The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  I shook my head again. “I could have sworn. I can feel it so strongly.”

  “Thousands of people—hundreds of thousands—lived there, for hundreds of years.” She shrugged. “Wouldn’t that leave a trace?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” said Kip. “It’s taboo. I’m not going anywhere near a town from the Before.”

  “If you’re worried about breaking the Council’s laws, I’m fairly sure that ship has sailed,” she said.

  “This is different. It’s not about the law. You know that—it’s about the Before. You can’t go near any of that stuff.”

  “That’s why Zoe’s right,” I acknowledged. “Nobody will go near it. If the pass goes through the town, it’s our best chance of getting through the mountains without getting caught.”

  “There’s a reason nobody will go there. It’s contaminated. Deadly. You’ve seen the posters.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’ve also seen the posters about how we’re dangerous horse thieves.”

  “And don’t forget all those posters about how Omegas are worthless, dangerous, a burden on the Alphas,” added Zoe.

  I nodded. “Even if the taboo were there for a reason, it couldn’t be more dangerous than our other options.”

  He sighed as he headed off toward the river. “I wouldn’t mind so much if the town weren’t on top of a damned mountain.”

  None of us talked much the rest of the day. The climb was steep, and we were often clambering through scratchy, dense undergrowth. After lunch—a handful of stringy mushrooms that Zoe had found—she left us for nearly an hour, coming back with a rabbit and two small birds hanging from her belt. “I’d normally have gotten more, but there’re people around, coming up the valley. One patrol of Council soldiers, and a lot of local Alphas, still after that bounty.”

  “Do you think they caught many of those who got away from the island?” I stretched my legs as I stood.

  “Some, probably,” she threw on her pack. “The evacuees will have split up, spread out, tried to make it to safe houses. But there’s a lot of Alphas looking for them. The good news is they’re so damned noisy they had no chance of catching me, and they seem to be sticking to the lower slopes, not far above the river. The bad news is they’ve scared off half the game on the slopes, and there’s not much hunting higher up.”

  “How long to the pass, do you reckon?” Kip asked.

  She wrinkled her nose. “With the two of you slowing me down, three days, I’d say. Maybe more if the searchers come higher and we have to play it safe.”

  For the rest of the afternoon we kept quiet but made steady progress, stopping for the night not far below the tree line. We didn’t risk a fire, and although Kip and I swore we couldn’t face the raw meat Zoe offered us, we both ended up forcing down a little. Water was more of a problem: we’d filled the flasks at the river, but hadn’t passed a spring since then, and were limiting ourselves to occasional sips. I sat leaning against a tree trunk, too narrow to provide any comfortable support, and wincing as I picked tiny thorns from my legs, crosshatched with scratches. I kept running my tongue over my teeth, slightly tacky from the heat and lack of water. I tried not to think about the meat, its gluey texture and the strings of uncooked fat that had snagged between my teeth.

  Zoe, sitting opposite, spoke suddenly. “Do you think it’s over?”

  “The fighting on the island?” I closed my eyes for a moment. “I can’t tell. I haven’t felt anything more, not since the night before you found us, when I had a vision of the fort’s gate being breached. But I don’t know if it’s over, or if it’s just that we’re too far away now for me to sense anything.”

  She was picking at her nails with a knife, in the now-familiar movement. “Too far away? I hate to break it to you, but with you two tagging along, we don’t move all that fast. Anyway, I didn’t think distance was a big deal for you. You could feel them coming before they’d even launched the boats. That’s what you said.”

  I looked down at my hands. “I did. But the seeing depends on a lot of things, and distance is one of them. Along with a kind of”—I paused—“intensity. Like with the Confessor, looking for me—she’s so focused on me, so intent, that I can feel that all the time, no matter where I am.”

  For a while the only sound was the impatient clicking of Zoe’s knife on her nails. Eventually Kip spoke. “It’s not Cass’s fault that it doesn’t work the way we want it to.”

  She looked at him. “You say that because she hasn’t found your twin?”

