The Refuge Song (4 page)

“What are you doing here?” Again, Piper's bored, impatient tone, as he might sound when chatting in a tavern with a tiresome companion. But I could see the tendons in his hand drawn wire-tight, and the careful angle of his wrist, as he held the knife poised above his shoulder. The blade itself was a tiny dart of silver in the moonlight. If I hadn't seen those knives in action, I might have thought it looked beautiful.

“I need to talk to the seer about her twin,” the Ringmaster said.

“And do you always start a conversation with a knife to the throat?” Piper asked.

“We both know this is no ordinary conversation.” The Ringmaster, behind me, was perfectly still, but I saw the tiny movements of his soldiers. The light moving on the blade of one man's sword, as he inched closer to Piper; the tremor of the archer's bow as the arrow was pulled back farther.

“I won't talk to you while you're threatening us,” I said. With each word I felt his knife, rigid against my neck.

“And you need to understand that I'm not a man who makes idle threats.” He raised the blade, so that my chin was forced upward. I could feel the pulse of my neck against the steel. The blade had been cold at first, but was warming now. Zoe was moving, very gradually, so that she stood back-to-back with Piper, facing the soldiers behind him. The soldier with the bow was only a few feet from her, one eye narrowed as he squinted down the line of the arrow at her chest.

When Piper moved, everything seemed to unfold very slowly. I saw how he released the blade, his arm extending, one finger pointing at the Ringmaster like a denunciation. Zoe launched at the same time, her two knives hurled at the archer as she dived to the side. For an instant the
three blades were in flight, and the arrow, too, slicing through the air where Zoe had stood a moment before.

The Ringmaster swiped Piper's knife from the sky with his own blade. The noises came in quick succession: the clash of his blade against Piper's; a shout from the archer as Zoe's knife hit him, and the clang as her second blade struck one of the poles. The arrow had passed my left shoulder and been lost to the darkness.

“Hold,” the Ringmaster shouted at his men. I clutched at my neck, where his knife had sat, and waited for the pain and the gush of loosened blood, its hot spurt through my fingers. It never came. There was just the old scar, and my pulse thrashing underneath my own grip.

chapter 5

For several seconds we were all motionless. The Ringmaster crouched in front of me, his knife pointed at Piper, who held his own dagger only an inch or two from the Ringmaster's. Zoe, with two more throwing knives drawn, stood with her back to Piper. Beyond her, the archer was grimacing, still clutching the knife lodged by his collarbone. The other two soldiers had moved in, swords outstretched, just beyond the reach of Zoe's vigilant blades.

I groped for the knife at my belt, but steel scraped on steel as the Ringmaster sheathed his blade. “Stand down,” he said, with a toss of his head at his soldiers. They dropped back, the injured man swearing. I couldn't see his blood but I could smell it: the unmistakable raw-liver stench that reminded me of skinned rabbits, and of the bodies on the island.

“I think we understand one another,” the Ringmaster said. “I came to talk, but you know now that if it comes to blades, I'll stand my own.”

“Touch her again and I'll cut out your tongue,” said Piper. “You won't be talking then.”

He moved past the Ringmaster and grabbed me, drawing me back to where Zoe stood. Her knives were lowered but not sheathed.

“Leave us,” the Ringmaster shouted to his soldiers, with an impatient wave. They withdrew until the darkness and distance hooded their faces, and I could no longer hear the wounded archer's labored breathing.

“You're OK?” Piper said to me.

My hand was still at my neck.

“He could've slit my throat,” I whispered, “when you threw the knife.”

“He was never going to kill you,” Piper replied. “Not if it was so important to him to talk to you. It was a ploy.” He spoke up now so that the Ringmaster could hear him. “Just posturing, to impress upon us what a big man he is.”

I looked up at Piper and wondered what it must be like to be so certain of everything.

Zoe was surveying the valley. “Where are the rest of your soldiers?” she said to the Ringmaster.

“I told you—I brought only my scouts. Do you have any idea what would happen if word got out that I'd met with you?”

I turned. His men were watching us warily from twenty yards away. The swordsmen still had their blades drawn. The injured man had dropped his bow and leaned against one of the bent metal poles, but then jerked upright again as though the touch of the taboo remnant was more painful than the dagger in his flesh.

“How did you find us?” I swung back around to face the Ringmaster. “The Council's been searching for months. Why you, and why now?”

