The Refuge Song (25 page)

“You don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“I lost Kip,” I said. “If you'd told me about Lucia, I would have understood. You act like you want us to be close, but you didn't even tell me about her. You had to wait for me to work it out.”

Of all the responses I might have expected, his was the last. He
looked at me, for a long moment, and then laughed. He arched his head back, his Adam's apple bobbing with each gasp of laughter.

I didn't know how to respond. Was he mocking Kip? Mocking the comparison I'd drawn, between my loss and his? His laughter echoed back at us from the tree trunks and the fire, until even the flames seemed to be laughing at me.

Finally he lowered his head again, and exhaled deeply.

“I shouldn't laugh,” he said, wiping his face with his hand. “But there's not been much to laugh about for a while.”

“And this is funny to you, is it? Kip and Lucia are dead.”

“I know.” The creases around his eyes disappeared when he stopped smiling. “And it's not funny. But it's not what you think.”

“Then tell me. Tell me what it is.”

“I can't speak for Zoe,” he said. “You know what she's like.”

“Apparently not,” I said, my voice rising again. “Apparently I'm so wrong about everything.”

“I know you meant no harm. But you'll need to make this right with her.”

He walked to the lookout spot, leaving me alone with the fire.

Ω

We'd rigged a canvas sheet against a tree trunk, to keep the snow off. I crawled into the space beneath, though I didn't sleep until Zoe came back, after midnight. She slipped, unspeaking, into the cramped space beside me. I felt her shivering as she fell asleep.

She dreamed of the sea. We'd slept apart for weeks, while I was in the holding house; now we had no choice but to sleep close, and I shared again her dreams of the sea, reliable as tides. Perhaps that was what made me realize my mistake. When Piper shook my shoulder to wake me for my lookout shift, I understood the truth about Lucia.

chapter 30

Sitting at the lookout post, while Piper and Zoe slept, I traced each clue that I'd missed, or misinterpreted.

I thought of how Zoe knew how to deal with my visions, better than Piper.
She can't talk yet
, she'd said to him, when he tried to badger me about what I'd seen.
She'll stop carrying on in a minute.
I'd registered it only as dismissiveness. I hadn't recognized the confident familiarity of someone who'd seen this many times. Someone who'd passed many nights with a seer.

Her words to me:
You're
not the first seer
.

Her reluctance to sail, and her clenched hands on the railing of the boat when we'd left the Sunken Shore.

I had taunted her:
I bet you were glad when Lucia died.
But it was the bones of her own lover that Zoe was searching for every night, when she slept.

I looked over my shoulder to where Piper and Zoe lay, sleeping. The canvas above them was sagging with the weight of snow. They slept back-to-back, just as they'd fought in the battle. In the cold, with the blanket pulled high around their necks, they looked like one creature with two heads.

I was always getting things wrong. I was more blind than Leonard. I'd been wrong about the Confessor, thinking that it was me she was hunting, instead of Kip. I'd been wrong about Zoe's dreams, and about Lucia. Getting the visions was one thing, but interpreting them was another. My visions had led me to the island, but our presence had led the Confessor there, too. My visions had showed me the silo, and allowed us to destroy the database—but that had cost Kip his life. My visions had shown me so much, and I'd understood so little.

I didn't need to wake Zoe for her shift—she woke herself, as she usually did, and crawled from the shelter to stand behind where I sat at the lookout spot. It was still dark. Downstream, one of the horses gave a small whinny.

“Go to sleep,” she said. “There's hours yet until dawn.”

“It was you, wasn't it,” I said. It wasn't a question. “You loved Lucia.”

It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I could see the white clouds of her breath.

“We loved each other,” she said.

It was strange to hear her talk of love. Zoe of the rolled eyes and the shrugs. Of the poised knives.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I've been an idiot.”

“It's not the first time. I doubt it'll be the last.” There was no spite in her voice, just tiredness.

“I don't know why I didn't realize,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “Because I'm a woman. Because I'm an Alpha, and
she was an Omega. Because although you like to think you're so far above the assumptions and prejudices of the rest of the world, it turns out you're not so different from them after all.”

I had nothing to rebut her accusation. It settled on me like ash.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked eventually.

“It was mine.” She paused. A glimpse of her eyes, white in the dark, as she looked at me, and away again. “I feel like there's so little that's left of her. I don't want to share it around.”

I thought of how I had been reluctant to speak about Kip. There'd been times that I'd felt as though his name were a relic—it was all that I had left of him, now, and it might be worn out if I used it too much.

