The Fire Sermon (31 page)

“But you seem to like it up here.”

He shrugged, still with his back to me. “It’s quiet. And I like seeing the city itself—everything we’ve achieved.”

I was reluctant to step away from the stairs and join him—the memory of those precarious minutes on the ramparts at Wyndham was still too raw. But he turned and ushered me forward, so I came to stand by him. We looked down together at the steep city, diligent with movement. His hand on the wall, close to where my hands rested, was broad, the fingers strong. My skin had browned in the months since the Keeping Rooms but was still nowhere near as richly burnished as Piper’s.

I broke the silence. “Why did you send for me? Is it about what I told you yesterday?”

He nodded. “In part. The Assembly met for most of the night to discuss it. Some don’t believe it; others are convinced.”

“And you?”

“I wish I didn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s so huge that it seems implausible. But the way they’ve been treating us, these last few years—that’s even more implausible. Until you told us about the tanks. If that’s their endgame, then it all makes sense.

“It’s perfect, in a way. They just keep raising the tithes, which drive us to starvation, and eventually to the refuges, but it also pays for what they’re doing. The new buildings at the refuges, and the development of the tanks—Omegas paid for all that, with the same tithes that will eventually drive them to the tanks themselves. We’re paying for the tanks, and eventually we’ll even hand ourselves in.”

I could admire it, the same way I could admire Zach’s cunning when he exposed me back in the village. There was a horrible simplicity to it.

“What’s your Assembly going to do about it?”

“That’s what we were trying to decide last night,” he said. “Spread word to avoid the refuges, at any cost. That’ll be the first step. But even that’s easier said than done. People don’t go to the refuges lightly. And if people are starving enough, desperate enough, it’ll be hard to warn them away, unless we can offer them an alternative.”

“And can you?”

“We can offer them this.” He gestured at the island below us. “Barely big enough to support our current numbers. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve been self-sufficient enough to stop shipping food in. And now this place is under threat, if the Confessor’s focusing on us as you say. I can’t stop thinking about her, what it would mean for us if she finds the island.”

“Then you know how I feel most of the time,” I said. “I can never stop thinking about her, ever since we got away. She’s looking for me.”

“You can feel it?”

I nodded. Even here, standing beside him in the island’s clear light, I could feel her hunting. The scrutiny of her mind, insidious as unwanted hands on flesh. “All the time. It’s worse even than when she used to interrogate me.”

“And you don’t know why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I got away.”

He smiled, shook his head as he turned to face me. “You think she’s after you just because you got away? You think if anyone else escaped from the Keeping Rooms that it would be such a problem for them? You have no idea what you’re worth.”

“Worth? I’m not for sale at market. And if you think I’m worth so much, stop patronizing me.”

He looked at me carefully. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that I’m always slightly taken aback by you—by how much you underestimate your own powers. Think of the Confessor’s value to the Council, the threat she poses to us. They’ve been hunting us ever since the first Omegas discovered the island—more than a century ago. But they can’t trawl every inch of ocean. Now, though, with her, they don’t need to. She’ll find us, eventually, just like you did.”

“I’m not like her.”

“You keep saying that. And I do understand what you mean. But if you recognized what you’re capable of, you could be the one real threat to them. Think of everything you’ve achieved already.”

“Achieved? All we’ve done is manage not to get caught yet.”

He had a way of looking directly in my eyes that was disconcerting. “You resisted the interrogations of the Confessor, for four years. You escaped from the Keeping Rooms. You found out about the tanks and, even more, found them yourself and got somebody out alive. You escaped the sealing of New Hobart, and delayed it by burning down half the forest. You found your way to a place that has depended on complete secrecy and the impenetrable reef for the last hundred years, and warned us of the Council’s master plan to tank us all.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Seems to me you’ve done quite enough to keep them on their toes.”

“But all that stuff just happened. I didn’t plan it, as part of some strike against the Council. I wasn’t thinking about the resistance. Until I got here, I didn’t even know for sure that there was a real Omega resistance.”

“But now you do know. So the question is what you can do for the resistance. Starting with telling me who your twin is.”

I didn’t speak for a while. The sounds of the city wafted up to us. Below the city’s sprawl, in the hollow at the base of the crater, the lake nestled. Around the lake, and on the side of the crater opposite the city, the fields of wheat and maize had been harvested and were humped with bales of hay. In the city itself, even on the busiest streets, the roofs, windowsills, and tiny, steeply terraced gardens were clustered with pumpkins, tomatoes, spinach.

“Are there any other seers here, now?” I asked.

“Not now. We’ve had two. Both useful in different ways. One we got to before he was split, before branding. That’s made him invaluable for undercover work on the mainland. There are a few other Omegas who can pass for Alpha at a glance: the less visible mutations, which can be hidden by clothing. But none as convincing as seers.

“The other was branded, so she couldn’t go undercover. Her powers weren’t quite like yours, I think—she could never have found her own way out here. But she was handy in planning the rescue trips. She helped with locating newborns, or others in need of refuge, or warning us of Council patrols near the coast. But, for the last year or so, she was half-mad.” Most people avoided this topic around me, or retreated into euphemisms:
not quite stable
, they’d say, or
you know how it can be, with some seers
. But Piper was as direct as ever. “The visions were too much for her. She didn’t know what was real anymore, I think.”

I remembered those final months in the Keeping Rooms, taunted by my visions of the tanks, and by the Confessor’s probing. How I’d felt my mind giving up on me.

“You talk about her in the past tense,” I said. “Did the Council get hold of her?”

