The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  I remembered my isolation in the Keeping Rooms, with the horizon shrunk to the gray walls of my cell, and nothing to distract me from the horror of my visions.

  “And I wasn’t there,” Zoe went on. “She wanted to spend more time on the mainland—to move here full-time, even. But I told her it was too dangerous, until I could sort out a safe place for us, somewhere out east, away from the patrols. The more unstable she got, the harder it was to keep her hidden, and stay safe. She was getting really volatile. It wasn’t just the screaming when the visions came. At other times, too, she couldn’t control what she said. You’ve seen what Xander’s like. We couldn’t count on her to make sense, let alone stick to a cover story.”

  Zoe paused, looked down at her hands. It was lighter, now, the wind nudging the clouds from the moon. She’d slipped one of her knives from her belt and was fiddling with it.

  “I told her to get on that boat.” Silence. She rocked the tiny knife from side to side, slicing air. “She hated going back to the island, by that stage. But I made her. I shouted at her, when she tried to refuse. Told her it was for her own safety.”

  She gave a bleak laugh. “Like Piper said the other day: she was good with weather. You know how you’re good with places? Weather was one of her things. She could always sense a storm picking up. Even a change of wind coming. It was one of the reasons she was so useful to the resistance, over the years—letting them know when they could make a safe crossing.”

  For once her hands were still, the knife resting inert on her palm, like an offering.

  “She would have warned them about the storm. She always knew. But they didn’t listen to her anymore. Because she’d started to behave oddly. And because they all despised her, because of us. Because of me. They called her a traitor. And they wanted to get back to their precious island.” She looked straight at me, defying me to deny it. “I know she must have tried to warn them about the storm.”

  The final word caught in her mouth. I waited, while she stared straight ahead and took several slow breaths.

  “I saw how the madness crept up on her,” she said. “And on Xander, too. When you came along, I hoped at first that you might be different. Piper was so worked up about you. And you’d found your own way out to the island. I couldn’t ignore that.

  “Even after I met you, I hoped you might learn to control your visions, so you wouldn’t fall into the same trap as her. As all the others. I tried to help you. But it’s happening all over again. The visions, the screaming. The way your eyes shift around after you’ve seen the blast. Even when you talk to us these days, sometimes it’s like you’re looking at something else going on, just behind us. Or through us.” She looked down. “She used to do that, too, toward the end.

  “So that’s why I’m done with seers,” said Zoe. “When you wake up screaming, I already know what it means. And when you talk about the visions of the blast, especially, I’ve already heard it all. I know where it ends.”

  I was used to her looking at me with disdain, or irritation. I was used to her snapping that my night screams would bring down a Council patrol on us, or complaining that she and Piper would be traveling at twice the speed without me slowing them down. The look she gave me now, though, was one I never thought I’d see: she pitied me. I pictured Xander’s frantic hands, his restless eyes. I was remembering my own future.

  She met my eyes. “I can’t pin everything on a seer again—not the future of the resistance, or even Piper’s happiness. I can’t watch it happening again.”

  She turned away from me. I waited for a few minutes, but she said nothing more. I slipped back to the shelter, to Piper’s warmth. For the few hours that I slept, I dreamed her dreams. Gray water, thrashing under a storm. The sea’s black underbelly, keeping its secrets.

  Ω

  In the morning she was gone. I found Piper standing by the empty lookout post. I could see by the slump in his shoulders that he already knew.

  The dawn was staining the eastern sky with light.

  “She left us the lantern,” he said. “All the jerky, too.”

  “Can’t you go after her?”

  He shook his head. “If she doesn’t want to be found, I wouldn’t have a chance.”

  He looked at me. “Did you talk to her, last night, about Lucia?”

  I nodded. “I thought it might be different, now that we’d spoken. That she might stop hating me.”

  “It’s not about you, Cass,” he said. “It’s never been about you.”

  He went back to the shelter and squatted to unrig it, shaking off the snow before shoving the canvas into his rucksack.

