The Refuge Song
Page 37
“When we found The Rosalind, my crew sailed back to Broken Harbor to report the news,” she said. “But two of us came aboard your ship, to be the first emissaries. Then Caleb died in the storm.” She looked down. “So it’s just me now.”
Silence fell. Where could we begin? What questions came first, when encountering a new world? It had felt so audacious even to dream of Elsewhere that I’d never allowed myself to give the dreams detail, or to imagine what people from Elsewhere might be like. This twinless woman, pale and alone, was more like us than I’d imagined, but more alien than I could grasp.
Thomas was showing Piper a map, he and Paloma bending over it to gesture toward Elsewhere’s location, somewhere beyond the map’s edge. Zoe stood nearby, watching.
I couldn’t face being there when Piper told Zoe and Paloma about the Ark, and what we’d discovered there. It was cowardly of me, perhaps. Paloma’s twinless state was like a high-pitched sound that only I could hear, and when I was standing close to her, my teeth clenched tight and my breath evaded me. I left them talking, and walked back to the stern, to share my unease with the restless sea.
Ω
After a while, I heard Zoe’s footsteps on the deck.
“Piper told us about what you found in the Ark,” she said. “About the blast.”
I nodded, still staring at the water.
“I’m glad,” she said, stepping to the railing beside me. I raised my eyebrows. “Not about the blast, obviously,” she went on. “But I’m glad I know now. It makes me understand Lucia more, I think.” She paused. “Why the visions of the blast damaged her the way they did. On some level, she must have known that it was coming.”
I nodded, thinking of Xander, too, and his scattered mind. He, Lucia, and I had all borne witness to what was coming.
“Piper told me about Kip, too,” said Zoe. “That you found him.”
“It wasn’t Kip that I found,” I said. “It was just his body.”
She offered me no words of comfort, and I was grateful. She had dispensed enough death herself to know that it wasn’t something that could be softened. Instead, she stood with me and watched the sea.
“Even though he looked so different,” I went on, “it was the first time, since The Confessor told me about his past, that I could remember him properly.”
“It wasn’t Kip she was telling you about,” she said impatiently. “Any more than it was him who you found in the Ark. Why don’t you get it? Whoever he was when they put him into that tank, he wasn’t the same person when they took him out. Nobody could be.”
She turned to face me. “The Confessor didn’t know him,” she said. “That was her big mistake. She let you and Kip find her, in the silo that night, because she thought her twinship with him meant you’d be helpless. She thought she was drawing you into a trap. The Kip that she grew up with wouldn’t have done what he did. He wouldn’t have jumped to save you.”
A gull swooped low over the water.
“If you assume that Kip’s past defines him,” she said, “you’ll be making the same mistake the Confessor made. And you’ll be letting her take him from you twice.”
Farther out, beyond the breaking waves, the sea reflected the clouds. A doubled sky.
“I know what you’re doing, when you focus on Kip’s past,” she said. “Because I did it, too. I focused on the bad stuff, so I wouldn’t have to mourn Lucia.”
She closed her eyes for a few moments. When she opened them, she spoke quietly. “Instead of dreaming about the sea every night, I wish I could dream about her. Not her death, or her madness, but who she actually was. About the way her nose wrinkled when she smiled. How she could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. How, when she’d been sweating, the back of her neck smelled like pine shavings.” She gave half a smile. “The madness took her away from me, and then the sea did it again. But I betrayed her, too, when I only remembered the bad parts. I should have remembered her properly, even though it’s harder.”
Ω
The sun was high before Piper came to join us at the railing. He stood on the other side of me, his feet planted wide on the shifting deck.
“Did Paloma tell you?” Zoe asked him.
He nodded and turned to me. “She confirmed what we heard in the Ark: they found a way to end the twinning. Just like the people in the Ark did, except that in the Scattered Islands they actually went through with it. It’s not simple, and it’s not a magic cure. It’s the same as it said in Joe’s papers: no fatal bond, but everyone has mutations. Maybe they always will have. And they can’t undo existing twins—only the next generation. But we already knew that.”
“And you’ve told her about the Council,” I said, “and the blast?”
He nodded. “I don’t know if she’s taken it in properly yet. But she said she’s staying. She said she wants to help.”
My life was a map of other people’s sacrifices. Bodies marked it like wayposts. Now all of Elsewhere was in jeopardy.
“There’s something else,” Piper said. “Thomas told me something, about Leonard’s song. You know Thomas said he sent some of his sailors inland, to the safe house? They heard the song in a settlement along the way. And that’s how they first heard about the battle of New Hobart—there was a verse about how the Council was defeated there.”
