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There was something else about the refuge that unsettled me. I searched and searched for it, until I realised that it was an absence, not a presence. It was the almost total lack of sound. Piper had said that there were thousands of people within those walls. I thought of the sound of the New Hobart market, or of the island’s streets. The constant noise of the children at Elsa’s holding house. But the only sounds reaching us from the refuge were the strikes of the workers’ hoes on the frost-hardened earth. There was no background hum of voices, and I could sense no movement within the buildings. I recalled the tank chamber I’d seen at Wyndham, where the only sound had been the buzz of the Electric. All those throats stoppered with tubes like corks in bottles.
There was movement on the road that led east past the refuge. It wasn’t mounted soldiers – just three walkers, moving slowly, and laden with packs.
As they drew closer, we could see they were Omegas. The shorter of the men had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other man limped heavily, one twisted leg gnarled like driftwood. Between them walked a child. I’d have guessed he was no older than seven or eight, although he was so thin that his age was hard to tell. He looked down as he walked, guided only by his hand held tightly by the tall man.
Their heads looked too large on their thin bodies. But it was their packs that pained me most. Those bundles, tightly wrapped, would have been carefully chosen. A few treasured possessions, and all the things they thought they’d need, in the new life they’d embarked upon. The taller of the men had a shovel across his shoulders. From the other man’s pack hung two cooking pans, clattering with each step.
‘We need to stop them,’ I said. ‘Tell them what’s waiting for them in there.’
‘It’s too late,’ Piper said. ‘The guards would see us. It would all be over.’
‘And even if we could get to them without being seen, what could we say?’ Zoe said. ‘They’d think we’re mad. Look at us.’ I looked from Zoe to Piper, and down at myself. We were dirty and half-starved. Our clothes were ragged, and had never shed the grey stain of the deadlands.
‘Why would they trust us?’ Piper said. ‘And what can we offer them? Once, we could have offered them safety on the island, or at least the resistance network. Now, the island’s gone, and the network’s collapsing by the day.’
‘It’s still better than the tanks,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But they won’t. How could we even begin to explain the tanks to them?’
A gate in the stone wall opened. Three Council soldiers in red tunics stepped forward, to await the new arrivals. They stood casually, arms crossed, waiting. And I was struck once again by the ruthless efficiency of Zach’s plan. The tithes did the work for him, driving the desperate Omegas to the very refuges that their tithes had helped to build. Inside, the tanks would swallow them, and they would never emerge.
To the east, in the field behind the wooden palings, I saw a sudden movement. One of the workers was waving. He had run close to the fence and was waving frantically to the travellers on the road. He swung both arms back the way the walkers had come. There was no mistaking his meaning: Away. Away. There was such a gulf between the violence of the action, and the silence in which it was conducted. I didn’t know whether he was a mute, or whether he was just trying to avoid the notice of the guards. The other workers in the field were watching him – a woman took a few steps towards him, perhaps to help him, perhaps to stop him signalling. Either way, she froze, looking over her shoulder.
A soldier was running from the wooden building behind the fields. He tackled the waving man quickly, felling him with a blow to the back of the head. By the time a second guard had reached them, the Omega was on the ground. They dragged his motionless body back to the building and out of sight. Three other soldiers emerged into the field, one walking along the inside of the fence, staring at the remaining workers, who bent quickly back to their tasks. From a distance the whole thing had been like a shadowplay, unfolding quickly and in silence.
It was over in moments, the soldiers’ response so efficient that I didn’t think that the new arrivals even saw the disturbance. Their heads were still down, and they were walking steadily towards the soldiers waiting at the gate, just fifty feet away. Even if they had seen the man’s warning, would it have saved them if they’d turned and run? The guards could have overtaken them in no time, even on foot. Perhaps the warning had been futile – but I admired it nonetheless, and winced to think of what would be happening to the waving man now.
The two men and the boy reached the gate. They paused there, in a brief conversation with the guards. One of the guards held out his hand for the shovel that the tall Omega carried; he handed it over. The three of them stepped forward and the soldiers began to drag the gates closed. The taller of the Omega men turned back to stare along the plain. He couldn’t even see me, but I found myself raising my hand, and I echoed the frantic wave of the farming man. Away. Away. It was pointless – my body’s instinct, as futile and as unstoppable as a drowner’s underwater gasp for air. The gates were already closing, and the man turned away and stepped into the refuge. The gates clashed shut behind him.
We could not save them. Already more would be on their way. In settlements nearby, they would be weighing the decision, and thinking of what they might pack. Closing the doors of houses to which they would never return. And this was only a single refuge – all over the land there were more, each one being equipped with its tanks. Piper’s map, on the island, had shown nearly fifty refuges. Each one, now, a complex of living death. I couldn’t look away from the new building. It would have been intimidating even if I didn’t know what it contained. Now that I did, the building was a monument to horror. Only when Piper nudged me, and began to pull me deeper into the copse, did my lungs stutter back into breath, a juddering intake of air.
