The Fire Sermon (14 page)

“But what do we do next? When we get out of here?”

“I’ve no idea. But that feels OK, too, somehow. There’s a kind of symmetry to it, for me at least—I don’t know what happened before, I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

“They won’t stop looking for us.”

He sighed, rolled onto his side. “They can’t be more curious about me than I am myself.”

We slept for perhaps an hour. I woke him and made him walk, but he was struggling against exhaustion. I couldn’t imagine what it had done to him—his time in the tank, and his sudden release. His body was unused to itself; at first, he moved like a drunkard. “Let’s sleep” became his refrain, every few hours, and in the weird timelessness of the tunnel the whole journey began to feel like a dream or delirium: wake, walk, sleep briefly, wake, walk, sleep. When I finally saw the light ahead, it was only the pain in my eyes that convinced me I wasn’t dreaming. The tunnel’s narrow mouth was shielded by thick scrub, but enough sun crept through to show it was high daylight, though what day I didn’t know.

We emerged, wincing at the light, on a steep embankment leading down to a river running wide and fast below us. I cursed at the thorned bush we had to clamber through at the cave’s entrance but was quickly mollified by the indecently fat berries that grew on its stems. Ignoring the thorns, I picked the fruit so greedily that I couldn’t distinguish between the blood on my hands and the leaking berry juice. He ate, too, then turned back, his arm against the rock face, and vomited.

“Too fast?” I asked.

He wiped his mouth. “Sorry. I think it’s been a while. I mean—I know it’s been a while since you ate, too, but I had that tube . . .”

I nodded. “You don’t know how long you were in there for?”

He looked down at himself. He was thin, but not starved—I’d seen worse among some of the Omegas at the settlement the year the crops failed. His light brown hair reached his shoulders, and under the bright sun his skin was the color of bone. I could trace the structure of his bones under the network of tendons and faded muscles.

“Long enough to lose my tan,” he said. “If I ever had one.”

We stayed at the cave mouth for just enough time for him to eat again, more slowly, and this time he kept down some berries. Then the thirst demanded our attention, and we made our precarious way down the embankment, the thorns snagging our clothes and skin. At least it was warmer, here—hot, even, in the sun.

At the river’s edge he was more cautious, cupping mouthfuls in his hand to drink slowly, while I hunched on all fours to drink straight from the river.

“Have we ended up downstream from where the tunnel started? Won’t they look this way?”

I shook my head. “It’s a different river. It branches off the other, upstream from Wyndham, and goes down the other side of the mountain. We cut through the mountain, more or less.”

“So is that how being a seer works, for you? Not that I’m not grateful for it. It just seems odd. I was thinking you’d be able to read my mind, but it seems that geography’s more your thing.”

I grinned with him but shook my head. “Sorry to disappoint you. But it’s not just places. Places are easiest for me, but I can usually get a feel for emotions, and things that are going to happen, too. There’s not really a difference—I feel what’s there. I could see that if we came upstream there’d be the cavern, then the cave. It existed, so I could feel it.”

“But things that are going to happen—they don’t exist yet. It’s not the same as a river that’s been there forever.”

“I know. With events, they don’t exist yet. But they will, so I can sense them. It’s not like visions. It’s more like—like memories. As if I’m out of kilter with time. I can remember things that haven’t happened yet. But it’s not consistent—sometimes I can predict little things, and miss the really big things. Sometimes it’s the other way around.”

“And can you remember what happens next, for us?” he asked, sitting back and letting his feet dangle in the river.

“Not exactly. It’s not always like that. And sometimes I can’t tell if something’s just logic, just a good idea, or if it’s a seer thing. Like now—I think we should go via the river, float downstream. But that just seems to make sense—because it’s hard to move through this.” I gestured to the thick, high scrub that extended up both sides of the riverbank. “And because we won’t get lost, and they won’t be able to hunt for us with dogs.”

He sighed. “I thought when you got me out of that tank that I’d be done with floating in water for a while.”

“Sorry.”

“And I don’t suppose there’s time for a sleep first?”

I laughed, getting to my feet. “Our neighbor, in the village where I grew up, had an old sheepdog that used to sleep all day on their doorstep. It was called Kip. That’s what I’m going to call you: Kip. And no, we can’t risk a sleep yet. We’ve already waited here too long.”

Unlike the river beneath Wyndham, here the water was a rich red-brown, soaked with peat. We stepped in together. At the shallower edges it was warmer, but as we moved toward the middle we flinched at the chill of the quick, deep water.

“What do you think?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’d settle for a bit warmer, ideally.”

“No—about the name.”

He grinned at me, turned to face upstream, lowered himself backward into the river’s flow. As he drifted downstream he called back to me: “After getting me out of that tank, you can call me whatever you like.”

