The Fire Sermon (45 page)

“No,” he said, picking up the knife. “It startled me, but I’m fine. We’ll do more damage this way.” He sliced at a cable stretched above him. The severed ends leaped apart with a jealous hiss.

We made a rapid circuit of the huge space, slicing and unplugging as we went. Whenever I tugged on a cord, and felt the resistance shift to release, I was reminded of the tube I’d unwittingly pulled out when I’d discovered Kip.

Next to me, he used his knife to lever open the casing of one of the machines. The side landed on the floor with a clash of metal on concrete. Inside was a miniature version of the room itself: units connected by wires in a sequence that seemed chaotic at first but was in fact precisely choreographed. When Kip and I took to it with knives and hands, it protested with smoke. The lights along its base blinked urgently, then stopped altogether.

When nobody came, despite the clangs and sparks, we grew bolder. Kip wielded a narrow strip of metal casing like a crowbar, swinging it into the control panels of the machines. Now our footsteps were amplified by broken glass. Even though smoke was beginning to claw in my throat, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed the destruction: tearing the casings from the machines, ripping out their tender, wired insides.

When we’d completed a loop of the chamber, we began climbing the spiral stairs, slicing as we went at the cables within reach on the wall. The heavier cords clanged satisfyingly as they dropped, severed, against the machines on the opposite side. The smoke from the damage on the ground level was thinner here, though still enough to blur the floor, farther and farther below us, and to make my breath rasp.

As we neared the top I paused and held my hand out to halt Kip behind me. I squinted slightly, then closed my eyes. Above us the platform loomed, extending almost twenty feet from the wall, blocking a third of the roof. Beneath its base, all the room’s cables culminated. I looked up at the point where the staircase penetrated the platform’s floor, right by the wall. From below, all I could make out was the square opening, brightly backlit by the lights above.

“Somebody’s up there.”

He raised an eyebrow. “If they’ve let us do this much already, I’m guessing they’re not looking for a fight.”

I shook my head. “It’s not always that simple.” I noticed we were whispering and thought how absurd it was, given the cacophony we’d created in the last ten minutes. “I can’t tell. I’ve felt her so strongly, for so long—and this place reeks of her and Zach anyway. But I think it could be her.”

“The Confessor?”

I nodded.

“So now what?” He was one step below me. His hand came up the rail to reach mine, gave it a squeeze.

“I don’t think we can finish this without going up and facing her.”

“I never thought I’d long for Piper and Zoe, but shouldn’t we come back with them?”

I shook my head.

“Cass, I’m sure you’re a hellcat in a fight, but when you say ‘finish this,’ don’t you think it would be better if there were more, you know, deadly, knife-throwing rebels involved?”

“No. We’ve brought enough on them—we can’t put them at risk like that. Too much of the resistance depends on them. Anyway, with the Confessor, it’s a mind game; I don’t think she could fight any more than the two of us. When I said ‘finish this,’ I didn’t mean it had to come to blood. I just meant”—I paused, struggling to explain it to him—“I meant that this started with us. And the whole time, it’s been her I’ve felt, tracking me. More even than Zach. We can’t keep running away from her. All of this”—I gestured at the machine-encased chamber below us—“she’s the core of it. We can’t finish it without facing her.” I slipped my knife back into its sheath at my belt.

He kept his knife out but stepped up next to me. The spiral steps were so narrow that the two of us were crammed close and off-balance, but I was glad to feel him beside me as we climbed the final few stairs and stepped onto the platform.

Set against the wall, next to a closed steel door, was a huge control panel at which the Confessor sat in a wheeled chair. Her eyes were closed, but I could see them moving busily beneath the twitching lids as her hands roamed the console, pressing buttons, caressing dials. Around her forehead sat a metal band, a steel halo, from which a single wire draped to meet the central console.

“It’s her?” Kip whispered at my side.

I nodded.

Unhurried, the Confessor spun in her chair to face us. “I wondered when I’d be seeing you again.”

I opened my mouth to answer but saw that the Confessor hadn’t even glanced at me. Still staring at Kip, she stood, lifted off the metal band, narrowed her eyes, then smiled slowly. “We’d guessed there’d be damage, but it’s strange to see in person. And it’s worse than I’d realized. You really are a blank slate, aren’t you? Remarkable.”

