The Fire Sermon (44 page)

Despite this new purposefulness, Kip himself was edgy. He spoke less, even at night when the two of us curled together, away from Piper and Zoe. I thought his new silences might just be the result of exhaustion. But we’d been exhausted before—he and I had been pursued across the country and back, and he’d never been so hushed. This new silence, which he carried with him like a weight, had been with him only since the taboo town on the mountaintop. The wires there had taken him back to the tanks, and he hadn’t fully emerged. Perhaps I’d underestimated, over our months together, what the tanks had done to him. It was easy to forget, among his quips and his lopsided smile, what he had lived through. His physical recovery had been so quick. His body was strong now, despite his leanness, and his movements had little of the initial clumsiness the tanks had left him with. But his raw panic in that mountaintop ruin, snaked with wires, had reminded me that something was still broken. Something that all the days we’d spent together, and all the nights, couldn’t even begin to heal.

One morning he whispered to me, so quietly that in my half sleep I could hardly hear it.

“What if it comes back to me, and I don’t like what I remember?”

I rolled closer to him. Under my hand, his heart was beating too quickly, a trapped thing. “What if I’m not a good person?” he went on. “What if I remember, and the person I was isn’t someone I want to be?”

“Do you remember something?”

I felt him shake his head. “No. But we’ve always assumed that remembering my past would be a good thing. What if it’s not?”

I patted his chest slowly, coaxing his pulse to keep time with my hand. So many times, when I’d woken screaming from visions, he’d patted my back the same way. What had I offered him? What had I given him to fill his hollow memory, except the burden of my own horror-filled nights, and the new horrors of pursuit and battle?

“You choose who you are,” I said.

“You believe that?”

I nodded into his shoulder.

“I know you, Kip.”

As the dry plains receded and the network of rivers began to spread its grasp, there were more signs of habitation. At first, just a few settlements in the dry but still arable land. These were meager Omega outposts, some consisting of only a few shacks, but we still kept a safe distance, skirting each settlement widely and not lighting fires at night. Then, as the land grew richer, the Alpha habitations appeared: groomed fields and orchards surrounding large buildings. We saw people at work in the fields, or riding on the roads. But the country remained open enough for us to make our nocturnal way, unseen, avoiding the busiest roads even at night.

Two nights from Wyndham, there was a safe house, Piper and Zoe said. A lone Omega house in a damp valley, owned by a couple sympathetic to the resistance. Somewhere we could sleep indoors, wash, take shelter from the scrutiny of the open spaces. All through that night’s journey I imagined the feeling of lying in a soft bed again. The luxury of being oblivious to weather. But when we crested the valley, just before dawn, we were greeted by nothing but charred beams, some still smoking, and a puddle, black with ash.

“Somebody got careless,” Piper said, as we crouched just below the crest of the hill. “I was afraid this would happen, after the raid on the island: too many refugees, getting desperate, seeking shelter. The Alphas must have spotted something, found them out.”

“Or somebody gave them up,” said Zoe. “The hostages they took, maybe, from the island.”

“Maybe.” Piper peered down at the wreckage. “I don’t think we can risk getting any closer; it could be watched.” He turned to me. “Is there anyone alive down there?”

I shook my head. No feeling emanated from the valley, only the smoke. “I can’t sense anyone. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been killed. They might have been taken.” Since the discovery of the tanks, that idea was hardly comforting.

“We need to move on,” said Piper. “Find cover. But it’s looking more and more like what I feared. The whole network might have been cracked open.”

Two days later we drew within sight of Wyndham. I realized that I’d never seen it from the outside. My hooded, night arrival had shown me nothing, and my only subsequent impressions had been from the ramparts of the fort, above the city. Now, approaching from the west, with the sun beginning to rise ahead of us, the city reared up, buildings clinging to the hill like mussels on a rock, right up to the fort. Beneath the fort, the river emerged from the hillside and meandered its way downstream to the north. Just a day or so’s journey downstream, the silos waited for us. Farther downstream was my childhood village, and my mother. Our mother. And on the southern side of the mountain, hidden from sight now, wound the other river, which I couldn’t think of without gratitude: the river that Kip and I had followed in those first days of escape, months before.

Zoe looked appraisingly at the city’s peak. “That fort’s full of soldiers, and the three of you are on top of their wanted list. The city’s crawling with them, too.”

“What about you?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It depends how much they’ve penetrated the network, since the attack. We’ve done our best, but you can’t do what I’ve done for years without some people getting word of it. For years I’ve been escorting refugees to the pickup points, helping with rescues, meeting and sending messengers. With the hostages the Council took, chances are that somebody will have squealed by now. They might not know about me being Piper’s twin, but my guess is that they’ve got some idea of who I am, what I do.”

“But they won’t be expecting us to have come back here, of all places,” said Piper.

“Don’t underestimate the Confessor,” I warned. “But I think you’re right: they know we were on the island only recently. I don’t think they’d expect us to have headed back here, let alone so quickly.”

For most of the day we rested, under cover of a scrubby copse, and when we set off in the afternoon we avoided the roads. By the time darkness was sloping into the valley, we’d skirted north of the city to join the river, me leading the way.

“How far downstream do you think?” Piper asked.

“A day’s walk, I’d guess. The silos were half a day upstream from our village, and Wyndham about a day farther upstream—far enough away that we never went there.”

It must have been a few hours past midnight when we passed the small, slumbering outpost where the gorge left the river. It wasn’t much more than a stable block and a single, long barracks, topped by an Alpha flag hanging slackly in the still night air. The garrison hadn’t been there when I was a child.

“Room there for fifty soldiers, maybe more,” said Piper. “These kinds of outposts are springing up more and more these days.”

