

Piper sent for Sally. I heard him explaining Zach’s arrival in the corridor. I couldn’t make out her words, but her tone was clear enough. When she came in she looked at Zach, and it was as though winter had come again, settling over her features.

‘I should see to his face,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘If he gets an infection, it’s bad news for Cass.’

His injuries didn’t look dangerous – I’d seen far worse – but he’d taken a beating. Sally pushed him into a chair and stood over him. The tenderness with which I’d seen her care for Xander was completely absent in the way she examined Zach’s face. She touched him only with the tip of her thumb and forefinger, pinching under his chin, pulling his head first one way and then the other to inspect the cuts on his temple and lip. She called for water and cloths, swiping firmly at the swollen flesh until the cloth was a rusted red. ‘Hold this on,’ she said to him, pressing another cloth onto the graze above his eye. Fishing a miniature bone-handled dagger from her boot, she leaned over Zach – he flinched – to flick out gravel embedded in the wound, using the very tip of the knife.

Zach gave a small grunt of pain.

‘You want something to complain about?’ Sally said, keeping her voice low and pressing the knife against the open wound. It was a tiny blade – the same one she used for chopping tobacco, and getting splinters from Xander’s knees. But in Zach’s grated flesh, it was big enough. He winced his eyes shut, and I jerked my head away from my own jab of raw-flesh pain.

‘Get this mad old bitch off me,’ grunted Zach, raising his bound arms to swipe at her.

‘Sally,’ Piper said, his hand on her arm. But she’d already stopped, turning away from Zach.

‘I’m done,’ she said, wiping the tip of the blade and slipping the dagger back into her boot. I watched her, and envied her those words: I’m done. When would I be done with Zach?

The Ringmaster stepped closer to Zach, peering at his face. Sally had cleaned the skin around his wounds, but the rest of his face was still smeared with grime.

‘How far you’ve come,’ The Ringmaster said quietly.

‘Not only me,’ said Zach. ‘You too. It’s a long way from the Council rooms at Wyndham. All those pretty serving girls. Yet here we both are.’

‘There’s a difference between us,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘I had a choice. I came here because I chose to – because I wanted to stand against you and The General, and your obsession with the machines. But you have no choice. You’re here because you need help.’ He gestured around at the rest of us, and the guards at the door. ‘Without their protection – my protection – you’re dead.’

Zach leaned forward, holding out his shackled arms towards The Ringmaster. ‘I might be in chains,’ he said, ‘but we’re both here because we have no choice. The only difference is that I’ve been honest about it. You wouldn’t be here, helping them, if you didn’t need them just as much as I do. You’ve never given something for nothing. Not ever. You’ve been trying to make out that you’re here as the saviour of the Omegas? Here to help the oppressed?’ Zach laughed, a hollow sound, like the clanking of his chains. ‘You’re only here because you were getting sidelined at the Council. You saw that The General and I were gaining power, and that you were being left behind because you refused to be reasonable about the potential of the machines.’ Zach sat back, his chained arms crossed over his chest. ‘You didn’t leave the Council to help the Omegas,’ he said to The Ringmaster. ‘You left because you figured you could capitalise on their uprising as your best chance at overthrowing us, taking back the power for yourself.’

None of us came to The Ringmaster’s defence. Zach was only saying what we’d all thought, at times. What we’d all feared.

For a few seconds nobody spoke. Piper’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed Zach; beside me, The Ringmaster was standing stiffly, and I could hear the careful evenness of his breath. Honest, Zach had said. How many of us, in this room, were really being honest with one another?

‘Take him to the storage room out the back,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘I want Simon at the door. Two of my men too.’

It didn’t escape me that he chose Simon first. When I’d first met The Ringmaster, a few months earlier, he never would have trusted an Omega, let alone valued his skills. But whatever else The Ringmaster might have been, he wasn’t stupid. He’d seen Simon fighting in the battle for New Hobart, and in the sparring ring where the soldiers trained. It wasn’t only his three arms that made him a valuable fighter: Simon was fast, experienced, and strong. In the battle, I’d seen him stand, legs planted wide, hefting his swords as though he were the only solid thing in a flimsy world.

Piper nodded, grabbing Zach roughly by the elbow.

‘And when he’s locked up, send for Zoe from Elsa’s,’ I said. Piper hesitated for a moment before he nodded. We both knew that when I said Zoe, I meant Zoe and Paloma. I hated the thought of bringing Paloma into the same building as Zach – but Paloma needed to be part of this discussion.

In the doorway, Zach turned back.

‘I will remember every detail of how you treat me,’ he said.

‘You’re not the only one with a memory,’ I said. I stared at him, and I wondered if I would ever be able to remember swimming with him in the river as children, without remembering the sodden bodies of the drowned children from the tanks. I remembered how the two of us used to clamber up the trees above the riverbank, and all I could think of was Leonard’s distended neck as he hung from the tree.

‘Take him away,’ I said.

*

Zoe threw the door open so hard that it bounced back off the wall, almost hitting Paloma as she followed Zoe through.

‘He has the hide to come to us?’ she spat. ‘After what he’s done? And we’re supposed to protect him now?’

‘No,’ Piper said. ‘We’re not protecting him. We’re protecting Cass.’

‘He’s using us,’ Zoe said.

The Ringmaster exhaled. ‘Probably. He’s always operated that way. But I don’t see that we have any choice.’

Zoe turned to me. ‘How do you even know he’s telling the truth about The General turning on him?’

‘He’s telling the truth,’ I said. It wasn’t that I trusted him. It wasn’t even the cuts and bruises on his face that convinced me. It was my certainty that he would never come to me unless he had no choice.

The Ringmaster spoke up. ‘It was always a matter of when The General would turn on him, not if. You don’t know The General like I do.’ He paused, then continued slowly, each word slithering through gritted teeth. ‘She’s not somebody who likes to share.’ I remembered how casually The General had told us about her capture and torture of the crew of one of our ships.

The Ringmaster went on. ‘But it doesn’t follow that Zach will be safe here, with us. If we keep him here, our own soldiers might kill him. Every soldier in this town, Alpha or Omega, would kill him with pleasure.’

‘If that was true,’ I said, ‘they’d have killed me, months ago.’

‘Do you think we haven’t been protecting you?’ Piper said. He threw the words out as though it were just an ordinary observation, but it knocked the air from my lungs.He went on. ‘I always have guards that I trusted watching the holding house. Zoe and I have been with you ourselves whenever we could.’

Months ago, on the island, one of Piper’s own advisers had tried to kill me, to take out Zach. I’d thought, since then, that I’d proved my worth to the resistance. And I’d believed that Piper’s watchfulness was because of The Ringmaster. I hadn’t realised that he still believed I was at risk from our own soldiers, our own people.

Piper spoke gently. ‘It was only a precaution,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think they’d kill you directly – they’ve seen you fight for us, and they know what you’ve done for the resistance. You helped us evacuate the island, and free this town. I think our people understand that we need you, even if that means that Zach lives.’ He cast a glance at the door through which Zach had been taken. ‘But if Zach’s here with us, it’s a provocation. If they caught him on his own, with that sneer on his face, it would be easier for them to see you as collateral damage. At best, they’ll rough him up, hurt him badly enough that it’ll hurt you too. At worst, they’ll finish him off, and you with him.’

‘We can’t keep him with us, though,’ shouted Zoe. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘This isn’t about you,’ snapped Piper. ‘You think I wouldn’t like to give him a beating myself?’ Piper’s voice was rigid, but then it softened. ‘Hell on earth, Zoe. I was next to you when we pulled those kids out of the tanks. And you weren’t even on the island – you didn’t have to see what I saw there. The Confessor executing my soldiers, one after another – all on Zach’s orders. Stop acting like you’re the only one who hates him.’

‘If we don’t take him in, they’ll kill him?’ Paloma said. She’d been standing silently to the side while we argued. Now she spoke up. ‘Kill him, and Cass too?’ she went on.

The Ringmaster gave a quick nod.

‘Then we keep him,’ Paloma said. She made it sound as if it were simple: the only choice.

Zoe’s face twisted in disgust. ‘He’ll be spying on us. Manipulating us. And he’ll find out about Paloma—’

‘We need Cass,’ Paloma interrupted her. I was surprised to hear her put it like that. I’d seen how she watched me when I had a vision. How she’d avoided being close to me, since she’d first understood that I had seen Elsewhere burn.

‘It’s not that simple,’ I said, but I was grateful nonetheless for the certainty in her voice.

‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said. ‘I hate your visions, hate that you’ve seen my home burn, my people massacred.’ She choked a little on those words, and pressed her lips tightly together before she could continue. ‘But I believe you. It’s coming. And you’re the one who’s warned us. You know more than anyone about the blast. We can’t save the Scattered Islands without you.’

We were all watching her. She stood very straight, arms wrapped around herself, waiting there in the middle of us all for a response.

‘We keep him here,’ Piper said.

‘Under guard,’ The Ringmaster added. ‘And away from Paloma.’

Zoe was about to speak again, but she looked at Paloma, and then said nothing.

So he stayed. I thought I might feel relieved – it was true, after all, that we would both be killed if the others hadn’t agreed to take him in. But an unease had settled in my guts. Zach had come to us, bruised, desperate and alone, and still we had no option but to do what he demanded.




CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_8c961f3e-50e0-50d0-b5c4-5f936da96e11)


The next morning, when I woke, I lay silently for a few minutes. I stretched, feet jammed against the bars that made up the foot of the bed, trying to forestall the moment of getting up and facing the day, which meant facing Zach.

Piper had slipped away the night before, while the rest of us were eating in the kitchen. When he’d come back it was nearly midnight, Paloma rolling over with a half-asleep grunt as the door clattered shut and he strode to his bed. I didn’t need to ask him where he’d been – I could tell that he’d been talking to Zach. I could see it clearly enough in the way he kicked his boots off and halfway across the room, and in the way he shoved and punched his pillow into shape beneath his head. Now, even though it was barely dawn, Piper was already awake and out in the courtyard with Sally, the two of them talking in low voices.

Zoe and Paloma were awake too, talking by the dormitory window. Paloma was nodding at something Zoe was saying. She was wearing Zoe’s shirt, too large for her, the sleeves rolled and bunched over her pale arms. I left the two of them alone.

I found Elsa in the kitchen. While she busied herself with sifting weevils from the flour, I stirred the porridge. The pot held only a dusty handful of oats, thickened with water until it was more like paste than porridge.

‘Been like this ever since the last weeks of winter,’ Elsa said, seeing me grimace at the grey mixture. ‘The grain stores are nearly empty. Half the farms around here weren’t even planted last season. The Council only maintained a handful of the fields – enough for the troops stationed here.’

The Council hadn’t planted the farms, because they’d thought that by the time the wheat was shoulder-high and ready for harvest, the thousands of Omegas who lived in New Hobart would be tanked, just as the children had been.

‘Even now,’ she went on, ‘some of the farmers are reluctant to work their smallholdings outside the wall. A lot of them have packed up and left.’

I couldn’t blame them. The area surrounding New Hobart clung to a semblance of normality, but it was hard not to feel as though the town occupied a pause between battles.

I was still hungry after I finished my porridge, every last scrap of it; I scraped my spoon against the inside of the bowl until the clay squealed.

Walking up through the town to the Tithe Collector’s office, the four of us passed a patrol of The Ringmaster’s soldiers on their way down to the wall. A year before, if I’d passed them in the street and glanced at their faces, I’d have assumed they were Omegas. Each face had been forced to remember its skull, the bone outlines hard against the flesh. Not since the drought years, when I was a child, had I seen Alphas looking so gaunt.

When we reached the Tithe Collector’s office I looked closely at The Ringmaster. Even he had lost weight about the face, though his mass of curly hair disguised the worst of it.

I asked him about the rations.

‘I’ve secured the grain silos at Deadmeadow and Landfall. Most of the western plains are still held by garrisons loyal to me. The tithe takings, too.’

Piper’s lips tightened – that money had all been taken from Omegas, often at the lash of a whip.

But if The Ringmaster noticed, he paid no heed. ‘The problem is getting it here,’ he continued. ‘The Council’s holding Wreckers’ Pass – the convoys from my garrisons can’t get through any other way without getting dangerously close to Wyndham. The General’s soldiers have picked off two convoys of grain in the last month, and one of weapons. As long as The Council holds the pass, and the plains around Wyndham, we’re going to struggle to feed all the troops, let alone the townsfolk.’ He added, with a glance at the guards by the door, ‘My soldiers aren’t used to such short rations.’

‘Our troops have worked on less than this for years,’ sniped Zoe.

‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ said Piper. ‘We need to do better, for all of them. We’re asking them to take on the Council, in open battle, when The General attacks – and she will, eventually. We can’t defend New Hobart with disgruntled troops. Forget about principles or loyalty – nothing breeds mutiny like a hungry army.’

‘And what about new recruits?’ I said. ‘Have there been more, as the news of the refuges spreads?’

For generations the refuges had been the last resort of the Omegas: places where they would be fed and housed by the Council in exchange for their labour. Though they’d always been little more than prison camps, they were supposed to be the last safety net of a Council that could never endanger Alphas by allowing Omegas to starve. In recent years, under Zach and The General’s rule, they had become something more sinister: places where desperate Omegas in their thousands turned themselves in, only to be tanked, permanently preserved to protect their Alpha counterparts.

‘You can’t be the only one who’s decided not to stand for the Council breaking the taboo,’ I added.

The Ringmaster shrugged. ‘The news of the refuges is spreading – that song you started did its job, I’ll give you that, and Omegas have been trickling in, though many are reluctant to come into a town that I’m holding. As for the Alphas – most of them don’t believe the rumours about the tanks. And even for those who do, it’s a question of what they fear most: the machines, or the Omegas and the fatal bond. Of how far they’d be willing to go to be free of their twins.’

This was the same question I asked myself about him, every day. Every time he spoke of twins, I couldn’t help thinking of his own twin, locked away somewhere.

‘They fear The General, too,’ he went on. ‘And rightly. It’s one thing for them to want the taboo upheld. Another for them to be willing to oppose her.’

‘It would be different if they actually saw the tanks,’ I said. I could never forget what I’d seen in there. The melding of tubes and flesh; the heavy silence of the floating bodies. ‘Hearing the rumours is different from having to see the reality. Except for the soldiers actually working in the refuges, the Alphas never have to see the tanks. They never have to confront what’s actually being done in their name.’

‘Your brother and The General know that well enough – their plans depend on it,’ The Ringmaster said, a little impatiently. ‘Anyway, while they hold Wreckers’ Pass, we couldn’t feed more recruits, even if they were pouring in the gates.’

Piper must have seen how my shoulders slumped.

‘It’s not all bad news,’ he said. I raised an eyebrow. ‘If The General’s concentrating on starving us out, then they might not be planning a major counterattack. Not yet, anyway.’

How long did we have, I wondered, before the Council found out about Paloma, and about Zach? If The General knew that we were sheltering both of them here, would she crush New Hobart? And would The Ringmaster and his troops be enough to defend us, if the Council turned its whole force against us? Would he even try?

*

The Ringmaster was the first person to comment aloud on Paloma and Zoe, the day after Zach’s arrival. It was late afternoon; Paloma and Zoe were on the far side of the main hall in the Tithe Collector’s office, talking with Simon and Piper. As Paloma walked behind Zoe, she let her hand trail briefly across the back of Zoe’s neck.

The Ringmaster spoke so that only I could hear. ‘Of all the people she could have chosen,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Because Zoe’s a woman?’ I shot back.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘Because Zoe’s as spiky as a blackthorn shrub.’ He gave me a conspiratorial look.

I didn’t return it. I didn’t want to discuss Paloma and Zoe – least of all with him. So much of our lives was already under his control; I didn’t want to have him sullying this as well.

‘Paloma’s our only emissary from Elsewhere,’ The Ringmaster went on. ‘I might not be as keen as the rest of you to join ourselves to them, but I’m not fool enough to think we should risk alienating them. Paloma’s goodwill is no small thing. The last thing we need is to have a lovers’ quarrel jeopardise our only contact with them.’

‘There haven’t been any quarrels,’ I said. Zoe was as prickly as ever with the rest of us, but around Paloma she had a new calmness. Across the room, Paloma was standing in front of Zoe, and Zoe had tucked her chin to cup the top of Paloma’s head.

The Ringmaster was staring too.

‘The soldiers are already asking about Paloma,’ he said. ‘They’re not blind, or stupid. They know she’s not from here – they’re asking where she’s from and why she’s here. What it means for the future.’

‘You know what it means,’ I said. ‘You can’t expect us to ignore what we’ve learned. If we can save Elsewhere, we’ll be able to end the twinning. Look at Paloma.’