  “Did you know she was going to leave?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. There was a long pause. “But I’m not surprised.” He stood, shouldering his rucksack. “I saw what losing Lucia did to her. Not just when Lucia drowned, but before then, when her mind started to go. Now Zoe’s had to watch you and Xander struggle with your visions. I’ve seen what that cost her.”

  That night, as I sat by the fire with Piper, I thought of how the sea refused to give up Lucia’s bones. I thought of Leonard, in the shallow ditch. Kip’s body on the silo floor. Had they taken him away, and buried him? Was the silo abandoned, and had it become his tomb, and the Confessor’s, too? I couldn’t decide what was worse: the thought of strange soldiers shifting him, hauling his body away to bury somewhere. Or the thought of him being left there, where he lay.

  That night, in my dreams, Kip was floating in a tank again. I woke to my own shouts, so loud that the horses panicked and yanked at their tethers. Piper wrapped his arm around me until the shaking stopped.

  Later, when the sweat had cooled on my face, and the tremors had left my hands, I sat beside Piper and told him the truth about Kip’s past. Some things are easier said in the dark. He listened in silence, without interrupting. Finally, he spoke.

  “He did terrible things. But he suffered for them, didn’t he? When they cut off his arm, put him in the tank for years? When he killed himself, to save you?”

  I didn’t know how to respond. How much forgiveness could be purchased with an arm, or a life? And who could decide the punishments, or make that kind of reckoning? Not me, I knew, with my own guilt and complicities to bear.

  Ω

  We rode for five more days. Only once did we see a sign of pursuit: a single rider who came upon us one night, not long after dusk had fallen. The terrain here was jagged with spars of rock and little shelter, and when we crossed the wide road running north, we’d decided to risk it for the short distance to the shelter of the forest visible a few miles away.

  The soldier spotted us first—by the time I saw his red tunic, a few hundred yards ahead, he was already wheeling his horse around. Even from that distance, he would have seen Piper was missing an arm. For an Omega to ride a horse was already a whipping offense—if the rider made it to his garrison, they would send patrols to hunt us down.

  Piper didn’t consult me, he just leaned forward and pressed his horse to a gallop. I did the same, not sure if I was chasing the soldier or trying to stop Piper.

  We were never going to catch up with the soldier—he had too great a start, and our horses were tired and hungry from long days of riding in snow and ice. But Piper wasn’t aiming to catch him. We were thirty yards away when Piper threw the knife. At first I thought he’d missed—the rider didn’t move, or cry out. But after a few yards, he began to slump forward. When he was prone, face pressed to his horse’s mane, I saw the glint of the blade in the back of his neck. Then, with a terrible slowness, he slid to one side. When he finally toppled from the saddle, one foot was stuck in his stirrup, so that when the horse panicked and sped away, the man was dragged along. The hoof falls were joined by an extra beat, the soldier’s skull bouncing on the iced road.

  That surreal chase seemed to last forever: the horse frantic, bucking and shying,
and us gaining on him only slowly. The soldier upside down, his head dragging, bouncing and for several seconds, even tangling between the horse’s back legs. When we finally drew even, the horse was crazy-eyed, its dark coat striped with sweat. Piper grabbed the reins, and the horse recoiled as if trying to shake its head free of its own neck. Its hoofs clattered on the ice as it danced on the spot.

  There had been a time when I would have screamed at Piper, and asked why the soldier and his twin had needed to die. Now I said nothing. If we were captured, the Ark and Elsewhere would slip further from the grasp of the resistance. Zach and the General would win, and the tanks would be fed.

  Piper jumped down and freed the soldier’s body from the stirrup. I dismounted and looped all three reins together, pinioning them with a heavy rock. We dragged the body from the road to the cover of the shallow ditch; I knelt with Piper there, helping to scoop snow over the stiffening corpse. The blood was black where it pooled beneath the man’s neck, and pink at the edges of the spreading stain.

