The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  “Then the price we paid on the island is for nothing,” Piper said.

  “You don’t need to tell me about the price.” The shout burst from Simon like one of Xander’s cries. “I was there. I saw those people killed. But is that even the price you’re talking about? Or are you just talking about the cost to yourself—being forced out of leading us?”

  “This isn’t about me,” Piper said. “Not at all.”

  “Are you so sure?” said Simon.

  It was nearing sunrise, and we hadn’t slept since the previous dawn. Sally made no complaint, but I saw the slight tremor in her hands as they rested in her lap. Next to her, Xander had fallen asleep with his head on the table.

  “You need rest, all of you,” said Simon. “We’ll talk more about this later” was the only assurance he would give, as he stood and headed for the door.

  When he led us through the quarry to our quarters, the resistance soldiers were already awake, fifty or more of them gathered around the campfires. Their conversations stopped, and they turned and watched our progress on the muddy path. Sally, at the front, was greeted with smiles and, from two older men and a woman, salutes. But when their gazes turned to the rest of us, the smiles faded. They stared warily at me and Zoe, leading Xander between us. I looked back to see how they greeted Piper. A few nodded in acknowledgment as he passed, but a tall woman with red hair glared at him with her single eye, and a man leaning on a crutch spat on the ground, muttering something to his companion.

  Simon guided us to a tent that had been hastily cleared of its previous occupants’ belongings. Before he left, he reached for Piper again and clasped Piper’s hand with all three of his own.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “Despite everything.”

  As Simon was ducking out of the tent door, I called to him, looking once again at the yellowing skin around his eyes, and his wilting stance.

  “What happened to you, since the island?”

  His exhaled heavily. “I took over Piper’s job, that’s what happened.”

  Ω

  We rose before noon, after just a few hours sleep, though we left Sally and Xander to rest for longer. Back in Simon’s tent, with Piper, Zoe, and a handful of Simon’s advisers, I began to get some sense of the daily business of rebuilding the resistance. Periodically, the signal whistle would be relayed down into the quarry, announcing the arrival of a scout. Messengers came to Simon with news of raids, of patrol numbers, and of the evacuees from the island still in search of safe haven. A scout from the east reported more expansions at Refuge 14, and of posters in the region announcing another increase in tithes. Another scout from near Wyndham brought rumors of tension within the Council: of more jockeying for power between the General, the Reformer, and the Ringmaster, since the Judge’s death. We recounted our own encounter with the Ringmaster, and the news that reached Simon now seemed in accord with what we’d heard. The Ringmaster still commanded huge loyalty among the army but was increasingly sidelined in the Council Halls, where the General was ruling, with Zach at her side. But that was as far as our information went—in these days of strict segregation, it was harder and harder to gain any intelligence about the Council beyond the scraps of tavern gossip that filtered down to the Omega townships and settlements.

  Throughout the long afternoon of discussions and plans, whenever the Reformer’s name was mentioned all eyes in the room would turn to me. Zach was a problem to which my own body held the solution. All day I noticed how Piper and Zoe positioned themselves in front of me, between me and the others, and how Piper’s arm never strayed far from his belt, loaded with knives. But hearing the news from the Council, I knew there were threats from which they couldn’t protect me. I’d seen for myself how brutal the rivalries in the Council could be. The Judge had lived longer than most. If Zach had powerful enemies at Wyndham, then my death was as likely to come from an assassin’s blade to Zach as it was from an ambush at the quarry. My own death might have nothing to do with me.

  Over that day and the next, in Simon’s crowded tent, I began to understand his exhausted demeanor. Each new report from a scout demanded decisions, and action: a doctor was dispatched to the east, where the newly established camp for evacuees was overrun with dysentery, while five guards were sent with him to help the camp shift to a spot with a cleaner water source. One of Simon’s advisers, Violet, was sent to a camp a day’s ride north, to oversee the interrogation of a Council soldier captured near New Hobart.