He shook his head. “No. A ship went down, in heavy seas, on the way back from the mainland. We lost ten people that day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It happens. It’s the price we pay for this location.”

“There you go again: price, worth. Like we can calculate the value of lives.”

“Can’t we?” Again, that penetrating stare. “It’s my job. To do whatever will benefit the most of our people.”

I stepped back, away from the battlement, and from him. “That’s the problem with you: ‘our people.’ That’s why I can’t tell you who my twin is. You don’t get it, any more than the Council does.” At the top of the stairs, I turned back to him. “Twenty people died when that ship went down, not ten.”

As I began to descend, I was hoping to hear the sounds of him following, or calling after me. But I was followed only by the sound of my own footsteps.

In the week that followed, Piper continued to summon me daily. He made no mention of the argument on the tower. His questions were specific, detailed: the layout of the Keeping Rooms. The secret caves and tunnels under Wyndham. He got me to draw the tanks, every feature I could remember. He asked about the bones I’d seen at the bottom of the grotto pool. Often we were joined by members of his Assembly, with their own questions. The maps the Confessor showed me: how detailed were they, and which areas had they covered? The soldiers I’d seen at New Hobart: their numbers, their weapons, the proportion that were mounted. I answered all the questions except the one Piper returned to most often: my twin.

About ten days after our arrival he sent for us both again.

“Good news,” he said, when we were ushered into the huge Assembly Hall, empty for once except for Piper. “I thought you’d both want to know.” There were papers in front of him on the table. He swept them aside, pushed his chair back slightly as we sat down. “We can take him out. The Reformer. We have a source in the Council Halls, watching him for a long time now.”

“One of us?”

“One like you,” replied Piper, turning to me. “The seer I told you about—the unbranded one. He’s seventeen, now, has been working to infiltrate the Council since he left here two years ago. His seer abilities have helped, of course, though at times he’s feared the Confessor might sense him.”

“How close has he gotten?” I asked, working hard to suppress the tremble in my voice.

“He’s a serving boy, in the private household of the General. It’s not just access to her, though—he has access to many in the Council, waits on privy meetings with the Ringmaster, the Judge, others, too.” He looked clearly at me now. “The ship that came in late last night brought a message from him. He’s starting to get access to the Reformer, too. He’s been alone with him several times now. He’s in a position to make a hit. I just have to give the word and we can have the Reformer killed.”

Even as Piper reached for the bell at the table’s edge and rang it, even as the two guards entered, he kept his eyes fixed on me. Kip, too, was watching for my reaction. I said nothing. I felt suddenly exhausted, a physical surge of tiredness like I hadn’t felt since our arrival on the island.

With one of his characteristically careless jerks of the head, Piper indicated the watchmen waiting attentively, just out of earshot.

“So what do you say?” he asked me. “Do I give the order?”

Kip turned to him. “Why ask us? You don’t care what we say.”

Piper answered Kip but kept his gaze on me. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

chapter 21

I slammed the door to our quarters before Kip had even reached the stairs that led up to it. He got there in time to hear the key turn on the other side.

“I had to, Cass,” he called through the door.

“It’s not your choice to make,” I shouted from inside. From where he stood, against the door, he would have heard the crash of the wine bottle, cups, and mirror. I threw the lamp against the door; its metal base bounced toward me while the glass shattered.

“What was I supposed to do?”

He was answered by another crash, as I kicked over the small table between the beds.

“You think you’re a big hero?” I yelled. “Jumping in and telling him Zach’s my twin? That’s not your decision.”

“You think
you’re
a big hero? Keeping quiet, letting him kill Zach, kill you?”

I stepped over the broken glass, unlocking the door and wrenching it inward so quickly that he almost stumbled onto me.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. “He doesn’t have a seer at Wyndham. The Confessor’s too good. And even if they got past her, I’d have felt it—a threat to Zach, to me. I’d have felt something coming. He was calling our bluff. Why do you think he asked you to come along?”

“Did it occur to you that he might actually value my opinion? That as the only one here who’s actually been in one of your twin’s science experiments, I might have the right to know what’s happening?”

I just raised an eyebrow and waited.

“Oh crap.” Kip slumped down on the bed. “He knew I’d try to stop him.” He closed his eyes. “He wasn’t really able to have Zach killed. But now—”

Quieter now, I sat down next to him. “Yep.”

“And he wouldn’t need spies, sources, assassins.”

“No. Just me.”

He tipped his head back against the wall. I did the same.

“I can see a cup that you missed, on the windowsill,” he said. “Want to smash it?”

“Maybe later.” I gave a tired smile, closed my eyes.

He waited a long time for me to say something.

Afterward, when we’d swept up the fragments of glass and pottery, we lay in silence in our separate beds. Under the door we could see the patient shadow of a watchman who’d been posted there immediately after our return from the Hall. At the window a ribbon of smoke was visible, from the pipe of another guard stationed on the rampart below.

Kip looked across at me. “I don’t mean to bring down the mood or anything” (I snorted at this), “but why haven’t they killed you yet?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

“But it’s good, right?”

I laughed outright at this. “Well, I’m glad I’m not dead yet.”

“You know what I mean. It’s a good sign—that he didn’t kill you right away.”

I rolled over to face him across the small room. “When did we become grateful for such small mercies?” I watched his face, his anxious, tired eyes. “But you’re right, I think. He must think we’re useful.”

“You don’t have to patronize me, you know. It’s you he can use. What good am I to him?” He paused. “Or to you.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing.”