The Fire Sermon (33 page)

I looked past him at the maps on the walls. All of them were heavily annotated in black ink, to show the Council garrisons and refuges, as well as the villages, the settlements, the safe houses. The whole network that the resistance relied on to get people out to the island. All those people relying on him.

“If that’s your job, then why haven’t you killed me already?”

“I need you to change the numbers. Give me a reason not to do it.”

My voice was calm. “I’ve told you everything I know about Wyndham. About the Confessor. I was the one who warned you about Zach’s plans for tanking more Omegas.”

“There has to be more. About the search for the island.”

I shook my head. “That’s not news to you. You know they’re looking. You know they’ll find it, eventually. It’s only a matter of when.”

He grabbed my arm. “Then tell me when. Give me details.”

I wrenched my arm from his grip. “I don’t have anything more to tell you. It doesn’t work like that—I don’t get dates, maps. My visions aren’t something you can pin to your wall. They’re inconsistent—sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen, sometimes I don’t have a clue.”

“But you found us—you found the island.” He paused, lowered his voice further. “What about what lies beyond here?”

I shook my head. “What do you mean? There’s nothing beyond here. Everything’s back east.”

“Everything we know about. But it wasn’t always that way. What if there are other places, further west? Or even east, past the deadlands.”

“You mean Elsewhere? That’s just old stories. Nobody’s ever found it—there’s nothing to find.”

“Most people on the mainland think the island’s just a story, just a rumor.” His face was absolutely serious.

“You know something about Elsewhere? You’ve found it?”

“No. I was hoping you might be able to help us.” He pulled a map from the wall. Much of what I saw, as he lay it in front of me on the floor, was familiar. The coastline I recognized from the Confessor’s maps, and from others I’d seen on the island. And I recognized the island itself, barely a speck, adrift a few inches from the western coast. But this map was different: it left out the mainland itself, which was cut off by the right-hand edge of the paper. Except for the stain of coast down that margin, the map showed only sea. But it was scrawled with pencil marks: currents, reefs, a tracery of pencil markings emanating from the island and reaching far out west.

I looked up at him. “You’re sending ships out. You’re looking for Elsewhere.”

“Not me. At least, not just me—it started before I was in charge. But, yes—we’ve been searching. Maybe five years now. There are two ships out there as we speak—our two biggest. They’ll be gone a month next full moon.”

“And you really think there’s something to be found?”

He kept his voice low, but I could feel his anger. “There are some ships that haven’t come back. You think I’d take those risks if I didn’t think there was something out there?”

I looked down at the map, avoiding his gaze.

“Help us, Cass. If you can sense something—anything at all—it could change everything.”

I realized I’d pressed my palm to the map, as if it would help me scan those miles of ocean with my mind. I closed my eyes, tried to probe the unmapped space. I concentrated until I could feel the blood straining in the vein at my left temple, but all I could see was the stubborn ocean, the gray miles of sea that spread in all directions.

“It’s too far,” I said, lifting my hand from the map as I slumped back.

“Not in the Before it wasn’t. They had bigger ships, faster.” He grabbed my hand and pressed it onto the map again, hard. “Try again.”

I did try. I forced my mind as I’d done when I was on the boat, in the clutches of the reef. I visualized the reef, then the open sea beyond, and I probed westward. My whole body tensed; when Piper finally released his hand, my own palm had left a clammy print on the map. But I could see nothing, feel nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If it’s out there, it’s too far for me—I’ve never sensed anything about it.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Piper. Although his hand had been on mine until a moment ago, he suddenly seemed very distant. “It would have simplified things if you could have helped.”

He glanced in the direction of the door, behind which I could hear voices, raised and abrasive. “They want you dead. They want to take out the Reformer and you’re the price they’re happy to pay. It’s an easy decision for them.”

“Not for you?”

“I think your death might be too high a price. I think we need you. You, your visions, could change the whole picture.”

“But you won’t let us go.” It wasn’t a question.

“I can’t. But I can keep you safe.”

“And I’m supposed to be grateful, while you use me as a hostage to stop Zach from attacking?”

“I thought of that,” he said evenly. “But if we let him know we have you, try to use you to rein him in, there’s every chance his own people will take him out. He’s not running the Council—not yet, anyway. Any hint that he might be under our sway, and they’d kill him themselves. We’d be rid of him, but there’re others who’d still hunt us down. And you’d be dead, too.”