“What do you know about Kip?” I said. My voice echoed back at us from the roof of the silo.

“Kip—is that what they’re calling you now?” She stepped closer to him until there were only a few feet between them. “I had another name once, too. It’s been so long now, I can hardly remember it. I’m very much like you, you see.”

“You’re nothing like him.” I darted forward, snatched the metal band from her hands, tore it from its cable and hurled it from the platform. The noise was obscene. The contraption hit the far side of the chamber before ricocheting its way down to the floor with a final, resounding clang.

The Confessor hadn’t moved, just raised her hands and shrugged. “You let off steam as much as you like. I cut off the high-voltage power when you started your little frolic downstairs. Slashing at live wires with knives and bare hands—you’re lucky you didn’t kill yourselves. So I’ve been running on the auxiliary generators.” Her words meant nothing to us, but she ignored our baffled expressions. “Just enough voltage to give you a nice fireworks show, keep you busy. And, of course, for me to get on the intercom, call your brother, to let him know the prodigal twin is back.” She peered beyond the edge of the platform at the smoke-strewn wreckage beneath. “Much of the damage will be superficial, by the way. The computers are a huge asset, of course, but most of the crucial stuff goes on in here.” She tapped her head, then looked at me. “But you knew that already, of course.”

“You don’t need to give us another incentive to kill you,” said Kip.

She laughed. “Believe me, you don’t want to do that.”

I waved a hand at the console, the machines massed below. “How can you do this, to your own kind?”

“It’s no stranger than an Alpha running about with the Omega resistance.”

“We’re telling you nothing about them,” said Kip.

“Oh, you mean your friend Zoe—Piper’s twin. Yes, we know all about her. And I’m sure her whereabouts, and his, will be one of the things the interrogators will be asking you about shortly. But I wasn’t talking about her.”

Kip and I exchanged blank looks.

“And as for ‘my own kind,’ ” she went on, “you of all people should know it’s not that straightforward for a seer. The Omegas resent us, because we’re not deformed like them. And the Alphas are scared of us: we’re like them, only better. We don’t belong anywhere.”

“I do,” I said.

“Where? With your parents, who were so keen to get rid of you? Or how about that bleak little settlement you scraped by in, after your folks had kicked you out? Or maybe on the island? Though if you belonged so well there, it seems odd that you’d leave them to be slaughtered.”

“With me,” said Kip. “She belongs with me. And Piper and Zoe.”

The Confessor laughed gently. “How very sweet. But you’re not quite one of them, are you, Cass? You’re worth more than any of them. This Piper, at least, must have realized what you could be worth to them, or he’d have killed you as soon as he got hold of you, to be rid of Zach.” She cocked her head slightly as she stared at me. “Though I’m beginning to wonder whether I didn’t overestimate you. Whether we all didn’t. I’m sure you have your moments. I’m guessing we have you to thank for the evacuation of most of the islanders; probably the fire at New Hobart, too. But I’m surprised at your blind spots. You still haven’t harnessed what you’re capable of, it seems.”

She’d drawn even closer to us, but as always it was her mental presence that was most confronting. The calculation behind her still eyes; the probing that made me want to wince.

“You’re disappointing, Cass. Like these machines. It turns out they’re not everything we might have hoped. Oh, they’re great for storing the information. It’s all in there.” She waved vaguely at the stacks of machines below. “You should have seen the record chambers at Wyndham, before Zach and I had it moved into the computers here. They had the information, but it was so unwieldy. Now, if I need to find something straightforward, it’s phenomenally good. Think of the thousands of clerks we’d need, all scuttling about with millions of files, just to keep track of the basic details. With the computer, it’s all synthesized, in one system. Like a live thing. So I can tap into it, interact with it, use the information as fluently as thinking. If we’d stayed with paper records, we’d never have been able to do what we’ve done.”

“And what a tragic loss that would be.”

The Confessor ignored Kip entirely. “But the computers are still—how can I put this?—limited. For complex things—predictions, deductions—they don’t match the human brain. They will, one day—and perhaps they did, Before. Though I doubt they’d ever eclipse what a seer is capable of. But what they’d achieved, back then—you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen what they achieved,” I said.

