The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  Kip looked around. “Why, though? For all his posturing and his uniformed watchmen, Piper’s hardly a threat to the Council. What’s he going to do: march on Wyndham with his gang of one-armed soldiers?”

  “He doesn’t need to. It’s enough that the island’s here. I’m sure the Council’s got practical concerns, like getting no tithes or registrations from those who make it out here. But that’s not the real issue—it never will be. What really worries them is the fact that this place is beyond their control.” I remembered what Alice had said to me, before she died. “It’s the idea of the island, as much as the actual island.”

  “The actual island is enough for me,” he said, leaning back and grinning as he looked up at the soaring crater’s edge, cupping the horizon.

  I looked up, too, mirroring the angle of his head. “I know. Even though I’d seen it so many times in visions, it’s different really being here. Feeling part of it.”

  “You do, then? Feel part of it, I mean.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I want to believe that I am.” He spat out his plum stone, watched it settle in a gap between cobbles. “To believe we could stay here.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “I find it hard to be sure of anything. And the way Piper ignores me isn’t exactly reassuring. It’s like they all think that after what happened to me, I’m nothing. Like I don’t count.”

  I surveyed his face. The straight, narrow nose, tilting slightly up at the end; the cheekbones and jaw sharply defined. Every angle of his face had become so intimately known to me. It was easy to forget how unfamiliar he must be to himself, without the anchoring of his past or, above all, his twin.

  “I can’t get my head around how strange it must be for you—the twin thing most of all. How lonely.”

  “More lonely than having a twin like yours? Who’d expose you, hurt you, have you locked up? Seems to me it’s a pretty lucky kind of loneliness to have.”

  “But you must think about her,” I said. “You must wonder who she is.”

  “Not knowing about my twin is probably the only normal thing about me. Your experience is the unusual one. These days, people are split so young, all most people have of their twins is a name, the place they were born.” He was silent for a while, gazing at the crowded street, each passing body bearing its own deformity. I waited for him to speak again. “But I do wonder about her, sometimes. Mainly just about the obvious stuff, to be honest. You know the sort of thing: is she about to tumble off a cliff somewhere and take me with her? So I hope she has a safe, boring life; a safe, boring job, with no plows to get caught in, or fights to get involved with.”

  “Lots of healthy food, and early nights,” I joined in.

  “Keeping chickens for a living. Or—weaving rugs.”

  “By hand, though. No dangerous looms.”

  “Now you’re talking,” he said, turning to plant a kiss on my forehead as we walked on together through the crowd.

  The next day the sun’s glare persuaded me to skip our planned walk up to the crater’s edge. Kip left straight after breakfast, with a water flask and a pocket full of fresh figs, but I made my way to a small terrace that we’d found the day before, halfway up the tower. From decades of footsteps, the stone stairs of the tower were worn down, rounded at the edges like softened pats of butter. It was still a few hours short of noon, but out on the terrace the paving stones were already hot. When I lay down in the sun, the stones scorched the skin where my shirt had ridden up at my waist. I basked in the brightness. Since the Keeping Rooms, the sun and the open sky retained their novelty—even the hellish boat journey hadn’t destroyed the pleasure of sun on my skin. It was a pleasure, too, just to concentrate on simple bodily sensations. To step back from all the machinations and complications and to focus instead on sun on skin, skin on stone. In the Keeping Rooms, I’d had to resort to pain to keep my mind from the nightscape of my visions and fears. Now, pleasure did the same thing.

  It was the island, too, that permitted these simple joys. Even in New Hobart, where the streets had thronged with Omegas, the cringe of fear and shame was still present. At any moment a Council soldier might ride through the street, or the tithe collectors might come to remind us of our subservience. I’d seen, in Kip, how our very movements were different on the island. He had shrugged off the furtiveness, and the tentativeness, of our months on the run. I thought again of Piper himself, the unbowed cock of his head and the breadth of his shoulders. I was beginning to realize that some of the joy of being with Kip came from the island itself, and the unabashed Omega bodies that it permitted. Of all that the island had given us, this was perhaps the most unexpected: the gift of our own bodies.