“Which seems like a shame.”

He looked at me. “Yes. It would be a shame.”

He escorted me back through the Hall where the Assembly, suddenly silent, turned to watch our progress. He put his arm on my shoulder as he guided me through the gathered men and women, but I shrugged him off.

One of the men leaned close to me. It was Simon, Piper’s most trusted adviser. “I wouldn’t be so quick to brush him off, if I were you,” he said. “Seems to me he’s the one thing keeping you alive.”

Another man laughed at that. I turned to face him. He was stocky, with a dark beard, a crutch under one arm. “That’s right,” he said. “If I had my way, you’d have been finished off by now. You and your twin.”

I replied only quietly. “My twin shut me in the Keeping Rooms to stop me being used against him. If you kill me, you confirm everything the Alphas think: that we’re a liability, a risk to them. That we need to be locked away, to protect them.” There was no response, but they were all watching me. “You want to kill me? Why don’t you go even further and get rid of every Alpha that way? Sure, you’ll kill all of us by doing it, but it’s worth it, right?” I was shouting now, as Piper dragged me from the Hall.

chapter 22

When Piper came to our quarters early the next morning, I wasn’t sleeping, but my eyes were still closed. Something had woken me a few moments before, a dream or a vision, and I was concentrating on it, eyes clasped shut as I tried to prolong the state of half sleep to clarify what it was that I’d seen.

I heard Kip jump up from his bed as the key turned in the lock, and move between me and the door.

“Relax,” said Piper. “I’m not here to hurt her.”

“Quiet,” Kip whispered. “She doesn’t sleep much at night—often mornings are the only sleep she gets.”

“How much sleep do you get, if you’re watching her all night?” asked Piper. He’d dropped his voice, but I could picture the way his eyebrow would have arched.

“Just don’t wake her.”

“Actually, it’s you I want to see.”

“There’s a first,” muttered Kip. I heard them move away from my bed. I dared to peek between my half-closed eyelids. They stood at the window, their backs to me. Outside, the crater’s encircling walls blocked the rising sun from view, though the dawn light was suffused with red.

Kip looked down at the guard who leaned against the wall on the balustrade beneath our window. “He’s not getting much sleep, either, I suppose.”

“You’d rather take your chances?”

“I don’t know.” Kip’s answer was calm. “I’m not crazy about the idea of your mates from upstairs coming to get us, to be honest.” He glanced down at the knives lining Piper’s belt. “But Cass and I have spent enough time locked up, before we got here. We didn’t expect more of it, here of all places.”

“You don’t know how long you were in that tank,” Piper pointed out.

“True. Imagine if I found out it was only twenty minutes. Embarrassing, really, after all this fuss.”

Piper laughed with him but only briefly. “The Assembly—my ‘mates from upstairs’—you don’t concern them, I think.”

“I guessed as much, during one of the many times I’ve been left here while you and they consult Cass.”

“I’m not trying to diminish your importance,” said Piper. “You’re the only one we’ve found who’s been in the tanks. We all want to find out what goes on in that place. But I’m trying to reassure you: I don’t think you’re in any danger.”

“Not from your lot, maybe. But I’m guessing there’re some Alphas on the mainland who’re pretty keen to reacquaint themselves with me.”

“You’d rather stay here, under guard?”

“You say it like we have a choice.”

“You do.” Piper reached to his belt. I was about to spring up, thinking he was going for one of his knives, but then I saw he was proffering Kip a key. I scrunched my eyes closed again as Kip turned to look at me.

“No,” said Piper. “You know she’s too valuable for me to let her go. But there’s no reason for you to be kept here.”

“And your reason for letting me go—it’s entirely altruistic, is it, and nothing to do with getting me out of the way and having Cass to yourself?”

“If I needed to get rid of you, you’d be gone by now.”

“So this doesn’t have anything to do with how you feel about her?”

Piper sounded unconcerned. “There’s a boat leaving in an hour. There’s room on it for you. It doesn’t matter what you believe my motives are.”

“You’re right,” said Kip calmly. “It doesn’t matter. You really think I’d leave, either way? Or that she’d be grateful to you, for letting me go?”

“Not really.”