‘I have,’ he said coolly. I followed his gaze. With Zoe standing close behind her, Paloma’s false leg was barely visible, a few shades darker than the rest of her flesh.

‘She’s free of the twinning,’ I said. ‘They all are, over there.’

‘And they’re all mutants,’ he said. ‘You’re asking us to make a huge sacrifice.’

I noticed that he still spoke of the Alphas as us.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re asking you to take your fair share. We’ve carried the burden, for centuries. Not just the infertility, but everything else too. We’ve done it alone, while you’ve lived comfortably in your intact bodies.’

‘Do you realise what you’re asking? You’re asking us to give that up.’

‘It must be nice,’ I said, ‘to be so convinced of your own perfection.’

His nostrils flared slightly. ‘Easy for you Omegas to claim the moral high ground. You’re not the ones who’ll be taking this medicine. You want us to risk everything by taking a taboo medicine that you don’t even understand.’

He was right: I didn’t understand how it worked. Even Paloma didn’t know the details of that. The only proof I had was Paloma, and a handful of documents from the Ark. And The Ringmaster was right, too, that it wouldn’t be the Omegas taking the medicine. The treatment was for the next generation, so it would be wasted on us, since the one mutation that all Omegas shared was our infertility.

He continued. ‘Untwinning – the kind that you’re describing – it wouldn’t have saved my wife.’

His wife had died in childbirth, when the Omega twin, with an enlarged head, had become stuck. Since confiding this to me, he’d never mentioned it again, until now, and the one time I’d raised it he had responded with fury. But now he raised it himself, unprompted, his voice tired.

‘It wasn’t the twinning that killed Gemma,’ he said. ‘It was the freak she gave birth to. And you want me to help you make this untwinning happen – to make the whole next generation into freaks.’

There was a long silence.

‘This isn’t for us,’ I said. ‘It won’t save us, or change us, or raise the dead. But there’s a chance for the next generation’s lives to be their own.’

He was still staring across the room at Paloma’s false leg, and at Piper and Simon.

‘But what kind of life can it be, really?’ he said.

I looked at him, and pity mingled with my anger. How could he ask? I followed his gaze. There was Piper, his wide shoulders bent over a map as he spoke with Simon, and Paloma, whose bond with Zoe sometimes felt like the only growing thing in a scorched world. How could The Ringmaster look at them and speak of imperfection, or of meaningless lives?

‘For all your perfection,’ I said, ‘you see nothing.’ The Ringmaster looked at me strangely – I hadn’t meant to, but I’d laughed as I spoke. ‘Do you really think it’s the deformations that make our lives impossible? I’m not stupid enough to say the deformations aren’t hard. But the real problem’s the settlements, the tithes, the curfews, the whippings. The Alphas who spit as they ride past us, and the raiders who raid our settlements, knowing the Council won’t protect us.’

‘But I have protected you,’ he said. ‘I freed this town, and fought alongside you, because we agreed that the taboo had to be upheld.’

‘We agreed that what Zach and The General were doing was wrong,’ I said.

‘And what if I think what you want to do, with Elsewhere’s medicine, is wrong?’ he said.

I did my best to keep my breath steady. ‘Then you must make your choice,’ I said. ‘Just as I have.’

*

When one of The Ringmaster’s soldiers brought a tray of food to the table, Piper glanced towards the room where Zach was locked up. ‘We should take him some food,’ he said.

‘Why?’ snapped Zoe. ‘Let him go hungry. It’s the least he deserves.’

‘We need him healthy,’ Piper said. ‘If he weakens, or sickens, it puts Cass at risk.’

‘I’m not suggesting we starve him to death,’ Zoe said. ‘But it won’t kill him to miss a few meals. I’m not going to be waiting on him hand and foot, that’s for sure.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said, standing. I bent to spoon more stew into my bowl, and grabbed the last hunk of flatbread.

The Ringmaster and Piper were both watching me as I straightened.

‘See what you can get out of him,’ The Ringmaster said.

‘You don’t need to tell me what to do,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to see him for fun.’

Even as I walked down the corridor towards where Zach was kept, I felt the sweat sting my underarms, and my heart pummel my ribs; I walked faster, to make my footsteps match its pace.

During the years that he’d kept me imprisoned in the Keeping Rooms, I used to wait for his visits. I’d counted the days, the meal trays, the steps outside my cell. Even though I’d hated him, he’d been the only person who ever came, except for The Confessor. My hatred for him, and my longing to see him, had curdled in me.

Now it was my turn, taking those steps down the corridor to the room where Zach waited.

Simon had been given a break, but there were still four guards outside the room, stepping aside and unbolting the door for me as I approached.

It was barely a room, really – more like a cupboard, though a narrow window up high let in some light. Dust mounted in the corners, where empty crates were stacked.

When I stepped inside, ducking under the low lintel, Zach raised his hands to show me how his shackles had been passed through a metal ring screwed to the wall. I put the bowl on the floor and slid it towards him, but he ignored it.

‘This is how you choose to treat me?’ he said.

The door closed behind me. ‘You came to us,’ I said. ‘You knew what to expect.’

‘I didn’t expect this,’ he said, shaking his hands so that the chain rattled.

‘You did worse to me,’ I said. ‘Four years in the Keeping Rooms. Be grateful that you’ve got fresh air, and sunlight. It’s more than you gave me.’

‘Four years?’ he said. ‘Try thirteen.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He cocked his head to the side. ‘You think this is the first time I’ve been your prisoner?’ he said. ‘What about the first thirteen years of our lives? You kept me trapped. You made my own parents wary of me. I couldn’t start school; couldn’t make friends; couldn’t do anything, fit in anywhere, until I was free of you.’ He stared at me unflinchingly. ‘Thirteen years,’ he said again, dragging the words out, making each syllable last. ‘My life couldn’t start until I’d got rid of you. I’ve had to make up for lost time ever since.’

‘Don’t blame me for what you’ve done,’ I said. ‘It was your choice – all of it.’ I looked at his hands, and thought of the things they had done. Looked at his mouth, and thought of the orders he had given. ‘You’ve done unspeakable things.’

‘What alternative was there?’ he shouted. ‘Let things continue as they were? Everyone subject to the whims of Omega bodies, that could sicken at any moment?’

I ignored him. ‘Tell me what you know,’ I said. ‘Where did you move the blast machine? What’s The General planning?’

He went rigid. ‘I’ve told you. The General’s been freezing me out, ever since you destroyed the database and retook this town.’

How quickly we were back to his old refrain: everything was my fault. Mine.

‘But you still must know,’ I said. ‘You were in the Ark, when they were moving the blast machine out.’

Night after night, I had groped after that blast machine. I’d forced myself to reach for it, against every instinct that recoiled at the thought of such a weapon. I’d reached for it, clenching my eyes so tightly that I saw white shapes moving in front of the blackness. It made no difference – however hard I strained to see the place, I felt nothing, or worse, a wavering impression: north one day, and two days later gone altogether, or to the west. My seer’s knack for finding things was failing me. Or the blast machine had broken it, as it would break everything in the end.

‘I’ve got nothing to tell you,’ Zach said. ‘The General ordered the relocation. I never saw the new site. I already told that to your friend Piper, when he came to badger me.’ Zach’s lips tightened at the memory. ‘Him and The Ringmaster together, asking me the same questions, for hours. Trying to scare me, intimidate me. I told them what I’ve told you: I never went there. I don’t know.’

‘You’re lying to me,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do about it?’ he said. ‘Torture me?’ There was a smirk at the edges of his lips.

I banged on the door. While the guards were unbolting it, I kept my hand to the door, pressing my palm hard against the rough wood and trying to stay calm. Zach eyed me appraisingly. He knew that I would share any pain inflicted on him. Last night, when I’d guessed that Piper and The Ringmaster were in here with him, I’d slept with my body half-braced, awaiting the pain. It hadn’t come – but I didn’t know how long I could expect Piper and The Ringmaster to spare me. It didn’t matter that Zach and not I was responsible for his crimes. It made no difference: my body had become an obstacle between the resistance and what we needed to know.

Before I rejoined the others in the main hall, I stood for a moment with my back against the wall of the corridor. The guards were locking the door of Zach’s room again, and I felt my breath slowing with the scrape of each bolt sliding home, but flames still hissed at the edge of my vision. The blast was stalking me. How much longer, I wondered, before I joined Xander in the Kissing Tree, and in his silence? How much longer before I surrendered to the blast?

