The Refuge Song (20 page)

They'd been the Confessor's words to Kip, in the silo:
You did this to me. You made me what I am.
I saw how our childhood had formed him. It wasn't a question of blame, now—only of knowledge.

We rode out to meet them when the sun was at its highest. Twenty soldiers accompanied us—ten of the Ringmaster's troops, and ten of Simon's. At the front rode the five of us: me, Piper, Zoe, Simon, and the Ringmaster. Half an hour's ride from New Hobart, we saw them coming the other way: twenty or more riders.

Zach rode at the front. Even from that distance, I could see the sharp line of his jaw, and the way he moved his head: sudden, jerky movements, between the long stillness of his stares.

The sun glared off the snow. I squinted at the outline of that man, my twin. He was pale, and the cold had daubed his cheeks with red. I saw how he held his right arm gingerly, and I glanced down at my own arm, still in its sling. If I were to squeeze my own swollen flesh, I would see him flinch.

The woman who rode next to him was the only other person who didn't wear a soldier's red tunic. The eyes of all the other soldiers were trained on her alone. The General. Zach glanced several times at her as they rode, but she ignored him entirely. Her angular features were emphasized by her hair, pulled back tightly from her head. She rode very upright, eyes fixed on us.

When she raised her hand, the soldiers beside them halted. She
and Zach rode the final few yards, to draw up in the middle of the open space between the two groups. She didn't look at me, deliberately, but focused only on my companions.

“It's quite the alliance,” she said. “A disgraced resistance leader, rejected by his own Assembly. An Alpha, lowering herself to live among Omegas. And a Councilor who's been cast out of the Council.”

“Spare us your speechifying,” said Piper.

She ignored him and turned to face me. “And you. A seer, whose visions seem to lead the resistance from one massacre to another.”

“We freed New Hobart,” Piper said. “We couldn't have done it without Cass.”

Zach interrupted him. “You couldn't have done it without the Ringmaster, not Cass. And it cost you half your troops.” He stared from Piper to me, and back again. “Things haven't been going so well for you, have they, since she came along? You lost the island. You lost your position. Your numbers have been slashed. Haven't you worked it out yet?” He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper. “She's poison. She always has been.”

I spoke over him. “You can call me what you like,” I said. “But you're afraid of me. You always have been.”

His voice was a lash, quick and furious. “Be careful how you speak to me,” he said. “I have something of yours.”

The General interrupted him. “Fascinating as this is, we didn't come here so that you and your twin could hash out the intricacies of your relationship.”

“She's right,” said the Ringmaster. “We need to talk about where we go from here.”

“There isn't any
we
,” the General said. “You took New Hobart. You might even be able to hold it. It's a delay, no more than that. Just like destroying the database was. There are other settlements, other towns.”

“You can't stop us,” Zach put in. “All you've done is pointlessly sacrifice lives by pushing us to battle. Everything I've been working toward is about saving lives.”

“Saving Alpha lives,” I said, “by putting us in tanks. That's worse than death, and you know it.” I knew the tanks for what they were: a dying that goes on forever. “And how can you even talk about saving lives, after what you did to the children?”

The General smiled, but her eyes didn't move. Just her mouth, a curve as precise as a dagger's edge. “Since we weren't in New Hobart to welcome you in person, we wanted to make sure our soldiers left you a gift.”

She turned to the Ringmaster. “You know you can't return to Wyndham now. Your days on the Council are finished.”

“They were finished long ago,” said the Ringmaster. “How long has it been, really, since anyone other than you two wielded any real power?”

“And you think you can seize that power now?” She laughed at him. “Just because a bunch of disaffected soldiers are running to you, because their superstitions are larger than their ambitions? You really think they're going to stick with you, if this uprising continues?”

“They can see what you're doing is wrong,” I said.

Zach shook his head. “You're as naive as ever, Cass. It's not compassion that's driven them to the Ringmaster, any more than it's compassion that drives him. It's fear. The taboo. They don't have the intelligence to see what technology could offer us.

“Their fear's nothing that education won't remedy. I've seen it myself, with the people we recruited to work on the tanks. Every one of them was hesitant, at first. But when they understand what I can offer them—a world in which they never have to worry about their twin again—they see the benefits. Nothing dissolves fear as quickly as self-interest.

“And what are you offering them, as an alternative?” He looked at me as though I were a foolish child. “I can offer a future free of the twinning,” he went on. “You're offering war. Thousands will die, Alphas and Omegas alike. And even if you were to win, what then? No progress. The fatal bond still there, a burden to everyone. Our lives still won't be our own. Do you really think people will follow you, once they understand that?”

