The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  It must have been a few hours past midnight when we passed the small, slumbering outpost where the gorge left the river. It wasn’t much more than a stable block and a single, long barracks, topped by an Alpha flag hanging slackly in the still night air. The garrison hadn’t been there when I was a child.

  “Room there for fifty soldiers, maybe more,” said Piper. “These kinds of outposts are springing up more and more these days.”

  An hour beyond that, having made our way up the rock-strewn gorge, we came within sight of the three silos. Round, flat-roofed, and huge, they blocked the stars behind them. They were still windowless, as I’d remembered them, but were now connected to one another by walkways near the top. Where the doorways used to gape open, now a closed door was visible at the base of each silo: an oblong of dark metal against the pale, moon-washed concrete of the buildings.

  “They’re from the Before?” Kip asked.

  I nodded. “The doors are new, and the walkways at the top. But otherwise it looks the same as when we used to come here.”

  “Why aren’t they guarded?” Zoe spoke quietly.

  “The same reason they’re hidden all the way out here, miles from Wyndham. They don’t want anyone to know about it. Plus it’s taboo, so it’s not as if they need to worry about random visitors wandering in. There’re the barracks nearby, but this is Zach and the Confessor’s pet project. They don’t trust anyone.”

  “Even if we don’t have guards to worry about, what about the doors?”

  Zoe grinned. “I already told you how Piper and I got by, as kids. I’ve been picking locks since I was ten. I can get us in there.”

  “You can let me and Kip in,” I said, “but you’re not coming with us.”

  She rolled her eyes. “First you didn’t want to get involved in the resistance, and now you’re going to do the whole martyr thing?”

  “It’s not a martyr thing. If it were, I wouldn’t drag Kip into it. This isn’t going to be a battle. It’s a machine, not an army base. I told you, Zach’s too paranoid to trust soldiers here.”

  Piper shook his head. “But he’s not stupid. You shouldn’t go in alone.”

  “I won’t be alone—I’ll have Kip. That’s our best chance: keeping it small, keeping it quick. I’ll know where to go, what to do.”

  “It makes sense,” Zoe turned to Piper. “Think about it: if they get taken out, we’ll still be able to carry on with our work.”

  “Nice to know you care,” said Kip.

  “But she’s right,” I said. “The resistance is falling apart since the attack. There are refugees from the island being chased by bounty hunters and soldiers; the network of safe houses is collapsing. What Kip and I are going to do here, it matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters. You and Zoe need to get things back on track.”

  He looked at me appraisingly. “You don’t need to make up for what happened on the island.”

  “Just get us in there.”

  “Then what?”

  “When we get out, we’re going to need to get away, as far from here as we can. And quickly, too, before the dawn. Do you think you could make it back to the Council outpost, get hold of some horses, without raising an alarm?”

  Zoe nodded. “We could be back within the hour, meet you at the neck of the gorge, where there’s some cover. But we can’t hang around—not so close to the barracks. If we take horses, the alarm will be raised as soon as the soldiers are up. If you’re not back by dawn, we’ll have to leave.”

  “Ever the sentimentalist,” said Kip.

  “It goes both ways,” said Piper. “If we’re not there, go on without us. Head east. As far as the deadlands if necessary.”

  I murmured my assent as I tightened the straps of the rucksack. Piper checked I still had his knife at my belt. Kip’s hand, too, kept returning to the knife at his own belt. We approached the silos slowly. For the last fifty yards there was no cover; even the sparse bushes that lined much of the gorge had thinned out. But there were no windows in the silos to overlook our approach. Only the same sense of surveillance that I always felt: the unrelenting scrutiny of the Confessor, seeking me.

  I led us to the door of the largest silo. There was no handle in the studded steel, just the lock. Piper pressed his ear to the door, waited several moments, then nodded at Zoe. She knelt, pulled from among the knives on her belt a tiny metal tool, and fiddled for a few seconds with the lock. Her tongue emerged from the corner of her mouth, and she closed her eyes. Her hand moved swiftly and jerkily. It reminded me of Kip when he slept: how his body alternated between twitches and stillness. Two seconds later, there was the satisfying click of the lock giving way.

