The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  Whispering broke out among his guards as they assembled around us. Then they saluted. At first I thought they were saluting Piper, as they used to do on the island. But it wasn’t him they were looking at, as they all raised their hands to their foreheads. It was Sally, limping beside me, Xander leaning on her arm. If she noticed the guards’ response to her, she didn’t acknowledge it.

  Simon stopped a few feet from where we stood. The others, six or seven of them, fanned around us. There were no more salutes now. They were all armed; the woman nearest to me had a short sword in her hand. She was close enough that I could see the dent on the blade, where another sword had left a snarl in the steel’s edge.

  Simon stepped forward.

  “It’s just the five of you?” He addressed Piper.

  Piper nodded. “We have important information that you’ll need.”

  “You’ve come to tell me what to do next?” Simon said.

  Sally sighed. “I brought him here, Simon. Hear him out.”

  “Does Sally know what you did?” Simon said to Piper. “Does she know about the island?” He was staring at me now. I had become a shorthand for a massacre. A single glance at me was loaded with meaning. Heavy with blood.

  “She knows,” said Piper. He didn’t break his gaze, and his jaw didn’t retreat from its usual jut.

  Sally spoke impatiently. “Don’t make this into a pissing contest. This fight’s going to need us all.”

  Simon’s gaze was fixed on Piper. There was only a foot or two between them. I’d seen them together many times on the island, and seen them debating heatedly, but never like this. The space between them was stacked with the island’s dead. The air was thick with remembered screams, and the sound of arrows in flesh.

  “He’s a traitor,” muttered one of the men beside Simon.

  “Thinks he can walk back in here, after what he did?” added the woman beside him.

  We were completely encircled. Zoe stood with her hands on her hips; it looked casual enough, but I knew how quickly she could dispatch death from the knives at her belt. We were outnumbered here, though. I looked at Simon again. For all his exhausted appearance, his arms were still knotted with muscles. The leather-wrapped handle of his ax was stained black, and I remembered the smell of blood that had filled the island’s crater, and knew it wasn’t only sweat that darkened the leather.

  “I haven’t come here to grovel.” Piper was looking at Simon, but he made sure to speak loudly enough for the assembled guards to hear. “I stand by my decision. You’ve seen what the Council’s capable of—they were never going to spare the island, whether or not I handed over Cass and Kip.”

  “We paid too great a price for one seer,” said Simon.

  “The minute you start thinking of people in terms of price, we’ve already lost,” I said. “And it wasn’t just me. It was Kip, too.”

  “What difference does it make?” Simon said.

  “He killed the Confessor,” I said. “It cost him his life, but he did it. And we destroyed the machine they were using to keep track of all of us, and to decide who lived and died, and who should be tanked.”

  Simon turned to Sally. “I’d heard the rumor that the Confessor had died. Is it true?”

  Sally nodded. “I believe them. She’s dead. And the machine that relied on her—it’s finished, too.”

  “But you still betrayed the Assembly,” Simon said to Piper. “Killing the Confessor, or dragging Sally along now, doesn’t change that.”

  Sally shrugged Xander’s hand from her arm and stepped closer to Simon. The ring of weapons around us lowered slightly as she spoke. “I’ve fought for this resistance since I was fifteen, Simon, and in that whole time, I’ve never been dragged anywhere. I’ve seen and done things that you can’t imagine, and I’m no stranger to hard choices.” She paused for breath. “Piper made a hard choice on the island. It was the right one. I’ve come here to vouch for him. But it makes no difference that I vouch for him and Zoe.” I noticed that she made no mention of me. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you need them.”

  “She’s right,” Piper said to Simon. “I have information for you. There’re things we need to talk about, and things you need to do.”

  The woman close to me tightened her grip on the sword hilt.

  “You don’t get to tell me what I need to do,” said Simon. “But I’ll hear your news.” He turned away. “You’d better come inside.”

  There was a pause, and then the guards around us stepped back. The scraping sound, as they sheathed their weapons, was protracted, reluctant. Simon kept his ax in hand as we followed him farther into the quarry.

  In the deepest part of the excavations, among the low trees that clustered there, was a handful of tents, staked out wherever the trees and boulders provided shelter from anyone looking down from above. Simon and his guards had been here for some time; long enough that the paths between the tents were worn down to shallow trenches of boot-clutching clay.

  When Simon led us to his tent, I noted that the guards took up positions at the door before it had even fallen closed behind us.

  Inside, both Piper and Zoe had to duck under the sagging roof. Simon, ax in hand, stood by the lamp at the far side of the tent and waited.

  As soon as the door was closed, he sprang at Piper. Zoe drew back her throwing arm quicker than my intake of breath, but Piper’s laughter disarmed us both. Simon was embracing him, the two of them chest to chest, and patting each other resoundingly on the back.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Simon said, with a jerk of his thumb outside. “But you saw how most of them feel. If I’m to keep my authority, they need to see that I don’t just lay down the red carpet for you.” He squeezed Piper’s shoulder once more. “I hoped you’d be back.”

