The Fire Sermon (32 page)

“Really? Because on the scale of things to apologize for, surely condemning someone to near-certain death has to be up there.”

I was silent.

“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I sat up. “Can I come over there?”

“Sure—though I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.”

He shifted over to make room. I lay on my back, so he rolled onto his back, too, but we were pressed tightly against each other.

“I like it when you lie on that side of me,” he said. “When I feel your arm, next to me like that, it sort of feels like having an arm on that side.”

“I picked this side because it stops you getting handsy.” We both laughed.

“Why aren’t you angrier at me?” he said, after a while.

“Because he was right.”

“Piper? You’re defending him now, after how he played us?”

“Oh, he’s not right about everything. But he was right about you.”

“Yeah. That I’m an idiot.”

“No. That you’d do whatever it took to protect me.”

The next day the door remained locked. The sentry outside ignored our shouted requests for information. In the afternoon, a watchman opened the door and stood guard while another stepped inside. Kip jumped to his feet, rushed in front of me.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Piper’s not going to send someone else to do it.”

The watchman placed a tray on the table by the door and left without speaking.

“He’ll do it himself,” I said.

“How can you be so sure?” said Kip, picking up the tray and bringing it to my bed.

“He’s not a coward.”

“Yes, because nothing would show courage like killing an unarmed prisoner.”

After two more days locked up, I demanded that the sentry pass on a message to Piper asking that we at least be allowed out for air. No answering message came, but in the late afternoon four watchmen came and escorted us both up to the tower, and stood waiting in the stairs below.

I stood at the battlement, looking down. The city looked the same as it had a few days before, when I’d stood there with Piper. But now it was a prison rather than a haven.

“Maybe it would be for the best,” I said. “They get rid of me, they get rid of Zach. Rationally, I can’t argue with it.”

“Don’t be so stupid. It’s not irrational, or selfish, to not want to be killed.”

“I’m not being stupid. It seems like quite an obvious answer, actually: he’s behind all this stuff. The things they did to you, and others. We don’t know how many—maybe hundreds, thousands. So if you do the math, it seems like an easy answer: my life against theirs.”

“It’s not a math problem, Cass. It’s not that simple.”

“That’s what I was saying to Piper, not so long ago. But what if it does come down to calculation? What if I’m only making it more complicated because that gets me off the hook?”

Kip sighed. “Sometimes I can’t believe that you’re meant to be this crash-hot seer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, since when have you worried about getting yourself off the hook? You’ve never worried about that. You smashed me out of that tank instead of just getting out of there—that could’ve landed you back in the Keeping Rooms. The same goes for all the times since then that I’ve slowed you down.”

“But when it comes to the core issue—the problem the island’s facing, the problem that put you in the tank in the first place—I could solve it right now.”

I gestured at the drop in front of us. One hundred feet below us, the city was going about its business.

“You won’t do it,” Kip said, getting up and walking back toward the stairs. “You think Piper would let us up here if he thought there was a chance you’d jump? He’s right about that, although he’s got the reasoning wrong. He thinks you’re protecting yourself. Thinks that’s why you tried to keep Zach’s identity secret.”

“And you think he’s wrong?”

“Of course I do.” He didn’t even turn around as he replied. “You’re not protecting yourself. You’re protecting Zach.”

I called after him. “Isn’t that just a different kind of selfishness? A different kind of cowardice?”

He looked back at me from the top step. “You’ve always imagined a world where twins don’t have to hate each other. An unsplit world, where we wouldn’t even need a place like the island. Maybe it’s cowardice. Or maybe it’s a kind of courage.”

My nights had always been broken by visions, but that night each time the sentry shifted outside our door, I pictured the small knives at Piper’s belt. Kip couldn’t sleep, either; I could feel him tensing at each sound from the door or window. When we kissed it wasn’t the same delirious haze of that first kiss, or the gentle explorations of the following weeks, as we’d settled into this new intimacy. Now there was a sense of urgency: that at any moment it could be over. The key in the lock, the knife blade. And the idea of my own death was crueler to me, now, because Kip and I had only just discovered each other. Because there were parts of his neck I hadn’t yet kissed, and because the feeling of my fingers clutching his hair was still a novelty. Such little things to grieve for, I told myself, in the face of all the years I’d lived, and everything I stood to lose. But in the bed that night they didn’t feel trivial, and when I cried it wasn’t for the imminent knife blade but for the loss of his hand on my skin, the tender abrasiveness of his stubble on my shoulder.

Piper sent for me in the morning. The watchman took me without speaking, leading me swiftly from the room before Kip and I could exchange anything more than a glance.

I was led into the Assembly Hall, where a number of the Assembly were gathered. Simon was there, and I recognized several of the other men and women. Over the last couple of weeks, they’d questioned me at length, but not aggressively or without sympathy. Now, instead of greeting me, they fell silent when I entered. Even Simon stood quietly, all three arms crossed against his chest. Piper wasn’t in his usual seat at the table near the door. The watchman guided me through to an antechamber at the other end of the Hall. It was a tiny room, not much more than a cupboard, but I saw by the maps pinned on the walls and the comfortable clutter that Piper had made it his base. In the corner a sleeping mat was clumsily rolled, a blanket shoved beside it.

