The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  I could feel him looking at me again. “It was my decision, Cass. Not yours. I didn’t have to let you go.”

  I nodded but still didn’t look up.

  “You think I shouldn’t have?”

  I couldn’t speak. All I could manage was breathing; words had given up on me altogether.

  “I think I made the right decision,” he went on. “Though maybe for the wrong reasons. I do believe that we need you—that you could be a powerful weapon for the resistance. But that wasn’t it, or it wasn’t all of it.” He paused.

  “Do you remember, on the terrace on the island, how I said I didn’t know if there was a place where my role on the island ended, and I began?”

  I nodded.

  “I learned the answer, when the Assembly decided to hand you over. What I did, it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t do it for the island. And people bled for my decision.” When he spoke of it, I could see that he was seeing it again: the blood congealing on the cobbles. He looked straight at me, without any embarrassment. He knew that I was seeing what he saw—that my visions had shown me the Confessor directing the massacre. It made us closer, and also further apart. Whatever he’d thought of, or hoped for, when he made that decision, the blood in the courtyard would never be unseen. Whatever his feelings were, the blood made them at once too weighty, and too trivial.

  “It’s done now,” he said.

  In the trees above us, the day’s first birds were summoning the sun. I remembered a story I’d heard at the settlement: that when the blast came, all the birds in flight that weren’t killed instantly were blinded. I tried to imagine it. Those that couldn’t land, that flew until they dropped. I pictured the blind, inexorable descent.

  “Zoe thinks you’re running scared,” he said.

  “I am,” I said. “Scared, I mean.”

  “But not running?”

  “No.” There was no point now. There was no distance that would spare me the knowledge of what had happened on the island. And there was no safety to be gained anymore.

  chapter 29

  When the others emerged, we lit a small fire and ate.

  “Now what?” Zoe asked. I was surprised that the question was addressed to me, not Piper.

  “We have to go back toward Wyndham. It’s time to strike back at them.”

  Kip sighed. “We haven’t been very efficient about this. We’ve spent the last few months running away from that place. I never thought I’d be going back to see those tanks again.”

  I spoke quickly. “You won’t be.”

  “You’re not going without me.” A statement, not a question, though his eyes shifted quickly from me to Piper and back.

  “Of course not. Maybe I ought to be trying some heroic solo mission, but it didn’t even occur to me. But we’re not going back to the tanks.”

  “That’s not your plan?” Piper and Zoe looked as nonplussed as Kip.

  “Think about it,” I said to Kip. “You were the only one, in all those tanks, who was alert, conscious. We got you out of there, but it was luck—or being a seer—that let me find you. The others, though, we don’t know what kind of state they’re in. And we only just got out of there—they’ll have tightened up security since then. We can’t go back.”

  “You’re leaving them there, then—all those others?”

  I shook my head. “You’ve told me before—about being conscious, in the tank. Seeing the others, in the tanks nearby. You were looking out of there for who knows how long. Years, maybe. But you never said anything about anyone looking back.”

  He looked down. “I was in and out of consciousness. I could have missed it.”

  One of Zoe’s knives twanged impatiently as she flicked it under her nails. I ignored her.

  “You made a promise to that guy on the island,” Kip said. “You promised you’d do all you could to help those people.”

  “To Lewis. I know. And you told me at the time it was stupid. Look, I want to get them out—all of them. But even if we could get in, we don’t know if we could get them out alive. They might not be as strong as you.” A simultaneous snort from Piper and Zoe. “It could kill them—and their twins. And even if they could survive getting out of the tanks, how would we get them out of there, from the middle of Wyndham, with armed guards everywhere? I can’t pull a secret escape route out of the hat every time we need one, let alone with hundreds of half-dead amnesiacs in tow.”

  “They mightn’t be amnesiacs.”

  “Exactly. They mightn’t react to the tanks the same way as you. That’s my whole point. I can’t risk it if I don’t even know that I can get them out alive.”

  Piper interrupted. “And keep them that way. In the past, we might have been able to use our network of safe houses, keep them in hiding, maybe even smuggle them as far as the island. But that’s not an option now. The island’s gone; the network’s in chaos.”

  Kip didn’t even look at Piper, just kept his gaze on my face. “So we leave them there?”

  “We have to. For now, anyway.”

  “That’s your big plan?” said Zoe. “Not attacking the tanks complex?”

  “If only it were that easy,” I said. “But I think there’s another target, just as important, and with less chance of people being killed.”

  Piper interrupted: “Killing people isn’t a deal breaker. It isn’t for them, so it can’t be for us.”

  “That’s the whole problem right there,” I snapped. “Them and us. Why can’t you see that it makes no difference who you kill? You still wipe out both. It’s just that you only have to stick your little knife into one of them.”

  “Our ‘little knives’ have saved your bacon more than once,” said Zoe. “Don’t blame us for doing what you can’t bring yourself to do.”

  Shaking my head, I tried again. “But there’s a target that’s not guarded. Or hardly at all. It was the wires that Kip stumbled onto, in the taboo town, that made me realize. It reminded me of the glimpse I had, from the Confessor. It was important to her—so important that she freaked out when I saw it.”

