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The Councilman stepped back from the fire, the brand held high. To my surprise, Mum didn’t grab me again, or make any move to stop me as I backed away. It was the Councilman who moved, quicker than I would have imagined, given his size. He grabbed Zach by the neck and pressed him against the wall beside the hearth. In the Councilman’s other hand, raised above Zach’s face, the brand was smoking slightly.
I shook my head, as if trying to shake the world into some sort of sense. My eyes met Zach’s. Even with the brand so close to his face that its shadow fell across his eyes, I could now see the smirk of triumph. And I admired him, as I always had: my twin; my brave, clever twin. He’d managed to surprise me after all. Could I bring myself to surprise him? Call his bluff and play along, let him be branded and exiled?
I almost could have brought myself to do it, if I hadn’t detected, beneath his triumph, that splinter of terror, insistent as the brand itself. My own face was screwed up against the sizzling heat that I could sense in front of his.
‘He lied. It’s me. I’m the seer.’ I forced my voice into calmness. ‘He knew I’d tell you the truth.’
The Councilman pulled back the brand, but didn’t release Zach.
‘Why not tell us, if you knew it was her?’
‘I tried, for years. Nobody believed me,’ Zach said, his voice half-crushed by the Councilman’s hand at his throat. ‘I couldn’t prove it. I could never catch her out.’
‘And how do we know we can believe her now?’
In the end it was a relief for me to tell it all: how the flashes of vision came to me at night, at first, and later even when I was awake. How the blast tore open my sleep with its roar of light. How I sometimes knew things before they happened: the falling branch, the doll, the brand itself. My mother and the Councilman listened carefully. Only Zach, knowing it already, was impatient.
Finally the Councilman spoke. ‘You’ve given us all quite the runaround, girl. If it wasn’t for your brother, you might have kept on playing us for fools.’ He plunged the brand back into the coals with such force that it sparked against the metal grating. ‘Did you think you were different from the rest of the filthy Omegas?’ He hadn’t let go of the handle of the brand. ‘Better than them, just because you’re a seer?’ He pulled the brand again from the fire. ‘See this?’ He had me now by the throat. The brand, only inches away, singed a few strands of my hair. The smell and the heat forced my eyes shut. ‘See this?’ he said again, waving the brand before my clenched eyes. ‘This is what you are.’
I didn’t cry out when he pressed it to my forehead, though I heard Zach give a grunt of pain. My hand was at my chest, clutching the key that hung there. I squeezed it so tightly that later, upstairs, I saw that it had left its imprint on my flesh.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_98b046c0-3242-58fa-9f8a-8876750f874e)
They let me stay for four days, until the burn had begun to heal. It was Zach who rubbed balm on my forehead. He winced as he did it, whether from pain or disgust I didn’t know.
‘Hold still.’ His tongue emerged from the corner of his mouth as he peered close to clean the wound. He’d always done that when he concentrated. I was extra aware of these small things, now, knowing that I wouldn’t see them anymore.
He dabbed again. He was very gentle, but I couldn’t help but flinch as he touched the raw skin.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Not sorry for exposing me – sorry only for the blistered flesh.
‘It’ll get better in a few weeks. But I’ll be gone by then. You’re not sorry about that.’
He put down the cloth and looked out the window. ‘It couldn’t stay the same. It couldn’t be the two of us, any longer. It’s not right.’
‘You realise you’re going to be by yourself, now.’
He shook his head. ‘You kept me by myself. I can go to school now. I’ll have the others.’
‘The ones who throw rocks at us when we pass by the school? It was me who cleaned up the wound when Nick landed that rock right above your eye. Who’s going to mop up your blood once they’ve sent me away?’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He smiled at me. For the first time I could remember, he was perfectly serene. ‘They only threw rocks because of you. Because you made us both into a freak show. Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again.’
It was refreshing, in a way, to be able to speak openly after all the subterfuge. For those few days before I left, we were more comfortable together than we had been for years.
‘You didn’t see it coming?’ he asked, on my last night, when he’d blown out the candle on the table between our beds.
‘I saw the brand. I felt it burning.’
‘But you didn’t know how I’d do it? That I’d declare myself the Omega?’
‘I guess I only got a glimpse of what would happen in the end. That it would be me.’
‘But it might have been me. If you hadn’t said.’
‘Maybe.’ I shifted again. The only bearable way to lie was on my back, so that the burn didn’t touch the pillow. ‘In my dreams, it was always me branded.’ Did that mean that staying silent had never been an option? Had he known so surely that I would speak up? And what if I hadn’t?