“When you heard the bards' music, back at the spring that day, and told me about the bard you and Piper used to listen to when you were kids. I thought it was Piper you were thinking of.”

She snorted. “I'd always remembered that bard. When I first met Lucia, that's who she reminded me of. They both had beautiful hands.” She gave a small laugh. “And Lucia used to sing, too. She was always humming away to herself in the mornings, when she brushed her hair.”

She was quiet for a while.

“I wish you'd told me,” I said. “I would have understood.”

“I don't need your understanding.”

“Maybe I could've used yours,” I said.

She shrugged. “My relationship with Lucia didn't exist just to teach you a lesson about grief. She didn't die just so you and I could bond over our sob stories.”

She sat beside me on the log and leaned her elbows on her knees. I could see her hands, the lighter skin of her fingertips, five pale points in the night as she reached to push her hair back from her face.

“I was used to not speaking about her, anyway. We had to be careful all the time. Working for the resistance, the last thing we needed was
any more attention. An Alpha and Omega relationship is a whipping offense, even without it being between two women. All that crap about Alphas having an obligation to breed.” She snorted. “Like that would have made a difference with me. As if I'd otherwise have found some nice Alpha guy and started pumping out babies.” The chilled air seemed to absorb her laugh.

“It was hard for her, on the island. You know what people are like about seers at the best of times—always a bit suspicious, standoffish. Then they found out about the two of us being together. After that, they just cut Lucia out.” Her hands tightened into fists. “It didn't matter to them that I'd been working for them for years. That I'd done more for the resistance than most of them ever had. Or that Lucia was risking her life working for them, too. They stopped speaking to her. They were happy enough to keep benefiting from her visions, and the work she did. But they wouldn't even talk to her. They forced her out of the house she'd lived in. They called her a traitor, an Alpha-lover.

“Piper did his best for her—found her somewhere to stay in the fort, and tried to tackle the worst of them about what they were doing. But he had the resistance to run. There was only so much he could do. That's when her mind started to go. I know it was the visions that did it, really, but she'd been able to manage them better, when she had friends—people to talk to. Once they left her on her own, she didn't have anything except the visions.”

I remembered my isolation in the Keeping Rooms, with the horizon shrunk to the gray walls of my cell, and nothing to distract me from the horror of my visions.

“And I wasn't there,” Zoe went on. “She wanted to spend more time on the mainland—to move here full-time, even. But I told her it was too dangerous, until I could sort out a safe place for us, somewhere out east, away from the patrols. The more unstable she got,
the harder it was to keep her hidden, and stay safe. She was getting really volatile. It wasn't just the screaming when the visions came. At other times, too, she couldn't control what she said. You've seen what Xander's like. We couldn't count on her to make sense, let alone stick to a cover story.”

Zoe paused, looked down at her hands. It was lighter, now, the wind nudging the clouds from the moon. She'd slipped one of her knives from her belt and was fiddling with it.

“I told her to get on that boat.” Silence. She rocked the tiny knife from side to side, slicing air. “She hated going back to the island, by that stage. But I made her. I shouted at her, when she tried to refuse. Told her it was for her own safety.”

She gave a bleak laugh. “Like Piper said the other day: she was good with weather. You know how you're good with places? Weather was one of her things. She could always sense a storm picking up. Even a change of wind coming. It was one of the reasons she was so useful to the resistance, over the years—letting them know when they could make a safe crossing.”

For once her hands were still, the knife resting inert on her palm, like an offering.

“She would have warned them about the storm. She always knew. But they didn't listen to her anymore. Because she'd started to behave oddly. And because they all despised her, because of us. Because of me. They called her a traitor. And they wanted to get back to their precious island.” She looked straight at me, defying me to deny it. “I know she must have tried to warn them about the storm.”

The final word caught in her mouth. I waited, while she stared straight ahead and took several slow breaths.

“I saw how the madness crept up on her,” she said. “And on Xander, too. When you came along, I hoped at first that you might be different.
Piper was so worked up about you. And you'd found your own way out to the island. I couldn't ignore that.

“Even after I met you, I hoped you might learn to control your visions, so you wouldn't fall into the same trap as her. As all the others. I tried to help you. But it's happening all over again. The visions, the screaming. The way your eyes shift around after you've seen the blast. Even when you talk to us these days, sometimes it's like you're looking at something else going on, just behind us. Or through us.” She looked down. “She used to do that, too, toward the end.

