He was rocking backward and forward now, his arms wrapped around his knees. I recognized, in his scrunched body, that futile attempt to hide from the visions, as if making yourself smaller would somehow spare you. I remembered curling like that myself, as a child, with my head tucked down toward my chest and my eyes clamped closed. It didn’t work, of course. Xander was right: Forever fire. It would never go away. The blast would haunt all of us seers, always. But why did it burst into our dreams more often now, enough to drive Xander to this?
“Let him rest,” Sally said, stepping forward and cupping Xander’s chin in her hand. She lifted the blanket that had fallen from him, and tucked it again around his shoulders.
As we were leaving, he opened his eyes and, for a moment, fixed them on me.
“Lucia?”
I looked at Piper for an explanation. He’d glanced up at Zoe, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She crossed her arms in front of her. Her face shut down.
“Lucia?” said Xander again.
Piper looked up at me. “He must be able to tell you’re a seer. Lucia was a seer, too.”
The older seer from the island, branded. She’d drowned, Piper had said. A shipwreck in a storm, on the way to the island.
“Lucia’s gone,” Piper said to Xander. “The ship went down more than a year ago. You know that already.” His voice was too brisk, too loud: his attempt to sound casual was jarring.
We left Xander gazing out the window, watching the sea swap its colors with the sky. His hands twitched and twisted constantly. I thought of Leonard’s hands on his guitar strings. Xander’s hands were kept busy on the unseen instrument of his madness.
“What will you do with him?” I asked Sally, when she’d closed the door to the bedroom.
“Do?” She laughed. “You say it like I have choices. As if there’s anything I could do, other than just keep surviving. Keep him safe.”
Even from the next room, I found Xander’s presence exhausting. The churning of his mind, from behind the closed door, made me feel seasick. When Sally sent us out to gather firewood and mushrooms, I felt guilty at my own relief.
Piper and I knelt together at the base of one of the trees, where mushrooms clustered thickly. Zoe was gathering wood nearby. Piper spoke quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear.
“You’ve seen Xander—what being a seer has done to him.” He looked up at Zoe, twenty yards away, and dropped his voice even further. “It happened to Lucia, too.” At the mention of the dead seer’s name, his voice caught, his eyelids closed. For a single moment I felt as though we were standing on different islands, and the tide had swallowed the neck of land between them. “Toward the end,” he added. Then he looked quickly back at me and went on. “Now you’re having more and more visions of the blast, too. So why hasn’t it happened to you yet?”
I had often wondered this myself. There were times when I’d felt my sanity coming loose like a bad tooth. When the flames erupted within me again and again, I had wondered how it was that I still managed to function. Now I’d seen how the words bubbled out of Xander like water from an overheated pan, and wondered how long it would take before my own visions brought me to the boil. Did I have years, or months? When it happened, would I know?
When I asked myself why it hadn’t happened already, I always came up with the same answer, though it wasn’t an answer that I could share with Piper: it was Zach. If there was some streak of certainty in me, something that held me together when the visions tried their best to tear me apart—then it had its roots in Zach. If there was a strength in me, it was my stubborn belief in him that had formed it. Zach had been the steady point in my life. Not a force for good—I’d seen too much of what he’d done to believe that. But a force, nonetheless. I knew there was no part of me that had not been shaped by him, or against him. And if I allowed myself to slip into madness, then I could neither stop him nor save him. It would all be over.
Ω
Back inside, we helped prepare the meal. Occasionally, from the bedroom, we could hear Xander hurling syllables at the night air. Bones and fire slipped under the door. He might be mad, but he saw clearly enough what the blast had made of our world. Bones and fire.
“How long have you been living here?” I asked Sally, as I helped her pluck the brace of pigeons that she’d thrown onto the table. With each tug at the feathers the graying flesh stretched, leaving a clammy film on my fingers.
“Years. Decades. Time gets slippery, when you’re as old as me.”
It’s slippery for seers, too, I wanted to say. I was jerked between different times, without any say in it. After each vision I’d wake, gasping, as if the future were a lake I’d been dragged down into, before surfacing back in the present.
“I’ve thought about leaving here, sometimes. It’s no place for an old woman. I used to be able to scramble down to the shore and do some fishing. These days I just set snares, and grow what I can. I never want to eat another potato, that’s for sure. But it’s safe here. The Council’s looking for a lame old woman. I figure this place isn’t going to be an obvious choice.”
“And your twin?”
“Look at me,” she said. “And believe me, I’m even older than I look. If there’d been registrations when Alfie and I were split, no doubt the Council would have got to me that way. But things were different then. They didn’t have us all pinned down in their records, the way they do now. And wherever he is, my brother’s had the sense to lie low, take care of himself.”
She got up and crossed to the stove. When she passed Piper, her hand paused for a while on his broad shoulder. When he first came here, as a child, his hand would have been as small as hers. Smaller, probably. Now she had to stretch up to reach his shoulder, and her hand rested there like a moth on a bough.
When we ate, Xander sat at one end of the table, swinging his legs and staring at the ceiling. Piper carved the pigeons, severing the wings with a long, curved knife. Watching him, it was hard not to think of all the knives he’d wielded. The things he’d seen, and the things he’d done.
