“It’s coming, and soon,” I said. “And we have to find it before the Council does, or any chance we have will be lost. There isn’t time to go back to New Hobart.” I stood up. “And I’m not asking for your permission. I’m going, with or without you.”
He was staring at his scarred knuckles. How many times had he unleashed his blades from those fingers, I wondered? How many lives had that hand taken? Would he stop me, if I tried to walk away?
His face was grave. “If we’re going to stop the Council, the resistance is going to need you more than ever. You nearly got us both killed in the Ark. You can’t just go off now, taking more risks.”
“You say the resistance needs me,” I said. “That’s why you spared me, on the island. But if the resistance needs me, it’s because my visions are valuable. So listen to me.”
When he spoke, his voice had dropped low. “The resistance has needed me, too.” A pause. “Needed me to do things. To make decisions. To be certain, even when I haven’t had much certainty left.”
He looked up at me, the flames lighting the underside of his face, leaving his eyes in darkness. Outside, the snow had stopped, and the night was hushed.
I remembered what he’d said to Leonard, months ago: There are different kinds of courage. I’d seen Piper fight, and I’d seen him stand before the assembled troops and rally them to battle. But it would take a different kind of courage, now, for him to choose to follow me.
“If I set off now,” I said, “I might be able to cross the western ridge while the snow holds off.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“I’m glad,” I said. And it wasn’t until I spoke the words that I knew they were true.
Ω
In the long days of riding westward, my mind kept returning to those final moments in the ventilation pipe. How I had reached for Kip’s and Zach’s names, instinctive as breath.
I thought often of Zoe, too, though Piper never spoke of her. All that we knew of her was that she lived. And although I found myself missing the click of her knife on her nails, I thought she was better off, wherever she was, not knowing the news that Piper and I had dredged up from the Ark. Zoe had enough burdens already.
At night, I dreamed of the blast, and of the cliff that waited for the ship. There were no more visions of Kip in the tanks, and that was a mercy. But the blast dreams took on a new potency, now that I knew their true significance.
“I used to think my visions were letting me down,” I said to Piper one night, after the blast had left my sleep in ashes. “Because they were unclear, or inconsistent. That they were failing me somehow. Now I know it was me failing them. I only saw what I wanted to see.”
“Maybe you saw what you needed to see.”
I kept staring at the night sky.
“Maybe you had enough to deal with,” he went on. “If you’d known all along about the blast, it would have been too much. Perhaps you would’ve gone mad. Or given up.”
Sometimes I thought my madness was an Ark, buried deep within me. I could feel it, even if he couldn’t. Soon enough it would be found.
Ω
Our escape from the Ark, drenched and nearly frozen, had left me with a fever. For three days I’d been sweat-soaked and shivery, my neck swollen and my throat inflamed. Piper wouldn’t admit it, but he was unwell too—his skin was clammy and he’d picked up a wheezing cough. When we crossed the high pass over the mountains, the snow drifts were so deep in places that we had to dismount and lead the horses. By the time we were on the far side of the pass, my teeth were chattering loudly and Piper could no longer conceal his own body’s shaking.
We both knew we could not continue like this much longer. When we came across the small settlement clustered by the stream, it was after midnight, and there were no lamps visible in the windows. We decided to tether the horses in the woods upstream, and risk sneaking into the barn at the settlement’s edge. We climbed up to the loft, and lay in the mounded hay. I ignored the itching and spiking of the hay, and burrowed deep for warmth. Beside me, Piper was trying to silence his cough. I was both cold and hot at once, my swollen neck pulsing with pain. We didn’t sleep so much as pass out.
Our sickness had made us careless—we didn’t take lookout shifts, and woke at dawn to the sound of the barn door slamming open below us.
