The Fire Sermon Read online

  I felt him settle back down beside me. “I’m grateful for your seer stuff, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t envy you.”

  Nobody would envy seers. The Alphas despised us, and other Omegas resented us. The visions were the hardest thing, though. I was always contending with the shards of past and future that punctured my days and nights, making me distrust my own place in time. Who would envy us our broken minds? I thought again of the mad seer at Haven market and his endless muttering.

  “And you?” I asked him. “Did you dream in the tanks?”

  “The whole time I was in the tank, the bits I can remember, I used to wish it was a dream, wish I’d wake up from it. A lot of the time I’d slip in and out of consciousness. But when I was asleep, I’d dream of the tank, and when I’d come to, it was still there.” He paused. “Now, when I sleep, it’s wonderful—there’s nothing at all.”

  “Why do you think you were the only one awake? In the tanks, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t awake all the time. And when I was, it wasn’t like being awake properly. I couldn’t move, or barely. I couldn’t even see anything, really—it was dark most of the time. Sometimes, if I’d drifted close to the glass, I could just make out other tanks; sometimes even the other people, floating.” Somewhere nearby, a pigeon cooed. “You scared me, when you woke up screaming like that,” he said eventually. “I guess that’s the downside to being a seer—the visions aren’t exactly optional.”

  “You scared me, too, when I saw you the first time. I mean, the whole setup was terrifying, but when you opened your eyes I nearly screamed.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. I think you made enough noise when you smashed the tank.”

  I smiled, turned on my side to face him. Above the cliff opposite, dawn was beginning to declare itself, the darkness fading at the edges.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said, reaching over and sweeping my hair back from where it had fallen over my eye, before rolling to his side, his back to me. I closed my eyes. After the isolation of the cell, it was nice to hear his breathing, slightly out of sync with my own.

  chapter 11

  For two more days we stuck to the path that followed the river downstream. On the first day we heard people approaching, though I could never be sure what came first: my sense of unease or the distant thrum of hooves. We scrambled from the path and down the embankment. It was steep, and the river below it was rock-studded and fast, but we had no time for caution. We clung to the cliffside, concealed by an uprooted tree lodged above us. The percussion of the passing hooves dislodged clumps of loose dirt and leaves. We stayed there long after the sound had gone, then emerged quietly, brushing the mulch from our hair.

  When we heard horses again, the next day, there was no cliff to shelter us. The steep bluffs had subsided into grassed banks leading gently to the river, which ran wide and slow here. There was less shelter, but at least the quiet river allowed us to hear the hooves coming. They were close, probably less than a few hundred yards away, and we were sheltered only by the river’s bend. There was no time for words—we turned away from the river, sprinting so hard that the long, wiry marram grass sliced at our calves. The only cover within sight was a small cluster of bushes, and we dived behind them just as the first horse rounded the bend in the path. Half-submerged in leaves, we squinted through the scrub and watched the three riders slow to a walk as they neared the river. Kip’s grip on my arm became rigid; I could feel the slight tremors of my body against his. The men were so close that, when they dismounted, I could feel the thud as each man landed lightly by his horse. They were Council soldiers, their long red tunics emblazoned with the Alpha insignia. One wore a sword, long enough that it brushed the top of the tall grass as he walked. The other two had bows slung across their backs.

  We watched as they led the horses down to the river to drink. Even with my pulse loud in my ears, and my body thrumming with repressed shaking, I was fascinated by the horses. My only close encounter with them had been at my abduction from the settlement. I’d seen a few horses before, of course, ridden by travelers, or at the market in Haven, but they were rare. There were none in our village when I was a child, though there’d been sheep, cattle, and donkeys. Later, at the settlement, there were no animals, of course—Omegas were forbidden not only to own animals but even to buy or eat meat. In the settlement, the only horses we saw were ridden by passing Alpha traders, tithe collectors, or the Alpha raiders. We Omegas would exchange envious tales of the decadence of Wyndham: a horse for every soldier. Dogs not just trained to guard but kept as pets. Meat eaten every week.

  They say there were more animals in the Before—that they were common and came in different types, more than we can even imagine. Once, when Zach had been to the market at Haven with Dad, he came back full of talk of a picture he’d seen. A traveling merchant had been hawking it on the sly, in one of the alleys off the market. He claimed it was a drawing from the Before. It showed hundreds of different types of birds. Not just the birds we knew of: the pale chickens or the stumpy gray pigeons, or even the gulls that sometimes came inland from the sea out west. Zach said that the picture had shown birds smaller than a chicken’s egg, and others with a wingspan wider than our kitchen table. But he could describe it to me only in whispers, when we were in our room and the candle was out. He was already in trouble, he said, since Dad had hauled him away from the small crowd that had gathered around the merchant’s stall. Such relics of the Before were taboo, and Dad in particular was impatient with any speculations about the past.