“Your brother, him and the General, think their machines allow
them to keep track of everything. Maybe it worked well enough when they had the Confessor and her visions to help out. They never had time for old-fashioned methods. They could've learned a lot from the older Councilors, or some of the senior soldiers, if they'd taken the time to listen, like I did. I've been paying urchins in half the settlements from Wynd­ham to the coast, for years. When you need updates from the ground, a greedy local kid with the promise of a silver coin is worth more than any machine. Sometimes it's a waste of money—often enough they bring me nothing but rumors, false alarms. But every now and again you get lucky. There was an unconfirmed sighting of you at Drury. Then someone came to me, said three strangers had been seen in Windrush. The interesting bit was that there was an Alpha girl with two Omegas. I've had my scouts tracking you for four days.”

“Why?” Piper interrupted him.

“Because we have things in common.”

Piper laughed, the sound somehow louder in the darkness. “Us? Look at yourself.”

The Ringmaster might have traveled away from Wyndham, but he still had the plush appearance of a Councilor. Somewhere, not far from here, would be a tent, carried and erected by his soldiers, and outfitted with clean bedding. While we'd traveled on foot, thigh-deep in drifts of ash, or footsore over rocky hills, he would have ridden. His men probably fetched him water to wash in—his face and hands showed none of the grime that marked the three of us. And by the look of his rounded cheeks, he'd never had to pick the grubs off a mushroom that was his only meal at the end of a long night of walking, or spend ten minutes scraping the last scraps of flesh from a lizard's thorny carcass. Our hunger was a garment that we could not remove, and as I looked at his well-fed face, I joined in with Piper's laughter. Zoe, behind me, spat on the ground.

“I know why you're laughing,” the Ringmaster said. “But we have more in common than you know. We want the same thing.”

It was Zoe's turn to laugh. “If you knew what I'd like to see done to you and the other bastards on the Council, you wouldn't be saying that.”

“I've told you already—you're making a mistake if you assume we're all the same.”

Piper spoke. “You're all happy to sleep in feather beds while Omegas suffer. What difference does it make to us if you bicker among yourselves about the best ways to screw us over? You kill one another periodically, but things don't get any better for us.”

“Things have changed.”

“Let me guess,” Piper said. “You care about Omegas, all of a sudden?”

“No. Not at all.” His honesty stopped even Zoe, who'd been on the point of interrupting him.

The Ringmaster continued, making no pretense of shame. “I care about Alphas. I want to do what's best for them. That's my job, just as it's yours to act in the best interests of your own people.”

“I'm not in charge of the Assembly anymore,” Piper said. He gestured at himself—his ragged clothes, his dirty face. “Do I look like the leader of the resistance to you?”

The Ringmaster ignored him. “What the Reformer and the General are doing now, or trying to do, is a risk to all of us—Alphas and Omegas alike.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Don't play coy with me,” he said. “You escaped from Wyndham fort through the tank rooms. You know they're resurrecting the machines, the Electric. And I suspect you know more than you'd admit about the Confessor's database, too—I've never swallowed the Reformer's story that it was the Confessor's twin, alone, who killed her.”

I said nothing.

“For years I worked closely with the General, and the Reformer, too,” he said. “I was even willing to tolerate his closeness with the Confessor.” There was a curl of distaste in his upper lip. “She was useful, at least. But there came a stage when our agendas diverged. It's become clear to me that your twin and the General no longer give any credence to the taboo. They pay lip service to it—they know that's what the public demands. But they're pushing at it. Always pushing.

“They've been working as secretively as they can, but they can't do it all alone. Over the past year or more, some of the soldiers from their personal squadrons have come to me. They've seen the things they're guarding: the tanks. The database. I rose up through the army, unlike the Reformer or the General, for all that she's taken a soldier's name for herself. I understand the soldiers, the ordinary people. I know how deep the taboo runs. Your twin and the General are so enthralled by their ideas, they've underestimated how much most people hate and fear the machines.”

“More than they fear the Omegas?” I asked.

“It's all the same thing,” he said. “People know that. The machines caused the blast, caused the twinning, and the Omegas.”

That was how he saw us: as an aberration—a horror to be listed along with the blast. A problem to be solved.

He went on. “When the Confessor was killed, and her database trashed, I hoped that might be the end of it. But your brother's and the General's enthusiasm for the machines is unabated. It's already gone too far. The Judge was the last one on the Council with the power to openly oppose them. Even when they had his twin, toward the end, he still stood firm on the taboo, because he knew the public wouldn't stand for it if he didn't. So they killed his twin, and him, as soon as they figured they didn't need him anymore.”

“What about the others on the Council?” Piper said. “Do they know what the Reformer and the General are doing? What they're planning?”

