The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  My hand on Kip’s arm tightened momentarily.

  Piper went on: “Right from the start of his ascent, he’s been pushing this radical anti-Omega agenda. More and more restrictions on our people. Policies to drive us out into settlements, and into the refuges. Then more.”

  “Is he ruling the Council now?” I was amazed at how calm I’d managed to keep my voice.

  Piper shook his head. “No. He’s too young, too extreme.” From the sheaf of maps and papers on the desk he pulled a huge sheet that looked at first glance like a family tree. It was a list of names, more than sixty, each one illustrated with a sketch, all connected by a series of arrows. He looked up at Kip. “You can read?” Kip nodded impatiently.

  Piper placed a finger at the head of the page.

  “The Judge,” I read, looking at the sketch accompanying it: an old face with a distinctive thicket of white hair.

  Piper nodded. “He’s ruled for more than a decade now; was hugely powerful, at first. But we’ve long suspected that he’s a figurehead. They need him—he’s trusted, well enough liked, even by some of our people. But he’s always been a moderate. In his early days he was against tithes, and permissive about cohabitation in the eastern regions. This new stuff isn’t coming from him.”

  “So is he just outnumbered, now, on the Council?” asked Kip.

  “Or they’ve got hold of his twin,” I said matter-of-factly.

  Piper agreed. “We think that’s probable. A man of the Judge’s convictions is unlikely to use the Keeping Rooms for his own protection. We think they’re holding his twin, manipulating him that way.”

  “And who’s ‘they’?” I asked, though I knew the answer. Piper’s finger moved down the chart now, to a cluster of names.

  “Here: the real power base, for the last few years at least. The General, the Ringmaster, the Reformer. All young, all radical.”

  I leaned in to examine the sketches next to each name. The Ringmaster’s face looked incongruously warm. Beneath his mass of curly, dark hair his eyes were welcoming, his lips carving a smile. In the sketch to the right, the General’s long pale hair was pulled back from her slim face. Her features looked exaggerated: brows arched, cheekbones sharp. Her eyes lacked the animation of the Ringmaster’s. Instead, her expression was appraising, controlled.

  Piper saw my scrutiny of the picture. “You’ve heard of her?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Everyone has.”

  “I wish I never had,” he said. “She’s as ruthless as they come. Makes the Ringmaster look like an Omega supporter in comparison.”

  Then I saw Zach’s face: the Reformer. The sketch was basic, but the artist had done a good job with Zach’s eyes: their intentness; their defensiveness.

  “Do you recognize any of these faces? Or the names—do they mean anything to either of you?”

  He shoved the paper closer to me. I was reminded of the sessions with the Confessor, with her map.

  I was careful to examine the other faces with equal care, but my mind, and my eyes, kept returning to the Reformer. How awful, I thought, to have to hide like that, to construct a persona and maintain it always.

  “I’ve heard of these two,” I said, carefully keeping my voice even. “The Ringmaster and the Reformer. We were told about them in New Hobart.”

  Then I saw it. This sketch wasn’t linked to the treelike hierarchy of the others. The name and image floated to the left of the page, blank parchment around it. Piper followed my gaze to the sketch, the grinning, calm visage.

  “I wondered when you’d notice her. The Confessor. Your old friend.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I couldn’t look away from the sketch. It was remarkable how those few skillful lines of ink could bring it back: the terrible intimacy of those sessions in the Keeping Rooms. The probing of my mind.

  Piper continued. “She came on the scene about six years ago, recruited by the Reformer, we think.”

  “Why does she work for them?” asked Kip.

  “I know it seems perverse, that she’d work for those who’d rid themselves entirely of people like her. People like us,” Piper said. “But she works with them, I think, rather than for them. She’s powerful—they recognize that, I think, by using her as they do. She’s no pawn.”

  I watched his finger lingering by the Confessor’s sketched face and remembered the current of fear in Zach’s voice when he spoke of her. “I can see why they need her. I’ve seen her power,” I said. “But what does she need from them? Like Kip said, why does she do it?”

