The Fire Sermon (9 page)

It was true, though it wasn’t a proper swing—just a spot we’d found, upstream, where a willow grew so close to the water that you could grasp the low draped branches and swing out above the river. On hot days, we’d compete to see who could swing farthest out, dropping triumphantly into the river below.

There were more recent memories, too, from the settlement. The evenings when I’d sit in front of my small fire and read Alice’s book of recipes, or her collection of songs, and picture her sitting in the same spot, years earlier, and writing them.

And later, the warmth on the coin from my mother’s hand, when she’d passed it to me in her attempt to warn me about Zach. It was a small thing to treasure: not even a touch—just the secondhand warmth of a coin that she’d held. But it was all I had of her, from those last few years, and it was mine.

All these things were now exposed to the Confessor’s dispassionate gaze. To her, they were no more than clutter in a drawer that she was rifling through, in search of something more valuable. Each time she moved on, she left me scrabbling to reassemble the disarranged mess of my mind.

When the Confessor stood and left, taking the map with her, I knew I should have been pleased that I’d managed to keep her from the island. But in concentrating on concealing those, I was forced to leave so much else exposed. These memories, these scraps of the life I’d lived before the cell, she just picked up, turned over, and cast aside. And although they were insignificant to her, nothing she’d touched was untarnished. After each visit, I felt I had fewer memories for her to peruse.

The next day, Zach came. His visits were rarer these days, and when he did come, he usually avoided my eyes, fidgeting with his keys instead. He hardly spoke, responding with shrugs to most of my questions. But every few weeks I’d hear the key in the lock, the door scrape along the floor, and in he’d come, my twin, my jailer, to sit at the far end of my bed. I didn’t know why he came, any more than I knew why I was always glad when I heard his footsteps in the corridor.

“You need to talk to her,” he said. “Just tell her what you see. Or let her in.”

“Into my mind, you mean?”

He shrugged. “Don’t sound so horrified. You’re like her, after all.”

I shook my head. “I don’t do what she does. I don’t poke around in other people’s minds. And she can stay the hell out of mine—it’s the only thing I’ve got here.” I didn’t know how to express to him what it was like when she tried to probe my mind. How it left me feeling sullied, unsafe even in my own head.

He gave a sigh that turned into a laugh. “I’d be impressed that you’ve held her out this long, except that I already knew how stubborn you are.”

“Then you should know it’s not going to change. I won’t help you.”

“You need to, Cass.” He leaned close to me. For a moment I thought he might take my hand, as he had all those years ago when our father was dying and he’d begged for my help. His pupils flared and contracted in their own uneven pulse. When he was this close to me, I could see the bloodied flakes of skin on his lower lip. I remembered how he used to chew his lip when Mom and Dad were fighting downstairs, or when the other children in the village were taunting us.

“What are you scared of?” I whispered. “Are you afraid of the Confessor?”

He stood. “There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.” He slapped at the wall. His open palm left a mark on the dusty concrete. “Worse things happening to some of the Omegas kept here. It’s only because you’re a seer that you get to live like this.” Stretching his neck backward, he dragged his hands down his face, took a few breaths with his eyes closed. “I told her you’d be useful.”

“You want me to be grateful? For this?” I gestured at the cell around us. The walls had become a vise around my life, everything crushed down to these few square yards of grayness. And my mind, too, had started to feel cell-like: enclosed and murky. Worst of all was the grim indifference of time, which kept passing, while I was stuck here in this endless half-life of meal trays and relentless light.

“You don’t know the care I take of you. Everything you eat”—he gestured to the tray on the floor—“I have somebody taste it first. Every jug of water. Everything.”

“I’m touched by your concern for me,” I said. “But as I recall, when I was living my own life, in the settlement, I didn’t even have to worry about people trying to poison me.”

“Your own life? You weren’t so keen on ‘your own life’ all those years when you were trying to claim mine.”

“I wasn’t trying to claim anything. I just didn’t want to be sent away, any more than you did.” Silence. “If you’d just let me on the ramparts occasionally, like when I was first here. Or to talk to some of the other prisoners. Just to be able to talk to someone else.”

He shook his head. “You know I can’t. You saw what happened on the ramparts that time. It could have been you who that madman attacked.” He looked at me with what could have been tenderness. “The whole point of having you here is to keep you safe.”

“If we were allowed to talk to one another, that wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have gone mad. Why would the other Omegas here ever hurt me? They’re in the same situation as I am. Why deny us company?”

“Because of who their twins are.”

“Their twins are your friends, your Council cronies.”

“You’re so naive, Cass. They’re the people I work with, work for—not my friends. You think some of them wouldn’t like to get their own twins to finish you off, to get at me?”

“Then where does it end? By your logic, we should all spend our lives in padded cells, Alphas and Omegas alike.”

