The Refuge Song (16 page)

“If you already have me so well figured out, what did you hope to achieve by coming here?”

I looked at his pale face, his hand tight around the stem of the wineglass. “Why are you so afraid of us?” I said. “When you first came to me, I'd hoped it might be compassion that made you want to stop the tanks. But it's fear. You say you want to uphold the taboo. But your fear of the taboo is just fear of us. We're what the machines wrought. We're what you're afraid of. But you can't fight the machines unless you fight alongside us.”

“You don't know anything about me,” he said. He pushed the wine away so hard that it spilled. I watched the red trickle down the stem of the glass and pool on the table.

“What did we ever do to you?”

He stared at me in silence for several moments. He wore a knife in a scabbard at his belt. Have I pushed him too far? I wondered. He could kill me in an instant. His soldiers would drag my body away, and he wouldn't even need to clean up the mess. I could see it unfolding. But it was less vivid than the other images that had stalked my vision for the last few days: the tanks waiting to swallow the whole town of New Hobart; the battle; the ring of blood around the town, from our futile attempt to free it.

“I had a wife.” The Ringmaster's voice jolted me from my thoughts. “We got married young. We were going to have a child.”

“Children,” I said.

“Call it what you like.” He lifted his glass again, avoiding my eyes as he drank. “For nine months we watched Gemma's belly grow. I left the
army, started working for a Councilor, because I didn't want to be away so often. I wanted to see my child grow up.

“When Gemma went into labor, the Alpha came first. She was beautiful. Perfect. I got to hold her, while we were waiting for the Omega. But it couldn't come out. It got stuck.” He paused for a moment. “We had the midwife there. We did everything we could. But its head was deformed.” He looked down, his mouth distorted, as though the memory were a bitter taste on his tongue. “There was something wrong with it. Two heads, maybe, the midwife thought. Anyway, it wouldn't come.

“My wife told me to get the doctor to cut it out of her, to try to at least save the baby. But I couldn't do it. I should have done. It was stupid of me. As it was, I lost them both.”

For a second, I thought he meant both twins. That he was at least acknowledging that he'd lost his Omega child, too. But he went on.

“My baby girl first. And then my wife, too, within a day and a half. The other baby was stuck in her, dead, and Gemma got sicker and sicker. She went gray. Her fever was so high that she was half-crazed. And the whole time she was asking about the baby, our little girl. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was wrapped up, on a chair in the kitchen, dead.” He looked up at me. “If anyone tells you they don't fear Omegas, they're lying. You are the curse that the blast left us with. You're the burden that the innocent have to bear.”

“Your son,” I said. “Wasn't he just as innocent as your daughter? And the children of New Hobart—aren't they innocent, too?”

“The Omega baby killed my whole family.”

“No. He died, and they died, too. And it was terrible, and cruel, for all of them. But when your wife died, her Omega twin died as well—and that's not her fault either. If you turn tragedies like that it into a reason for hating all Omegas, we end up with people like Zach and the General arguing that we should all be tanked.”

He continued as if I hadn't spoken. “After she died, they cut it out of her. I asked them to.” He looked up at me. “I wanted to see it for myself.”

“He was your son.”

“You think that's why I wanted to see it?” He shook his head slowly. “I wanted to see the thing that had killed her. Not two heads, or not quite. One huge head, with a second face bulging out the side of it.” Disgust contorted his face. “I told the midwife to get rid of it. I didn't want it to be buried with my wife and daughter.”

“He was your son,” I said.

“You think if you keep saying that, it will somehow make it mean something?”

“And do you think if you keep denying it, ignoring it, it will make it untrue?”

He stood. “I can't help you free New Hobart. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do it in time.”

“At least tell me this,” I said. “What do you know about the Ark, or Elsewhere?”

“Nothing,” he said. I scanned his face, and could find no lie there. “Nothing but conversations that stop when I enter the room. This isn't something they discuss openly, in the Council Halls. I've heard whispers of an Ark. I know it's part of their plan, but I don't know how it all fits together. And I know it's something to do with what they're searching for in New Hobart.”

“If we free New Hobart, I can help you find it. We can find the Ark. We can change everything.”

“Do you believe that?” he said.

I stood and pushed back the tent flap. The canvas was heavy with ice.

“You can't change what happened to your wife and your children,” I said. “But you can change what happens now. Whether you sit back and
let the tanks come, and let Zach and the General find what they're looking for in New Hobart. Or whether you make a change.”

