The Refuge Song (13 page)

It's not finished
, he'd said. I'd been trying to make the pieces fit, Elsa and the Ark paper and New Hobart, but it was all one piece. And Xander had known all along.

Sally brought Xander in, a blanket draped around his shoulders. Zoe led him to the bench and I knelt beside him.

“What's the
maze of bones
?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

He didn't speak. His eyes began their usual surveillance of the ceiling.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I told you already,” he said.

“You did,” I said. “But we didn't understand. Tell me again.”

“It used to feel different,” he said. “A quiet space, underground.”

I wanted to prompt him, but I forced myself to wait. His eyes did another lap of the tent's ceiling. Sally's hand, on his shoulder, was tensed.

“Then it got noisy,” he went on. “People rattling the bones.”

“Is it the Ark?” I said.

“It's just a hole,” he muttered. “A place where people lost their bones. A maze of bones.”

“But now you can feel noises there? People in it?”

He nodded. “Sounds in the dark place.”

“Has the Council found it? Do you know where it is?”

He swung his head from side to side. “It's noisy there now. But they're still looking for pieces. Paper pieces. Word bones, from Before.”

“In New Hobart?” I asked. I remembered what Zoe had told me, the report about papers surfacing in New Hobart years ago, and the Council crushing the resistance cell before anything more could be found. “Papers from the Ark, like the one that Sally made a copy of—is that what they're searching for there?”

Xander nodded. “They need them,” he said again. “It's not finished.”

chapter 14

That was all we could get out of him, but it was enough. When he had descended again into aborted syllables and broken words, I turned to Simon.

“If thousands of people being tanked wasn't enough to get you to free New Hobart, will this make a difference?”

“We had a lead from New Hobart about the Ark, years ago,” he said. “But it came to nothing. The soldiers got there first, wiped out our whole cell.”

“Whatever there was to be found, it was important to the Council,” I said. Important enough for them to move quickly, and to kill for. They're still searching—there's more to be found. And I think Elsa knows something about it.” I thought again of her face as we'd stood in her kitchen, when I'd asked about the resistance. She'd mentioned her dead husband, but she'd never dared to tell me what had happened to him. His story was an intake of breath that had never been exhaled. “Her
husband was killed, and she hinted that it was from asking too many questions. Couldn't he have been involved?”

Piper shook his head. “We had six people in New Hobart. I knew all of them myself. None of them was married to the keeper of the holding house. I'd never heard anything to suggest a link to her.”

“It's a bit convenient, isn't it?” said Zoe. “That the person who might have crucial information for you should just happen to be the person you stayed with there.”

I turned from her to Piper. “You're the one who's always going on about how important my visions are. What they're worth. Didn't it occur to you that there was a reason that Elsa was the person I went to in New Hobart? That something could have drawn me to her house, even if I wasn't aware of it, the same way I was drawn to the island?”

I'd been wondering about this since Kip's death. I'd been thinking of all the tanks lined up in that chamber I'd discovered under Wyndham. Had I found myself at Kip's tank, of all the tanks in that room, because something had led me there? Had my fear of the Confessor drawn me, unwittingly, to find her twin?

“Whether your friend is involved or not,” said Simon, “it makes no difference—we can't free the town. That would mean open war, outnumbered and under-resourced.”

“It's already war,” I said. “Just a slow war, and we're losing. They're looking for something in New Hobart—something important enough for the Council to hold the city all this time. It's something that could help us to find the Ark, or even Elsewhere. It could make all the difference.”

“How?” Simon's voice was weary. “Even if we could free the town and find the papers, what will some dusty documents offer us? More details of the Before? More taboo machines that we can't understand?”

“You're sounding like the Ringmaster,” I said. “We can't run from
this, just because the machines scare us. Zach and the General have been using machines all along. That's always been at the heart of their plans. They've already found the Ark. The papers could lead us there, or to Elsewhere. You want to let the Council find the papers first? The more information they have, the more dangerous they get.”

For an hour, we argued. We kept coming back to the necessity of freeing New Hobart, and the impossibility of doing so. The conversation was a closed loop, like the wall around the town itself.

“If we lose the battle,” Simon said, “it would be the end of the resistance.”

Sally had been sitting in silence, Xander's hand in hers. She spoke quietly.

