The Fire Sermon Page 3

  Zach’s new knowledge allowed me some respite from his daily cruelties, but it wasn’t enough to declare us split. For that, he needed proof—years of impassioned but futile assertions on his part had taught him that. He waited awhile for me to slip up again and reveal myself, but for nearly a whole year more I managed to hold my secret. The visions had grown stronger, but I’d trained myself not to react, not to cry out at the flashes of flame that punctuated my nights, or at the images of distant places that drifted into my waking thoughts. I spent more time alone, venturing far upstream, even as far as the deep gorge leading away from the river, where the abandoned silos were hidden. Zach no longer followed me when I went off by myself.

  I never entered the silos, of course. All such remnants were taboo. Our broken world was scattered with these ruins, but it was against the law to enter them, just as it was forbidden to own any relics. I’d heard rumors that some desperate Omegas had been known to raid the wreckage, searching out usable fragments. But what would be left to salvage after all these centuries? The blast had leveled most cities. And even if there were anything salvageable in the taboo towns now, centuries later, who would dare to take it, knowing the penalty? More frightening than the law were the rumors of what those remnants could hold. The radiation, said to shelter like a nest of wasps in such relics. The contaminating presence of the past. If the Before was mentioned at all, it was in hushed voices, with a mixture of awe and disgust.

  Zach and I used to dare each other to get close to the silos. Always braver than me, once, he ran right up to the closest one and placed a hand on the curved concrete wall before running back to me, giddy with pride and fear. But these days I was always alone, and would sit for hours under a tree that overlooked the silos. The three huge, tubular buildings were more intact than many such ruins—they’d been shielded by the gorge that surrounded them, and by the fourth silo, which must have taken the brunt of the blast. It had collapsed entirely, leaving only its circular base. Twisted metal spars rose out of the dust like the grasping fingers of a world buried alive. But I was grateful for the silos, despite their ugliness—they guaranteed that nobody else would go near the place, so I could at least count on solitude. And unlike the walls of Haven, or the larger of the villages nearby, there were no Council posters flapping in the wind: Vigilance against Contamination from Omegas. Alpha Unity: Support Increased Tithes for Omegas. Since the drought years, everything seemed scarcer except for new Council posters.

  I wondered, sometimes, whether I was drawn to the ruins because I recognized myself in them. We Omegas, in our brokenness, were like those taboo ruins: Dangerous. Contaminating. Reminders of the blast and what it had wrought.

  Although Zach no longer came with me to the silos, or on my other wanderings, I knew he was still observing me more intently than ever. When I came back from the silos, tired from the long walk, he’d smile at me in his watchful way, ask politely about my day. He knew where I’d been but never told our parents, although they would have been furious. But he left me alone. He was like a snake, drawing back before the strike.

  The first time he tried to expose me, he took my favorite doll, Scarlett, the one in the red dress that Mom had sewn. When Zach and I had first been given separate beds, I’d hung on to that doll for comfort at night. Even at twelve, I always slept with Scarlett under one arm, the coarse, plaited wool of her hair reassuringly scratchy against my skin. Then one morning she was gone.

  When I asked about Scarlett at breakfast, Zach was buoyant with triumph. “It’s hidden, outside the village. I took it while Cass was asleep.” He turned to our parents. “If she finds where I buried it, she has to be a seer. It’ll be proof.” Our mother chided him and put a hand on my shoulder, but all day I saw how my parents watched me even more carefully than usual.

  I cried, as I had planned. Seeing the hopeful alertness of my parents made it easy. How keen they were to solve the riddle that Zach and I had become, even if it meant being rid of me. In the evening I pulled from the small toy box an unfamiliar-looking doll with awkwardly chopped short hair and a simple white smock. That night, tucked under my left arm, Scarlett was returned from the toy box exile that I’d imposed on her a week before, when I’d swapped her red dress onto an unfavored doll and hacked off her long hair.