He stood outside the tent, watching as I began to walk up the gully, ignoring the soldiers who turned to watch me go.

“I can't help you,” he called after me.

“Midnight, on the new moon,” I said again. It felt just as futile and absurd as our carving of the messages on the pumpkins. If the Ringmaster warned the Council, our attack was doomed before it began. But it was all I could do, and so I did it. I'd seen the blood and the tanks that were New Hobart's future. I gave the Ringmaster those five words, because they were all that I had to offer. And because if I wanted the Alphas to recognize our humanity, I had to take a gamble that somewhere within the Ringmaster was some humanity, too.

At the head of the gully, a sentry led my horse to me. He wouldn't give me my knife until I was mounted, and then he handed it to me carefully, holding it by the blade, so that our hands didn't touch.

By the time I led the horse along the tangle of paths through the swamp, it was nearly dawn. I was exhausted, and the horse was quivering with cold as we waded through the iced water to avoid Simon's sentries in the outer marshes. When I reached the final path to the camp, the water deep on each side, Sally was waiting.

“Will he help us?” she said.

I shook my head. “We had to try,” I said as I handed her the reins.

She said nothing, but as I slunk back into the tent where the others slept, oblivious, I was glad that Sally knew what I had done. If I'd just betrayed the resistance, at least Sally and I were bound together in this. My betrayal was her betrayal, my hope her hope.

chapter 18

For those final three days, my mind was with the Ringmaster. While weapons were sharpened and distributed in the snowbound camp, I was picturing him, in his comfortable tent, and wondering whether he would betray our plans to the Council. While Simon and Piper drilled the troops, and Sally went over the plan of attack with them, I waited and waited for some sign from the Ringmaster. If he'd moved quickly enough, there might be time for him to bring soldiers to us before we marched on the town. I watched the horizon to the north and the west. Sally kept her distance from me, but on the last day she caught me alone, staring beyond the ring of reeds that encircled the camp.

“No messengers? Nothing?” she said.

“Nothing.” I could feel no hint of reinforcements, or of the Ringmaster's presence. Nothing was visible on the horizon but the charred bones of what had been the forest. Tomorrow we would attack, and we would be doing it alone.

I had seen the blast scorch the world, a thousand times or more, but the battle scenes in my recent visions were so intimate that they affected me differently. I saw a sword hilt breaking a jawbone. An arrow striking a chest with such force that the tip emerged at the back. A death was a personal thing—it felt indecent to have seen what I had. In the camp, as I watched our troops adjusting their bows, and fixing their improvised shields, I had trouble meeting their eyes. I wanted to allow them the privacy of their own blood.

Piper and Simon kept them busy. They ran drills at night now, as well as in the day, to prepare for the midnight attack. The troops responded efficiently to Piper's and Simon's shouted orders, and when I watched them practice they were grim but focused. But we couldn't keep them occupied every moment, and among the rows of leaking tents, unease was growing. I overheard complaints about the rations, and the allocation of weapons. Fear had infested the camp like lice. I'd heard what they were muttering, as they clustered around the fires with their hands tucked into their armpits for warmth, and their shoulders hunched against the wind.
A fool's errand
. The same words that the Ringmaster had used.

“We can't win like this,” said Simon, the night before the attack, when we were gathered in his tent. “Not if they go into battle already convinced of our defeat.”

I had no answer for him that would not be a lie. Nobody knew better than me that we couldn't expect to succeed. I'd seen the blood and the blades.

Ω

Right up until the day of the attack, I was still arguing with Piper and Zoe about whether I would join the battle. Piper was adamant: “It's mad,” he said. “We haven't kept you safe for all this time only to risk you now.”

The three of us were walking toward Simon's tent. I was almost running, to keep pace with Piper and Zoe's long strides. “Kept me safe for what?” I said. “If we lose tonight, there isn't anything else to be done. It'll all be over. We need to throw everything we have into this attack. I should be there. If I have a vision, it could help.”

“There'll be enough screaming and weeping without you having your visions,” Zoe said.

“I could see something that would help in the battle.”

I didn't want to fight—I wasn't stupid. I'd seen the battle on the island, and I would never forget the smell of blood, and the sound of broken teeth spraying on flagstones. I'd learned, on the island, that the body's wholeness is an illusion that a sword quickly shattered. I had seen the Council soldiers fight, and I knew that my knife and my lessons from Zoe would count for little, in the brute chaos of a battle.