  I felt more than ever the truth of what Zach had said on the road outside New Hobart. I was poison. He was right. Even to glimpse me now, a hooded figure in the snow, meant death. My journeys in the last few months had left a map of bones laid across the land.

  If I was a prophet, I foretold only death, and I fulfilled my own prophecies. Ever since the silo, I’d been struggling to recognize the Kip I knew in the person the Confessor had described. Now, for the first time, I wondered if he would recognize me.

  Piper held out his hand, appraising the snow that still fell on it.

  “It’ll cover the tracks, at least. It should buy us some time—more time than if he’d raised the alarm tonight. They won’t find the body before daylight, even if they realize he’s missing by then. But we have to leave the road, now.”

  We led the dead man’s horse with us when we left. He was still skittish and nervy, jerking at his reins, and Piper and I were both exhausted. By midnight we reached the forest, and there we tethered the horses and Piper took the first watch as I slept for a few hours. I woke to a vision of the blast, and couldn’t reconcile the extremes—my body shaking with cold and my mind shimmering with flames.

  Piper was watching me, but in the slightly distracted way that I’d grown used to in these last few days, since Zoe had left. He seemed a long way away—always scanning the distance beyond the horizon of my face.

  He’d never accused me of driving Zoe away. He didn’t need to. I saw myself through her eyes, now. I was both in my body and aware of it. Aware of how I shook when a vision came. How when I dreamed of the tanks, I woke with my mouth wide, greedy for air, as if I’d just surfaced from the tank’s cloying liquid. I heard, as if for the first time, the noises I made when I had a vision of the blast. The strangled screams that never expected to be heard, because there was nobody left to hear, and no world left to hear in.

  “Where do you think Zoe’s gone?” I said to him.

  “There’s a place out east, where she used to think of building somewhere for her and Lucia. It’s harsh country, right on the edge of the deadlands, but it’s a long way away from all of this.” He didn’t have to explain what he meant.

  Once, I would have argued with him, said that I didn’t think Zoe would give up on the resistance. But after the mistakes that I’d made, I had no right to claim that I knew her. Or to ask anything more of her than she had already given.

  “Do you think she’s coming back?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer.

  chapter 31

  I felt the river before I felt the Ark. We’d emerged from the forest onto the open grasslands, and I could sense the water’s movement within the stillness of the plain. Piper pointed to the east, and the mountain range that squatted across the horizon. From the Ark painting, I could recognize the distinctive peak of Broken Mountain, and the plateau of Mount Alsop.

  Within a few hours of riding, I began to feel the Ark itself. It was an aberration in the earth. Ahead of us, beneath the plain, I could sense the obstinate hardness that was neither soil nor stone. And within this buried carapace was air, where earth should be.

  I could feel, too, the soldiers massed there. I heard Xander’s voice: noises in the maze of bones. The whole Ark hummed. If I’d had any doubts that the Council had discovered the Ark, I had none now. It was a hive, ready to swarm.

  A few miles from the river, we tethered the horses in a copse. I was reluctant to leave them like that: there was no water other than a few shallow puddles, half-frozen, and I didn’t know how long we would be gone for. But it was too risky to set them free, where they could be noticed by the soldiers. “And we might need them again,” said Piper. I noted the might; we were both thinking the same thing: If we come back.

  We moved, hunching, through the long grass. Ahead, the plain rose to a broad hill, where trees fought the boulders and stones for a patch of earth. The river curved around the hill from the west. The winter hadn’t caught this river—its dark water was too deep and too fast to freeze.

  “Do we need to cross it?” Piper asked, eyeing the flow warily.

  I shook my head, and pointed at the hill. “The Ark’s on this side, under there.” I could feel it more clearly than ever. There was metal beneath the hill—I tasted its iron tang. Doors and passageways, a tracery of metal and air under the earth.

  I led Piper a little way up the base of the hill, among the trees, toward the point where I could feel one of the passages climb to meet the air. The trace of metal was strong here—I could sense the doors, iron slabs set into the slope.

