Читать книгу: «The Map of Bones»
Copyright
HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016
Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2016
Jacket design by Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Wendy Stevenson / Arcangel Images (front cover, skull).
Jacket photography © Johnny Ring. Branding iron made by Nick Moran at London Forge. All other images © Shutterstock.com.
Author photograph © Andrew North.
Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007563098
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007563111
Version: 2016-08-04
Dedication
This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents, Alan and Sally, who shared with me their enduring passion for words.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Francesca Haig
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Each time he came to me in dreams, I saw him as I’d seen him the first time: floating. He was a silhouette, blurred by the tank’s thick glass, and by the viscous fluid in which he was submerged. I could see only glimpses: his head slumped against his shoulder; the curve of his cheek. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was him, the same way that I would know the weight of his arm across my body, or the sound of his breath in the darkness.
Kip’s torso curled forwards, his legs hanging. His suspended body was a question mark that I couldn’t answer.
I would have preferred anything to those dreams – even the memory of his jump. That came to me often enough in the daytime: his half-shrug, before he leapt. The long fall. How the silo floor was the mortar that made his bones a pestle, grinding his own flesh.
When I dreamed of him in the tank it was a different kind of horror. Not the spreading blood on the silo floor, but something worse: the immaculate torture of the tubes and wires. I had freed him from the tank myself, months ago. But ever since I’d watched him die in the silo, my dreams encased him once again within the glass.
The dream shifted. Kip was gone, and I was watching Zach sleeping. One of his hands was thrust out towards me. I could see the gnawed skin around his fingernails; I could see his jaw, roughened by stubble.
When we were very small we’d shared a cot, and slept each night curled together. Even when we were older, and he’d begun to fear and despise me, our bodies never unlearnt that habit of closeness. When we’d outgrown our shared cot, I would roll over in my own bed and watch how he, sleeping on the far side of the room, would roll too.
Now I stared again at Zach’s sleeping face. There was nothing on it to show what he had done. I was the branded one, but his face should have worn some kind of mark. How could he have built the tanks, and ordered the massacre on the island, and still sleep like that, open-mouthed and oblivious? Awake, he had never been still. I remembered his hands, always moving, tying invisible knots in the air. Now he was motionless. Only his eyes were twitching as they followed the movements of his own dreams. At his neck, a vein pulsed, keeping count of his heart’s beats. My own, too – they were the same thing. When his stopped, so would mine. He had betrayed me at every opportunity, but our shared death was the one promise that he couldn’t break.
He opened his eyes.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said.
I had fled from him all the way to the island, and back to the deadlands of the east, but here he was, my twin, staring at me across the silence of my dream. It was as if a rope bound me to him, and the further we ran from each other, the more we felt it tighten.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said again.
‘I want to stop you,’ I said. Once I would have said I wanted to save him. Perhaps there was no difference.
‘You can’t,’ he said. There was no triumph in his voice – just a certainty, hard as teeth.
‘What did I do to you?’ I said to him. ‘What have you done to us?’
Zach didn’t answer – the flames did instead. The blast came, its white flash ripping through the dream. It stole the world and replaced it with fire.
CHAPTER 1
I woke from flames, a scream bursting from me into the darkening air. When I reached out for Kip, I found only the blanket, chalky with ash. Each day that I tried to adjust to his absence, I’d wake to find my forgetful body rolling towards his warmth.
I lay back in the echo of my own scream. I dreamed of the blast more often now. It came to me in sleep, and sometimes when I was awake. I understood more than ever why so many seers went mad. Being a seer was like walking on a frozen lake: each vision was a crack in the ice underfoot. There were many days when I felt sure I would plunge through the brittle surface of my own sanity.
‘You’re sweating,’ said Piper.
My breath was fast and loud, and refused to be slowed.
‘It’s not hot. Do you feel feverish?’
‘She can’t talk yet,’ said Zoe from the other side of the fire. ‘She’ll stop carrying on in a minute.’
‘She’s running a fever,’ Piper said, his hand on my forehead. He reacted like this whenever I had a vision. At my side quickly, crowding me with his questions before the visions had even had a chance to dissipate.
‘I’m not sick.’ I sat up, brushing his hand away, and wiped my face. ‘It’s just the blast again.’
No matter how many times I’d endured the vision, there was no preparing for it, and no lessening its impact. It made my senses bleed into one another. The sound of it was absolute blackness; the colour a white that shrieked in my ears. The heat went beyond pain: it was total. The size of the flames was beyond any measure: the horizon was consumed, the world snatched away in an instant of flame that lasted forever.
Zoe stood and stepped over the crumbs of the fire to pass me the water flask.
‘It’s happening more often, isn’t it,’ Piper said.
I took the flask from Zoe. ‘Have you been counting?’ I said to Piper. He didn’t reply, but kept watching me as I drank.
Until that night, I knew I hadn’t screamed for weeks. I’d worked so hard at it. Avoiding sleep; taming my convulsive breath when a vision came; clenching my jaw until my teeth felt as though they would grind each other down to dust. But Piper had noticed anyway.