But it was the battle on the island that made me sure I had to join. I couldn't hide, once again, while other people did the fighting. The dead who I carried were already too many—I could tolerate no more. It was selfishness, not martyrdom. I was afraid of fighting—but I was more afraid of hiding, and of seeing the dead mount up in my absence. Of being left behind with the burden of the ghosts.

I didn't try to explain that to Piper and Zoe.

“If the Council soldiers know I'm there, in the thick of the fighting, it might force them to hold back,” I said. “They'll have orders from Zach not to harm me. He'll protect himself, as always. It made a difference on the island, and I wasn't even fighting there.”

“They won't hold back,” Zoe said. “Not if New Hobart's as important to them as we think. You heard what the Ringmaster said: the General's the real power now, not Zach. If she has to put him at risk to protect her plans, she won't hesitate.”

A dark-haired woman interrupted, stepping in front of us and block
ing the path. After days of footfalls from hundreds of soldiers, the path had become a furrow of half-frozen mud.

“If you can see the future,” she said, “then you can tell us how it's going to go tonight.”

“That's not how it works,” I said.

She made no move to step aside.

I couldn't tell her what I'd seen. Her death would come soon enough—I couldn't bear to be the one to hand it to her, there, on the muddy path. I stepped around her, Piper and Zoe flanking me.

“Tell me,” she called after me, as I hurried away. It wasn't just the ice-slickened mud that made me stumble. It was what I'd seen, slipping in between my eyes and the world. All the blood, unforgiving on the snow.

In the end, it was that woman who persuaded them to let me fight. Her and the others who gathered around me, each time I ventured out of our tent. Most of them kept their distance, looking at me with the mixture of unease and disgust that I'd become used to. But they all had the same question:
Tell us what happens.
Tell us how it will be.

“You need me to fight,” I said, as soon as we'd regained the cover of Simon's tent.

“We've talked about this,” said Zoe. “It's not worth the risk.”

“It's not about me,” I said. “It's about them.” I gestured at the tent door. “They know that I can see what's coming. And they need to believe that there's at least a chance of victory. And they won't, if they see me staying back.”

“They might believe in your visions, but that doesn't mean they'll rally behind you,” Piper said. “They don't trust you. You know what people are like with seers. You heard what Violet said just the other day.”

Sally was looking at me. “She's right,” she said. “It's because they
don't trust her that they'll follow her. They'd never believe that she'd go into a battle that she didn't know we were going to win.”

“I have to be there,” I said. “Right at the front, where they can see me.”

So it was decided. I'm glad, I told myself, and it was true. But my lungs strained at each breath, a pair of creaking bellows, and sweat itched where my woolen sweater touched the back of my neck. It wasn't just the fear of battle, though there was plenty of that. It was the knowledge, hard and certain in my stomach, that my presence at the battle was to be a lure. A false assurance to our troops that victory was possible.

Ω

At sunset on the night of the battle, Sally and Xander sat alone amid what was left of the dismantled camp. We were leaving them there, along with the handful of troops who were unable to fight.

“Where will you go, if we don't free the town?” I said.

“Will it make any difference where we go?” she said. “I'll do my best to keep Xander safe. Maybe we'll make it as far as the Sunken Shore. But you and I both know there's not much chance for any of us if we don't win. You heard what Piper said to me, when we were in my house: the soldiers will come for me there, eventually.”

I knelt next to Xander, but he wouldn't look at me. He sat with his knees drawn up before him. One of his hands tapped out a silent message on his shoe.

“We're going to try to find the papers,” I said to him. “The papers that you told us about, from the maze of bones.”

He nodded, and then the nod spread to his whole body, until he was rocking backward and forward. “Find the papers. Find the papers,” he said. There was no way of knowing whether it was an order, or an echo. When I walked away he was still rocking.

In the last few weeks, time had seemed to run away from us. Not enough time to gather troops, or to drill them; not enough time to warn the people of New Hobart; and always the fear that we might be too late, and that the tanks would consume them before we could free them. That the Ark papers would be found before we could enter the town. Now, as we waited in the darkness, time was a landslide on a scree slope, gathering speed, and taking us all with it.

I knew I would fight and not turn back. But as I stood next to Piper and Zoe, the troops gathered behind us, my body was undergoing its own quiet revolt. A shaking had begun in my damp feet, and now spread through me, my whole body resonating like a struck bell.