“This is where you sleep?”

“Sometimes.” When the door had opened, Piper had risen quickly from the stool. He waved the watchman away, stepped across the small room himself to shut the door behind me. He stood with his back to the door, pointed me toward the stool. The knives still hung from his belt.

“Surely you, of all people, would have proper quarters?” I sat, glancing over at the sleeping mat in the corner. There was something touching about his hurried attempt to tidy it away. “A proper bed, at least?”

He shrugged. “I have quarters upstairs. But I like to be here, closer to the barracks, closer to all this.” He gestured at the mess. Some of the maps were held to the wall not by tacks but by throwing knives, jabbed into the rich tapestries that upholstered the room. “Anyway,” he went on, “it’s not important.”

“OK,” I said.

He leaned his head against the back of the door. For the first time, I sensed he was nervous. I knew, then, that he hadn’t brought me here to kill me.

“You didn’t send for me to talk about your sleeping arrangements.”

“No,” he replied, but said nothing further.

“We could talk about my sleeping arrangements, then. About the fact that Kip and I are still locked in, a guard at the door.”

“And the window,” he said calmly.

“I should be flattered that you think we need so many.”

He raised a dark eyebrow. “You think you could take on one of those men? You and Kip?” He laughed.

“We got this far,” I pointed out.

He exhaled impatiently. “The guards aren’t there to stop you getting out.”

It took me a few seconds to understand. I remembered the stares of the Assembly in the Hall outside. I knew now what it reminded me of: the expression on the faces of the children I encountered on the day I left my parents’ village.

“How many know who my twin is?”

“Only the Assembly, so far,” he said. “But how long it can stay that way, I don’t know.”

“They want me dead.”

“You’ve got to understand.” There was only one stool, so he sat down on the bed roll opposite me, and leaned in close. “Lewis, my oldest adviser—”

“I know Lewis,” I said. I remembered the impressive, gray-bearded man, perhaps fifty, who had questioned me many times.

“His niece—his twin’s Omega child who Lewis has cared for since her birth—she’s one of the ones who was taken. Why do you think he pressed you so hard for details of what you saw in the tanks where you found Kip?”

“I only saw a handful of people,” I said, angry at the weight of this unsuspected responsibility. “He couldn’t expect me to have seen them all—there were so many.”

“Exactly,” Piper whispered urgently. “There are so many. Branded, taken, killed. Everyone out there has lost someone because of the Reformer. Everyone on this island knows he’s looking for us. Have you heard the games the children play?
Come out and play, come out and play—
”

“He’s coming to take you away.”
Without thinking, I completed the chant, familiar from the cries that had drifted up from the city to our window every morning and evening when the children played in the streets.

Piper nodded. “It’s him they’re playing at—the Reformer. There are other Councilors with aggressively anti-Omega policies—the General in particular. But none like the Reformer. When the children on the island wake up at night, shouting from a nightmare, it’s him they’re thinking of.”

I almost laughed at the impossibility of reconciling Zach with that nightmarish figure. Zach, who had burned his finger on a griddle and cried. Zach, who had sidled behind Dad’s legs when a bull was led through the market square. But my laugh never formed. I knew, somehow, that they were the same thing: Zach’s fear, as a child, and the fear I recognized in the children’s chant. One was the source of the other. All the things that I knew about Zach—the memory of how gently he had cleaned my burn after the branding; his body shaking with tears when our father was dying—were deeply buried now. I believed in them—the same way I had believed in the sky during my years in the cell. But I knew what he’d done—I’d seen it myself, manifested in the unanswerable glass and steel of the tank rooms. In the bones that lay in the grotto. I couldn’t expect that anybody else would understand the tenderness and fear that lay beneath the Reformer. And I knew that nobody would deny it more ferociously than Zach himself. The Reformer was his creation. What remained of the boy who had reached for my hand, outside the shed where Alice lay dying, and begged for my help? I’d kept my faith with the sky in the Keeping Rooms, and I’d emerged from the cell to find the sky waiting, unchanged. But did that frightened boy, my brother, still exist somewhere within the Reformer? And could I keep my faith with him, without betraying Piper, and the island?

I met Piper’s eyes. “Are you trying to justify why you’re going to have to kill me?”

He leaned forward, his voice an urgent, whispered hiss. “I need you to justify why I shouldn’t. Give me a reason that I can take to the Assembly, to Simon and Lewis and the others, to explain why I haven’t done it already.”

Again the weight of exhaustion settled on me. I felt as though I were being eroded, worn away like the stone of the island itself, where it met the sea. “This island is meant to be the one place where we don’t have to justify our right to exist.”

“Don’t lecture me about this island. I’m trying to protect it—it’s my job.”

“But when you kill me, or lock me away, this won’t even be the island anymore. It’ll just be the Keeping Rooms with a sea view. The Assembly will just be a Council, by another name. And you’ll have become just like Zach.”

“I have a responsibility to the people here.” He looked away from me.

“But not to me.”

“You’re one person. I’m responsible for all these people.”

“That’s what I said to Kip. And he said it wasn’t that simple: that it’s not a question of numbers.”

“Of course he said that. He doesn’t have my job.”