The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  “How many know who my twin is?”

  “Only the Assembly, so far,” he said. “But how long it can stay that way, I don’t know.”

  “They want me dead.”

  “You’ve got to understand.” There was only one stool, so he sat down on the bed roll opposite me, and leaned in close. “Lewis, my oldest adviser—”

  “I know Lewis,” I said. I remembered the impressive, gray-bearded man, perhaps fifty, who had questioned me many times.

  “His niece—his twin’s Omega child who Lewis has cared for since her birth—she’s one of the ones who was taken. Why do you think he pressed you so hard for details of what you saw in the tanks where you found Kip?”

  “I only saw a handful of people,” I said, angry at the weight of this unsuspected responsibility. “He couldn’t expect me to have seen them all—there were so many.”

  “Exactly,” Piper whispered urgently. “There are so many. Branded, taken, killed. Everyone out there has lost someone because of the Reformer. Everyone on this island knows he’s looking for us. Have you heard the games the children play? Come out and play, come out and play—”

  “He’s coming to take you away.” Without thinking, I completed the chant, familiar from the cries that had drifted up from the city to our window every morning and evening when the children played in the streets.

  Piper nodded. “It’s him they’re playing at—the Reformer. There are other Councilors with aggressively anti-Omega policies—the General in particular. But none like the Reformer. When the children on the island wake up at night, shouting from a nightmare, it’s him they’re thinking of.”

  I almost laughed at the impossibility of reconciling Zach with that nightmarish figure. Zach, who had burned his finger on a griddle and cried. Zach, who had sidled behind Dad’s legs when a bull was led through the market square. But my laugh never formed. I knew, somehow, that they were the same thing: Zach’s fear, as a child, and the fear I recognized in the children’s chant. One was the source of the other. All the things that I knew about Zach—the memory of how gently he had cleaned my burn after the branding; his body shaking with tears when our father was dying—were deeply buried now. I believed in them—the same way I had believed in the sky during my years in the cell. But I knew what he’d done—I’d seen it myself, manifested in the unanswerable glass and steel of the tank rooms. In the bones that lay in the grotto. I couldn’t expect that anybody else would understand the tenderness and fear that lay beneath the Reformer. And I knew that nobody would deny it more ferociously than Zach himself. The Reformer was his creation. What remained of the boy who had reached for my hand, outside the shed where Alice lay dying, and begged for my help? I’d kept my faith with the sky in the Keeping Rooms, and I’d emerged from the cell to find the sky waiting, unchanged. But did that frightened boy, my brother, still exist somewhere within the Reformer? And could I keep my faith with him, without betraying Piper, and the island?

  I met Piper’s eyes. “Are you trying to justify why you’re going to have to kill me?”

  He leaned forward, his voice an urgent, whispered hiss. “I need you to justify why I shouldn’t. Give me a reason that I can take to the Assembly, to Simon and Lewis and the others, to explain why I haven’t done it already.”

  Again the weight of exhaustion settled on me. I felt as though I were being eroded, worn away like the stone of the island itself, where it met the sea. “This island is meant to be the one place where we don’t have to justify our right to exist.”

  “Don’t lecture me about this island. I’m trying to protect it—it’s my job.”

  “But when you kill me, or lock me away, this won’t even be the island anymore. It’ll just be the Keeping Rooms with a sea view. The Assembly will just be a Council, by another name. And you’ll have become just like Zach.”

  “I have a responsibility to the people here.” He looked away from me.

  “But not to me.”

  “You’re one person. I’m responsible for all these people.”

  “That’s what I said to Kip. And he said it wasn’t that simple: that it’s not a question of numbers.”

  “Of course he said that. He doesn’t have my job.”

  I looked past him at the maps on the walls. All of them were heavily annotated in black ink, to show the Council garrisons and refuges, as well as the villages, the settlements, the safe houses. The whole network that the resistance relied on to get people out to the island. All those people relying on him.

  “If that’s your job, then why haven’t you killed me already?”

  “I need you to change the numbers. Give me a reason not to do it.”

  My voice was calm. “I’ve told you everything I know about Wyndham. About the Confessor. I was the one who warned you about Zach’s plans for tanking more Omegas.”

  “There has to be more. About the search for the island.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not news to you. You know they’re looking. You know they’ll find it, eventually. It’s only a matter of when.”

  He grabbed my arm. “Then tell me when. Give me details.”

  I wrenched my arm from his grip. “I don’t have anything more to tell you. It doesn’t work like that—I don’t get dates, maps. My visions aren’t something you can pin to your wall. They’re inconsistent—sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen, sometimes I don’t have a clue.”

  “But you found us—you found the island.” He paused, lowered his voice further. “What about what lies beyond here?”

  I shook my head. “What do you mean? There’s nothing beyond here. Everything’s back east.”

  “Everything we know about. But it wasn’t always that way. What if there are other places, further west? Or even east, past the deadlands.”

  “You mean Elsewhere? That’s just old stories. Nobody’s ever found it—there’s nothing to find.”

  “Most people on the mainland think the island’s just a story, just a rumor.” His face was absolutely serious.

  “You know something about Elsewhere? You’ve found it?”

