The Refuge Song

by Francesca Haig

  It was hours before I spotted the lone spruce tree. As I neared the mouth of the gully, it wasn’t only the darkness that slowed my progress. I moved hesitantly, aware than at any moment the Ringmaster’s sentries would see me, and that swords would spring out of the night. Ever since I left the Keeping Rooms, I’d been doing my utmost to avoid being taken by Council soldiers. Now I was seeking them out. I was undefended, Piper and Zoe miles away, on the other side of New Hobart. After all this time spent together, their absence now was like the snow, making the world unfamiliar.

  I pushed onward, the horse picking its way through the deepening snow. The Ringmaster had assured me that I was no use to him as a hostage, now that the General was the main force behind the Council. But he could change his mind. I might not be enough to stop the tanks, but handing me over to Zach would still gain him some leverage. Each step I took now might be leading me back to the Keeping Rooms, or worse.

  When had the decision been made, that had led me here? It wasn’t when I’d crept away from Zoe, Piper, and Xander sleeping in the tent, or even when we’d decided to try to free New Hobart. It went further back. To the island, and the massacre there. Or to the tank room underneath Wyndham, when I’d chosen to free Kip, and we’d set out together.

  Further back still: to Zach, and the day he’d succeeded in having me sent away, the brand still a fresh wound on my forehead. That day, the first that we’d been separated, had set us both on our paths. There was no going back. Zach had shed me, like his old name, to become the Reformer, and conjure his dark fantasy of the tanks. All that I could do was ride onward, into the thickening dark, and do whatever I could to stop him.

  A shout came from ahead, and then it all happened quickly. Soldiers converged, stepping out of the darkness. A ring of raised swords. If I’d moved a foot in any direction I’d have been skewered.

  “I’m here alone,” I shouted, throwing up my hands. “I need to see the Ringmaster.”

  One of them grabbed my bridle, and another half dragged me from the horse. My dagger was ripped from my belt. A soldier raised his lamp close to my face to inspect my brand. “It’s one of them,” he said, his face so close that I could see the patch of stubble on his jaw that his razor had missed when he shaved. “Might be the seer—can’t see anything else wrong with her.” As he patted me down for other weapons, his hands lingered on my body.

  “I don’t think my breasts are a threat to your boss, do you?” I said quietly.

  One of his companions snickered. The man said nothing, but he moved his hands on, rubbing them down the outside of my arms, and kneeling to pat down my legs.

  “Stand down,” said the Ringmaster. He was panting as he ran up the gully. His black jacket had a fur-lined hood, so it was hard to tell where his curls ended and the fur began.

  The swords lowered.

  “Bring her in,” he said. “But double the guard on the perimeter. Make sure she came alone.”

  He didn’t wait for my reaction, just turned and led the way down into the gully. I followed him, a soldier at each side, while the third dropped back, still holding my horse.

  I’d thought it was dark before, but as we descended, the gully cloaked us in a second layer of darkness. The tents were pitched at the very base, shielded by the growth overhanging the cliffs on each side. Horses were tethered in a row by the largest tent, stamping and whinnying as soldiers rushed past us, carrying lamps.

  The Ringmaster threw back the flap of the central tent and strode in. “Leave us,” he said to the soldiers, who stepped back into the night.

  He might have been camping, but the arrangement bore no relation to the makeshift camps I’d occupied for the last few months, or the sagging tent-city that housed the resistance troops in the swamp. The Ring­master’s tent was thick white canvas, tall enough that he could stand upright. A blanket of fur covered the raised bed in the corner, and close to the entrance stood a table and chairs. A lamp was mounted on the pole in the center of the tent, throwing warped and darting shadows on the canvas.

  He pushed back his hood. “Do your resistance companions know you’re here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sit,” he said. I remained standing, but he sat, and leaned back in his chair to stare at me. “It’s dangerous for you to be traveling alone. Don’t you know how many people are searching for you?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” I said. “I know exactly who’s searching for me, and why. But this was the only way. Why are you watching New Hobart?”

  “The same reason you are. Your brother and the General are interested in this place. That means I am, too.”

  I made an effort not to quail under his stare.

  “I knew you’d change your mind,” he went on. “What information do you have for me?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” I said. “I’ve come to give you a chance. If you really want to stop the tanks, I need your soldiers and their swords. I need your army.”

  This time he laughed.

  “You’re offering me nothing, and asking for something you know I can’t possibly give.”

  “I’m not offering you nothing,” I said. “I have information for you. We’re going to attack the town.”

  “That’s madness.” He picked up a jug and poured a glass of wine for himself.

  “Not if we have your help.” I took a step closer to him. “I know you have soldiers loyal to you. If we fought together, we could succeed.”

  “Half the army or more is loyal to me,” he said. “Your brother and the General are too caught up with their personal projects to stay in touch with the people on the ground. But being loyal to me doesn’t mean my men would fight alongside Omegas, for an Omega cause. You ask too much of them. And of me.”

