The Fire Sermon Read online

  “At worst, Cass, we get caught. Worst is me, back in the tank, and you locked up again. That’s worst.”

  I stood up. “No, it’s not. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t plan on getting caught. And you know I don’t want anything to happen to you. But it’s not just about the two of us. We don’t yet know everything that the Council’s planning for Omegas, but we know it’s not going to be pretty. And sealing New Hobart’s just one more step in that direction.”

  For a long time the only noise was the distant cacophony of axes. Kip was hunched low, chin on his hand. Eventually he looked up at me. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Of course I am.”

  With his foot he stirred the mass of dried leaves and twigs on the ground. “And we have to light the fire back there?”

  “If we don’t, they’ll know it wasn’t an accident. And the wind’s going this way, away from New Hobart—if we don’t get back to the town edge of the forest, the fire won’t reach the axmen, won’t slow them down, or burn up their immediate wood supplies.”

  “That was my next question. No chance of us accidentally burning down the town?”

  I shook my head. “Not unless the wind changes.”

  He stood up, heaved the bag to his shoulder, and began heading back the way we’d come. A few steps away he turned back to me. “This time, you’re carrying the sack.”

  chapter 16

  The way back took much longer. The dark was now so absolute that I had to hold a hand in front of me to feel my way and to fend off the low branches. At times we had to crawl, or scramble. At least I didn’t even have to think about navigating—we simply headed back toward the noise of the axmen, growing steadily louder.

  “Do you think they’ll keep going all night?” whispered Kip.

  “No question. They might be working in shifts, I guess, but they’ll keep at it for as long as it takes to get the wall up.”

  Now the red glow was visible, and the forest before us became an outline, backlit by high torches planted at lengths in the ground. As we crept closer we could see, between the trees, the shapes of men and the ceaseless movement of the axes. Other soldiers were climbing the trees and hitching ropes, and whole teams of men were heaving at the weakened trees.

  From the growing clearing the road led off to the left, to the forest’s edge. Beyond, New Hobart was visible, ringed by dots of light, some moving as the patrols marched. Keeping always a few hundred feet from the torches, we went right, circling the clearing on the forest side, away from the town. I’d thought I’d get used to the noise, but the longer we were there the more violent and unending it seemed. Periodically a series of shouts and orders would herald the latest tree to succumb, and the men would scramble clear. There would be a long, wrenching wail as the trunk began its collapse, followed by the crash of the tree’s landing, shuddering the earth.

  As we reached the far side of the clearing and began to sneak closer, I was grateful for the noise. Behind us the forest was already thinning, easing into the plain that led up to New Hobart. The noise felt as much like cover as the trees that shielded us. The very air within the clearing was churning with sound. Ahead of us, at the clearing’s edge, the ring of torches flared. I told myself that, from the clearing itself, Kip and I would be shadows at most, behind the circle of flame. Opening the bag, I reached for the matches.

  If anyone had been watching from within the clearing, they would have seen a small light flare briefly in the shadows as another flame caught on, closer to the ground than the ring of torches mounted on the posts. Then the flame split into two—two heads of light moving low and quick along the clearing’s edge, pausing often. Where we paused, sometimes at ground level, sometimes at the height of the low-hanging branches, the flames left their mark, smoldering into more flames. The fire passed its whispered message along the northern edge of the clearing. The two bobbing torches carried on farther, past the boundary of the clearing, to where the low scrub grasped at the flames without being persuaded, and the fire took off gleefully on its own.

  That was when I realized that we’d become unnecessary: the trail we’d laid, perhaps five hundred yards long, was solidifying, the spots of flame reaching out to one another to form a line. The line grew higher, climbing up the low scrub and into the foliage itself. Kip and I, running at one end of the line, could spread the fire no quicker than it was spreading itself. The flames’ whisper had become a rumor, and it was spreading fast. Igniting the northerly wind, it crept up to the orderly ring of torches at the clearing’s edge and then subsumed it.