But the meal dragged me back to the room. Sally had stuffed the pigeons with sage and lemon, and the meat was soft and moist. It bore no resemblance to the meat we’d eaten on the road, cooked quickly over furtive fires, the outer flesh scorched and the middle still cold and springing with blood. We didn’t talk much, until there was nothing left but a forlorn cluster of bones, and the moon had climbed past the window to hang above us.
“Piper told me about how you infiltrated the Council,” I said to Sally. “But he didn’t tell me why you stopped.”
She was silent.
“They were exposed,” Zoe said. “Not Sally, but the two other infiltrators working with her.”
“What happened to them?” I said.
“They were killed,” said Piper abruptly, standing and beginning to gather the plates.
“The Council killed them?” I said.
Zoe’s lips thinned. “He didn’t say that.”
“Zoe,” cautioned Piper.
“The Council would’ve killed them, eventually,” said Sally. “Given how much they hated infiltrators, they would never have let them live, even when they’d finished torturing them for information. They didn’t get a chance, though, with Lachlan—he managed to poison himself first. We had capsules to take if we were caught. But they searched Eloise before she had a chance, and took her capsule away.”
“So what happened to her?”
Piper stopped clearing away. He and Zoe were both staring at Sally. Sally looked straight at me.
“I killed her,” she said.
chapter 10
“Sally,” said Piper quietly. “You don’t have to talk about this.”
“I’m not ashamed,” she said. “I know what they’d have done to her. It would have been worse than death—far worse—and they’d have killed her at the end of
it anyway. We all knew the deal. We were the heart of the whole intelligence network—if we cracked, half the resistance would fall. All our contacts, all the safe houses, all the information we’d gathered and passed on over the years. It would have been disastrous. That’s why we had the capsules.”
She was still looking at me. I wanted to tell her that I understood. But it was clear that she didn’t need my understanding. She wasn’t looking for forgiveness, not from me or anyone else.
Sally’s choice had been harder even than Kip’s, perhaps, because it wasn’t her own death that she had to bestow. I thought, again, of Piper’s words to Leonard: There are different kinds of courage.
“They were denounced in the main Council Hall,” she said. “I was up in the gallery when it happened, talking to some Councilors. Lachlan and Eloise never had a chance: the soldiers were waiting to swoop. There were at least four soldiers to each of them. Lachy got to his capsule as soon as they had him cornered—he had it on a strap around his neck, like all of us. But after he started frothing and thrashing, they realized what had happened and pinned Eloise down.”
Her voice was steady, but when she pushed her plate aside, the knife and fork clattered slightly with her hand’s tremor.
“I was waiting for them to come for me,” she said. “I’d slipped my own capsule into my mouth—had it in between my teeth, ready to bite down.” I could see her tongue move to the side of her mouth, tasting the memory. “But it never happened. I was braced for it—if anyone had been watching me, they’d have seen that something was going on. But nobody was. Everyone was just staring at all the chaos down below. For a moment I just stood there, watching what was happening. Lachy was on the floor by then, thrashing around, blood coming out of his mouth. It’s not an easy death, poison. And there were four soldiers holding Eloise, arms pinned to her sides. I was staring down like everyone else. And I realized the soldiers weren’t coming for me. Whoever found out about Lachy and Eloise hadn’t discovered there were three of us.”
Piper placed his hand on her arm. “You don’t need to go through this all again.”
She gestured at me. “If she wants to throw her lot in with the resistance, she needs to know what happens. What it’s really like.” She turned and looked squarely at me. “I killed her,” she said again. “I threw my knife, got her in the chest. It would have been a quicker death than Lachy’s. But I couldn’t stay to watch. It’s only because of all the chaos, and because I was up on the gallery, that I managed to get out of there at all, and even then it meant going through a stained-glass window and down a thirty-foot drop.”
“That’s when she smashed her foot,” said Zoe. “Her good foot—and it’s never recovered. But she managed to get on a horse, and made it out of Wyndham, to the nearest safe house.” She laid her hand on Sally’s other arm, so that she and Piper framed the old woman. “And they said the first thing she did when she stumbled in, bleeding, was to spit out the poison capsule. She’d had it in her mouth the whole time, ready to bite down if they caught up with her.”
Piper picked up the flow of Zoe’s story, without pause. “They searched for her for years,” he said. “There were posters everywhere. They used to call her ‘the Witch.’ ” He laughed bleakly. “As if that’s what it would take for one of us to pass as an Alpha. The idea that we had some kind of magic was less threatening to them than the idea that we weren’t so different from them after all.”
Zoe joined his laughter, but I was watching Sally. She wasn’t laughing. Could her shattered foot really be the only damage from that day? Could you sink a dagger into the chest of a friend and not find something changed inside you?
“It was you who taught Piper and Zoe to throw knives?” I said.
She nodded. “You wouldn’t think it, to look at me now, but I used to be able to split a cherry from fifty yards.”
I’d seen Zoe’s and Piper’s skill with knives. That was Sally’s legacy, then: this knack for killing. I didn’t know if it was a gift or a burden.