*
A few miles from the refuge, Piper thought he saw a movement through the scrub to the east. But by the time he got there he could find only some trampled grass, and no trail to follow in the dry terrain. The next day, when Zoe was taking the watch while Piper and I slept in the cover of a hollow, she heard a chaffinch’s call, and woke us both, whispering that early winter was the wrong season for a chaffinch to sing, and that it could have been a whistle, a signal. I drew my knife while I waited for her and Piper to circle the perimeter of our camp, but they found nothing. We struck camp early that day, leaving before sundown and avoiding open ground, even when night had come.
At midnight, we crossed a valley pierced by the remains of metal poles from the Before. Bent but not felled by the blast, they curved above us, forty-foot ribs of rust, as though we were traversing the carcass of some vast monster, long dead. A jostling wind had blown all night, making it hard to speak; here in the valley the wind was noisier than ever as it shredded against the poles.
We were just beginning the climb from the valley’s base when the man sprang from behind one of the rusted posts. He grabbed me by the hair, and before I could scream he had spun me around, his other hand pressing a knife to my throat.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.
I dragged my eyes from the hilt of his blade. Piper and Zoe had been just a few steps behind me. Both had their knives out now, poised to throw.
‘Let her go, or you die here,’ said Piper.
‘Have your people stand down,’ the man said to me. He spoke calmly, as if Zoe and Piper, bristling with knives, were barely a concern to him.
Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘We’re not her people.’
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he told her.
The knife at my throat sat precisely where The Confessor’s knife had left its scar. Would that thickened strip of skin slow the blade, if he cut me? I craned my head to the side to try to see his face. I could make out only his dark hair, not tightly curled like Piper’s or Zoe’s, but massed in loose whorls. It reached his jaw, tickling the side of my cheek. He ignored me, except for his attentive knife. Slowly I turned my head further. Each movement pressed my neck more firmly into the knife blade, but at last I could see his eyes, fixed on Piper and Zoe. He was older than us, though still probably under thirty. I’d seen his face somewhere before, though the memory felt insubstantial.
Piper worked it out before I did.
‘You think we don’t know who you are?’ he said. ‘You’re The Ringmaster.’
I knew, now, where I’d seen him: in a sketch on the island. Those few marks on a page had become flesh. The full lips, and the smile lines outside each eye. From up close, as he clasped me tightly, each one was a ridge of moonlight on his darkened face.
‘Stand down,’ The Ringmaster said again, ‘or I’ll kill her.’
Three figures stepped from the darkness behind Zoe and Piper. Two of them held swords; the third a bow. I could hear the creak of the bowstring, pulled taut, the arrow pointed at Piper’s back. He didn’t turn, though Zoe pivoted to face the soldiers.
‘And if we do stand down, what’s to stop you killing her then?’ Piper asked evenly. ‘Or all of us?’
‘I won’t kill her unless I have to. I came to talk. Why do you think I came without a big squadron? I’ve taken a risk to find you, talk to you.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Again, Piper’s bored, impatient tone, as he might sound when chatting in a tavern with a tiresome companion. But I could see the tendons in his hand drawn wire-tight, and the careful angle of his wrist, as he held the knife poised above his shoulder. The blade itself was a tiny dart of silver in the moonlight. If I hadn’t seen those knives in action, I might have thought it looked beautiful.
‘I need to talk to the seer about her twin,’ The Ringmaster said.
‘And do you always start a conversation with a knife to the throat?’ asked Piper.
‘We both know this is no ordinary conversation.’ The Ringmaster, behind me, was perfectly still, but I saw the tiny movements of his soldiers. The light moving on the blade of one man’s sword, as he inched closer to Piper; the tremor of the archer’s bow as the arrow was pulled back further.
‘I won’t talk to you while you’re threatening us,’ I said. With each word I felt his knife, rigid against my neck.
‘And you need to understand that I’m not a man who makes idle threats.’ He raised the blade, so that my chin was forced upwards. I could feel the pulse of my neck against the steel. The blade had been cold at first, but was warming now. Zoe was moving, very gradually, so that she stood back-to-back with Piper, facing the soldiers behind him. The soldier with the bow was only a few feet from her, one eye narrowed as he squinted down the line of the arrow at her chest.
When Piper moved, everything seemed to unfold very slowly. I saw how he released the blade, his arm extending, one finger pointing at The Ringmaster like a denunciation. Zoe launched at the same time, her two knives hurled at the archer as she dived to the side. For an instant the three blades were in flight, and the arrow too, slicing through the air where Zoe had stood a moment before.
