The Fire Sermon

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‘Fine. Fair enough. But you couldn’t do it to me. You wouldn’t.’

‘You called my bluff once already, at the split. I protected you that time. I can’t do it again.’

He took a step forward; I edged back. Only my toes and the balls of my feet were on the wall now; my heels tremored over the emptiness below.

‘I’ll do it. There’s no reason for me to go on living, in that cell.’

‘I let you out – you’re out here now, aren’t you?’

I dared a glance over my shoulder, then turned back quickly, hoping my eyes didn’t reveal too much of my terror.

‘Here’s what’s going to happen.’ The stones on each side were warm and rough under my outstretched hands. I wondered if it was the last texture I’d feel. ‘Walk back, all the way to the door.’ He nodded, kept nodding as he walked slowly backwards, hands still raised.

One arm still on the stone merlon to my right, I lifted my shirt and jumper with my other hand to reveal the makeshift rope I’d wrapped around my waist at dawn. I smiled at the thought of my comment to The Confessor the day before. All day the knotted strips of sheet had been digging into my stomach, but I hadn’t dared to loosen it, already worried that the bulk beneath my clothes might be visible.

Unwinding the rope was a delicate task. At first I tried to keep one hand on the stone, but it was too difficult, the unwound loops dropping around my legs and threatening to tangle me. Finally I relented and used both hands. I’d edged forwards a little, but my heels were an inch, at most, from the brink. I kept my eyes on Zach. The white rope, slowly unfurling, trailed its way down the outer wall behind me.

I don’t know whether I saw him tense, or just sensed his intention, but before he’d taken a single rushed step forward I raised a hand.

‘Run at me and I jump, or we’ll both end up going over. It amounts to the same thing.’

He stopped. His breathing was harsh, heavy. ‘You’d seriously do it.’

It was a statement now, not a question. At least it spared me from giving an answer that I didn’t have. I just looked at him, and he retreated again to the far wall.

The whole rope was unwound now. The base of the merlon was far too thick for me to pass the rope around, but at the top it narrowed to a single stone’s thickness. To loop the rope around this, I had to turn sideways, my cheek pressed against the stone so that I could keep watching Zach while I reached upwards. To pass the rope from one hand to the other I had to wrap both arms around the merlon’s breadth in an awkward embrace. When it was done, I was reluctant to relinquish the tight hold on the stone.

‘You must be insane,’ called Zach. ‘The rope’ll never hold. You’ll fall and kill us both. And even if you do get down there alive, there’re guards all along the outer perimeter. It’s pointless.’

I looked at the rope. He had a point: to transform my sheet into any kind of length, I’d had to tear it into strips only two fingers thick. The knots looked shoddy, even to me. I knew I was light these days, but the rope was still uninspiring. And what Zach couldn’t see was that the rope hung only part of the way down the face of the fort beneath me; from its frayed end, there was still a drop of at least twenty feet to the stone terrace below.

‘Listen carefully,’ I told him. ‘You’re going to go out that same door. You’re going to lock it behind you. If I hear you shout for guards, I jump. If I hear you starting to unlock the door again, I jump. Even if I’m half-way down the rope and I see you peering down at me, I jump. You get behind that door and you count to one hundred before you even think about opening it, or making a sound. Got it?’

He bobbed his head. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said quietly.

‘Four years in a cell will do that.’ I wondered if this was the last time I’d see him. ‘You could change too, you know.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘It’s your choice,’ I said. ‘Remember that. Now lock that door.’

Still facing me, his hand groped along the wall behind him and found the door handle. He had to turn to unlock it, but spun back to face me as he pulled it open. He was still staring as he stepped backwards into shadow and pulled the door closed. I heard the key rummaging for the lock, then the heavy tumbler sliding across.

I counted too, picturing him pressed against the door, making his way through the numbers in unison with me. Forty-nine, fifty. I realised I was crying, but whether from fear or sadness I didn’t know. Seventy-six, seventy-seven. He’ll be rushing, I thought, with his habitual impatience, but then making himself slow down, not wanting to burst out too soon and force my hand. And already, I knew, he’d be planning: where to position the guards, how to seal the city. He’d come after me, like I’d always known he would.

Ninety-nine. The lock moved slowly, but its age gave it away with a rusted squeal.

The Confessor would have seen through my plan, of course. But Zach sprinted straight to the point from which the rope hung. Half of his body was hanging over the edge, peering down at the prop rope, when I slipped out from behind the door, ran inside, and locked it behind me.

CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_250d10ce-788e-5b2f-befe-30678e8fe813)

I felt strangely calm. Behind me, through the heavy door, I could hear Zach’s shouts. He was kicking the door too, but it was solidly braced in its frame and emitted only dulled thuds.

At first, as I ran, I was just tracing the route along which Zach had led me. Then, at a point that I couldn’t quite pin down, I was guided by a different kind of memory. My body was a compass needle, faithfully seeking the tank room, which I could feel more strongly than ever. It was my greatest fear, but it was also my destination. I had to see it, to witness it in the flesh if I were ever to help those people, or even to spread the word. It was also the last place he would search for me. It was in the depths of the fort, far below any of the exits that a fugitive might be expected to seek. More importantly, if Zach had any suspicion that I knew about it, his most closely guarded secret, I’d have been tanked long ago.