I heard the chink of metal as Piper slipped a knife from his belt. But nobody came up the ladder, and the sounds from below were the unhurried noises of daily work. A barrow was wheeled inside, and then came thuds of wood on wood. I was lying facedown, and I moved slowly to scrape aside the hay, uncovering cracks in the rough floor to peer through. Below, the barn door stood open, admitting the first hints of dawn, and a woman with a single eye was loading a barrow with logs of wood from a pile in the corner.
That’s when I heard the whistling. The chilled air blurred the notes at the edges, but I knew the tune immediately: Leonard’s song. She was whistling the chorus, pausing between lines as she bent to grab another armful of wood, and huffing in the cold so that half the notes were more breath than tune. But it was clear enough, and in my mind I matched the words to the notes as they reached me on the lazy wind:
Oh you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever, ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
Like me, Piper was smiling. I closed my eyes and found his hand. Here, at least a hundred miles northwest of where we’d last seen Leonard alive, the song had found its way. It wasn’t much—just a scattering of notes, hanging for a moment in the air. The song had seemed such a slight thing to carry the message of the tanks—but it was spreading.
We slipped from the hayloft as soon as the woman had gone, and ran from the settlement in the hesitant dawn light. I was thinking of Leonard—the chill of his dead flesh, and the broken guitar around his neck. I’d seen enough of death, these last few months, to know its absoluteness. I’d seen the dead bodies on the island, and at the battle of New Hobart. I’d seen Kip on the silo floor, each angle of his body wrong, and seen him again, his double-death, preserved in the tank. There was nothing romantic in death, and nothing that would bring those dead back: not tanks, not tears, and not songs. But having heard Leonard’s music in the barn, I was assured that at least some part of him had slipped that noose.
Ω
It took two more weeks to reach Cape Bleak. The snow had melted, and our fevers receded. The spare horse meant we could rotate mounts, and we made good progress, even though we had to travel at night once we’d reached Alpha country. For more than a week we passed through hills richly populated with villages and towns. We moved through the darkness, unseen, and I didn’t feel afraid, even when Piper told me that we were passing within miles of the biggest Council squadron in the west. I’d seen the Ark, and knew its secrets. I passed through the blast each time I slept. Little else could scare me now. And the half-heard song from the hayloft sustained me, and helped to heal my sick body, more than any of the sinewy hares that Piper caught.
Eventually the land grew scrappy again, gnarled by the coastal winds, and there were no more Alphas to avoid. Then we came within sight of the sea. Inhospitable cliffs cut away into the ocean. I knew them at once for the cliffs I had dreamed of. White as sliced flesh, before the blood springs to the wound.
There I dreamed of the sea. When I woke, I knew that the waves that had broken on the edges of my sleep were not my own dreams. I sat up quickly, almost expecting to find Zoe there, sleeping beside me as if she’d never gone. But there was only Piper’s back as he sat looking out from the cave’s entrance, watching the sun set over the water.
“That headland, there.” He jerked his head to the north, to a finger of land that pointed accusingly at the ocean. “That’s Cape Bleak. It doesn’t look like it, but on the northe
rn face there’s a path down to a small cove. When courier ships from the island were due to come this way, our scouts on the mainland would light a signal fire on the point, to let them know it was safe to send in the landing craft.”
It was full dark by the time we reached the tip of the headland. The wood that we’d scavenged was damp, and Piper had to tip the last of the lamp oil on the mound to coax it into flames.
We waited all night, but there was no answering gleam of flame from the sea—only an occasional flash of white where the waves broke below the cliffs. The cries of gulls scraped at the night.
At dawn, the fire had subsided into ashes.
Piper exhaled as he rubbed his face with his hand
“So we try again tomorrow night,” he said. But I noted the slump of his shoulders, the set of his mouth.
We should have learned it after the island, and after the tanks of dead children in New Hobart. After Zach had thrown the ships’ figureheads at our feet. And after the Ark, which held nothing for us but another blast. Nothing was more dangerous than hope.
Ω
We sat for a long time. We should have been sleeping, but neither of us wanted to go back to the cave, and to be cramped in there with nothing to speak of but the ship that might never come. So we waited on the cliff, watching the light from behind us spread over the sea.