  “I don’t want to ally myself with you any more than you do with us.” I hadn’t meant for the disgust to be so audible in my words. I tried to moderate my voice. “You know they’ve already tanked the children?”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “That’s always been their strategy, thinking in the long term. Stop the Omegas at the source. You should hear the way they talk. Less resource intensive, the General said to me, if they’re tanked as infants. I don’t think they grow once they’re in the tanks, you see. So they stay small forever. Cheaper to feed. Take up less space.” He grimaced as he spoke, spitting out the words.

  “How can you have heard them say things like that and not want to stop them?”

  “You’re asking me to start a war. To set different factions of the army fighting against each other.”

  “I’m asking you to stop an atrocity.”

  That wasn’t entirely honest. An atrocity was unavoidable. If we fought to free New Hobart, many would die, and their twins with them. I was choosing those deaths over the endless not-quite-death of the tanks that would otherwise await the town’s inhabitants. I couldn’t remember a time when decisions had seemed uncomplicated.

  “You wanted information,” I said. “You wanted my help. I’m giving you this: we attack in three days’ time—at midnight, on the new moon.”

  It was in his hands now. This information could see us all killed, if he decided to betray me. I thought of how Leonard had reacted when we’d told him about the tanks and the refuges. We hadn’t asked for his help—we hadn’t needed to. We’d given him the information, and that had become an imperative. And I thought of Kip, and how his eyes had met mine through the glass of the tank. He had asked nothing of me. The knowledge that he was there, trapped, conscious, was enough. I knew that sometimes a moment could become a promise.

  “It’s a fool’s errand,” the Ringmaster said. “Even if I wanted to help you, there’s not enough time to prepare. The soldiers in New Hobart are loyal to the General. I’d have to muster my soldiers from farther north. And for what? For an attack that can never succeed.”

  “We don
’t have any choice. Nor do you. You can’t step away now as if it’s nothing to do with you.”

  He raised his hands. “It’s too soon. What kind of army can you have mustered, since the island?”

  “Any later is too late,” I said. “You know that. They’ve taken the children. Soon they’ll take the others. And you’re going to sit back and watch us try. If we succeed, you’ll be glad, and you’ll use it to help you in your maneuvering against Zach and the General. And if we fail, you’ll wash your hands of it.”

  “If you already have me so well figured out, what did you hope to achieve by coming here?”

  I looked at his pale face, his hand tight around the stem of the wineglass. “Why are you so afraid of us?” I said. “When you first came to me, I’d hoped it might be compassion that made you want to stop the tanks. But it’s fear. You say you want to uphold the taboo. But your fear of the taboo is just fear of us. We’re what the machines wrought. We’re what you’re afraid of. But you can’t fight the machines unless you fight alongside us.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” he said. He pushed the wine away so hard that it spilled. I watched the red trickle down the stem of the glass and pool on the table.

  “What did we ever do to you?”

  He stared at me in silence for several moments. He wore a knife in a scabbard at his belt. Have I pushed him too far? I wondered. He could kill me in an instant. His soldiers would drag my body away, and he wouldn’t even need to clean up the mess. I could see it unfolding. But it was less vivid than the other images that had stalked my vision for the last few days: the tanks waiting to swallow the whole town of New Hobart; the battle; the ring of blood around the town, from our futile attempt to free it.

  “I had a wife.” The Ringmaster’s voice jolted me from my thoughts. “We got married young. We were going to have a child.”

  “Children,” I said.

  “Call it what you like.” He lifted his glass again, avoiding my eyes as he drank. “For nine months we watched Gemma’s belly grow. I left the army, started working for a Councilor, because I didn’t want to be away so often. I wanted to see my child grow up.

  “When Gemma went into labor, the Alpha came first. She was beautiful. Perfect. I got to hold her, while we were waiting for the Omega. But it couldn’t come out. It got stuck.” He paused for a moment. “We had the midwife there. We did everything we could. But its head was deformed.” He looked down, his mouth distorted, as though the memory were a bitter taste on his tongue. “There was something wrong with it. Two heads, maybe, the midwife thought. Anyway, it wouldn’t come.

  “My wife told me to get the doctor to cut it out of her, to try to at least save the baby. But I couldn’t do it. I should have done. It was stupid of me. As it was, I lost them both.”

  For a second, I thought he meant both twins. That he was at least acknowledging that he’d lost his Omega child, too. But he went on.

  “My baby girl first. And then my wife, too, within a day and a half. The other baby was stuck in her, dead, and Gemma got sicker and sicker. She went gray. Her fever was so high that she was half-crazed. And the whole time she was asking about the baby, our little girl. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was wrapped up, on a chair in the kitchen, dead.” He looked up at me. “If anyone tells you they don’t fear Omegas, they’re lying. You are the curse that the blast left us with. You’re the burden that the innocent have to bear.”

  “Your son,” I said. “Wasn’t he just as innocent as your daughter? And the children of New Hobart—aren’t they innocent, too?”

  “The Omega baby killed my whole family.”

  “No. He died, and they died, too. And it was terrible, and cruel, for all of them. But when your wife died, her Omega twin died as well—and that’s not her fault either. If you turn tragedies like that it into a reason for hating all Omegas, we end up with people like Zach and the General arguing that we should all be tanked.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “After she died, they cut it out of her. I asked them to.” He looked up at me. “I wanted to see it for myself.”

