The Refuge Song (19 page)

June stood. “My people aren't happy that there are still soldiers manning the walls, whether they call themselves Council soldiers or not. If it were up to us, we'd tear the walls down.”

“And make the town completely vulnerable to the Council's attack,” said Piper. “If we can use them defensively, they stay. But I want Omega patrols out there as well.”

“My soldiers won't stand for that,” the Ringmaster said. “It was hard enough persuading them to fight against the Council. But asking them to work directly with Omegas is too much. And it won't help any of us if the soldiers start picking fights.”

“Then make sure they don't,” I said. “Work it out.” I stood but had to steady myself on the back of my chair. “Draw up a roster so that Omega patrols can take turns. Or have your men patrol the walls, and ours manning the gates. Just work it out.”

I stepped closer to the Ringmaster. “Do you have ships?”

“What are you talking about? How are ships going to help us to hold New Hobart, or to tackle the tanks?”

“We're looking for Elsewhere,” I said. “You're right—it will be next to impossible to win here. And if the only way we can do it is with battles, then ultimately nobody wins. But there might be an alternative. Somewhere where things are different. Somewhere that could help us, or at least offer a real haven.”

“Right now,” said the Ringmaster, “the Reformer and the General will be massing their troops. Working out how best to rout us. Who next to tank. Which settlement to target when they make reprisals—which
you know they'll do. If you focus on sailing away and looking for Elsewhere, people will see it as a betrayal.”

There was a long silence before I spoke. “Everything we do through force is just stalling,” I said. “Nothing lasting can come from it—only more death. We fought this battle because we had to. But already, there will be Alphas mourning those who died here, and turning against us more than ever. We did what was necessary, and we may have to do it again. But it's not the answer. We can't kill our way to a lasting peace. That's not how killing works.”

“She's right,” Piper said. “We need to seize this chance. Not just to recruit more Omegas to the resistance, but also to renew the search for the ships. The Council's attention will be here, and not on the coast. We could fit out new ships, if we act quickly. Push further north, past the ice channel—”

“Don't start this again,” interrupted Simon. “The ships are gone. If the Council's fleet didn't finish them off, the winter storms will have. My scouts waited at Cape Bleak as long as they could, Piper. There's no chance for the ships—not this far into winter. You've always clung to the idea of Elsewhere. It's just a way of avoiding the real problems of here and now.”

Piper spoke over him, to the Ringmaster.

“Two of our ships sailed northwest more than four months ago. If they have the good sense to scout the island before landing, and not sail right into the Council's arms, then they'll come to the mainland instead. We need to have scouts posted on Cape Bleak.”

The Ringmaster shook his head. “Whose scouts? Have you got the soldiers to spare? Cape Bleak wouldn't just mean getting safely out of here—it'd mean getting through hundreds of miles of densely populated Alpha territory. There's a Council garrison between here and there that's half the size of Wyndham.”

“What would you do instead?” I said. “We need to push for real change, not just more battles.”

“Real change is what I'm talking about,” he said. “Change that we can actually achieve, instead of some pipe dream. We're in a position to negotiate with the Council now—to use this victory to push for Council reform. Challenge the General for control of the Council. There are others in the Council who'd support me. It could be a new Council of moderates, more sympathetic to Omegas. We'd uphold the taboo. Stop the tanks. Bring tithes back to reasonable levels. Isn't that what you want?”

“Sympathetic to Omegas,” Piper said. “But still ruling over us. Reasonable tithes? Why should we be paying the Council anything? We didn't pay tithes on the island.”

“There isn't any island,” said the Ringmaster. “Not anymore. I'm not committing more men to some wild-goose chase for Elsewhere. I'm here to stop the machines, to try to bring the Council back into safe hands. That's all.”

“Safe hands?” said Zoe. “Your hands, you mean.”

“Would you prefer that the Reformer and the General stay in power? Because without me, that's what will happen.”

“We can't waste time arguing about this,” I said. “We need to think beyond swords and battles and blood. If the ships make it back to the mainland, we need to find them before the Council does. And we should be searching already for the papers that the Council was looking for.”