In my vision, the ship had cut cleanly through the water. The ship that we saw, rounding the point, moved sluggishly. It lurched when the wind picked up, wallowing to the left. The mast was crooked, and the sail puckered where it had been stitched. The figurehead wasn’t the only thing missing; all along the prow the wood was gouged. Sections had been patched with tar and boards, but the wounds still showed.
People were busy on the deck, and another was clambering in the rigging. But one figure was motionless at the bow, hands on the rail.
A whistle came to us. The wind on the headland was gusty, and it stretched the notes and then snatched them away. But I’d heard enough to know. Piper stood, and we both ran to the cliffside path, while the chorus of Leonard’s song was carried past us on the wind.
chapter 39
By the time we’d scrambled down to the rocky cove, a dinghy had been lowered and was halfway to shore. Piper waded thigh-deep into the water to meet it. I watched while he embraced Zoe, his arm so tight around her waist that for a moment he lifted her, and the other sailors had to move quickly to steady the small boat. Then he lowered her into the water beside him. She smiled as she walked toward the beach, where I waited. I wished I could have stopped time there: Zoe smiling, Piper grinning behind her in the water. I didn’t want to speak—our news was too grim to give to her, on this bright morning, when she’d just found us.
“I thought you’d gone east,” I said. “Got away from all of this.” From me, I meant.
She shook her head. “I was going to.” She was unabashed. “For the first day I did head eastward.” She paused, squinting into the glare of the sun on the water. “But then I kept thinking about Xander.”
Piper was listening, too, but Zoe wasn’t looking at either of us. She was staring beyond The Rosalind at the low waves.
“I kept thinking of how he was always telling us The Rosalind was coming in, and how we’d dismissed him.” She spoke very quietly. “I thought I should try, at least. That one of us should believe in him.”
I watched her staring at the waves, and I knew that it wasn’t only Xander who she had been keeping faith with, but Lucia, whom nobody had listened to, at the end.
The crew had jumped from the dinghy, and three of them began to haul it on to the beach. The fourth sailor limped as he waded to Piper. They shook hands, the man grasping Piper’s hand with both of his.
“This is Thomas,” Piper said, turning to me. “Captain of The Rosalind.”
“We didn’t see the signal fire until just before dawn,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if we’d get here in time to catch you.”
“We thought you’d been taken,” I said.
“We nearly were,” Thomas said. “We hit a bad summer storm in the western straits, barely a month after we’d left the island. We got off fairly lightly, but The Evelyn was driven aground on a reef. The damage was bad, and half of their water tanks were wrecked too, so Hobb had to turn back.” He looked grim. “Zoe told us about what’s happened: the island. The figureheads. What the General said, about Hobb and the crew being captured. They must have got back just after the Council seized the island. Probably sailed right into the Council’s fleet.”
“And your figurehead?” said Piper, turning to look at the ship’s patched prow. “I saw it myself. How the hell did they get hold of that?”
“When we eventually came back, we didn’t make it back to the island—a Council ship gave chase just outside the reef. Got close enough to do some damage to our mast, but we managed to lose them in the western reef and get clear. We knew then that the island must have fallen. We limped back to the mainland, and came here first, like we’d agreed. But there was no signal, no sign of anyone from the resistance. After that we tried all the usual places, but there were no signal fires, and more and more Council ships about. In Chantler Bay there were three of them at anchor—we only got past there unseen because it was dark. The winter storms were well and truly starting by then, and we got desperate—even dropped anchor by Atkin Point and sent four scouts inland to the safe house, but it was burned out. Had to keep moving—they’re patrolling the coast more tightly than ever. We’d been spotted again, and had one of their brigs on our tail, when the big storm blew in from the north, a month back. Seas as high as I’ve seen. We shook off the Council ship, but lost two men. Ran aground on some rocks, just off Chantler Bay, started taking on water. That’s when we lost the figurehead, and half the prow with it. The brig that was chasing us must have come across it. Who knows if they really thought we’d gone down, or if they just wanted you to think we had?