“If you think your position is so unassailable, why did you call this meeting?” the Ringmaster said. “You're running scared. We've taken back New Hobart, and you realize it's time to start negotiating.”

“You can't negotiate with Omegas,” the General said. “They're not capable of it.” She waved an arm toward me, Simon, and Piper. “It's always been the problem with you people. It's because you can't breed. You're not fit to parent, so you don't have the responsibility of future generations to consider, like we do. It's why you're fundamentally shortsighted.”

“Not fit to parent?” I said. I was picturing Elsa, the softness of her hands as she smoothed back the hair of the dead children. And Nina, who had died to protect children who had been brought to the holding house by strangers. “How can you sit there and say that to me, after what you did to the children? Even before then—you Alphas are the ones who send half your children away, not us. We take them, and care for them, and do our best to protect them from you.”

The Ringmaster spoke over me. “This isn't the time for sniping at one another. We all want to avoid civil war, so let's discuss our demands. A guarantee that the Council will uphold the taboo, as a first step.”

“Your demands?” the General said. “You want to negotiate?” She nodded slowly. “Fine. I brought you something. Another gift, if you like. Something to open negotiations. I thought you might like to see it.”

Without turning, she raised a finger, gesturing at Zach. He turned
back to where their soldiers waited, and ushered two of them forward. As they obeyed, I saw that they carried a wooden chest, slung between the two horses.

Zach dismounted and handed his reins to one of the soldiers. While they lowered the trunk, Zach steadied it with his left hand. Something rattled within as it was settled on the ground. The soldiers moved back, taking Zach's horse with them.

“Open it,” he said to me. “Go on.”

“You open it,” I said.

Zach looked up and smiled. He seemed unconcerned by the fact that we were still mounted, and that he stood alone on the ground before us. He stepped forward, and heaved open the lid.

For a moment I thought they were human heads. They were about the right size and shape. Then the smell reached me, incongruous in the snow-laden air. It took me straight back to the island, where the air had a constant base note of salt. I leaned forward over my horse's neck, to peer more closely at the two shapes within the chest. They were some kind of wooden sculptures. When Zach lifted one out I saw that it was a carving of a woman's head, with long curls of hair tracing their way down over her shoulders. The wood was bleached with age. Time had blunted the features of her face—her nose was eroded to almost nothing. Only at the neck was the color different: ax strokes had left sharp lines, exposing the darker wood within.

I turned to Piper. For several seconds, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked once more at the carved head, then back at the General.

“Where did you get them?” he said quietly.

“It doesn't make a difference,” she said.

“What are they?”

I'd whispered it to Piper, but Zach turned, pulling the second sculp
ture from the chest and throwing it to the ground in front of me. My horse snorted and jerked backward a few steps. The wooden head rocked from side to side several times before settling in the shallow snow. It lay face up, staring blindly at the white sky.

“The figureheads from
The Rosalind
and
The Evelyn
,” said the General. “Your precious ships.”

chapter 23

“This proves nothing,” Zoe said. “The crews could have landed safely, left the ships moored.”

“Would you prefer it if I brought you the head of your friend Hobb?” the General said. I saw Piper's hand tighten on his reins.

The General went on. “They were on their way back to the island, when our patrol ships chased them down on the open sea.”

“Where are the crews?” Simon said. “Hobb and the others?”

“Tanked,” said the General. She tossed the syllable down, as casual and dismissive as a cough. “But not before we got information out of them,” she added. “We know what they were looking for.”

Zach came forward, stepping carelessly over the fallen figureheads, to stand right in front of me. “You made the mistake of thinking we wouldn't find you on the island. You've seen what we did to the children. See this, now, and remember. There is nowhere, not in the farthest
oceans, where we won't track you down. There is no place on this earth where you will be free of us.”

The General looked down at him and gave him a slight nod. He walked back to where the soldiers waited and swung himself into the saddle.

“Did you think I was going to come here, cowed,” the General said, “just because you've managed to claw back this hole of a town? Did you think I was going to apologize, and we were going to have a nice chat about how we're going to do things your way from now on?”

She turned her horse. “You can't stop us. You can't even begin to know what we can do.” She began to ride away.

I started my own horse forward. Piper grabbed at my reins, jerking my mount backward. As my horse skittered on the spot, I called after Zach. The General and the soldiers turned, too, but I looked only at Zach.

“What you just said:
There's no place on this earth where you will be free of us
.
The same goes for you,” I said. “All of this—the violence, the scheming. It's all because you and your kind are so afraid to acknowledge that we're the same as you. More than that: we're part of you.”