  “Will he be tortured?” I asked Simon.

  Sally rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a time for squeamishness,” she said. “Do you think the Council hesitates to use torture when they need to?”

  “And is that our aim, then, to be like them?” I shot back.

  Nobody had an answer. And the messengers and reports kept coming, most of them the same: news of families, or sometimes whole settlements, struggling with the onset of winter, after another year of high tithes and land that would yield only meager crops. More and more of them were turning to the refuges, not knowing, or perhaps not believing, what awaited them there. Others were being burned out of their homes, not by soldiers but by ordinary Alphas, in response to the news of the Judge’s death, supposedly at the hands of his Omega twin.

  Simon sat at the head of the table, his advisers beside him. He issued orders decisively, and remained calm, but the longer I watched the more he seemed like a man trying to gather water in his arms. And the more it seemed to me that we were all mired in the endless stream of small crises, with no chance to consider any larger strategy. Simon consulted us as he went about the day’s business, and his advisers listened avidly to Sally, and even tolerated Piper’s views. But when we raised the issue of the ships, or of New Hobart, they brushed us aside, returning to the day’s immediate concerns: a new message about a raid on a settlement; the next scout’s arrival. Even Piper was less insistent, now, on the subject of the ships. When he pressed Simon to send more scouts north, his voice lacked its usual conviction. I thought of the dark waves that I’d crossed to reach the island, and tried to imagine them whipped by winter storms, let alone the hazards of the ice sheets that lay farther north. I looked at the rigid set of Piper’s shoulders, his head slightly bowed, and knew that he was thinking of the same thing.

  Each night, back in our own tent, I bent over the Ark paper. By now I knew every word by heart, and needn’t have bothered with the paper itself. But I clutched the page as I ran over the words again and again, as if that fading sheet of parchment was a map that would help guide my visions to the Ark, or to Elsewhere. But all I could find was my own fear, and the tank water rising over New Hobart. I couldn’t make the pieces fit: Elsewhere; the Ark; New Hobart.

  “Perhaps the Ark’s there—under New Hobart. Maybe it’s that simple,” Sally said. “And that’s why the Council seized the town—to get at the Ark.”

  I shook my head. “No. I was in New Hobart for weeks. If the Ark were there, I would have felt it—places are the thing that I usually feel most clearly.” I’d felt the tank rooms under Wyndham, and the caves and tunnels through the mountain. I’d felt the island. “The Ark isn’t in New Hobart,” I said. When I closed my eyes, I saw it again: the defenselessness of Elsa’s open mouth, the liquid creeping in, thick and slow, like the probing of an unwanted tongue. The visions came again and again, until my jaw was sore from being clenched so tightly, and I was sweating, even though the ground underneath our tent was hardened with frost. I was so tense that the sounds of my own body felt exaggerated: the passage of air in my nostrils. The sound of skin on skin as I pressed my hands over my eyes and rubbed them.

  “It’s not finished,” Xander said, reaching for the paper. “The maze of bones.”

  “What are you talking about?” I snapped. “Say what you mean.” I could hear the glint of hysteria in my own words.

  Sally moved between us. “Don’t talk to him that
way,” she said, and I knew she was right. I looked at him, mouth opening and closing like a fish. And I, more than anyone, knew that he wasn’t trying to be obscure. I knew that his visions had knocked words loose inside his head and that he was scrambling among the wreckage.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and tried to reach for his hand, but Sally blocked my arm, turning her back to me as she soothed Xander.

  All night I heard his mutterings and cries, his mangled words being spat from his mouth like broken teeth.

  It was my fault, and my future.

  Ω

  On the third night, after midnight, Simon yanked open our tent flap.

  “You need to come, now,” he said. He waited while we rose and threw on our clothes, his swinging lamp tossing agitated shadows on the walls of the tent. Xander was muttering, halfway between waking and sleep, so we left him to rest.

