The Fire Sermon (46 page)

In the silence of Kip and the Confessor’s dual unconsciousness, I realized what I’d missed. It came sharply into focus, like Kip’s face emerging from the blur of the tank months ago. I wondered whether, as with my mother’s warning about the Keeping Rooms, I’d known all along.

chapter 31

The Confessor was the first to come to. She blinked several times, shook her head, grimaced. When she opened her eyes properly, her first look wasn’t at me, standing over her, but at Kip, still unconscious.

“All this time,” I said. “I felt you searching for me. Ever since I escaped.”

“Since he escaped,” corrected the Confessor.

“All that time, I thought it was me you were looking for. But I still don’t see how it’s possible. You can’t both be Omegas.”

“We had to take off the arm. Just branding him wasn’t enough,” she said, sitting up further. “The arm was Zach’s bright idea. There’d be resistance to the idea of tanking Alphas, even among those working on the tank project. And we couldn’t have him traceable to me—too much of a liability. So we had to make him look like an Omega. The amnesia is an added bonus, though I can’t take credit for it. It’s not something we anticipated. They’ve never brought anyone out of suspension before—the effects were unknown.”

“And you didn’t care what it would do to him.”

“I cared that it didn’t kill him.” She touched the side of her head, looked with distaste at the smear of blood on her hand. “Now you know why I wasn’t scared of the two of you finding me here. I knew you’d stuck together. If you’d grown close to him, you’d never harm me. But I underestimated the effects of the tank. I could sense that he’d been damaged, but not that he’d completely forgotten everything. And I overestimated you. I assumed you would have worked it out.”

“I’ve been so blind.”

Wincing, the Confessor pressed her swollen temple again. “We both have. I should have told you immediately. It was rash.” She turned back to Kip, now shifting groggily on the floor. “But he’s changed. The coward I knew would never have attacked like that.”

“You don’t know him. He might be your twin, but he’s nothing like you.”

“Perhaps not. Any more than you’re like Zach. Zach and I were both burdened with twins who lacked our ambition.”

I knelt over Kip, lifted his head just enough to slide my arm beneath it and raise him, slowly, until his shoulders and head rested on my knees. He clenched his eyes more tightly shut, then opened them, flinching at the light.

“Her?” he said. “It’s impossible.”

I shook my head. “They cut off your arm, Kip, to disguise you. I’m so sorry.”

He closed his eyes again, for a long time. Several times his lips began moving, as if he were about to speak. When his eyes opened again he looked straight at me. “Is it true?”

I nodded. There was another long silence.

“Guess this means I can’t hold your twin against you anymore,” he murmured to me, staring beyond me at the Confessor as she stood. “Looks like both of us really hit the sibling jackpot.”

He was searching her face, his expression more intent than I’d ever seen it. As if he might recognize himself in it. As if he would see, written on her pale skin, all the secrets of his lost past.

Her eyes, usually so implacable, were surveying him curiously. “Even now, you really remember nothing?”

He shook his head. “Why? You want to start reminiscing about our childhood?”

“There wasn’t an ‘our,’ ” she said. “I was sent away at eight, as soon as I couldn’t hide my visions anymore. But that wasn’t enough for you, of course. Nor was this.” She swept her hand over her branded forehead. “Not enough to have me branded, scraping by at a settlement while you took over Mom and Dad’s farm, lived the good life. Nothing was ever enough for you, when it came to hating me. So three years back, you wanted to make sure I wasn’t a liability. Approached the local Councilman, asked for help to track me down. Told him you’d heard rumors that a wealthy person might pay to have his twin ‘taken care of’ in the Keeping Rooms.”

Piper had mentioned this on the island. But I couldn’t imagine it of Kip. I could come to terms with the idea of him as an Alpha. But this person she described—spiteful, cruel—I couldn’t recognize at all.

“That wasn’t me,” he shouted, sitting up. “I don’t even know who I was then. I don’t have any memories at all, because of what you did to me.” I’d never seen him cry before, but now tears streaked the dirt on his cheeks. “I don’t even care about the arm,” he said, shrugging the stub of his shoulder. “It’s everything else. You took away everything.”