“They were looking for some papers all right,” said June. She gave a tired laugh. Everyone turned to look at her. “There's not a recipe or a love letter in New Hobart that they didn't confiscate, these last months. Took apart all the traders' shops down at the market, too. Dug up half the road outside the baker's place, when somebody gave them a lead about something buried there.” Her smile faded. “I shouldn't laugh about it.
They roughed up a few people pretty badly when they thought they were holding something back. But they've been searching for months. Offered rewards, too. If people weren't going to hand them over for the gold the Council was offering, in these lean times, how are you going to find them?”

“I need to talk to Elsa, from the holding house. And I need to see the tanks, so we can start working out whether it's safe to take the children out.”

A silence settled over the room.

“What?” I said. “What haven't you told me?”

Piper stood. “I'll take you to the tanks. Elsa's there already.”

chapter 22

The snow had drained most of the color from the streets. Black wooden beams, white snow, black mud. Many houses bore damage from the battle, or from the months of occupation. A few were completely burned out; on others, the doors or shutters were broken, or hastily mended. Those people we passed in the street looked thin, and some wore bloodied bandages. I walked slowly, my arm jarring with each step, despite the sling. A blind man came the other way, his cane scraping to and fro on the icy paving stones. He stumbled where a half-burned door had fallen on the road. Piper took his arm and helped him over the obstacle. “Used to get around here just fine,” the man said. “It's all changed.” It was true—I would barely have recognized New Hobart from my time there months ago.

A corner of the new building had been damaged when one of the fires lit against the wall had spread. A black scorch mark climbed toward the roof. The door was broken in, and snow had blown through the open doorway.

I followed Piper inside but stopped after a few steps. The door behind me admitted the only light in the long room, and it was reflected in the curve of huge tanks lining the space. Everything else was darkness.

There should have been rows of lights, flashing green above the tanks. And there should have been a low hum, the snoring of the machines. Instead, there was only a waterlogged silence, so heavy that I couldn't follow Piper any further. I stood, stranded by the door.

Elsa stepped out from behind one of the tanks, brandishing a kitchen knife. When she saw Piper, she tossed it to the floor.

“I already told you, and your soldiers. I don't need help. I'll do it myself.”

Her disembodied face had drifted before me in so many visions that it was a shock to see her like this: solid, with dirty hands and a rag tying her hair back, and a bruise swelling one eye closed. She looked older than I'd remembered, her hair grayer and her posture more slumped.

I called her name. She squinted at me against the light from the doorway behind me. Then she ran, uneven on her bowed legs, and grabbed me to her. She pressed me to her chest so tightly that I was sure I must have had the imprint of her shirt buttons on my cheek. I cried out as my splinted arm was crushed, and she released me.

“Where's Kip?” she said.

“He's dead.” It still shocked me to say it out loud. But there was no time to dwell on it. Not with the silent tanks waiting behind Elsa.

“What happened?” I said.

She pursed her lips. “Looks like we both have stories to tell. And no happy endings, either.” She moved her hands to my face, and for a moment she smiled so widely that her uninjured eye was nearly as closed as the swollen one. “But it's good to see you, girl.”

The smile was gone. She took my good arm and led me deeper into the room, to where Piper stood. I could see the tanks clearly now. They
were the same height as those I'd seen before, reaching a few feet above my head, but each one was fifteen feet wide. I thought of what the Confessor had said to me in the silo:
our
recent experiments in mass tanks
. They filled the room, two rows of huge vats. Enough, I figured, to tank the whole town, eventually. For now, all but the nearest three tanks were empty, encasing nothing but air.

The tank closest to us had been drained. A few inches of fluid pooled at its base, around the open plug set into the floor. A rope ladder, tied to the gangway above, stuck to the tank's damp side before coiling in the liquid at the bottom.

I stepped farther into the room, gripping Elsa's arm more tightly.

The next tank was full of liquid. But the children's bodies didn't float, like the Omegas in tanks I'd seen before. They were piled at the base of the tank, six deep. The tubes that had pierced their mouths and wrists still stretched out of the liquid's surface, but they were tangled, and some had pulled loose and dangled at large in the fluid. The surface of the liquid was utterly still; it didn't vibrate with the orderly hum of the Electric. And without the Electric, each tank had become nothing more than a glass crypt. The children were all drowned.

“The fire didn't do this,” I said. I knew, before Piper spoke, what he would say.

