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Until that night, I knew I hadn’t screamed for weeks. I’d worked so hard at it. Avoiding sleep; taming my convulsive breath when a vision came; clenching my jaw until my teeth felt as though they would grind each other down to dust. But Piper had noticed anyway.
‘You’ve been watching me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, not flinching from my stare. ‘I do what I have to do, for the resistance. It’s your job to endure the visions. And it’s mine to decide how we can use them.’
It was me who broke the gaze, rolling away from him.
For weeks our world had been made of ash. Even after we’d left the deadlands, the wind still blew from the east, loading the sky with a burden of black dust. When I rode behind Piper or Zoe, I saw how it settled even in the elaborate contours of their ears.
If I’d cried, my tears would have run black. But I had no time for tears. And who would I cry for? Kip? The dead of the island? All who were trapped in New Hobart? Those still suspended, out of time, in the tanks? There were too many, and my tears were no good to them.
I learned that the past is barbed. Memories snagged at my skin, relentless as the thorn bushes that grew by the deadlands’ black river. Even when I tried to recall a happy time – sitting with Kip on the windowsill, on the island, or laughing with Elsa and Nina in the kitchen at New Hobart – my mind would end up at the same point: the silo floor. Those final minutes: The Confessor, and what she had revealed about Kip’s past; Kip’s jump, and his body on the concrete below me.
I found myself envying Kip’s amnesia. So I taught myself not to remember. I clung to the present, the horse beneath me, its solidity and warmth. Leaning with Piper over a map sketched in the dust, to calculate our next destination. The indecipherable messages left in the ash by the lizards that dragged their bellies across the ruined earth.
When I was thirteen and freshly branded, I’d stared at the healing wound in the mirror and said to myself: This is what I am. Now I did the same with this new life. I tried to learn to occupy it, as I’d learned to inhabit my branded body. This is my life, I said to myself, each morning, when Zoe shook my shoulder to wake me for my shift as lookout, or when Piper kicked dirt over the fire and said it was time to move again. This is my life now.
After our raid on the silo, the whole Wyndham region was so thick with Council patrols that before we could travel back to the west we had to head south, picking our way through the deadlands, that vast canker on the earth.
Eventually we had to let the horses go – unlike us, they couldn’t survive on lizard flesh and grubs, and there was no grass where we travelled. Zoe had suggested eating them, but I was relieved when Piper pointed out that they were as thin as us. He was right: their backbones were sharpened like the peaked spines of lizards. When Zoe untied them they galloped off to the west on legs that were nothing more than splints of bone. Whether they were fleeing us, or just trying to get away from the deadlands, I didn’t know.
I’d thought I knew the damage that the blast had wrought. But those weeks showed me the wreckage anew. I saw the skin of the earth peeled back like an eyelid, leaving scorched stone and dust. After the blast, they say most of the world was like that: broken. I’d heard bards singing about the Long Winter, when ash had shrouded the sky for years, and nothing would grow. Now, hundreds of years later, the deadlands had retreated to the east, but from our time out there, I understood more of the fear and rage that had driven the purges, when the survivors had destroyed any of the machines that were left after the blast. The taboo surrounding the remnants of the machines wasn’t simply a law – it was an instinct. Any rumours or stories of what machines had once been able to do, in the Before, was overshadowed by the evidence of the machines’ ultimate achievement: fire and ash. The Council’s strict penalties for breaking the taboo never had to be enforced – it was a law upheld by our own revulsion; we shuddered away from the fragments of machines that still surfaced, occasionally, in the dust.
People shuddered away from us, too, we Omegas in our blast-marked bodies. It was the same fear of the blast and its contagion that had led the Alphas to cast us out. To them, our bodies were deadlands of flesh: infertile and broken. The imperfect twins, we carried the stain of the blast in us, as surely as the scorched earth of the east. They chased us far away from where they lived and farmed, to scratch an existence from the blighted land.
Piper, Zoe and I had emerged from the east like blackened ghosts. The first time we washed, the water downstream ran black. Even afterwards, the skin between my fingers was stained grey. Piper and Zoe’s dark skin took on a greyish tone that wouldn’t wash away – it was the pallor of hunger and exhaustion. The deadlands weren’t something that could easily be left behind. When we headed west, we were still shaking ash from our blankets each night when we unpacked them, and still coughing up ash in the morning.
*
Piper and I sat near the entrance to the cave, watching the sun shrug off the night. More than a month earlier, on the way to the silo, we’d slept in the same hidden cave, and perched on the same flat rock. Next to my knee, the stone still bore the scuff-marks from where Piper had sharpened his knife all those weeks ago.