  Outside Simon’s tent, a guard was holding a horse, its gray coat dark with sweat, its hot breath steaming into the night air. When Simon entered the tent ahead of us, the woman inside stood hastily, but Simon gestured for her to sit. There were flecks of mud on her face from riding fast through the wet night. She was closer to Simon’s age than Piper’s. Her dark hair was bound back tightly and she had the wiry strength of a life lived hard. Her left wrist finished at a stub, rounded like the end of a loaf of bread.

  “Tell them, Violet,” Simon said.

  Violet raised an eyebrow. She was looking at Piper and Zoe, and at me.

  “I’ve told you already.” Simon pushed his chair and stood. “They can be trusted.”

  She spoke, while Simon paced by the door.

  “I’ve been north, seeing what we could get out of the soldier that Noah’s crew captured. He was a courier, heading back to New Hobart from one of the southern garrisons. The message he carried wasn’t of particular interest—updates on troop replacements and cargo. But we were able to get more out of him, about New Hobart itself.”

  “How?” I interrupted. “Did you torture him?”

  Simon glared at me. “We have a job to do. Don’t tell us how to do it.”

  Violet ignored us both. “He said they’ve been searching for something,” she said. “Inside New Hobart. Asking about documents.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “He didn’t know any more than that,” said Violet. “Said only the senior soldiers were privy to the details. But they’ve all had the orders: anything old, any papers, to be reported straightaway. Twice his squadron was sent out to search, after tip-offs. They found nothing but a secret school—illegal, sure, for Omegas, but usually the Council wouldn’t be so zealous about stuff like that. They were told to search the whole place, and all the papers had to be packed up and taken to the HQ.” Violet shrugged. “He thought it was funny at the time—all the kids’ papers with their ABCs scrawled on them, being parceled up carefully to be examined.” Her face hardened. “He didn’t think it was so funny by the time we’d finished extracting the story from him.”

  They all stared at me when I stood.

  “Get Xander,” I said to Sally.

  Violet rolled her eyes. “Isn’t one seer enough? What’s the point of dragging the mad one into it?”

  I went to speak, but Simon spoke over me.

  “You’re dismissed for tonight,” he said to Violet. “Rest, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  She glared over her shoulder at Piper as she left. Sally stood, too. “I’ll bring Xander,” she said.

  I turned to Piper. “Xander tried to tell us. He told us that it wasn’t me they were looking for in New Hobart. You’re not what they’re looking for, he’d said. I thought he’d meant that the Confessor had really been searching for Kip, not me. But that’s not what he was saying.”

  It’s not finished, he’d said. I’d been trying to make the pieces fit, Elsa and the Ark paper and New Hobart, but it was all one piece. And Xander had known all along.

  Sally brought Xander in, a blanket draped around his shoulders. Zoe led him to the bench and I knelt beside him.

  “What’s the maze of bones?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

  He didn’t speak. His eyes began their usual surveillance of the ceiling.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “I told you already,” he said.

  “You did,” I said. “But we didn’t understand. Tell me again.”

  “It used to feel different,” he said. “A quiet space, underground.”

  I wanted to prompt him, but I forced myself to wait. His eyes did another lap of the tent’s ceiling. Sally’s hand, on his shoulder, was tensed.

  “Then it got noisy,” he went on. “People rattling the bones.”

  “Is it the Ark?” I said.

  “It’s just a hole,” he muttered. “A place where people lost their bones. A maze of bones.”

  “But now you can feel noises there? People in it?”

  He nodded. “Sounds in the dark place.”

  “Has the Council found it? Do you know where it is?”

  He swung his head from side to side. “It’s noisy there now. But they’re still looking for pieces. Paper pieces. Word bones, from Before.”

  “In New Hobart?” I asked. I remembered what Zoe had told me, the report about papers surfacing in New Hobart years ago, and the Council crushing the resistance cell before anything more could be found. “Papers from the Ark, like the one that Sally made a copy of—is that what they’re searching for there?”