‘You’ve been watching me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, not flinching from my stare. ‘I do what I have to do, for the resistance. It’s your job to endure the visions. And it’s mine to decide how we can use them.’
It was me who broke the gaze, rolling away from him.
For weeks our world had been made of ash. Even after we’d left the deadlands, the wind still blew from the east, loading the sky with a burden of black dust. When I rode behind Piper or Zoe, I saw how it settled even in the elaborate contours of their ears.
If I’d cried, my tears would have run black. But I had no time for tears. And who would I cry for? Kip? The dead of the island? All who were trapped in New Hobart? Those still suspended, out of time, in the tanks? There were too many, and my tears were no good to them.
I learned that the past is barbed. Memories snagged at my skin, relentless as the thorn bushes that grew by the deadlands’ black river. Even when I tried to recall a happy time – sitting with Kip on the windowsill, on the island, or laughing with Elsa and Nina in the kitchen at New Hobart – my mind would end up at the same point: the silo floor. Those final minutes: The Confessor, and what she had revealed about Kip’s past; Kip’s jump, and his body on the concrete below me.
I found myself envying Kip’s amnesia. So I taught myself not to remember. I clung to the present, the horse beneath me, its solidity and warmth. Leaning with Piper over a map sketched in the dust, to calculate our next destination. The indecipherable messages left in the ash by the lizards that dragged their bellies across the ruined earth.
When I was thirteen and freshly branded, I’d stared at the healing wound in the mirror and said to myself: This is what I am. Now I did the same with this new life. I tried to learn to occupy it, as I’d learned to inhabit my branded body. This is my life, I said to myself, each morning, when Zoe shook my shoulder to wake me for my shift as lookout, or when Piper kicked dirt over the fire and said it was time to move again. This is my life now.
After our raid on the silo, the whole Wyndham region was so thick with Council patrols that before we could travel back to the west we had to head south, picking our way through the deadlands, that vast canker on the earth.
Eventually we had to let the horses go – unlike us, they couldn’t survive on lizard flesh and grubs, and there was no grass where we travelled. Zoe had suggested eating them, but I was relieved when Piper pointed out that they were as thin as us. He was right: their backbones were sharpened like the peaked spines of lizards. When Zoe untied them they galloped off to the west on legs that were nothing more than splints of bone. Whether they were fleeing us, or just trying to get away from the deadlands, I didn’t know.
I’d thought I knew the damage that the blast had wrought. But those weeks showed me the wreckage anew. I saw the skin of the earth peeled back like an eyelid, leaving scorched stone and dust. After the blast, they say most of the world was like that: broken. I’d heard bards singing about the Long Winter, when ash had shrouded the sky for years, and nothing would grow. Now, hundreds of years later, the deadlands had retreated to the east, but from our time out there, I understood more of the fear and rage that had driven the purges, when the survivors had destroyed any of the machines that were left after the blast. The taboo surrounding the remnants of the machines wasn’t simply a law – it was an instinct. Any rumours or stories of what machines had once been able to do, in the Before, was overshadowed by the evidence of the machines’ ultimate achievement: fire and ash. The Council’s strict penalties for breaking the taboo never had to be enforced – it was a law upheld by our own revulsion; we shuddered away from the fragments of machines that still surfaced, occasionally, in the dust.
People shuddered away from us, too, we Omegas in our blast-marked bodies. It was the same fear of the blast and its contagion that had led the Alphas to cast us out. To them, our bodies were deadlands of flesh: infertile and broken. The imperfect twins, we carried the stain of the blast in us, as surely as the scorched earth of the east. They chased us far away from where they lived and farmed, to scratch an existence from the blighted land.
Piper, Zoe and I had emerged from the east like blackened ghosts. The first time we washed, the water downstream ran black. Even afterwards, the skin between my fingers was stained grey. Piper and Zoe’s dark skin took on a greyish tone that wouldn’t wash away – it was the pallor of hunger and exhaustion. The deadlands weren’t something that could easily be left behind. When we headed west, we were still shaking ash from our blankets each night when we unpacked them, and still coughing up ash in the morning.
*
Piper and I sat near the entrance to the cave, watching the sun shrug off the night. More than a month earlier, on the way to the silo, we’d slept in the same hidden cave, and perched on the same flat rock. Next to my knee, the stone still bore the scuff-marks from where Piper had sharpened his knife all those weeks ago.
I looked at Piper. The slash on his single arm had healed to a pink streak, the scar tissue raised and waxy, puckered where stitches had held the wound closed. At my neck, the wound from The Confessor’s knife had finally healed, too. In the deadlands, it had been an open wound, edged with ash. Was the ash still there, inside me, specks of black sealed beneath the scar’s carapace?
Piper held out a piece of rabbit meat skewered on the blade of his knife. It was left over from the night before, coated with cold fat, congealed into grey strings. I shook my head and turned away.
‘You need to eat,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us three more weeks to get to the Sunken Shore. Even longer to get to the west coast, if we’re going to search for the ships.’
