I told him about the Confessor, but it was clear that he’d already heard of her. “She’s a formidable character, by all accounts. I wish we could have got to her before the Council did.”
“Trust me,” I said. “You wouldn’t want her on your side.”
“Perhaps not. But I’m not sure I want her on theirs, either—that’s the problem.”
I told him about the moment I’d tried to fight back and had snatched a glimpse inside her own mind. The huge chamber, bedecked with wires, that I’d seen there, and her furious response.
“It wasn’t some other part of the tank room?”
“No. Completely different.” I pictured it again—the sinuous climbing of the wires around the metal casings and up the curved walls. It wasn’t only that the chamber had looked unlike anything else I’d seen. It was the rage of her response, dagger-fast and sharp. Whatever it was that I’d seen, it was important to her.
When we reached our escape from New Hobart, and told him about the hanging cage outside the marsh settlement, he only nodded.
“You’re not surprised?” Kip demanded.
“I wish I were. One of our own ships returned two days ago, with the same news.”
“They’d been to the same settlement?” It seemed an unlikely coincidence, given the vast expanse of marshland, where the only people we’d glimpsed had been the mounted soldiers.
Piper shook his head. “No. Our scouts had been north of New Hobart.” Nausea blossomed in me as he paused. I knew what was coming. “Two settlements there, and another closer to the coast. Soldiers rode through there as well. One person was whipped at each. They didn’t even bother to trump up charges as they usually do—just checked their registration cards, to make sure they weren’t twinned with anyone important. Then whipped them, and made sure they were displayed for all to see.”
He must have seen the horror in our faces.
“It might have been intended for you,” he said bluntly. “I’m not going to offer you any false comfort. But reports reached us, too, of an uprising in New Hobart, after the Council began to seal the town.” I thought of Elsa, and Nina. “It didn’t amount to much—nothing more than stones thrown, and marching and shouting—but even that kind of thing is unprecedented. There are lots of reasons why the Council might be trying to make an example of people right now.”
I pictured the small settlement where Kip and I had sneaked close to the barn and danced to the bards’ music. Did a cage now swing from a gibbet there as well? I was too aware of the blood in my veins. It dragged like gravel. I wanted to reach for Kip’s hand, but even the consolation of touch was more than I was able to grant myself. There was horror in Kip’s face that I’d never seen before, not even as we sprinted from the fire, or battled the encroaching water of the reef.
Only after Piper prompted us were we able to continue. I could hardly hear my own words. I felt as though I were speaking over the sound of the gibbet’s chain, creaking in my mind.
Piper was particularly attentive when we described our journey to the island. When we told him it had taken us two nights and two days, he’d nodded. “Longer than usual, then, by a good twenty hours. But that’s for experienced sailors, on the most direct route from the mainland and through the reef. And we’d never make the crossing in a boat so small.”
He asked me to try drawing a map, but after several false starts I pushed the paper away. “I can’t see it that way—it doesn’t just come like that.”
“Try again. You made the journey recently, you must remember it.” Piper pushed the paper back across the table toward me.
Kip placed his hand firmly on the paper. “Enough—give it a rest. You have maps, anyway—your people must have.”
“Of course,” said Piper. “We have maps, though we guard them carefully. But no one ever made it here without one. Not even the seers. We’ve had two on the island, but they were brought here. Neither found their own way.”
“Lucky me,” I said. “I made it all this way, only to be interrogated again.”
Piper didn’t acknowledge the anger in my voice, though he did reach out and draw the paper back toward him. “You two need to understand. Our location is the one thing that protects this island. They’ve known for a long time that we have a stronghold somewhere. Our rescues have been concentrated largely in the west, because that’s what we can access most easily—so the Council must know we’re off the west coast. But that’s more than six hundred miles of coastline. What Cass has told me, about the Confessor, suggests they’ve narrowed it down. But the distance, the reef, the crater, they’re our main defenses. No one sets foot on this island who hasn’t been brought here. Until you.”
Kip stood up. “So you think we’re a threat?”
Piper stood up, too, but only to walk over to the cabinet on the side wall and retrieve a key that hung beneath the mirror.
“No. I think you’re a gift. I think you may be the most powerful weapon we have.” He was looking at me now. “I have to go, to talk to the Assembly, tell them what you’ve told me. We’ll talk again soon. For now, take this.” He handed me the key. “It’s the gate to the fort. My guards will show you to your lodgings.” He turned to Kip, reached out his arm. They shook hands. Despite the difference in their sizes, I was struck by the symmetry of the movement.
On the way out, I paused at the door. “Your predecessor—the fancy-chair guy. What happened to him?”
Piper looked straight at me. “I killed him. He was a traitor—charging refugees money for safe harbor here. Planning to betray the island to Alphas.”
“And his twin?”
This time Piper didn’t even lift his gaze from the maps laid out on the table before him. “I killed her, too, I suppose.”
chapter 19
The next morning, as we finished the bread that had been brought to us for breakfast, a watchwoman leaned into the open door of our room. “Piper wants you in the Assembly Hall.” But when Kip and I both headed for the door, she spoke again. “Only her.”