  “I’m not even sure I want to know. But the whole seer thing—it’s not straightforward. You’ve seen how she wakes up every night. It’s not easy for her.”

  “Her waking up in the night isn’t easy for any of us,” she said, turning back to me. “And if you’re going to do it again tonight, try to cut out the whole shouting bit. There are still people looking for you.”

  I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. And I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about the island, or Piper. But I think he wouldn’t have been taken alive.”

  Zoe shrugged. “You don’t need to be a seer to figure that out.”

  “But it’s still good news, isn’t it? We know he’s not dead. And if that means he isn’t caught, either, then there’s a chance he’s OK.”

  “Guess we’ll find out in a few days. If he’s OK he’ll come to the meeting place.”

  I settled down next to Kip, wrapping the blanket tighter around us both. “I don’t believe you, you know,” I said quietly. “About not wanting to know who your twin is.”

  Zoe, lying down a few feet away, joined in. “It’s not like me to agree with Cass, but I don’t believe you, either. How could you not want to know?”

  “It’s not as weird as you think,” he said. Lying behind me, when he spoke I felt his breath warming my hair. “People lived for thousands of years without twins, in the Before.”

  Zoe snorted. “And look how well that turned out.”

  It rained lightly in the night, and a thick mist squatted over the valley as we packed up and set off in the morning. “It’s good news,” Zoe pointed out, when I complained of the weight of the wet blanket. “We’ll be clear of the trees by noon, but the mist will give us cover if it stays.”

  “It’ll stay,” I said.

  We could see only a few feet ahead, and all sound was muffled. When I slipped and grabbed a narrow tree trunk for support, the bark was loamy and damp, coming away in my hand. After an hour or so I was able to lead us to a small stream, a trickle really, but boosted by the night’s rain. We filled our flasks, drank furiously, and filled them again before continuing to climb through the gradually thinning trees. Within a few hours the trees had given up altogether, leaving a landscape of scree and boulders. Here we had to proceed more carefully, as the slopes of the lower mountainside were replaced by rifts and loose rocks. Twice we had to backtrack to find a passable route, before Zoe grudgingly let me navigate. The scree slopes were the worst, slipping out from underfoot and sometimes threatening to give way and carry us down the mountain. Several times we recoiled as a small cascade of stones hurtled beneath us, the noise loud even in the muffling fog. We tried to stick to the bouldered areas, but the progress was slow, and we found ourselves climbing as much as walking. Although Kip never complained, his single arm made the climbing hard for him, and even Zoe helped him from time to time, reaching back down to let him grasp her arm.

  In the treacherous conditions, we had to stop as soon as the light became bad. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the mist had left a pervasive damp over everything. We agreed to risk a fire, but it was hard to find unsoaked wood, as only a few scrappy shrubs risked existence above the tree line. The wood took us half an hour to collect and lasted only long enough to barely cook the rabbit, over a spitting, petulant flame that gave out more smoke than heat. My body was so tired that there was a kind of satisfaction in the weariness, as I lay by the fire stretching my legs and probing the countless aches of my muscles.
It was cold, and when I nestled down close to Kip the wet-wool smell of the blankets reminded me of the horses, their musty, organic scent, and those first days on the road together. So many days and weeks, now, with Kip; at least three months, I estimated. The years before—the village, then the settlement, then the Keeping Rooms—felt very distant.

  For him, I reminded myself, these recent months were all there was, apart from those indistinct and ghastly memories of the tank. And not only was he unanchored by his past but, strangest of all, he was also adrift without a twin. He was a question without an answer. I knew it was strange, like Zoe had said, that he claimed he didn’t want to know about his twin. I wondered whether our bond had gone any way to filling that void. The symmetry that linked us, ever since his eyes had caught mine through the curved glass of the tank.

  But it wasn’t symmetry. I rolled away from him, pulling the blanket higher. Because it wasn’t only the pair of us. His twin might be unknown, but mine was always there, as pressing and vivid as Kip, Kip who lay next to me, breathing the endearingly noisy breath of sleep.