I’d envisaged a gentle float downstream, but the river was not so generous. At points it ran too shallow and we had to scramble, sore-footed, over low rapids and slippery shale. At other points the rapids were too fast and deep, so we crawled out and climbed our way down the steep embankments, rejoining the river where it calmed. Twice Kip fell, skidding down the bank before he managed to grab a root or rock to pull up short of the river’s clutches. At some points, where the river’s banks were flat and grassy, we left the water to walk beside it, but I made sure we alternated between the river’s sides so we left no clear trail on either. The thorned berry bushes grew at several points on the banks, and Kip spotted some mushrooms on the underside of a log that hung over the river’s edge. We were so hungry by that stage that even the rank taste didn’t deter us.

It was late afternoon when he suggested we stop. “If we get out now, at least our clothes will have a chance to dry while it’s still sunny.”

I looked at his face, his jaw muscles tensed to suppress his shivering. “Good idea.” I’d been starting to feel exposed in the river, as the landscape around it had become sparser, the thick scrub at the top of the embankment giving way to grass plains interrupted only by the occasional tree.

I led the way up the embankment. At several points I had to haul myself up by the roots of the trees that clung to the near-vertical slope. Beneath me I could hear Kip scrambling and cursing, but he kept up. It was Kip who spotted the path, lightly trodden but distinct, running along the top of the embankment. Silent now, we clambered back down a few feet to a ledge, overhung by tree roots, where we couldn’t be seen from the path above. In our ragged state, we’d draw attention from anyone, not just our pursuers.

Looking at Kip, I saw that the day’s sun had already reddened his back, which was also trellised with cuts and scratches.

He caught me looking at his raw shoulders. “It’s not as if you got off scot-free, either, you know,” he said, pointing at the bruises and scratches on my own burned shoulders. “We’re neither of us a picture at the moment.”

“You should stay out of the sun.”

“My complexion is the least of my worries at the moment. Capture, imprisonment, torture: absolutely. Sunburn: not so much.”

“You sound pretty cheerful for somebody with those sorts of things on your mind. Aren’t you afraid?”

He smiled. “Of going back? No.” He was still smiling, but he glanced down at the gorge below us, the river scouring its depths. “Because I wouldn’t. Even if they find us—I’d jump first.”

Although we were huddled close on the narrow ledge, the dark as it settled brought with it a sense of anonymity, made it easier to talk. I found myself telling Kip about the years in the Keeping Rooms, and even before: the six years at the settlement, and my childhood at the village, too.

“Sorry—I’ve probably talked too much.”

I could feel his shrug where our shoulders touched. “It’s not as though I’m full of stories to share.”

Indeed, in the absence of his own past, he seemed almost hungry for the details of mine, prompting me, asking questions, particularly about Zach.

“That must be the oddest thing, for you, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, it’s all odd, obviously, but of all the things to forget, it must be strangest to not know about your twin.”

“I know. The rest—well, of course it’s important. But I feel like I have some residual sense of who I am, and not knowing where I lived, or what I’ve done, doesn’t affect that so much. But not knowing who my twin is—it’s such a gap, makes me feel I can’t really know myself. Not properly.”

“I can’t imagine it. Like you’re only half a person. Like losing a limb.” There was silence. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—obviously.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean. But you shouldn’t feel too sorry for me. Your twin hasn’t exactly been a blessing.”

“I know. But I can’t imagine anything else. And if he were someone else, I wouldn’t be the same. I can’t wish it were different, any more than you could wish for two arms. I can’t even imagine not having Zach.”

“I suppose not. And with my twin, even though my mind’s forgotten, my body can’t have. If she gets hit by a cart tomorrow, it won’t make a bit of difference that I don’t know who, or where, she is. My body will remember pretty damn quick.”

We sat without talking for a while. “Do you think she’s like your twin?” he said. “Do you think she put me in that tank?”

Forgetting the darkness, I shook my head. “I don’t know. It could be like that—somebody powerful, wanting you put away. But those tanks—they had to test them first, right? It could be that you’re just unlucky, just somebody they got hold of.”

“And you weren’t in the tanks. Maybe that means my twin isn’t powerful, isn’t important.”

“Would you prefer that?”

“I don’t know. I guess it would mean that my twin didn’t choose to do it to me. That it was like what you just said—just bad luck.”

“I know what you mean. But I think the reason I wasn’t in the tanks was because they wanted to use me—to find out what I saw.”

“If you weren’t a seer, then, do you think Zach would’ve put you in the tanks?”

“He was going to anyway,” I said with a shudder, remembering the dreams that had tortured my last days in the cell. “Soon.” I thought for a while. “But if I weren’t a seer, then everything would be different. We would have been split at the start, and he wouldn’t have had to fight so hard against me all the time, to prove himself the Alpha. Things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. He wouldn’t have turned out the way he did.”

“So it’s all your fault? For being a seer?”

“That’s not what I meant. But it’s complicated.” I rolled away from him. “We should get to sleep.”

I dreamed of the Confessor and woke with a shout. In the darkness, it took me a few moments to realize where I was. Kip, lying behind me, was trying to quiet me. Below us the river echoed his shushing sound.