The Ringmaster swiped Piper’s knife from the sky with his own blade. The noises came in quick succession: the clash of his blade against Piper’s; a shout from the archer as Zoe’s knife hit him, and the clang as her second blade struck one of the poles. The arrow had passed my left shoulder and been lost to the darkness.
‘Hold,’ The Ringmaster shouted at his men. I clutched at my neck, where his knife had sat, and waited for the pain and the gush of loosened blood, its hot spurt through my fingers. It never came. There was just the old scar, and my pulse thrashing underneath my own grip.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2c502650-6673-5ef2-b550-af46a986e83c)
For several seconds we were all motionless. The Ringmaster crouched in front of me, his knife pointed at Piper, who held his own dagger only an inch or two from The Ringmaster’s. Zoe, with two more throwing knives drawn, stood with her back to Piper. Beyond her, the archer was grimacing, clutching the knife lodged by his collarbone. The other two soldiers had moved in, swords outstretched, just beyond the reach of Zoe’s vigilant blades.
I groped for the knife at my belt, but steel scraped on steel as The Ringmaster sheathed his blade. ‘Stand down,’ he said, with a toss of his head at his soldiers. They dropped back, the injured man swearing. I couldn’t see his blood but I could smell it: the unmistakable raw-liver stench that reminded me of skinned rabbits, and of the bodies on the island.
‘I think we understand one another,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘I came to talk, but you know now that if it comes to blades, I’ll stand my own.’
‘Touch her again and I’ll cut out your tongue,’ said Piper. ‘You won’t be talking then.’
He moved past The Ringmaster and grabbed me, drawing me back to where Zoe stood. Her knives were lowered but not sheathed.
‘Leave us,’ The Ringmaster shouted to his soldiers, with an impatient wave. They withdrew until the darkness and distance hooded their faces, and I could no longer hear the wounded archer’s laboured breathing.
‘You’re OK?’ Piper said to me.
My hand was still at my neck.
‘He could’ve slit my throat,’ I whispered, ‘when you threw the knife.’
‘He was never going to kill you,’ Piper replied. ‘Not if it was so important to him to talk to you. It was a ploy.’ He spoke up now, so that The Ringmaster could hear him. ‘Just posturing, to impress upon us what a big man he is.’
I looked up at Piper and wondered what it must be like to be so certain of everything.
Zoe was surveying the valley. ‘Where are the rest of your soldiers?’ she said to The Ringmaster.
‘I told you – I brought only my scouts. Do you have any idea what would happen if word got out that I’d met with you?’
I turned. His men were watching us warily from twenty yards away. The swordsmen still had their blades drawn. The injured man had dropped his bow and leaned against one of the bent metal poles, but then jerked upright again as though the touch of the taboo remnant was more painful than the dagger in his flesh.
‘How did you find us?’ I swung back around to face The Ringmaster. ‘The Council’s been searching for months. Why you, and why now?’
‘Your brother, him and The General, think their machines allow them to keep track of everything. Maybe it worked well enough when they had The Confessor and her visions to help out. They never had time for old-fashioned methods. They could’ve learned a lot from the older Councillors, or some of the senior soldiers, if they’d taken the time to listen, like I did. I’ve been paying urchins in half the settlements from Wyndham to the coast, for years. When you need updates from the ground, a greedy local kid with the promise of a silver coin is worth more than any machine. Sometimes it’s a waste of money – often enough they bring me nothing but rumours, false alarms. But every now and again you get lucky. There was an unconfirmed sighting of you at Drury. Then someone came to me, said three strangers had been seen in Windrush. The interesting bit was that there was an Alpha girl with two Omegas. I’ve had my scouts tracking you for four days.’
‘Why?’ Piper interrupted him.
‘Because we have things in common.’
Piper laughed, the sound somehow louder in the darkness. ‘Us? Look at yourself.’
The Ringmaster might have travelled away from Wyndham, but he still had the plush appearance of a Councillor. Somewhere, not far from here, would be a tent, carried and erected by his soldiers, and outfitted with clean bedding. While we’d travelled on foot, thigh-deep in drifts of ash, or footsore over rocky hills, he would have ridden. His men probably fetched him water to wash in – his face and hands showed none of the grime that marked the three of us. And by the look of his rounded cheeks, he’d never had to pick the grubs off a mushroom that was his only meal at the end of a long night of walking, or spend ten minutes scraping the last scraps of flesh from a lizard’s thorny carcass. Our hunger was a garment that we could not remove, and as I looked at his well-fed face, I joined in with Piper’s laughter. Zoe, behind me, spat on the ground.
‘I know why you’re laughing,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘But we have more in common than you know. We want the same thing.’
It was Zoe’s turn to laugh. ‘If you knew what I’d like to see done to you and the other bastards on the Council, you wouldn’t be saying that.’
‘I’ve told you already – you’re making a mistake if you assume we’re all the same.’