“That wasn’t in the song,” I said. “Leonard wrote it a month before we freed New Hobart.”
Piper smiled. “It’s changing, like Leonard said it would. Growing. More and more people hearing it, and adding to it.”
“Not Leonard, though,” I said. And I realized that we still had to tell Zoe about Leonard’s body hanging from the tree.
Piper saw my lips tighten. “It’s not hopeless, Cass. We have the alliance with the Ringmaster, and his army. We freed New Hobart. The news of the refuges and the tanking is spreading fast. We’ve found out the truth about the Council’s plans for the blast. You destroyed the Ark, with all those tanks, and whatever pieces of the blast machine they hadn’t already taken. And we’ve found Elsewhere.”
What he said was true. But like everything, these days, it was doubled. New Hobart was safe from the Council for now—but I wasn’t sure how long we could trust the Ringmaster. He would approve of us destroying the Ark, but his reaction to Paloma, and the news of Elsewhere’s cure for twinning, was less certain.
We had found Elsewhere, but the Council and their blast machine were searching, too. Either the people of Elsewhere would be our saviors, or we would be their doom.
I stared down at my hands, holding the wooden rail at the stern of The Rosalind. Since that day in the silo, I sometimes looked at my own body with incredulity. Zach was my twin, but it had felt as though it was Kip’s death that I could not possibly survive. But here I was. The same hands. The same heart, still churning blood. Since Kip had taken that leap, I’d punished my traitorous body every day, for continuing. I’d embraced the cold, and the hunger, and the exhaustion, as if they were my due—until those moments in the flooded Ark, when I’d caught myself fighting for my life. And there’d been no noble desire to save the resistance in my mind during those breathless moments in the tunnels. Only my own desire for life. Hope was not a decision I made. It was a stubborn reflex. The body squirming toward the air. The taking of the next breath, and the one after that.
Months ago, when we’d looked down toward the distant sea from McCarthy’s Pass, Piper had told me that there wasn’t only ugliness left in the world. Believing that had very often felt like more of a stretch than believing in Elsewhere. But in the flooded Ark, I’d fought for life. And I was glad of it—glad to feel the ship’s wood beneath my hands, as I stood and watched the horizon with Zoe and Piper at my side.
Paloma would be waiting for us at the prow, and there would be information to share, plans to be made. The conflict had spread, somehow, to encompass the world. For all my visions, I could
not see my way through it. But for these few moments I stopped trying. I allowed my body to be enough. I remembered what I had said to myself, as a child, when I was trying to resign myself to my newly branded face: This is my life now. Here, on The Rosalind, I let the words unfold in my mind once more: This is my life now. The emphasis had shifted.
I spoke out loud to Zoe and Piper the words I’d not yet admitted to myself. “Before, when I refused to kill myself, it was because I was protecting Zach. Now, it’s not Zach I want to save.” I looked up at them. “It’s myself. I want more days. I want to see more things like this.” I gestured at the sea below us, the gulls hoisting themselves on the wind coming off the cliffs. “I want to listen to bards again. I want to get old, as old as Sally, and have a head full of memories instead of visions.”
It felt wrong to be smiling. That small declaration, more days, felt more audacious than ever in the face of the Ark’s secret.
All my memories were entangled with death. But I claimed them, nonetheless, gathering them up as I’d gathered the fragments of Leonard’s guitar. There, facing the sea, I closed my eyes and let myself remember.
acknowledgments
My exemplary agent, Juliet Mushens, has been the best possible partner for this series, with invaluable support from Sarah Manning, and from Sasha Raskin in the U.S.
For their clear and insightful reading and advice, I warmly thank my editors Natasha Bardon at HarperVoyager (UK) and Adam Wilson at Gallery Books (USA). I would also like to thank my excellent copyeditors, Joy Chamberlain and Erica Ferguson.
Clara Haig-White and Andrew North have been patient and thoughtful advisers throughout the writing process. Sarah Heaton helped me to arrive at the title.
I am enormously grateful for the work of Florence Laty, Aysel Durmaz, and Julie Bonaparte, who helped to care for my son while I wrote this book.
about the author
Francesca Haig grew up in Tasmania, gained her PhD from the University of Melbourne, and was a senior lecturer at the University of Chester. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies in both Australia and England, and her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water, was published in 2006. In 2010 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. The Fire Sermon, her first novel, was published in 2015. She lives in London with her husband and son.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Francesca-Haig
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-6719-2
ISBN 978-1-4767-6726-0 (ebook)