Once they’d taken the eastern gate, the town fell quickly. More smoke rose from within the walls. The southern gate, closest to us, was forced open from within, and it was the Ringmaster’s troops who stormed their way through the fighting at the base of the watchtower and rushed out of the gate. I heard shouts from within the walls, and imagined the confusion of the townsfolk, faced with these new arrivals who still wore the Council’s red tunics but who were fighting alongside them to free the town.
Something pale swung from the eastern watchtower. At first I thought it might be another body, slumped over the railing. But the wind gusted and the pale object lifted, flapped twice, and then unfurled. I could see the silhouette of a hunchbacked woman, raising the flag to the wind. It was the Omega insignia, painted on a sheet.
The Council had branded it on our foreheads. Now, it hung from the tower, above the smoke and blood. The town had fallen.
Out on the plain, the remaining Council soldiers were fighting with the frenzied energy of those who knew they could not win. Next to me, Zoe struggled hand to hand with a bearded man. Beside her was Piper, holding off a soldier who was already bleeding from a slash to the head. Piper dodged beneath the blow of a second soldier, a woman bearing an ax. When she saw me standing behind him, she came straight at me, ax raised. She looked as scared as I was, her eyes open too wide, white showing all around the pupils, like those of the horse I had killed. Had that been only hours before? Time had slowed until it was something I waded through, like the bloodied snow.
I raised my sword and braced myself. I blocked the first swing. When she came at me again, the impact knocked the sword from my hands. She raised the ax once more. Everything in the frost-tipped morning suddenly seemed very bright. Zach, I thought. What have I done to you? What have you done to us?
chapter 21
My first thought on waking was that I must be back in the deadlands—my vision had the same cloudiness as in those weeks of watering eyes and ash-laden winds. Then I saw that I was indoors, and there was no ash, only a blurriness that pulsed slightly, the room around me sharpening, then slipping back into haze, keeping time with the throbbing lump at the back of my head.
It took a while for me to distinguish between the different pains in my body. The surface pain of the grazes and scrapes on my knuckles and knees. The tightness at the side of my head, the swollen skin amplifying my pulse so that each beat became a wince. And the one pain around which the others orbited: my right forearm.
“She’s awake.” Zoe’s voice.
Piper walked toward me. He was limping heavily.
“You hurt your leg?”
“No.” He gestured at Zoe. She was still sitting, and as my vision began to clear I could make out a bandage around her right thigh. Blood had seeped through it, carving a red smile in the white cloth.
“It’s a clean cut, and it’s been stitched. It’ll heal quickly,” she said.
“What about your head?” Piper asked me.
I lifted my good arm to touch the lump, which felt hard and hot. My hand came away clean of blood. But when I tried to lift my other arm, there was a pain that didn’t limit itself to the wrist but darted through my body, and brought me to the brink of vomiting. The wrist had swollen, thickening to twice its normal width. I tried to move my fingers, but they ignored me.
“What happened?”
“It’s broken,” Piper said.
“Not that. What happened at the end of the battle?”
“We’re in New Hobart,” he said.
“Us and the Ringmaster,” said Zoe pointedly.
“We can talk about that later,” Piper said. “We need to reset the bone, straighten it before the swelling gets worse, and get it in a splint.”
“You can’t do it yourselves,” I said.
“You see any doctors around here?” Zoe waved her arm at the room around us. It was small and half in darkness. The shutter on the window had been smashed, the broken spars casting uneven lines of shadow across the floor. The door to the next room was burned away, nothing remaining but a strip of wood next to the hinges. Through the door I could see a pile of broken chairs, stacked haphazardly. I was on a bare mattress. Another mattress lay against the opposite wall, beside a jug of water.
Zoe took the edge of the sheet from the other mattress and began to rip it into strips. The noise reminded me of the tearing of arrows through the air. I tried to sit up, and the pain flooded my arm again.
Somewhere in Wyndham, or wherever he was, Zach was feeling the same pain. Once, when we were eight or nine, he’d cut his foot open on some broken glass in the river. I’d been sitting alone on the doorstep peeling parsnips when the pain came. I’d looked down at my foot. There was nothing to see: no blood, no wound, nothing at all to explain the slicing pain that had made me cry out and drop the vegetables to the ground. For a moment I’d thought I must have been bitten by a spider or a fire ant. But as I examined my intact foot, crying, I realized it must be Zach. Soon he came limping up to the house, leaving red footsteps in the dirt. His foot was opened from instep to heel, a cut so deep that it had to be stitched. I limped for days, he for weeks.
Now, as Piper whittled a chair leg into a splint, and Zoe prepared the bandages, it was comforting to know that Zach would be feeling my pain, too. Was it that I wanted him to suffer? Or because he would share my pain, understand it? Both, perhaps.
I couldn’t help but cry out when Zoe braced her foot against the table and pulled my arm straight. Piper was holding me still, and I turned my head into his neck so I didn’t have to watch what Zoe was doing. When she began, Piper’s grip tightened against me as I tried to shy away from my own arm. There was a grinding of bones.
