The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  Two days after we’d found the abandoned safe house, and my fight with Zoe, Piper left at dawn to scout a small Omega town farther 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 setup. 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 that 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 onto 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 ass,” 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 Councilors 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 Councilors 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 Councilors 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 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 Councilors don’t live long. But the General’s the sharpest of the lot, politically. She got her start working for the Commander. The rumor 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 among 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 farther and farther 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.

  chapter 4

  The next night, well after midnight, I began to sense something. I was jittery, and found myself scanning the darkness around us as we walked. Once, when Zach and I were little, wasps had made a nest in the eaves of our house, right outside our bedroom. For days, until Dad found the nest, a buzzing and scraping had kept us awake, lying in our small beds and whispering of ghosts. What I felt now was like that: a high-pitched buzz at the edge of my hearing, a message that I couldn’t interpret but that soured the night air.

  Then we passed the first sign for the refuge. We were about halfway between Wyndham and the southern coast, skirting the wagon road. But we passed close enough to the road to see the sign, and crept nearer to read it. The wooden board was painted in large white letters:

  Your Council welcomes you to Refuge 9—6 miles south.

  Securing our mutual well-being.

  Safety and plenty, earned by fair labor.

  Refuges: sheltering you in difficult times.

  It was illegal for Omegas to attend schools, but many managed to scrape together the basics of reading, learning at home, as I had, or in illicit schools. I wondered how many of the Omegas who passed the refuge’s sign could read it at all, and how many of those would believe its message.

  “In difficult times,” Piper scoffed. “No mention of the fact that it’s their tithes, or pushing Omegas out to blighted land, that make the times so hard.”

  “Or that if the difficult times pass, it makes no difference,” added Zoe. “Once people are in there, they’re in for good.”

  We all knew what that meant: the Omegas floating in the nearly-death of the tanks. Trapped in the horrifying safety of those glass bellies, while their Alpha counterparts lived on unencumbered.

  We kept clear of the road, following it from a distance among the cover of gullies and trees. As we approached the refuge I found myself slowing, my movements sluggish as we drew closer to the source of my disquiet. By dawn, when the refuge itself came into view, walking toward it felt as though I was wading upstream through a river. In the growing light, we crept as close as we dared, until we were peering down at the refuge from a copse at the top of a rise only a hundred feet away.

  The refuge was bigger than I could have imagined—it was the size of a small town. The wall surrounding it was higher even than the wall the Council erected around New Hobart. More than fifteen feet high, it was built of brick rather than wood, with tangled strands of wire along the top like nests thrown together by monstrous birds. Within the wall, we could glimpse the tops of buildings, a jumble of different structures.

  Piper pointed to where a huge building loomed on the western edge. It took up at least half of the refuge, and its walls still had the yellow tinge of fresh-cut pine, bright against the weathered gray wood of the other buildings.

  “No windows,” Zoe said.

  It was only a few syllables, but we all knew what it meant. Within that building, row upon row of tanks waited. Some would be empty, and some still under construction. But the sickness loitering deep in my gut left me in no doubt: many had already been filled. Hundreds of lives submerged in that thick, viscous liquid. The cloying sweetness of that fluid, creeping into their eyes and ears, their noses, their mouths. The silencing of lives, with nothing to hear but the hum of machines.

  Almost all of the refuge’s sprawling complex was entombed within the walls. But at the eastern edge was a section of farmed land, surrounded by a wooden fence. It was too high to climb easily, and the posts were too closely spaced for a person to slip through, but there was room enough to show the crops in their orderly lines, and the workers there, busy with hoes among the beets and marrows. Perhaps twenty of them, all Omegas, bent over their work. The marrows had grown fat—each one larger than the last few meals that Piper, Zoe, and I had eaten.

  “They’re not all tanked, at least,” Zoe said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “That’s what, six acres of crops?” Piper said. “Look at the size of the place—especially with that new building. Our records on the island showed that thousands of people have turned themselves in at the refuges each year. More than ever, lately, since the bad harvest and the tithe increases. This refuge alone would have upward of five thousand people. No way they’re being fed from those fields—it’d barely be enough to feed the guards.”

  “It’s a display,” I said. “Like a minstrel show, a pretty picture of what people think a refuge is. But it’s all for show, to keep people coming.”

  There was something else about the refuge that unsettled me. I searched and searched for it, until I realized that it was an absence, not a presence. It was the almost total lack of sound. Piper had said that there were thousands of people within those walls. I thought of the sound of the New Hobart market, or of the island’s streets. The constant noise of the children at Elsa’s holding house. But the only sounds reaching us from the refuge were the strikes of the workers’ hoes on the frost-hardened earth. There was no background hum of voices, and I could sense no movement within the buildings. I recalled the tank chamber I’d seen at Wyndham, where the only sound had been the buzz of
the Electric. All those throats stoppered with tubes like corks in bottles.

  There was movement on the road that led east past the refuge. It wasn’t mounted soldiers—just three walkers, moving slowly, and laden with packs.

  As they drew closer, we could see they were Omegas. The shorter of the men had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other man limped heavily, one twisted leg gnarled like driftwood. Between them walked a child. I’d have guessed he was no older than seven or eight, although he was so thin that his age was hard to tell. He looked down as he walked, guided only by his hand held tightly by the tall man.

  Their heads looked too large on their thin bodies. But it was their packs that pained me most. Those bundles, tightly wrapped, would have been carefully chosen. A few treasured possessions, and all the things they thought they’d need, in the new life they’d embarked upon. The taller of the men had a shovel across his shoulders. From the other man’s pack hung two cooking pans, clattering with each step.

  “We need to stop them,” I said. “Tell them what’s waiting for them in there.”

  “It’s too late,” Piper said. “The guards would see us. It would all be over.”

  “And even if we could get to them without being seen, what could we say?” Zoe said. “They’d think we’re mad. Look at us.” I looked from Zoe to Piper, and down at myself. We were dirty and half-starved. Our clothes were ragged and had never shed the gray stain of the deadlands.

  “Why would they trust us?” Piper said. “And what can we offer them? Once, we could have offered them safety on the island, or at least the resistance network. Now, the island’s gone, and the network’s collapsing by the day.”