Piper spoke. ‘You’re all happy to sleep in feather beds while Omegas suffer. What difference does it make to us if you bicker amongst yourselves about the best ways to screw us over? You kill one another, periodically, but things don’t get any better for us.’
‘Things have changed.’
‘Let me guess,’ Piper said. ‘You care about Omegas, all of a sudden?’
‘No. Not at all.’ His honesty stopped even Zoe, who’d been on the point of interrupting him.
The Ringmaster continued, making no pretence of shame. ‘I care about Alphas. I want to do what’s best for them. That’s my job, just as yours is to act in the best interests of your own people.’
‘I’m not in charge of the Assembly anymore,’ Piper said. He gestured at himself – his ragged clothes, his dirty face. ‘Do I look like the leader of the resistance to you?’
The Ringmaster ignored him. ‘What The Reformer and The General are doing now, or trying to do, is a risk to all of us – Alphas and Omegas alike.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Don’t play coy with me,’ he said. ‘You escaped from Wyndham fort through the tank rooms. You know they’re resurrecting the machines, the Electric. And I suspect you know more than you’d admit about The Confessor’s database, too – I’ve never swallowed The Reformer’s story that it was The Confessor’s twin, alone, who killed her.’
I said nothing.
‘For years I worked closely with The General, and The Reformer too,’ he said. ‘I was even willing to tolerate his closeness with The Confessor.’ There was a curl of distaste in his upper lip. ‘She was useful, at least. But there came a stage when our agendas diverged. It’s become clear to me that your twin and The General no longer give any credence to the taboo. They pay lip service to it – they know that’s what the public demands. But they’re pushing at it. Always pushing.
‘They’ve been working as secretively as they can, but they can’t do it all alone. Over the past year or more, some of the soldiers from their personal squadrons have come to me. They’ve seen the things they’re guarding: the tanks. The database. I rose up through the army, unlike The Reformer or The General, for all that she’s taken a soldier’s name for herself. I understand the soldiers, the ordinary people. I know how deep the taboo runs. Your twin and The General are so enthralled by their ideas, they’ve underestimated how much most people hate and fear the machines.’
‘More than they fear the Omegas?’ I asked.
‘It’s all the same thing,’ he said. ‘People know that. The machines caused the blast, caused the twinning, and the Omegas.’
That was how he saw us: as an aberration – a horror to be listed along with the blast. A problem to be solved.
He went on. ‘When The Confessor was killed, and her database trashed, I hoped that might be the end of it. But your brother’s and The General’s enthusiasm for the machines is unabated. It’s already gone too far. The Judge was the last one on the Council with the power to openly oppose them. Even when they had his twin, towards the end, he still stood firm on the taboo, because he knew the public wouldn’t stand for it if he didn’t. So they killed his twin, and him, as soon as they figured they didn’t need him anymore.’
‘What about the others on the Council?’ Piper said. ‘Do they know what The Reformer and The General are doing? What they’re planning?’
‘Not many. Most have given their tacit approval: they’re not looking too closely. They’re happy to benefit if it works, and they don’t want to be implicated if it all goes wrong.’
What a luxury it would be, I thought, to choose ignorance. To shrug off the burden of knowledge.
‘Then there are those with no choice,’ he said. ‘Those who didn’t get to their own twins before The Reformer and The General did.’
‘What about your twin?’ I asked.
‘I have her,’ he said. ‘Not in the Keeping Rooms, but under guard, with soldiers I can trust.’
I tensed my neck muscles against the shudder that rose in me. There were still nights when I dreamed I was back in the cell at the Keeping Rooms, the formless days passing, and me trapped forever, a prisoner of time.
‘You think that’s better than the Keeping Rooms?’
‘It’s safer,’ he said. ‘For her and me. The way things are at the moment, I don’t think I could protect her in Wyndham. Not even in the Keeping Rooms.’
‘Why have you sought us out?’ I said.
‘For the last few years, since I realised the extent of their obsession with the machines, I’ve been trying to gather information, learn as much as I can about their plans. I’ve tried using other seers. There’s only a handful of them. Their powers vary so much – some are of no practical use, and most of them are broken.’ He said it so offhandedly, as though when the madness claimed us, a seer was no more than a cartwheel with a broken spar, or a rusted bucket.
‘You, though.’ He turned back to me. ‘From what I hear, you could be of some use. And if you’re working with the resistance,’ he nodded at Piper and Zoe, ‘then there’s even more to be gained from some kind of cooperation.’
‘I’ve told you,’ Piper said, enunciating each syllable slowly. ‘I’m not in charge anymore.’
‘You don’t want to work to stop the tanks, then?’
‘What is it that you think you want from us?’ I interrupted.
The four of us were circling one another, a wary dance amongst the poles, while his soldiers watched from a distance.
‘I need your help,’ he said, ‘to stop your twin and The General, and their pursuit of the machines.’
