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The Map of Bones
Francesca Haig
‘Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their ‘weaker’ Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’ GuardianThe second book in Francesca Haig’s incredible Fire Sermon series.The Omega resistance has been brutally attacked, its members dead or in hiding.The Alpha Council’s plan for permanently containing the Omegas has begun.But all is not entirely lost: the Council’s seer, The Confessor, is dead, killed by her twin’s sacrifice.Cass is left haunted by visions of the past, while her brother Zach’s cruelty and obsession pushes her to the edge, and threatens to destroy everything she hopes for.As the country moves closer to all-out civil war, Cass will learn that to change the future she will need to uncover the past. But nothing can prepare her for what she discovers: a deeply buried secret that raises the stakes higher than ever before.
Copyright (#ulink_fa68d237-ea5f-5479-bc2b-aa77849fd50e)
HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016
Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2016
Jacket design by Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Wendy Stevenson / Arcangel Images (front cover, skull).
Jacket photography © Johnny Ring. Branding iron made by Nick Moran at London Forge. All other images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com).
Author photograph © Andrew North.
Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007563098
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007563111
Version: 2016-08-04
Dedication (#ulink_3181c784-f3a3-595c-a063-ed2382e6e5fb)
This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents, Alan and Sally, who shared with me their enduring passion for words.
Contents
Cover (#ub279c46a-30ea-5a2b-b157-2f8de3db4681)
Title Page (#ud5226de3-8d22-5204-8504-385d3aa044ff)
Copyright (#u61d5ae14-dd8f-5d35-8ee3-f21d850ce578)
Dedication (#u8c573bc4-2992-569e-b7b4-5321049ba0f0)
Prologue (#u0fdcb671-7c01-5520-a1d1-1d33dbd8c26a)
Chapter 1 (#u5e0e8877-a687-5cbe-a8ba-c9a4444d92ce)
Chapter 2 (#u1c2f8c09-8088-5e3f-905d-be28b550e9d3)
Chapter 3 (#u1c3092b5-6cee-5d63-8fc2-64686d0fdb5d)
Chapter 4 (#u6fae08a3-26ba-5cf0-9211-e49b340ccc2b)
Chapter 5 (#u8318faf1-1162-5c53-827c-dc62f66a2a6e)
Chapter 6 (#uc61360f9-8b21-5651-aa42-400a42646ba0)
Chapter 7 (#ud3036844-6565-55d7-92fe-31f4bf002e24)
Chapter 8 (#ud1731f7a-e240-50ad-a64d-a3f4dd556c6a)
Chapter 9 (#u85ed5aee-a970-51b9-a155-f286ca4c8d49)
Chapter 10 (#ua0ae21b3-eb76-5797-86b2-258b447b5d0c)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Francesca Haig (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_12b42261-d0ce-5dda-ae48-1d334cb17529)
Each time he came to me in dreams, I saw him as I’d seen him the first time: floating. He was a silhouette, blurred by the tank’s thick glass, and by the viscous fluid in which he was submerged. I could see only glimpses: his head slumped against his shoulder; the curve of his cheek. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was him, the same way that I would know the weight of his arm across my body, or the sound of his breath in the darkness.
Kip’s torso curled forwards, his legs hanging. His suspended body was a question mark that I couldn’t answer.
I would have preferred anything to those dreams – even the memory of his jump. That came to me often enough in the daytime: his half-shrug, before he leapt. The long fall. How the silo floor was the mortar that made his bones a pestle, grinding his own flesh.
When I dreamed of him in the tank it was a different kind of horror. Not the spreading blood on the silo floor, but something worse: the immaculate torture of the tubes and wires. I had freed him from the tank myself, months ago. But ever since I’d watched him die in the silo, my dreams encased him once again within the glass.
The dream shifted. Kip was gone, and I was watching Zach sleeping. One of his hands was thrust out towards me. I could see the gnawed skin around his fingernails; I could see his jaw, roughened by stubble.
When we were very small we’d shared a cot, and slept each night curled together. Even when we were older, and he’d begun to fear and despise me, our bodies never unlearnt that habit of closeness. When we’d outgrown our shared cot, I would roll over in my own bed and watch how he, sleeping on the far side of the room, would roll too.
Now I stared again at Zach’s sleeping face. There was nothing on it to show what he had done. I was the branded one, but his face should have worn some kind of mark. How could he have built the tanks, and ordered the massacre on the island, and still sleep like that, open-mouthed and oblivious? Awake, he had never been still. I remembered his hands, always moving, tying invisible knots in the air. Now he was motionless. Only his eyes were twitching as they followed the movements of his own dreams. At his neck, a vein pulsed, keeping count of his heart’s beats. My own, too – they were the same thing. When his stopped, so would mine. He had betrayed me at every opportunity, but our shared death was the one promise that he couldn’t break.
He opened his eyes.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said.
I had fled from him all the way to the island, and back to the deadlands of the east, but here he was, my twin, staring at me across the silence of my dream. It was as if a rope bound me to him, and the further we ran from each other, the more we felt it tighten.
‘What do you want from me?’ he said again.
‘I want to stop you,’ I said. Once I would have said I wanted to save him. Perhaps there was no difference.
‘You can’t,’ he said. There was no triumph in his voice – just a certainty, hard as teeth.
‘What did I do to you?’ I said to him. ‘What have you done to us?’
Zach didn’t answer – the flames did instead. The blast came, its white flash ripping through the dream. It stole the world and replaced it with fire.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_cf66940f-e4f4-571c-9f2a-bddca0adea79)
I woke from flames, a scream bursting from me into the darkening air. When I reached out for Kip, I found only the blanket, chalky with ash. Each day that I tried to adjust to his absence, I’d wake to find my forgetful body rolling towards his warmth.
I lay back in the echo of my own scream. I dreamed of the blast more often now. It came to me in sleep, and sometimes when I was awake. I understood more than ever why so many seers went mad. Being a seer was like walking on a frozen lake: each vision was a crack in the ice underfoot. There were many days when I felt sure I would plunge through the brittle surface of my own sanity.
‘You’re sweating,’ said Piper.
My breath was fast and loud, and refused to be slowed.
‘It’s not hot. Do you feel feverish?’
‘She can’t talk yet,’ said Zoe from the other side of the fire. ‘She’ll stop carrying on in a minute.’
‘She’s running a fever,’ Piper said, his hand on my forehead. He reacted like this whenever I had a vision. At my side quickly, crowding me with his questions before the visions had even had a chance to dissipate.
‘I’m not sick.’ I sat up, brushing his hand away, and wiped my face. ‘It’s just the blast again.’
No matter how many times I’d endured the vision, there was no preparing for it, and no lessening its impact. It made my senses bleed into one another. The sound of it was absolute blackness; the colour a white that shrieked in my ears. The heat went beyond pain: it was total. The size of the flames was beyond any measure: the horizon was consumed, the world snatched away in an instant of flame that lasted forever.
Zoe stood and stepped over the crumbs of the fire to pass me the water flask.
‘It’s happening more often, isn’t it,’ Piper said.
I took the flask from Zoe. ‘Have you been counting?’ I said to Piper. He didn’t reply, but kept watching me as I drank.