  Whatever animals had existed in the Before, few survived the blast, and fewer still had survived the hungry decades of the Long Winter that followed. Unable to adapt like humans, most animals had died out. Even among the surviving species, there was a high rate of deformities—it wasn’t unusual to see a three-legged pigeon, for example, or a whole flock of eyeless sheep following their shepherd by the sound of a bell on a staff. Only that morning Kip and I had passed a two-headed snake stretched out on a rock by the river’s edge, observing us with both sets of eyes. I supposed deformations sometimes happened to horses, too, though I’d never seen it. I’d never even known that horses came in different colors—the few I’d seen had all been brown. These three, now about thirty feet away and drinking noisily at the river’s edge, were gray, their manes and tails a yellowing white. Their very size unnerved me, and the sound of their slurping and whinnying.

  The men led the horses back toward us, away from the river. The man with the sword bent to adjust a stirrup and for a moment his head was at our level, not ten feet away. I scrunched my eyes shut, as if that would hide me. But when I dared to open them again I saw something that terrified me far more than his sword. In a patch of dirt on the grassy path, right beside his horse’s front legs, was the print of a bare foot. It wasn’t even complete—just the indentation of Kip’s toes and the ball of his foot. But once I’d seen it, the print seemed glaring, unmistakable. When the man bent down, my whole body braced to run. What hope did we have, though, against three armed soldiers, with horses? My breath was the frantic flutter of a moth. The man stepped back, and for a moment I thought he might have missed it. But then he bent again, lower this time. I closed my eyes again and gripped Kip’s arm. It was over. Already I could feel the tank closing around me. Around us both.

  When I opened my eyes again, the soldier was still bent low, busily inspecting his horse’s hooves, one by one. He flicked a pebble from one hoof, straightened, and spat on the ground.

  They left as quickly as they’d come, throwing themselves up into their saddles with a casual elegance.

  From then on we avoided the path. Kip was subdued all afternoon. Whereas I’d been sensing the Confessor’s avid scrutiny from the moment we’d escaped, seeing the soldiers had made the pursuit more real to him.

  “They’re not going to stop coming after us, are they,” he said that night. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. “And where can w
e run to? I’ve only been thinking, so far, about getting as far away from Wyndham as possible. But away isn’t really a destination.”

  “We’re not just running away,” I said. “We’re going to the island.” I hadn’t realized that, until I said it out loud. Nor had I realized that Kip was coming with me. But when I wasn’t dreaming of the Confessor, I’d been dreaming of the island, its single peak rising from the broken sea. And ever since we left Wyndham we’d been heading roughly southwest, toward the distant coast. I wasn’t sure whether that was chance, or whether I’d been steering us that way the whole time.

  Kip had heard about the island already—it was becoming clear that his knowledge of general life was solid enough; the tank had left him with a frustratingly specific void that kept from him solely the details of his own life, his own identity. So he was aware of the island, but only in the way that I had been, before it had intruded on my visions. So, like me, he’d assumed it was a myth, a rumor—a furtive murmuring about a haven for Omegas, as vague and unlikely as the rumors about Elsewhere, other lands across the sea, lost to us since the blast. But when I told him that my visions had shown me the island, I was touched that he didn’t doubt its reality.

  “So the Council’s really looking for it?” he asked. “And has been for a while?”

  I nodded, remembering the Confessor’s interrogations on the subject. My jaw tightened at the thought of her eyes fixed on mine, her mind tightening around my own like a snare around a rabbit’s neck.

  “And given that they’re looking for us already, you think it’s a good idea to head for the one place we know they’re also searching for?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I know—it does seem like a bit of a perfect storm. But they wouldn’t be looking for it if it weren’t important. If we want to find out what the Council’s doing with the tanks, or to try to piece together what’s happened to you, I think the people who can help us are on the island.”

  That night, the Confessor stepped into my dream. She was suddenly there, as real as the fallen tree under which Kip and I were huddled. From the mossy bank above us, she looked down with the expression of absolute indifference that I remembered so well from the Keeping Rooms. The only blemish on her perfect skin was the brand on her forehead. And she was here, standing over us, her face lit by the zealous full moon. There was no point in running, and no point screaming, either. Her presence was total, as though she’d always been here, only we were too stupid to realize it. When her eyes met mine, my blood felt too thick, as if half-frozen, dragging its granular way along my veins.

  The pain in my hands woke me, not Kip’s grip on my shoulder, or his voice, calling my name. I was scrabbling in the dirt, clawing into the ground and into the rotted base of the log by which we slept. By the time I was properly awake, I’d scraped a hole six inches deep, and those fingernails I hadn’t broken off were thickly packed with dirt and splintered wood. I was crying out, too, an animal wail of terror that sounded strange to my own ears as I surfaced from the dream.

  Kip was bent over me, still holding my shoulder. He leaned in, pulling me close, half to comfort me and half to silence me. I exhaled slowly, forcing my body to stillness, and pressed my forehead against his lowered head to quell my shaking. I felt the match of our brands, the scars mirroring each other as his forehead rested against mine.

  “It’s all right, shhhh, it’s all right,” he murmured.

  “It was her. She was here, in my dream. Right here.”

  “And you were going to dig to safety?”

  Now, in the light of his wry gaze, it seemed absurd. But although I mustered a laugh, my body was still shaking.

  “It was only a dream,” he said.

  “It’s never only a dream,” I pointed out. “Not for me.”