Then it was over. Not the pain, which continued, but the dragging of bone on bone. My body slackened onto Piper’s chest. I could feel my sweat, greasing both our skin.
Zoe was busy, strapping the wooden splint tightly to my arm.
“You’ll need to keep it still, and raised if you can,” Piper said. “When Zoe broke her wrist as a kid, she made it worse by refusing to rest properly after Sally set it for her.”
“Did it keep hurting for long, after it was set?”
I’d asked Zoe, but they both answered. “Yes.”
“Done,” said Zoe, tying the bandage tightly.
Piper lowered me so that I was lying down again. He placed a folded blanket under my arm, to prop it higher. He moved me as carefully as a person carrying a butterfly in cupped hands. I thought of how his knife had been trained on me when our defeat had seemed certain. I said nothing of it to him. We both knew there was no less tenderness in that poised knife blade than there was in this holding.
“You should rest,” he said.
“Tell me what happened.”
“You saw almost all of it,” Zoe said. “The Ringmaster and his soldiers tore through the eastern gate in no time. There was some confusion, inside, from the Omegas of the town, but they worked it out soon enough. The Council soldiers fighting us were outnumbered.”
“What happened to them?”
“They refused to surrender,” Piper said. “Most of them were killed.”
I didn’t realize that I’d winced, until Zoe rolled her eyes. “Don’t act precious about it,” said Zoe. “You were out there yourself, swinging a sword around. You knew what it meant, when we decided to free the town.”
As if I could forget. I could still feel the sensation of killing that man. The feeling of blade wedged into bone. The double scream of him and his twin, in different octaves of terror.
Piper went on. “Some fled north. We didn’t pursue them. A few gave themselves up, at the end. We still haven’t decided what to do with them.”
“You say that as though it’s up to us,” Zoe said. “The Ringmaster’s soldiers are guarding them. You really think he’s going to ask for our opinion?”
“It’s under the rule of a different Councilor, at least,” said Zoe.
I closed my eyes again. Or, rather, they closed themselves. Unconsciousness was claiming me again.
“Find Elsa,” I tried to say, but my lips wouldn’t obey me, and I slipped into silence.
Ω
I was thirsty, and stuck amid dreams of flame. Somewhere nearby, I heard the Ringmaster’s voice.
“But she’s going to live?” he said.
“If you let her rest,” Zoe snapped. Somebody wiped my face with a cloth, and I turned to press my skin against its coolness.
“Why’s she so pale?” the Ringmaster asked.
The flames rose again, and I heard nothing more.
When I woke there was no sign of him, or Piper. Only Zoe, asleep on the floor by my mattress. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep for, but the blood that had been scarlet on her bandaged leg was now dried and black.
She woke when Piper came in. When he’d strapped my broken arm into a sling, made of torn sheets, I managed to eat a little of the bread that he’d brought with him. Standing was difficult, and my whole body moved awkwardly around the pivot of pain that was my bound arm. I had to lean on Piper’s shoulder as I followed him and Zoe into the next room. Beyond the stack of smashed chairs, the room opened up into a large hall. A circle of intact chairs was laid out in the center, where the Ringmaster was waiting, with Sally, Xander, Simon, and an older woman. I’d not met her before, but I recognized her short hair and the hump on her back. It was she who’d unfurled the makeshift flag from the eastern tower, toward the end of the battle.
“This is June,” said Piper. “She led the uprising inside the town.”
She glanced at my arm, the splint protruding from the bandage at my elbow. “I won’t shake your hand, then,” she said.
“And of course you remember the Ringmaster,” said Zoe. Her words were sharpened.
“You’d all be dead, or tanked, by now, if she hadn’t gone to him,” Sally said.
“You lied to us,” Zoe said.
“If I’d told you I was meeting him that night, you wouldn’t have let me go. We wouldn’t have been able to free the town.”
“Is it free?” said Zoe. “I still see Council soldiers patrolling the gates.”
“I’ve told you,” said the Ringmaster. “They work for me, not the Council. And if it weren’t for them, the Council could retake this city anytime they wanted.”
He sat apart from the others. There was a cut on his cheek, already healing. Simon, opposite me, had his left arm in a sling, and a bruise at the corner of his mouth.
“What is this place?” I asked, looking around. It was big—too big to be a house. This room alone was bigger than the children’s dormitory in Elsa’s holding house.
“It’s the tithe collector’s office,” the Ringmaster said.
“It doesn’t help with the morale in the town,” June said. “You setting yourselves up here, where the Council used to make us queue to deliver our tithes. That and taking down the flag.”
“This place was empty,” the Ringmaster said. “What would they prefer? That we turn someone out of their home and base ourselves there? As for the flag, you can’t expect my troops to be happy about working night and day under an Omega flag, when it was them who freed the town.”
“We freed it together,” I said. “If we hadn’t attacked, you and your soldiers would have done nothing to free New Hobart.” I turned to June. “When we left the warnings for you, we never hoped that you’d manage to do so much. How did you do it? Had you hidden weapons?”