The General raised an eyebrow. “You're a side effect of us. Nothing more.”

She rode off. Zach stared at me for a moment, then wheeled his horse around and followed the General down the road. The trunk was left open and empty on the ground, the figureheads abandoned where they lay as the snow began to fall once more.

Ω

Once we had handed our horses over to the soldiers at the gate, I went straight to Elsa's.

“We should've gone back with the others,” Zoe said as she followed me up the street toward the holding house. “We need to talk about what the Council's next move will be—and where we go from here. And it's not safe for you to wander around alone.”

“Go back if you want,” I said. “But there's nothing to say. Zach and the General want us frightened and bickering. They want to scare us off searching for Elsewhere, and for the Ark papers. They want to make us doubt ourselves. I won't do it.”

We turned the corner into Elsa's street. There were footprints in the snow, but we saw nobody. A shutter slammed closed as we passed a narrow house on the left.

The holding house, the largest building on the street, was still standing, but the front door was gone, and the shutters smashed. Zoe waited by the door, keeping watch as I stepped inside.

I walked down the corridor, calling Elsa's name. I found her in the kitchen, on her hands and knees, sorting fragments of crockery.

“They smashed the place up, when we tried to stop them taking the kids,” Elsa said. “I haven't had a chance to clean up yet, what with everything that's happened.”

Beyond her I could see the courtyard, a boneyard of broken wood: slats of shutters, and crippled chairs and tables. On one side, furniture had been thrown into a pile and set alight, leaving a mound of blackened wood spars, topped with snow. A fire had etched blackness up one wall and across half the ceiling.

“You've done enough today,” I said to Elsa. “Leave this.” I waved my hand at the wreckage of the kitchen. “You need to rest.”

“Better to be busy,” she said, not looking at me.

I thought of what she'd said to me a few hours ago, about lies:
there's no time for it anymore
. I didn't waste time with preliminaries.

“Your husband—you never told me how he died.”

She stood, slowly, her hands pressing the small of her back like a pregnant woman.

“It was too dangerous to talk about,” she said. “I had the children to think of.”

Still avoiding my eyes, she began sweeping the smashed crockery into a pile. The pottery pieces scratched loudly against the flagstones. Occasionally she found a bowl or mug that was chipped but otherwise intact, and would bend to retrieve it and set it carefully aside.

“Who are you saving that for?” I said, taking a dented mug from her hands. “They're not coming back.”

“There will always be more children,” she said, resuming her sweeping.

“You think the Alphas will bring them here, now? It's a war, Elsa. They're all going to be tanked, from birth, if we can't defeat the Council.”

No sound but the crunch of broken pottery and the broom's scraping.

“You never told me the truth about your husband, because you didn't want to endanger the children. Look around you.” I gestured at the empty courtyard; the shutters pulled off their hinges. “There are no children. They drowned them all. There's nobody left to protect.”

She let the broom drop. The handle clattered on the flagstones as she stared at me.

“They took him,” she said. After all the day's crying, her voice was as rough as the scrape of the broken plates on the floor. “You've guessed that much already. They came at night, four years ago. They took Joe, and then they turned the house upside down, ripped the whole place to pieces—slit open every mattress in the kids' dormitory. Emptied every pot in the kitchen.”

“Did they find what they were looking for?”

“If they did, I didn't see it,” she said. “They just left. Never said a
word to me, even when I was screaming at them to tell me what was going on, where they'd taken him, and why.” She sniffed. “It's funny what sticks in your mind. What you remember. When I think about that night, I always remember how it was my screaming that scared the children. They were used to seeing soldiers roughing people up—even back then, the kids knew not to expect any different from a red shirt. It was me losing it that frightened them. Nina did her best to keep them calm, but I set them off.” She looked down into her lap, where her hands were rubbing at each other.

“It was the soldiers' fault, not yours,” I said. “They'd taken your husband and smashed up your home.”

“I know that.” She looked up. “And I knew as soon as they took Joe that they'd kill him. And they did.”

“How do you know?”

“I waited for weeks for news of him. Even went to the tithe collector's office, to ask after him. The soldiers wouldn't so much as let me up the steps. Wouldn't tell me a thing. In the end I left the children with Nina and went to Joe's twin's village. It's down near the coast, a long way west. It took me three weeks of walking. And it's all Alpha country out that way, so it wasn't easy. Forget about begging a bed for a night, even in a barn. More than once I had to hightail out of a village with stones coming after me. But you know me.” She laughed. It was hard to tell the noise from a sob. “I don't give up easily.”