  “So that you could punch me in the face again?” Piper said, one eyebrow raised.

  “Sit,” said Simon, waving us to the side of the tent, where a table and benches had been cobbled together from fresh-hewn wood. “And eat something. You look like you need it.”

  “We didn’t come here for a tea party,” said Zoe.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Sally. The bench creaked as she slumped down onto it and reached for the food.

  Simon left us alone until we’d finished helping ourselves to the flatbread and water on the table. I made myself eat, but I was so tired that my head felt heavy on my neck. I poured a little of the water into my hand and splashed my face.

  Simon lowered himself onto the bench next to Piper.

  “You know I don’t agree with what you did.”

  “Say what you mean,” I interrupted. “Stop edging around it. What you did. Why can’t you just say it? You would have handed me over to the Confessor. Or just killed me yourself.”

  At least Simon looked me straight in the eye. “Yes. That’s what I would have done. That’s what I wanted Piper to do.”

  “You know it wouldn’t have saved the island,” said Piper. “They’d have taken her, and they’d still have killed the others.”

  “Perhaps.” Simon leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and rubbed his face. “That’s what some people believe, anyway, now that they’ve seen so much of the Council’s ruthlessness. Perhaps you’ll be able to persuade more people ’round to your way of thinking, now that you’re back.”

  “We can worry later about what people think. But there are things you need to know, about the Council’s plans for New Hobart. Things that Cass has seen.”

  “I’d keep quiet about the seers for now,” Simon said. “People might accept you back, if I’m seen to endorse you. And bringing Sally was a wise move. But wandering in here, trailing not just Cass but another seer, and an Alpha, isn’t going to help. After all that’s happened, people need to feel that you’re one of us.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Piper said. “Zoe’s done more f
or the resistance than almost anyone. And seers are Omegas, just like the rest of us.”

  “You know what I mean,” Simon said. His gaze, as he looked me up and down, said enough. I’d seen it before: the appraising way that people would stare at me, once they’d realized that my brand didn’t correspond with any visible mutation. The distance that they kept, from then on.

  Simon went on. “And since the island, they’ve got a better reason than ever to fear both seers and Alphas.” He looked at me again. “Tell me what happened. How did Kip kill the Confessor?”

  I swallowed, and took a breath, but the words didn’t come. Piper stepped in, and gave Simon a brief account of what had happened in the silo.

  “I should’ve known you had something to do with that,” Simon said to Piper. “That’ll go a long way in winning people over. They saw what the Confessor did, on the island. If they knew you’d had a part in killing her, they’d forgive you for what you did. They’d even come around to the seer.”

  “We don’t want their forgiveness,” said Zoe.

  She hadn’t even been on the island, but I noted how she took on Piper’s guilt, and his defiance, as her own.

  “You might not want it,” Sally said, “but that doesn’t mean you won’t need it. This isn’t about your ego. It’s about reuniting the resistance.”

  “It makes no difference,” Piper interrupted. “We can’t go around proclaiming that we were involved in killing the Confessor. The official story is that only Kip was there. If the Council links her death to Cass, they might decide to take out the Reformer themselves, to get rid of her.”

  Simon sighed. “You’re not making it any easier for me to welcome you back.”

  “Did you think the job would be easy, when you took over?” Piper said.

  “I didn’t take over. You left, to chase your seer. Those who remained chose me to lead. I didn’t choose this.” He grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. “What about the song? Was that you as well? One of my scouts reported a bard in Longlake, singing about the refuges. Warning people not to go.”

  “A blind bard? With a younger woman?” I asked.

  Simon shook his head. “A young bard. He was traveling alone, my scout said.”

  Piper and I exchanged smiles. The song was already spreading.

  “I wouldn’t be celebrating too much,” Simon said. “Every bard who sings it might as well be sticking their head in a noose.”

  “Did the scout say anything about bards being caught for it?”

  “No. But it’s only a matter of time. Word’s spreading.”

  “That’s the point,” I said.

  “What news of the ships?” Piper asked him.

  “Eight are moored nearby, at deep anchor off the peninsula. But the Council’s increased its coast patrols, so we’ll have to move the fleet east again. At least four of our ships were seized soon after landing, right by the Miller River. There’s a report that The Caitlin went down, farther north. An unconfirmed sighting of The Juliet, much further north—could be that Larson and his crew are still on the move. The rest still unaccounted for.”

  “That’s good news about the eight, at least. But that wasn’t what I meant. What about the ships out west?”

  “Nothing.” Simon shook his head. “It was always a waste of time. I said so back then, too.”

  “You’ve seen Sally’s Ark paper yourself,” Piper said. “You know Elsewhere exists. You were outvoted.”

  “We know it existed in the Before—that doesn’t mean anything now,” Simon said. “And I was outvoted because you had the Assembly eating out of your hand.”

  “They made a decision.”

  “The Assembly’s decision didn’t seem to matter so much to you in the end, though, did it?”

