The Fire Sermon (42 page)

“How long to the meeting place?” Kip asked.

“We can reach it tonight, if there’s enough moonlight to see by.”

He nodded. I knew he was longing to rest, to close his eyes against the world that had ambushed him with the memory of the tank rooms. But it was equally clear that Zoe wouldn’t pause. Moonlight or not, I knew we’d be walking tonight until we reached the meeting place. I tried to make my mind grope ahead for some hint of whether Piper would be there, but my thoughts were still too muddied by the clamorous dead, and by my awareness of Kip’s clenched hand in my own.

There was something else, too: the wires and cables that had set Kip off had resonated in my mind as well. They’d reminded both of us of the tank room. But for me they’d also evoked that other room, the one I’d snatched a glimpse of from within the Confessor’s mind, on my last day in the Keeping Rooms. When Kip had frozen at the sight of those wires, I’d seen that room again, only this time I recognized it. Not the wires that clambered up the walls, but the walls themselves: the precise curve of them. I’d never been inside the room before, I was certain. But I was equally certain that I knew the place from outside. The old silos that Zach and I used to go to as children.

chapter 28

If the climb had been exhausting, the descent had its own challenges. The moon did its best, but once we reached the tree line we were walking mainly in darkness, stumbling often. Zoe was sure of the way, or reckless with anticipation, leading us with unhesitating speed. I’d been worried about whether Kip could keep going so long, but he seemed to welcome the frantic pace, the distraction necessitated by keeping up, scrambling through trees and among boulders. Several times I heard him stumble or skid, heard the scatter of stones and the grunt of breath as he grazed the ground, or struck out and clutched at something to hold him upright.

Zoe froze. In the darkness we didn’t know she’d paused until Kip and I almost stumbled over her. She didn’t need to hush us; the sudden and total stillness of her body was warning enough. In the silence that followed I was acutely aware of how noisy our progress had been before.

Worse, I realized at the same time that we weren’t the only ones waiting in the darkness. To our left, deep in the condensed black of night, something among the trees shifted, paused, shifted again. The day had been such a concatenation of terrors that I couldn’t even tell what I feared most: Alpha pursuers, or the taboo town’s unquiet dead, somehow revived by darkness. Beside me, Kip held his breath. I felt, as much as saw, Zoe slowly raise an arm and jerk her thumb backward. I ventured a step in retreat, and felt Kip doing the same beside me. But I was still staring at Zoe’s hand. Backlit by moonlight I could see the silhouette of her knife, poised to throw.

“Stop.” My voice shocked me as much as the others. The realization had come so suddenly, and so certainly, that I didn’t pause to think. “It’s Piper.”

He stepped forward, barely twenty feet from us, a shape emerging from the darkness and only recognizable by his voice.

“I like to think she would have checked before she let that knife fly,” he said.

“Don’t count on it,” said Zoe. “You’ll get us both killed, sneaking around at night like that.” She moved toward him. They didn’t embrace, or even touch, but even in the nearly total darkness, I felt that I should look away.

It lasted only a few moments. As I stood, my face turned to Kip’s shoulder, I heard Piper move toward us. He reached out, cupped my face with his hand, turned it to him. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but I could feel him inspecting me. He searched my face with the intentness of a lover. Or of a buyer at market, checking for flaws. He swept his thumb along the top of my cheekbone, pressing firmly, as if reassuring himself even of my bones. When he finally exhaled, his breath was warm on my cheek, even while my hand was still in Kip’s.

Piper didn’t take his eyes off my face. “Thank you for keeping her safe.”

“I didn’t, really,” said Kip.

“I was talking to my sister.” He dropped his hand, turned to Kip. “You made it, too, I see.”

“I never thought I’d come to see you as the charming one of the family,” Kip said to Zoe, who had joined us.

“Tell us what happened on the island,” she said.

Piper shook his head. “Not now. We need to keep moving. I’m not the only one who could have found you.”