“It’s not just me,” he said. “It’s always happened: using those who are close to people to manipulate them. Even in the Before. If they needed to control somebody, they could kidnap their husband, child, lover. The only difference in the After is that, now, it’s more direct. In the Before, you had to watch your back. Now, we all have two backs to watch. It’s that simple.”

“It’s only simple because you reduce having a twin to a liability. You’re paranoid.”

“And you’re willfully naive.”

“Is that why you come down here?” I asked him as he stood and unlocked the door. “Because you can’t trust anybody else up there, in the Council?”

“That would imply I could trust you,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him. I heard the key turn.

I calculated that it must have been at least a year since I’d seen the sky. In the artificially lit world of the Keeping Rooms, even my dreams changed; my daytime visions, too. When I’d first started to have visions of the island, I’d wondered if they were just a fantasy to alleviate the horror of my confinement. Now that new, darker visions began to intrude, for a long time I thought they might just be morbid imaginings, that the horror of my long isolation had seeped into my dreams. As my tally of days in the Keeping Rooms crept upward, I was growing distrustful of my own mind. But what I saw was too alien, and too consistent, for me to believe that I’d come up with it myself. The details, too, were so vivid that I was convinced I couldn’t have created them: the glass tanks, real right down to the dust on the rubber seals at the base. The wires and panels above the tanks, each panel speckled by tiny lights, red or green. The tubes, flesh-colored and rubbery, emerging from the top of each tank.

How could I have invented such a sight, when I couldn’t even decipher what it was? All that I knew for sure was that it was taboo, like the glass ball of light in my cell. The tubes and wires that I saw surrounding the tanks matched the stories of the Before, and all its electric alchemy. The lights, too, were the same unnatural spark as the light in my cell. Each light, unwavering, was a dot of pure color, without heat. This was a machine—but a machine for what? It was both messier and more awesome than the whispers about the Before had led me to believe. The tangle of wires and tubes looked disordered, improvised. But the whole, the pulsating mass of connections, lights, and tanks, was so huge and so complex that it couldn’t help be impressive, despite the shudder it provoked in me.

At first, the tanks were all that the visions showed me. Then, floating within the tanks, I saw the bodies, suspended in a viscous liquid that seemed to slow everything until even the waving of their hair was lethargic. From each drooping mouth, a tube. But the eyes were the worst. Most had their eyes closed, but even those few with open eyes wore entirely blank expressions, their eyes utterly empty. These were the ruins of people. I thought of Zach’s words, when I’d complained about the cell:
There are worse things
we could do to you than this cell, you know.

I sensed the tanks most acutely when Zach came, though he did this rarely now. The tank room was like a smell that clung to him. Even as I heard his key in the lock I could feel the faces looming into sight. After he left, they crowded me for hours with their closed eyes and open mouths. They were all Omegas, all suspended in the timelessness of those glass vats. As the months passed, even as Zach’s visits grew rarer, my awareness of the tank room became near-constant. Far from being abstract, it felt not only real but also close. It became so pressing a physical presence that I felt as if I could navigate by it: the sure pull of that room, perhaps only hundreds of feet away, had become my compass point. Just as the river had once been the basis of my mental map of the valley where I grew up, now my imagination’s map of the fort was oriented by two locations: the cell, and the tank room. Beneath it all, the river was still there. I could sense it running deep underfoot, its ceaseless movement taunting me with my own stagnation.

One day the Confessor unlocked the door but didn’t step inside the cell.

“Get up,” she said, holding the door open.

I hadn’t been out of the cell for more than a year. I wondered if she was taunting me. In the last few months, I’d sometimes begun to fear I was going mad. Looking through the open door, I distrusted even the strip of corridor I could make out. To my space-starved eyes, the concrete passageway seemed as far-fetched as a mountain vista under sunlight.

“Hurry up. I’m going to show you something. We don’t have long.”

Even with three armed soldiers standing by, and the Confessor watching me impatiently, I couldn’t hide my excitement as we stepped through the door.

She refused to tell me where she was taking me, or to respond at all to any of my questions. She walked briskly, a few steps ahead of me, the guards following closely behind. As it turned out, it wasn’t far: just to the end of the corridor, through another locked door, then down a flight of stairs to another row of doors.

“We’re not going outside?” I asked, facing the row of cell doors that mimicked my own: the gray steel; the narrow slot for meal trays near the base; the observation hatch at eye level, which could be opened only from the corridor, not within.

“This isn’t a picnic excursion,” she said. “There’s something you need to see.”

She walked to the third door and slid open the hatch. Like the one in my cell, it clearly hadn’t been opened often—it slid awkwardly, shrieking with rust.

The Confessor stepped back. “Go on,” she said, gesturing at the hatch.