  “A weapon? Like a bomb?”

  “Worse, in a way. It’s where they’re keeping all the names—the pairing up.”

  “The registrations?” Piper lifted his head.

  “So? People know who their twins are anyway. Even those who were split young. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t,” Zoe said, gesturing at Kip. “And he’s not exactly normal.”

  “Most people know, sure,” I said. “Though many don’t know what becomes of their twin, after they’re split. All most of them have is what’s on their registration papers: their twin’s name, the place they were born. But even if people knew every detail about their twin—that’s not the same as the Council knowing.” I turned to Kip. “You saw what they did to that man in New Hobart, just for not being registered. Why do you think it’s so important to them?”

  “The last few years, we’ve had more and more reports of that,” Piper said. “They’re ruthless in enforcing the rules on registrations—more strictly even than tithe payments.”

  “I still don’t see how a few pieces of paper can be more of a threat to us than the tanks,” Kip said.

  “It’s not just a few pieces of paper,” I replied. “It’s millions of them, and it’s the source of all the other stuff. How do you think they pick who goes in the tanks? Or track down people like me, with powerful twins?”

  “And the list from the island,” added Piper, “that the Confessor was using to decide who to kill, who to take away?”

  “By the sounds of it, that was the Confessor rather than the list,” said Zoe.

  “She’s a big part of it,” I conceded. “She’s right at the heart of it, somehow—that’s why she was so shocked when I saw that chamber. It’s close to her—dear to her, even. Her, the registrations, the list, and that chamber I saw in her mind. It’s all part of the same thing. They’ve got all that information; they’re using it to manipulate everything.
Everything about you—what you’ve done, who you are, who your twin is—it’s all there to be used in any way they see fit.”

  “But how can they use it?” said Zoe. “Like you said, there must be millions of registrations. How could they keep track of it all?”

  “The machines. That’s what I saw in the chamber—the wires, the metal boxes. They’re using the machines to keep track of it all. They could do it with paper—they managed like that for years and years. But with the technology, they’re infinitely more efficient. More information, more quickly. It’s deadly. All this time everyone’s been so paranoid that if people started using machines from the Before again, it’d end in another blast. And it turns out it’s much simpler than that: just the information. That’s all they need.”

  “No it’s not. What about the technology in the tank room? All that stuff. You think that’s not important?”

  “Of course it is.” I took Kip’s hand. “But where do you think they get the information about who to put in the tanks, who to experiment on? The information’s the first stage. Everything else is built on it. Even if they didn’t have the tanks, they’d just have locked you all up in cells somewhere.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “It’s not. I know. And one day, if we don’t stop them in time, they’ll be able to tank us all, indiscriminately. But they’re not there yet—nowhere near. And until they are, this information is what they’re relying on. It’s what they use, every time they choose who lives or dies. Who walks free and who gets whipped, or locked away, or tanked.” I was leaning in close to his face, close enough to see the tiny flecks of darker brown in his irises, the flared pupils pulsing. “If they didn’t have the names, the pairings, they wouldn’t know who they were after, or where to find them. That’s the source of it all.”

  “I thought your twin was the source of it all,” said Zoe.

  “He is. I’m not denying that. Him and the Confessor. Others, too, like the General. But the information is the thing that’s allowed him to do all these things. And I know where to find it.”

  It took two weeks’ hard traveling to make it back to the outskirts of Wyndham. When Kip and I had escaped, we’d headed southwest for weeks, avoiding the Spine Mountains that bisected the land, extending north to south until they petered out above the marshy lands toward New Hobart. Now, after landing from the island much higher up the west coast, with Zoe we’d cut straight across the Spine Mountains, so that from the cave we were heading almost directly east toward Wyndham.

  We traveled mainly at night, though in the empty plains east of the mountains we risked the daylight, too, sleeping only for a few hours a day, when shelter presented itself. Even then we took shifts. Kip and I would never have managed to maintain the relentless pace, except that unlike when we were traveling alone, this time we were never hungry. Zoe and Piper caught birds, rabbits, and, one morning, a snake that only Piper dared to eat, though he swore it was delicious. But even with full stomachs it was exhausting, and in the scorched plains thirst was the problem. Zoe and Piper took turns to scout ahead, while I guided us to the few sparse springs that I could sense, where we filled our flasks. We talked little, even when settling down for sleep. It felt like the delirium of those first few days of my escape with Kip, in the tunnel through the mountain: wake, walk, sleep, wake, walk. I saw how tired Kip was. At night, when I curled back-to-back with him, his spine was sharp against my own. Neither of us wished to slow, though. There was a momentum to our journey now, a sense of purpose that had been lacking in the past. I remembered Kip’s comment, months earlier: away isn’t really a destination. We have a destination now, I thought, though who knows what will come of it.