  Piper ignored the jibe. “The Rosalind and The Evelyn are still out there,” he said.

  “We don’t even know that—all we know is that they haven’t come back. They could’ve sunk months ago, for all we know—or been picked up by the Council fleet.” Simon paused, and lowered his voice. “I did send scouts. Not that I held out any hope for Elsewhere—but I could use every ship we’ve got, not to mention the troops who were manning them. So I sent Hannah, and two scouts. They waited at Cape Bleak for three weeks. No signal fires, and nothing to see but Council ships patrolling. The winter storms were closing in. If the ships were still out there by then, there was no hope for them. I need my troops here, not waiting for ghost ships.”

  His voice was grave. I was glad, at least, that he took no pleasure in telling us this.

  Piper had closed his eyes against the news, but only for a few seconds. Now he was pursing his lips, eyes on the table in front of him. He was already recalculating, figuring out where to go from here.

  “Elsewhere’s still the one thing that can offer real change,” I said. I remembered how I’d felt, when I read the mention of allied nations in the Ark paper: a sense that the world had stretched, widened. That the blank spaces where our maps had always ended might hold something after all, and that there could be something beyond the Council. Beyond the cycle of violence that pitted us against our twins, and killed both of us.

  “I’m telling you now,” said Simon. “There’ll be no more boats sent out while I’m in charge. That’s the kind of gamble that you might be able to justify in decent times, but not now, when everything’s gone to hell.”

  “Isn’t that the time that we need it most, though?” I said.

  “While you’ve been preoccupied with your pie-in-the-sky ideas, I’ve been busy doing the real work of keeping the resistance going. We’ve been working day and night: organizing shelter and rations for all the evacuees. Reestablishing the communications network, and finding new safe houses, now that so many have been raided. Getting warnings to all the people who are at risk, given who’s been taken. Monitoring Council troop movements, and keeping track of their fleet, too. We’ve identified a site in the southeast that might be able to accommodate some of the refugees, and we’ve got a team out there setting up shelters, to see the most vulnerable through the winter, at least.”

  “It’s not enough,” I said.

  Simon turned to me. His voice was a low roar. “You have no idea what it takes to keep the resistance together.”

  “It has to be done,” I said. “And I don’t doubt that you’re doing it well. But it’s never going to be enough. It’s just rebuilding what we had before. It’s more running and hiding. You want to build another hiding spot, only this time near the deadlands? What happens next? Another Council raid, another attack. How can things ever change if running and hiding is all that we do? What about striking back?”

  “How?” Simon threw out his hands. “We lost half our troops on the island. There might come a time when we can strike back against the Council. But it’s not now. Not with our troop numbers slashed, and half our civilians going hungry and on the run.”

  “It’ll be too late,” I said. “That’s what the Council’s counting on: keeping us downtrodden enough that we can’t conceive of fighting back.”

  “What would you do, to strike back?” Simon said.

  “I’d send more troops north, to seek the ships again. I’d outfit new boats, ready to send out as soon as spring comes. But that’s not all. I’d free New Hobart.”

  chapter 13

  Simon slammed his hands onto the table, knocking over one of the water mugs and setting a plate spinning.

  “Freeing New Hobart would be a massive undertaking at any time—let alone now, with the whole resistance in disarray. You’re talking about open battle. Attacking a tightly guarded town.”

  I explained what I had seen: that the town would soon be tanked. Thousands at once, worse even than the insidious expansion that was already taking place in the refuges. I could picture it: Elsa and the children, and all the thousands of others in the walled tow
n. The hubbub of the market square replaced with the sterile hum of the tanks. But Simon addressed Piper instead of me.

  “All these mad schemes, the wild-goose chases. The boats out west. Throwing your lot in with the seer. Even that bloody song that the bards are singing. Now this. You could be doing real good, if you’d work with me, instead of chasing mad ideas.”

  “One of our mad ideas got rid of the Confessor, and her database,” said Piper. “It’s done more strategic good than anything else the resistance has achieved in years.”

  “The people coming to me aren’t concerned with strategy. They’re just trying to survive,” said Simon. “They’re afraid, and hungry.”

  “They’re right to be afraid,” said Sally. “The Council wants them all tanked, in the end. Survival isn’t going to stop the Council, or keep us out of the tanks. You need to fight back, now more than ever. Throw everything you have into finding the ships and freeing New Hobart.”

  “You’ve been doing this for long enough to know the responsibilities that I have,” Simon said. “I need to devote our resources to rebuilding. Reestablishing the safe houses, finding shelter for the evacuees . . .”

  Piper stared unblinkingly into Simon’s eyes. “I protected Cass, at great cost, because of her value to us. If you ignore what Cass is telling you, that sacrifice is in vain.”

  I closed my eyes. Piper was doing the same thing that Simon had done—measuring lives in terms of costs and value. Everything reduced to some kind of calculation.

  “It was your sacrifice,” Simon spat, “not mine. And I won’t throw away more lives on the whim of your seer, just to make you feel better about saving her.”