  Piper laughed. “You think all Omegas are good? That they all work for the improvement of humanity? That no Omega can be bought, for the price of gold, or power, or security?”

  I met his gaze. “What about Alphas then? Do you think they’re all evil?”

  He ignored me, looked back at the sheet, then jabbed once again at the sketch of Zach, so forcefully that I had to suppress the impulse to wince.

  “All our sources bring us the same news—the Reformer’s the key. The General’s scary, in her own way, and the Ringmaster’s always been anti-Omega, but the Reformer’s the one driving this new agenda. We don’t know for sure that it’s him holding the Judge’s twin, but it’s him calling the shots.”

  While I did my best to avert my gaze from the sketch of Zach, I saw Kip’s eyes straying back there, squinting attentively. Piper noticed, too.

  “He’s the one, Kip. Just over five years ago, after his position on the Council was consolidated and he had the Confessor working with him, our people began to disappear. Not just the twins of Councilors, but in huge numbers. People like you.”

  Kip looked up sharply. “Insignificant people, you mean?”

  “I mean people who don’t have a direct link to the Council. There’s a chance, of course, that your twin could be related to the Council. But that doesn’t narrow it down as much as you’d think. There are several hundred Councilors, almost half of them women. Then factor in other Alpha women the Councilors might value enough to protect: wives, daughters, advisers, friends. Any of those might ultimately have their Omegas tanked. But it’s more likely that you have no link to the Council. That you’re one of the many they’ve taken for their experiments: Omegas of no perceived value.”

  “No perceived value,” repeated Kip.

  “From the Council’s perspective, that’s exactly what it is,” said Piper impatiently. “Experimental subjects, usually young, who pose no risk to the Council if it goes wrong.”

  “If they’re killed, you mean. You don’t need to sugarcoat it for us,” I said. “I’ve seen the tanks, and Kip’s been in them. We’ve seen the bones in the grotto below.”

  Piper nodded. “It’s hard to keep track, given the thousands they’ve taken, but we’ve had hundreds of confirmed accounts of deaths. Of the Omegas taken for the experiments, so many of their Alpha twins have died suddenly that even the Alphas are starting to ask questions.” He looked at Kip. “You survived. You might be luckier than you realize.”

  “I can’t think why I haven’t been more grateful,” said Kip.

  “But none of this answers the big question,” I pointed out. “All this stuff about how the Council’s treating us—it still doesn’t make sense. What do they gain from treating us like that, driving us to the point of starvation? Their lives depend on us. It’s the one unchangeable thing.”

  “That’s the blessing and the curse,” Piper said. “The link is our only protection, but it’s also what makes Omegas complacent. It’s why we struggle to recruit people to the resistance: they know the Council could never really let us come to any serious harm. Even when things have got so much worse, these last few years, we’ve always known that the Alphas depended on us too much to see us starve to death. The refuges are seen as testament to that. Much as people hate to hand themselves in, to relinquish control over their own lives, the refuges are a safety net—and the recent expansions have reassured people. Nobody’s stupid enough to swallow the Council line that the
refuges are an act of charity. But even though they’re clearly driven by Alpha self-interest, the refuges are an acknowledgment that there has to be a limit to what they can do to us. A line they can’t cross.”

  “Seems to me they’re crossing that line pretty emphatically now,” said Kip.

  “But why?” I said. “Why now? What’s changed?”

  “For a while we thought they might be trying to break the link between twins,” Piper said. “There’ve been rumors about that for as long as I can remember: breeding programs, experiments, anything to try to produce children that weren’t linked. But nobody’s ever succeeded. For the Councilors, at least, tanking their twins offers the next best thing.”

  I nodded, but I was distracted. “What did you say before—about the expansions of the refuges? You said something about it the other day, too. On the terrace.”