“I took away everything?” Her laughter was a curved blade. “What about me, sent away at eight? You never cared about me. You would have done to me what I did to you.” There it was: the hatred that had pursued us ever since we escaped. It had nothing to do with me. “I knew you’d come after me, eventually,” she said. “Someone as spiteful as you—I knew you were never going to forgive me for those first eight years.” Her voice was still quiet, but her eyes were narrowed, her jaw so tight that her words had a staccato quality. “I had to find a way to protect myself. That’s one of the reasons I sought out Zach, started working with him. Maybe that’s why he and I work so well together—he has his own ax to grind when it comes to being split late. I’ve always known what drove Zach, because I saw the same fear and spite in you, even if you were never ambitious like he is, or smart like he is.”

Was that how she made sense of the world, I wondered? Not Alpha against Omega, but the ambitious, pitted against all who weren’t willing to match them in ruthlessness?

“I can’t argue about our past with you.” Kip’s voice was so low I could hardly hear it. Each word dropped into the silo below us like a stone down a well. “I don’t have anything left of it. It’s all gone. You did this to me.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You did this to me. You made me what I am.”

“You don’t know Kip,” I said.

“He’s my twin,” she said. “I know him better than you ever will.”

I was about to retort, but Kip spoke first. “Cass is right. You don’t know me. We have nothing to talk about.” He turned back to me.

She was standing between us and the stairs. A wary stillness connected the three of us. I looked at the steel door set in the wall, but knew it was hopeless even before the Confessor spoke.

“Don’t bother. It’s locked.” She was still focused intently on Kip. “I used to go and look at you, sometimes, you know,” she said. “When you were in the tank. It was peaceful, seeing you like that. Like keeping a pet frog.”

“That’s sick,” I said, remembering Kip floating in the tank, and the automated, muted terror of that scene.

“He would have done it to me,” she said. “He tried to pay to have me put in a cell.” She turned back to him. “When I used to watch you, you were livelier than the others. Sometimes I could have sworn you looked back at me. The technicians reported it, too: signs of possible alertness from you. They didn’t know why, of course—didn’t know you weren’t an Omega like the others.”

I tried to shut her out, and to focus only on Kip as I bent low over him. “The stuff she says about your past,” I told him. “I know it’s not you. I know it’s not the person that you are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“No,” I shook my head. “Don’t say that. It’s not you.” I remembered what he’d said a few nights earlier:
What if the person I was isn’t someone I want to be?

He guessed what I was thinking, of course. “I didn’t know,” he said quickly. “But since the taboo town, and all those wires, I started to have some flashbacks. Nothing specific, and nothing about her, or about being an Alpha. It was just like being in someone else’s skin. And I didn’t like that person. I’d thought not knowing was the worst thing. But this was worse. That person I was aware of—he was full of disgust. And fear.” He looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not you.” I spoke loudly enough for the Confessor to hear. I wanted her to know. “Don’t be sorry. I know you,” I said.

I followed the curves of his brand with my finger. “It doesn’t make a difference that you’re an Alpha.” I dropped my voice again, trying to carve out a moment of privacy between the two of us, even under the Confessor’s gaze. “Though I’d started to think there might have been a touch of seer in you, too.”

He shook his head. “Then you’d think I would have seen
this
coming.”

But I did, I thought. I felt it the whole time. I was just too stupid, too self-obsessed, to realize what it meant.

“Maybe you didn’t sense that,” I said. “But there was other stuff, just little things. The way you know what I’m thinking or feeling. How you butt in and say what I’m about to say.”

“I think maybe there’s another word for that,” he said, with the crooked smile that had become so familiar.

“So your little escapade is over,” interrupted the Confessor. “Now we wait. You can’t fight me.” She picked up the knife from where it had fallen from Kip’s hand. I stood to face her as she approached, the knife held out in front of her. She ran it up my neck, then down again, stopping at the hollow between my collarbones. I thought of the many nights when Kip and I had huddled close, his nose buried in the same notch where the knife blade now rested. “That door’s locked. Zach’s not far away—he was working in another facility nearby. The soldiers won’t be far behind him. It’ll be up to him to decide what he wants to do with you, but I’d imagine, after this, you’ll both be heading for the tanks.”