All of our conversations began and ended at the ships. Their names had become like charms: The Rosalind. The Evelyn. And if the hazards of the unknown seas didn’t sink the ships, then sometimes I felt that the weight of our expectations would. They were everything, now. We’d managed to rid the Council of The Confessor, and of the machine that she was using to keep track of all Omegas – but it wasn’t enough, especially after the massacre on the island. We might have slowed down the Council, and cost them two of their most powerful weapons, but the tanks were patient. I’d seen them myself, in visions and in the awful solidity of reality. Row after row of glass tanks, each one a pristine hell.
That was the Council’s plan for all of us. And if we didn’t have a plan of our own, a goal to work for, then we were just scrapping in the dust, and there’d be no end to it. We might forestall the tanks for a while, but no better than that. Once, the island had been our destination. That had ended in blood and smoke. So now we were seeking the ships that Piper had sent out from the island, months before, in search of Elsewhere.
There were times when it felt more like a wish than a plan.
It would be four months at the next full moon since the ships sailed. ‘It’s a hell of a long time to be at sea,’ Piper said as we sat on the rock.
I had no reassurance to offer him, so I stayed silent. It wasn’t just a question of whether or not Elsewhere was out there. The real question was what it could offer us, if it existed. What its inhabitants might know, or do, that we couldn’t. Elsewhere couldn’t just be another island, just a place to hide from the Council. That might offer us a respite, but it would be no solution, any more than the island was. There had to be more than that: a real alternative.
If the ships found Elsewhere, they’d have to make their way back through the treacherous sea. If they survived, and if they weren’t caught attempting to return to the captured island, then they should be returning to a rendezvous point at Cape Bleak, on the north-west coast.
It felt like such a tenuous chance: if piled on if, each hope feeling flimsier than the last, while Zach’s tanks were solid, multiplying with each day that passed.
Piper knew better, by now, than to push against my silences. He kept staring at the sunrise, and went on. ‘When we’ve sent out ships in the past, some of them made it back to the island, months later, with nothing to show for the journey but damaged hulls and crews sick with scurvy. And two ships never came back.’ He was quiet for a moment, but his face betrayed no emotion. ‘It’s not just a question of distance, or even storms. Some of our sailors have come back with stories of things we can barely imagine. A few years back, one of our best captains, Hobb, led three ships north. They were gone for more than two months. It was nearing winter, when Hobb got back – and there were only two ships by then. The winter storms we’re used to on the west coast are bad enough – we didn’t even make crossings to the island in winter, if we could help it. But further north, Hobb told us the entire sea up there had started to freeze solid. The ice crushed one of the ships, just like that.’ He opened his hand wide, then closed his fist. ‘The whole crew was lost.’ He paused again. Both of us were looking at the frost stiffening the grass. Winter was on its way.
‘After all this time,’ he said, ‘do you still believe that The Rosalind and The Evelyn could be out there?’
‘I’m not sure about belief,’ I said. ‘But I hope they are.’
‘And that’s enough for you?’ he said.
I shrugged. What would ‘enough’ mean, anyway? Enough for what? Enough to keep going, I supposed. I’d learned not to ask for more than that. Enough to get me to fold my blanket at the end of each day’s rest, stuff it back into my rucksack, and follow Piper and Zoe once more onto the plain for another night of walking.
Piper held out the meat again. I turned away.
‘You need to stop this,’ he said.
He still spoke as he always had: as if the world was his to command. If I’d closed my eyes, I could imagine he was still giving orders in the island’s Assembly Hall, rather than squatting on a rock, his clothes torn and stained. There were times that I admired his self-assurance: its audacity, in the face of a world that did its best to show us that we were worthless. At other times, it baffled me. I’d caught myself watching how he moved. The last few weeks had left him thinner, his skin stretched a little too tightly over his cheekbones, but it hadn’t changed the defiant jut of his jaw, or the spread of his shoulders, unafraid to occupy space. It was as though his body spoke a language that mine could never learn.
‘Stop what?’ I said, avoiding his gaze.
‘You know what I mean. You’re not eating. You barely sleep, or talk.’
‘I’m keeping up with you and Zoe, aren’t I?’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that you’re not yourself anymore.’
‘And since when are you an expert in what I’m like? You hardly know me.’ My voice was loud in the morning stillness.
I knew it wasn’t fair to snap at him. What he’d said was true enough. I’d been eating less, even now we were out of the deadlands and the hunting was good. I ate just enough to stay well, to travel fast. On frosty days, when it was my turn to sleep, I cast the blanket off my shoulders and offered myself up to the cold.
I couldn’t explain any of this to Piper or Zoe. It would mean talking about Kip. His name, that single syllable, caught in my throat like a fish bone.