Piper watched me carefully as I entered the main hall; conversation stopped when I entered.

‘Did you get anything out of him?’ The Ringmaster said.

I shook my head. ‘He says he doesn’t know anything.’

‘Do you believe him?’ asked Zoe.

‘I don’t know,’ I snapped. ‘I can’t read his mind.’

Zoe raised her hands in mock surrender, rolling her eyes. ‘Take it easy. Nobody’s suggesting that the two of you are best friends.’

I busied myself with pouring a cup of water at the side table, so that I could turn away from their stares. The water splashed from my unsteady hands.

Piper picked up his cup and joined me. ‘Zach’s trying to mess with you,’ he said, without looking at me, as he took the jug and filled his cup. He kept his voice low, so the others couldn’t hear. ‘Don’t let him in your head.’

I nodded. But he didn’t know that Zach had never been out of it.




CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_2fcadae2-0965-5475-bf4d-8accacf33d0e)


Sally, Elsa, Xander and I sat in the front room of the holding house as the town’s evening noises rattled past the window. Soldiers off duty; the more orderly footsteps of those still on patrol; the voices of passing townsfolk. When I was last in New Hobart, it had taken me a few days to realise why the town sounded strange. It wasn’t only the aftermath of the battle that had left the town damaged and the residents nervy and furtive. Even after the repairs had begun, and people had returned to the streets, the sound of the city remained different. Eventually I’d realised that it was the nearly total absence of children. At Elsa’s house, around the market, and in the streets, only adult voices were to be heard. There was a whole layer of noise missing: the high voices of children’s chatter; the crying of babies; the sudden shout of a child ambushed in a game. The town was far from silent now – thousands of people lived here, and went about the business of their days – but like a dented bell, New Hobart didn’t ring true.

My gaze kept straying to where Xander sat, leaning against Sally’s chair with his eyes closed. I thought of Zach, locked in his cell at the Tithe Collector’s office. Zach was my past, Xander was my future. And ahead of us all: the blast, which would be the end of Elsewhere, and the resistance, and any futures that I could envisage.

Below the large window, another patrol passed – twelve mounted soldiers on their way back from the wall.

Sally saw me watching them.

‘We’ve increased the size of the patrols, since the Council seized Wreckers’ Pass and started picking off the convoys. We’ve set up some permanent outposts on the supply routes, too.’

It wasn’t the size of the patrol that had caught my attention, though. It was the two men in the centre of it, who didn’t wear the same uniform as the rest of The Ringmaster’s soldiers. They wore the blue of the island’s guards, and they were Omegas. The first man’s left arm was a stub, a clawed hand protruding directly from his shoulder. The taller man, behind him, had a hunchback that forced him to lean forward over the pommel of his saddle.

‘They’re patrolling together now?’ I said to Sally.

She nodded. ‘Neither side was that keen on it – The Ringmaster’s men in particular. It was never a decision we made. It just happened. There was the fire in the northern quarter while you were away, and everyone had to pitch in together, to stop the whole town going up in smoke. And at times, they were a few hands short for some of the Alpha patrols. Drafted in a couple of our troops – not without some muttering, on both sides.’

‘But they’ve kept doing it?’ I said, my gaze following the last of the riders as they turned the corner at the top of the hill.

‘Don’t get dreamy-eyed about it,’ Sally said. She took a deep pull of Elsa’s pipe, held the smoke in her mouth for a few seconds. ‘Nobody did it because they wanted to. Like I said: it just happened. Still only happens when a patrol’s shorthanded, or there’s some kind of emergency.’

I nodded, and leaned my face against the window frame to hide my smile. This was how it happened: daily familiarity, not grand gestures. You could only pass a fellow soldier so many times, at shift handover, and see him unbuckle his sword, and grunt about the weather, before you learned that he was a man just like you, no more mysterious or terrifying than that. The Council’s policy of segregation had been a key part of its attempt to stoke tensions between Alphas and Omegas. Sharing a latrine might do more to bring the two together than any inspiring speeches could have done.

‘It’s not all been smooth sailing,’ Elsa said. ‘There’s been bickering, and some big flare-ups, especially since rations got so tight. While you were away at the coast, some of The Ringmaster’s men tried to claim the biggest well, in the market, saying it was for Alpha use only. They were trying to get everyone worked up about it. Muttering about contamination.’

Sally rolled her eyes. ‘We share a womb, but they reckon they’ll catch something if we share a well?’

I knew what she meant, but I also knew that it was because we shared a womb that they flinched from us, not in spite of it – I’d learned that from Zach. Nothing frightened them more than the realisation that we were not so different after all.

‘There were arguments,’ Elsa went on, ‘and more than a couple of fistfights.’

Sally nodded. ‘The Ringmaster came down hard on both sides – he was fair about it, I’ll say that. Didn’t take any nonsense, not from his own soldiers any more than ours.’ She gave a slow chuckle. ‘It was laziness that put an end to the idea though – not discipline, let alone principles. Most of the Alphas quartered on the eastern side of town were too lazy to go across town to the market for water. The whole thing petered out after a few days.’

She still spoke of them that way: his soldiers and ours. But for the first time since Zach’s arrival I permitted myself a moment of hope that in this half-starved town, we were building something new. In its own small way, the sight of those riders, Alphas and Omegas together, felt as monumental as Elsewhere itself.

*

Sally came to the dormitory that night, when I was alone. I heard her distinctive gait across the courtyard: a slow step, each movement precise because it cost her so much pain.

‘I’ve seen you watching Xander,’ she said.

His name was enough to make me stiffen. What she said was true. I didn’t like to be near Xander, but when I was, I couldn’t stop watching him.

‘I don’t mean to stare,’ I said. ‘But I can’t help it. When I see him, I can see what I’m becoming—’

She spoke over me. ‘I don’t have time for your platitudes.’ She waved a hand impatiently. ‘You’re a seer and I need your help. I can’t reach him any more. Tell me what can be done for him.’ I thought of Xander’s face, blank as the burnt-out buildings that still lined the streets of New Hobart. ‘He’s barely said a word, for weeks,’ Sally went on. ‘Not even the usual fire-talk.’ His old refrain: Forever fire.

‘What’s the point of him saying it, now?’ I said. ‘You don’t stand in the middle of a burning forest, shouting, Fire! The blast is upon us. It’s too late for warnings. He knows it. We know it.’

‘So how can I help him?’ she said.

‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, not any more than you already are. Talk to him. Keep him fed. Let him go to the Kissing Tree, if it helps to calm him.’ All the hundred things that she did for him each day. That same morning, from the dormitory window, I’d seen her kneel on the gravel to trim Xander’s toenails, though kneeling seemed to take her minutes, both hands on the small of her back as she lowered herself.

‘Does he even know what’s going on around him?’ she asked.

‘He’s living in the blast,’ I said. ‘It’s all he sees now.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘I think he’s aware of things passing. He hears what we say. But everything that isn’t the blast doesn’t count. Everything else …’ I paused, trying to find a way to describe what I felt each time I saw Xander. I remembered what Paloma had said, when she was telling us what had happened to the mines and oil wells when the blast came: Everything that could burn, burned. ‘Everything else,’ I said to Sally, ‘is just fuel. It burns away.’

*

Orders had been sent for the ships to be readied. The General held most of the coast, but The Ringmaster had two ships at a garrison to the south, and they were to be sailed to the north-west coast to join The Rosalind. It was dangerous – the Council had increased its coastal patrols, even that far north, and mooring the ships at deep anchor meant exposing them to the storms. And we all knew that the Council would attack New Hobart at some point – if they didn’t starve us out first. But it was some comfort to know that if we could survive for a few months, the fleet should be ready. As soon as the last of the northerly winds carried spring away, Paloma could lead us back to her homeland – if the Council hadn’t found or destroyed the Scattered Islands first.

Although he’d given the orders to prepare the fleet, I noticed that The Ringmaster was still wary around Paloma. If we sat around the table in the main hall, he always made sure he was at the far end, opposite her. When the rest of us asked her questions about Elsewhere, he just watched her, arms crossed over his chest. He was silent when the topic of the medicines was raised.

Piper noticed it too. ‘You have an objection?’ he asked.

‘I’ve already said I’ll provide the ships, and do what I can to protect Paloma,’ The Ringmaster replied. ‘But I can’t make a promise that will expose my people to taboo medicine.’

‘You won’t even offer them the choice?’

‘We Alphas have preserved proper humanity for four hundred years. You want to undo all of that.’