I tried to imagine how it must have been for her, walking into an Alpha village on her crooked legs, demanding answers.

“I'd never met his twin, of course—all I had was her name and the name of the village she and Joe were born in. Didn't even know if she'd still be there.” She looked out the window. “Well, she was—but six feet under the village green. Flowers planted on the grave; a nice headstone and everything.”

She had never been given her own husband's body back to bury. I thought of Kip again, his body on the silo floor.

“The people in his village just wanted me gone—but I made a nuisance of myself, hung around the outskirts, trying to get somebody to talk to me. Some were threatening to call the soldiers to get me to clear off, but in the end I guess they figured it was easier just to tell me what I needed to know. She'd died a month before, they said. As close as I could figure it, it was a few days after they took him.” She fell silent. Her lips were pressed tightly together, her chin betraying the slightest quiver.

“It wasn't quick.” Her voice had dropped low, each word pulled from her mouth like a tooth. “That's what they said: that she started screaming, and didn't stop for two days.” She looked up at me. “Joe made a lot of mistakes, but he didn't deserve what they did to him.”

For a while we just sat there, looking out at the courtyard with its assemblage of broken furniture.

“Do you know what they were looking for?” I said. “Did you ever hear anything about Elsewhere, or a place called the Ark?”

“No.” She shrugged. “He never talked much about the stuff he traded in,” she said. “I didn't want to know, to be honest—I was happy enough to look the other way. And it's not as though I didn't have plenty on my hands, with the kids to take care of. He traded on the black market, sure, and he dealt in some relics and dodgy stuff. But he wasn't stupid. Any machines, anything with wires, he knew it was more trouble than it was worth. That stuff freaked him out, to be honest—and I wouldn't have let him bring it near the house. The bits and pieces from the Before that he traded were just tat—papers, broken crockery. Bits of metal. The kind of thing that's a bit of a curiosity to most people. Half of it, to tell you the truth, wasn't even from the Before. One summer he and his friend Greg did a roaring trade in a load of pottery that they said was taboo. It was just some fancy stuff they'd nicked from the back of an Alpha cart, then
chipped and soaked in tea and dirt until it looked ancient. People liked a bit of that: something exotic, a bit dangerous.” She gave a bleak smile. “He wasn't one to look for trouble, my Joe. He was too lazy for that. He was only interested in little odds and ends—stuff he could sell quickly, bring in a few easy coins, a bit extra that the tithe collector wouldn't know about.”

“He wouldn't be the first person to trade in taboo stuff, or to dodge tithes,” I said. “That's not enough to explain why they'd kill him. Or torture him for days.”

At the word
torture
Elsa flinched as though she'd been struck.

I pushed on. “You never saw the things he traded?”

She shook her head. “I didn't want anything shady here—not with the kids around. He kept his work stuff in his storehouse by the market anyway. Slept there, too, often enough—I didn't like him being around the kids when he'd been drinking.”

“The storehouse,” I said. “Is it still there?”

“Don't be stupid. The day after they took him, it was burned down—took out the back of the bakery, too. It was no accident, of course—Greg saw Council soldiers clearing it out before dawn, taking away everything in it.

“I kept waiting for them to come for me, after that,” she said. “But for once it worked in our favor, the fact that they don't acknowledge Omega marriages. They knew he worked here sometimes, or they wouldn't've searched the place like they did. But because he had his storehouse, down at the market, they thought he lived there. And because they think of us as not much more than animals, they never figured we were married.”

She fell silent again.

“Tell me what they were looking for,” I said. “Please.”

“I've already told you,” she snapped. “He never told me any details about that stuff.”

“That doesn't mean you don't know.”

I'd never seen Elsa look like this before. I was used to seeing her striding around, badgering Nina about the shopping list at the same time as braiding a child's hair. But now she was deflated, shoulders folded inward. Her eyes were unfocused, her lips pinched.

“I've kept quiet about this for four years.” She was whispering, even though we were alone in the kitchen. “I saw what they did to Joe. Now I've seen what they did to the children.”

“I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't be afraid,” I said. “You're right to be afraid. I saw what you saw—I helped you pull the children from the tanks. We both know what the Council's capable of. But that's why you have to tell me.” I took her hand. “If we don't find what they're looking for, we can't stop them. There'll be more tanks, and more killings. Until we're all tanked.” No more children in the holding house dormitory, no more voices in the courtyard. Just the silence of the tanks, and the children floating.

She was motionless, as if the tanks had come for her already.

“Do you know what Joe was hiding?” I said.

“Not what,” Elsa said. She straightened her shoulders and wiped her hands on her apron. “But I think I know where.”