  I’d thought the noise of the clearing could not be beaten, but as the fire took hold it brought a noise of its own, a throaty, bass roar that silenced the axes. There were still shouts, but now they took on a new urgency, spreading and catching like the fire itself.

  We didn’t dare to wait any longer. When we ran, it felt like a repeat of our earlier, panicked dash through the forest, but this time the imagined pursuit was real, the hot wind behind us a constant reminder of the fire that it carried. The forest was both dark and light, now: the night thickened by the smoke but reddened by the fire’s advancing glow. Several times Kip fell behind, and I turned to look for him, reminded of how I’d talked him into this. But each time, when he caught up enough to emerge from silhouette, his face was flushed with a kind of glee.

  I’d meant to head south, but as the trees began to thin I saw that we must have been blundering southwest, and so we found ourselves near the western edge of the forest. Behind us, to the east, the forest was a map of fire, and the distance and the smoke combined to block out any glimpse of New Hobart beyond. I didn’t know if it had been my seer instincts, or blind luck, that had led us to the forest’s western limit. Watching the fire consuming the horizon, it was clear that if we’d stayed in the forest we couldn’t have outrun the flames much longer. On the plains, though, which rapidly sunk to the marshy ground that we remembered from the east of the town, the fire kept its distance. Brief spot fires flared in the long grass close to the forest but never took hold.

  We stopped perhaps a mile from the forest’s edge. Wading knee-deep into one of the marsh ponds, we drank and splashed the water over our faces. Kip’s face was tarnished with ash and smoke; when I looked down I saw the water running black down my own arms. When I stepped out of the pool onto the thick tussocks of grass, there was a tidemark at my calves, above which my skin was ash-blackened. Even this far from the fire, the smoke tainted every breath. I rinsed my hands and knee, grazed from my fall, and dislodged a few stubborn pieces of gravel. Then I pulled the knife from the bag and cut two strips from the top of the sacking. Soaking them in the water, I tied mine around my face first, then turned to Kip and fastened his. Even with his mouth covered I could tell he was still grinning.

  “Why so perky? You weren’t so keen about this fire business beforehand.” My voice was indistinct, but breathing was easier through the wet cloth.

  “I know,” he said, shouldering the bag as we headed off, parallel with the forest’s smoking edge. “But it felt good to be doing something.”

  “We’ve not exactly been taking it easy for the last few months.”

  “I know. But that’s been different—being on the run, just trying to get clear of them. But this time, it’s changed: we did something to them. Something decisive.”

  I laughed. “You weren’t feeling so decisive a while ago when I was trying to persuade you.”

  He laughed back. “But that was before I became a hardened saboteur, you see.”

  I shoved him lightly, toppling him from a tussock into the shallow water. He kicked through the water, splashing me. Against the backdrop of smoke and fire, our two small figures walked on, tracing a path among the marshy pools.

  For three days, the fire was visible: at first the choking mass of smoke and a reddened glow in the air, and later as a black pall hanging over the horizon like a premature patch of night. When the rains swept through from the west, on the third night, I
woke to find all trace of the fire gone, the smudge on the horizon wiped clean.

  Ever since the fire, I could feel the island even more strongly. I was drawing closer to it. It was a splinter in me, working its way to the surface. But the Confessor’s seeking was still present, too, a searching that made me distrust the very sky and flinch at every insect that brushed my skin when we settled down to rest.

  When I woke at dawn, screaming, Kip sleepily asked me: “Which one was it tonight?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting up.

  “These days, it’s always the island, the Confessor, or the blast. But as you were screaming, I’m guessing one of the second two.”

  “It was her again,” I said. Whenever I dreamed of her, these days, her seeking was studded with rage. It lashed at the night sky like the whip we’d seen wielded in New Hobart.

  Settling down again, closer to Kip, I was grateful for the wiry swamp grass beneath me, for its itches and scuffs that steadied me back into my real body rather than my dreamscape.

  “I should’ve known it was her,” said Kip, throwing over me the blanket that I’d cast off in my nightmare’s thrashing. “You scream loudest when it’s her you’re dreaming of.”