Ω
That night, after Sally had settled Xander back in the bedroom, we told her everything that had happened since the island, and everything we knew about the Council’s plans. She questioned us carefully. Sometimes she closed her eyes as we answered. Each time I began to wonder whether she’d fallen asleep, she would open her eyes suddenly—an owl’s stare—and ask another question. Her questions were specific and deliberate. How many days since we saw the burned-out safe house? How many guards had we counted at the refuge? How many patrols had we seen since leaving the deadlands? What had the Ringmaster said, about the alliance between the General and the Reformer?
It was after midnight when she went to the bedroom to sleep. We laid our blankets out close to the stove. I tried not to think about the thin layer of planks between us and the sea. There were no sounds coming from the room where Sally and Xander slept, but behind the closed door I could feel the scurrying of his mind. When I finally slept, I dreamed of Kip drifting in the tank. I woke into a grief as thick as the liquid that filled his ears and mouth. It left me silent, stranded far from words, or even from screams. When I’d managed to calm my breathing, I stood and tiptoed to the small window by the door. It looked away from the cliff to the trees.
“We don’t need to keep a watch,” Piper whispered. “The tide’ll be high until dawn. And even if somebody came by boat, there are the traps. Make the most of it.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”
I could barely make him out as he crossed the room, stepping carefully over Zoe, who rolled over with an impatient grunt. He joined me at the window.
“You need rest,” he said.
“Stop fussing over me. I’m not an old lady.”
He laughed, a deep chuckle. “Sally is, and I wouldn’t dare to fuss over her.”
“You know what I mean. You’re always hovering, always worrying.”
“I’m looking out for you. Isn’t that what Kip used to do?”
I didn’t respond.
“It’s not such a bad thing,” he said, “to have somebody watching out for you.”
When I thought of someone watching over me, all I could think of was the Confessor and her merciless scrutiny.
“I don’t want to be watched,” I said. “I only want to be left alone.”
“I see how you punish yourself,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to make up for what happened. That’s not your responsibility.”
I drew a little closer. I didn’t want Zoe to hear us, but my whisper was the hiss of fat in a pan.
“Which thing don’t I have to make up for? The people who died on the island? The people trapped in New Hobart? Kip, dying to save me? Or everyone who’s suffered because of Zach? Or are you somehow offering me some magical free pass for all of them?”
It was his turn to be angry. “You give yourself too much credit,” he said. “It’s not all about you, or even about Zach. He’s not even running the Council—it’s the General who’s in charge now. And this is a war. The people who died on the island knew the risks of being in the resistance. And, in the end, even Kip made his own decision. You think you’re being selfless, taking it all on yourself, but you’re being arrogant. How will it help them, or anyone, you being so hard on yourself, being miserable?” He was leaning toward me, but I avoided his gaze. “This is your life,” he said, “not the aftermath of your life.”
I wished he’d been wrong. It would have been easier if I could snap at him again. But the word lodged in my head, as undeniable as a toothache. Aftermath. That’s what this was: not living, but reeling. I’d staggered out of the silo, and I was still staggering.
I stared out of the window and watched the stars drag their trails of light across the sky.
“It takes time to get over what’s happened,” I whispered eventually.
I heard him exhale. “How mu
ch time do you think we have?”
Ω
At dawn, over breakfast, Piper was pressing Sally about the latest news from the resistance.
“It’s bad—but you know that already,” she said. “Of the ships that landed safely, everyone on them is scattered. Then there were raids, in the weeks that followed. You know what it’s like—it spreads. Each raid gives them a few more people to interrogate.” There was such a gulf between her personality and her body. Her words had sharp edges, but they emerged breathy and slightly slurred. She leaned on the table as she stood up, straightening her legs with a small sigh.
“We always took care,” said Piper. He rubbed the side of his face. “Kept all the cells working separately. Limited the contacts. It shouldn’t have unraveled this fast.”
Sally nodded. “You kept things in good order. Better, even, than in my day. But no system’s perfect. For now, everyone’s been told to steer clear of the old safe houses, the old routines.”
“Who gave the order?” Zoe said. “Who’s leading the Assembly?”
“Assembly? Nothing so formal as that, since the island. They’re all scattered, those who lived, and there’s plenty who’ve gone to ground, too scared to be part of any resistance after what happened out there. But those who’re left are following Simon.”
Since the attack on the island, if Piper had smiled at all it was brief and muted. But now he grinned widely.
I remembered Simon. Of the Assemblymen on the island, he was the one who’d seemed closest to Piper. Often, when Piper had sent for me, I’d arrive to find him closeted with Simon, talking together over maps and scrolls. Like Piper, he’d seemed a soldier rather than a courtier: his three arms were muscled and scarred. Where some Assemblymen and women had dressed in rich fabrics, Simon had worn a weathered tunic patched with leather. It was he, on the island, who had defended the north tunnel, long after there was no hope that we could defeat the Council invaders. Although Simon and the rest of the Assembly had opposed our escape, it was his defense of the tunnel that had bought me and Kip the time we needed to make it off the island.
The Refuge Song Page 9