  From then on Scarlett remained secret, in full view, on my bed. I never bothered to go to the lightning-charred willow downstream and dig up the doll in the red dress that Zach had buried there.

  chapter 3

  Downstairs, Mom and Dad were fighting again, the sound of their argument drifting up through the floorboards, insidious as smoke.

  “It’s more of a problem every day,” Dad said.

  Mom’s voice was quieter. “They’re not ‘a problem’—they’re our children.”

  “One of them is,” he replied. A pot clattered loudly on the table. “The other one’s dangerous. Poison. We just don’t know which one.”

  Zach hated to let me see him cry, but the dregs of the candle threw out enough light for me to see the slight shuddering of his back under the blanket. I slipped out from under my quilt. The floorboards creaked slightly as I took the two steps to the edge of Zach’s bed.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” I whispered, putting a hand on his back. “He doesn’t mean to hurt you when he says things like that.”

  He sat up, shrugging off my hand. I was surprised to see he didn’t even try to wipe away the tears. “I’m not hurt by him,” he said. “What he says, it’s all true. You want to pat me on the back, comfort me, act like you’re the caring one? It’s not them hurting me. Not even the other kids, the ones who throw stones. See all of this?” The sweep of his hand took in the sounds from the kitchen below, as well as his own tear-streaked face. “It’s all your fault. You’re the problem, Cass, not them. You’re the reason we’re stuck in this limbo.”

  I was suddenly aware of the cold boards underfoot and the night air on my bare arms.

  “You want to show you really care about me?” he said. “Then tell them the truth. You could end it right away.”

  “Do you really want me sent away? It’s me. I’m not some strange creature. Forget what the Council says about contamination. It’s just me. You know me.”

  “You keep saying that. Why should I think I know you? You’ve never been honest with me. You never told me the truth. You made me figure it out for myself.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” I said. Even admitting as much to him, alone in our room, was risky.

  “Because you didn’t trust me. You want to make out that we’re so close. But you’re the one who’s lied this whole time. You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth. All these years, you left me to wonder. To fear that it might be me who was the freak. And now you think I should trust you?”

  I retreated to my bed. He was still staring at me. Could things ever have been different, if I’d trusted him with the truth? Could we have found a way to share the secret, to make our way together? Had he caught his distrust from me? Maybe that was the poison I’d been carrying—not the contamination of the blast that all Omegas bore, but the secret.

  A tear had settled on the top of his upper lip. It glinted gold in the candlelight.

  I didn’t want him to see the matching tear on my face. I reached out to the table and snuffed the flame.

  “It’s got to end,” he whispered into the darkness. It was half a plea, half a threat.

  His impatience to expose me grew with our father’s illness. Dad fell sick when we’d just turned thirteen. As with the previous year, there was no mention of our birthday—our age had become an increasingly shameful reminder of our unsplit state. That night, Zach had whispered across the bedroom: “You know what day it was today?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Happy birthday,” he said. It was only a whisper, so it was hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic.

  Two days later, Dad collapsed. Dad, who had always seemed as robust and solid as the huge
oak crossbeam that ran the length of the kitchen ceiling. He hauled buckets of water up the well faster than anyone else in the village, and when Zach and I were smaller he could carry us both at once. He still could, I thought, except that he rarely touched us now. Then, in the middle of the paddock on a hot day, he stumbled to his knees. From where I sat, shelling peas on the stone wall at the front of our yard, I heard the shouts of the others working near him in the field.

  That night, after the neighbors had carried him back to the cottage, our mother sent for Dad’s twin, Alice, from the Omega settlement up on the plain. Zach himself went with Mick in the bullock cart to fetch her, returning the next day with our aunt lying in the hay on the back of the cart. We’d never met her before, and looking at her, the only similarity I could see between her and Dad was the fever that currently slickened their flesh. She was thin, with long hair, darker than Dad’s. The coarse brown fabric of her dress had been mended many times and was now flecked with hay. Beneath the strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead we could make out the brand: Omega.