  “Sorry. I know it’s not exactly stealthy.”

  I felt his shrug. “Your visions have got us this far. The odd bout of screaming’s a side effect I’m happy to put up with.” Mosquitoes snagged at the edges of the silence. “It does seem odd, though. I know the Confessor was no picnic, but how can those visions scare you more than the ones of the blast? Surely the end of the world has to trump her.”

  I knew it would be hard to explain, even to Kip. The blast had its own brand of terror: its destruction was absolute, unanswerable. It took the world and turned it into fire. The Confessor was not worse than the blast—nothing could be. But whereas the terror of the blast was indiscriminate, the Confessor’s hatred was specific, personal. She was seeking, sifting, scouring the land for me. The blast didn’t hate—it was pure destruction. It turned hate into flames, along with everything else. But the Confessor’s hatred was a pulsing thing. I felt it constantly, more than I’d ever felt it in the cell. Back then, her attitude to me had been one of disdain, or occasional frustration. When I’d dared to return her scrutiny, and had managed to see the wired chamber in her thoughts, she had been enraged, but even that anger hadn’t matched the spite that now stained the air. Since I’d escaped from Wyndham, that spite was constant, as ever-present as the swamp mosquitoes. I recognized it like an old companion: it was the same hatred that I used to see in Zach.

  That day six riders came from the west. On the bland expanse of marsh, the white horses and red tunics of soldiers stood out from more than a mile away. When Kip saw them we dropped to the ground, then crawled on knees and elbows to the shelter of a reed bed at the edge of a pond.

  “They can’t see us, surely—not from that distance?” Kip asked.

  “Not if we don’t move. And if we’re lucky.”

  We were lying waist-deep in a stagnant pool, its surface scummed with green.

  “I don’t know about you,” Kip said, wrinkling his nose as he looked down at the furred water, “but I’m not feeling particularly lucky right now.”

  The riders made slow progress on the marshy ground, so for most of the morning we were stuck, watching the horses pick their way across the horizon.

  “They’re not coming this way,” he said. It was as much a prayer as an observation.

  “They’re heading straight for the coast.”

  But we discovered the next day that the soldiers had stopped off en route. We came across a settlement, a damp hollow where a handful of shacks propped up one another next to a small wood. We kept our distance, slinking past in the cover of the long reeds, but even from there we could see the gibbet. It looked new. The wood was freshly hewn, and it was the only vertical thing in the settlement, not yet having succumbed to the swampy, shifting land that had settled the older structures into lurching angles. An Alpha symbol was scorched into the top beam, from which a cage hung, suspended from a chain like a grotesquely oversize birdcage. Against the gibbet’s rigid, perpendicular lines, the body slumped within the bars looked even more broken. She had only one leg, and even at a distance we could see that a whipping had shredded the back of her shirt and painted her with blood. The wind blowing off the marshland, and the woman’s occasional movements, twisted the cage back and forth, so that it looked like she was scanning the horizon with her closed eyes.

  We alternated running with walking for the rest of the day, but even when the settlement had long passed from sight, and we had left the marsh behind us, I imagined I could hear the sound of the chain, sawing at the wind.

  “We need to start walking at night,” I said. “And taking turns to watch in the day.” It wasn’t just the need for answers that drew me to the island, now. It was raw fear. There was nowhere else in this scorched world where we might be safe. Not New Hobart, not even the forsaken marsh.

  “And on the island—what is it you think we’ll find? What if it’s not the resistance movement we’re hoping for?”

  “I don’t know if they’re militants or hermits on the island, or anything in between. But it’s a place out of Alpha control, just for Omegas. That’s enough to make it a threat to the Council. You saw the crowd in New Hobart, watching the whipping in the market and not daring to say anything. Because there’s never been any alternative: Alpha rule is how it’s always been. That’s why the island frightens the Council: the idea that things could be different.”

  “And if the Council hasn’t been able to find it, after all this time, what makes you so sure that we can?”