His past, too, stopped me at the brink of words. I couldn’t speak about it. Since the silo, when The Confessor had told me what Kip had been like before the tank, I carried her news with me everywhere. I was good at secrets. I’d hidden my seer visions from my family for thirteen years before Zach exposed me. I’d concealed my visions of the island from The Confessor for the four years of my captivity in the Keeping Rooms. On the island, I’d hidden my twin’s identity from Piper and the Assembly for weeks. Now I concealed what I knew about Kip. The knowledge that he had tormented The Confessor as a child, and delighted when she was branded and sent away. That he’d tried, as an adult, to track her down and pay to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
How could he be such a stranger to me, when I could identify each of his vertebrae under my fingertips, and I knew the precise curve of his hip bones against my own?
But at the end, in the silo, he’d made the choice to die, to save me. These days, it seemed that was the only gift we had to offer one another: the gift of our own deaths.
CHAPTER 2
Halfway to the Sunken Shore, Zoe led us to a safehouse at the edge of the plains. Nothing moved in the cottage but the wind, banging the front door, which had been left open.
‘Did they run, or were they taken?’ I asked, as we walked through the empty rooms.
‘Either way, they left in a hurry,’ said Zoe. In the kitchen, a jug lay in pieces on the floor. Two bowls sat unwashed on the table, velveted with green mould.
Piper was bending to look at the door latch. ‘The door was kicked in, from outside.’ He stood. ‘We have to leave now.’
And even though I’d looked forward to a night of sleeping indoors, I was glad to leave those rooms where all noise was muted by dust. We retreated into the long grass that grew right up to the house itself, and didn’t make camp until we’d walked all day, and half the night.
Zoe was kneeling over a rabbit that she’d caught the day before, skinning it while Piper and I lit a fire.
‘It’s worse than we thought,’ said Piper, leaning forward to blow on the timid flame. ‘Half the network must’ve been infiltrated.’
It wasn’t the first ruined safehouse that we’d seen. On the way to the silo we’d come across another safehouse, where nothing remained but blackened beams, still smoking. The Council had taken prisoners on the island, and the resistance’s secrets were being wrung from them.
As Zoe and Piper took stock of what we knew, I sat in silence. It wasn’t that they excluded me from conversations – rather that their talks were full of shorthand references to people, places and information that they shared, and that I had never encountered.
‘No point in going past Evan’s place,’ Piper said. ‘If they took Hannah alive, then they’ll have got him too.’
Zoe didn’t look up from the rabbit. She stretched it out on its back, grasped its back legs with one hand, and ran her knife down the line of exposed white fur. The stomach fell open like two hands parting.
‘Wouldn’t they pick up Jess, first?’ she said.
‘No. She never dealt with Hannah directly – she should be safe. But Evan was Hannah’s contact. If she’s taken, Evan’s done for.’
The resistance network on the mainland had been larger and more intricate than I’d ever realised. At how many other safehouses did broken doors now swing onto empty rooms, the latches smashed? The network was like a woollen jumper with several loose threads, each one threatening to unravel the entire thing.
‘Depends how long Hannah held out for,’ Zoe said. ‘She might’ve bought him some time to get clear. Julia lasted three days when they took her.’
‘Hannah’s not as strong as Julia – we can’t assume she managed to last that long.’
‘Sally had no contact with Hannah, either. And some of the western cells should still be intact,’ Zoe went on. ‘They reported straight to you – there were no links with the eastern network.’
I spoke up. ‘I never realised how much of the resistance was going on here, on the mainland.’
‘You thought the island was the only thing that mattered?’ Zoe said.
I shrugged. ‘That was the main thing, wasn’t it?’
Piper pursed his lips. ‘The thing about the island – it mattered that it existed. It was a symbol – not just for the resistance, but for the Council too. It was a signal that there could be a different way. But it was never going to be big enough for all of us. Even in those final months, we were having to turn down some requests from refugees – until we’d built up our capacity. Added to the fleet, sorted out the supply situation.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘It was never going to be the final answer.’
Zoe interrupted him. ‘Most people on the island did nothing. They felt like great rebels just for living out there, but that was it. They might have joined the guards or done a few shifts in the lookout posts, but not many of them were actually actively contributing – coming to the mainland to help with rescues; running the safehouse network; monitoring the Council’s movements. Even some of those in the Assembly with Piper – they were happy enough to sit about in the Assembly Hall, looking at maps and talking about strategy, but you wouldn’t catch half of them making the crossing. The mainland was where the hard work still happened – but once they’d made it to the island, most people never came back.’
‘I wouldn’t have put it like that, but Zoe’s right,’ Piper said. ‘A lot of people on the island were complacent. They thought being there was enough. It was those on the mainland, or working the courier ships between the two, who did most of it. Zoe did more than most, and she’s never even been to the island.’
I looked up quickly. ‘Really? I was sure that you had,’ I said.
‘They never wanted any Alphas setting foot on the place – even I understood why.’ Zoe was hunched over the rabbit. She pulled the fur from the flesh as if peeling off a glove. ‘Why did you think I’d been there?’
‘I guess because you dream about the sea all the time.’