  Zoe stood. There were no big farewells, just the meeting of eyes in the darkness.

  “Neck of the gorge, before dawn,” Piper said, briefly brushing my arm.

  “Before dawn,” I repeated, like an incantation. Then Piper and Zoe stepped back into the night, and I turned to the unlocked door.

  chapter 30

  I remembered the noise in the tank rooms, how it had surprised me. The silo was the same, though louder. Inside, it was one huge room, a spiral staircase running up one side, leading to a small platform near the roof. Banked five feet thick all around the walls were the machines. Hundreds, I thought at first. But when I arched my neck back to trace their climb up to the ceiling, I saw that there were thousands. Around the edge of the floor huge black boxes hummed, each one disgorging hundreds of cables that then spread their way like cobwebs up the machine-stacked walls. Electric lights were suspended from the ceiling, but not much light penetrated to the floor two hundred feet below, where we stood. The little light that did reach us fell in intricate, trellised patterns from the cables that crisscrossed the hollow room. After the coolness outside, the heat in the silo was pressing and static. When my arm brushed against one of the machines, the metal casing was hot.

  Kip already had his knife in his hand. “So we just start cutting wires?”

  “No.” I looked around. “I mean, it couldn’t hurt, but it won’t be enough—they’ll be able to fix that kind of damage. We need to get at the heart of it—into the system.”

  “Where would you start?” He began to spin around, slowly, head back, scanning the immense mass of metal, punctuated by the occasional blip of a flashing light. But I hadn’t moved, my eyes still fixed on the highest point, the platform at the top of the stairs. The wires emanating from it were in such thick clusters that they’d been bound together, forming muscular boughs of cable.

  He followed my gaze up the precipitous stairs, and sighed. “Once. Just once, couldn’t it be easy?” I smiled ruefully. “But we can do some damage while we’re down here, at least,” he added. He took an experimental swipe at a nearby cable, leaping back and dropping the knife when a blue arc sparked. “It couldn’t hurt, you said?”

  “I wasn’t speaking literally.” I looked nervously at my own knife. “Maybe if we just pull the cables out?”

  “No,” he said, picking up the knife. “It startled me, but I’m fine. We’ll do more damage this way.” He sliced at a cable stretched above him. The severed ends leaped apart with a jealous hiss.

  We made a rapid circuit of the huge space, slicing and unplugging as we went. Whenever I tugged on a cord, and felt the resistance shift to release, I was reminded of the tube I’d unwittingly pulled out when I’d discovered Kip.

  Next to me, he used his knife to lever open the casing of one of the machines. The side landed on the floor with a clash of metal on concrete. Inside was a miniature version of the room itself: units connected by wires in a sequence that seemed chaotic at first but was in fact precisely choreographed. When Kip and I took to it with knives and hands, it protested with smoke. The lights along its base blinked urgently, then stopped altogether.

  When nobody came, despite the clangs and sparks, we grew bolder. Kip wielded a narrow strip of metal casing like a crowbar, swinging it into the control panels of the machines. Now our
footsteps were amplified by broken glass. Even though smoke was beginning to claw in my throat, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed the destruction: tearing the casings from the machines, ripping out their tender, wired insides.

  When we’d completed a loop of the chamber, we began climbing the spiral stairs, slicing as we went at the cables within reach on the wall. The heavier cords clanged satisfyingly as they dropped, severed, against the machines on the opposite side. The smoke from the damage on the ground level was thinner here, though still enough to blur the floor, farther and farther below us, and to make my breath rasp.

  As we neared the top I paused and held my hand out to halt Kip behind me. I squinted slightly, then closed my eyes. Above us the platform loomed, extending almost twenty feet from the wall, blocking a third of the roof. Beneath its base, all the room’s cables culminated. I looked up at the point where the staircase penetrated the platform’s floor, right by the wall. From below, all I could make out was the square opening, brightly backlit by the lights above.