  The day before, I’d found a bruise-like mark on my neck from where one of Kip’s playful bites had turned into a kiss, and then back into a bite. He’d been apologetic when the morning’s light had revealed the mark on my skin, but I’d felt oddly jubilant. My body had borne too many marks that I hadn’t chosen. The brand. The pallor of the Keeping Rooms. The scrapes, blisters, and sharpened bones of our long journey. Instead, this mark on my neck had been made in joy. Now, lying on the warmed stones, I ran my fingers over it and smiled.

  I don’t know how long I dozed there. When I felt the shadow pass across my closed eyelids, I sat up with a jerk. I was fully dressed, but there was an intimacy in the abandon with which I’d given myself over to the warmth.

  Even when backlit by the harsh sun above, Piper’s silhouette was unmistakable.

  “Sorry,” he said, stepping farther out onto the terrace. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “You didn’t,” I said, and began to stand.

  “Don’t get up.” He squatted to my level. “They told me you were up here, but I didn’t know you were sleeping.”

  “Not sleeping properly,” I said. “I don’t do much of that, anyway.”

  “The visions?”

  I nodded. He settled down beside me, cross-legged, and turned his face up to the sun.

  “I’m sleeping less, since you and Kip arrived, if that’s any consolation. The whole Assembly’s been shaken by it.”

  “Us? It’s not as if we invaded the place. We’re just two more hungry Omegas. The only difference is that we happened to find our own way out here.”

  “ ‘We’ didn’t find the way here—you did. Not Kip.”

  “We did it together.”

  “That seems to be the way with you two.” He glanced at the bruise on my neck, then changed the subject. “You have to understand—arriving unescorted, unannounced, like you did. It scares people, when this whole place is built on secrecy.”

  “It’s not me and Kip you should be worried about,” I said, “with the Confessor searching for you.” The memory of her stole the heat from the stones beneath me.

  “If only there were a limit to what I should worry about.” He sighed. “You don’t know how bad things have become, on the mainland, even in the years you were locked away.”

  “I got some idea, at New Hobart.”

  “What they did there—that’s in line with what we’ve been seeing everywhere. More restrictions targeting Omegas; higher tithes; Omega settlements sealed off. The reports we’re getting—beatings, whole settlements nearing starvation—none of it makes sense. The Council’s expanding the refuges, at least, but it’s still nonsensical. Why drive us to dependence on them? If they lowered the tithes and the unreasonable controls, we wouldn’t need the refuges, and they wouldn’t need to provide them.”

  For a moment, he looked tired.

  “So you can see why the Assembly’s nervous about your arrival. People are suspicious of seers at the best of times. And now more than ever, we need to know the island’s secure.”

  “Kip and I are hardly a threat.”

  “I’ve told you that I don’t think you are.”

  “And Kip? You don’t trust him?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about him. He doesn
’t know anything about himself.”

  “That’s not his fault.”

  “I know. But it doesn’t make him useful to me.”

  “Is that really how you see people? Useful or not useful?”

  He didn’t deny it, as some people might have done. “That’s how I have to see things. It’s my job.”

  “But what about you—outside of your job?”

  He laughed. “Maybe once there was a place where the job stopped, and I began. Now, I don’t know.”

  “But you wanted this—you chose to run for leader.”

  “I knew I could do it better than the others. I was right, too.” He rested his elbow on a raised knee, dropped his head forward to let the sun warm the skin on the back of his neck. “Once I knew that, it wasn’t really a choice.”