“When the storm was over, we couldn’t even find somewhere safe to beach and fix the hull. I had to keep the crew on the pumps night and day.”
“I came here first,” Zoe said, taking over the story. “Right after I’d left you. Waited a few nights. Tried Chantler Bay, but drew a blank. But a fisherwoman in a tavern there said she’d seen a ship, listing badly, and heading south. She said it wasn’t one of the Council’s, but too big to be a local fishing boat. I went down to Siddle Point, lit the signal fire on the old lookout post, three nights running. A patrol came through, too, on the second day, passed not a hundred yards from where I was hiding. I was about to give up. I could hardly believe it, on the third night, when I saw the lantern flashing back at me.
“When I was aboard, we sailed back here.” I thought of Zoe’s nightly dreams, and knew what it must have cost her, to take to the sea again. “The patrol ships hardly ever come this far north,” she went on, “so we were able to beach The Rosalind in Coldharbor Bay. It took almost a week just to fix the hull.” She looked at me and Piper. “If you’d come a few days later, you’d have missed us. I was going to head back to New Hobart, to Simon, and leave the crew here to guard Paloma.”
“Is that another ship?” I said.
Zoe shook her head.
Ω
They rowed us out to The Rosalind. Two sailors threw down the rope ladder. When they saw Piper, they jumped to attention, saluting him. Thomas led us toward the prow. The sailors stood in silence as they watched us pass. Their clothes were bleached by sun and salt, and they looked as battered as The Rosalind itself. Many were thin, and some had the blue-red blotching of scurvy on their arms and hands.
A group of sailors was seated by the prow, where the stump of the broken figurehead jutted at the sky. Only one of them stood as we approached.
She left the group, limping slightly as she walked toward us. At first I thought one foot was bare, though it made no sense, on the frosty deck. But as she d
rew closer I could see that the bare leg was false. Not a wooden stump, such as I’d seen often enough. Instead, it was made from a smooth, harder material with a fleshlike texture, carefully crafted to look like a foot, although it didn’t bend at the ankle when she walked.
It wasn’t the uncanny replica foot that made me stare at her. Nor was it the fact that the other sailors all wore the blue of the island’s guards, and she did not. There was something else different that I could feel: a thinness about her, an insubstantiality that I couldn’t grasp. As though she would cast no shadow.
She was solid enough—when I shook her hand, her grip was strong.
“I’m Paloma,” she said, turning from me to shake Piper’s hand. But I still couldn’t stop staring. Piper seemed oblivious—why didn’t he flinch from her as I did?
“She doesn’t have a twin,” I said. I heard the fear in my own voice. I hadn’t meant it to be so obvious. But it was as if I could see a wound on her that the others couldn’t see. She was incomplete. Half a person.
“None of us do, in the Scattered Islands,” the woman said. “I gather that you call it Elsewhere.”
Ω
Thomas and Paloma told us their story first. The Rosalind hadn’t found Elsewhere, despite a tortuous journey through the northern ice straits, farther than any other resistance ship had ever traveled. Instead, Paloma’s ship had found them.
“There used to be machines for sending and receiving messages,” she said, “even after the detonations. But no messages ever came and we never knew whether anyone was out there to hear ours. Then the communication machines stopped working altogether. So the Confederacy’s been sending out ships, almost every year, for as long as anyone can remember.”
The cadence of her voice was unlike any I’d heard before. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even within the mainland, there were variations in accents. When I’d met people from the east, close to the deadlands, their voices usually marked them as decisively as their ragged clothes or starved faces. A drawling tone, some words musically elongated. Up north, people shortened their vowels. My own father had spoken in the slightly clipped accent of the northern regions, where he’d been raised. Paloma’s accent was far stronger than any I’d encountered. It made familiar words strange, stretching them in unexpected directions.
The Refuge Song Page 36