The Fire Sermon (28 page)

“I’m beginning to feel like your maid.” Kip handed me a chunk of bread and resumed his perch on the windowsill, where he’d been waiting for me.

“You’re too messy to be any good as a maid,” I said, pointing at his unmade bed as I joined him on the broad stone ledge. We sat facing each other, our backs against the sides of the window, our feet just touching.

“You know what I mean. You’re off in council all day with Piper and the Assembly, I’m hanging around here like some kind of sidekick.” He leaned his head back against the window. “How was it?”

It had been three days since our first meeting with Piper, and I’d been summoned every day. Kip, however, was never sent for. The mornings we spent together, but every afternoon the guards found us and told me to go to the Hall. “Just her,” they said, each time. On the third day he’d tried to accompany me, and the guards had turned him back at the door of the Assembly Hall. They weren’t rough, just dismissive. “You haven’t been sent for,” the older guard had said, stepping in his path.

“I’d like him to come with me,” I said.

“Piper didn’t send for him,” the guard repeated blandly, closing the door in Kip’s face.

When I asked Piper why Kip couldn’t join us, he’d just raised an eyebrow. “He doesn’t know his own name, Cass. What could he tell me?”

So while I was cloistered with Piper and the other Assembly members, Kip spent the afternoons exploring the island. When I returned each night he’d tell me of the things he’d seen. The old boat, carried up piece by piece from the harbor and reassembled on the western tip of the city for the children to play at being sailors. The lookout posts concealed at the top of the crater and manned night and day. The house at the outskirts of the city where an old woman had shown him the six beehives on her balcony, shimmering with noise. But though he told me what he’d seen each day, he was more eager to hear what I’d discussed with Piper and the Assembly.

“Don’t get the impression that they’re not interested in you,” I told him. “Half the time that’s what they ask about.”

“Then why don’t they ask me? I feel like I’m begging for scraps, just hanging around all day and then getting leftover bits of news from you. If they want to know about me, why not ask me themselves?”

“What could you tell them?” I winced to hear myself echoing Piper’s phrase.

“What can you tell them? If you’ve had any breakthroughs about my past, I’d love to hear about them.”

I kicked him lightly. “Don’t be a chump. They just want to know how I knew about you—you and the others. The visions I had, of the chamber. All that stuff I’ve already told you.”

“So you don’t think it’s just an excuse for him to spend time with you?”

I laughed. “In the intimate, romantic setting of the Assembly Hall, with all his Assembly there, too?”

“That’s one way of making himself look impressive.”

“Come on.” Jumping back down into the room, I waited for him to follow. “Let’s go out—you still haven’t shown me the western side. And there’s a market there tonight, Piper said.”

“Did you point out that we haven’t got any money?”

“I didn’t need to.” I pulled a small purse of coins from my pocket. “From Piper. For both of us.”

“
Now
I’m impressed,” said Kip.

I tossed him the bag. “Doesn’t take much to buy your loyalty.”

“For another few coins I’d even wear one of his fetching blue uniforms.”

From our quarters above the courtyard it was only a short walk to the market. The watchmen knew us now, nodded and held back the gate as we left the fort.

Watching Kip in the streets, I was reminded of how he’d always been eager for noise; how he’d thrown open the shutters at New Hobart and relished the busy street sounds. For the first days after I’d released him from the tank, I’d noticed him shaking his head to each side, probing his ears with his little finger, convinced that there were still traces of that viscous liquid trapped there. He seemed to associate silence with the tank, and with the greater silence of his past. Since we arrived on the island, I’d complained of the city’s noise keeping me awake at night. Kip, however, relished it. He’d sit on the windowsill, eyes closed, absorbed in the noises of island life: the watchmen’s footsteps in the gravel courtyard, and above, on the stone of the parapet. The pigeons that clustered and heckled on the windowsill. The clatter of donkeys on the flagstones, and the chants of children.

Watching him grinning as we made our way to the market, I couldn’t begrudge him the din. We followed the noise: the cries of the stallholders trading cloth, cantaloupes, onions. The children shouting as they ran among the legs of the crowd. Even the sounds of livestock: pigs corralled into flimsy pens, chickens in cages hanging from pegs on the stone walls. In the city, because of the steep walls of the crater, dawn came late and sunset came early. For all but the middle of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, the streets were shielded from the heat. Now, in the early evening, the darkening sky was warmed by the lambent glow of the torches in brackets, and candles in windows. A goat was tethered in a tiny patch of grass between two houses, chewing mournfully.

“Piper says the animals are a nightmare,” I told Kip. “Getting them out here on the boats is tough. And they’re less efficient for food than just growing crops, especially in such a tight space. But people really want them here, just because we’re not allowed to have animals on the mainland.”

“I’m not sure that secret goat-farming is the most effective show of defiance.”

“He said a goat got loose on a boat once, on the way out here, and they just about capsized trying to rescue it.”

“I thought all these private meetings with you every day were high-level strategy, not a chance for him to impress you with his amusing goat anecdotes.”

“Yes, because the man who runs this island, and the whole Omega resistance, needs to rely on his goat anecdotes to impress me.”

He rolled his eyes as he took my arm in his.

All along the street the market flaunted its wares. We bought two plums, their skin such a deep purple that it was tinted black. “I’ve never tasted one of these before,” I said, biting into the fat flesh.

Kip grinned. “Welcome to my world.”

“But it can’t really be new to you, can it? You know most stuff, really. What things are, how to read, how to tie your shoelaces. It’s not like a child, actually seeing things for the first time.”

He paused to examine a table displaying small wooden boxes. Removing a lid, he admired how neatly it fitted when he put it back on. “Yeah—but that makes it weirder, in a way, not easier. That I know how to aim for the pisspot, but don’t know my own name.”