I left at dawn the next day. Zach’s happiness was barely disguised, and didn’t surprise me, though I was saddened to see how my mother rushed the farewell. She avoided looking at my face, as she had ever since the branding. I’d seen it only once myself, sneaking into Mum’s room to meet my new face in the small mirror there. The burn was still raised and blistered, but despite the inflammation surrounding it, the mark was clear. I remembered the Councilman’s words, and repeated them to myself: ‘This is what I am.’ Holding my finger just above the scorched flesh I traced the shape: the incomplete circle, like an inverted horseshoe, with a short horizontal line spreading out at each end. ‘This is what I am,’ I said again.
What surprised me, when I left, was my own relief. Although the pain of my brand was still sharp, and although Mum pushed a parcel of food into my arms when I tried to embrace her, there was something liberating about leaving behind those years of hiding. When Zach said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ I nearly laughed out loud.
‘You mean: take care of you.’
He looked straight at me, not averting his eyes from my brand the way our mother did. ‘Yes.’
I thought that maybe, for the first time in years, we were being honest with each other.
Of course, I cried. I was thirteen years old and I had never been parted from my family before. The furthest I’d ever been from Zach was the day he journeyed to collect Alice. I wondered if it would have been easier if I’d been branded as a child. I would have been raised in an Omega settlement, never known what it was to be with my family, with my twin. I might even have had friends, though never having experienced any closeness apart from with Zach, I didn’t really know what that might mean. At least, I thought, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore.
I was wrong. I was hardly even out of the village when I passed a group of children my own age. Although Zach and I had not been able to attend the school, we knew all the local children, had even played with them in the early years, before our strange togetherness became a public problem. Zach had always carried himself with confidence, and insisted he would fight anyone who said he wasn’t an Alpha. But as the years passed, parents began to warn their children away from the unsplit twins, so we’d relied more and more on each other for company, even as Zach’s resentment at our isolation grew. During the last few years the other children had not just avoided us, but had openly taunted us, hurling rocks and insults if our parents were out of sight.
The four children, three boys and a girl, had been riding on a pair of old donkeys, taking turns to race each other on their comically awkward mounts. I heard them from a distance, and saw them shortly afterwards. I kept my head down and kept to the side of the narrow road, but word of our split had spread quickly, and when they grew close enough to see my brand they were filled with the excitement of seeing the news confirmed.
They surrounded me. Nick, the tallest of the boys, spoke first, while the others looked with undisguised disgust at my brand.
‘Looks like Zach can finally come to school.’
Nick hadn’t spoken to either of us for years, other than to shout slurs, but it seemed my branding had immediately returned Zach to favour.
Another of the boys spoke: ‘Your kind don’t belong here.’
‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back towards the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: ‘freak’; ‘dead-end’; ‘poison’.
My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, ‘Stop them. Please.’
Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly on to the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. ‘That’s our water,’ Ruth said. ‘From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.’
They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.
For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos, but pushed onwards, further south than I’d ever been.
It had taken Zach more than half a day in the cart to reach the Omega settlement when he collected Alice. For me, on foot, avoiding the roads, my footsteps never quite keeping time with the throbbing of my head, it took nearly three days. Several times a day I stopped to bathe my forehead in the river, and to tear off some bread from the parcel Mum had given me. I slept on the riverbank, glad of the midsummer warmth. On the second morning I re-joined the road, where it curved away from the river to climb up the valley. Although I was still afraid of encountering people, it was for a different reason. I was in Omega country now.
The landscape itself was different. The Alphas had always claimed the best land for their own. The valley where I’d been raised was good farming country, the soil plush with river-silt. Up here there was no valley to shield the land from the harsh light, which glared from the rocky soil. The grass, where it grew at all, was brittle and pale, and the roadside was covered with brambles. Their barbed leaves glistened with spiderwebs, a thick mist that did not lift. There was some other strangeness, too, that I couldn’t work out until I looked about to refill my flask, and realised that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hear the river. Its noise had been the backdrop to my entire life, and I knew it intimately: the surge of the high water in flood season, the heavy buzz of insects that drifted over the still pools in summer. The river had always provided the spine of my mental map of the area: upstream from the village was south, past the gorge and the silos that Zach and I used to dare each other to approach. Further upstream lay Wyndham, the biggest city and the Council’s base. I’d never been that far, but had heard stories of its size and wealth. Even the refuge outside Wyndham, Mum had told me, was bigger than any town I’d seen. Downstream led north, through the fields, larger villages. A day’s walk downriver was Haven, the market-town where Dad used to take us when we were smaller. Beyond Haven, the shallow rapids took the river beyond my knowledge.