“Not many. Most have given their tacit approval: they're not looking too closely. They're happy to benefit if it works, and they don't want to be implicated if it all goes wrong.”

What a luxury it would be, I thought, to choose ignorance. To shrug off the burden of knowledge.

“Then there are those with no choice,” he said. “Those who didn't get to their own twins before the Reformer and the General did.”

“What about your twin?” I asked.

“I have her,” he said. “Not in the Keeping Rooms, but under guard, with soldiers I can trust.”

I tensed my neck muscles against the shudder that rose in me. There were still nights when I dreamed I was back in the cell at the Keeping Rooms, the formless days passing, and me trapped forever, a prisoner of time.

“You think that's better than the Keeping Rooms?”

“It's safer,” he said. “For her and me. The way things are at the moment, I don't think I could protect her in Wyndham. Not even in the Keeping Rooms.”

“Why have you sought us out?” I said.

“For the last few years, since I realized the extent of their obsession with the machines, I've been trying to gather information, learn as much as I can about their plans. I've tried using other seers. There's only a handful of them. Their powers vary so much—some are of no practical use, and most of them are broken.” He said it so offhandedly, as though when the madness claimed us, a seer was no more than a cartwheel with a broken spar, or a rusted bucket.

“You, though.” He turned back to me. “From what I hear, you could be of some use. And if you're working with the resistance”—he nodded
at Piper and Zoe—“then there's even more to be gained from some kind of cooperation.”

“I've told you,” Piper said, enunciating each syllable slowly. “I'm not in charge anymore.”

“You don't want to work to stop the tanks, then?”

“What is it that you think you want from us?” I interrupted.

The four of us were circling one another, a wary dance among the poles, while his soldiers watched from a distance.

“I need your help,” he said, “to stop your twin and the General, and their pursuit of the machines.”

It seemed absurd. He was a Councilor, soldiers and money at his command, and powerful beyond what any of us, ragged, thin and exhausted, could imagine.

“You want help?” Piper said. “Then ask your Council cronies.”

The Ringmaster laughed. “You really think we're one big happy family, sitting around the Council chamber backslapping one another?” He turned from Piper to me. “When you were in the Keeping Rooms, who did you think the Reformer was protecting you from? A Councilor's greatest enemies are those closest to him—those with the most to gain if he slips from power. Look at what happened to the Judge.”

“Why would we help you maneuver against them?” Piper said. “You've only come to us because you're being edged out of power, and you're desperate.”

“Edged out of power?” The Ringmaster met Piper's gaze. “You'd know how that feels.”

I interrupted him. “You chose to work with them, before the machines drove you apart. Why would we work with somebody who hates Omegas?”

“Because I can offer your people a better life than the tanks. The refuge system has worked well for decades, as a humane way of dealing
with the Omega problem. Maintained by tithes, it's a workable solution. Without your brother and the General, things could continue the way they used to.”

“That's why I could never work with you,” I said. “There isn't an
Omega problem
. Only those problems that the Council's created for us: the tithes. Pushing us further and further out, to land where nothing will grow. The branding, and all the other restrictions that make it nearly impossible to live.”

“That's all immaterial now. We both know the only thing that matters is stopping the tanks.”

“Then why didn't you just come with more soldiers,” I said, “and take me back to Wyndham? With me as your prisoner, you know you could force Zach to do whatever you like.”

“I would have, if I'd thought it would do me any good. Thought about killing you, too, to take him out altogether.” He was as unapologetic as his blade itself, whose indentation I could still feel on my throat. “A few months ago, it might have worked. But it's bigger than your brother now. He allied himself too closely to the Confessor. Now she's gone, it's weakened his standing. The General's been around for longer than him; she's better established on the Council. When the two of them killed the Judge, she grabbed power, and she's not going to let it go. If I threaten the Reformer, or even kill him, it's not going to put a stop to this. And if the General even suspected that we were using you as a hostage to control your twin, she'd kill him herself.”

Before I escaped from Wyndham, Zach had said to me:
I've started something, and I need to finish it
. But he was caught up now, as if trapped in the workings of one of his own machines.

“Anyway,” the Ringmaster went on, “you're more use to me out here, as a contact with the resistance.”

“I won't be used.”

I was thinking of Piper, and what he'd said to me, just a few days ago:
It's your job to endure the visions. And it's mine to decide how we can use them.
I was tired of men who saw me as a tool to be wielded.

“We could benefit each other,” said The Ringmaster. “We could benefit each other. We want the same thing.”

“No we don't.” This accusation cut me more than his blade had done. “You want to be rid of us, just like Zach does—you just disapprove of his methods.”