  “It’s not enough to account for the numbers needing them,” said Piper dismissively. “Nowhere near. See for yourself.” He flicked through the sheaf of papers on the table, finally laying a map on top of the others. It was on a much larger scale than the coastal maps he’d shown me previously. This one showed a cluster of buildings and fields, all enclosed by a double fence.

  “This is Refuge One, just south of Wyndham.” His hand hovered above the right-hand side of the map, where a mass of buildings surrounded one huge rectangular building half as big as the rest of the camp itself. “That whole complex there, it’s all new—they started building it last year. Same thing reported at all the refuges we’ve been able to monitor. But the new buildings are still nowhere near enough to accommodate the increase in people turning themselves in. We’re talking about thousands of people. These new barracks are big, but not enough for thousands of people to live in.”

  “Why would they want to take on responsibility for so many of us?” said Kip. “It’d be simpler, and probably cheaper, for the Council just to make it easier for us to survive outside of the refuges.”

  “Unquestionably. But there’s something to be said for a captive population, in terms of control.”

  “No,” I interrupted Piper. “I mean, you’re right, but it goes beyond that.” I thought of what Mom had said about Zach when she came to warn me at the settlement: he’s ambitious. And I heard Zach’s words to me on the ramparts: I’ve started something, and I need to finish it. I remembered, too, his words to me all those years ago, when Alice and Dad were dying: Why can’t you do something? I saw it, now: Zach’s attempt, in his own sick way, to “do something” about the fatal bond between twins. I looked down again at the map of the refuge, and that huge new building.

  “You said the new buildings aren’t big enough for thousands of people to live in. But they don’t want us living. They just want us alive.”

  “Is there a difference?” said Piper.

  “Now there is—thanks to the tanks.” When I closed my eyes it played out before me. First a single tank, like the ones I’d seen so many times before. But then my vision drew back, and the farther away from the tank I was, the more I saw: row upon row of tanks, dwarfing the tank room where I’d found Kip. They were all empty. They were all waiting.

  I took a long breath, wondering if my idea would sound ridiculous once I’d committed it to syllables.

  “They want us all in the tanks, eventually. Every Omega.”

  The easy smile that was Piper’s habitual expression was entirely gone. He stood up. “You’re sure?”

  “They’re going to push it as far as they can,” I said. “You said it yourself: they’ve been trying to break the link between twins. If they can’t do that, this is their next best option. Think about it: a world of Alphas, physically perfect, living their unblemished lives, until they die of old age on a feather bed.”

  “They couldn’t,” said Kip.

  “I’m not saying it’d be easy,” I said. “Or that they’re capable of it yet. But what if that’s their goal? A population of Omegas all neatly classified, documented, and ultimately tanked.”

  “And the refuges,” Piper said. “They’re not even workhouses now—just collection centers for the tanks.”

  I nodded. “If they’re not yet, they will be.”

  “All Omegas?” said Kip. “Could they really be aiming for that?”

  I felt ashamed for Zach, even admitting it to myself, let alone voicing it. But I also knew it was true. “It’s the only thing that makes sense of how they’re treating us. They’ll tank us from birth, if they can. Imagine it—just getting rid of us from the start. An Alpha world.”

  Kip grimaced. I knew that we were remembering the same thing: the tiny skull on the floor of the grotto, picked clean by water and years. And the babies taken from Elsa.

  “They’ve already started trying,” I said.

  Piper swept the papers to the floor.

  “If you’re right, it changes everything. All this time, we’ve had a false sense of security. Even with all these creeping ‘reforms,’ we thought they could never let it get to the point that we were actually endangered. But what you’ve told us—it removes the whole idea of codependence. Any sense of mutual obligation is erased. There’s no limit to the Council now. If their goal is all of us in tanks, I don’t think they’re even concerned that some of us are dying under the current regime. Before, it would have been a disaster, unsustainable. Now, they’ll just see that as a short-term side effect of the plan: oppress us, and even if a few die in the process it’s only a short-term problem.”