  “No. I was hoping you might be able to help us.” He pulled a map from the wall. Much of what I saw, as he lay it in front of me on the floor, was familiar. The coastline I recognized from the Confessor’s maps, and from others I’d seen on the island. And I recognized the island itself, barely a speck, adrift a few inches from the western coast. But this map was different: it left out the mainland itself, which was cut off by the right-hand edge of the paper. Except for the stain of coast down that margin, the map showed only sea. But it was scrawled with pencil marks: currents, reefs, a tracery of pencil markings emanating from the island and reaching far out west.

  I looked up at him. “You’re sending ships out. You’re looking for Elsewhere.”

  “Not me. At least, not just me—it started before I was in charge. But, yes—we’ve been searching. Maybe five years now. There are two ships out there as we speak—our two biggest. They’ll be gone a month next full moon.”

  “And you really think there’s something to be found?”

  He kept his voice low, but I could feel his anger. “There are some ships that haven’t come back. You think I’d take those risks if I didn’t think there was something out there?”

  I looked down at the map, avoiding his gaze.

  “Help us, Cass. If you can sense something—anything at all—it could change everything.”

  I realized I’d pressed my palm to the map, as if it would help me scan those miles of ocean with my mind. I closed my eyes, tried to probe the unmapped space. I concentrated until I could feel the blood straining in the vein at my left temple, but all I could see was the stubborn ocean, the gray miles of sea that spread in all directions.

  “It’s too far,” I said, lifting my hand from the map as I slumped back.

  “Not in the Before it wasn’t. They had bigger ships, faster.” He grabbed my hand and pressed it onto the map again, hard. “Try again.” />
  I did try. I forced my mind as I’d done when I was on the boat, in the clutches of the reef. I visualized the reef, then the open sea beyond, and I probed westward. My whole body tensed; when Piper finally released his hand, my own palm had left a clammy print on the map. But I could see nothing, feel nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If it’s out there, it’s too far for me—I’ve never sensed anything about it.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Piper. Although his hand had been on mine until a moment ago, he suddenly seemed very distant. “It would have simplified things if you could have helped.”

  He glanced in the direction of the door, behind which I could hear voices, raised and abrasive. “They want you dead. They want to take out the Reformer and you’re the price they’re happy to pay. It’s an easy decision for them.”

  “Not for you?”

  “I think your death might be too high a price. I think we need you. You, your visions, could change the whole picture.”

  “But you won’t let us go.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I can’t. But I can keep you safe.”

  “And I’m supposed to be grateful, while you use me as a hostage to stop Zach from attacking?”

  “I thought of that,” he said evenly. “But if we let him know we have you, try to use you to rein him in, there’s every chance his own people will take him out. He’s not running the Council—not yet, anyway. Any hint that he might be under our sway, and they’d kill him themselves. We’d be rid of him, but there’re others who’d still hunt us down. And you’d be dead, too.”

  “Which seems like a shame.”

  He looked at me. “Yes. It would be a shame.”

  He escorted me back through the Hall where the Assembly, suddenly silent, turned to watch our progress. He put his arm on my shoulder as he guided me through the gathered men and women, but I shrugged him off.

  One of the men leaned close to me. It was Simon, Piper’s most trusted adviser. “I wouldn’t be so quick to brush him off, if I were you,” he said. “Seems to me he’s the one thing keeping you alive.”

  Another man laughed at that. I turned to face him. He was stocky, with a dark beard, a crutch under one arm. “That’s right,” he said. “If I had my way, you’d have been finished off by now. You and your twin.”

  I replied only quietly. “My twin shut me in the Keeping Rooms to stop me being used against him. If you kill me, you confirm everything the Alphas think: that we’re a liability, a risk to them. That we need to be locked away, to protect them.” There was no response, but they were all watching me. “You want to kill me? Why don’t you go even further and get rid of every Alpha that way? Sure, you’ll kill all of us by doing it, but it’s worth it, right?” I was shouting now, as Piper dragged me from the Hall.

  chapter 22

  When Piper came to our quarters early the next morning, I wasn’t sleeping, but my eyes were still closed. Something had woken me a few moments before, a dream or a vision, and I was concentrating on it, eyes clasped shut as I tried to prolong the state of half sleep to clarify what it was that I’d seen.

  I heard Kip jump up from his bed as the key turned in the lock, and move between me and the door.

  “Relax,” said Piper. “I’m not here to hurt her.”

  “Quiet,” Kip whispered. “She doesn’t sleep much at night—often mornings are the only sleep she gets.”

  “How much sleep do you get, if you’re watching her all night?” asked Piper. He’d dropped his voice, but I could picture the way his eyebrow would have arched.

  “Just don’t wake her.”

  “Actually, it’s you I want to see.”

  “There’s a first,” muttered Kip. I heard them move away from my bed. I dared to peek between my half-closed eyelids. They stood at the window, their backs to me. Outside, the crater’s encircling walls blocked the rising sun from view, though the dawn light was suffused with red.

  Kip looked down at the guard who leaned against the wall on the balustrade beneath our window. “He’s not getting much sleep, either, I suppose.”

  “You’d rather take your chances?”

