The Fire Sermon (41 page)

In the treacherous conditions, we had to stop as soon as the light became bad. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the mist had left a pervasive damp over everything. We agreed to risk a fire, but it was hard to find unsoaked wood, as only a few scrappy shrubs risked existence above the tree line. The wood took us half an hour to collect and lasted only long enough to barely cook the rabbit, over a spitting, petulant flame that gave out more smoke than heat. My body was so tired that there was a kind of satisfaction in the weariness, as I lay by the fire stretching my legs and probing the countless aches of my muscles. It was cold, and when I nestled down close to Kip the wet-wool smell of the blankets reminded me of the horses, their musty, organic scent, and those first days on the road together. So many days and weeks, now, with Kip; at least three months, I estimated. The years before—the village, then the settlement, then the Keeping Rooms—felt very distant.

For him, I reminded myself, these recent months were all there was, apart from those indistinct and ghastly memories of the tank. And not only was he unanchored by his past but, strangest of all, he was also adrift without a twin. He was a question without an answer. I knew it was strange, like Zoe had said, that he claimed he didn’t want to know about his twin. I wondered whether our bond had gone any way to filling that void. The symmetry that linked us, ever since his eyes had caught mine through the curved glass of the tank.

But it wasn’t symmetry. I rolled away from him, pulling the blanket higher. Because it wasn’t only the pair of us. His twin might be unknown, but mine was always there, as pressing and vivid as Kip, Kip who lay next to me, breathing the endearingly noisy breath of sleep.

The next day was still wet, but by noon we broke through the mist and found ourselves looking down on a valley entirely hidden by the sulky gray clouds. It was steep, still, but the going was more certain. The boulders and scree were below us, only bare, stark sheets of rock remaining.

I was used to seeing the world as being shaped by the blast: craters wide enough to form their own horizon; piles of rubble; cliffs, even mountains, crumbled like sandbanks. There were places, however, where you could still get a glimpse of the world formed by other, earlier forces. The island had been like that: its crater predated the blast, I was sure. Here, too, the slabs of stone showed the layers formed over many centuries, heaved out of the earth in a way that spoke of long, inexorable shifting.

I felt exposed, the three of us moving across the naked mountain face, but Zoe pointed out that we would be invisible to anyone below the cloud line. “There would have been a road up here, once,” she said. “The climb would have been straightforward, in the Before.”

“There would have been a lot of things,” Kip said.

Within an hour, as the ground plateaued, we began to see signs of it: three metal poles, each leaning nearly parallel to the ground, at precisely the same angle, their melted bases showing where the blast had wrenched them. The foundations of a wall, barely visible along a section of the plateau. And then the city itself, tucked in the hammock of the mountain pass.

Except it wasn’t a city at all. It was more negative space than anything else. The metal rods of building foundations were exposed, bowed like the ribs of dead cattle on the roadside in the drought years. There were some walls and some concrete slabs partly intact, but only ever enough to hint at the shape of a larger structure, now gone.

I’d seen a machine from the Before, years ago at the settlement. I’d known it was risky even to pay the bronze coin to see the traveling show that promised to display a real artifact. But when the exhibit had arrived on its grimy wagon, I lined up and paid, like almost everyone else in the settlement. It was a cool morning, long past harvest. When I reached the front of the queue and the crier’s son ushered me inside the tent, there was a rough plinth in the center, its base showing where the red cloth draped over it failed to meet the tent floor. The crier in the morning had said it was a machine scavenged from a taboo town to the west. At first I thought the machine must be inside the bruised metal box that sat on the plinth. Then the crier ceremoniously opened the lid, and I realized that the machine was the box itself. Inside, the top half contained fragments of what looked like tarnished glass. The bottom half was splintered, a mass of melted blackness. A cord, in parts withered away to a single thread of wire, hung from the box, ending partway down the red cloth. “For the Electric,” the man whispered, confidentially. I’d heard about that, too: how, when the Electric broke in the blast, the Before was stranded. Houses, whole cities, full of forsaken, useless machines, each with its own wistful cord.

Nothing in this mountain town looked as well preserved as that box had been. The strangest thing about the place was the disjunction between the town itself—the desolate, vacant space—and the crowd of impressions that surrounded it. To me, it was almost a roar, the sheer volume of lives that had shared this space. Their absence was as vivid as their presence. It didn’t feel like my visions—not even my visions of the blast. It was more like a residue. It was the resonance of a bell, echoing long after the bell itself has stopped.

I was surprised to look up and see Zoe and Kip unaffected. Both were moving warily among the rubble, and Kip kept looking over his shoulder, but it was evident that neither of them felt the same silent cacophony that was besieging me. Kip noticed me, though, and the way my hands had moved, instinctively and uselessly, to cover my ears. He moved to my side, stepping over a twisted metal beam.

“I guess if you could feel the city from the valley, it must be pretty strong up here?”

I nodded, but didn’t speak.

“It’s all a long time ago, you know.” He took my arm.

I nodded again. “I know. But they don’t. It’s like”—I checked Zoe was too far away to hear me—“like nobody told them they were dead.”

He looked down, turned over a small chunk of concrete with his foot, watched the gray dust rise and settle. “We don’t have to go this way. We can backtrack—go around.”

I shook my head. “It’s OK. I just didn’t expect it to be this strong.”

I kept hold of his arm as we caught up with Zoe and followed her through the wreckage. Some of the time it was clear where the old roads had lain, and the going was easy. Often, however, the road disappeared under rubble, and we had to pick our way through. A number of the buildings had collapsed into their cellars, leaving sinkholes crammed with debris. We were heading more or less through the town’s center. I kept expecting the ruins to come to an end, but the town seemed infinite, and after more than an hour we stopped for a drink, perching on the few remaining stones of a low wall.