I looked at Piper. The slash on his single arm had healed to a pink streak, the scar tissue raised and waxy, puckered where stitches had held the wound closed. At my neck, the wound from The Confessor’s knife had finally healed, too. In the deadlands, it had been an open wound, edged with ash. Was the ash still there, inside me, specks of black sealed beneath the scar’s carapace?
Piper held out a piece of rabbit meat skewered on the blade of his knife. It was left over from the night before, coated with cold fat, congealed into grey strings. I shook my head and turned away.
‘You need to eat,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us three more weeks to get to the Sunken Shore. Even longer to get to the west coast, if we’re going to search for the ships.’
All of our conversations began and ended at the ships. Their names had become like charms: The Rosalind. The Evelyn. And if the hazards of the unknown seas didn’t sink the ships, then sometimes I felt that the weight of our expectations would. They were everything, now. We’d managed to rid the Council of The Confessor, and of the machine that she was using to keep track of all Omegas – but it wasn’t enough, especially after the massacre on the island. We might have slowed down the Council, and cost them two of their most powerful weapons, but the tanks were patient. I’d seen them myself, in visions and in the awful solidity of reality. Row after row of glass tanks, each one a pristine hell.
That was the Council’s plan for all of us. And if we didn’t have a plan of our own, a goal to work for, then we were just scrapping in the dust, and there’d be no end to it. We might forestall the tanks for a while, but no better than that. Once, the island had been our destination. That had ended in blood and smoke. So now we were seeking the ships that Piper had sent out from the island, months before, in search of Elsewhere.
There were times when it felt more like a wish than a plan.
It would be four months at the next full moon since the ships sailed. ‘It’s a hell of a long time to be at sea,’ Piper said as we sat on the rock.
I had no reassurance to offer him, so I stayed silent. It wasn’t just a question of whether or not Elsewhere was out there. The real question was what it could offer us, if it existed. What its inhabitants might know, or do, that we couldn’t. Elsewhere couldn’t just be another island, just a place to hide from the Council. That might offer us a respite, but it would be no solution, any more than the island was. There had to be more than that: a real alternative.
If the ships found Elsewhere, they’d have to make their way back through the treacherous sea. If they survived, and if they weren’t caught attempting to return to the captured island, then they should be returning to a rendezvous point at Cape Bleak, on the north-west coast.
It felt like such a tenuous chance: if piled on if, each hope feeling flimsier than the last, while Zach’s tanks were solid, multiplying with each day that passed.
Piper knew better, by now, than to push against my silences. He kept staring at the sunrise, and went on. ‘When we’ve sent out ships in the past, some of them made it back to the island, months later, with nothing to show for the journey but damaged hulls and crews sick with scurvy. And two ships never came back.’ He was quiet for a moment, but his face betrayed no emotion. ‘It’s not just a question of distance, or even storms. Some of our sailors have come back with stories of things we can barely imagine. A few years back, one of our best captains, Hobb, led three ships north. They were gone for more than two months. It was nearing winter, when Hobb got back – and there were only two ships by then. The winter storms we’re used to on the west coast are bad enough – we didn’t even make crossings to the island in winter, if we could help it. But further north, Hobb told us the entire sea up there had started to freeze solid. The ice crushed one of the ships, just like that.’ He opened his hand wide, then closed his fist. ‘The whole crew was lost.’ He paused again. Both of us were looking at the frost stiffening the grass. Winter was on its way.
‘After all this time,’ he said, ‘do you still believe that The Rosalind and The Evelyn could be out there?’
‘I’m not sure about belief,’ I said. ‘But I hope they are.’
‘And that’s enough for you?’ he said.
I shrugged. What would ‘enough’ mean, anyway? Enough for what? Enough to keep going, I supposed. I’d learned not to ask for more than that. Enough to get me to fold my blanket at the end of each day’s rest, stuff it back into my rucksack, and follow Piper and Zoe once more onto the plain for another night of walking.
Piper held out the meat again. I turned away.
‘You need to stop this,’ he said.
He still spoke as he always had: as if the world was his to command. If I’d closed my eyes, I could imagine he was still giving orders in the island’s Assembly Hall, rather than squatting on a rock, his clothes torn and stained. There were times that I admired his self-assurance: its audacity, in the face of a world that did its best to show us that we were worthless. At other times, it baffled me. I’d caught myself watching how he moved. The last few weeks had left him thinner, his skin stretched a little too tightly over his cheekbones, but it hadn’t changed the defiant jut of his jaw, or the spread of his shoulders, unafraid to occupy space. It was as though his body spoke a language that mine could never learn.
‘Stop what?’ I said, avoiding his gaze.
‘You know what I mean. You’re not eating. You barely sleep, or talk.’