I didn’t realise I knew it, until I heard myself say it. In all those nights that we’d slept close to one another, I’d shared her dreams, the same way I’d shared her water flask or her blanket. And her dreams were all of the ocean. Perhaps that’s why it hadn’t struck me before: I was used to it, after my years of dreaming of the island. Used to the sea’s restlessness, and its shifting register of greys, blacks and blues. In Zoe’s dreams, though, there hadn’t been any island, nor any land at all: just the churning sea.
One minute Zoe was squatting by the fire, the rabbit’s flaccid body in her hands; the next her knife was at my stomach.
‘You’ve been snooping in my dreams?’
‘Stand down,’ said Piper. He didn’t shout, but it was a command nonetheless.
The blade didn’t budge. Her other hand had grasped a handful of my hair, her knuckles jabbing against my skull, holding me in place. The blade had gone straight through my jumper and shirt, and was pressed flat against my stomach; I felt its cold indentation on my skin. My head was twisted back and to the side. I could see the rabbit on the ground where she’d dropped it, its wrung neck and open eyes.
‘What the hell have you been doing?’ she said. As she leaned closer the blade became more insistent. ‘What did you see?’
‘Zoe,’ warned Piper. He wrapped his arm around her neck, but he didn’t fight her – just held her, and waited.
‘What did you see?’ she repeated.
‘I told you. Just the sea. Lots of waves. I’m sorry – I can’t control it. I didn’t even realise until just now.’ I couldn’t explain to her how it worked. How my awareness of her dreams wasn’t an eavesdropping, any more than I’d eavesdropped on the sea while on the island. It was just there, a background noise.
‘You said it didn’t work like that,’ she said, her breath hot on my face. ‘You said you couldn’t read minds.’
‘I can’t. It’s not like that. I just get impressions, sometimes. I don’t mean to.’
She shoved me backwards. When I’d steadied myself, I put my hand to my stomach. It came away red.
‘It’s rabbit blood,’ Piper said.
‘This time,’ said Zoe.
‘If it makes any difference,’ I said, ‘you know what I dream about.’
‘Everyone within ten miles knows what you dream about, the way you scream and carry on.’ She tossed the knife down next to the half-skinned rabbit. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to poke around in my head.’
I knew how it felt – I would never forget the sense of violation that The Confessor’s interrogations had left me with. How my whole mind had felt sullied by her probings.
‘I’m sorry,’ I called after her, as she walked away towards the river.
‘Let her go,’ said Piper. ‘Are you OK? Show me your stomach,’ he said, reaching out to lift my jumper.
I swiped his hand away.
‘What was that about?’ I said, staring after Zoe.
He picked up the rabbit and shook the dirt from its flesh. ‘She shouldn’t have done that – I’ll talk to her.’
‘I don’t need you to talk to her for me. I just want to know what’s going on. Why did she react like that? Why is she like this?’
‘It’s not easy for her,’ he said.
‘Who has it been easy for? Not for me, that’s for sure. Not for you, or any of us.’
‘Just give her some space,’ he said.
I waved at the plain surrounding us, the pale grass stretching for miles, and the sky so big that it seemed to have encroached on the earth itself. ‘Space? There’s nothing here but space. She doesn’t have to be in my face every moment.’
I got no answer but the rasping of the grass in the wind, scratching at the underside of the sky, and the moistened scrape of Piper’s knife on the rabbit’s flesh as he finished the skinning.
Zoe didn’t come back until after dawn. She ate in silence, and slept on the far side of Piper, instead of her usual spot between us.
I thought of what she’d said earlier: once they’d made it to the island, most people never came back. Is it Piper she’s thinking of, I wondered, when the sea floods her sleeping mind? The sea that he crossed for the island, leaving her on her own, after all that she’d given up to be with him.
CHAPTER 3
I’d first heard Piper and Zoe mention Sally, and the Sunken Shore, when we were still in the deadlands. They were meant to be resting, but I could hear their raised voices from the lookout spot. It was dawn; I’d volunteered to take the first watch, but when I heard them arguing I left the lookout post and headed back to the fire.
‘I never wanted to drag Sally into this,’ Zoe said.
‘Who?’ I said.
They both turned to face me. It was the same movement, doubled. And the same expression: the same angle to their eyebrows, the same appraising eyes. Even when they were arguing, I felt like an intruder.
Piper answered me. ‘We need a base, with someone we can trust. The safehouse network’s crumbling. Sally will give us shelter, so we can start to muster the resistance and send people to Cape Bleak to seek the ships. Outfit new ships, if we need.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ said Zoe, still ignoring me and addressing only Piper. ‘We can’t get Sally involved. We can’t ask her. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘Zoe told you about how we got by, as kids, after we were split?’
I nodded. They’d been raised in the east, where people used to let twins stay together a little longer. Piper had been ten when he’d been branded and exiled. She’d run away to follow him. The two of them had survived by stealing, working, and hiding, with some help from sympathetic Omegas along the way, before they’d finally joined the resistance.
‘Sally was one of the people who helped us,’ he said. ‘The first one. When we were really young, and needed it most.’
