The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  “I’m not like her.”

  “You keep saying that. And I do understand what you mean. But if you recognized what you’re capable of, you could be the one real threat to them. Think of everything you’ve achieved already.”

  “Achieved? All we’ve done is manage not to get caught yet.”

  He had a way of looking directly in my eyes that was disconcerting. “You resisted the interrogations of the Confessor, for four years. You escaped from the Keeping Rooms. You found out about the tanks and, even more, found them yourself and got somebody out alive. You escaped the sealing of New Hobart, and delayed it by burning down half the forest. You found your way to a place that has depended on complete secrecy and the impenetrable reef for the last hundred years, and warned us of the Council’s master plan to tank us all.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Seems to me you’ve done quite enough to keep them on their toes.”

  “But all that stuff just happened. I didn’t plan it, as part of some strike against the Council. I wasn’t thinking about the resistance. Until I got here, I didn’t even know for sure that there was a real Omega resistance.”

  “But now you do know. So the question is what you can do for the resistance. Starting with telling me who your twin is.”

  I didn’t speak for a while. The sounds of the city wafted up to us. Below the city’s sprawl, in the hollow at the base of the crater, the lake nestled. Around the lake, and on the side of the crater opposite the city, the fields of wheat and maize had been harvested and were humped with bales of hay. In the city itself, even on the busiest streets, the roofs, windowsills, and tiny, steeply terraced gardens were clustered with pumpkins, tomatoes, spinach.

  “Are there any other seers here, now?” I asked.

  “Not now. We’ve had two. Both useful in different ways. One we got to before he was split, before branding. That’s made him invaluable for undercover work on the mainland. There are a few other Omegas who can pass for Alpha at a glance: the less visible mutations, which can be hidden by clothing. But none as convincing as seers.

  “The other was branded, so she couldn’t go undercover. Her powers weren’t quite like yours, I think—she could never have found her own way out here. But she was handy in planning the rescue trips. She helped with locating newborns, or others in need of refuge, or warning us of Council patrols near the coast. But, for the last year or so, she was half-mad.” Most people avoided this topic around me, or retreated into euphemisms: not quite stable, they’d say, or you know how it can be, with some seers. But Piper was as direct as ever. “The visions were too much for her. She didn’t know what was real anymore, I think.”

  I remembered those final months in the Keeping Rooms, taunted by my visions of the tanks, and by the Confessor’s probing. How I’d felt my mind giving up on me.

  “You talk about her in the past tense,” I said. “Did the Council get hold of her?”

  He shook his head. “No. A ship went down, in heavy seas, on the way back from the mainland. We lost ten people that day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It happens. It’s the price we pay for this location.”

  “There you go again: price, worth. Like we can calculate the value of lives.”

  “Can’t we?” Again, that penetrating stare. “It’s my job. To do whatever will benefit the most of our people.”

  I stepped back, away from the battlement, and from him. “That’s the problem with you: ‘our people.’ That’s why I can’t tell you who my twin is. You don’t get it, any more than the Council does.” At the top of the stairs, I turned back to him. “Twenty people died when that ship went down, not ten.”

  As I began to descend, I was hoping to hear the sounds of him following, or calling after me. But I was followed only by the sound of my own footsteps.

  In the week that followed, Piper continued to summon me daily. He made no mention of the argument on the tower. His questions were specific, detailed: the layout of the Keeping Rooms. The secret caves and tunnels under Wyndham. He got me to draw the tanks, every feature I could remember. He asked about the bones I’d seen at the bottom of the grotto pool. Often we were joined by members of his Assembly, with their own questions. The maps the Confessor showed me: how detailed were they, and which areas had they covered? The soldiers I’d seen at New Hobart: their numbers, their weapons, the proportion that were mounted. I answered all the questions except the one Piper returned to most often: my twin.

  About ten days after our arrival he sent for us both again.

  “Good news,” he said, when we were ushered into the huge Assembly Hall, empty for once except for Piper. “I thought you’d both want to know.” There were papers in front of him on the table. He swept them aside, pushed his chair back slightly as we sat down. “We can take him out. The Reformer. We have a source in the Council Halls, watching him for a long time now.”

  “One of us?”

  “One like you,” replied Piper, turning to me. “The seer I told you about—the unbranded one. He’s seventeen, now, has been working to infiltrate the Council since he left here two years ago. His seer abilities have helped, of course, though at times he’s feared the Confessor might sense him.”

  “How close has he gotten?” I asked, working hard to suppress the tremble in my voice.

  “He’s a serving boy, in the private household of the General. It’s not just access to her, though—he has access to many in the Council, waits on privy meetings with the Ringmaster, the Judge, others, too.” He looked clearly at me now. “The ship that came in late last night brought a message from him. He’s starting to get access to the Reformer, too. He’s been alone with him several times now. He’s in a position to make a hit. I just have to give the word and we can have the Reformer killed.”