“Half the machines had been smashed,” Piper said, “and the wires cut.” I looked where he was pointing. At the far end of the room, a huge metal box had been pulled open, its wire innards exposed and slashed. The pipes that ran from the wall to the tanks, and along the ceiling above them, had been shattered, too. One of the pipes was leaking, viscous liquid dripping to the ground.

“I sent men here as soon as the town was secured,” Piper went on. “They found it like this. The Council's soldiers must've done it as soon
as they realized they were under attack. They must have had orders not to let the machines fall into our hands.”

Elsa interrupted him. “That's not why they did it. That might have been part of it, sure. But you know as well as I do that this was a punishment.” She looked back at the tanks. “They broke the machines and they let the children drown, because we fought back.”

I couldn't look away from the slumped bodies. It was hard to differentiate individual children among the mass of limbs. Most of their eyes were open, their mouths wide in underwater screams. I couldn't bear to think about their final minutes, but I couldn't look away. What price had we paid, to free New Hobart? But we hadn't paid the price. These children had.

“I found the way to open the plug and drain the first tank,” Elsa said. Her sleeve on my arm was wet. I looked down at her. Her whole shirt was soaked, and her trousers, too, were wet to the knees. She led me to the far end of the room. There, laid out on a sheet, were the bodies she had pulled from the first tank. They lay there, drenched, like seaweed dumped on a beach by the sea.

“I've got the first twelve kids out,” she said. “But I've got more work to do. There are sixty kids or more in here.”

And sixty more again, in Alpha homes, where parents would have gone to wake their children the morning after the battle and found them in their beds, blue-lipped and drowned in air.

Zach had done this. Sickness twisted my guts, bile rising at the back of my throat. When I was a child, and had hidden my visions so that Zach and I could not be split, he had outwitted me by declaring himself the Omega. He'd known me well, my clever brother: I protected him, and took the branding and exile that I could not bear to see inflicted on him. Even back then, he'd been willing to risk hurting himself in order to be rid of me. Ordering the killing of the children, even knowing that
Alpha children would die, too, was the same gesture, on a grand scale. His declaration, and the General's, that no cost was too great to be rid of us.

In the end, I persuaded Elsa to accept help. She was soaking and exhausted, though she wouldn't admit it. Piper fetched Zoe and Crispin, the dwarf who had been on the lookout when we'd first reunited with the resistance at the quarry. Elsa would let nobody but her lay out the bodies, but she allowed the others to take on the task of hauling the children from the tanks. She showed Piper the lever she had found in front of each tank, to open the plug at the base. As the liquid drained away, circling the plug, the mounded bodies shifted and stirred in a grotesque parody of life. The first time it happened, Crispin vomited quietly behind one of the tanks.

Nobody spoke. It wasn't just the horror of the dead children—it was the machines themselves. I watched how Piper moved warily among the tanks, and saw how Zoe flinched when her arm brushed one of the inert pipes, as though it were hot. I'd spent years under the electric lights of the Keeping Rooms, and had seen tank rooms before, as well as the Confessor's database. But the others navigated the room as if each pipe and wire was a snare, ready to entangle them. Everything in this room was taboo. Crispin stared at the machines the same way that Alphas stared at us: as if the machines carried the taint of the blast itself.

When each tank was drained, Zoe and Crispin climbed down the rope ladder and disentangled the bodies. I watched how carefully they both stepped, to avoid standing on the children, and how gently they slipped the tubes from the open mouths, and from the wrists, before climbing the ladder to hand their sodden burdens to Piper, waiting on the gangway. He passed each body down from the gangway to Elsa.

I had seen the world burn, and I'd seen flesh slashed in the battle
only days before. But there had been no horrors in my life to equal that day, in the half-dark room, seeing the small bodies dredged from the tanks, or watching Elsa stroke their hair from their faces and straighten their stiffening limbs. She tried to close their eyes, but they had stared too long at death and their eyelids would not be moved.

Piper had ordered soldiers to fetch more sheets and blankets from the holding house, and I helped Elsa shroud the children. It was hardest when I recognized the faces. Not all the children were from Elsa's holding house, but many were. When it was Louisa who was laid before me, I saw that her mouth was open. I couldn't stop looking at her small teeth, and the gaps between them. Of all the things I saw that day, it was the sight of those little white teeth that made me turn away.

