The Fire Sermon (24 page)

That day six riders came from the west. On the bland expanse of marsh, the white horses and red tunics of soldiers stood out from more than a mile away. When Kip saw them we dropped to the ground, then crawled on knees and elbows to the shelter of a reed bed at the edge of a pond.

“They can’t see us, surely—not from that distance?” Kip asked.

“Not if we don’t move. And if we’re lucky.”

We were lying waist-deep in a stagnant pool, its surface scummed with green.

“I don’t know about you,” Kip said, wrinkling his nose as he looked down at the furred water, “but I’m not feeling particularly lucky right now.”

The riders made slow progress on the marshy ground, so for most of the morning we were stuck, watching the horses pick their way across the horizon.

“They’re not coming this way,” he said. It was as much a prayer as an observation.

“They’re heading straight for the coast.”

But we discovered the next day that the soldiers had stopped off en route. We came across a settlement, a damp hollow where a handful of shacks propped up one another next to a small wood. We kept our distance, slinking past in the cover of the long reeds, but even from there we could see the gibbet. It looked new. The wood was freshly hewn, and it was the only vertical thing in the settlement, not yet having succumbed to the swampy, shifting land that had settled the older structures into lurching angles. An Alpha symbol was scorched into the top beam, from which a cage hung, suspended from a chain like a grotesquely oversize birdcage. Against the gibbet’s rigid, perpendicular lines, the body slumped within the bars looked even more broken. She had only one leg, and even at a distance we could see that a whipping had shredded the back of her shirt and painted her with blood. The wind blowing off the marshland, and the woman’s occasional movements, twisted the cage back and forth, so that it looked like she was scanning the horizon with her closed eyes.

We alternated running with walking for the rest of the day, but even when the settlement had long passed from sight, and we had left the marsh behind us, I imagined I could hear the sound of the chain, sawing at the wind.

“We need to start walking at night,” I said. “And taking turns to watch in the day.” It wasn’t just the need for answers that drew me to the island, now. It was raw fear. There was nowhere else in this scorched world where we might be safe. Not New Hobart, not even the forsaken marsh.

“And on the island—what is it you think we’ll find? What if it’s not the resistance movement we’re hoping for?”

“I don’t know if they’re militants or hermits on the island, or anything in between. But it’s a place out of Alpha control, just for Omegas. That’s enough to make it a threat to the Council. You saw the crowd in New Hobart, watching the whipping in the market and not daring to say anything. Because there’s never been any alternative: Alpha rule is how it’s always been. That’s why the island frightens the Council: the idea that things could be different.”

“And if the Council hasn’t been able to find it, after all this time, what makes you so sure that we can?”

I shrugged. “The same thing that made me sure about the caves and tunnel under Wyndham.”

He looked at me carefully. “I guess that’s good enough for me.”

“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “I might know where we want to go, but getting there’s another question. If a storm comes up, I wouldn’t like our chances. It’s a long way from the mainland, and weather’s unpredictable, even for me. And I’ve never been in a boat.”

He sighed. “Let’s just hope it turns out that I was an expert sailor, before the tank.” But the laughter I was used to hearing in his voice was entirely absent. It had been left on the marsh, swinging from the gibbet.

From New Hobart, it took us nearly two weeks to reach the coast, traveling at night, and sometimes half the day, too. We had a few provisions, at least, from Elsa, and the going was easier now that we were out of the marsh and among lightly wooded plains. The food lasted five days, though the bread was tough and ropey after two. After that, we foraged. A nest of eggs in a low tree branch was a feast that lasted us another two days, baked slowly on a reluctant fire. There were fewer mushrooms as we got farther from the marshes, but those we did find were larger, and less dank. The landscape had become starker as we neared the coast, but after the soggy, circuitous marshes I welcomed the dryness of the rock-strewn hills. In the day we found cover beneath the edges of the white, hulking boulders but took turns to keep watch. We saw nothing.

At dawn on the tenth day, when the grazes on my hands and knee had healed completely, came the smell of the sea. Only we didn’t know it was the sea, just speculated that the new salt sharpness of the air was a hint of the coast to come. Then, rounding the peak of a hill, we saw it for the first time, close enough that we could make out bursts of spray at some of the lower cliffs.

“Do you think you’ve seen it before?” I asked, as we sat in the long grass and looked down to where the cliffs ended and the shifting blueness began.

He squinted at the horizon. “I don’t know.”

If he had seen it before, no familiarity remained—he was staring with the same wonder as me. If he’d seen the ocean in his past life, it was just another thing that had been taken from him. The tank had swallowed even the sea.

I leaned against his side. We sat there for at least an hour, watching the waves goad the shore. Somewhere out there, in the sea’s massive blankness, was the island. And here we are, I thought, the two of us, tired and skinny, with no idea how to sail, going to seek out this island, the sea’s secret.

We found the fishing village the next day. Cooler weather had begun to shift in, so smoking chimneys revealed the village from miles away. It was large, too—perhaps sixty houses clustered at the top of one of the cliffs. The herd of fat black-and-white cows grazing nearby was enough to declare it an Alpha village, even without the Alpha insignia on the wooden sign planted proudly by the main path. At the east, where the cliff dropped sharply to a small cove, a trail clung to the side of the cliff. For a day we watched, noting how early the villagers descended the path to the boats and how they returned in the afternoon, met by the elderly and the children who helped them unload the nets slung with their catch. That was the worst—watching, from the ridge above, close enough to see the glint from the fish scales. By that point we hadn’t eaten for a day and a half, the urgency of hunger nearly matching the sense of pursuit. We had to wait for night, when we made our way down to the harbor. It was just light enough to see without a flame, though we went slowly on the narrow path, wincing at each dislodged rock that clattered down to the shore.