‘Proper humanity?’ I said. ‘You mean Alphas – ideal people like Zach, or The General?’

‘You know what I mean,’ he said impatiently. ‘Physical perfection. Strength. It might not be the Long Winter any more, but this is still a hard world. We need hardy people to survive it.’

From the other end of the table came Paloma’s voice. ‘You really think everyone was perfect before the bomb?’ She was leaning back in her chair.

The Ringmaster stared at her. ‘We know the blast caused the mutations. We’ve always known it – and the papers from the Ark confirmed it. They talk about the mutations, and how they developed after the blast.’

‘Yes,’ Paloma said, leaning forward. ‘I can’t deny what the blast did. But do you think all bodies were the same before then?’ She bent, chin almost to the table, and there was a clicking sound as she twisted her false leg free of the socket. ‘This technology,’ she said, placing the leg on the table, ‘was from before the bomb.’ The Ringmaster’s nostrils narrowed as he watched the leg rock from side to side, and then settle. ‘At home we have other technology taken from back then as well,’ she went on. ‘Wheelchairs, and artificial hands. The doctors only managed to preserve a fraction of what they used to have, but it’s enough to know for sure that there were people born then like we are today.’

‘They had the words for it,’ I said. ‘In the Before.’

‘What are you talking about?’ The Ringmaster’s head snapped around to face me.

‘In the Ark papers, when they were writing about the mutations,’ I said. ‘They already had the words to describe them.’ It had been a jumble of syllables to me: polymelia; amelia; polydactyly; syndactyly. But it had meant something to the people who wrote it. They were horrified at how many people had mutations, since the blast, but the conditions they were witnessing were already named, already known. These were things that had preceded the blast. ‘They knew what these problems were,’ I said. ‘They had names for them.’

‘And medicines, for some of them,’ Paloma added. ‘We haven’t been able to preserve many of them, but there are some conditions that can be improved, or managed, at least, with the right medicines. My youngest sister has seizures, or she used to. The doctors gave her a medicine, to take every day. She’s hardly had a seizure since.’

The Ringmaster shook his head. ‘Just because there used to be a few freaks, in the Before, doesn’t mean it’s right. Doesn’t mean that we should just give up, and let everyone here become like that.’

I started laughing. Paloma looked at me as though I’d gone mad. Perhaps I had. But I could see it all, now. I’d seen it with Zach, and now again with The Ringmaster. How frantically they shored up the walls that collapsed around their beliefs.

‘Freaks?’ I said. ‘You’re just drawing a line in the sand. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s arbitrary.’

As the argument continued over the table, I kept thinking about how things used to be clearer. The clear line between Before and After had been blurred by the discovery of the Ark, and Elsewhere, and what we had learned about the past. And the line between Alphas and Omegas was fading, despite the best efforts of Alphas to maintain it.

But what about the line between me and Zach?

*

That night I woke with a shout of pain, clutching my forehead. Across the dormitory Zoe gave a grunt, and tugged at the blanket that Paloma had dragged to her side of the bed.

At first, I made the same assumption as Zoe: that the pain in my head was a vision, or a dream. I lay in the bed and waited for it to dissipate, but it grew worse, and I curled tightly, knees to face, hearing my own moan. When I sat up, Zoe was kneeling in front of me, her face a mixture of irritation and concern. Paloma was behind her, blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The courtyard door banged open and Piper ran in, but I closed my eyes against the agony in my forehead. It had the insistence of a burn. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I was thirteen, the day that I’d been branded, the Councilman’s breath on my face as he’d pressed the brand into my skin. Then the sound of skin extinguishing fire.

‘Show me,’ said Zoe, peeling my hands away from my face. I fought her – as if pressing my hands against my forehead could somehow contain the pain – but she was so much stronger.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she said, looking around at Piper.

He guessed first.

‘Zach,’ he said.

*

By the time we got to the Tithe Collector’s office, The Ringmaster had found him.

I’d stumbled through the darkened streets, one hand gripping Piper’s arm to keep me steady, the pain so hot that I had to bite my lower lip to stop myself from shouting.

Beside the Tithe Collector’s office, six soldiers stood with their backs to the wall, heads lowered. Two men wore the red of The Ringmaster’s soldiers; the others, three men and a woman, were in the blue of the resistance. Facing them stood The Ringmaster, a lamp raised in one hand. He kept his anger tightly contained, which only made it more frightening.

Sitting on the ground by the wall, a few feet from the soldiers, was Zach. His hands were cupped over his forehead, just like mine.

The Ringmaster saw us. ‘Simon was off duty. Four of them jumped Zach on the way back from the privy,’ he said. ‘Two of his guards were escorting him. They didn’t do their job.’ Each of his words was as tightly clenched as a fist.

‘I tried to stop them,’ said the woman. I recognised her: it was Meera, one of Simon and Piper’s senior soldiers, whom I’d spoken to often enough.

Piper stepped forward. ‘How hard did you try?’ he said.

She gave no answer. Her tunic was ripped at the neck, but there were no bruises or wounds on her – however hard she’d battled to protect her ward, it hadn’t been enough to mark her. Even while my teeth were gritted against the pain in my forehead, I didn’t think I could blame Meera. Hadn’t I swung my fist at Zach myself, only the night before?

‘If they’d got carried away,’ Piper spat, ‘Cass could be dead. You understand?’

‘Yes sir,’ Meera said, head lowered. I didn’t know whether she was hiding her contrition, or her lack of it.

The Ringmaster turned to give a dismissive glance at Zach. ‘I think no more of him than you do,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘But he’s under our protection. And any attack on him is an attack on our seer. She’s valuable to us.’

He looked carefully at each of the soldiers, memorising each face.

‘Get back to your barracks,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. There will be consequences for each of you.’

They left in silence. I looked at their retreating backs, red and blue tunics together. I had not wanted it to be this way; I didn’t want hatred for Zach to be the one thing that could unite our fractured army.

Piper grabbed Zach by the back of his shirt, and hauled him upright. Only then, when he came within range of The Ringmaster’s lamp, could I see what they had done to him.

They must have planned it in advance, because they’d made the brand. It lay on the dirt by the wall, just a piece of metal, crudely bent, the farrier’s tongs fallen open nearby. Zach must have struggled, so the burn sat crookedly on his forehead, a lopsided  with no crossbar. It didn’t matter that it was barely intelligible – the message was clear enough. Already, one side of the Alpha symbol was a fattening blister; the other was a red indentation, black at the edges. I remembered my dream: Zach, his forehead branded like mine. When I leant in to look more closely at his wound, he flinched away.

‘Pull yourself together,’ Piper said to Zach, releasing him to stand on his own. ‘It’s only a brand, no worse than nearly every Omega gets as a child.’

He led Zach into the main hall, and let him sit down. Elsa had followed us up the hill, slow on her bowed legs; she came in now, looked at Zach with distaste, then rummaged through her medicine bag to find a salve.

‘Put it on his burn – it’ll ease the pain,’ she said, giving me the small jar. ‘For you, I mean. I couldn’t care less about him.’

On the far side of the room, the others were talking quietly and urgently around the big table; in the corner, I stood over Zach, but he didn’t meet my eyes. The salve smelled of lard and rosemary, and it was so thick that I had to rub it between my hands to warm and soften it before I could apply it Zach’s wound. He was sweating – a hot, urgent sweat of fever and panic, dampening the underarms of his shirt.

He flinched when I put the salve onto the burn.

I looked down at him. ‘I know how it feels.’

We were both remembering the same thing: the brand on my flesh, while the Councilman held me down. Zach standing with my parents on the other side of the room, watching. I remembered him giving a grunt of pain; he must have felt, back then, a taste of my own agony. Now it was truly his.

‘I dreamed you would be branded,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. It didn’t make any sense, back then.’ I picked up a cloth and wiped the last of the salve from my fingers. It left a greasy film on my skin.

‘I would never have come to you, if I’d known you can’t even control your own soldiers,’ Zach said.

I shrugged. ‘It was your choice to come to us. You want to leave now?’ I looked at the doorway. Even if there were no guards behind it, we both knew that Zach would never dare to go. If she got hold of him, The General would not stop at branding him. The soldiers who had just attacked him were the only thing keeping us both alive.

*

It wasn’t only pain that kept me awake that night. Piper had stayed up at the Tithe Collector’s office to guard Zach himself, and even though Zoe was close by, I found it hard to sleep without Piper’s breath in the next bed, or his silhouette at the window, when he sat overlooking the courtyard.

