The Refuge Song (24 page)

The Ringmaster shrugged. “You said it yourself: you wanted to know what happened to him.”

He reached a hand for my face. For an instant it rested against the side of my jaw. The last time he'd touched me, it had been to grab my wrist, when we'd argued in the tithe collector's rooms.

I jerked away, stepping backward. He looked down at his hand as though it were a stranger's. The disgust on his face mirrored that on my own.

He stepped back into the dark of the courtyard and was gone. When I turned back to the dormitory, hand pressed to my face, Piper was still busy with the papers and had noticed nothing.

That night, after Piper had gone, it wasn't the Ringmaster I thought of, but Heaton. It was true—I had said that I wanted to know. And it
was also true that his death had probably been quicker and less painful than a slow death on the surface, poisoned with radiation, and starving. But as I lay in bed, I wished I could have left Heaton's story unfinished. I wanted to be able to imagine him climbing upward, throwing open a hatch for the final time, seeing the light filtered through the sky's veil of ash, and stepping out into the world.

chapter 28

Piper came back at dawn. I was already awake, and had been most of the night—a vision of the blast had ripped me from sleep not long after midnight, and I'd been lying there, trying to douse the flames that still smoldered in my mind. When I heard the footsteps in the courtyard I reached for the knife beneath my pillow.

“It's me,” he said, letting the door slam against the wall as he opened it. His eyes were swollen, the skin beneath them darkened.

“Did you sleep at all?” I said, as I sat up and swung my legs to the ground.

“I think I can find it,” he said. “The Ark. Look here.”

He tried to pass me a sheet of paper, but I waved him away as I pulled on my sweater.

“At least let me get dressed,” I said. “The Ark's been there for four hundred years. It's not going anywhere.”

It was so cold that I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders over my clothes, as I squatted to look at the papers he laid out on the floor.

“Here,” he said, sliding a page across to me. It wasn't dated, but the neat printing marked it as being from the Ark's early years. It was one of the expedition logs, recording radiation levels on the surface.

“Look at the first column,” he said.

The heading read:
Radiation readings (Bq) taken at mile intervals from the Ark (Entrance 1).
Below it, the numbers unfurled:
West 1; W. 2; W. 3
; and so on down the page.

“But then the readings just stop,” Piper said “W. sixty-one is the last one. But in this sheet”—he passed me a second sheet, similarly barred with columns of numbers—“another expedition goes east, and they get much further. Up to E. two hundred forty.”

“So? They had to turn back earlier when they headed west. Maybe they got as far as they planned; maybe they ran into some kind of trouble. Met some hostile survivors and had to leg it.”

He shook his head. “They weren't in a hurry—they were taking measurements on the way back as well—look at the third column.” He looked up at me. “They stopped because they hit the coast.”

“OK.” I paused and wiped the sleep from my eyes. “But even if that's what happened, how much does that help us? It places the Ark about sixty miles inland. But which part of the coast? That's a strip more than six hundred miles long.”

“Look—here.” He rifled through the papers he'd arranged, and passed me a sheet. “The bit at the bottom, about the water.”

It was one of the Ark's regular status reports, with updates on supplies, outbreaks of illness, and issues with the underground structure itself.

Yr. 3, August 9. INFRASTRUCTURE/RESOURCE BRIEFING (MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE).

Potable water: tanked supplies should, at current rates, last a further 26 months (shorter than anticipated, due to the rupture of Tank 7 during the detonations) after which we will be relying on the external water supply. The filtration system for the external supply is functioning, but while the removal of ash and residue has substantially reduced radiation levels (to well below prefiltration readings taken by Surface Expedition 4), it remains significantly higher than . . .

I looked up at him. “They had access to drinking water. So they're near some kind of stream or river?”

“There were more than a thousand people there. It'd have to have been a decent-size water source.”

“OK—so we're talking about a river, passing sixty miles or so from the coast. It doesn't exactly pinpoint the location.”

“Here.” He was ready with another single sheet, its bottom half torn away.

I read the title:

Yr. 18, April 18. SURFACE EXPEDITION 23: OBSERVATIONS (TERRAIN VIABILITY W/ VIEW TO FUTURE RESETTLEMENT).

But Piper didn't wait for me to read it all—he reached over and tapped on a section near the page's truncated end. “There—read that bit.”

given that radiation levels have failed to subside at expected rates, any surface resettlement in future decades should ideally be located close enough to continue to use the Ark's facilities (espec. the water filtration systems and

The Ark's location, while optimal for minimizing damage on impact, has limitations for surface resettlement. The clay loam soil that made the area ideal for stable excavation is poorly suited to farming . . .