By the edge of the jetty, a throng of gulls was jostling at a huge cane container and picking at the discarded catch. When we approached, the birds set up such a squawking that I was convinced the whole village would be roused. But at that point I almost didn’t care: the gulls, taking off, had revealed a mound of fish and offal, knee-deep. When we reached, grimacing, beneath the top layers on which the birds had feasted, we were able to grab intact fish. They were tiny, some the size of my smallest finger, but firm enough, and not rancid. We carried our hoard along the pebbled shore until we were out of sight of the harbor, and risked a small fire to cook them. I relished every bite. I even relished picking the sharp bones from my teeth and licking my oily fingers. Kip’s cheek had been anointed with a tiny flash of silver, where some scales had brushed off on his skin. The scales mirrored the firelight as we sat, looking out to sea, the small cairn of fish bones between us.

“We could stay here, you know,” he said. “It wouldn’t be such a bad life.”

I ran my tongue along my teeth, scanning for fish bones. “Sleeping under a rock, sneaking down here every night to fight the gulls for the Alphas’ scraps?”

“It wouldn’t have to be like that. We could go farther along the coast. Catch fish ourselves. Build a little place.”

I shook my head. “You really think they wouldn’t come for us?” I thought of that presence that never left me, the appraising eyes of the Confessor. And the red riders on the marsh, and the whipped woman hanging in the cage. They were coming for us already. “And even if they weren’t hunting us, do you think Omegas would be allowed to live in a place like this, right on the coast, with all these fish for the taking? Even if Zach’s men never came for us, we’d be driven out, sure as anything.”

He threw a small stone at the water. “Maybe you’re right. I thought I at least remembered stuff like that—how the world worked, even if I didn’t remember how I fit into it. But I don’t remember it being this hard.”

I shrugged. “It’s not your fault. Things have become harder, too—every year, lately. We don’t know how long you were in that tank. It was only since the drought years that the tithes have crept up so much. The ban on Omega settlements on rivers and coasts, that’s even more recent—since the General joined the Council, Nina said. And the registrations, and the sealing of the Omega cities—all that stuff’s as new to me as you.”

He was rolling a pebble in his hand as if weighing it. “What about Elsewhere?” he said.

“It’s the same everywhere—even out east, these days, apparently.”

“Not elsewhere here. I meant Elsewhere—like in the stories. Another place, over the sea. Do you think it could be real? Somewhere where things might be different?”

Looking out over the infinite sea, it was hard to imagine anything beyond it.

I shrugged. “Maybe there was, once,” I said. “Right now the island itself seems far enough. And we need to get there—need to find the Omega resistance, tell them what we know.”

“What we know?” he said. “Sometimes I feel like we haven’t learned anything since we left Wyndham, except which mushrooms not to eat. We still haven’t learned anything about me, or the tanks.”

I understood his frustration, but I shook my head. “I think we’ve learned more than we realize. I’ve been thinking about Zach—the projects that he mentioned, the day I escaped. All the crackdowns on Omegas. And the registrations. The way they’re trying to keep tabs on all Omegas now.”

“Sure, we’ve learned about all that stuff. But it still doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Zach might be crazy, but he’s not stupid. It doesn’t make sense for them to push us to the point of starvation. Even with the refuges, it’s not sustainable.” He rubbed the back of his hand over his tired eyes. “They’re stripping away everything, bit by bit. And now they’re torturing people, whipping them, just to send a message.” He didn’t need to say what we both feared. It was the weight we’d each carried since we saw the cage swinging from the gibbet: that the message was for us.

He tossed the stone into the sea. “I can’t make sense of the world anymore.”

I followed it with a stone of my own, not looking directly at him. “Do you blame me for what Zach’s doing?”

It was his turn to shrug. “He put me in the tank, you got me out of it. So the two of you come out even.”

“Seriously.”

He looked at me. “I blame Zach. I know you think that amounts to the same thing, but it’s not. Whatever his plans are, they’re his. You and your brother aren’t the same.”

“He’d certainly agree with you about that.”

Below us, the sea inhaled and exhaled, wetting our shoes with spray.

I thought often about Zach: wondered what he was doing, where he was. More often, though, I thought about the Confessor. Even under tonight’s broad moon, just waning from full, I was vividly aware of that other presence in the night sky, seeking me endlessly.

We took the boat that night. I’d been afraid of setting off in the dark, but the rising moon was bright and growing brighter. We’d looked at several of the larger vessels, fishing reels and nets crowded on the decks, but in the end the boat we stole was tiny. I’d thought a bigger one might be safer on the open sea but, as Kip said, with only three arms between us we couldn’t deal with the web of ropes and pulleys on the larger crafts. “You don’t feel any stirrings of nautical knowledge?” I’d asked, half joking, and when Kip confessed that he was as baffled as me by the network of ropes and cleats, we settled on the smallest one there: a red dinghy, two long oars neatly stashed, a bucket by the tiller, and a small white sail wrapped around its mast.