I had been afraid, in different forms, for as long as I could remember. Afraid, when we were growing up, that Zach would expose me and I would be branded and sent away. Afraid, in the settlement, that Zach would come for me. And when he had come for me, and I was in the Keeping Rooms, I was afraid that I would never get out, and never see the sky again. The six months since my escape had been a collection of different fears: pursuit, hunger, imprisonment, battles.

For a long time after Kip’s death, I had cared little for my own life, or for anything else. But now I had fought my way through that, and found there were things in the world that I wanted, and relished. So when I’d seen Zach huddled on the ground, and felt his pain in my own skin, my fear had a new simplicity: I did not want to die. I did not want Zach and his enemies and treachery to snatch this life from me, just when I’d learned to occupy it again.

The next day, the soldiers who’d branded Zach were whipped. Piper had warned me, first thing in the morning, when he came back to the holding house.

‘Is it really necessary?’ I said. ‘Most of them are Omegas. They joined the resistance because they wanted to fight the Council, and they’ve found themselves taking orders from The Ringmaster, and now seeing Zach here too. It’s hard for them.’

‘If we can’t control our army, we’ve no hope of beating the Council’s,’ said Piper.

I couldn’t argue with him. I knew that it wasn’t only my own life, or Zach’s, that depended on our army holding together. But through those long morning hours as I worked with Elsa in the kitchen, Zach’s brand still pulsing on my forehead, the sky outside was smeared grey, as if the news of the whippings had spread an ugliness over the day.

I refused to watch the whipping. Paloma, too, had scrunched her face with distaste when Zoe asked her if she wanted to see, so she waited with Zoe in the holding house, while I went to the Tithe Collector’s office to check on Zach.

When Piper and Elsa and I passed the square on the way, the whipping post was being fixed in place. Months before, Kip and I had witnessed a man whipped bloody by Alpha soldiers in the same square. The raised platform they’d used had long since been torn down, and probably burned for firewood. Now, two Omega soldiers were sinking a thick post into the ground. With each pound of the mallets, the ground spat back dust. I walked faster, yanking on Elsa’s arm as she craned her neck to see. The soldiers who weren’t on patrol had all been summoned to the market square. They were gathering already, the crowd thickening as we shouldered our way through.

In the main hall, The Ringmaster was waiting, along with Simon. To my surprise, so was Zach.

The Ringmaster stood as we entered. ‘I’m leaving him here with you,’ he said. ‘Piper and I are needed in the square, and I want you both properly guarded.’

I knew I was being protected, and that I wasn’t wearing shackles like Zach, but I still looked to Piper for reassurance.

He nodded. ‘Simon will be here the whole time. And three guards, hand-selected, on the door.’ He gestured at the doorway, where soldiers waited. Two of them were The Ringmaster’s, but I was relieved to recognise Crispin, too.

At first, after Piper and The Ringmaster left, the massed soldiers in the square beyond the northern window were a background hubbub of noise. But at noon they fell silent. The cries of the market traders, too, were hushed. And even from where we sat, with the shutter closed, we could hear the strokes of the whip. Ten strokes each for the four soldiers who had attacked Zach. Five strokes each for Meera and the other soldier who had been guarding Zach, for failing in their duty.

Simon sat by the door. He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, but one of his hands rested on his axe hilt, and he didn’t take his eyes off Zach.

Zach and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and heard each stroke. It seemed to take a very long time: a pause after each blow, and then the crack of the next. The noisiest thing of all seemed to be the silence between me and Zach. We stared at each other, him on a chair at the table and me on the windowsill, my back against the closed shutter. Zach fidgeted from time to time, reaching up to his burn, and prodding gingerly around its edges.

‘Don’t touch it,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

There was another stroke of the whip. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing, a sharp intake of air through my closed teeth.

‘You can stop glaring at me,’ Zach said. ‘It’s hardly my fault that your soldiers attacked me.’

I kept my expression blank, my eyes on his. ‘It’s your fault that they wanted to.’

‘And your army’s weak discipline that meant they went ahead with it.’

Another thwack. I didn’t want Zach to know how I felt. That his arrival had left me exposed, as though the walls of New Hobart had fallen.

‘He’s whipping them himself, you know,’ Zach said. ‘Piper.’

Yet another whip stroke cracked the silence.

‘You didn’t know that?’ Zach said. His voice was like a knife, probing flesh.

‘I knew,’ I lied.

Zach just raised an eyebrow.

I ignored him. We sat there together, under Simon’s gaze. The pain in my head had lessened already, just a reminder of last night’s searing, but periodically Zach would ignite it again by touching the burn, grimacing as he tested the tautness of the blister.

When the whippings were over, Piper came back. He let the door slam behind him. He was sweaty, but I was relieved to see no blood on his clothes, or on the leather whip that he tossed to the ground. Whatever he’d done, it had not been as brutal as the whipping I’d witnessed with Kip. The length of plaited leather lay on the ground between us.

Zach had stood as soon as Piper entered; he moved to the far side of room, eyeing the whip as though it were a snake that might strike at him.

‘You can stop cowering,’ Piper said. ‘I’m done for today.’

He came to stand by me at the window. I kept my voice low, aware of Zach watching us from the far side of the room.

‘Couldn’t it have been The Ringmaster who whipped them?’ I said. ‘Or couldn’t you have got one of the other senior soldiers to do it? What about Simon?’

‘I don’t ask my men to do things I’m not willing to do myself,’ he said. ‘And it had to be me, not The Ringmaster. Can you imagine the response, if we put The Ringmaster up there, to whip mainly Omega troops, in defence of The Reformer?’ He exhaled. ‘It had to be me.’

He was probably right. But when he put his hand on the windowsill, close to mine, I couldn’t help thinking of the whip.

‘This isn’t what we wanted,’ I said in a whisper. ‘This isn’t what we’re doing this for.’ I didn’t want to say it in front of Zach – didn’t want to show him the cracks that I could see, spreading everywhere. But I was thinking of what I’d said to Piper and Zoe, back in the deadlands: that if we didn’t find Elsewhere, we would build our own. That we would find a way to make a better world here. This wasn’t what we’d dreamed of: the whip on the floor, the beaten soldiers outside.

‘You’re not different from me, Cass, for all that you’d like to think you are,’ Piper said. He was leaning forward over the sill, his weight on his arm. ‘You’ve made the same choices I have, to survive, and to do what has to be done. You think that because you can’t throw a knife, or wield a whip, that you’re somehow innocent?’

I wasn’t angry because I disagreed with him. I was angry because everything he said was true.

‘I have done only what’s been necessary,’ he said. ‘I am what the resistance has needed me to be.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Then what do you want from me?’ he said.

What could I have told him that wouldn’t have sounded wistful, impossible? A different world, in which he didn’t have to be those things. In which neither of us did.

‘Nothing,’ I replied.




CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_fad65f6b-1b0b-500d-9bc7-f16c42dad292)


‘We’re moving Zach to stay with Cass,’ The Ringmaster announced. ‘We—’

‘No,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘No way. Absolutely not.’

It had been such a relief when Simon led Zach back to his cell, and Elsa, Zoe and Paloma had joined us in the Tithe Collector’s office. Now The Ringmaster’s words struck me like a kick. I turned to Piper for support, but his face was firm.

‘I’m trying to keep you alive,’ he said. ‘We need to have both you and Zach guarded, by people we can trust. And we have Paloma to worry about as well. If Zach’s with you, that’s one location to cover instead of three. I’m posting guards outside the holding house. I’ll be there too, when Zoe’s not.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘Even if he has to be with me, he can’t come to the holding house. Not with Paloma there. And you can’t expect Elsa to have him.’

Piper’s face remained set.

‘I’ll move up here,’ I said. ‘Don’t bring him to Elsa’s.’

He lowered his voice, brought his head close to mine. ‘I want you where you can be safe.’ He looked across the room at The Ringmaster. ‘Not here, with him, in the thick of his soldiers.’

Even though we gathered daily in the Tithe Collector’s office, there was still a sense that it was The Ringmaster’s territory, and that Elsa’s was ours. Perhaps it was the residue of the building’s former role: this was a place where Omegas used to come in supplication, to hand over their tithes. Even after the battle, and the hungry months since, the rooms still had a scale and grandeur that marked them as Alpha territory. We were all more at home admidst the half-trashed furniture of the holding house, than on the leather-upholstered chairs of the Tithe Collector’s office.