Now, in Omega country, I was still confident that I could find my way – I could usually sense the landscape, just as I could sense emotions and events. But without the river, I felt cut loose, turning about on this unfamiliar plain. There was only one road and I followed it as my mother had told me. I left it only once, following some tell-tale birds to a small spring that bubbled from a crack in the rock, from which I drank quickly before scrambling back to the barren road.
By the time I saw the settlement, night was lowering on the plain, and the first lamps had been lit in the windows. The cluster of houses was smaller than my village, but substantial enough that there could be no doubt. A huddle of low buildings, surrounded by a spread of fields, where the recently harvested crops were bald in patches and interrupted by large boulders. I pulled back the shawl that covered my head, waving away the flies that made busy with the still-seeping burn. This is what I am, I reminded myself, one hand on the key that hung at my neck. But as I approached, a small figure on the wide and broken road, I wished that Zach were by my side. A stupid thought, I reprimanded myself. Nonetheless, he had been like the sound of the river to me: always there.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_43c3b017-bcd4-55cd-8e41-793bdc650fce)
In the years that followed, I was grateful at least for Alice’s cottage, and the stash of bronze coins that I’d found in the buried chest beneath the lavender. After six years at the settlement there were few coins left, but the money had allowed me to eke out the leanest months of the bad season, to pay the Council’s tithe collectors (who came without fail, regardless of the success or failure of crops), and to help some of those who might otherwise have gone hungry. Little Oscar, from my parents’ village, was there, being raised by his relatives in a cottage near my own. He’d been sent away much too young to remember me, but whenever I saw him it felt like a link with the village, and with those that I’d left behind. But although the others at the settlement still referred to the cottage as ‘Alice’s place’, I gradually began to feel established there.
The other Omegas had grown used to me, too, though they tended to keep their distance. I understood their wariness: arriving there, newly branded at thirteen, meant that I would never quite be seen as one of them. That was compounded by the fact that I was a seer. Once or twice I overheard mutterings about my absence of any visible mutation. Easy enough for her, I heard my neighbour Claire say to her wife, Nessa, when I offered to help them with the rethatching of their roof. It’s not like she’s had to struggle like the rest of us. Another time, at work in my garden, I heard Nessa warning Claire to steer clear of me. I don’t want her sitting in my kitchen. We’ve got enough troubles without a neighbour who can read your mind. There was no point trying to explain to her that it didn’t work like that – that being a seer was a series of impressions, not a neat narrative, and that I was more likely to catch a glimpse of a town ten miles east, or of the blast itself, than to be privy to Nessa’s thoughts. I kept silent, went on picking the snails from my broad-bean stems, and pretended I’d heard nothing. I’d learned, by then, that if Omegas were seen as dangerous, seers were doubly so. I found myself spending more time alone than I had at the village, where I’d had Zach’s company, however grudging.
I’d been surprised to find books at Alice’s cottage. Omegas weren’t allowed to go to school, so most couldn’t read. But in the buried chest, along with the coins, were two notebooks of handwritten recipes, and one of songs, some of which I’d heard bards sing in our village. For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw. Even in our relatively well-off village, books were a rarity: reading was for making out instructions on a seed packet bought at market, or reading in the Village Book the names of the two travelling Omegas who had been fined and whipped for stealing a sheep. In the settlement, where few could read and fewer would admit to it, books were an indulgence we couldn’t afford.
I didn’t tell anyone about Alice’s books, but I read and re-read them so many times that the pages began to come away from the spines as I turned them, as if the books existed in a perpetual autumn. In the evenings, when we’d all finished working in the fields and I went home to the cottage, I’d spend hours in Alice’s kitchen, following her compact, scrawled guidance for adding rosemary to a loaf of bread, or the easiest way to peel a clove of garlic. When I first followed her instructions, and learned to crush the garlic with the flat of my knife so that the clove slipped from its dry husk like a sweet from its wrapper, I felt closer to Alice than to any of the others in the settlement.