It was hard to imagine Zoe and Piper needing help. But I reminded myself of how young they’d been – even younger than I’d been when my family sent me away.
‘She took us in,’ said Zoe. ‘Taught us everything. And she had a lot to teach. She was old when we found our way to her, but years before that she’d been one of the resistance’s best agents, working in Wyndham.’
‘In Wyndham?’ I thought I must have misheard. No Omegas were allowed to live in an Alpha town – let alone in Wyndham, the Council’s hub.
‘She was an infiltrator,’ said Piper.
I looked from Zoe to Piper, and back again. ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said.
‘That was the idea,’ Zoe said impatiently.
‘It was the resistance’s most covert project,’ Piper said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible these days. This was back when the Council was less strict about branding, especially out east. We’re talking about fifty years ago, at least. The resistance had managed to recruit a few unbranded Omegas, with deformations minor enough that they could be disguised, or hidden. For Sally, it was a malformed foot. She could jam it into a normal shoe, and she trained herself to walk straight on it. It hurt her like crazy, but she got away with it for more than two years. There were three infiltrators, right inside the Council chambers. Not as Councillors, but as advisors or assistants. They were right in the thick of it.
‘The Council hated infiltrators more than anything.’ Piper smiled. ‘It wasn’t even the information that they managed to find out. It was the fact that they managed to do it – pass themselves off as Alphas, sometimes for years. Proof that we’re not that different, after all.’
‘Sally was the best of any of them,’ Zoe said. ‘Half of the current resistance was built on the information she got out of the Council.’ When she spoke of Sally, Zoe had none of her usual sarcasm, or the raised eyebrow that could sharpen a single word into a weapon. ‘But she’s ancient now,’ she went on. ‘She can hardly walk. Hadn’t worked for the resistance for years, even by the time we came to her. Too risky, apart from anything else. She was top of the Council’s wanted list for a long time, and they knew what she looked like. I don’t want to get her involved.’
‘We’re all involved, whether we want to be or not,’ said Piper. ‘The Council will come for her, soon enough. They won’t care that she’s old, or frail.’
‘She’s managed to stay hidden from them for all these years,’ Zoe said. ‘We can’t drag her into this.’
He paused, and then spoke more quietly to her. ‘You know she’d never turn us away,’ he said.
‘That’s why it’s not fair to go to her.’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t have any other options. Not after what I did on the island.’
I could see it again: the blood thickening between the stones of the courtyard.
‘The Council would never have spared the island if you’d handed Cass and Kip over to The Confessor,’ Zoe said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But we can’t assume that the rest of the resistance will understand that. You saw how they reacted at the time. When that many people are killed, people cast around for someone to blame. We can’t know how they’re going to take it when we reappear, especially not with Cass. We don’t know if it will be safe for her. If we’re going to reconnect with the resistance, we need to start with somebody we know we can trust.’
She turned away from me again, and looked only to Piper. ‘Sally’s been through enough,’ she said.
‘She’d want us to go to her,’ he said.
‘You brave enough to try telling her what she’d want?’ said Zoe, with a slow smile. Piper smiled back at her. He was like her reflection.
*
At each settlement we passed on the journey to the Sunken Shore, we did our best to spread the word about the Council’s plans for tanking Omegas. Above all, we tried to warn them away from turning themselves in to refuges. These huge, secure camps were supposed to be the Council’s protection for struggling Omegas – a place where any Omega would be given food and shelter, in exchange for their labour. They were a last resort for Omegas, and a reassurance for the Alphas themselves. A guarantee that however much they might restrict Omegas to blighted land, and however high they raised their tithes, we would not take them with us into starvation. But for years now, those who entered the refuge gates had not been allowed to leave. The refuges were expanding rapidly, and had become nothing more than tank complexes.
But time and again, when we tried to pass on this news at settlements, we were met with silence. Wary stares and crossed arms. I remembered how Kip and I had started the fire outside New Hobart: how it had taken on its own momentum as it built and spread. Spreading the word of the Council’s tanks was more like trying to light a fire in rain, with sodden green twigs. It wasn’t the kind of tale you could just share with a stranger in a tavern, as if it were no more than gossip about a neighbour. We could only risk raising the topic with those who were sympathetic to the resistance – and who would admit to that, after the massacre on the island? The Council, after years of denying that the island existed, was now spreading the word of the island’s defeat. The blood on its streets had rendered it safe: a cautionary tale, rather than a threat.
And the cautionary tale was working. People were warier than ever. When we approached settlements, people straightened in the fields and watched us coming, their hands firmly on their pitchforks and spades. We ventured into Drury, a large Omega town, but both times we entered taverns the noisy conversations stopped, as if the sound were a lamp suddenly extinguished. At every table, people turned to the door to assess us. Their loud conversations never resumed – whispers and mutterings replaced them. Some people would push back their chairs and leave as soon as they saw Zoe’s unbranded face. Who in the taverns within would dare to discuss the resistance with three ragged strangers, let alone a group that included an Alpha and a seer?