  We sat in silence for a while. I was so used to being alone with Kip, I’d thought it would be strange to find myself so often spending time with Piper. Whenever we were together I was sharply aware of the one great silence between us: my twin’s name. That silence sat in the center of all our conversations. It was like the crater in the island itself: everything else was constructed around it. But when we avoided that topic, it was easy to be near him. Easy to bask in his grin, and to feel safe under his commanding gaze. But as we sat there, in the companionable sun, I reminded myself of Zach, my shadow half. Of Piper’s dead predecessor. Of the knives that glinted from his belt.

  He turned to me. “And you—being a seer. Is there a place outside of it, where the visions end and you begin?”

  “It’s not a job, or a choice. Being a seer isn’t something you do. It’s who I am.”

  “Maybe it’s the same for me, now. Taking care of the island.”

  “And if it were a choice—would you choose it again?”

  “Would you choose to be a seer?”

  I didn’t have an answer to give him.

  Our quarters had separate beds, but I perched on the end of Kip’s as we talked into the night.

  “He was asking again today about my visions—what I’d seen about the island, before I came here. He didn’t ask about Zach, not directly.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’s not trying to work it out. You know that. He knows we haven’t told him everything.”

  “If he didn’t trust us, do you really think we’d have a key to the fort, be free to wander all over the island?”

  “Seems like the perfect way of keeping an eye on us,” said Kip. “This place is crawling with his guards.” I thought of what Piper had said that morning, on the terrace: They told me you were up here. Kip went on. “Plus, I’d bet my life that if we went anywhere near a boat we’d find we didn’t have such free rein after all. He likes to have you right on call for his little interrogations.”

  “You could hardly call them interrogations. We talk. He tells me things, too. If he didn’t trust us we’d be in a dungeon somewhere.”

  “Nothing we wouldn’t be used to, at least.” He reached over for the jug of wine on the table, and I held out the cups while he poured. “What does he tell you, then?”

  “Stuff about the island. The situation on the mainland, too.”

  “Anything you didn’t know already, from your visions?”

  “Loads. It’s not like that, anyway, the visions—I’ve told you already. It’s vaguer than that. It’s not like there’s a neat narrative.” I sipped the wine, sucked my top lip to clear the dark red tannin that clung to it.

  “He’s going to find out about Zach. He must already know that your twin’s important. Who else would have access to the Keeping Rooms?”

  “I know. But that still leaves hundreds, maybe more, that it could be. He doesn’t know what Zach is, exactly, what he does.” I paused. “Even I don’t know what Zach is, or what he does.”

  “You have a pretty good idea. But how long do you think you can keep it from Piper? He’ll figure it out. Council members might go by different names—but he’ll work it out. He’s not stupid.”

  “Most of the time you’re trying to convince me what a dumb thug Piper is.”

  “Don’t mess around, Cass. I may not like him, but it doesn’t mean he’s not smart. He’s going to figure it out, if he hasn’t already. Sooner or later he’s going to realize your twin’s behind all of it—the stuff they did to me, and the others in the tanks. Then what?”

  “You want me to walk up there and tell Piper I’m Zach’s twin and let him get rid of us both? Will that make you feel better about what happened to you?”

  “I don’t even know what happened to me.” He realized he was shouting, reverted to a whisper. “I just don’t want Piper to have that over you. They’ll use you to get at Zach. You know that.”

  “I don’t know that, and nor do you.”

  “So why haven’t you told him, then?”

  I slumped back against the wall, staring fixedly at my feet hanging over the side of the bed. He leaned back next to me but not touching. I lolled my head to the side to look at him.

  “Don’t you get exhausted by it—never trusting people?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I trust Piper,” he said. “Zach’s your twin, it’s your decision. I just worry for you. You always want to believe the best of people. Look what happened with Zach, even after your mom warned you.”

  “If I hadn’t trusted Zach, and ended up in the Keeping Rooms, I’d never have found the tanks. I’d never have gotten you out.”

  He laughed. “Only you could see four years in a cell as an endorsement of your trusting attitude.” He took my hand. I pulled our clasped hands closer to me, slowly kissed each of his long fingers.