  Even as Piper reached for the bell at the table’s edge and rang it, even as the two guards entered, he kept his eyes fixed on me. Kip, too, was watching for my reaction. I said nothing. I felt suddenly exhausted, a physical surge of tiredness like I hadn’t felt since our arrival on the island.

  With one of his characteristically careless jerks of the head, Piper indicated the watchmen waiting attentively, just out of earshot.

  “So what do you say?” he asked me. “Do I give the order?”

  Kip turned to him. “Why ask us? You don’t care what we say.”

  Piper answered Kip but kept his gaze on me. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  chapter 21

  I slammed the door to our quarters before Kip had even reached the stairs that led up to it. He got there in time to hear the key turn on the other side.

  “I had to, Cass,” he called through the door.

  “It’s not your choice to make,” I shouted from inside. From where he stood, against the door, he would have heard the crash of the wine bottle, cups, and mirror. I threw the lamp against the door; its metal base bounced toward me while the glass shattered.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  He was answered by another crash, as I kicked over the small table between the beds.

  “You think you’re a big hero?” I yelled. “Jumping in and telling him Zach’s my twin? That’s not your decision.”

  “You think you’re a big hero? Keeping quiet, letting him kill Zach, kill you?”

  I stepped over the broken glass, unlocking the door and wrenching it inward so quickly that he almost stumbled onto me.

  “Don’t you get it?” I said. “He doesn’t have a seer at Wyndham. The Confessor’s too good. And even if they got past her, I’d have felt it—a threat to Zach, to me. I’d have felt something coming. He was calling our bluff. Why do you think he asked you to come along?”

  “Did it occur to you that he might actually value my opinion? That as the only one here who’s actually been in one of your twin’s science experiments, I might have the right to know what’s happening?”

  I just raised an eyebrow and waited.

  “Oh crap.” Kip slumped down on the bed. “He k
new I’d try to stop him.” He closed his eyes. “He wasn’t really able to have Zach killed. But now—”

  Quieter now, I sat down next to him. “Yep.”

  “And he wouldn’t need spies, sources, assassins.”

  “No. Just me.”

  He tipped his head back against the wall. I did the same.

  “I can see a cup that you missed, on the windowsill,” he said. “Want to smash it?”

  “Maybe later.” I gave a tired smile, closed my eyes.

  He waited a long time for me to say something.

  Afterward, when we’d swept up the fragments of glass and pottery, we lay in silence in our separate beds. Under the door we could see the patient shadow of a watchman who’d been posted there immediately after our return from the Hall. At the window a ribbon of smoke was visible, from the pipe of another guard stationed on the rampart below.

  Kip looked across at me. “I don’t mean to bring down the mood or anything” (I snorted at this), “but why haven’t they killed you yet?”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  “But it’s good, right?”

  I laughed outright at this. “Well, I’m glad I’m not dead yet.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s a good sign—that he didn’t kill you right away.”

  I rolled over to face him across the small room. “When did we become grateful for such small mercies?” I watched his face, his anxious, tired eyes. “But you’re right, I think. He must think we’re useful.”

  “You don’t have to patronize me, you know. It’s you he can use. What good am I to him?” He paused. “Or to you.”

  “You don’t have to keep apologizing.”

  “Really? Because on the scale of things to apologize for, surely condemning someone to near-certain death has to be up there.”

  I was silent.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I sat up. “Can I come over there?”

  “Sure—though I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.”

  He shifted over to make room. I lay on my back, so he rolled onto his back, too, but we were pressed tightly against each other.

  “I like it when you lie on that side of me,” he said. “When I feel your arm, next to me like that, it sort of feels like having an arm on that side.”

  “I picked this side because it stops you getting handsy.” We both laughed.

  “Why aren’t you angrier at me?” he said, after a while.

  “Because he was right.”

  “Piper? You’re defending him now, after how he played us?”

  “Oh, he’s not right about everything. But he was right about you.”

  “Yeah. That I’m an idiot.”

  “No. That you’d do whatever it took to protect me.”

  The next day the door remained locked. The sentry outside ignored our shouted requests for information. In the afternoon, a watchman opened the door and stood guard while another stepped inside. Kip jumped to his feet, rushed in front of me.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Piper’s not going to send someone else to do it.”

  The watchman placed a tray on the table by the door and left without speaking.

  “He’ll do it himself,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?” said Kip, picking up the tray and bringing it to my bed.

  “He’s not a coward.”

  “Yes, because nothing would show courage like killing an unarmed prisoner.”

  After two more days locked up, I demanded that the sentry pass on a message to Piper asking that we at least be allowed out for air. No answering message came, but in the late afternoon four watchmen came and escorted us both up to the tower, and stood waiting in the stairs below.

  I stood at the battlement, looking down. The city looked the same as it had a few days before, when I’d stood there with Piper. But now it was a prison rather than a haven.

  “Maybe it would be for the best,” I said. “They get rid of me, they get rid of Zach. Rationally, I can’t argue with it.”

  “Don’t be so stupid. It’s not irrational, or selfish, to not want to be killed.”