An hour beyond that, having made our way up the rock-strewn gorge, we came within sight of the three silos. Round, flat-roofed, and huge, they blocked the stars behind them. They were still windowless, as I’d remembered them, but were now connected to one another by walkways near the top. Where the doorways used to gape open, now a closed door was visible at the base of each silo: an oblong of dark metal against the pale, moon-washed concrete of the buildings.

“They’re from the Before?” Kip asked.

I nodded. “The doors are new, and the walkways at the top. But otherwise it looks the same as when we used to come here.”

“Why aren’t they guarded?” Zoe spoke quietly.

“The same reason they’re hidden all the way out here, miles from Wyndham. They don’t want anyone to know about it. Plus it’s taboo, so it’s not as if they need to worry about random visitors wandering in. There’re the barracks nearby, but this is Zach and the Confessor’s pet project. They don’t trust anyone.”

“Even if we don’t have guards to worry about, what about the doors?”

Zoe grinned. “I already told you how Piper and I got by, as kids. I’ve been picking locks since I was ten. I can get us in there.”

“You can let me and Kip in,” I said, “but you’re not coming with us.”

She rolled her eyes. “First you didn’t want to get involved in the resistance, and now you’re going to do the whole martyr thing?”

“It’s not a martyr thing. If it were, I wouldn’t drag Kip into it. This isn’t going to be a battle. It’s a machine, not an army base. I told you, Zach’s too paranoid to trust soldiers here.”

Piper shook his head. “But he’s not stupid. You shouldn’t go in alone.”

“I won’t be alone—I’ll have Kip. That’s our best chance: keeping it small, keeping it quick. I’ll know where to go, what to do.”

“It makes sense,” Zoe turned to Piper. “Think about it: if they get taken out, we’ll still be able to carry on with our work.”

“Nice to know you care,” said Kip.

“But she’s right,” I said. “The resistance is falling apart since the attack. There are refugees from the island being chased by bounty hunters and soldiers; the network of safe houses is collapsing. What Kip and I are going to do here, it matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters. You and Zoe need to get things back on track.”

He looked at me appraisingly. “You don’t need to make up for what happened on the island.”

“Just get us in there.”

“Then what?”

“When we get out, we’re going to need to get away, as far from here as we can. And quickly, too, before the dawn. Do you think you could make it back to the Council outpost, get hold of some horses, without raising an alarm?”

Zoe nodded. “We could be back within the hour, meet you at the neck of the gorge, where there’s some cover. But we can’t hang around—not so close to the barracks. If we take horses, the alarm will be raised as soon as the soldiers are up. If you’re not back by dawn, we’ll have to leave.”

“Ever the sentimentalist,” said Kip.

“It goes both ways,” said Piper. “If we’re not there, go on without us. Head east. As far as the deadlands if necessary.”

I murmured my assent as I tightened the straps of the rucksack. Piper checked I still had his knife at my belt. Kip’s hand, too, kept returning to the knife at his own belt. We approached the silos slowly. For the last fifty yards there was no cover; even the sparse bushes that lined much of the gorge had thinned out. But there were no windows in the silos to overlook our approach. Only the same sense of surveillance that I always felt: the unrelenting scrutiny of the Confessor, seeking me.

I led us to the door of the largest silo. There was no handle in the studded steel, just the lock. Piper pressed his ear to the door, waited several moments, then nodded at Zoe. She knelt, pulled from among the knives on her belt a tiny metal tool, and fiddled for a few seconds with the lock. Her tongue emerged from the corner of her mouth, and she closed her eyes. Her hand moved swiftly and jerkily. It reminded me of Kip when he slept: how his body alternated between twitches and stillness. Two seconds later, there was the satisfying click of the lock giving way.

Zoe stood. There were no big farewells, just the meeting of eyes in the darkness.

“Neck of the gorge, before dawn,” Piper said, briefly brushing my arm.

“Before dawn,” I repeated, like an incantation. Then Piper and Zoe stepped back into the night, and I turned to the unlocked door.

chapter 30

I remembered the noise in the tank rooms, how it had surprised me. The silo was the same, though louder. Inside, it was one huge room, a spiral staircase running up one side, leading to a small platform near the roof. Banked five feet thick all around the walls were the machines. Hundreds, I thought at first. But when I arched my neck back to trace their climb up to the ceiling, I saw that there were thousands. Around the edge of the floor huge black boxes hummed, each one disgorging hundreds of cables that then spread their way like cobwebs up the machine-stacked walls. Electric lights were suspended from the ceiling, but not much light penetrated to the floor two hundred feet below, where we stood. The little light that did reach us fell in intricate, trellised patterns from the cables that crisscrossed the hollow room. After the coolness outside, the heat in the silo was pressing and static. When my arm brushed against one of the machines, the metal casing was hot.

Kip already had his knife in his hand. “So we just start cutting wires?”

“No.” I looked around. “I mean, it couldn’t hurt, but it won’t be enough—they’ll be able to fix that kind of damage. We need to get at the heart of it—into the system.”

“Where would you start?” He began to spin around, slowly, head back, scanning the immense mass of metal, punctuated by the occasional blip of a flashing light. But I hadn’t moved, my eyes still fixed on the highest point, the platform at the top of the stairs. The wires emanating from it were in such thick clusters that they’d been bound together, forming muscular boughs of cable.

He followed my gaze up the precipitous stairs, and sighed. “Once. Just once, couldn’t it be easy?” I smiled ruefully. “But we can do some damage while we’re down here, at least,” he added. He took an experimental swipe at a nearby cable, leaping back and dropping the knife when a blue arc sparked. “It couldn’t hurt, you said?”

“I wasn’t speaking literally.” I looked nervously at my own knife. “Maybe if we just pull the cables out?”