The Fire Sermon (40 page)

I closed my eyes. “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to be some kind of secret weapon.”

“I know that,” said Zoe. “But maybe you should.”

We were lying close enough to the fire that I could hear the shifting of the ash as it settled into new configurations. Beside me, Kip’s breathing was starting to assume the light, even sounds of sleep. Across the fire, Zoe’s body was an indistinct shape, but I could tell she was still awake. I whispered, trying not to wake Kip.

“Everyone on the Assembly except for Piper wanted me dead. If I get involved with the resistance again, why would it be different? The minute they know who I am, that’s it for me: I’m most useful to them dead. The one thing I could do for them—kill myself, and Zach—is the one thing I can’t do. I can’t do it to Zach. You of all people should understand what it’s like to care about your twin.”

Zoe propped her head on an elbow. “Right now, I’m waiting to see whether your twin is going to succeed in killing mine, and me. You really expect me to see your twin as some kind of poster boy for reconciliation?”

“But you and Piper stuck together. You can’t really want a world in which twins are split up.”

Zoe laughed quietly. “What makes you think the world has anything to do with what I want, or what you want? The world is how it is. If Alphas are going to treat Omegas like they do, then Omegas need somewhere separate. It’s safer that way. That was the whole idea of the island.”

“So now we just find another island? And then another, when the Alphas raid that one?”

“I don’t see you coming up with any better solutions.”

I closed my eyes, remembered what Kip had said to me on the tower:
an unsplit world, where we wouldn’t even need a place like the island
. “I don’t have any solutions. I just think that when you run out of islands you’re going to realize that the real problem’s still there.”

“Don’t preach to me,” she hissed. “You can talk as much as you like about bringing Alphas and Omegas together. But for the last few years, while you’ve been safely locked up, Piper and I have been seeing exactly what your twin and his kind can do. And we’ve been fighting to do something about it. You really think you can change people’s minds, people who’ve seen children taken away, locked up, killed in experiments?”

There was a silence. “I saw the experiments. Not all of them, I mean. But you know I saw the tanks.” Another pause. “And Kip understands. He doesn’t always agree, but he gets what I mean, even after what he’s been through.”

Zoe grunted. “ ‘What he’s been through’? The whole problem with him is he doesn’t remember what he’s been through. Piper told me—he’s a blank slate. You could convince him of anything.”

I didn’t even feel myself scramble up, or cross the fire. I just launched myself at Zoe, pinning her down and striking wildly at her.

As soon as she got free of her blanket she caught one of my wrists and wrestled me to the side, but it was Kip’s shout that stopped me.

“What the hell’s going on?” He was standing, peering blearily across the fire at our struggling figures.

Zoe released me with a shove.

“Did she attack you?” he asked me as I retreated to our side of the fire.

Zoe rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I rescued the two of you just so I could attack you in your sleep.” She pulled our blanket from the edge of the fire, where it had fallen, and stamped the smoldering corner before throwing it back at us. “Don’t worry. She was just defending your honor.” She rolled away as if nothing had happened.

Kip looked from me to Zoe, and back again. I shook out the blanket, wrinkling my nose at the smell of burned wool, and settled back down.

“Sweet of you to bother,” he said, as he lay down next to me, “but next time, I’d rather you just let me sleep.”

chapter 27

It was raining again in the morning. We didn’t relight the fire but crouched in the shelter of the trees at the clearing’s edge and ate the cold scraps of rabbit, the fat congealed and clammily white. When we set off, Kip made to continue following the river, but Zoe shook her head.

“We leave the river here. There’s a big town less than a day’s walk upstream—we can’t risk getting any closer. And I reckon they’ll be watching the valley. If I were on my own, I’d take the valley road, but with the two of you, it’s too risky.”

I looked around, staring up above the trees. Behind us the valley widened as the river traced its way toward the sea. Ahead, the valley carved an ever-narrowing path between the mountains. On either side, those mountains imposed themselves on the sky. The trees faded out less than halfway up, exposing cliff faces and collapsed sections of scree.

Kip sighed and looked to me. “Don’t suppose you’re getting a feel for any secret tunnels that are going to save us the climb?”

I smiled. “Not this time—sorry. But Zoe’s right—there’s a big town upstream. And people on the move all around it.”

She nodded. “It’s a market town—there’ll be people from all over making their way to it for the end of the week. If we’ve got to cross the mountains, the easiest pass is this side of the river.” She gestured at a dip in the peak to our left. “But they’ll be watching it, for sure. So we should cross the river here and take the high pass beyond that peak.”

Following her pointing finger, I looked up at the peak to our right, across the river. I shook my head. “There’s a big town there—bigger than the one in the valley. Are you out of your mind?”

“One of us is.” She was already moving down, toward the river.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kip shouted. “She can sense stuff like that.”

“I know she can,” Zoe called back. “And she’s even better than I thought, if she can sense that town.”

“She’s never been wrong,” said Kip, following her so he didn’t have to shout.

“I’m not saying she’s wrong.” Zoe turned to face us. “But her timing’s a bit off. There was a town there—a huge one, bigger even than Wyndham. But that was in the Before.”

I shook my head again. “I could have sworn. I can feel it so strongly.”

“Thousands of people—hundreds of thousands—lived there, for hundreds of years.” She shrugged. “Wouldn’t that leave a trace?”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Kip. “It’s taboo. I’m not going anywhere near a town from the Before.”

“If you’re worried about breaking the Council’s laws, I’m fairly sure that ship has sailed,” she said.

“This is different. It’s not about the law. You know that—it’s about the Before. You can’t go near any of that stuff.”

“That’s why Zoe’s right,” I acknowledged. “Nobody will go near it. If the pass goes through the town, it’s our best chance of getting through the mountains without getting caught.”