  “I’m not being stupid. It seems like quite an obvious answer, actually: he’s behind all this stuff. The things they did to you, and others. We don’t know how many—maybe hundreds, thousands. So if you do the math, it seems like an easy answer: my life against theirs.”

  “It’s not a math problem, Cass. It’s not that simple.”

  “That’s what I was saying to Piper, not so long ago. But what if it does come down to calculation? What if I’m only making it more complicated because that gets me off the hook?”

  Kip sighed. “Sometimes I can’t believe that you’re meant to be this crash-hot seer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, since when have you worried about getting yourself off the hook? You’ve never worried about that. You smashed me out of that tank instead of just getting out of there—that could’ve landed you back in the Keeping Rooms. The same goes for all the times since then that I’ve slowed you down.”

  “But when it comes to the core issue—the problem the island’s facing, the problem that put you in the tank in the first place—I could solve it right now.”

  I gestured at the drop in front of us. One hundred feet below us, the city was going about its business.

  “You won’t do it,” Kip said, getting up and walking back toward the stairs. “You think Piper would let us up here if he thought there was a chance you’d jump? He’s right about that, although he’s got the reasoning wrong. He thinks you’re protecting yourself. Thinks that’s why you tried to keep Zach’s identity secret.”

  “And you think he’s wrong?”

  “Of course I do.” He didn’t even turn around as he replied. “You’re not protecting yourself. You’re protecting Zach.”

  I called after him. “Isn’t that just a different kind of selfishness? A different kind of cowardice?”

  He looked back at me from the top step. “You’ve always imagined a world where twins don’t have to hate each other. An unsplit world, where we wouldn’t even need a place like the island. Maybe it’s cowardice. Or maybe it’s a kind of courage.”

  My nights had always been broken by visions, but that night each time the sentry shifted outside our door, I pictured the small knives at Piper’s belt. Kip couldn’t sleep, either; I could feel him tensing at each sound from the door or window. When we kissed it wasn’t the same delirious haze of that first kiss, or the gentle explorations of the following weeks, as we’d settled into this new intimacy. Now there was a sense of urgency: that at any moment it could be over. The key in the lock, the knife blade. And the idea of my own death was crueler to me, now, because Kip and I had only just discovered each other. Because there were parts of his neck I hadn’t yet kissed, and because the feeling of my fingers clutching his hair was still a novelty. Such little things to grieve for, I told myself, in the face of all the years I’d lived, and everything I stood to lose. But in the bed that night they didn’t feel trivial, and when I cried it wasn’t for the imminent knife blade but for the loss of his hand on my skin, the tender abrasiveness of his stubble on my shoulder.

  Piper sent for me in the morning. The watchman took me without speaking, leading me swiftly from the room before Kip and I could exchange anything more than a glance.

  I was led into the Assembly Hall, where a number of the Assembly were gathered. Simon was there, and I recognized several of the other men and women. Over the last couple of weeks, they’d questioned me at length, but not aggressively or without sympathy. Now, instead of greeting me, they fell silent when I entered. Even Simon stood quietly, all three arms crossed against his chest. Piper wasn’t in his usual seat at the table near the door. The watchman guided me through to an antechamber at the other end of the Hall. It was a tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, but I saw by the maps pinned on the walls and the comfortable clu
tter that Piper had made it his base. In the corner a sleeping mat was clumsily rolled, a blanket shoved beside it.

  “This is where you sleep?”

  “Sometimes.” When the door had opened, Piper had risen quickly from the stool. He waved the watchman away, stepped across the small room himself to shut the door behind me. He stood with his back to the door, pointed me toward the stool. The knives still hung from his belt.

  “Surely you, of all people, would have proper quarters?” I sat, glancing over at the sleeping mat in the corner. There was something touching about his hurried attempt to tidy it away. “A proper bed, at least?”

  He shrugged. “I have quarters upstairs. But I like to be here, closer to the barracks, closer to all this.” He gestured at the mess. Some of the maps were held to the wall not by tacks but by throwing knives, jabbed into the rich tapestries that upholstered the room. “Anyway,” he went on, “it’s not important.”

  “OK,” I said.

  He leaned his head against the back of the door. For the first time, I sensed he was nervous. I knew, then, that he hadn’t brought me here to kill me.

  “You didn’t send for me to talk about your sleeping arrangements.”

  “No,” he replied, but said nothing further.

  “We could talk about my sleeping arrangements, then. About the fact that Kip and I are still locked in, a guard at the door.”

  “And the window,” he said calmly.

  “I should be flattered that you think we need so many.”

  He raised a dark eyebrow. “You think you could take on one of those men? You and Kip?” He laughed.

  “We got this far,” I pointed out.

  He exhaled impatiently. “The guards aren’t there to stop you getting out.”

  It took me a few seconds to understand. I remembered the stares of the Assembly in the Hall outside. I knew now what it reminded me of: the expression on the faces of the children I encountered on the day I left my parents’ village.