  I shrugged. “The same thing that made me sure about the caves and tunnel under Wyndham.”

  He looked at me carefully. “I guess that’s good enough for me.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” I said. “I might know where we want to go, but getting there’s another question. If a storm comes up, I wouldn’t like our chances. It’s a long way from the mainland, and weather’s unpredictable, even for me. And I’ve never been in a boat.”

  He sighed. “Let’s just hope it turns out that I was an expert sailor, before the tank.” But the laughter I was used to hearing in his voice was entirely absent. It had been left on the marsh, swinging from the gibbet.

  From New Hobart, it took us nearly two weeks to reach the coast, traveling at night, and sometimes half the day, too. We had a few provisions, at least, from Elsa, and the going was easier now that we were out of the marsh and among lightly wooded plains. The food lasted five days, though the bread was tough and ropey after two. After that, we foraged. A nest of eggs in a low tree branch was a feast that lasted us another two days, baked slowly on a reluctant fire. There were fewer mushrooms as we got farther from the marshes, but those we did find were larger, and less dank. The landscape had become starker as we neared the coast, but after the soggy, circuitous marshes I welcomed the dryness of the rock-strewn hills. In the day we found cover beneath the edges of the white, hulking boulders but took turns to keep watch. We saw nothing.

  At dawn on the tenth day, when the grazes on my hands and knee had healed completely, came the smell of the sea. Only we didn’t know it was the sea, just speculated that the new salt sharpness of the air was a hint of the coast to come. Then, rounding the peak of a hill, we saw it for the first time, close enough that we could make out bursts of spray at some of the lower cliffs.

  “Do you think you’ve seen it before?” I asked, as we sat in the long grass and looked down to where the cliffs ended and the shifting blueness began.

  He squinted at the horizon. “I don’t know.”

  If he had seen it before, no familiarity remained—he was staring with the same wonder as me. If he’d seen the ocean in his past life, it was just another thing that had been taken from him. The tank had swallowed even the sea.

  I leaned against his side. We sat there for at least an
hour, watching the waves goad the shore. Somewhere out there, in the sea’s massive blankness, was the island. And here we are, I thought, the two of us, tired and skinny, with no idea how to sail, going to seek out this island, the sea’s secret.

  We found the fishing village the next day. Cooler weather had begun to shift in, so smoking chimneys revealed the village from miles away. It was large, too—perhaps sixty houses clustered at the top of one of the cliffs. The herd of fat black-and-white cows grazing nearby was enough to declare it an Alpha village, even without the Alpha insignia on the wooden sign planted proudly by the main path. At the east, where the cliff dropped sharply to a small cove, a trail clung to the side of the cliff. For a day we watched, noting how early the villagers descended the path to the boats and how they returned in the afternoon, met by the elderly and the children who helped them unload the nets slung with their catch. That was the worst—watching, from the ridge above, close enough to see the glint from the fish scales. By that point we hadn’t eaten for a day and a half, the urgency of hunger nearly matching the sense of pursuit. We had to wait for night, when we made our way down to the harbor. It was just light enough to see without a flame, though we went slowly on the narrow path, wincing at each dislodged rock that clattered down to the shore.

  By the edge of the jetty, a throng of gulls was jostling at a huge cane container and picking at the discarded catch. When we approached, the birds set up such a squawking that I was convinced the whole village would be roused. But at that point I almost didn’t care: the gulls, taking off, had revealed a mound of fish and offal, knee-deep. When we reached, grimacing, beneath the top layers on which the birds had feasted, we were able to grab intact fish. They were tiny, some the size of my smallest finger, but firm enough, and not rancid. We carried our hoard along the pebbled shore until we were out of sight of the harbor, and risked a small fire to cook them. I relished every bite. I even relished picking the sharp bones from my teeth and licking my oily fingers. Kip’s cheek had been anointed with a tiny flash of silver, where some scales had brushed off on his skin. The scales mirrored the firelight as we sat, looking out to sea, the small cairn of fish bones between us.