  Before we reached the doors we saw the first soldiers. A covered wagon, pulled by four horses, flanked by eight more riders. Piper and I dropped to a crouch in the snow. The grass was long enough to hide us, but each time one of the soldiers turned to scan the plain I found myself holding my breath. When they passed the curve in the road they were less than thirty yards from us. Close enough that I could see the red beard of the soldier driving the cart, and the rip in the tunic of the last rider, where his sword’s hilt had worn away the fabric.

  Then they had passed us. We watched them approach the scar in the hillside where the door must once have been. But there was no door now: just a gouged space, forty yards across, in the earth. At some stage in the last four hundred years, the hill of scree and boulders had engulfed the doorway that I could sense, and claimed it as its own. By the looks of it, it hadn’t been easy for the Council to excavate. To the side was a mound of earth and rocks, some of the boulders as large as a horse. Trees, too, had been uprooted and dragged there, roots groping at the air. The detritus of centuries. In front of the opening, a line of soldiers waited: at least ten of them, a tongue of red peeking from the hill’s open mouth.

  For an hour or more we watched the entrance. Soldiers came and went to the wagon, and in and out of the dark chasm, but the watching guards didn’t move from their posts. They weren’t alone, either. Piper pointed out to me the bowman waiting on the hill, twenty yards above the door. She was nearly concealed by the boulders among which she perched. If Piper hadn’t told me what to look for, I might have mistaken the protruding tip of her bow for a sapling. But it moved slightly, when she turned to survey the hill below her. Anyone who stepped from the long grass of the plain would be dead before they got within fifty yards of the door.

  Parting the grass with both hands, I scraped the snow clear, closed my eyes, and pressed my cheek against the iced ground, and tried to get a feel for the overall shape of the Ark that lay below. It took me a few moments to work out why it felt familiar. Then I recognized it: it was like the island, but inverted. Where the island had been a cone rising from the sea, this was an upside-down cone, tunneling down to a central point. The outer corridors, at the surface level, traced a rough circle, several miles in diameter. Within this ring, narrower and deeper, a network of rooms and corridors burrowed. A nest of circular cor
ridors, ever smaller and more deeply sunken. Even the outer ring of the Ark wasn’t close to the surface. In front of us, beyond the buried door, a passageway dropped steeply to join the outer corridor. And there was a symmetry to the Ark’s layout, I realized, as my mind fumbled its way through the stone and steel. The passageway to the surface was repeated, at equal lengths around the Ark’s circular rim.

  “Remember what the papers said,” I whispered to Piper. “The radiation measurements were taken from Ark Entrance 1. There are other entrances. I can feel three more, around the outer circle. One at each of the compass points, more or less.”

  For the rest of the day we edged around the rock-strewn hill, crouching in the deep grass. Three times I sensed a passageway climbing to meet the air. But each time, when we crept close enough, we were greeted by the same sight: guards, swords, and bows. In front of the western door was a cluster of tents—enough to quarter at least a hundred soldiers.

  The southern door, closest to the river, had been spared the hill’s advances, and instead of a messy excavation, a steel structure was visible, at ground level, although rusted. It was circular, more a hatch than a door, and was the height of two men. It looked as though the Council had blasted it open, somehow: a hole was torn in the center of the hatch, edged by sharpened spurs of metal, reaching inward like monstrous teeth.

  When we’d retreated out of sight of the door, Piper exhaled slowly, closing his eyes for a moment. “We’ll have to come back, with troops. Even with Zoe, we could never have taken one of those entrances. And even if we did, we’d only be trapped as soon as we entered.” He kicked at the snow. There was no time for this. No time to make the risky journey back to New Hobart, and to return again. No time for another battle, and more blood. How much luck, and how much time, did we have left? The Council’s soldiers in the Ark were excavating more knowledge, more power, every day—and each day, the refuges swelled with more Omegas.