Again, the interruption didn’t even seem to register. “In the Before, all of this information, all this power, would have existed in a single machine, no bigger than one of those generators. We’re not there yet, and it’s doubly hard, under the pressure of secrecy. People still aren’t ready to embrace the benefits. Our fault, perhaps—we’ve preserved the taboo, maybe too zealously, for too long. So, for now, we work with what we’ve got. Quietly. And for the really complex stuff: that’s where I come in.

“We could have used you, too, if you’d worked with me. You could have been a part of it. Already, with just me, and access to all that information, there’s not much I can’t do. It’s so much more than what I did on the island. Think about it. Some Omega rabble-rouser out east, giving the Council a hard time about tithes, and with his own bodyguard of resistance fighters? We can track down his Alpha twin, going under a different name and working on the south coast, in half an hour, and have a knife at his throat in half a day. An Alpha from Wyndham running for election against your brother? You’d be amazed how fast he’ll retire to his country estate once we’ve got his twin in custody. Better still, we can predict hot spots. We’ve got algorithms that monitor everything, day by day, in a way we never could before. We can keep tabs on which towns have low registration rates, patchy tithe collections. Move in early, wipe out the whole place before we have an uprising on our hands. Zach’s been focused on the tanks, but none of that’s possible without this.”

“Why so unprotected, then? Why could the two of us just waltz in here?”

“There’s a lack of curiosity, and we’re not particularly keen to change that. Councilors and soldiers aren’t above being terrified of the taboo, either. Nobody wants to know about this installation. Oh, they know, but not the whole story.” She gestured to the floor below. “The generators down there, and in the other silos, provide the electricity for half of Wyndham—most of the Council buildings are wired now, in some form, and the Council knows about the tanks. They’re hypocrites: happy enough to have electric lights in their private chambers, even to have their own twins tanked, but they won’t resist the taboo in public. They don’t dare. And they don’t see the potential to take it further.

“Your brother and I had more of a vision, though. Plans to take it to its logical conclusion. That’s why we’ve kept this quiet: it’s ours. If we start drafting in a security detail, everyone’s going to want to know.”

“The logical conclusion,” I echoed. “All of us in tanks, you mean. And you and your Alpha friends, living as if we never existed.”

“She’s melodramatic, isn’t she?” the Confessor said to Kip. “It’s more complicated than that. Think of the logistics: millions of Omegas to be dealt with. Even with our recent experiments with mass tanks, you’re still looking at a whole lot of infrastructure. It’s not going to happen overnight, despite what Zach might want. That’s why we’ve been focusing on this database, and on strategic tanking, for now—just key targets. And, of course, at the other end of the scale, low-value targets in the experimental stages. It took us three years of solid work just to get the first tanks viable. We suffered quite heavy losses in the development process.”

“
You
suffered heavy losses?” Kip had been edging closer the whole time. His knife was in his hand.

“She has a twin, Kip,” I whispered, grabbing the back of his shirt.

“So do all the people she’s killed. She’s the system. If we take her out, we shut it down. Think of what we’d achieve. That was the plan when we came here.”

“No. When we came here, we didn’t know the system was a person.”

“She hardly counts as a person.”

“That’s how the Alphas feel about us,” I said. “We can’t be like that.”

“We have to.”

He rushed forward. I followed, without thinking. I could hear my own pulse, urgent, competing with the crashing sounds as Kip brought the Confessor down hard against the floor, the chair skidding into the consoles. He was on top of her, one knee on her chest, but she grabbed at his hand, and with both arms was twisting his wrist, forcing the knife back toward him. His single arm couldn’t withstand the force and he had to roll to avoid the knife, until she was on top of him. I looked around. The knife in my belt was too deadly. On the whole platform, starkly glass and steel, the chair was the only alternative. I grunted involuntarily as I picked it up, then swung it back and launched it at the Confessor’s head.

At first I thought I must accidentally have hit Kip, too. The Confessor slumped heavily sideways, her head bouncing as it hit the floor. Kip did the same: his shoulders dropped to the floor, teeth snapping shut as the back of his head hit the metal surface. But it didn’t fit. The chair hadn’t touched him. I’d seen it clip the Confessor on the side of the head on its way to the far edge of the platform, where it now rested on its side against the door, wheels spinning.