“There’s a reason nobody will go there. It’s contaminated. Deadly. You’ve seen the posters.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’ve also seen the posters about how we’re dangerous horse thieves.”

“And don’t forget all those posters about how Omegas are worthless, dangerous, a burden on the Alphas,” added Zoe.

I nodded. “Even if the taboo were there for a reason, it couldn’t be more dangerous than our other options.”

He sighed as he headed off toward the river. “I wouldn’t mind so much if the town weren’t on top of a damned mountain.”

None of us talked much the rest of the day. The climb was steep, and we were often clambering through scratchy, dense undergrowth. After lunch—a handful of stringy mushrooms that Zoe had found—she left us for nearly an hour, coming back with a rabbit and two small birds hanging from her belt. “I’d normally have gotten more, but there’re people around, coming up the valley. One patrol of Council soldiers, and a lot of local Alphas, still after that bounty.”

“Do you think they caught many of those who got away from the island?” I stretched my legs as I stood.

“Some, probably,” she threw on her pack. “The evacuees will have split up, spread out, tried to make it to safe houses. But there’s a lot of Alphas looking for them. The good news is they’re so damned noisy they had no chance of catching me, and they seem to be sticking to the lower slopes, not far above the river. The bad news is they’ve scared off half the game on the slopes, and there’s not much hunting higher up.”

“How long to the pass, do you reckon?” Kip asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “With the two of you slowing me down, three days, I’d say. Maybe more if the searchers come higher and we have to play it safe.”

For the rest of the afternoon we kept quiet but made steady progress, stopping for the night not far below the tree line. We didn’t risk a fire, and although Kip and I swore we couldn’t face the raw meat Zoe offered us, we both ended up forcing down a little. Water was more of a problem: we’d filled the flasks at the river, but hadn’t passed a spring since then, and were limiting ourselves to occasional sips. I sat leaning against a tree trunk, too narrow to provide any comfortable support, and wincing as I picked tiny thorns from my legs, crosshatched with scratches. I kept running my tongue over my teeth, slightly tacky from the heat and lack of water. I tried not to think about the meat, its gluey texture and the strings of uncooked fat that had snagged between my teeth.

Zoe, sitting opposite, spoke suddenly. “Do you think it’s over?”

“The fighting on the island?” I closed my eyes for a moment. “I can’t tell. I haven’t felt anything more, not since the night before you found us, when I had a vision of the fort’s gate being breached. But I don’t know if it’s over, or if it’s just that we’re too far away now for me to sense anything.”

She was picking at her nails with a knife, in the now-familiar movement. “Too far away? I hate to break it to you, but with you two tagging along, we don’t move all that fast. Anyway, I didn’t think distance was a big deal for you. You could feel them coming before they’d even launched the boats. That’s what you said.”

I looked down at my hands. “I did. But the seeing depends on a lot of things, and distance is one of them. Along with a kind of”—I paused—“intensity. Like with the Confessor, looking for me—she’s so focused on me, so intent, that I can feel that all the time, no matter where I am.”

For a while the only sound was the impatient clicking of Zoe’s knife on her nails. Eventually Kip spoke. “It’s not Cass’s fault that it doesn’t work the way we want it to.”

She looked at him. “You say that because she hasn’t found your twin?”

“I’m not even sure I want to know. But the whole seer thing—it’s not straightforward. You’ve seen how she wakes up every night. It’s not easy for her.”

“Her waking up in the night isn’t easy for any of us,” she said, turning back to me. “And if you’re going to do it again tonight, try to cut out the whole shouting bit. There are still people looking for you.”

I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. And I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about the island, or Piper. But I think he wouldn’t have been taken alive.”

Zoe shrugged. “You don’t need to be a seer to figure that out.”

“But it’s still good news, isn’t it? We know he’s not dead. And if that means he isn’t caught, either, then there’s a chance he’s OK.”

“Guess we’ll find out in a few days. If he’s OK he’ll come to the meeting place.”

I settled down next to Kip, wrapping the blanket tighter around us both. “I don’t believe you, you know,” I said quietly. “About not wanting to know who your twin is.”

Zoe, lying down a few feet away, joined in. “It’s not like me to agree with Cass, but I don’t believe you, either. How could you not want to know?”

“It’s not as weird as you think,” he said. Lying behind me, when he spoke I felt his breath warming my hair. “People lived for thousands of years without twins, in the Before.”

Zoe snorted. “And look how well that turned out.”

It rained lightly in the night, and a thick mist squatted over the valley as we packed up and set off in the morning. “It’s good news,” Zoe pointed out, when I complained of the weight of the wet blanket. “We’ll be clear of the trees by noon, but the mist will give us cover if it stays.”

“It’ll stay,” I said.

We could see only a few feet ahead, and all sound was muffled. When I slipped and grabbed a narrow tree trunk for support, the bark was loamy and damp, coming away in my hand. After an hour or so I was able to lead us to a small stream, a trickle really, but boosted by the night’s rain. We filled our flasks, drank furiously, and filled them again before continuing to climb through the gradually thinning trees. Within a few hours the trees had given up altogether, leaving a landscape of scree and boulders. Here we had to proceed more carefully, as the slopes of the lower mountainside were replaced by rifts and loose rocks. Twice we had to backtrack to find a passable route, before Zoe grudgingly let me navigate. The scree slopes were the worst, slipping out from underfoot and sometimes threatening to give way and carry us down the mountain. Several times we recoiled as a small cascade of stones hurtled beneath us, the noise loud even in the muffling fog. We tried to stick to the bouldered areas, but the progress was slow, and we found ourselves climbing as much as walking. Although Kip never complained, his single arm made the climbing hard for him, and even Zoe helped him from time to time, reaching back down to let him grasp her arm.