“You have a name now.”

“Sure,” he said. “And it’s a nice name. But you know what I mean.”

We’d reached the end of the market now and sat on a stone bench that looked back along the bustling square.

“When I remember my past,” I said, “it’s mainly Zach I remember. I can almost imagine not remembering other things, but I can’t imagine not remembering your twin. Because they’re part of you, really.”

“The Alphas don’t exactly see it that way.”

“They must, I think. They wouldn’t be so afraid of us if they didn’t know, really, how much like them we are.”

“Afraid of us? You’ve got to be joking. That’s why we’re hiding here? And all these people, too?” He gestured back toward the market’s throng. “The Alphas must be cowering in terror, with their big army, their forts, their Council.”

“They wouldn’t be so desperate to find the island if they weren’t afraid of it.” I remembered once more the Confessor’s insistence on asking me, again and again, about the island. The jabbing of her finger on the maps; the probing of her mind.

Kip looked around. “Why, though? For all his posturing and his uniformed watchmen, Piper’s hardly a threat to the Council. What’s he going to do: march on Wyndham with his gang of one-armed soldiers?”

“He doesn’t need to. It’s enough that the island’s here. I’m sure the Council’s got practical concerns, like getting no tithes or registrations from those who make it out here. But that’s not the real issue—it never will be. What really worries them is the fact that this place is beyond their control.” I remembered what Alice had said to me, before she died. “It’s the idea of the island, as much as the actual island.”

“The actual island is enough for me,” he said, leaning back and grinning as he looked up at the soaring crater’s edge, cupping the horizon.

I looked up, too, mirroring the angle of his head. “I know. Even though I’d seen it so many times in visions, it’s different really being here. Feeling part of it.”

“You do, then? Feel part of it, I mean.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want to believe that I am.” He spat out his plum stone, watched it settle in a gap between cobbles. “To believe we could stay here.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“I find it hard to be sure of anything. And the way Piper ignores me isn’t exactly reassuring. It’s like they all think that after what happened to me, I’m nothing. Like I don’t count.”

I surveyed his face. The straight, narrow nose, tilting slightly up at the end; the cheekbones and jaw sharply defined. Every angle of his face had become so intimately known to me. It was easy to forget how unfamiliar he must be to himself, without the anchoring of his past or, above all, his twin.

“I can’t get my head around how strange it must be for you—the twin thing most of all. How lonely.”

“More lonely than having a twin like yours? Who’d expose you, hurt you, have you locked up? Seems to me it’s a pretty lucky kind of loneliness to have.”

“But you must think about her,” I said. “You must wonder who she is.”

“Not knowing about my twin is probably the only normal thing about me. Your experience is the unusual one. These days, people are split so young, all most people have of their twins is a name, the place they were born.” He was silent for a while, gazing at the crowded street, each passing body bearing its own deformity. I waited for him to speak again. “But I do wonder about her, sometimes. Mainly just about the obvious stuff, to be honest. You know the sort of thing: is she about to tumble off a cliff somewhere and take me with her? So I hope she has a safe, boring life; a safe, boring job, with no plows to get caught in, or fights to get involved with.”

“Lots of healthy food, and early nights,” I joined in.

“Keeping chickens for a living. Or—weaving rugs.”

“By hand, though. No dangerous looms.”

“Now you’re talking,” he said, turning to plant a kiss on my forehead as we walked on together through the crowd.

The next day the sun’s glare persuaded me to skip our planned walk up to the crater’s edge. Kip left straight after breakfast, with a water flask and a pocket full of fresh figs, but I made my way to a small terrace that we’d found the day before, halfway up the tower. From decades of footsteps, the stone stairs of the tower were worn down, rounded at the edges like softened pats of butter. It was still a few hours short of noon, but out on the terrace the paving stones were already hot. When I lay down in the sun, the stones scorched the skin where my shirt had ridden up at my waist. I basked in the brightness. Since the Keeping Rooms, the sun and the open sky retained their novelty—even the hellish boat journey hadn’t destroyed the pleasure of sun on my skin. It was a pleasure, too, just to concentrate on simple bodily sensations. To step back from all the machinations and complications and to focus instead on sun on skin, skin on stone. In the Keeping Rooms, I’d had to resort to pain to keep my mind from the nightscape of my visions and fears. Now, pleasure did the same thing.

It was the island, too, that permitted these simple joys. Even in New Hobart, where the streets had thronged with Omegas, the cringe of fear and shame was still present. At any moment a Council soldier might ride through the street, or the tithe collectors might come to remind us of our subservience. I’d seen, in Kip, how our very movements were different on the island. He had shrugged off the furtiveness, and the tentativeness, of our months on the run. I thought again of Piper himself, the unbowed cock of his head and the breadth of his shoulders. I was beginning to realize that some of the joy of being with Kip came from the island itself, and the unabashed Omega bodies that it permitted. Of all that the island had given us, this was perhaps the most unexpected: the gift of our own bodies.

The day before, I’d found a bruise-like mark on my neck from where one of Kip’s playful bites had turned into a kiss, and then back into a bite. He’d been apologetic when the morning’s light had revealed the mark on my skin, but I’d felt oddly jubilant. My body had borne too many marks that I hadn’t chosen. The brand. The pallor of the Keeping Rooms. The scrapes, blisters, and sharpened bones of our long journey. Instead, this mark on my neck had been made in joy. Now, lying on the warmed stones, I ran my fingers over it and smiled.

I don’t know how long I dozed there. When I felt the shadow pass across my closed eyelids, I sat up with a jerk. I was fully dressed, but there was an intimacy in the abandon with which I’d given myself over to the warmth.