  Xander nodded. “They need them,” he said again. “It’s not finished.”

  chapter 14

  That was all we could get out of him, but it was enough. When he had descended again into aborted syllables and broken words, I turned to Simon.

  “If thousands of people being tanked wasn’t enough to get you to free New Hobart, will this make a difference?”

  “We had a lead from New Hobart about the Ark, years ago,” he said. “But it came to nothing. The soldiers got there first, wiped out our whole cell.”

  “Whatever there was to be found, it was important to the Council,” I said. Important enough for them to move quickly, and to kill for. They’re still searching—there’s more to be found. And I think Elsa knows something about it.” I thought again of her face as we’d stood in her kitchen, when I’d asked about the resistance. She’d mentioned her dead husband, but she’d never dared to tell me what had happened to him. His story was an intake of breath that had never been exhaled. “Her husband was killed, and she hinted that it was from asking too many questions. Couldn’t he have been involved?”

  Piper shook his head. “We had six people in New Hobart. I knew all of them myself. None of them was married to the keeper of the holding house. I’d never heard anything to suggest a link to her.”

  “It’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?” said Zoe. “That the person who might have crucial information for you should just happen to be the person you stayed with there.”

  I turned from her to Piper. “You’re the one who’s always going on about how important my visions are. What they’re worth. Didn’t it occur to you that there was a reason that Elsa was the person I went to in New Hobart? That something could have drawn me to her house, even if I wasn’t aware of it, the same way I was drawn to the island?”

  I’d been wondering about this since Kip’s death. I’d been thinking of all the tanks lined up in that chamber I’d discovered under Wyndham. Had I found myself at Kip’s tank, of all the tanks in that room, because something had led me there? Had my fear of the Confessor drawn me, unwittingly, to find her twin?

  “Whether your friend is involved or not,” said Simon, “it makes no difference—we can’t free the town. That would mean open war, outnumbered and under-resourced.”

  “It’s already war,” I said. “Just a slow war, and we’re losing. They’re looking for someth
ing in New Hobart—something important enough for the Council to hold the city all this time. It’s something that could help us to find the Ark, or even Elsewhere. It could make all the difference.”

  “How?” Simon’s voice was weary. “Even if we could free the town and find the papers, what will some dusty documents offer us? More details of the Before? More taboo machines that we can’t understand?”

  “You’re sounding like the Ringmaster,” I said. “We can’t run from this, just because the machines scare us. Zach and the General have been using machines all along. That’s always been at the heart of their plans. They’ve already found the Ark. The papers could lead us there, or to Elsewhere. You want to let the Council find the papers first? The more information they have, the more dangerous they get.”

  For an hour, we argued. We kept coming back to the necessity of freeing New Hobart, and the impossibility of doing so. The conversation was a closed loop, like the wall around the town itself.

  “If we lose the battle,” Simon said, “it would be the end of the resistance.”

  Sally had been sitting in silence, Xander’s hand in hers. She spoke quietly.

  “That’s all we focus on these days, isn’t it? The massacre on the island. Shifting out to the east, like you’re doing now. Call it what you like—it’s a retreat. But when did we stop thinking about what we’re fighting for? We’re just running and hiding, trying to forestall the end of the resistance. I understand the fear—I’ve seen how hard things have got. I know what we’re up against. But what if this Ark could really change things? What if we stopped thinking about the end of the resistance, and started thinking about the end of the Council?”

  Ω

  Just before dawn, Simon gave the order to strike camp and head for New Hobart. Troops were sent to the woods to retrieve the horses hidden there and to lead them down to the quarry to be loaded with gear. Two guards were being left in the quarry, but tents and gear still needed to be shifted. The white clay clung to everything, including the tents, and the horses slipped on the paths that had become troughs. Twice I tried to help with the loading, but each time I approached, the guards would turn from me, dragging the horses away without a word.