We worked in silence, because the words had not been made that could encompass what we did. Sometimes Elsa cried, in silence, too. When we were finished, we shifted the shrouded bodies to the doorway. Elsa carried the older children, and I, with one arm in the sling, took the babies and toddlers. Wrapped, the smallest child I carried that day was barely bigger than a loaf of bread. But even the infants felt heavier than they ought to have done, their tiny lungs and stomachs awash with liquid.

Only when all the wrapped bodies were laid out by the door did Elsa and I talk. Zoe and Crispin had gone back to the tithe collector's office, and Piper was outside, speaking to another soldier about sending a cart for the bodies. My arm was aching, and I could see that Elsa was exhausted, and I was tempted to wait another day before I burdened her with my news. But I'd learned better than to count on more days, and there were things that we both needed to know.

It took a long time to unravel the weeks and months since I'd last seen her. I told her about what had happened on the island, and she nodded.

“Usually we heard nothing about what was going on outside, but the soldiers here were keen enough to spread that news. Before then, I'd been hoping you'd found your way to the island. Then, when the news came in, I was praying that you hadn't.”

When I told her who my twin was, I was watching her face. She looked back at me, examining my face carefully, as if reassuring herself that I was still the same person. Then she gave my hand a squeeze.

“It doesn't change who you are,” she said.

I wished it were true. But Zach had changed who I was. He, and all that he had done, had shaped me, as much as I had shaped him. One of us was the blade, the other the whetstone.

I kept hold of her hand while I explained what we had learned about the tanks, and Zach's plans for them.

“I'm not stupid,” she said, her voice low. “I knew it was bad, when they took the kids. But this place, and what you've told me—it's even worse than I feared.”

“You tried to stop them, when they came for the children?” I said.

Elsa turned her face to me, raising the eyebrow above her blackened eye. “What do you think?”

“And Nina?” I asked.

She looked down. “She was hurt worse than me, when we tried to stop them taking the kids. Took a blow to the head, and then blood started coming out of her ears.” She took a slow breath. “She died two days later.”

We sat together, the shrouded children laid out in rows at our feet.

“Maybe they didn't suffer,” I said.

Elsa reached for my hand again. “When you and Kip first came here, I understood why you had to lie to me about your names, and where you'd been. But you don't need to lie to me now. I'm too old for it. There's no time for it anymore.”

Ω

We were watching the troops load the children's bodies onto wagons when Piper's name was shouted from up the hill, and then mine. Zoe rounded the corner, running. She was sweating, and her haste had reopened the wound on her thigh; fresh blood seeped through the leg of her trousers.

“A messenger, from the Council,” she said. “He came alone, ten minutes ago, to the eastern gate.”

Elsa squeezed me again, hard, before we left, and I told her I'd return soon. Piper, Zoe, and I rushed together through the town, as fast as her injured leg and my broken arm would allow.

“It's your brother.” The Ringmaster stood when we entered the tithe collector's office. “Sent a message: he wants to talk.”

“He's coming here?”

“Him and the General. They're to the east, with a squadron. The messenger asked us to meet them in the middle, on the eastern road.”

“All of us?”

“You want to see your twin alone?” The Ringmaster was watching my face. Suspicion coated everything in this room. It lay thicker than the snow outside.

I shook my head. “I don't want to see him.” My hands were still sticky with the tank fluid that had dripped from the hair of the dead children. It was Zach and the General who had given those orders. Their decision to have the children taken and tanked. Their decision to have them drowned in the dark.

“We're all angry about the children,” the Ringmaster said. “But we need to meet both of them, and make the most of this opportunity. They know how much of the army has defected to me. This is our strongest chance to negotiate.”

I shook my head. “They haven't come to negotiate,” I said.

“How do you know?” Sally said. “Have you seen it in your visions?”

I shook my head. “No. But I know Zach.” I had seen his ruthlessness. The same ruthlessness that had led him to risk everything, as a child, in order to expose me as the Omega, and that now led to those mounds of sodden bodies in the tanks. So much had changed since then, and so little. “I know what he is,” I said, “because I made him what he is.”