The large hall, nearly empty the previous day, was busy now. Rumors of our arrival had obviously spread; as I made my way through the clusters of people, some pointed, while others just stared. I caught snatches of their not-quite-whispered conversations: found us herself—seer—no map—so she claims.
I found Piper at the same table as before. He waved away the woman he’d been speaking to and ushered me to sit.
There were no preliminaries. “The tanks,” he said. “How could it work? How can the Council members keep their Omega twins unconscious, and keep functioning themselves?”
“They’re not unconscious. Not the way somebody is after a blow to the head.” I struggled to make words fit what I’d witnessed in the tank room. The liminal state that those people had occupied. “Somehow the Council’s found a way, using the machines, to keep them in a suspended state. Not sleep, but not death, either. I think that’s what was so awful about the place. Worse than death, because of the way they’re still there in some way. Stuck.”
I couldn’t explain it properly. A few times, diving for mussels in the river with Zach, I’d dived too deep, or stayed too long wrestling a stubborn mussel from a rock. That moment, swimming for the surface, when you realize you’re almost out of air, and the light above seems impossibly far away, was where the tanked bodies were trapped. In the tanks, the limbo of that moment was drawn out forever. And I remembered what Zach had said to me, on one of the nights when Mom and Dad were arguing about us downstairs: You’re the problem, Cass. You’re the reason we’re stuck in this limbo.
When Piper spoke again, I was glad to have my thoughts of Zach interrupted. It felt safer to keep Zach out of my mind, tucked away where our link could not be exposed. If Piper found out who my twin was, I knew it could be used against me.
“But apart from Kip, you didn’t see any movements?” he asked. “Any sign of consciousness?”
“A few had their eyes open,” I said. “But he was the only one w
ho was alert. His eyes moved. But I could feel the others—all of them.”
“If what you’re saying is true—”
“It is.”
He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t disguise the fact that he was appraising me, his brown eyes scanning my face intently. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think it is. Then it confirms our worst fears about the Council, and what they’re willing to do.”
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled, the lines at the outer edges of his eyes deepening. His face slipped easily into happiness, like a waterbird launching onto a lake. Even midsmile, however, he was purposeful.
“Sorry because you bring bad news? Or sorry because your twin is involved?”
I looked away, but his gaze didn’t budge. Eventually I turned back to face him.
“You still haven’t asked me who he is.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would you tell me if I did?”
“No.”
“Exactly. I’m not in the habit of wasting my time.” He wasn’t menacing, only matter-of-fact. He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “We know he’s in the Council. We know you’re afraid to tell us who he is. We will find out.”
Where I might have expected anger, again I felt only exhaustion. Even here, on the island that had occupied my dreams for years, Zach could still jeopardize everything.
“We came here seeking shelter,” I said. “Just like all the other Omegas who come here. Shouldn’t this island be the one place where my twin can’t be used against me?”
“I wish it could be,” said Piper. I looked at his face, and I believed him. “But you changed the island, the moment you arrived. The way you came, and the news that you bring—those things have consequences, for every person on this island.”
Poison, I thought. It was just as Zach used to say, back in the village: You’re poison. Everything you touch is contaminated.
“I’m beginning to feel like your maid.” Kip handed me a chunk of bread and resumed his perch on the windowsill, where he’d been waiting for me.
“You’re too messy to be any good as a maid,” I said, pointing at his unmade bed as I joined him on the broad stone ledge. We sat facing each other, our backs against the sides of the window, our feet just touching.
“You know what I mean. You’re off in council all day with Piper and the Assembly, I’m hanging around here like some kind of sidekick.” He leaned his head back against the window. “How was it?”
It had been three days since our first meeting with Piper, and I’d been summoned every day. Kip, however, was never sent for. The mornings we spent together, but every afternoon the guards found us and told me to go to the Hall. “Just her,” they said, each time. On the third day he’d tried to accompany me, and the guards had turned him back at the door of the Assembly Hall. They weren’t rough, just dismissive. “You haven’t been sent for,” the older guard had said, stepping in his path.
“I’d like him to come with me,” I said.
“Piper didn’t send for him,” the guard repeated blandly, closing the door in Kip’s face.
When I asked Piper why Kip couldn’t join us, he’d just raised an eyebrow. “He doesn’t know his own name, Cass. What could he tell me?”
So while I was cloistered with Piper and the other Assembly members, Kip spent the afternoons exploring the island. When I returned each night he’d tell me of the things he’d seen. The old boat, carried up piece by piece from the harbor and reassembled on the western tip of the city for the children to play at being sailors. The lookout posts concealed at the top of the crater and manned night and day. The house at the outskirts of the city where an old woman had shown him the six beehives on her balcony, shimmering with noise. But though he told me what he’d seen each day, he was more eager to hear what I’d discussed with Piper and the Assembly.