  The reality was both better and worse than the dream. Better, because the bank above us was empty, the moss and fallen leaves undisturbed. And worse because her physical absence meant little: here or not, there was no escaping her scrutiny. Not by running, nor hiding, let alone by my foolish scrabbling in the dirt. She was seeking us, and I couldn’t shake her off. She made the whole night sky a searching eye, and beneath it I was helpless, skewered by her gaze just as Zach had skewered my pet beetle on the pin.

  We moved with a new urgency the next day. My awareness of her was physical, like a chronic pain. I carried her with me, and every place we passed through was tarnished by her presence. The Omegas were the vessels of contamination from the blast, as the Alphas never tired of telling us. But I felt as if the Confessor was the poison I carried now, the taint of her souring my very blood, and seeping out into the landscape that Kip and I were crossing.

  At least, since our conversation about the island, Kip and I had a sense of purpose: I knew the island was hundreds of miles away, but having spoken the destination out loud made it seem somehow closer. Heading more sharply westward, we left the path, and the river. We drank greedily first, not knowing how long it would be before we found water again. The hunger was the main thing, though. Most days we managed to find some berries or mushrooms, but we were more wary of the latter since a cluster of black mushrooms on the second day had made us both cruelly sick. In a small pool, the first day after we left the river, Kip had caught a handful of tiny fish, using my sweater as a net. The fish were tiny shreds of silver, no bigger than my smallest fingernail. We ate them raw, our hunger overcoming our squeamishness. I knew we couldn’t go on like this much longer.

  Kip was coping better than I’d feared. In the first days out of the tanks, his body had a formlessness, everything softened by disuse. Even his skin had been dilated and puffy from his submersion in the tanks. Now, despite the scaffolding of his bones that became clearer each day, I could see him taking shape in front of me, his muscles lean and strained beneath his skin, which was now darkened by days of sun and dirt. At first his skin had been tender, easily damaged, the base of each bare foot a network of blisters, and we’d had to stop often. He still moved clumsily, rediscovering his body after the tank. There was a hesitation about his movements that never quite faded. But he stumbled less often now, and had taken to running ahead, scrambling up to vantage points. At times I wanted to tell him to take it easy, to save his energy, but I couldn’t bring myself to suppress his delight in his body, newly his own again. But as the hunger grew, even he had fallen more and more quiet. As for my own body, it felt heavy, yet I knew I was growing lighter each day. At night, when we burrowed into ditches, or the hollows beneath logs, I was kept awake by thoughts of food, and by the insistent sharpness of my bones digging into the earth. Even at my hungriest, though, I could never summon any nostalgia for the regular food trays of the Keeping Rooms.

  Three days after leaving the river, we came upon the first village. It looked similar to the village where Zach and I had grown up, though this one was smaller. Not more than fifteen houses were gathered around a central well, with fields and an orchard spreading about them. Close to the large barn we could see figures at work. It must have been past midsummer, as the fields were freshly shorn, but the orchard provided enough cover for us to approach unseen. Occasional apples lay buried in the grass; they were shrunken and brown, skins puckered with age. We ate three each, in silence except for the staccato spitting out of pips.

  “Alpha or Omega?” Kip asked, peering through the trees to the village beyond.

  I gestured around us to the fields, the rows of apple trees. “The land’s good. Alpha’s my guess.”

  “And look—at the back of the big house.” He pointed at a long, narrow barn, divided into sections, each with a half door.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a stable, for horses.”

  “How can you recognize a stable but not know your own name?”

  He shrugged, irritated. “The same way I can remember how to talk, or swim. It’s just there. It’s only the personal stuff that’s gone, somehow. Anyway, at least we know this is Alpha territory.”

  “So w
e take as many apples as we can carry and keep going.”

  He nodded but didn’t move. In the village, a door opened, a woman’s voice carried across the afternoon air.

  I tugged at his arm. “Kip? We need to keep moving.”

  He turned to me. “Can you ride a horse?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Omegas aren’t allowed to ride.”

  “What about before you and Zach were split?”

  “There weren’t horses in our village. There were some donkeys, but the others wouldn’t let us ride.”

  “But you’ve seen it done. Those men, by the river.”

  “I know which end is forward, if that’s what you mean. I was carried on horseback, when Zach’s men took me from the settlement, though that hardly counts. And you can’t do it, either, can you?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.” He smiled at me. “But I wouldn’t mind having a go.”

  We waited until well after dark. From a perch in one of the apple trees at the farthest edge of the orchard, we watched as the children came out of the schoolhouse, perhaps ten of them, and played on the green around the well.

  “Does it make you nostalgic?”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t like that for us. Not after we were very young. We weren’t split; we couldn’t go to school. The other kids kept their distance, mainly. So it was just Zach and me, together.”

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t turn out odd. Apart from the whole fugitive seer thing, I mean.”

  I smiled. “And you—nostalgic?”

  “By definition, you can’t be nostalgic if you can’t remember anything,” he said. “I suppose amnesia has its advantages.” From across the orchard we could hear the children’s shouts and laughter. “Look at them: not a missing limb or flaw among them. Perfect little Alphas with their perfect little lives.”

  “It’s not their fault. They’re just children.”