I peered again through one eye. Piper had turned away from Kip to face the window once more. Through the window, above the crater’s edge, a flock of geese trailed its V on the lightening sky.

“Have you ever seen a bird hatch?” asked Piper, as the cries of the geese drew farther away.

I could hear the frustration in Kip’s voice. “Sure. It’s the one thing I remember. Not my name, or my twin. Just really vivid memories of birdwatching.”

“If you take an egg away from the mother before it hatches, when the chick comes out it attaches itself to the first thing it sees. Follows it round like its mother. When we were kids, we had a duckling my twin watched hatching. After that, it followed her everywhere.”

“So I’m the duckling in your little allegory, yeah? Hatched from the tank and latching blindly onto Cass?”

Piper met Kip’s gaze unapologetically. “I think maybe that’s part of it, yes. But I can’t figure out if it’s a bad thing.”

“Not for you. You’ve already used me to get to her—counting on me to expose who her twin is.”

“You’re right. I was testing you, and you acted how I thought you would. But I don’t know that necessarily means you failed.”

“And you’re testing me again now.” Kip looked back down at the key, which Piper had placed on the thick stone sill. “Any surprises?”

“No.” Piper took the key again, pocketed it. “I didn’t think you’d leave, though I hoped you would. I still can’t work out if you’re a liability. For her, I mean.”

“Sure,” said Kip, rolling his eyes. “Your reasons were entirely selfless.”

“Of course not. Why do you think I gave you separate beds?” Piper grinned wryly, and looked over at me. I hoped he didn’t make out the flicker of movement as I shut my right eye again. “But I’m beginning to think you should stay with her. I think you have to.”

“I’m not a liability anymore, then?” goaded Kip.

“You might well be. But the reason you’re a liability is also the reason you should stay.”

“This is all very magnanimous of you both, deciding who I need, what’s best for me,” I said, throwing back the blanket and swinging my feet down to the floor with a thump. “But did it occur to you that I might have an opinion about that as well?” I rubbed the right side of my face, creased from the pillow.

Kip spoke first: “Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Or me,” added Piper hastily.

“Don’t you talk to me,” I said to him. “Sneaking in here, trying to play with us like the pins on your stupid maps upstairs.”

“That’s what I said to him,” said Kip.

I turned on him. “Don’t you talk to me, either. You’re no better. Why wouldn’t you go?”

He looked uncertainly at Piper, who grinned.

“Don’t start smirking,” I said to Piper. “Ducklings? Seriously? For crying out loud. Of course Kip should go, but you’re an idiot to think he ever would.”

“So you do want me to go?” Kip ventured.

“Yes, of course, for your sake. No, of course, for mine. But what I want, more than anything, is for the two of you to just stop all this nonsense. I’m trying so hard to keep my head clear, to stay alive, to see what’s coming, and you two are behaving as if I’m a prize to be won at a fair. As if nothing’s up to me.”

Piper spoke first. “I’m sorry. Mainly for being foolish—I knew Kip wouldn’t leave.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“I’m being sincere.”

“No, shut up. I need to think clearly. For all your blathering about ducklings, something else had me half-awake just before you came in. Something important.”

“This isn’t important to you?” asked Kip.

“You know what I mean. I’d had a vision, something urgent.” I closed my eyes again, trying to coax the vision back from the haze of sleep. “A man—he was crying—and he put a knife in his boot.” I looked up quickly. “Someone’s coming.”

Piper had moved to the window and slammed the shutters before I’d finished speaking, but it was the door that shook as something crashed against it. The key turned, the latch lifted, and, with almost comical slowness, the door scraped open, pushed by the weight of the guard who had died against it. Kip was halfway to the door when the intruder stepped over the dead guard and rushed at me, a bloodied knife still in his hand.

He’d reached me when Piper’s knife landed in his throat, so that as he fell he dragged me down with him. Clutched to the man’s front, I felt him quiver as another of the throwing knives hit him in his back as we went down. The back of my head hit the stone floor when I landed beneath him, and for an instant the room around me became blurred. It took a few seconds for Piper and Kip to drag the man off me and lay him on his back, eyes still fixed on me. As my vision steadied, I saw that it was Lewis, Piper’s adviser. The small knife in his neck twitched with each of his heartbeats, but he hardly bled until Piper bent down and calmly retrieved his knife, unleashing a rhythmic spurting of blood.