“A few, but not enough,” she said. “They were thorough, in the weeks after they sealed the city. There were searches and raids, and rewards if people turned each other in for concealing contraband. They had us pretty well disarmed. Not to mention afraid.
“It was the pumpkins that gave us the idea,” she went on. “You’d already used the food against them once—we just did it again. They had us cooking for them, you see. They were stupid to trust us, especially after they’d taken the children. I even heard two of them talking, when the gate shifts changed over, the day after they’d taken the kids away. Expecting trouble tonight, after yesterday? one of them said to the soldier coming off shift. His friend just shrugged, said, Why? It’s not as if it’s even their kids.”
I was watching the Ringmaster. His face was expressionless.
“They took all the children under ten,” June went on. “They cleared out the holding houses, and I saw the soldiers dragging my neighbor’s adopted children away, kicking and screaming.” Her face hardened. “So when we got your message, we were ready to act. There’s belladonna, climbing up the embankment behind the market square. And hemlock, in the ditches by the wall. Four of us sneaked out after the curfew, to pick as much as we could. Even then, we couldn’t poison all the soldiers. The first shift was already getting sick not long after sunset, before the next shift came into the mess hall. Some of them died. A lot more were collapsing. They realized pretty quickly what we’d done. Had already whipped three of the cooks by the time the attack started. It would have gotten ugly, in here, if you hadn’t attacked when you said you would.”
It was already ugly, I thought, picturing the slow deaths of the poisoned soldiers. But I had no right to judge June for it. The people of New Hobart had done what we asked, more successfully than I could have imagined.
June turned to face the Ringmaster. “But we didn’t risk everything just to find ourselves under a new occupying force.”
The Ringmaster stood. “You’re not the only one who risked everything. I’ve given up my seat on the Council. My soldiers have risked their lives to defend you. Your ragtag army of Omegas was on the brink of being massacred when we arrived. If you think your forces are capable of withstanding a Council attack on New Hobart, I invite you to take over the defense of the town. Until then, be grateful.”
“Grateful?” spat Zoe.
“I don’t relish working with you any more than you do with me,” he said quietly. “We all want to stop the machines. I don’t wish harm on you people. Not like the Reformer or the General. I just want to manage the situation, to avoid another catastrophe like the blast.”
“Manage the situation,” I said. “All of us in refuges, eventually—that’s what you mean, isn’t it? Locked out of sight, in work camps, where we can’t be seen, let alone have lives of our own.”
At my raised voice, Xander began rocking backward and forward, hands pressed over his ears.
The Ringmaster ignored him. “It would mean security and stability, for Omegas as well as Alphas,” he said. “And it’s better than what your twin is proposing.”
“They’re not our choices,” shouted Piper. “We don’t have to choose between you and him, or the General—”
“We’re wasting time,” said Sally, interrupting. “This isn’t going to help us. We fought together, and we won. That’s more than we expected. We’ve kept this town from the tanks. But it’s only the beginning. If we bicker, we’ll just make it easier for the Council to fight back.” She turned to the Ringmaster. “How much of the army do you command, and will they stay loyal to you?”
If he was taken aback at having to answer to an old woman in a threadbare shawl, he didn’t show it.
“I’d say perhaps half the army will follow me, if it comes to that,” he said. “The Reformer and the General have been so seduced by the machines, they’ve underestimated what the taboo means to most people. I’ve had defectors coming to me, ever since the first rumors about the machines began to spread. Most of those who aren’t already here have left Wyndham, to muster to the west, inland of Sebald’s Bay.”
June stood. “My people aren’t happy that there are still soldiers manning the walls, whether they call them
selves Council soldiers or not. If it were up to us, we’d tear the walls down.”
“And make the town completely vulnerable to the Council’s attack,” said Piper. “If we can use them defensively, they stay. But I want Omega patrols out there as well.”
“My soldiers won’t stand for that,” the Ringmaster said. “It was hard enough persuading them to fight against the Council. But asking them to work directly with Omegas is too much. And it won’t help any of us if the soldiers start picking fights.”
“Then make sure they don’t,” I said. “Work it out.” I stood but had to steady myself on the back of my chair. “Draw up a roster so that Omega patrols can take turns. Or have your men patrol the walls, and ours manning the gates. Just work it out.”
I stepped closer to the Ringmaster. “Do you have ships?”
“What are you talking about? How are ships going to help us to hold New Hobart, or to tackle the tanks?”
“We’re looking for Elsewhere,” I said. “You’re right—it will be next to impossible to win here. And if the only way we can do it is with battles, then ultimately nobody wins. But there might be an alternative. Somewhere where things are different. Somewhere that could help us, or at least offer a real haven.”
“Right now,” said the Ringmaster, “the Reformer and the General will be massing their troops. Working out how best to rout us. Who next to tank. Which settlement to target when they make reprisals—which you know they’ll do. If you focus on sailing away and looking for Elsewhere, people will see it as a betrayal.”
The Refuge Song Page 20