‘It’s not just that,’ Piper said, stepping back again. ‘You can watch Zach in a way that we can’t. You know what happened when you were travelling with Zoe.’

Zoe’s face hardened at the reminder. In those weeks of sleeping close together, I had glimpsed her dreams. I’d never meant to, but each morning I’d woken with the memory of her dreams as well as my own. That was how I’d discovered her endless scouring of the sea for the drowned Lucia.

‘I can’t read minds,’ I said. ‘It’s not as tidy as that.’

‘I know that,’ Piper replied. ‘But anything that you can glean from him could still help us.’

Elsa spoke. ‘I’ll take him.’ She had stepped forward a little, chin high. ‘I can’t promise I’ll be civil to him. Or even that I won’t spit in his food. But if it’s the best way of helping, and of keeping Cass safe, I’ll take him.’

‘You don’t need to do this,’ I told her. ‘It’s asking too much.’

She shook her head. ‘I want you safe, and with me.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s just a side effect.’

I remembered how The General had said that Omegas were only side effects of Alphas – the same phrase that had been used in the Ark papers – and I smiled to hear Elsa use it now, to describe Zach.

For half a day the holding house was noisy with the sound of soldiers fitting bars on the windows, and a thicker door for the dormitory, with bolts on the outside. Elsa said nothing, just followed the soldiers with her broom and scolded them when they left iron filings and nails on the floor. A roster was drawn up, for the soldiers that we trusted, to watch the front of the holding house while Zoe and Piper guarded it from within. It wasn’t a long list. Simon, and his long-time adviser, Violet, were on it. Having seen her come to blows with Piper once, I trusted her candour, and her courage – and since their fight, she’d shown herself loyal to him. Crispin, who had served Simon and Piper on the island, and ever since, was on the list too.

The Ringmaster had offered us some of his senior soldiers as well. I doubted that we had a choice, but in the end I was glad of those he’d chosen: Tash, a tall woman from his personal guard, who spoke little but met my eyes without the disgust or evasiveness of many of the Alpha soldiers. Adam, a bluff man who was quick to laugh, and who, when stationed at the holding house door, seemed to laugh and chat as readily with Elsa and Sally as with his fellow Alphas.

Paloma and Zoe shifted their things out of the dormitory, to sleep in the small room Kip and I had once shared on the other side of the courtyard. Piper moved out too, dragging his bed out to the courtyard, under the covered porch by the main door.

‘It’s warm enough now,’ he’d said, over the scraping of the bed on the floorboards. ‘And I’ll be able to keep an eye on Zoe and Paloma’s door, as well as the dormitory.’

That was true – but we both knew that he also wanted to avoid sharing a room with Zach. I looked at the two drag marks left on the floor by the legs of his bed. It would just be me and Zach now, alone each night in the dormitory.

So he came. They kept the shackles on his wrists, and Piper and Zoe made sure that one of them was always in the holding house. At night, in the dormitory, his shackles were fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. I had measured it out myself: the chain reached just far enough for him to lie comfortably in bed, but fell short of my bed on the opposite wall.

During the day, when Zoe or Piper was nearby, his shackles were kept on but we let him take some exercise in the courtyard, or eat with the rest of us.

‘I don’t want him being waited on, like he’s still in the Council chambers,’ Zoe said. ‘And I’d rather have him where I can see him.’

The clanking of Zach’s shackles quickly became a familiar sound in the holding house.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again and again to Elsa, whenever we were alone. ‘I’m sorry that you have to see him every day.’

She just smiled at me, and gripped my hand. As for Zach, she never spoke to him, but she met his gaze squarely, and filled a bowl for him at mealtimes and placed it on the table. It was a kind of courage I’d never seen before, the way she faced him each day, in her home, where the children he’d killed used to live.

I wondered, at first, how Zach himself would react to being in the holding house. Most of the children’s possessions had been destroyed in the raid when they’d been taken, and half the holding house had been trashed. But the signs of them were everywhere. Behind the dormitory door, a row of hooks barely at hip height, where the children used to hang their winter coats. In Elsa’s smashed-up kitchen, the handful of cups that had survived the raid were all the children’s, and so we drank each day from the tiny cups, our lips where their lips had been.

If any of these things made Zach uneasy, he never showed any sign. I watched him at dinner, that first night. He wrapped his long fingers around the small cup, drank, and left it on the table for Elsa to tidy away. He never mentioned the children, who were absent and present everywhere.

*

The first night, alone in the dormitory, Zach and I lay on either side of the long, narrow room. He had his back to the wall, facing me. I blew out the candle so I wouldn’t have to look at him any more.

‘Light the candle again,’ he said.

‘Go to sleep.’

His chain clanked a few times as he shifted. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

‘Get used to it,’ I said, rolling over. ‘This isn’t the Council chambers. We don’t have an endless supply of candles.’

‘I never used to mind the dark,’ he said. ‘But since you flooded the Ark, I hate it.’

I remembered it too: the total darkness of those corridors. Black water rising in black air.

‘I only just made it out,’ he said. His breathing grew faster at the memory. I listened unwillingly, my arms crossed over my chest. I had enough of my own memories of the flooded Ark, and no time to waste on his.

‘Even when I made it to the surface,’ he went on, ‘it wasn’t over. The river burst through the western door. I was nearly caught up by it. Half the camp was swept away. At least four of our soldiers died. Men were tangled up in the canvas when the tents were washed away.’

More bodies to add to the tally of the dead. There were so many people that I had killed, directly or indirectly. Sometimes I felt tangled in them, like the soldiers drowning under the sodden canvas.

‘A hell of a way to die,’ Zach continued.

‘You’ve condemned many people to worse,’ I said.

He ignored me. ‘I dream about it,’ he went on. ‘If it’s dark, I dream about the Ark. The water in the corridors, and that flash flood by the western door.’

I tried not to listen, but I was remembering how we used to talk at night when we were children, while our parents were downstairs arguing about what they could do about us, their unsplit children. We’d lain there and whispered across the gap between our beds, just as we were doing now.

‘I have worse dreams,’ I said.

‘What about?’

I was silent. I wasn’t going to explain my dreams to him – he already knew too much about the blast.

‘What about?’ he said again.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Now shut up – I’m trying to sleep.’

‘You’re lying to me,’ he said.

‘I don’t owe you the truth,’ I said. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

He spoke over me. ‘You’re lying about your dreams, just like you did when we were kids. You never really talked to me, even then.’

‘What are you talking about? We used to talk all the time.’ It had been just the two of us, after all, under the scrutiny of the whole village.

‘Not properly.’ He spoke quietly. ‘You were lying to me the whole time.’

For a while I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to agree with what he’d said, but I couldn’t argue with it. My seer visions were the only thing that revealed me as an Omega, so I’d concealed them for years, to prevent being branded and exiled.

‘I had to,’ I said eventually.

‘And I had to do what I did,’ he said. ‘I had to claim my life.’

‘Have you forgotten how close we were?’ I asked. ‘Have you convinced yourself that it never happened, because you’re ashamed of being close to an Omega?’

He laughed. ‘You talk about those years as if it was some kind of paradise – you and me, the best of friends, together against the world. It wasn’t like that. It was never like that.’

‘But we were always together,’ I said. ‘All the time.’

‘Only because we didn’t have any choice,’ he shouted. ‘Because you made the whole village think we were freaks, and nobody would come near us.’

I could hear how he forced his breath to slow, his voice to lower.

‘It didn’t end, even when you’d finally gone. The taint didn’t go with you. It should’ve, but it didn’t. For years, people didn’t trust me. That’s why I had to leave the village so young.’

‘I left it when I was younger,’ I said, acid in my voice.

He overrode me again. ‘Even when I got to Wyndham, there were rumours about me. The word had spread, about how late we’d been split. I had to prove myself more than anyone else. Had to work twice as hard, prove my loyalty, over and over. Do things that others weren’t willing to do.’

The Council chambers at Wyndham were already notorious for their viciousness and ruthlessness. I looked through the darkness towards Zach, and thought of the depths of brutality to which he had sunk.

‘I never felt safe,’ he went on. ‘Not even when you were in the Keeping Rooms. Not for a moment. You took that from me, with all those years you made me live a half-life. You were the one who showed me how dangerous Omegas could be, what a burden they are. You’re the reason I had to come up with the tanks.’

I closed my eyes. I knew his excuses and justifications were madness, and that the tanks were his madness made solid, and not my doing. But I couldn’t stop picturing the children in the tanks, their hair drifting across their dead faces. I kept my eyes closed, trying not to remember.