  I nodded. “But it’s not just a side effect, the way they’re treating Omegas now. It’s part of the plan: the more oppressed we are—the more starved, weakened, dispirited, the more who turn themselves in to the refuges—the easier it is for them to tank us.”

  Piper sent for me the next day, but the watchman bearing the message told me to go to the tower instead of the Assembly Hall. When I reached the top of the winding stairs, he was standing at the low battlement that ringed the huge, circular space, looking down over the city. He didn’t turn, but must have heard my footsteps.

  “It’s a nice view from up here, but it’s pointless, defensively,” he said. “It looks over the city, not the ocean. By the time any invader reaches the city, it’s already over. Whoever built this place knew that secrecy was the best defense. Even from within the reef, there’re no signs of habitation, not until they penetrate the harbor. I don’t know why they bothered with a tower at all, let alone battlements, other than to make themselves feel important.”

  “But you seem to like it up here.”

  He shrugged, still with his back to me. “It’s quiet. And I like seeing the city itself—everything we’ve achieved.”

  I was reluctant to step away from the stairs and join him—the memory of those precarious minutes on the ramparts at Wyndham was still too raw. But he turned and ushered me forward, so I came to stand by him. We looked down together at the steep city, diligent with movement. His hand on the wall, close to where my hands rested, was broad, the fingers strong. My skin had browned in the months since the Keeping Rooms but was still nowhere near as richly burnished as Piper’s.

  I broke the silence. “Why did you send for me? Is it about what I told you yesterday?”

  He nodded. “In part. The Assembly met for most of the night to discuss it. Some don’t believe it; others are convinced.”

  “And you?”

  “I wish I didn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s so huge that it seems implausible. But the way they’ve been treating us, these last few years—that’s even more implausible. Until you told us about the tanks. If that’s their endgame, then it all makes sense.

  “It’s perfect, in a way. They just keep raising the tithes, which drive us to starvation, and eventually to the refuges, but it also pays for what they’re doing. The new buildings at the refuges, and the development of the tanks—Omegas paid for all that, with the same tithes that will eventually drive them to the tanks themselves. We’re paying for the tanks, and eventually we’ll
even hand ourselves in.”

  I could admire it, the same way I could admire Zach’s cunning when he exposed me back in the village. There was a horrible simplicity to it.

  “What’s your Assembly going to do about it?”

  “That’s what we were trying to decide last night,” he said. “Spread word to avoid the refuges, at any cost. That’ll be the first step. But even that’s easier said than done. People don’t go to the refuges lightly. And if people are starving enough, desperate enough, it’ll be hard to warn them away, unless we can offer them an alternative.”

  “And can you?”

  “We can offer them this.” He gestured at the island below us. “Barely big enough to support our current numbers. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve been self-sufficient enough to stop shipping food in. And now this place is under threat, if the Confessor’s focusing on us as you say. I can’t stop thinking about her, what it would mean for us if she finds the island.”

  “Then you know how I feel most of the time,” I said. “I can never stop thinking about her, ever since we got away. She’s looking for me.”

  “You can feel it?”

  I nodded. Even here, standing beside him in the island’s clear light, I could feel her hunting. The scrutiny of her mind, insidious as unwanted hands on flesh. “All the time. It’s worse even than when she used to interrogate me.”

  “And you don’t know why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I got away.”

  He smiled, shook his head as he turned to face me. “You think she’s after you just because you got away? You think if anyone else escaped from the Keeping Rooms that it would be such a problem for them? You have no idea what you’re worth.”

  “Worth? I’m not for sale at market. And if you think I’m worth so much, stop patronizing me.”

  He looked at me carefully. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that I’m always slightly taken aback by you—by how much you underestimate your own powers. Think of the Confessor’s value to the Council, the threat she poses to us. They’ve been hunting us ever since the first Omegas discovered the island—more than a century ago. But they can’t trawl every inch of ocean. Now, though, with her, they don’t need to. She’ll find us, eventually, just like you did.”