  “He was your son.”

  “You think that’s why I wanted to see it?” He shook his head slowly. “I wanted to see the thing that had killed her. Not two heads, or not quite. One huge head, with a second face bulging out the side of it.” Disgust contorted his face. “I told the midwife to get rid of it. I didn’t want it to be buried with my wife and daughter.”

  “He was your son,” I said.

  “You think if you keep saying that, it will somehow make it mean something?”

  “And do you think if you keep denying it, ignoring it, it will make it untrue?”

  He stood. “I can’t help you free New Hobart. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it in time.”

  “At least tell me this,” I said. “What do you know about the Ark, or Elsewhere?”

  “Nothing,” he said. I scanned his face, and could find no lie there. “Nothing but conversations that stop when I enter the room. This isn’t something they discuss openly, in the Council Halls. I’ve heard whispers of an Ark. I know it’s part of their plan, but I don’t know how it all fits together. And I know it’s something to do with what they’re searching for in New Hobart.”

  “If we free New Hobart, I can help you find it. We can find the Ark. We can change everything.”

  “Do you believe that?” he said.

  I stood and pushed back the tent flap. The canvas was heavy with ice.

  “You can’t change what happened to your wife and your children,” I said. “But you can change what happens now. Whether you sit back and let the tanks come, and let Zach and the General find what they’re looking for in New Hobart. Or whether you make a change.”

  He stood outside the tent, watching as I began to walk up the gully, ignoring the soldiers who turned to watch me go.

  “I can’t help you,” he called after me.

  “Midnight, on the new moon,” I said again. It felt just as futile and absurd as our carving of the messages on the pumpkins. If the Ringmaster warned the Council, our attack was doomed before it began. But it was all I could do, and so I did it. I’d seen the blood and the tanks that were New Hobart’s future. I gave the Ringmaster those five words, because they were all that I had to offer. And because if I wanted the Alphas to recognize our humanity, I had to take a gamble that somewhere within the Ringmaster was some humanity, too.

  At the head of the gully, a sentry led my horse to me. He wouldn’t give me my knife until I was mounted, and then he handed it to me carefully, holding it by the blade, so that our hands didn’t touch.

  By the time I led the horse along the tangle of paths through the swamp, it was nearly dawn. I was exhausted, and the horse was quivering with cold as we waded through the iced water to avoid Simon’s sentries in the outer marshes. When I reached the final path to the camp, the water deep on each side, Sally was waiting.

  “Will he help us?” she said.

  I shook my head. “We had to try,” I said as I handed her the reins.

  She said nothing, but as I slunk back into the tent where the others slept, oblivious, I was glad that Sally knew what I had done. If I’d just betrayed the resistance, at least Sally and I were bound together in this. My betrayal was her betrayal, my hope her hope.

  chapter 18

  For those final three days, my mind was with the Ringmaster. While weapons were sharpened and distributed in the snowbound camp, I was picturing him, in his comfortable tent, and wondering whether he would betray our plans to the Council. While Simon and Piper drilled the troops, and Sally went over the plan of attack with them, I waited and waited for some sign from the Ringmaster. If he’d moved quickly enough, there might be time for him to bring soldiers to us before we marched on the town. I watched the horizon to the north and the west. Sally kept her distance from
me, but on the last day she caught me alone, staring beyond the ring of reeds that encircled the camp.

  “No messengers? Nothing?” she said.

  “Nothing.” I could feel no hint of reinforcements, or of the Ringmaster’s presence. Nothing was visible on the horizon but the charred bones of what had been the forest. Tomorrow we would attack, and we would be doing it alone.

  I had seen the blast scorch the world, a thousand times or more, but the battle scenes in my recent visions were so intimate that they affected me differently. I saw a sword hilt breaking a jawbone. An arrow striking a chest with such force that the tip emerged at the back. A death was a personal thing—it felt indecent to have seen what I had. In the camp, as I watched our troops adjusting their bows, and fixing their improvised shields, I had trouble meeting their eyes. I wanted to allow them the privacy of their own blood.

  Piper and Simon kept them busy. They ran drills at night now, as well as in the day, to prepare for the midnight attack. The troops responded efficiently to Piper’s and Simon’s shouted orders, and when I watched them practice they were grim but focused. But we couldn’t keep them occupied every moment, and among the rows of leaking tents, unease was growing. I overheard complaints about the rations, and the allocation of weapons. Fear had infested the camp like lice. I’d heard what they were muttering, as they clustered around the fires with their hands tucked into their armpits for warmth, and their shoulders hunched against the wind. A fool’s errand. The same words that the Ringmaster had used.

  “We can’t win like this,” said Simon, the night before the attack, when we were gathered in his tent. “Not if they go into battle already convinced of our defeat.”

  I had no answer for him that would not be a lie. Nobody knew better than me that we couldn’t expect to succeed. I’d seen the blood and the blades.

  Ω

  Right up until the day of the attack, I was still arguing with Piper and Zoe about whether I would join the battle. Piper was adamant: “It’s mad,” he said. “We haven’t kept you safe for all this time only to risk you now.”