“Weird to think that there’re more places like this,” said Kip.

“Heaps more,” Zoe said. “I’ve been to a few.”

“As big as this?”

“Bigger. There’s one, on the south coast, must have been ten times this size. Most of it’s underwater now, but you can still see stuff, if you take a boat out. And some of the tall buildings still poke out of the sea, at low tide.” She passed me the flask, the water warm and barely refreshing.

“So do you think there’s anything in it? The taboo, I mean,” he said.

“All the ruins are just like this.” Zoe waved her arm at the rubble surrounding us. “Useless, rather than scary. There’s not much to be salvaged. The stuff people warn about—the radiation, the dangerous stuff—it might have been true once, but not now.” She tossed a stone against a sheet of iron half-buried in dust. It gave an apathetic clang. “Now it’s just a heap of junk. But people are scared of it because of what it stands for: the Before, the blast. All of that.”

“And the machines?”

“None of them work anyway. Even if you could piece some of them together, they’d still need the Electric.”

“They have it, you know,” I said. “The Alphas, in Wyndham. Not just in the tank rooms, but in my cell. The other cells, too, and some of the corridors.”

I told her what I’d told Piper, about the glass ball hanging from the ceiling of my cell. Its unwavering, cold light.

She nodded. “I thought as much. There’d be an uproar if people ever found out, but I’m sure they’ve been dabbling in that stuff for years. I’m just surprised they haven’t done more of it. People say that in the Before there were traveling machines, flying machines, a whole lot of stuff I bet some on the Council would love to build again, if the people would stand for it. But the fear runs too deep, after the blast. The Council knows better than to risk another purge.”

We both turned at the same time, at the strangled shriek of metal as Kip heaved open what was left of a door, leading into a concrete structure largely submerged in the earth. Zoe’s hand went straight to her knives, but nothing followed the sound but a haze of dust, rising briefly then settling, anointing Kip’s hair, eyebrows, and shoulders with a chalky white.

She sighed, turning back to me. “He could make more noise, but only if I gave him a drum and a trumpet.”

But I was still watching Kip. I saw how he had frozen. How his hand, powder-dusted and taut, still gripped the door. When I reached him he still hadn’t moved. It took me a while to make out what he was staring at, particularly as Zoe, joining us, blocked out the last of the light from the doorway. When I did see what was inside, for a moment I didn’t understand why Kip had reacted like that. It looked innocuous at first: a cabinet mounted on the wall, its cover blasted or fallen off. From inside it, snaking out into the darkened room, was a mass of wires, their colors faded but still distinct: red, blue, yellow. Some were bundled together, others hung loose. It wasn’t a dramatic sight: just another piece of detritus from the unfamiliar world of the Before.

That’s when I realized it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I remembered the wires snaking along the wall above the tanks. Bundled together in places, elsewhere branching out like ungainly ivy. The wires, the cords, the tubes. And the scar in Kip’s wrist, perfectly round and still visible, where one of the tubes had entered his body.

When I tried to pull him away from the door, his whole body was stiff. I had to wrap both arms around him and haul him back into the light, as Zoe moved out of our way. When I maneuvered around to face him, still in my arms, his eyes remained fixed on the doorway. He was completely silent, his face expressionless.

“Shut it. Shut the damned door,” I said.

Zoe responded quickly. From behind me, I could hear the squeal and thump of the door as it closed. I didn’t move, didn’t take my eyes from Kip’s face. I remembered the first time I’d seen it. His eyes, back then, meeting mine through the tank’s glass, had been more animated than they were now as he stared blankly over my shoulder. For the minutes that we stood there, he didn’t speak or move.

Zoe broke the silence. “We’ve been in the open too long. If he’s going to have a breakdown, he’ll have to wait until we find some cover.”

I was thankful that she asked no questions. Between us, we half steered, half dragged Kip through the debris, taking shelter finally in an alcove between two collapsed concrete slabs. Around us, as in much of the city, small plants had taken root. Big trees wouldn’t grow at this height, but vines and creepers had infiltrated the cracks of the concrete.

“You want to explain what that was about?” Her question was addressed to me, but Kip replied.

“It was the same as the tank room. The wires and stuff.” He looked up apologetically. “I guess I never expected to see something like that again.”

Zoe raised an eyebrow. “It was the same?”

“Not the same,” I said. “Not the tanks, or anything like that. But the wires—there were wires like that all over the room, when I found him.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Piper saw a team of Council soldiers, once, in a taboo town out west. Shifting stuff out, taking it away by the cartload.”

“But the tanks, where you found me,” Kip said. “I never heard about anything like that, from the Before.”

“I’m not saying they had machines just like those ones. But the technology the Alphas are building on—look around you,” Zoe said. “It’s from the Before. All that stuff Cass told Piper about—the tanks, the tubes, the machines—you really think The Reformer and his Council mates just knocked that up with an anvil and a bit of thatch? Come on. They might not dare to go public with any of it, but they’ve been perfecting this stuff for years—it’s all from the Before.”

“But they’re the ones who enforce the taboo,” he said. “If the Council wanted to use things from the Before, wouldn’t they just change the law?”

I shook my head. “Think about what you were saying before, about why you didn’t want to come into a taboo town. It’s not about the law. People hate this stuff—anything to do with the Before. They’ll never embrace it, or anything to do with it. The Council couldn’t let people know they’re using it.”

“Or,” added Zoe, “they want to make sure they’re the only ones using it.”

“Both, probably,” I said.

Kip was still looking pale, but Zoe was insistent that we’d halted too long already. As we moved off through the outskirts of the vanished city, the light was leaching from the sky, and the ruins were casting long, jagged shadows in the dust.