  “I don’t know.” Kip’s answer was calm. “I’m not crazy about the idea of your mates from upstairs coming to get us, to be honest.” He glanced down at the knives lining Piper’s belt. “But Cass and I have spent enough time locked up, before we got here. We didn’t expect more of it, here of all places.”

  “You don’t know how long you were in that tank,” Piper pointed out.

  “True. Imagine if I found out it was only twenty minutes. Embarrassing, really, after all this fuss.”

  Piper laughed with him but only briefly. “The Assembly—my ‘mates from upstairs’—you don’t concern them, I think.”

  “I guessed as much, during one of the many times I’ve been left here while you and they consult Cass.”

  “I’m not trying to diminish your importance,” said Piper. “You’re the only one we’ve found who’s been in the tanks. We all want to find out what goes on in that place. But I’m trying to reassure you: I don’t think you’re in any danger.”

  “Not from your lot, maybe. But I’m guessing there’re some Alphas on the mainland who’re pretty keen to reacquaint themselves with me.”

  “You’d rather stay here, under guard?”

  “You say it like we have a choice.”

  “You do.” Piper reached to his belt. I was about to spring up, thinking he was going for one of his knives, but then I saw he was proffering Kip a key. I scrunched my eyes closed again as Kip turned to look at me.

  “No,” said Piper. “You know she’s too valuable for me to let her go. But there’s no reason for you to be kept here.”

  “And your reason for letting me go—it’s entirely altruistic, is it, and nothing to do with getting me out of the way and having Cass to yourself?”

  “If I needed to get rid of you, you’d be gone by now.”

  “So this doesn’t have anything to do with how you feel about her?”

  Piper sounded unconcerned. “There’s a boat leaving in an hour. There’s room on it for you. It doesn’t matter what you believe my motives are.”

  “You’re right,” said Kip calmly. “It doesn’t matter. You really think I’d leave, either way? Or that she’d be grateful to you, for letting me go?”

  “Not really.”

  I peered again through one eye. Piper had turned away from Kip to face the window once more. Through the window, above the crater’s edge, a flock of geese trailed its V on the lightening sky.

  “Have you ever seen a bird hatch?” asked Piper, as the cries of the geese drew farther away.

  I could hear the frustration in Kip’s voice. “Sure. It’s the one thing I remember. Not my name, or my twin. Just really vivid memories of birdwatching.”

  “If you take an egg away from the mother before it hatches, when the chick comes out it attaches itself to the first thing it sees. Follows it round like its mother. When we were kids, we had a duckling my twin watched hatching. After that, it followed her everywhere.”

  “So I’m the duckling in your little allegory, yeah? Hatched from the tank and latching blindly onto Cass?”

  Piper met Kip’s gaze unapologetically. “I think maybe that’s part of it, yes. But I can’t figure out if it’s a bad thing.”

  “Not for you. You’ve already used me to get to her—counting on me to expose who her twin is.”

  “You’re right. I was testing you, and you acted how I thought you would. But I don’t know that necessarily means you failed.”

  “And you’re testing me again now.” Kip looked back down at the key, which Piper had placed on the thick stone sill. “Any surprises?”

  “No.” Piper took the key again, pocketed it. “I didn’t think you’d leave, though I hoped you would. I still can’t work out if you’re a liability. For her, I mean.”

  “Sure,” said Kip, rolling his eyes. “Your reasons were entirely sel
fless.”

  “Of course not. Why do you think I gave you separate beds?” Piper grinned wryly, and looked over at me. I hoped he didn’t make out the flicker of movement as I shut my right eye again. “But I’m beginning to think you should stay with her. I think you have to.”

  “I’m not a liability anymore, then?” goaded Kip.

  “You might well be. But the reason you’re a liability is also the reason you should stay.”

  “This is all very magnanimous of you both, deciding who I need, what’s best for me,” I said, throwing back the blanket and swinging my feet down to the floor with a thump. “But did it occur to you that I might have an opinion about that as well?” I rubbed the right side of my face, creased from the pillow.

  Kip spoke first: “Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Or me,” added Piper hastily.

  “Don’t you talk to me,” I said to him. “Sneaking in here, trying to play with us like the pins on your stupid maps upstairs.”

  “That’s what I said to him,” said Kip.

  I turned on him. “Don’t you talk to me, either. You’re no better. Why wouldn’t you go?”

  He looked uncertainly at Piper, who grinned.

  “Don’t start smirking,” I said to Piper. “Ducklings? Seriously? For crying out loud. Of course Kip should go, but you’re an idiot to think he ever would.”

  “So you do want me to go?” Kip ventured.

  “Yes, of course, for your sake. No, of course, for mine. But what I want, more than anything, is for the two of you to just stop all this nonsense. I’m trying so hard to keep my head clear, to stay alive, to see what’s coming, and you two are behaving as if I’m a prize to be won at a fair. As if nothing’s up to me.”

  Piper spoke first. “I’m sorry. Mainly for being foolish—I knew Kip wouldn’t leave.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “I’m being sincere.”

  “No, shut up. I need to think clearly. For all your blathering about ducklings, something else had me half-awake just before you came in. Something important.”