‘I’m keeping up with you and Zoe, aren’t I?’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that you’re not yourself anymore.’
‘And since when are you an expert in what I’m like? You hardly know me.’ My voice was loud in the morning stillness.
I knew it wasn’t fair to snap at him. What he’d said was true enough. I’d been eating less, even now we were out of the deadlands and the hunting was good. I ate just enough to stay well, to travel fast. On frosty days, when it was my turn to sleep, I cast the blanket off my shoulders and offered myself up to the cold.
I couldn’t explain any of this to Piper or Zoe. It would mean talking about Kip. His name, that single syllable, caught in my throat like a fish bone.
His past, too, stopped me at the brink of words. I couldn’t speak about it. Since the silo, when The Confessor had told me what Kip had been like before the tank, I carried her news with me everywhere. I was good at secrets. I’d hidden my seer visions from my family for thirteen years before Zach exposed me. I’d concealed my visions of the island from The Confessor for the four years of my captivity in the Keeping Rooms. On the island, I’d hidden my twin’s identity from Piper and the Assembly for weeks. Now I concealed what I knew about Kip. The knowledge that he had tormented The Confessor as a child, and delighted when she was branded and sent away. That he’d tried, as an adult, to track her down and pay to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
How could he be such a stranger to me, when I could identify each of his vertebrae under my fingertips, and I knew the precise curve of his hip bones against my own?
But at the end, in the silo, he’d made the choice to die, to save me. These days, it seemed that was the only gift we had to offer one another: the gift of our own deaths.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_1d0c478f-2452-56d6-86a0-35a74aa91e0b)
Halfway to the Sunken Shore, Zoe led us to a safehouse at the edge of the plains. Nothing moved in the cottage but the wind, banging the front door, which had been left open.
‘Did they run, or were they taken?’ I asked, as we walked through the empty rooms.
‘Either way, they left in a hurry,’ said Zoe. In the kitchen, a jug lay in pieces on the floor. Two bowls sat unwashed on the table, velveted with green mould.
Piper was bending to look at the door latch. ‘The door was kicked in, from outside.’ He stood. ‘We have to leave now.’
And even though I’d looked forward to a night of sleeping indoors, I was glad to leave those rooms where all noise was muted by dust. We retreated into the long grass that grew right up to the house itself, and didn’t make camp until we’d walked all day, and half the night.
Zoe was kneeling over a rabbit that she’d caught the day before, skinning it while Piper and I lit a fire.
‘It’s worse than we thought,’ said Piper, leaning forward to blow on the timid flame. ‘Half the network must’ve been infiltrated.’
It wasn’t the first ruined safehouse that we’d seen. On the way to the silo we’d come across another safehouse, where nothing remained but blackened beams, still smoking. The Council had taken prisoners on the island, and the resistance’s secrets were being wrung from them.
As Zoe and Piper took stock of what we knew, I sat in silence. It wasn’t that they excluded me from conversations – rather that their talks were full of shorthand references to people, places and information that they shared, and that I had never encountered.
‘No point in going past Evan’s place,’ Piper said. ‘If they took Hannah alive, then they’ll have got him too.’
Zoe didn’t look up from the rabbit. She stretched it out on its back, grasped its back legs with one hand, and ran her knife down the line of exposed white fur. The stomach fell open like two hands parting.
‘Wouldn’t they pick up Jess, first?’ she said.
‘No. She never dealt with Hannah directly – she should be safe. But Evan was Hannah’s contact. If she’s taken, Evan’s done for.’
The resistance network on the mainland had been larger and more intricate than I’d ever realised. At how many other safehouses did broken doors now swing onto empty rooms, the latches smashed? The network was like a woollen jumper with several loose threads, each one threatening to unravel the entire thing.
‘Depends how long Hannah held out for,’ Zoe said. ‘She might’ve bought him some time to get clear. Julia lasted three days when they took her.’
‘Hannah’s not as strong as Julia – we can’t assume she managed to last that long.’
‘Sally had no contact with Hannah, either. And some of the western cells should still be intact,’ Zoe went on. ‘They reported straight to you – there were no links with the eastern network.’
I spoke up. ‘I never realised how much of the resistance was going on here, on the mainland.’
‘You thought the island was the only thing that mattered?’ Zoe said.
I shrugged. ‘That was the main thing, wasn’t it?’
Piper pursed his lips. ‘The thing about the island – it mattered that it existed. It was a symbol – not just for the resistance, but for the Council too. It was a signal that there could be a different way. But it was never going to be big enough for all of us. Even in those final months, we were having to turn down some requests from refugees – until we’d built up our capacity. Added to the fleet, sorted out the supply situation.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘It was never going to be the final answer.’