“Don’t get the impression that they’re not interested in you,” I told him. “Half the time that’s what they ask about.”
“Then why don’t they ask me? I feel like I’m begging for scraps, just hanging around all day and then getting leftover bits of news from you. If they want to know about me, why not ask me themselves?”
“What could you tell them?” I winced to hear myself echoing Piper’s phrase.
“What can you tell them? If you’ve had any breakthroughs about my past, I’d love to hear about them.”
I kicked him lightly. “Don’t be a chump. They just want to know how I knew about you—you and the others. The visions I had, of the chamber. All that stuff I’ve already told you.”
“So you don’t think it’s just an excuse for him to spend time with you?”
I laughed. “In the intimate, romantic setting of the Assembly Hall, with all his Assembly there, too?”
“That’s one way of making himself look impressive.”
“Come on.” Jumping back down into the room, I waited for him to follow. “Let’s go out—you still haven’t shown me the western side. And there’s a market there tonight, Piper said.”
“Did you point out that we haven’t got any money?”
“I didn’t need to.” I pulled a small purse of coins from my pocket. “From Piper. For both of us.”
“Now I’m impressed,” said Kip.
I tossed him the bag. “Doesn’t take much to buy your loyalty.”
“For another few coins I’d even wear one of his fetching blue uniforms.”
From our quarters above the courtyard it was only a short walk to the market. The watchmen knew us now, nodded and held back the gate as we left the fort.
Watching Kip in the streets, I was reminded of how he’d always been eager for noise; how he’d thrown open the shutters at New Hobart and relished the busy street sounds. For the first days after I’d released him from the tank, I’d noticed him shaking his head to each side, probing his ears with his little finger, convinced that there were still traces of that viscous liquid trapped there. He seemed to associate silence with the tank, and with the greater silence of his past. Since we arrived on the island, I’d complained of the city’s noise keeping me awake at night. Kip, however, relished it. He’d sit on the windowsill, eyes closed, absorbed in the noises of island life: the watchmen’s footsteps in the gravel courtyard, and above, on the stone of the parapet. The pigeons that clustered and heckled on the windowsill. The clatter of donkeys on the flagstones, and the chants of children.
Watching him grinning as we made our way to the market, I couldn’t begrudge him the din. We followed the noise: the cries of the stallholders trading cloth, cantaloupes, onions. The children shouting as they ran among the legs of the crowd. Even the sounds of livestock: pigs corralled into flimsy pens, chickens in cages hanging from pegs on the stone walls. In the city, because of the steep walls of the crater, dawn came late and sunset came early. For all but the middle of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, the streets were shielded from the heat. Now, in the early evening, the darkening sky was warmed by the lambent glow of the torches in brackets, and candles in windows. A goat was tethered in a tiny patch of grass between two houses, chewing mournfully.
“Piper says the animals are a nightmare,” I told Kip. “Getting them out here on the boats is tough. And they’re less efficient for food than just growing crops, especially in such a tight space. But people really want them here, just because we’re not allowed to have animals on the mainland.”
“I’m not sure that secret goat-farming is the most effective show of defiance.”
“He said a goat got loose on a boat once, on the way out here, and they just about capsized trying to rescue it.”
“I thought all these private meetings with you every day were high-level strategy, not a chance for him to impress you with his amusing goat anecdotes.”
“Yes, because the man who runs this island, and the whole Omega resistance, needs to rely on his goat anecdotes to impress me.”
He rolled his eyes as he took my arm in his.
All along the street
the market flaunted its wares. We bought two plums, their skin such a deep purple that it was tinted black. “I’ve never tasted one of these before,” I said, biting into the fat flesh.
Kip grinned. “Welcome to my world.”
“But it can’t really be new to you, can it? You know most stuff, really. What things are, how to read, how to tie your shoelaces. It’s not like a child, actually seeing things for the first time.”
He paused to examine a table displaying small wooden boxes. Removing a lid, he admired how neatly it fitted when he put it back on. “Yeah—but that makes it weirder, in a way, not easier. That I know how to aim for the pisspot, but don’t know my own name.”
“You have a name now.”
“Sure,” he said. “And it’s a nice name. But you know what I mean.”
We’d reached the end of the market now and sat on a stone bench that looked back along the bustling square.
“When I remember my past,” I said, “it’s mainly Zach I remember. I can almost imagine not remembering other things, but I can’t imagine not remembering your twin. Because they’re part of you, really.”
“The Alphas don’t exactly see it that way.”
“They must, I think. They wouldn’t be so afraid of us if they didn’t know, really, how much like them we are.”
“Afraid of us? You’ve got to be joking. That’s why we’re hiding here? And all these people, too?” He gestured back toward the market’s throng. “The Alphas must be cowering in terror, with their big army, their forts, their Council.”
“They wouldn’t be so desperate to find the island if they weren’t afraid of it.” I remembered once more the Confessor’s insistence on asking me, again and again, about the island. The jabbing of her finger on the maps; the probing of her mind.
The Fire Sermon Page 20