“That's all we focus on these days, isn't it? The massacre on the island. Shifting out to the east, like you're doing now. Call it what you like—it's a retreat. But when did we stop thinking about what we're fighting for? We're just running and hiding, trying to forestall the end of the resistance. I understand the fear—I've seen how hard things have got. I know what we're up against. But what if this Ark could really change things? What if we stopped thinking about the end of the resistance, and started thinking about the end of the Council?”

Ω

Just before dawn, Simon gave the order to strike camp and head for New Hobart. Troops were sent to the woods to retrieve the horses hidden there and to lead them down to the quarry to be loaded with gear. Two guards were being left in the quarry, but tents and gear still needed to be shifted. The white clay clung to everything, including the tents, and the horses slipped on the paths that had become troughs. Twice I tried to help with the loading, but each time I approached, the guards would turn from me, dragging the horses away without a word.

Our group set off before noon, and we rode late into the night. Piper and I were at the front, next to Simon. Behind us rode Sally, holding Xander in front of her, with Zoe beside them, and two of Simon's scouts. After all the time I'd spent traveling with just Kip, or Zoe and Piper, it was a luxury to ride on horseback, with scouts navigating and keeping watch, and others to set up the camp and cook. We traveled in small groups, mainly at night, joining others occasionally when we camped at rendezvous points. But whenever we joined the other troops, I caught them staring at me. I recognized the look; all Omegas were familiar with it. It was the same look that the Alphas gave us: a mixture of fear and disgust. The troops were hostile to Piper and Zoe, too. Once, when we camped for a day in a boulder field, I heard a man scoff as he saw Piper.

“There he goes, with the Alpha and the seer again,” the man said.

A woman joined in. “More interested in them than in his own kind.”

Zoe had spun around, but Piper gripped her arm and guided her onward.

“You're going to stand for that?” Zoe said.

“Starting fights with our own troops isn't going to help us free New Hobart,” Piper said. “And we still have a long way to go.”

Xander began to mutter, echoing the words he'd heard, as if they were bouncing off him. “Long way,” he said, again and again. “Long, long way.” His hands rose and fell. He was often like this when he sensed that others were angry, and I moved away while Sally pressed his cheeks with both hands and bent her head to his, to talk him down from the precipice of his anxiety. When Sally had managed to calm him, she looked over her shoulder to Piper and spoke in a low voice.

“You'll need to deal with the troops at some stage. They need to be fighting for you, not against you.”

He gave her a quick smile. “Let me pick the time,” he said.

Ω

The resistance might have been hard-pressed since the attack on the island, but under Simon's leadership it was still substantial and well organized.

Within two nights we'd crossed McCarthy's Pass, a narrow gap in the mountain range at the base of the central plains. The night was clear, and from the top of the pass we could look down to the south and see the sea again. We dismounted to let the horses drink from a spring. Piper followed me when I stepped away from the group to stare down at the coast.

“It's always said that everything's broken, since the blast,” he said. “And we both know there's plenty that's broken enough.”

There were so many different kinds of brokenness to choose from. The broken-down mountains, slumped into heaps of slag and scree. The towns and cities from the Before, the bones of a world. Or the broken bodies he'd seen, too many to count.

“But look at that.” He waved down at the view below us. The rocks of the mountain pass gave way to the hills. Farther down, the sea hugged the curves of the shore like a sleeping lover.

He turned to face me. His look was always like this: direct, unabashed. “It's easy to forget, sometimes, that what's left isn't all ugliness.”

It was impossible to argue with him. Not in front of the ocean, unconcerned with us. And not in front of Piper himself. His eyes, their clear, pale green startling in his dark face. The ledge of his cheekbones, and the clean jut of his jaw. The world had always taught me that we were broken. But when I looked at Piper, I could see no brokenness in him.

He touched my face. I could feel the calluses on his fingers, from handling rabbit snares and knife blades. The softer skin of his palm, yielding when I pressed my face against it. Soft as Kip's cheek.

I jerked backward.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“I don't want anything from you.” His eyebrows drew together. “I see you struggling with your visions. And I know it's not easy for you to see what's become of Xander. I'm only trying to comfort you.”

I didn't know how to say to him that there was no comfort for me. That he had refused the brokenness the world had thrust on him, but I was broken in ways he couldn't understand. That if you cut me open, all that would tumble out would be fire, and visions of Kip in the tanks, and of Kip falling to the silo floor. That there were some things that could not be put right.

I left him on the hillside, among the stones of the shattered mountain.