  The next day was still wet, but by noon we broke through the mist and found ourselves looking down on a valley entirely hidden by the sulky gray clouds. It was steep, still, but the going was more certain. The boulders and scree were below us, only bare, stark sheets of rock remaining.

  I was used to seeing the world as being shaped by the blast: craters wide enough to form their own horizon; piles of rubble; cliffs, even mountains, crumbled like sandbanks. There were places, however, where you could still get a glimpse of the world formed by other, earlier forces. The island had been like that: its crater predated the blast, I was sure. Here, too, the slabs of stone showed the layers formed over many centuries, heaved out of the earth in a way that spoke of long, inexorable shifting.

  I felt exposed, the three of us moving across the naked mountain face, but Zoe pointed out that we would be invisible to anyone below the cloud line. “There would have been a road up here, once,” she said. “The climb would have been straightforward, in the Before.”

  “There would have been a lot of things,” Kip said.

  Within an hour, as the ground plateaued, we began to see signs of it: three metal poles, each leaning nearly parallel to the ground, at precisely the same angle, their melted bases showing where the blast had wrenched them. The foundations of a wall, barely visible along a section of the plateau. And then the city itself, tucked in the hammock of the mountain pass.

  Except it wasn’t a city at all. It was more negative space than anything else. The metal rods of building foundations were exposed, bowed like the ribs of dead cattle on the roadside in the drought years. There were some walls and some concrete slabs partly intact, but only ever enough to hint at the shape of a larger structure, now gone.

  I’d seen a machine from the Before, years ago at the settlement. I’d known it was risky even to pay the bronze coin to see the traveling show that promised to display a real artifact. But when the exhibit had arrived on its grimy wagon, I lined up and paid, like almost everyone else in the settlement. It was a cool morning, long past harvest. When I reached the front of the queue and the crier’s son ushered me inside the tent, there was a rough plinth in the center, its base showing where the red cloth draped over it failed to meet the tent floor. The crier in the morning had said it was a machine scavenged from a taboo town to the west. At first I thought the machine must be inside the bruised metal box that sat on the plinth. Then the crier ceremoniously opened the lid, and I realized that the machine was the box itself. Inside, the top half contained fragments of what looked like tarnished glass. The bottom half was splintered, a mass of melted blackness. A cord, in parts withered away to a single thread of wire, hung from the box, ending partway down the red cloth. “For the Electric,” the man whispered, confidentially. I’d heard about that, too: how, when the Electric broke in the blast, the Before was stranded. Houses, whole cities, full of forsaken, useless machines, each with its own wistful cord.

  Nothing in this mountain town looked as well preserved as that box had been. The strangest thing about the place was the disjunction between the town itself—the desolate, vacant space—and the crowd of impressions that surrounded it. To me, it was almost a roar, the sheer volume of lives that had shared this space. Their absence was as vivid as their presence. It didn’t feel like my visions—not even my visions of the blast. It was more like a residue. It was the resonance of a bell, echoing long after the bell itself has stopped.

  I was surprised to look up and see Zoe and Kip unaffected. Both were moving warily among the rubble, and Kip kept looking over his shoulder, but it was evident that neither of them felt the same silent cacophony that was besieging me. Kip noticed me, though, and the way my hands had moved, instinctively and uselessly, to cover my ears. He moved to my side, stepping over a twisted metal beam.

  “I guess if you could feel the city from the valley, it must be pretty strong up here?”

  I nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “It’s all a long time ago, you know.” He took my arm.

  I nodded again. “I know. But they don’t. It’s like”—I checked Zoe was too far away to hear me—“like nobody told them they were dead.”

  He looked down, turned over a small chunk of concrete with his foot, watched the gray dust rise and settle. “We don’t have to go this way. We can backtrack—go around.”

  I shook my head. “It’s OK. I just didn’t expect it to be this strong.”