  “Somebody’s up there.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “If they’ve let us do this much already, I’m guessing they’re not looking for a fight.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not always that simple.” I noticed we were whispering and thought how absurd it was, given the cacophony we’d created in the last ten minutes. “I can’t tell. I’ve felt her so strongly, for so long—and this place reeks of her and Zach anyway. But I think it could be her.”

  “The Confessor?”

  I nodded.

  “So now what?” He was one step below me. His hand came up the rail to reach mine, gave it a squeeze.

  “I don’t think we can finish this without going up and facing her.”

  “I never thought I’d long for Piper and Zoe, but shouldn’t we come back with them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Cass, I’m sure you’re a hellcat in a fight, but when you say ‘finish this,’ don’t you think it would be better if there were more, you know, deadly, knife-throwing rebels involved?”

  “No. We’ve brought enough on them—we can’t put them at risk like that. Too much of the resistance depends on them. Anyway, with the Confessor, it’s a mind game; I don’t think she could fight any more than the two of us. When I said ‘finish this,’ I didn’t mean it had to come to blood. I just meant”—I paused, struggling to explain it to him—“I meant that this started with us. And the whole time, it’s been her I’ve felt, tracking me. More even than Zach. We can’t keep running away from her. All of this”—I gestured at the machine-encased chamber below us—“she’s the core of it. We can’t finish it without facing her.” I slipped my knife back into its sheath at my belt.

  He kept his knife out but stepped up next to me. The spiral steps were so narrow that the two of us were crammed close and off-balance, but I was glad to feel him beside me as we climbed the final few stairs and stepped onto the platform.

  Set against the wall, next to a closed steel door, was a huge control panel at which the Confessor sat in a wheeled chair. Her eyes were closed, but I could see them moving busily beneath the twitching lids as her hands roamed the console, pressing buttons, caressing dials. Around her forehead sat a metal band, a steel halo, from which a single wire draped to meet the central console.

  “It’s her?” Kip whispered at my side.

  I nodded.

  Unhurried, the Confessor spun in her chair to face us. “I wondered when I’d be seeing you again.”

  I opened my mouth to answer but saw that the Confessor hadn’t even glanced at me. Still staring at Kip, she stood, lifted off the metal band, narrowed her eyes, then smiled slowly. “We’d guessed there’d be damage, but it’s strange to see in person. And it’s worse than I’d realized. You really are a blank slate, aren’t you? Remarkable.”

  “What do you know about Kip?” I said. My voice echoed back at us from the roof of the silo.

  “Kip—is that what they’re calling you now?” She stepped closer to him until there were only a few feet between them. “I had another name once, too. It’s been so long now, I can hardly remember it. I’m very much like you, you see.”

  “You’re nothing like him.” I darted forward, snatched the metal band from her hands, tore it from its cable and hurled it from the platform. The noise was obscene. The contraption hit the far side of the chamber before ricocheting its way down to the floor with a final, resounding clang.

  The Confessor hadn’t moved, just raised her hands and shrugged. “You let off steam as much as you like. I cut off the high-voltage power when you started your little frolic downstairs. Slashing at live wires with knives and bare hands—you’re lucky you didn’t kill yourselves. So I’ve been running on the auxiliary generators.” Her words meant nothing to us, but she ignored our baffled expressions. “Just enough voltage to give you a nice fireworks show, keep you busy. And, of course, for me to get on the intercom, call your brother, to let him know the prodigal twin is back.” She peered beyond the edge of the platform at the smoke-strewn wreckage beneath. “Much of the damage will be superficial, by the way. The computers are a huge asset, of course, but most of the crucial stuff goes on in here.” She tapped her head, then looked at me. “But you knew that already, of course.”

  “You don’t need to give us another incentive to kill you,” said Kip.

  She laughed. “Believe me, you don’t want to do that.”

  I waved a hand at the console, the machines massed below. “How can you do this, to your own kind?”