“So that's why I'm done with seers,” said Zoe. “When you wake up screaming, I already know what it means. And when you talk about the visions of the blast, especially, I've already heard it all. I know where it ends.”

I was used to her looking at me with disdain, or irritation. I was used to her snapping that my night screams would bring down a Council patrol on us, or complaining that she and Piper would be traveling at twice the speed without me slowing them down. The look she gave me now, though, was one I never thought I'd see: she pitied me. I pictured Xander's frantic hands, his restless eyes. I was remembering my own future.

She met my eyes. “I can't pin everything on a seer again—not the future of the resistance, or even Piper's happiness. I can't watch it happening again.”

She turned away from me. I waited for a few minutes, but she said nothing more. I slipped back to the shelter, to Piper's warmth. For the few hours that I slept, I dreamed her dreams. Gray water, thrashing under a storm. The sea's black underbelly, keeping its secrets.

Ω

In the morning she was gone. I found Piper standing by the empty lookout post. I could see by the slump in his shoulders that he already knew.

The dawn was staining the eastern sky with light.

“She left us the lantern,” he said. “All the jerky, too.”

“Can't you go after her?”

He shook his head. “If she doesn't want to be found, I wouldn't have a chance.”

He looked at me. “Did you talk to her, last night, about Lucia?”

I nodded. “I thought it might be different, now that we'd spoken. That she might stop hating me.”

“It's not about you, Cass,” he said. “It's never been about you.”

He went back to the shelter and squatted to unrig it, shaking off the snow before shoving the canvas into his rucksack.

“Did you know she was going to leave?” I asked.

“No,” he said. There was a long pause. “But I'm not surprised.” He stood, shouldering his rucksack. “I saw what losing Lucia did to her. Not just when Lucia drowned, but before then, when her mind started to go. Now Zoe's had to watch you and Xander struggle with your visions. I've seen what that cost her.”

That night, as I sat by the fire with Piper, I thought of how the sea refused to give up Lucia's bones. I thought of Leonard, in the shallow ditch. Kip's body on the silo floor. Had they taken him away, and buried him? Was the silo abandoned, and had it become his tomb, and the Confessor's, too? I couldn't decide what was worse: the thought of strange soldiers shifting him, hauling his body away to bury somewhere. Or the thought of him being left there, where he lay.

That night, in my dreams, Kip was floating in a tank again. I woke to my own shouts, so loud that the horses panicked and yanked at their tethers. Piper wrapped his arm around me until the shaking stopped.

Later, when the sweat had cooled on my face, and the tremors had left my hands, I sat beside Piper and told him the truth about Kip's past.
Some things are easier said in the dark. He listened in silence, without interrupting. Finally, he spoke.

“He did terrible things. But he suffered for them, didn't he? When they cut off his arm, put him in the tank for years? When he killed himself, to save you?”

I didn't know how to respond. How much forgiveness could be purchased with an arm, or a life? And who could decide the punishments, or make that kind of reckoning? Not me, I knew, with my own guilt and complicities to bear.

Ω

We rode for five more days. Only once did we see a sign of pursuit: a single rider who came upon us one night, not long after dusk had fallen. The terrain here was jagged with spars of rock and little shelter, and when we crossed the wide road running north, we'd decided to risk it for the short distance to the shelter of the forest visible a few miles away.

The soldier spotted us first—by the time I saw his red tunic, a few hundred yards ahead, he was already wheeling his horse around. Even from that distance, he would have seen Piper was missing an arm. For an Omega to ride a horse was already a whipping offense—if the rider made it to his garrison, they would send patrols to hunt us down.

Piper didn't consult me, he just leaned forward and pressed his horse to a gallop. I did the same, not sure if I was chasing the soldier or trying to stop Piper.

We were never going to catch up with the soldier—he had too great a start, and our horses were tired and hungry from long days of riding in snow and ice. But Piper wasn't aiming to catch him. We were thirty yards away when Piper threw the knife. At first I thought he'd missed—the rider didn't move, or cry out. But after a few yards, he began to slump
forward. When he was prone, face pressed to his horse's mane, I saw the glint of the blade in the back of his neck. Then, with a terrible slowness, he slid to one side. When he finally toppled from the saddle, one foot was stuck in his stirrup, so that when the horse panicked and sped away, the man was dragged along. The hoof falls were joined by an extra beat, the soldier's skull bouncing on the iced road.