  Despite this new purposefulness, Kip himself was edgy. He spoke less, even at night when the two of us curled together, away from Piper and Zoe. I thought his new silences might just be the result of exhaustion. But we’d been exhausted before—he and I had been pursued across the country and back, and he’d never been so hushed. This new silence, which he carried with him like a weight, had been with him only since the taboo town on the mountaintop. The wires there had taken him back to the tanks, and he hadn’t fully emerged. Perhaps I’d underestimated, over our months together, what the tanks had done to him. It was easy to forget, among his quips and his lopsided smile, what he had lived through. His physical recovery had been so quick. His body was strong now, despite his leanness, and his movements had little of the initial clumsiness the tanks had left him with. But his raw panic in that mountaintop ruin, snaked with wires, had reminded me that something was still broken. Something that all the days we’d spent together, and all the nights, couldn’t even begin to heal.

  One morning he whispered to me, so quietly that in my half sleep I could hardly hear it.

  “What if it comes back to me, and I don’t like what I remember?”

  I rolled closer to him. Under my hand, his heart was beating too quickly, a trapped thing. “What if I’m not a good person?” he went on. “What if I remember, and the person I was isn’t someone I want to be?”

  “Do you remember something?”

  I felt him shake his head. “No. But we’ve always assumed that remembering my past would be a good thing. What if it’s not?”

  I patted his chest slowly, coaxing his pulse to keep time with my hand. So many times, when I’d woken screaming from visions, he’d patted my back the same way. What had I offered him? What had I given him to fill his hollow memory, except the burden of my own horror-filled nights, and the new horrors of pursuit and battle?

  “You choose who you are,” I said.

  “You believe that?”

  I nodded into his shoulder.

  “I know you, Kip.”

  As the dry plains receded and the network of rivers began to spread its grasp, there were more signs of habitation. At first, just a few settlements in the dry but still arable land. These were meager Omega outposts, some consisting of only a few shacks, but we still kept a safe distance, skirting each settlement widely and not lighting fires at night. Then, as the land grew richer, the Alpha habitations appeared: groomed fields and orchards surrounding large buildings. We saw people at work in the fields, or riding on the roads. But the country remained open enough for us to make our nocturnal way, unseen, avoiding the busiest roads even at night.

  Two nights from Wyndham, there was a safe house, Piper and Zoe said. A lone Omega house in a damp valley, owned by a couple sympathetic to the resistance. Somewhere we could sleep indoors, wash, take shelter from the scrutiny of the open spaces. All through that night’s journey I imagined the feeling of lying in a soft bed again. The luxury of being oblivious to weather. But when we crested the valley, just before dawn, we were greeted by nothing but charred beams, some still smoking, and a puddle, black with ash.

  “Somebody got careless,” Piper said, as we crouched just below the crest of the hill. “I was afraid this would happen, after the raid on the island: too many refugees, getting desperate, seeking shelter. The Alphas must have spotted something, found them out.”

  “Or somebody gave them up,” said Zoe. “The hostages they took, maybe, from the island.”

  “Maybe.” Piper peered down at the wreckage. “I don’t think we can risk getting any closer; it could be watched.” He turned to me. “Is there anyone alive down there?”

  I shook my head. No feeling emanated from the valley, only the smoke. “I can’t sense anyone. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been killed. They might have been taken.” Since the discovery of the tanks, that idea was hardly comforting.

  “We need to move on,” said Piper. “Find cover. But it’s looking more and more like what I feared. The whole network might have been cracked open.”

  Two days later we drew within sight of Wyndham. I realized that I’d never seen it from the outside. My hooded, night arrival had shown me nothing, and my only subsequent impressions had been from the ramparts of the fort, above the city. Now, approaching from the west,
with the sun beginning to rise ahead of us, the city reared up, buildings clinging to the hill like mussels on a rock, right up to the fort. Beneath the fort, the river emerged from the hillside and meandered its way downstream to the north. Just a day or so’s journey downstream, the silos waited for us. Farther downstream was my childhood village, and my mother. Our mother. And on the southern side of the mountain, hidden from sight now, wound the other river, which I couldn’t think of without gratitude: the river that Kip and I had followed in those first days of escape, months before.

  Zoe looked appraisingly at the city’s peak. “That fort’s full of soldiers, and the three of you are on top of their wanted list. The city’s crawling with them, too.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It depends how much they’ve penetrated the network, since the attack. We’ve done our best, but you can’t do what I’ve done for years without some people getting word of it. For years I’ve been escorting refugees to the pickup points, helping with rescues, meeting and sending messengers. With the hostages the Council took, chances are that somebody will have squealed by now. They might not know about me being Piper’s twin, but my guess is that they’ve got some idea of who I am, what I do.”

  “But they won’t be expecting us to have come back here, of all places,” said Piper.

  “Don’t underestimate the Confessor,” I warned. “But I think you’re right: they know we were on the island only recently. I don’t think they’d expect us to have headed back here, let alone so quickly.”

  For most of the day we rested, under cover of a scrubby copse, and when we set off in the afternoon we avoided the roads. By the time darkness was sloping into the valley, we’d skirted north of the city to join the river, me leading the way.

  “How far downstream do you think?” Piper asked.

  “A day’s walk, I’d guess. The silos were half a day upstream from our village, and Wyndham about a day farther upstream—far enough away that we never went there.”