  “It’s no stranger than an Alpha running about with the Omega resistance.”

  “We’re telling you nothing about them,” said Kip.

  “Oh, you mean your friend Zoe—Piper’s twin. Yes, we know all about her. And I’m sure her whereabouts, and his, will be one of the things the interrogators will be asking you about shortly. But I wasn’t talking about her.”

  Kip and I exchanged blank looks.

  “And as for ‘my own kind,’ ” she went on, “you of all people should know it’s not that straightforward for a seer. The Omegas resent us, because we’re not deformed like them. And the Alphas are scared of us: we’re like them, only better. We don’t belong anywhere.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Where? With your parents, who were so keen to get rid of you? Or how about that bleak little settlement you scraped by in, after your folks had kicked you out? Or maybe on the island? Though if you belonged so well there, it seems odd that you’d leave them to be slaughtered.”

  “With me,” said Kip. “She belongs with me. And Piper and Zoe.”

  The Confessor laughed gently. “How very sweet. But you’re not quite one of them, are you, Cass? You’re worth more than any of them. This Piper, at least, must have realized what you could be worth to them, or he’d have killed you as soon as he got hold of you, to be rid of Zach.” She cocked her head slightly as she stared at me. “Though I’m beginning to wonder whether I didn’t overestimate you. Whether we all didn’t. I’m sure you have your moments. I’m guessing we have you to thank for the evacuation of most of the islanders; probably the fire at New Hobart, too. But I’m surprised at your blind spots. You still haven’t harnessed what you’re capable of, it seems.”

  She’d drawn even closer to us, but as always it was her mental presence that was most confronting. The calculation behind her still eyes; the probing that made me want to wince.

  “You’re disappointing, Cass. Like these machines. It turns out they’re not everything we might have hoped. Oh, they’re great for storing the information. It’s all in there.” She waved vaguely at the stacks of machines below. “You should have seen the record chambers at Wyndham, before Zach and I had it moved into the computers here. They had the information, but it was so unwieldy. Now, if I need to find something straightforward, it’s phenomenally good. Think of the thousands of clerks we’d need, all scuttling about with millions of files, just to keep track of the basic details. With the compu
ter, it’s all synthesized, in one system. Like a live thing. So I can tap into it, interact with it, use the information as fluently as thinking. If we’d stayed with paper records, we’d never have been able to do what we’ve done.”

  “And what a tragic loss that would be.”

  The Confessor ignored Kip entirely. “But the computers are still—how can I put this?—limited. For complex things—predictions, deductions—they don’t match the human brain. They will, one day—and perhaps they did, Before. Though I doubt they’d ever eclipse what a seer is capable of. But what they’d achieved, back then—you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen what they achieved,” I said.

  Again, the interruption didn’t even seem to register. “In the Before, all of this information, all this power, would have existed in a single machine, no bigger than one of those generators. We’re not there yet, and it’s doubly hard, under the pressure of secrecy. People still aren’t ready to embrace the benefits. Our fault, perhaps—we’ve preserved the taboo, maybe too zealously, for too long. So, for now, we work with what we’ve got. Quietly. And for the really complex stuff: that’s where I come in.

  “We could have used you, too, if you’d worked with me. You could have been a part of it. Already, with just me, and access to all that information, there’s not much I can’t do. It’s so much more than what I did on the island. Think about it. Some Omega rabble-rouser out east, giving the Council a hard time about tithes, and with his own bodyguard of resistance fighters? We can track down his Alpha twin, going under a different name and working on the south coast, in half an hour, and have a knife at his throat in half a day. An Alpha from Wyndham running for election against your brother? You’d be amazed how fast he’ll retire to his country estate once we’ve got his twin in custody. Better still, we can predict hot spots. We’ve got algorithms that monitor everything, day by day, in a way we never could before. We can keep tabs on which towns have low registration rates, patchy tithe collections. Move in early, wipe out the whole place before we have an uprising on our hands. Zach’s been focused on the tanks, but none of that’s possible without this.”