The Fire Sermon (15 page)

“Sorry. Bad dream.”

“It’s OK. You’re OK.”

I nodded into the darkness, my breath slowing.

He continued: “I mean, you’re on the run from your twin, and doubtless an army of his followers, and you’re halfway up a cliff with a seminaked stranger with amnesia. But apart from that, no problems.”

I laughed. “Thanks for the reassurance.”

“Any time,” he said, rolling onto his back.

I rolled onto my back, too. Above us I could see the tree roots that made up our roof, and the sky beyond, a lighter shade of dark, pierced by stars. Above it all, I could sense the Confessor’s searching, her mind seeking me. The night sky itself seemed to press down on me with the weight of her scrutiny.

“I keep dreaming about the Confessor,” I told him. “Ever since we got away. I used to think about her, in the Keeping Rooms, and dread seeing her, but now I feel her all the time.”

“You think she’s looking for you?”

“I know it. I can feel her—an awareness, seeking us out.”

Kip raised himself on his elbow. “How aware, exactly? Does she know where we are?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not yet. But she’s looking. It’s just—a presence, all the time.”

I thought again of the chamber I’d caught sight of, when I’d turned the Confessor’s scrutiny back on her during that final interrogation. That chamber, thick with wires, had been hidden by her—the same way I had consciously concealed the island in my own mind. Her flaring anger when I saw the chamber in her thoughts had attested to its significance. But what was it, and why was she shielding it so fiercely?

I felt him settle back down beside me. “I’m grateful for your seer stuff, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t envy you.”

Nobody would envy seers. The Alphas despised us, and other Omegas resented us. The visions were the hardest thing, though. I was always contending with the shards of past and future that punctured my days and nights, making me distrust my own place in time. Who would envy us our broken minds? I thought again of the mad seer at Haven market and his endless muttering.

“And you?” I asked him. “Did you dream in the tanks?”

“The whole time I was in the tank, the bits I can remember, I used to wish it was a dream, wish I’d wake up from it. A lot of the time I’d slip in and out of consciousness. But when I was asleep, I’d dream of the tank, and when I’d come to, it was still there.” He paused. “Now, when I sleep, it’s wonderful—there’s nothing at all.”

“Why do you think you were the only one awake? In the tanks, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t awake all the time. And when I was, it wasn’t like being awake properly. I couldn’t move, or barely. I couldn’t even see anything, really—it was dark most of the time. Sometimes, if I’d drifted close to the glass, I could just make out other tanks; sometimes even the other people, floating.” Somewhere nearby, a pigeon cooed. “You scared me, when you woke up screaming like that,” he said eventually. “I guess that’s the downside to being a seer—the visions aren’t exactly optional.”

“You scared me, too, when I saw you the first time. I mean, the whole setup was terrifying, but when you opened your eyes I nearly screamed.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. I think you made enough noise when you smashed the tank.”

I smiled, turned on my side to face him. Above the cliff opposite, dawn was beginning to declare itself, the darkness fading at the edges.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, reaching over and sweeping my hair back from where it had fallen over my eye, before rolling to his side, his back to me. I closed my eyes. After the isolation of the cell, it was nice to hear his breathing, slightly out of sync with my own.

chapter 11

For two more days we stuck to the path that followed the river downstream. On the first day we heard people approaching, though I could never be sure what came first: my sense of unease or the distant thrum of hooves. We scrambled from the path and down the embankment. It was steep, and the river below it was rock-studded and fast, but we had no time for caution. We clung to the cliffside, concealed by an uprooted tree lodged above us. The percussion of the passing hooves dislodged clumps of loose dirt and leaves. We stayed there long after the sound had gone, then emerged quietly, brushing the mulch from our hair.

When we heard horses again, the next day, there was no cliff to shelter us. The steep bluffs had subsided into grassed banks leading gently to the river, which ran wide and slow here. There was less shelter, but at least the quiet river allowed us to hear the hooves coming. They were close, probably less than a few hundred yards away, and we were sheltered only by the river’s bend. There was no time for words—we turned away from the river, sprinting so hard that the long, wiry marram grass sliced at our calves. The only cover within sight was a small cluster of bushes, and we dived behind them just as the first horse rounded the bend in the path. Half-submerged in leaves, we squinted through the scrub and watched the three riders slow to a walk as they neared the river. Kip’s grip on my arm became rigid; I could feel the slight tremors of my body against his. The men were so close that, when they dismounted, I could feel the thud as each man landed lightly by his horse. They were Council soldiers, their long red tunics emblazoned with the Alpha insignia. One wore a sword, long enough that it brushed the top of the tall grass as he walked. The other two had bows slung across their backs.

We watched as they led the horses down to the river to drink. Even with my pulse loud in my ears, and my body thrumming with repressed shaking, I was fascinated by the horses. My only close encounter with them had been at my abduction from the settlement. I’d seen a few horses before, of course, ridden by travelers, or at the market in Haven, but they were rare. There were none in our village when I was a child, though there’d been sheep, cattle, and donkeys. Later, at the settlement, there were no animals, of course—Omegas were forbidden not only to own animals but even to buy or eat meat. In the settlement, the only horses we saw were ridden by passing Alpha traders, tithe collectors, or the Alpha raiders. We Omegas would exchange envious tales of the decadence of Wyndham: a horse for every soldier. Dogs not just trained to guard but kept as pets. Meat eaten every week.