The armorers had given me a short sword and a wooden shield. I clutched the sword now in my sweaty hand. I would have been more comfortable with my knife, its leather-wrapped handle that had molded to my own grip, but Piper had insisted. “By the time anyone gets close enough for you to use that, you'll be dead,” he said. “You need range and heft.”

“I don't know how to fight with this,” I said.

“It's not as if you're an expert with the knife,” Zoe said. “Anyway, you're not going to be trying to fight. All you need to do is be seen, and not get killed. Keep your shield above you in the charge—that's when they'll use their archers. And stay close.”

I kept my old knife with me as well. In the hours of walking from the camp to the edge of the forest, the silent troops massed behind us, I'd been comforted to feel its familiar weight at my belt.

Zoe and Piper had been given swords, too. I picked up Zoe's to test its weight—it was so heavy that I needed both hands to hold it.

“This isn't a game,” she said, snatching it back from me and turning away.

She stood at my left, now, her eyes fixed on the blade as she passed
the sword from hand to hand. Piper was at my right. He, too, carried a long sword, but he also wore his usual row of throwing knives in the back of his belt. Behind us, the soldiers were gathered—more than five hundred, at the final tally. Leaving the camp had, alone, taken hours; the swampland didn't permit an orderly march, and instead the troops had to straggle their way, single file, along the few strips of land that emerged from the icy pits. The horses were led, one by one, along the narrow, tussocked paths; they kept their heads low and their nostrils wide, sniffing at the edges of the trail. Only once we reached the forest could the troops mass properly. Now they waited, row upon row. A few wore the blue uniforms of the island's guards, but more were wrapped in their own winter clothes, ragged and patched. Their faces were muffled against the snow. Nobody spoke. I looked away from them to the frozen trees around us. The icicles, stiff as the fingers of corpses. Everything seemed sharpened, as if I were seeing it for the first time.

I thought of the Ark papers that were hidden somewhere within the walls. And I thought again of those small hands clinging to the boards of the nailed-shut wagon. We were already too late to keep the children from the tanks. I thought, too, of Elsa and Nina, waiting within the walls. What we were about to do might make no difference to their fate—my dreams had shown me too much blood for me to have any faith that tonight's attack could free the town. Perhaps that was the only difference we could make: that if the people in New Hobart went to the tanks, they would at least go knowing that we had fought for them.

I'd felt the troops staring at me as I walked to my place with Piper and Zoe. My whole body was a trap, to lure these people into a battle that could not be won.

I turned to Piper.

“I'm lying to them,” I whispered haltingly, my breath uneven.

He shook his head, keeping his voice low. “You're giving them hope.”

“It's the same thing,” I said. It was the first time I'd spoken so bluntly about what I'd seen. “There isn't any hope. There're too many Council soldiers. In my visions, there's too much blood.”

“No,” he said. He bent slightly, so that his face was close to mine. In the night air, the steam of his breath hung white. “You're fighting, even though you've seen us lose. You've known all along, and you're still standing here, ready to fight. That's hope, right there.”

There was no time to say anything else. The troops were gathered in the expectant dark. They were watching Simon, waiting for him to step forward and address them. But Simon turned to Piper.

“You were always better at this than me,” he said.

“You're their leader now,” Piper said quietly.

The older man shook his head. “I'm in charge of them. That's not the same thing. They'll do what I tell them to, sure enough. But I haven't led them. Not since I brought you out to the island, all those years ago. You lead them, Piper.”

He put a hand on Piper's arm. They exchanged a long look. Then Simon raised his arm to his head, in a small salute. The troops whispered, and shifted to see more clearly, as Simon stepped back.

When Piper moved forward to address them, the whispers stopped.

“Our Omega brothers and sisters are waiting for us, in New Hobart,” he said, his voice cutting through the dark air. “I can't promise you that we will free them. But the alternative is to wait, while the Council steals from us more and more lives. They'll see us all tanked, if we don't stand against them. After centuries of Alpha oppression, there is no place, anymore, for Omegas in this world, except the one we begin to build here, tonight. It may be that we build it with our own blood—but the tanks are worse than death.”

He turned his head, unhurried, to survey the entire mass of troops before him. “The Council underestimated us,” he announced, his voice
loud and clear, “just as they always have done. They thought we would be crushed—that year after year of tithes and beatings and hunger would leave us broken, and ready to submit to new horrors. To go meekly to the tanks. They were wrong.