Ω

It took us a week to get to New Hobart. At first we were traveling through Alpha territory, but Simon's scouts kept us well clear of the Alpha villages and patrols. We moved mainly at night, until we reached the arid plains to the south of New Hobart, where the Alpha settlements withdrew, and we could travel in daylight again. The winds that ripped through these plains were ferocious, leaving my eyes red and my lips dry and chapped. Nothing grew but the wiry, tall grass, and our tracks were blown away as soon as we made them. Winter was beginning to establish its stranglehold on the land now.

When we passed the small town of Twyford, the fires were lit, smoke blurring the sky. In our tent, Xander whimpered with the cold and slept close between Zoe and Piper. It wasn't his moans or muttering that kept me awake, though. It was the thrashing of his mind. Once, when I was a child, an ant had crawled into my ear. For two days all my squirming and poking had not been able to dislodge the ant,
and I'd felt it moving, its every twitch amplified within my head. Being near to Xander was like that, for me.

At noon the next day, Sally shouted Piper's name. She and Xander, sharing a horse, were riding just behind us, a guard at each side. At her shouts we wheeled our horses and rode back to her, but there was no sign of ambush or disaster—only Xander's usual faraway expression, and Sally clutching both of his shoulders from behind.

“Say it again,” she said to Xander. He opened his mouth but no words emerged. Their horse shifted from side to side, as though Xander's unease trickled down to him, too.

“Say it again,” repeated Sally. “Tell Piper what you said to me.”

When Xander still said nothing, Sally turned to Piper.

“Which ships did you send out to search for Elsewhere?” she said.

“
The Evelyn
and
The Rosalind
,” Zoe and Piper said in unison.

Sally smiled, contorting her wrinkles into elaborate new configurations. “That's what he said.
Rosalind
.” She grabbed Xander's shoulders once more. “Tell Piper,” she said. “Say it again.”

Xander looked impatient, but spoke. “I already said it. Rosalind. Rosalind's coming back.”

He couldn't be persuaded to say any more, but those words were enough to spur us onward for the long day's ride. Simon was noncommittal, only muttering that he'd reconsider sending more troops to the west, in search of the ships, if we managed to free New Hobart. I understood his reluctance. A few stuttered words from Xander didn't seem much, in the face of the ships' long silence, and the winter storms that would be thrashing the sea.

Nonetheless, through all that day's hours of riding, and the next, I held Xander's words, cupping them in my mind like a bird's egg.
Rosalind's coming back.

Ω

The cold was worse when we reached the swamps. If we'd been traveling at a leisurely pace we might have had the luxury of avoiding the worst of the mires, but we had no time to waste and sometimes spent half a day or more leading our horses through the knee-deep water. Sally never complained, but at night, as we huddled around a fire of half-damp reeds, I could see how she struggled to hold her rations in her hands, which the cold had tied into intractable knots. I saw, too, how Piper's jaw muscles were tensed against his shivering, and how Zoe pulled her sleeves down over her blue-tinged hands.

When we were six miles east of New Hobart, deep in the marshes, Simon ordered the troops to make camp. The swamp was stubborn here, a mess of pits and marsh, held together only by threads and islands of higher land. The water, already iced at the edges, was too deep to wade through, and the reeds grew taller even than Piper. Where trees sprouted in the higher ground, they were contorted by the wind, their branches twisted and arthritic. Smaller trees clung at the edge of the swamp pools, their roots dangling straight into the water. It took us a day of seeking to find the best spot, an acre or two of tussocked island amid the fetid water. A single, circuitous path led there through the miles of swamp. The horses had to be led slowly through the path, testing each hoof as they placed it, and when we were in the camp, they clustered by the reeds and whinnied their suspicion. But the noise was no concern—this wasn't territory for passers-by. Any wanderers were more likely to drown in the murky, ice-rimmed water than to stumble across our camp, deep in the reeds.

Messengers and scouts had already been sent out, to muster the surviving members of the resistance. But it would take days, if not weeks, for them to join us. In Simon's tent, we gathered around a map of the
region. Rendered down to pen strokes on paper, the town itself was shown, rising on a hill on the plain, now ringed by the Council's wall. A mile or more to the south lay the forest that Kip and I had burned. To the north and west, the plains were broken only by occasional gullies and copses. And to the east, the swamps where our camp perched, islands of mud among half-frozen water and reeds that climbed half as high as the occasional trees.