Zoe interrupted him. ‘Most people on the island did nothing. They felt like great rebels just for living out there, but that was it. They might have joined the guards or done a few shifts in the lookout posts, but not many of them were actually actively contributing – coming to the mainland to help with rescues; running the safehouse network; monitoring the Council’s movements. Even some of those in the Assembly with Piper – they were happy enough to sit about in the Assembly Hall, looking at maps and talking about strategy, but you wouldn’t catch half of them making the crossing. The mainland was where the hard work still happened – but once they’d made it to the island, most people never came back.’
‘I wouldn’t have put it like that, but Zoe’s right,’ Piper said. ‘A lot of people on the island were complacent. They thought being there was enough. It was those on the mainland, or working the courier ships between the two, who did most of it. Zoe did more than most, and she’s never even been to the island.’
I looked up quickly. ‘Really? I was sure that you had,’ I said.
‘They never wanted any Alphas setting foot on the place – even I understood why.’ Zoe was hunched over the rabbit. She pulled the fur from the flesh as if peeling off a glove. ‘Why did you think I’d been there?’
‘I guess because you dream about the sea all the time.’
I didn’t realise I knew it, until I heard myself say it. In all those nights that we’d slept close to one another, I’d shared her dreams, the same way I’d shared her water flask or her blanket. And her dreams were all of the ocean. Perhaps that’s why it hadn’t struck me before: I was used to it, after my years of dreaming of the island. Used to the sea’s restlessness, and its shifting register of greys, blacks and blues. In Zoe’s dreams, though, there hadn’t been any island, nor any land at all: just the churning sea.
One minute Zoe was squatting by the fire, the rabbit’s flaccid body in her hands; the next her knife was at my stomach.
‘You’ve been snooping in my dreams?’
‘Stand down,’ said Piper. He didn’t shout, but it was a command nonetheless.
The blade didn’t budge. Her other hand had grasped a handful of my hair, her knuckles jabbing against my skull, holding me in place. The blade had gone straight through my jumper and shirt, and was pressed flat against my stomach; I felt its cold indentation on my skin. My head was twisted back and to the side. I could see the rabbit on the ground where she’d dropped it, its wrung neck and open eyes.
‘What the hell have you been doing?’ she said. As she leaned closer the blade became more insistent. ‘What did you see?’
‘Zoe,’ warned Piper. He wrapped his arm around her neck, but he didn’t fight her – just held her, and waited.
‘What did you see?’ she repeated.
‘I told you. Just the sea. Lots of waves. I’m sorry – I can’t control it. I didn’t even realise until just now.’ I couldn’t explain to her how it worked. How my awareness of her dreams wasn’t an eavesdropping, any more than I’d eavesdropped on the sea while on the island. It was just there, a background noise.
‘You said it didn’t work like that,’ she said, her breath hot on my face. ‘You said you couldn’t read minds.’
‘I can’t. It’s not like that. I just get impressions, sometimes. I don’t mean to.’
She shoved me backwards. When I’d steadied myself, I put my hand to my stomach. It came away red.
‘It’s rabbit blood,’ Piper said.
‘This time,’ said Zoe.
‘If it makes any difference,’ I said, ‘you know what I dream about.’
‘Everyone within ten miles knows what you dream about, the way you scream and carry on.’ She tossed the knife down next to the half-skinned rabbit. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to poke around in my head.’
I knew how it felt – I would never forget the sense of violation that The Confessor’s interrogations had left me with. How my whole mind had felt sullied by her probings.
‘I’m sorry,’ I called after her, as she walked away towards the river.
‘Let her go,’ said Piper. ‘Are you OK? Show me your stomach,’ he said, reaching out to lift my jumper.
I swiped his hand away.
‘What was that about?’ I said, staring after Zoe.
He picked up the rabbit and shook the dirt from its flesh. ‘She shouldn’t have done that – I’ll talk to her.’
‘I don’t need you to talk to her for me. I just want to know what’s going on. Why did she react like that? Why is she like this?’
‘It’s not easy for her,’ he said.
‘Who has it been easy for? Not for me, that’s for sure. Not for you, or any of us.’
‘Just give her some space,’ he said.
I waved at the plain surrounding us, the pale grass stretching for miles, and the sky so big that it seemed to have encroached on the earth itself. ‘Space? There’s nothing here but space. She doesn’t have to be in my face every moment.’
I got no answer but the rasping of the grass in the wind, scratching at the underside of the sky, and the moistened scrape of Piper’s knife on the rabbit’s flesh as he finished the skinning.
Zoe didn’t come back until after dawn. She ate in silence, and slept on the far side of Piper, instead of her usual spot between us.