The most frustrating encounters weren’t with those who refused to talk to us, but those who seemed to believe us, but still did nothing. In two of the settlements, people listened to our story, and seemed to understand how it made sense of the Alpha’s treatment of us. That the tanks were the endpoint to which the Council’s policies of the last few years had been heading. But the question we heard, again and again, was What are we supposed to do about it? Nobody wanted to shoulder the new burden of this news. They had enough burdens already. We saw it, everywhere we went: the lean faces, the bones of eye sockets thrust forward as though trying to escape the skin. The settlements where shanties and lean-tos propped one another up. The people with teeth and gums stained a livid red, from chewing areca nut to distract from their hunger. What did we expect these people to do with the news we told them?
Two days after we’d found the abandoned safehouse, and my fight with Zoe, Piper left at dawn to scout a small Omega town further west on the plain. He returned before noon, sweat darkening the front of his shirt despite the cold.
‘The Judge is dead,’ he said. ‘It’s all over the town.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ I said. The Judge had been ruling the Council for almost as long as I could remember, but he’d been under the control of Zach and his allies for years. ‘If he’s just a puppet, what difference does it make if he’s finally died?’
‘It’s not good news if his death only clears the way for someone more extreme,’ said Zoe.
‘It’s worse than that,’ Piper said. He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Zoe took it and opened it. I squatted on the grass next to her to read it, trying not to think about her knife at my guts, two nights before.
‘Council leader killed by Omega terrorists,’ the headline read. In smaller print, underneath, it continued: ‘Terrorists from the self-styled Omega “resistance” movement yesterday assassinated the twin of long-serving Council leader, The Judge.’
I looked up at Piper. ‘Is it possible?’
He shook his head. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Zach and his cronies have had The Judge’s twin locked up for half a decade – that’s how they’ve been controlling him ever since. It’s all a set-up. They’ve just decided they don’t need him anymore.’
‘So what’s changed? You always said they needed him because people wanted the Council led by someone who seemed to be moderate.’
‘Not now. Listen.’ He grabbed the poster and read from it out loud:
‘In his fourteen years as Council leader, The Judge was a staunch protector of Omegas. This latest outrage by Omega agitators raises pressing security concerns for those serving on the Council –’
‘As if they haven’t all had their twins locked up for years, if not tanked,’ scoffed Zoe.
Piper kept reading. ‘– and indeed for all Alphas. This attack on the very head of our government is further proof that the growing threat of Omega dissidents endangers both Alphas and Omegas. The General, reluctantly stepping forward to fill The Judge’s role, expressed her sadness at his untimely demise. “Through this cowardly act, these terrorists have robbed the Omegas of a steadfast ally, and have demonstrated the ruthlessness and brutality of those who claim to be agitating for Omega ‘self-determination’, and who are willing to kill their own kind in order to undermine the work of the Council.”
‘They’ve killed two birds with one stone,’ he said, tossing the paper on to the grass. ‘They’ve got rid of him, finally, and by pinning it on us, they’ve stoked the anti-Omega sentiments, strengthened their own argument against the moderates.’
‘So it’s The General in charge now,’ I said.
‘Reluctantly stepping forward, my arse,’ said Zoe. ‘She’s been pushing for this for years. And The Reformer and The Ringmaster will be neck deep in the whole scheme.’
None of the Councillors went by their real names. In the past, they’d chosen their Council names to disguise their identities and protect themselves from attacks on their twins. These days, when nearly all the Councillors kept their twins imprisoned in the Keeping Rooms, if not in the tanks, the elaborate names were just pageantry. Each of the names was a statement, a way of announcing to the world their agenda.
The General; The Ringmaster; The Reformer. I remembered the trifecta of faces from Piper’s chart on the island: the three young Councillors who were the real power in Wyndham. The Ringmaster, his smile half-hidden by his mass of dark curls. The General’s angular face, her cheekbones unforgiving. And Zach, The Reformer, my twin. His face frozen in the artist’s pen-strokes. The person who I knew best, and not at all.
‘The three of them have already been running things for years, really,’ Piper said. ‘But it’s a bad sign, that they felt able to get rid of The Judge once and for all. They’re confident enough of their support that they don’t even need to hide behind him anymore.’
‘More than that,’ Zoe said. ‘You’ve heard it, everywhere we go – the unease after the numbers who died at the island. I’d bet that even some Alphas were a bit restive about the killings. A stunt like this with The Judge shores up their own support – makes it seem as if it’s a righteous battle, against an Omega resistance that’s ruthlessly aggressive. Justifies their own brutal tactics.’
It was a network of fear, expertly manipulated by the Council. Not only the Omegas’ fears, but the fears of the Alphas too. I had seen how they cringed away from us, how they viewed us as walking reminders of the blast, our deformed bodies a poisonous residue. The fact that my mutation wasn’t visible didn’t make any difference: the Omega brand on my face had been enough to provoke spits and insults from Alphas who’d passed through my settlement when I was a teenager. Alphas had always shunned us, even in good times. Then came the drought years, when I was a child, and even Alphas had gone hungry. And the year the harvests failed, when I was at the settlement. People turn on one another when they’re hungry and afraid, and the Council had made sure that it was the Omegas that they blamed. This lie about The Judge’s death was just the latest part of the narrative that the Council had been constructing for years: that it was us against them.