In those quiet evenings, I thought often of my mother, and of Zach. At first, Mum wrote to me a few times a year, her letters carried by Alpha traders who wouldn’t even dismount at the settlement to drop them, instead tossing them from their saddle bags. Two years after I arrived at the settlement, she wrote that Zach had an apprenticeship at the Council, at Wyndham. Over the next year or so, more news filtered through: that Zach provided good service. That he grew in power. Then, after five years in the settlement, Mum wrote that Zach’s master had died, and Zach had taken over his post. We were only eighteen, but most Councillors started young. They died young too – the rivalries and factions within the Council were legendary. The Judge, who’d been in charge as long as I could remember, was a rare exception, as old as my parents. Most of the others were young. Stories reached us, even in the settlement, of the rise and fall of various Councillors. In the brutal world of the Council fort at Wyndham, it seemed, ruthlessness and ambition counted for more than experience. It didn’t surprise me that Zach had been drawn to it, or that he should have done well. I tried to picture him in the splendour of the Council chambers. I thought of his smile of triumph when he’d exposed me, and what he’d said afterwards: Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again. And while I feared for him, I didn’t envy him, even in the year the harvest failed and we went hungry in the settlement.
By that stage Mum’s letters were rare – a year or more between them – and for news of the rest of the world I had to rely on the gossip picked up at the Omega market to the west, or shared by the itinerants who passed through our settlement. Along with their small bundles of possessions, they carried with them stories. Those heading west were seeking better land to farm, as the bleak land closer to the deadlands in the east barely produced enough to pay the Council tithes, let alone to live on. But those coming from the west spoke of Council crack-downs: Omegas forced out of long-held settlements, where the land was now deemed too good for them; Alpha raiders who stole and destroyed crops. More and more people forced to seek out the refuges. Rumours of harsher treatment of Omegas came steadily. Even in our settlement, which had decent land compared to many, we were feeling the impact of the ever-higher tithes demanded by the Council collectors. Twice, too, Alpha raiders had attacked us. The first time they came, they’d beaten Ben, whose cottage was at the edge of the settlement. They’d taken everything they could carry, including the coins he’d put aside for the next month’s tithes. The second time they came was after the failed harvest; not finding anything to steal, they’d contented themselves with setting fire to the barn. When I suggested to my neighbours that we should report it to the Council, they rolled their eyes.
‘So they can send some soldiers out to burn down the rest of the settlement?’ said Claire.
‘You lived too long in that Alpha village, Cass,’ added Nessa. ‘You still haven’t got it.’
I was learning, though, with each story of brutality that found its way to the settlement. There were other rumours, too, though these were rare, and were shared more furtively: murmurings about Omega resistance, and whispers about the island. But watching my neighbours’ resignation as we rebuilt the barn, these ideas seemed far-fetched. The Council had ruled for hundreds of years; the idea that there could be any place free of their control was nothing but wishful thinking.
And why bother with the resistance, anyway? The fatal bond between twins was our safety net. Ever since the drought years there’d been more and more restrictions on Omegas, but at the same time as we griped about tithes, or the limitation of settlements to ever poorer land, we knew that the Council would ultimately protect us. That was what the refuges were for – and after the failed harvest, more and more Omegas considered them. That winter had left my bones straining towards the outside of my skin. It had worn us all down to bones and teeth, and finally one couple from our settlement left for the refuge near Wyndham. We couldn’t persuade them to stay, to gamble on the promise of new crops in spring. They’d had enough. So the whole settlement stood together in the dawn light, watching them lock up their cottage, before trudging off down the rock-strewn road.
‘Don’t know why they’re bothering to lock up,’ said Nessa. ‘They won’t be coming back.’
‘At least they’ll be fed,’ Claire replied. ‘Only fair that they should have to work for it.’
‘For a while, sure. But these days they’re saying that once you’re in, you’re in for good.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s their choice to go.’ I looked again at the retreating figures. The meagre packs they carried looked bigger on their wasted bodies. What choice did they really have?
‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘You can’t tell me you’d rather there were no refuges. At least we know the Council wouldn’t let us starve.’
‘Not wouldn’t.’ Ben, the oldest at the settlement, joined in. ‘They would if they could get away with it. But could not. There’s a difference.’
*
In spring, when the new crops had come in and the hunger was receding, my mother arrived in a bullock cart. When Ben showed her to my cottage, I didn’t quite know how to greet her. She looked the same, which only made me more aware of how much I must have changed. Not just the inevitable growth of six years, but the fact that I’d lived as an Omega for that time. That had changed me more than the hunger ever could. I’d encountered a few Alphas since coming to the settlement – the Council’s tithe-collectors; the shady merchants who sometimes came to the Omega market. Even amongst Alphas there were the outcast and the poor, passing through the Omega settlements in search of something better. All of them looked at us with contempt, if they met our eyes at all. I’d heard the names they called us: freak, dead-end. More hurtful than the words was their manner, the small movements that revealed their contempt, and their fear of Omega contamination. Even the most ragged of the Alpha merchants, those who stooped to trade with Omegas, would wince at the touch of an Omega hand when passing a coin.