‘You made me what I am,’ he said.

They were the same words that The Confessor had said to Kip, all those months ago in the silo.

*

That night, I waited for his dreams to come to me. With Zoe’s dreams, it had been an accident, her dreams seeping into me as she slept close by. Even when I’d tried not to sense them, her dreams had come to me, as full of loss and longing as the sea is full of salt. But Zach didn’t dream – or if he did, his dreams meant nothing to me. We had so much in common, and so little. If he dreamed, during those nights in the dormitory, nothing of them reached me. I wondered if our childhood, when I had worked so hard to hide my seer nature from him, had built some kind of barrier. All those years of lying in my small bed and training myself not to react to my visions, not to cry out at what I had seen, meant that I couldn’t reach out to him now, asleep or awake, nor feel any sense of what passed in his mind. I felt no closer to him, lying only a few yards away in the dormitory, than I had when I’d been on the island, hundreds of miles away.

I got no glimpse of his dreams, but he could not help but know something of mine. Before dawn I woke from a glimpse of the blast, my shouts bouncing back at me from the dormitory ceiling. He made shushing noises. At first, still reeling from the shock of waking from flames to darkness, I had forgotten whose voice it was nearby, soothing me. Then, when my breathing had settled, Zach spoke: ‘What did you see?’

I had never heard a hunger like I heard in his voice, and I knew hunger well. The whole of New Hobart was hungry. Only that night, the eight of us who now lived in the holding house had shared a stew made with two squirrels that Zoe had caught on the roof – and we’d boiled the bones clean.

I didn’t answer him. After that, I tried harder than ever to keep silent when the visions came. I couldn’t always manage to quell my screams – my visions were more frequent and more vivid than they had been when we were children. But I tried. I didn’t want to give him any hint of what I saw, nor the satisfaction of seeing me scream. Some nights, when I woke from dreams of fire and ground my teeth against the screams that I would not allow myself to make, I felt like nothing had changed: that Zach and I were still there, in our childhood bedroom, me hiding my visions, him watching and waiting.

*

From the very first day, when he saw her crossing the courtyard with Zoe, Zach stared at Paloma. I wished that her appearance didn’t announce her difference quite so loudly, but everything about her stood out: the bone-white hair and skin; the washed-out blue of her eyes. I watched him watching Paloma, and I felt my fists tightening. I didn’t want his eyes on her. He had always taken everything. I saw him stare at her and I wanted to shout: Not this. Not her. You can’t have this too.

‘It’s true, then,’ he said, his eyes following her as she and Zoe walked over the gravel.

I said nothing.

‘I knew you were searching.’ He shook his head. ‘But I didn’t believe you’d succeed. Piper and his rag-tag bunch of sailors. How did you do it?’

‘I’m not talking to you about her.’

‘I’m not an idiot,’ he said.

‘I never thought you were,’ I said. ‘You’re something much worse, and much more dangerous.’

When we went to the kitchen to eat, he didn’t hide his staring, and Paloma stared back, her curiosity matching his. This was the man who had unearthed the blast that might destroy her whole family, and everything that she had known. I saw how she narrowed her eyes, head cocked a little, as if straining to understand what could make a man do terrible things. And I wanted to shout at her: Stay away. Stay away.

Zoe did the shouting. When she saw Zach’s eyes lingering on Paloma, she stepped between them.

‘Keep your distance,’ she said to him.

He raised his arms before him, shaking them so that the shackles jangled.

‘I’m just a prisoner here,’ he said. ‘It’s not my choice where you people take me.’

‘You don’t need to stare at her all the time,’ Zoe said.

‘I’m just curious,’ he said, his voice gentle as a blade. ‘Nobody’s introduced me properly to your new friend.’ His eyes were scanning Paloma, coming to rest on her face. ‘I’d love to learn more about you.’

Paloma spoke: ‘I’ve heard more than enough about you,’ she said.

‘And you believe it?’ Zach said quickly. ‘What makes you think you can trust these people?’

Zoe opened her mouth, but Paloma spoke first. ‘I make my own judgments.’

‘And you’ve judged that this is the best alliance your homeland can hope for?’ Zach cast a glance around at the rest of us, and the shabby kitchen.

Zoe shoved him backwards. It was only a light push, but with his arms chained in front of him, he could neither balance nor break his fall, stumbling and landing on his back by the fireplace.

Piper moved to pull Zoe away, but she was already leaving, Paloma beside her.

‘Keep your distance,’ she repeated to Zach, without looking back. She slammed the kitchen door behind her.

Zach raised his eyebrows, heaving himself upright and doing his best to brush the dust from his trousers with his shackled hands.

‘What are you all so afraid of?’ he said.

My vision answered: the flames burst behind my eyes. Forever fire.

*

For all the years of my childhood, I had done everything I could to stay with him. I had lied, and hidden, concealed the truth about my visions from everybody, so that I could stay with him and my family. Now he was here, and all that I wanted was to get away from him.

There were moments when I was ambushed by the similarities between us. I heard his inflections in my own words and so fell silent. At meals, sitting with my chin on my hand and the other hand rubbing the back of my neck, I’d look across the table and see that he was doing exactly the same thing. I didn’t know who was mirroring whom. But I always jerked away, placed my hands awkwardly by my sides, glancing to see if any of the others had noticed.

Often he was silent, just watching. When he did speak, it was always for a purpose.

He singled Sally out, one morning over breakfast.

‘Have you thought about the other potential uses for the tanks?’ he said.

I froze, a spoonful of porridge halfway to my mouth. Sally ignored him, and Zoe made a point of turning her body away from him to face Paloma, at the far end of the table.

‘We’ve seen enough of your tanks,’ Piper said.

‘You’ve all been so quick to dismiss the tanks.’ Zach waved his hand around the table. ‘A kneejerk reaction, because you’re afraid of the taboo. But there are other uses for them.’ His burn was healing: the blisters gone, the dried skin cracked like summer earth. Soon enough he would have a scar in the same place as mine. ‘For the sick,’ he continued, ‘to keep people alive until they can be cured. Or for the elderly.’ His voice was soft now, his focus back on Sally. ‘Who knows what medicine might achieve in future years, if this uprising of yours isn’t allowed to derail our progress? The tanks could allow you to stay alive decades longer, until we have the ability to help with your condition.’

Sally had been continuing to eat, as if he weren’t even there. Now, though, she put down her spoon and laughed loudly. ‘I’m not elderly,’ she said to him. ‘I’m old.’ She rolled the word on her tongue, relishing it. ‘And my condition is that I’ve been on this earth for more than eighty years, and I’ve seen and done things you can’t even dream of. There’s no cure for that.’ She pushed back her bowl. ‘You think I’d go into a tank, in the hope of scavenging a few more years?’

She leaned in, her face so close to Zach’s that he drew his head back, barely hiding his distaste. ‘I’m going to die, son,’ she said. ‘And so are you. The only difference between us is that I’m wise enough to know that dying’s far from the worst thing that could happen to me.’

The bench creaked as she stood up. She took Xander’s hand and led him from the room.

*

I thought it was rain that had woken me, but it was just the claws of rats on the roof. There was a plague of rats in New Hobart. It had started in the western quarter, and before long they were all through the town, scrabbling under the floorboards of the holding house. Like us, they were suffering from the absence of crops in the surrounding farmland, and so they swarmed to the town to scavenge what they could, which felt like everything. Each morning we swept their pellets from the kitchen floor. The leather upholstery in the Tithe Collector’s office had been completely gnawed away, and one day I found a nest of eight baby rats sleeping in the horsehair stuffing of the largest chair.

The Council ban on Omegas keeping animals meant there were no cats in New Hobart. Even The Ringmaster had to laugh when he reported that he’d sent two small patrols into Council territory, to steal cats from towns and villages. I was there when they returned, and when they opened the two sacks that hung, thrashing, from the rear rider’s saddle, the cats sprang out with a hiss like water on a hot skillet, scattering and howling, sending one of the horses shying into a fence. Within a few days the cats had settled in as the guards of our grain stores, and they grew fat and glossy while the rest of us grew thinner.

Despite the cats, the rats kept coming, and they grew bold. One afternoon I saw one scuttle across the courtyard in broad daylight, dragging a pilfered potato in its mouth. When I threw a stone at it, it didn’t even dodge, just turned to stare at me briefly before continuing its steady progress across the gravel.




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