  “So what are you going to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I get the feeling it might not even be up to me.” I sighed. “I think you’re right about Piper. Not that we can’t trust him, necessarily, but that he’s smart.”

  chapter 20

  The next day Piper sent for us both. “About time,” Kip grumbled, but I could tell he was glad not to be left behind. It was early afternoon, and the Assembly Hall was busy: watchmen came and left, sometimes reporting to the members of the Assembly gathered around the foot of the dais with the empty chair. As was often the case, Piper stood slightly apart from the main group. He was deep in conversation with Simon, one of the Assemblymen. He was twice Piper’s age, and gray hair had settled in around his temples. A third arm hung beneath his right arm, something that contributed to his reputation as a fearsome fighter. He shared the same vitality as Piper. Many times when I’d been summoned, I’d arrived to find them talking, the older man not hesitating to debate forcefully with him. I guessed that this was why Piper preferred Simon’s company to that of the more deferential members of the Assembly. Once or twice I’d found the two men in a heated exchange, gesticulating and interrupting each other as they bent over maps or papers, but they always parted amicably, Simon gathering his papers and leaving with a polite nod to me.

  This time, when Simon stepped aside, Piper ushered us to a table on the far side of the Hall, beneath the stained-glass windows, where we couldn’t be overheard. He poured us each a small glass of wine, invited us to sit.

  “You’ve been patient with us, all these summonses, all these questions,” he said. “The Assembly and I wouldn’t keep bothering you, if it weren’t crucial.”

  “Not crucial enough to bother me for, evidently,” said Kip.

  Piper ignored him. “Things have been changing. The information you brought was new to us, but it seems to confirm what we’d already observed. A new mood, originating from the Council. It started with the drought years—when people are hungry, desperate, they’re quicker to turn on one another, and the Council exploited that, playing up anti-Omega sentiment. Things have been getting steadily worse for us since then, but in the last few years, it’s been dramatic. Tithe increases and other reforms led by the General: more and more Omega settlements being moved from fertile land, or cast out from Alpha areas. Villages out east, where Omegas had
stayed till five, six, or even longer, now sending them off to settlements as toddlers. Raids on settlements, crops stolen or burned. What seems to be a concerted effort to drive Omegas to the refuges. Of course, I’ve already told Cass this.”

  “And she’s told me,” Kip said pointedly.

  Piper continued. “Then we started hearing rumors of something more: our people being taken, being used strategically by their twins, or their twins’ enemies.”

  “The Keeping Rooms,” I murmured.

  “Yes. And not only being used by the Councilors themselves. There were several reports of wealthy Alphas, unconnected to the Council, paying to have their twin imprisoned there, for ‘safekeeping.’ ”

  How many were still there, I wondered, still stuck in cells like my own?

  “Then it got worse,” Piper said. “About five years ago, the Council started getting serious about registrations—insisting on keeping track of us at all times.”

  “There’s a reason they’re enforcing the registrations so strictly,” I said, remembering the man being whipped at New Hobart. “It’s all part of using the link between twins to manipulate us—they use that information to decide who’s disposable, and who they can use. I don’t know how they keep track of it all, but it underlies a lot of what they do.”

  Piper nodded. “I agree. But the registrations were only the start. Other reports started coming in, from all over: that Omegas who went to the refuges never came out. And we started to pick up rumors of missing children. Experiments. Even the settlements and the Keeping Rooms weren’t enough, it seems.”

  Kip pushed his chair back loudly. “We already told you this—gave you all the details, not just rumors.”

  I placed a hand on Kip’s arm as Piper replied.

  “You did. The details you’ve brought have been invaluable. And it’s confirmed our suspicions about the shift in attitude in the Alpha Council, the shift that we’d seen coming.”

  “You saw it coming?” said Kip. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “We didn’t know exactly what was going on. But we did know about a new power in the Council chamber, rivaling even the General. A young Alpha. Started young, but rose quickly. Went by the name the Reformer.”