She nodded. “We’re almost at the meeting spot anyway. We’ll get settled there for the night.” They moved off in unison.

Kip and I followed. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it,” he whispered to me.

“Seen what?”

“Twins together.”

I knew what he meant. I, too, had been mesmerized by the pair ahead: the symmetry of their movements, the perfect match of pace. They could be each other’s shadow.

After less than half an hour, as the descent was becoming steeper and rockier, Zoe and Piper led us sharply south, following a rock ridge that mounted higher to our right. The cave itself was well hidden by ivy and low scrub. When Zoe had wrenched back the ivy and we’d squeezed inside, Piper and Zoe couldn’t stand without hunching, but there was space for the four of us to lie.

The darkness in there was complete, and it seemed to make every noise more acute. As Kip and I were getting settled, brushing loose rocks from beneath us and shaking out the blanket, I could hear each movement as Zoe and Piper did the same. In the small space, our blanket’s reek of wet and burned wool was noticeable. I feared my own smell would be just as obvious. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed properly. Even the hasty rinse in the river was days ago now. I knew that Kip’s face, by daylight, had taken on a veneer of dirt, darker in the creases around his eyes and on his neck.

The others were quickly settled, clearly used to the place. I could understand, now, Piper’s preference for the tiny antechamber on the island, the thin, rolled-up mattress.

“Tell us what happened,” I said.

He spoke quietly, sounding exhausted. “Wouldn’t you rather sleep than hear the details?”

“If I sleep, I’ll only dream about it anyway.”

Zoe sighed. “You’d better tell us now then. If she’s seeing stuff in her sleep again, none of us will get any rest at all.”

“OK.” There was a long pause. “Well, it was better than you’d predicted, in some ways. Numberswise, I mean—because we’d managed to get the second sailing safely away.”

“And in other ways?” I asked.

“Worse, obviously. Because of what they did with those they’d caught.”

“But when we were on the island they were taking prisoners, mainly, from what we could see. They were holding back.”

“I know.” Piper shifted on the stone floor. “They weren’t killing—not at first. They had all the prisoners herded together in the courtyard, after they’d taken the fort’s outer walls. We’d had to draw back to the upper levels. I was on the ramparts. I could see everything. They had them all tied up, even the injured. They kept checking them against a list, one by one. Looking for certain features. Some they took aside, then down to the ships. The others they just killed there and then. Slit their throats, in a row, with the other prisoners waiting, while the woman with the list moved down the line. Checking.”

I could see it, as he described it. I’d seen glimpses already, on the first night back on the mainland, when I’d woken Kip with my screaming. But, like most of my visions, that had been a series of indistinct impressions. Now, Piper’s words were solidifying what I had seen, and painting in color what had been a blurred and gray sequence of moments.

“How could they possibly know who was who? And who their twins were?” said Zoe. “It’s not as if you had registration papers on the island.”

“Don’t underestimate how much information they have,” he said. “We’ve long thought that they’d be building a list of who they suspected of being on the island—the way they’re keeping tabs on Omegas these days, it’s harder and harder just to disappear. But that’s not how they knew who to kill,” he said. “Or not all of it.”

“The woman with the list,” I said, watching it unfold from behind my closed eyelids. “It was her.”

“I couldn’t see her brand from the ramparts,” he said, “but it had to be the Confessor. You could see it in the way the soldiers kept their distance from her—she wasn’t an Alpha. But they followed her orders all right. She was checking the prisoners against a list, but often she’d also lean over them, or put her hand on their head, with her eyes shut. Once she had what she needed, a nod from her was all it took, and the soldiers would step in, cut the throat.”

I saw it all. Her nods were somehow more brutal than the soldiers’ blades on flesh. She was so casual about it—giving a nearly imperceptible jerk of the head to the waiting soldiers, as she already turned to move on to the next prisoner.

Zoe spoke first. “How many got off the island?”