  I kept hold of his arm as we caught up with Zoe and followed her through the wreckage. Some of the time it was clear where the old roads had lain, and the going was easy. Often, however, the road disappeared under rubble, and we had to pick our way through. A number of the buildings had collapsed into their cellars, leaving sinkholes crammed with debris. We were heading more or less through the town’s center. I kept expecting the ruins to come to an end, but the town seemed infinite, and after more than an hour we stopped for a drink, perching on the few remaining stones of a low wall.

  “Weird to think that there’re more places like this,” said Kip.

  “Heaps more,” Zoe said. “I’ve been to a few.”

  “As big as this?”

  “Bigger. There’s one, on the south coast, must have been ten times this size. Most of it’s underwater now, but you can still see stuff, if you take a boat out. And some of the tall buildings still poke out of the sea, at low tide.” She passed me the flask, the water warm and barely refreshing.

  “So do you think there’s anything in it? The taboo, I mean,” he said.

  “All the ruins are just like this.” Zoe waved her arm at the rubble surrounding us. “Useless, rather than scary. There’s not much to be salvaged. The stuff people warn about—the radiation, the dangerous stuff—it might have been true once, but not now.” She tossed a stone against a sheet of iron half-buried in dust. It gave an apathetic clang. “Now it’s just a heap of junk. But people are scared of it because of what it stands for: the Before, the blast. All of that.”

  “And the machines?”

  “None of them work anyway. Even if you could piece some of them together, they’d still need the Electric.”

  “They have it, you know,” I said. “The Alphas, in Wyndham. Not just in the tank rooms, but in my cell. The other cells, too, and some of the corridors.”

  I told her what I’d told Piper, about the glass ball hanging from the ceiling of my cell. Its unwavering, cold light.

  She nodded. “I thought as much. There’d be an uproar if people ever found out, but I’m sure they’ve been dabbling in that stuff for years. I’m just surprised they haven’t done more of it. People say that in the Before there were traveling machines, flying machines, a whole lot of stuff I bet some on the Council would love to build again, if the people would stand for it. But the fear runs too deep, after the blast. The Council knows better than to risk another purge.”

  We both turned at the same time, at the stra
ngled shriek of metal as Kip heaved open what was left of a door, leading into a concrete structure largely submerged in the earth. Zoe’s hand went straight to her knives, but nothing followed the sound but a haze of dust, rising briefly then settling, anointing Kip’s hair, eyebrows, and shoulders with a chalky white.

  She sighed, turning back to me. “He could make more noise, but only if I gave him a drum and a trumpet.”

  But I was still watching Kip. I saw how he had frozen. How his hand, powder-dusted and taut, still gripped the door. When I reached him he still hadn’t moved. It took me a while to make out what he was staring at, particularly as Zoe, joining us, blocked out the last of the light from the doorway. When I did see what was inside, for a moment I didn’t understand why Kip had reacted like that. It looked innocuous at first: a cabinet mounted on the wall, its cover blasted or fallen off. From inside it, snaking out into the darkened room, was a mass of wires, their colors faded but still distinct: red, blue, yellow. Some were bundled together, others hung loose. It wasn’t a dramatic sight: just another piece of detritus from the unfamiliar world of the Before.

  That’s when I realized it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I remembered the wires snaking along the wall above the tanks. Bundled together in places, elsewhere branching out like ungainly ivy. The wires, the cords, the tubes. And the scar in Kip’s wrist, perfectly round and still visible, where one of the tubes had entered his body.

  When I tried to pull him away from the door, his whole body was stiff. I had to wrap both arms around him and haul him back into the light, as Zoe moved out of our way. When I maneuvered around to face him, still in my arms, his eyes remained fixed on the doorway. He was completely silent, his face expressionless.

  “Shut it. Shut the damned door,” I said.

  Zoe responded quickly. From behind me, I could hear the squeal and thump of the door as it closed. I didn’t move, didn’t take my eyes from Kip’s face. I remembered the first time I’d seen it. His eyes, back then, meeting mine through the tank’s glass, had been more animated than they were now as he stared blankly over my shoulder. For the minutes that we stood there, he didn’t speak or move.