They say there were more animals in the Before—that they were common and came in different types, more than we can even imagine. Once, when Zach had been to the market at Haven with Dad, he came back full of talk of a picture he’d seen. A traveling merchant had been hawking it on the sly, in one of the alleys off the market. He claimed it was a drawing from the Before. It showed hundreds of different types of birds. Not just the birds we knew of: the pale chickens or the stumpy gray pigeons, or even the gulls that sometimes came inland from the sea out west. Zach said that the picture had shown birds smaller than a chicken’s egg, and others with a wingspan wider than our kitchen table. But he could describe it to me only in whispers, when we were in our room and the candle was out. He was already in trouble, he said, since Dad had hauled him away from the small crowd that had gathered around the merchant’s stall. Such relics of the Before were taboo, and Dad in particular was impatient with any speculations about the past.

Whatever animals had existed in the Before, few survived the blast, and fewer still had survived the hungry decades of the Long Winter that followed. Unable to adapt like humans, most animals had died out. Even among the surviving species, there was a high rate of deformities—it wasn’t unusual to see a three-legged pigeon, for example, or a whole flock of eyeless sheep following their shepherd by the sound of a bell on a staff. Only that morning Kip and I had passed a two-headed snake stretched out on a rock by the river’s edge, observing us with both sets of eyes. I supposed deformations sometimes happened to horses, too, though I’d never seen it. I’d never even known that horses came in different colors—the few I’d seen had all been brown. These three, now about thirty feet away and drinking noisily at the river’s edge, were gray, their manes and tails a yellowing white. Their very size unnerved me, and the sound of their slurping and whinnying.

The men led the horses back toward us, away from the river. The man with the sword bent to adjust a stirrup and for a moment his head was at our level, not ten feet away. I scrunched my eyes shut, as if that would hide me. But when I dared to open them again I saw something that terrified me far more than his sword. In a patch of dirt on the grassy path, right beside his horse’s front legs, was the print of a bare foot. It wasn’t even complete—just the indentation of Kip’s toes and the ball of his foot. But once I’d seen it, the print seemed glaring, unmistakable. When the man bent down, my whole body braced to run. What hope did we have, though, against three armed soldiers, with horses? My breath was the frantic flutter of a moth. The man stepped back, and for a moment I thought he might have missed it. But then he bent again, lower this time. I closed my eyes again and gripped Kip’s arm. It was over. Already I could feel the tank closing around me. Around us both.

When I opened my eyes again, the soldier was still bent low, busily inspecting his horse’s hooves, one by one. He flicked a pebble from one hoof, straightened, and spat on the ground.

They left as quickly as they’d come, throwing themselves up into their saddles with a casual elegance.

From then on we avoided the path. Kip was subdued all afternoon. Whereas I’d been sensing the Confessor’s avid scrutiny from the moment we’d escaped, seeing the soldiers had made the pursuit more real to him.

“They’re not going to stop coming after us, are they,” he said that night. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. “And where can we run to? I’ve only been thinking, so far, about getting as far away from Wyndham as possible. But
away
isn’t really a destination.”

“We’re not just running away,” I said. “We’re going to the island.” I hadn’t realized that, until I said it out loud. Nor had I realized that Kip was coming with me. But when I wasn’t dreaming of the Confessor, I’d been dreaming of the island, its single peak rising from the broken sea. And ever since we left Wyndham we’d been heading roughly southwest, toward the distant coast. I wasn’t sure whether that was chance, or whether I’d been steering us that way the whole time.

Kip had heard about the island already—it was becoming clear that his knowledge of general life was solid enough; the tank had left him with a frustratingly specific void that kept from him solely the details of his own life, his own identity. So he was aware of the island, but only in the way that I had been, before it had intruded on my visions. So, like me, he’d assumed it was a myth, a rumor—a furtive murmuring about a haven for Omegas, as vague and unlikely as the rumors about Elsewhere, other lands across the sea, lost to us since the blast. But when I told him that my visions had shown me the island, I was touched that he didn’t doubt its reality.

“So the Council’s really looking for it?” he asked. “And has been for a while?”

I nodded, remembering the Confessor’s interrogations on the subject. My jaw tightened at the thought of her eyes fixed on mine, her mind tightening around my own like a snare around a rabbit’s neck.

“And given that they’re looking for us already, you think it’s a good idea to head for the one place we know they’re also searching for?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I know—it does seem like a bit of a perfect storm. But they wouldn’t be looking for it if it weren’t important. If we want to find out what the Council’s doing with the tanks, or to try to piece together what’s happened to you, I think the people who can help us are on the island.”

That night, the Confessor stepped into my dream. She was suddenly there, as real as the fallen tree under which Kip and I were huddled. From the mossy bank above us, she looked down with the expression of absolute indifference that I remembered so well from the Keeping Rooms. The only blemish on her perfect skin was the brand on her forehead. And she was here, standing over us, her face lit by the zealous full moon. There was no point in running, and no point screaming, either. Her presence was total, as though she’d always been here, only we were too stupid to realize it. When her eyes met mine, my blood felt too thick, as if half-frozen, dragging its granular way along my veins.

The pain in my hands woke me, not Kip’s grip on my shoulder, or his voice, calling my name. I was scrabbling in the dirt, clawing into the ground and into the rotted base of the log by which we slept. By the time I was properly awake, I’d scraped a hole six inches deep, and those fingernails I hadn’t broken off were thickly packed with dirt and splintered wood. I was crying out, too, an animal wail of terror that sounded strange to my own ears as I surfaced from the dream.

Kip was bent over me, still holding my shoulder. He leaned in, pulling me close, half to comfort me and half to silence me. I exhaled slowly, forcing my body to stillness, and pressed my forehead against his lowered head to quell my shaking. I felt the match of our brands, the scars mirroring each other as his forehead rested against mine.