Although I’d been branded an Omega when I left the village, I hadn’t really known what it meant. I remembered how hurt I’d been when my mother hadn’t hugged me goodbye. Now, as she stood awkwardly in my small kitchen, I knew better even than to reach out to her.
We sat opposite each other at my kitchen table.
‘I just came to give you this,’ she said, passing me a gold coin. Zach, she said, had sent her six of them, each one worth half a year’s harvest.
The coin warmed quickly in my hand as I turned it over, then back again. ‘Why give this to me?’
‘You’re going to need it.’
I gestured at the cottage around us, at the vines, heavy with figs, visible through the small window. ‘I don’t need it. I’m doing fine. And you’ve never cared, before.’
She leaned forward, spoke quietly. ‘You can’t stay here.’
I dropped the coin on the table. It spun noisily for a few seconds, settled with a clunk on the scratched wood. ‘What do you mean? Wasn’t it enough for you to drive me out of the village?’
Mum shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But you have to take the money and go. Soon. It’s Zach.’
I sighed. ‘It’s always Zach.’
‘He’s powerful, now. That means he has enemies. People are talking – about him, about what he’s done at the Council.’
‘What he’s done? We’re nineteen. He’s only been on the Council for a year.’
‘You’ve heard of The General?’
‘Everyone’s heard of The General.’ Omegas in particular. Each time a new anti-Omega policy was rumoured, it was her name people were whispering at the market. When the tithe-collectors had demanded higher rates from us over the last two years, it was always based on The General’s latest ‘reforms’.
‘She’s only a year older than you and Zach, if that. People make enemies on the Council, Cass. Most Councillors don’t live long.’ Nor did their twins, though she didn’t need to state it. ‘You know what Zach’s like. Driven. Ambitious. He’s going by the name The Reformer now. He has followers, works with important people. It won’t be long before somebody tries to get to you.’
‘No.’ I shoved the coin across the table to her. ‘I won’t leave. And even if he has enemies, he wouldn’t let them get to me. He’d keep me safe.’
She reached across the table, as if to take my hand, but stopped herself. How long had it been, I wondered, since anyone had touched me with tenderness?
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
I looked blankly at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve heard of the Keeping Rooms.’
This was one of the many stories that had blown through the settlement, like the tumbleweeds that snagged and rolled across the plain. Whispers that somewhere beneath the Council chambers at Wyndham was a secret prison where Councillors would keep their Omega twins. It was called the Keeping Rooms: an underground complex where Omegas were locked indefinitely, so that their powerful counterparts wouldn’t be vulnerable to any attack on their Omega twins.
‘That? It’s just a rumour. And even if it were true, Zach would never do it. He wouldn’t. I know him best.’
‘No. You’re closest to him. It’s not the same thing. He’ll come for you, Cass. He’ll lock you away, to protect himself.’
I shook my head. ‘He wouldn’t do it.’
Was I trying to convince her, or myself? Either way, she didn’t argue with me. We both knew that I wouldn’t leave.
Before going, Mum reached down from the cart and pressed the coin into my hand again. I felt it in my palm as the cart receded into the distance. And I didn’t spend it; not to run, or even to buy food. I kept it with me, as I’d once kept the key from Alice, and I thought of Zach whenever I held it.
It was Zach who’d taught me to repress my visions, as a child. His need to expose me had made me vigilant about not acknowledging or revealing anything of what I knew. Now I was doing it again, and again it was for him. I refused to countenance the scenes that came to me, just before waking, or during the moments in the field when I paused to splash water from my flask onto my face. I placed my trust in him, rather than in my visions. He wouldn’t do it, I repeated to myself. I thought of how gently he’d bathed my wound, after the branding. I remembered the days, months and years that the two of us, viewed with suspicion by the rest of the village, had spent together. And while I clearly recalled his hostility, his many cruelties, I knew also that he had depended on me as closely as I had depended on him.
So I worked, harder than ever before. When the harvest came, always the busiest time of year, my hands were calloused by the scythe, and the wheat chaff worked its way under my fingernails until they bled. I tried to concentrate on the immediate sounds: the rasp of the scythe, the thuds of the bundled wheat being tossed down, the shouts of the other workers. Every day I worked late, until the reluctant night finally arrived, and I made my way back to the cottage in the dark.
And it worked. I’d almost convinced myself that they weren’t coming at all, until they arrived and I realised that the approach of the armed riders was as familiar as the scythe in my hand or the path between the fields that led to the cottage.
As the rider hoisted me upwards, I caught a hint of gold below. The coin had fallen from my pocket to the ground, and was quickly lost in the hoof-churned mud.
