The Fire Sermon (5 page)

Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted, and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mom threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, “What’s wrong with you?”

She met his eyes clearly. “It’s the fever. I have the fever—your father, too, now.”

He scowled. “But before that—what’s wrong with you?”

Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place but also neatly clipped and clean.

Zach was impatient. “What? What is it?”

“Don’t they teach you to count at your school?”

I said what Zach would not. “We don’t go to school. We can’t—we’ve not been split.”

He interrupted quickly: “But we can count. We learn at home—numbers, writing, all sorts of things.” His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

“That’s my problem, sweetheart,” said Alice. “My toes don’t add up.” She looked at Zach’s deflated face and stopped her grinning. “I suppose there’s more,” she said, almost kindly. “You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped—my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a
dead end
, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.” She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. “If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?” He didn’t answer. She went on: “And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?”

Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. “There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumor, a lie.”

“Then why do you look so scared?”

I answered this time. “On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burned-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumors of the island.”

“He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,” Zach added, looking at the door again.

“And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,” I said, “where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.”

Alice shrugged. “Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumor. Just a lie.”

“It is—is a lie, I mean,” hissed Zach. “You need to shut up—you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.”

“They haven’t found it yet.”

“Because it doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s just an idea.”

“Maybe that’s enough,” she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.

He stood. “I’m going to check on Dad.”

I nodded, pressed the cool washcloth again to my aunt’s head. “Dad’ll be just the same—unconscious, I mean,” I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.

With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the center of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognize some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.

Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.

I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.

After a while, he said, “I saw him fall, you know.”

I should have realized, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.

“I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,” he went on. “I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.” Zach spat out a splinter of hay. “He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face-first, so I couldn’t see him because of the wheat.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been scary.”

“Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.” He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

There was no point lying to him, so I just nodded.

“Can’t you do anything?” he said. He grabbed my hand. Among everything that had happened over those last few days—Dad’s collapse and Alice’s arrival—the strangest of all was Zach reaching out for my hand, something he’d not done since we were tiny.

When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.

I squeezed his hand. “What could I do?”

“Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair—she’s killing him.”

“It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.”

“It’s not fair,” he said again.

“Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.”

“It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas—we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.”

I couldn’t argue with him about the illness—it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. “It’s not her fault,” I offered. “And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.”

He dropped my hand. “You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.”

“Of course I care.”

“Then do something,” he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.

“There’s nothing I can do,” I said. I knew that seers were rumored to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world—only perceive it in crooked ways.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he whispered. “If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.”

It made no difference whether I believed him. “There’s nothing I can do,” I repeated.

“What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?”

I reached once more for his hand. “He’s my dad, too.”

“Omegas don’t have family,” he said, snatching his hand away.

Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and I were in the shed, asleep, Alice’s jagged breath grating on our dreams. I woke suddenly. I shook Zach and said, without thinking of hiding my vision, “Go to Dad. Go now.” He was gone before he could even accuse me of anything, his footsteps racing on the gravel path to the cottage. I stood to go, too: nearby, my father was dying. But Alice opened her eyes, briefly at first, and then for longer. I didn’t want her to be alone, in the cramped darkness of an unfamiliar shed. So I stayed.

They were buried together the next day, though the gravestone bore only his name. Mom had burned Alice’s nightdress, along with the sheets from both fever-sweated beds. The sole tangible proof that Alice had existed was hanging on a piece of twine around my neck, under my dress: a large brass key. The night she died, when Alice had woken briefly and seen that she was alone with me, she’d taken the key from her neck and passed it to me.

“Behind my cottage, buried under the lavender, there’s a chest. Things that will help you when you go there.” She entered another coughing fit.

I handed it back, loath to receive another uninvited gift from this woman. “How do you know it will be me?”

She coughed again. “I don’t, Cass. I just hope it is.”

“Why?” I, more than Zach, had cared for this woman, this reeking stranger. Why would she now wish this upon me?

She pressed the key again into my resisting hand. “Because your brother, he’s so full of fear—he’ll never cope if it’s him.”

“He’s not afraid of things—and he’s strong.” I wasn’t sure if I was coming to his defense, or my own. “He’s just angry, I suppose.”

Alice laughed, a rasp that differed only slightly from her usual coughing. “Oh, he’s angry all right. But it’s all the same thing.” She waved my hand away impatiently as I tried to pass back the key.

In the end I took it. I kept the key hidden, but it still felt like an admission, if only to myself. Looking at Zach’s face as we stood in the graveyard, squinting in the relentless sun, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Since Dad’s death, I’d felt something shift in Zach’s mind. The change in his thoughts felt like a rusted lock that finally gives way: the same decisiveness, the same satisfaction.

With Dad gone, our house was filled with waiting. I began to dream about the brand. In my dream that first night, I placed my hand again on Alice’s head and felt her scar burning into the flesh of my own palm.