  We cared for her as much as we could, but it was clear from the start that she hadn’t long. We couldn’t allow her in the house, of course, but even her presence in the shed was enough to enrage Zach. On the second day his fury climaxed. “It’s disgusting,” he shouted. “She’s disgusting. How can she be here, with us running around after her like servants? She’s killing him. And it’s dangerous for all of us, having her so close.”

  Mom didn’t bother to hush him, but said calmly, “She’d be killing him more quickly if we’d left her in her own filthy hut.”

  This silenced Zach. He wanted Alice gone, but not at the expense of admitting to Mom what he had told me in bed the night before: what he’d seen at the settlement when he collected Alice. Her small, tidy cottage; the whitewashed walls; the posies of dried herbs hanging above the hearth, just as they hung above ours.

  Mom continued, “If we save her, we save him.”

  It was only at night, when the candle was out and no voices could be heard from Mom and Dad’s room, that Zach would tell me about what he’d seen at the settlement. He told me that other Omegas at the settlement had tried to stop them from taking Alice away—that they’d wanted to keep caring for her there. But no Omega would dare to argue with an Alpha, and Mick had brandished his whip until they backed away.

  “Isn’t it cruel, though, to take her from her family?” I whispered.

  “Omegas don’t have family,” Zach recited.

  “Not children, obviously, but people she loves. Friends, or maybe a husband.”

  “A husband?” He let the word hang. Officially Omegas weren’t allowed to marry, but everyone knew that they still did, although the Council wouldn’t recognize any such unions.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She didn’t live with anyone,” he said. “It was just a few other freaks from her settlement, claiming they knew what was best for her.”

  We’d barely seen Omegas before, let alone spent time in close quarters with one. Little Oscar next door had been sent away as soon as he was branded and weaned. The few Omegas who passed through the area rarely stayed more than a night, camping just downstream of the village. They were itinerants, on the way to try their luck at one of the larger Omega settlements in the south. Or, in years when the harvest had been poor, there’d be Omegas who’d given up on farming the half-blighted land they were permitted to settle on, and were heading to one of the refuges near Wyndham. The refuges were the Council’s concession to the fatal bond between twins. Omegas couldn’t be allowed to starve to death and take their twins with them, so there were refuges near all large towns, where Omegas would be taken in and fed and housed by the Council. Few Omegas went willingly, though—it was a place of last resort, for the starving or sick. The refuges were workhouses, and those who sought their help had to repay the Council’s generosity with labor, working on the farms within the refuge complex until the Council judged the debt repaid. Few Omegas were willing to trade their freedom for the safety of three meals a day.

  I’d gone out with Mom, once, to give some food scraps to one group on their way to the refuge near Wyndham. It was dark, and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mom had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travelers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mom’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.

  Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

  After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

  I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

  My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted, and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mom threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

  One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, “What’s wrong with you?”

  She met his eyes clearly. “It’s the fever. I have the fever—your father, too, now.”

  He scowled. “But before that—what’s wrong with you?”

  Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place but also neatly clipped and clean.

  Zach was impatient. “What? What is it?”

  “Don’t they teach you to count at your school?”

  I said what Zach would not. “We don’t go to school. We can’t—we’ve not been split.”

  He interrupted quickly: “But we can count. We learn at home—numbers, writing, all sorts of things.” His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to
her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

  “That’s my problem, sweetheart,” said Alice. “My toes don’t add up.” She looked at Zach’s deflated face and stopped her grinning. “I suppose there’s more,” she said, almost kindly. “You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped—my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.” She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. “If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?” He didn’t answer. She went on: “And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?”

  Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. “There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumor, a lie.”

  “Then why do you look so scared?”

  I answered this time. “On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burned-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumors of the island.”

  “He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,” Zach added, looking at the door again.

  “And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,” I said, “where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.”

  Alice shrugged. “Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumor. Just a lie.”

  “It is—is a lie, I mean,” hissed Zach. “You need to shut up—you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.”