Zach’s heavy bundle of keys, which I’d snatched from the rampart door after locking it, jangled as I ran. At each locked door I closed my eyes and let instinct lead me to the right key. Locking each door behind me, I was heading down again, but into a different wing from the Keeping Rooms. Even so, I hated to feel the fort closing above me once more, to feel the distance between me and that momentary taste of sky and light.

There was a long corridor, narrower than the grander corridors above. It was made narrower still by the network of pipes that ran along its sides. From the low roof hung glass balls, emitting the same sterile, pale light that had illuminated my cell. At the corridor’s end, down a short flight of steps, was the final door. My mind was so attuned to this place that I didn’t even have to hesitate to choose the key.

In my visions the tank room had been silent. Entering it now I was disarmed by the noise: the constant whirring of the machinery, and the sounds that water makes in the dark. Beneath it all, underfoot, the thrum of the river. I’d sensed the river throughout my years in the cell, but here it was audible, insistent.

Despite the eeriness of the place, its familiarity was weirdly comforting: apart from the noise, it was just as I’d seen it. Along the long wall of the chamber, the tanks stood. From each emerged a number of tubes, tracing to control panels above. When I pressed my palm against the glass of the nearest tank, I was surprised by its warmth. In the half-light I strained to make out a shape inside the viscous fluid. Something within was moving in time with the machine’s pulse. I knew what it would be, but squinted to see, hoping to be wrong.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shapes began to materialise, not just in this tank but along the whole row of tanks nearest to me. A young woman floated with her back to me, her three arms all raised as if reaching for the top of the liquid. A man curled in a foetal position near the base of his tank, his handless arms crossed over his knees. An old woman floated at a strange angle, her single eye closed beneath her brand. All of them were naked, and each body pulsed, barely perceptibly, in time with the machine’s rhythm. The chamber was so long that the door at the far end was indistinct. The tanks went on and on, the horror endlessly repeated down the row.

I didn’t know where the machine ended and the Electric began, or whether they were one and the same, but I knew that this alien sight was technology, and taboo. What sinister magic was in it, that permitted it to trap these people in this underwater sleep? The taboo might be a law, but it began in the gut: the nauseous recoil that churned my stomach when I looked at this web of wires and metal. The machines had ended the world. And as a seer, I’d seen the blast more directly than anyone: the pure destruction of that shear of hot light. Even spending the last four years beneath the Electric light of my cell hadn’t done away with my instinctive terror at the sight of these wires, tubes and panels. I became aware of the sweat on my body, the shaking in my legs. This rumbling, many-parted machine was like a slumbering beast.

My hands were shaking, too. I’d thought the tanks had been vivid in my visions, but seeing them like this was worse. The tubes that violated the bodies, emerging at the mouth and the wrist. Tubes like puppet strings, suspending the bodies from the top of the tanks. If I could get out, if I could spread the word, surely even most Alphas would be horrified at this? And if I could indeed count on my visions, then somewhere outside was the island, where I might find those who would believe me, even help me.

Making the horror all the more uncanny was the weird orderliness of the scene: the neatly laid-out rows of tanks; the perfect accord of the chests rising and falling to the machine’s perpetual lullaby. Despite the variety of deformations on display in the tanks, there was a ghastly uniformity about their comatose state. I walked along the row, paused, leant my face against the glass of a tank, letting myself be calmed by the pulsing semi-darkness.

A shudder ran through the glass, shocking me back into alertness. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a face, pressed against the glass on which I was leaning. The boy who had drifted to the front of his tank had eerily pale skin, his veins clearly outlined. His light brown hair floated up from his head, and his mouth was partly open around the tube. Only one thing disturbed the near-stillness of the tableau: his eyes, wide open and alert.

I jumped back, my small cry lost almost immediately in the thick dampness and rhythmic hum of the room. Averting my eyes from the boy’s stare, I looked down, but seeing that, like the others, he was naked, I fixed my eyes determinedly on his face. Despite his brand, his thin face reminded me of Zach. Later, I wondered whether that was why the boy had seemed so familiar.

I grasped at the thought that his open eyes must be empty, that they couldn’t possibly signify consciousness. Some of the other tanked figures had open eyes, but they were no less absent for it. I stepped slightly to the side. If his eyes hadn’t followed me I might have continued, all the way back to the door at the far end of the room, and beyond. Part of me was disappointed when I saw his dark eyes track my progress. At the same time, I knew that having witnessed that small movement of his eyes was a promise that I couldn’t break.

The tank’s lid seemed to be its only entry point, at least three feet above my head. At that level a platform ran around the wall, reached by a ladder at the far corner of the room. I took several steps towards it, then looked frantically behind me to try to reassure the boy that I wasn’t leaving. In the gloom it was already too late – he’d become a blur in the tank. I ran, counting tanks as I went, and trying not to think about their occupants, or about the empty tank that I passed at the end of the row. Climbing the ladder, I cringed at the sound my footsteps unleashed on the metal steps. On the ledge I counted my way back along the tanks. At the twelfth tank I reached over for the metal handle and found that the lid lifted to the side without resistance.

From above I could barely make out his drifting hair, now two feet below me. As I leaned down over the tank, the fluid smelled repulsively sweet. With my face turned up, away from the saccharine stench, I reached into the warm liquid, groped around, grasped something solid and gave a tentative tug. There was a slight resistance before what I was grasping came away in my hand. For an awful instant I imagined his fluid-soaked body somehow falling apart in my hands, but when I looked down I was both relieved and horrified to find that I was holding a pliable rubber tube. When I sought out his face I saw that the tube was now stripped from his mouth.