“I’m not going back.” Kip stood up, a little unsteadily.

“Oh, they’ll keep you out for a while—you in particular. Once we’re done interrogating you both, we’ll want to run tests on you. You’ll be quite the medical curiosity. We’ve never tanked an Alpha before, you see. And we don’t ever bring people out of suspension, let alone after as long as that. It’s a one-way ticket. But after we’ve satisfied our curiosity, you’ll go back in, eventually.”

The knife sank a little farther. I wasn’t aware of any pain, only the warmth of the blood that trickled from the wound, the slight tickle as it traced between my breasts.

“What’s his name?” I said. “His real name, I mean.”

The Confessor went to speak, but Kip interrupted her. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re not curious? Not at all?” she asked.

With the knife at my throat, I couldn’t turn my head, but I strained my eyes to the right, where I could just see Kip.

“I was,” he said. “A few months ago I would’ve given anything to know who I was. But it doesn’t matter anymore.” He was sidling farther into my line of sight, toward the steps at the far edge of the platform. “I know who I am now.”

The Confessor turned, keeping the knife at my throat as she maneuvered behind me. “Take one step down those stairs and you know I’ll kill her.”

“I know,” he said, edging closer to the staircase.

The Confessor tightened her arm further around my neck. “This I hadn’t expected—and that’s saying something, coming from me.” The blood was soaking into the front of my shirt now. “How about you, Cass? You ever think he’d betray you this way?”

I looked straight at Kip. I knew, then, what he was doing, with the same sudden certainty that I’d felt earlier when I’d realized his link to the Confessor.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

When he stepped backward my eyes were still fixed on his. I barely registered his half shrug, the final leap over the low railing behind him. As he dropped I refused to blink or look away, as if my gaze were somehow holding him to me, as if it were a lifeline that would arrest his fall. The Confessor screamed, but I made no noise. I reached the platform’s edge without even realizing, so I could trace his fall all the way down, until the silo’s cement floor shattered my gaze.

When I opened my eyes again, I was huddled on the ground, the platform’s metal floor cold against my cheek. Only three feet away, staring blindly at me, was the Confessor’s motionless face.

chapter 32

It might have been only seconds before Zach arrived; it might have been minutes. I heard noises, not from below but from the next silo: running footsteps, a key in the metal door. I ought to have been startled at his presence, after so long, but I never could be. It was his absence that had always felt strange.

He did look different, though: older, and thinner, and his eyes frantic with motion. He looked first over the railing, down to where Kip lay. Then he came to bend over me. He kept glancing from the Confessor to me, and back again. His hands and his lips were never still, angular fingers twitching as if working out some complex calculation. Periodically, his hand would move to his neck, pressing against the place where the knife had pierced me.

I didn’t move. Where my face rested against the floor the metal was warming slowly. My stillness matched that of the Confessor. It came to me again, the moment I’d first seen Kip, his face drifting into sight through the glass of the tank. To move away now, to break this symmetry with his twin, would be to move one step further away from that moment. To move into a world in which he was gone.

“Get up.” Zach’s voice hadn’t changed, though it echoed strangely in the round chamber.

“No.” I closed my eyes. Below us, the silo door opened; shouts and footsteps echoed up to us. “That’s your men down there, no doubt. They can drag me if they have to. But I won’t move.”

“They’re coming now, you idiot. You have to go.”

That made me look up. “What are you talking about?”

“If they find out you were involved, that’ll be it for me. Even if I locked you up myself, they’d get to you, or take me out directly. You’ve blown it now. She was our biggest asset.” He gestured at the Confessor’s body. “If they link her death to me, it’s the end of both of us.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Not to me.”

“You don’t get it.” The noises below grew closer. The soldiers were on the stairs now. “If you disappear, I can blame it on him. I can contain it: tell them it was just her twin, gone mad, out for revenge. The two of you haven’t been seen together since the island. But you have to go, now.” He fumbled at his belt, thrust me a small leather loop threaded with two keys. “Take these. Go out the way I came—the big key gets you out onto the walkway between silos. Then the smaller key for a red door, into my private offices in the next silo. Get down to the base, then it’s the same key for the outside door. It’s unguarded. You can be away in minutes. They’ll never know you were here.”