I picked up the paper, still warm from being crushed in Piper’s pocket. ‘It’s all accelerating, isn’t it. The Council’s got everyone running scared. Alphas and Omegas both.’
‘They don’t have The Confessor anymore,’ he said. ‘Or her machine. Don’t forget what we’ve achieved.’
I closed my eyes. The one thing I ought to have been grateful for – the fact that Zach no longer had The Confessor’s cruel brilliance at his disposal – I couldn’t even think of without losing my breath, the raw pain of it like a boot to the guts. Her death was Kip’s death.
‘How much do you know about The General?’ I asked them.
‘Not enough,’ said Zoe. ‘We’ve been monitoring her since she came on the scene. But it’s been decades since infiltrators were able to penetrate the Council fort. It’s harder than ever to get into Wyndham, let alone close to the Council.’
‘What we do know is all bad news,’ Piper said. ‘She’s militantly anti-Omega, just like The Ringmaster and The Reformer.’
It still jarred, to hear Zach spoken of by his Council name. In the silo, The Confessor had said, I had another name once. I wondered if my twin ever thought of himself as Zach anymore. I suspected not – he would have wanted to leave it behind, along with the unsplit childhood that he’d been forced to share with me.
‘The General’s better established than either of them,’ Piper went on. ‘They all started young, not that it’s unusual in the Council. That place is a snake pit – plenty of Councillors don’t live long. But The General’s the sharpest of the lot, politically. She got her start working for The Commander. The rumour was that she got her place by poisoning him.’
I remembered The Commander’s death being announced when I was still living in the settlement. Untimely, the Council’s bulletin had said. Timely enough for The General, it seemed.
‘The General’s never disputed those stories,’ Piper said. ‘True or not, it suits her to be feared. Every time she’s come up against opposition, it’s ended badly – and never for her. Scandals, disgrace, backstabbings – sometimes literally. One by one, everyone who’s opposed her has been silenced, or driven out. The only reason The Judge lasted as long as he did was because he was useful to her and the other two – a popular figurehead for them to use.’
‘Why her, as the new leader,’ I said, ‘and not The Ringmaster, or Zach?’
Piper was squatting, his elbow on his knee. ‘The Ringmaster came to the Council via the army,’ he said. ‘He’s got a huge following amongst the soldiers, but he’s less of a political operator than the other two. They need him – he’s been there longer, and he’s got the common touch, and the loyalty of the soldiers, who see him as one of their own. But the word is that he’s less radical. Don’t get me wrong – he’s still notorious. He runs the army, for one thing, so when it comes to enforcing Council rule, he’s been the driving force for years. But although he’s brutal, he’s not the one driving the big reforms. Most of the worst changes – pushing the settlements further and further from decent land; the tithe increases – they seem to have originated with The General. And the tightening up of registrations came from The Reformer. Probably The Confessor too, working behind the scenes with him.’
‘And what do you know about how Zach fits in to it all?’
‘Less than you, probably,’ Piper said.
Once, I would have agreed with him. I would have argued that I knew Zach better than anyone. Now, there was a distance between us that I couldn’t breach. Between us lay The Confessor’s body, and Kip’s. All the silent people floating in those round glass tanks.
Piper continued. ‘The Reformer’s always seemed like an outsider – it comes from being split late, and not raised in Wyndham like the other two. But he had The Confessor, and that made him hugely powerful. I think the tanks are his pet project – and the database, too. He’s never been smooth, like The General is – she can charm as well as intimidate. The Reformer’s just as ruthless, though, in his own way.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ I said.
Piper nodded. ‘But now that he’s lost The Confessor, allegiances might have shifted.’
I remembered how Zach had let me escape, after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths. I could still hear the waver in his voice, as he’d shouted at me to go before the soldiers arrived. If they find out you were involved, that’ll be it for me. Was it The General or The Ringmaster he feared? Or both? Before the silo, I might have convinced myself that, on some level, Zach had wanted me set free. But whatever part of me could have believed that had been left on the silo floor, along with Kip.
‘We need to get to Sally’s quickly,’ Piper said. ‘We don’t have a choice. From there, we start mustering the resistance, seeking the ships. They’ve wiped out the island; they’ve got rid of The Judge; they’re dismantling the resistance network, bit by bit.’
The sky above us, sulky with clouds, took on a new and pressing weight, and I felt that the three of us were very small. Just three people on the wind-scoured plain, against all the Council’s machinations. Each night, as we trudged through the long grass, there were more and more tanks being readied in the refuges. Who knew how many they’d tanked already. And more people were arriving at the refuges every day.
I couldn’t claim that I understood Zach anymore, but I knew enough to know this: it would never be enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all tanked.
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