“More than two-thirds got away clean, on the boats. All the children, and nearly all the civilians. But the second sailing was in too much of a rush, and overloaded, too. One of the ships foundered in the reef. We managed to save three of them, in the children’s dinghies, before we hid them in the caves.” He laughed bleakly. “Much good it did those three—they were on the island when the Alphas arrived that night.”

In the silence, my memories of the battle replayed in my mind, so vividly that I could again smell blood and wine. I knew that Kip and Piper would be revisiting it, too.

“You saw how the battle started,” he said. “After you left, it went a lot like you’d warned. The north tunnel fell after midnight, like you’d said, but we’d set up barricades beyond it. They’d overrun the whole caldera. A lot of the fighting was done in the streets—at close quarters. But they were so cautious—the Alphas, I mean. They were killing, but not indiscriminately. A lot of the time they used fire, to flush people out.”

“And in the end?” Zoe was insistent.

“We were just overrun. And after a while, it was clear there was nothing left to defend. They’d burned the city, blocked the tunnels. They’d breached the main gate into the fort; we were only just holding the upper levels. After they’d slaughtered most of the prisoners in the courtyard, there must have been ninety of us left, alive and uncaptured, against maybe six hundred of them. We’d never have got out of the fort alive, if they weren’t holding back from killing. I’d never have thought I’d be grateful for the Confessor.” He spat her name. “But they didn’t kill anyone if they could help it, not until they’d got them tied up and checked by her. So when we made that final break out of the fort, in the dark, they were holding back. The smoke helped, too—they’d burned half the city by then. But they thought they had us trapped, anyway. They didn’t know about the boats in the caves, so when we made it over the lip of the crater, they regrouped to protect the harbor. When we headed for the eastern side, they must’ve thought we were going to swim for it.” Again, that bleak laugh. “They’re not sailors, that’s for sure. Once we’d launched the rafts and canoes into the reef, their big ships couldn’t get near us, and quite a few of their landing craft foundered when they tried coming after us. They couldn’t catch us, even in our ridiculous boats. We were the raggediest fleet you ever saw, and we’d never have made it to the mainland. But we know the reef backward, and they couldn’t make any headway in the dark. And out past the reef, at anchor, their own fleet was hardly manned, except for the ship with the prisoners. We boarded two of their ships before they knew what was going on. The others hadn’t even enough crew on board to come after us. But I think they’d figured, by then, that they weren’t going to find what they were looking for.”

“How could they know?” asked Kip.

“The Confessor would know,” I said. “She’d feel it, I’m sure.”

“Maybe. But they didn’t even need her. They just asked.”

“I didn’t realize you were on such chummy terms.”

Piper ignored Kip’s interruption. “It was when they’d rounded up all the prisoners, before they started to kill them. The soldiers shouted up from the courtyard.”

In the silence that followed, I knew what he would say next.

“They said they’d spare them, if we handed you both over.”

I felt Kip’s rushed exhalation on my shoulder. I closed my eyes, but in the darkness it made no difference.

I woke early, surprised that I’d managed to sleep at all. I didn’t want to face the others, so I was relieved to hear nothing but sleeping breaths in the cave. But when I’d forced my way through the vines at the entrance, wet with dew, I saw Piper was already out, methodically sharpening one of his knives against the rock on which he sat.

I hadn’t seen him by daylight since the island. The sky was now only hinting at dawn, but there was enough light to make out his wounds: one eye two-thirds closed under a fat swelling, and a long gash on his arm.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. Zoe hardly felt it,” he said. “And the eye was just an accident—I copped an oar in the face when we were scrambling to get the little boats down from the caves.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” I said.

He looked at me, gave a half smile. “Not much point trying to, it seems.” He touched the edge of the swelling around the eye. “We both knew it was a risk, letting you go. When I told the Assembly what I’d done, a few of them let me know how they felt about it. I have Simon to thank for the black eye.”