“Now turn it over,” Piper said.

Even my careful handling sent small flakes of paper and dust drifting to the ground.

“There's nothing there,” I said. “Just a stain.” The back of the sheet had no writing—only a faded brown mark, spreading from the bottom of the picture, as though tea had long ago been spilled.

“That's what I thought at first,” I said. “But then I wondered why the back of the page hadn't been reused. All the other papers have every spare space filled. Half a page blank like that—they would have reused it.”

I bent to look more closely. There were overlapping layers of discoloration, seeping from the left-hand side.

“It's a picture,” Piper said. He reached over my shoulder and turned the page on its side. I could see it now—the stains weren't stains after all, but mountains, reaching into the bare sky. “Not a picture like the ones in that pile,” he said, gesturing to the technical diagrams that I'd massed on one of the beds. “It's not detailed, not there to show how something works. It's more like the kind of pictures my parents had hanging on the wall in their house.”

I wondered who had painted it. I tried to picture them pausing dur
ing one of the rare surface expeditions, wanting to take back into the Ark an image of the world that had been lost to them.

“Look,” he said. As he leaned forward from behind me to point at the picture, his arm rested on my shoulder. I could feel his warmth against my back. My whole body had shuddered from the Ringmaster's touch, but Piper's was as familiar as the weight of my rucksack on my shoulders, or the texture of my blanket against my neck.

“See that mountain,” he went on, “with the peak that drops away on one side? That's Broken Mountain, viewed from the west. Next to it, the one with the plateau—that's got to be Mount Alsop.”

I turned so I could see his face. He was grinning. It had been a long time since I'd seen a smile like that.

“There's a plain, west of the Spine Mountains, about eighty miles northwest of here. The Pelham River runs through it. It fits with the painting, and all the other stuff—the distance from the coast. Even the clay soil.”

I remembered all the maps, pinned to the walls in his tiny makeshift chamber on the island. Even before he joined the resistance, there were his years of traveling with Zoe. He knew the land in a way that I didn't. Not the vague groping knowledge of a seer, but the intimate knowledge of years of hard travel. He knew the best passes for crossing a patrolled mountain range; which coastal caves would flood at high tide; the quickest route through the swamps, avoiding all the roads.

“If I can get us to the right area,” he said, “can you find it?”

“It'll be guarded,” I said.

“That's not what I asked,” he said. “Can you find it?”

I closed my eyes. When I'd sought the island, it had been like a beacon, a light that I'd followed. The Ark felt different. It was a darkness, a blackness so complete that I couldn't even feel my way toward it. I tried, once again, to stop my mind's instinctive flinching from it,
and instead to turn and face it. I tried to picture the plain, and the river, overlooked by the mountains. And I felt it, the slightest tug, gentle and unsettling as a tiny bug crawling in my hair. Something was waiting for me in that buried place, where we would go to ask the bones what they remembered.

I nodded.

He gave an answering nod. “Then we leave today.”

Ω

I knocked at the door of Elsa's room and she came quickly, a shawl wrapped over her nightgown. When I told her we were leaving, she asked no questions, only pulled me to her, held me so close that I could smell the warmth of skin and sweat, the garlic tang of her hands. Neither of us said anything about meeting again. We had moved beyond the cheap consolation of words.

At the tithe collector's office the others were waiting.

“I've ordered three of our best horses to be made ready for you at the gates,” the Ringmaster said. “I offered to send some soldiers with you, too, but Piper refused.”

“Piper's right,” I said quickly. “We can travel more quickly, just the three of us, and without being seen.”

I was surprised that the Ringmaster hadn't insisted. I knew he didn't trust us, or this mission to the Ark.

He bent lower, speaking so that only I could hear. “Do you think I need to waste troops on making sure you don't betray me?” He shook his head slowly. “If you betray me, or risk us all by unleashing more machines, I have a whole town here, Cass. I have your Elsa, and Sally and Xander.”

He made no explicit threats, but their names were enough.

He straightened. “Be careful,” he said, louder. To the others, listening, it might have sounded like a benediction. I knew better.

Sally came in, unwrapping a scarf from her face.

“I've just spoken to the dawn patrol,” she said. “It's the same as yesterday: smoke to the south, and more sightings of Council soldiers. They're keeping their distance from the town, but they're out there, more and more of them. You'll have to wait until the snow comes. You'll need the cover, to get clear of here.”

I looked out the window. The clouds overhead were murky and thick, but it hadn't snowed for two days. Footsteps on the road outside had churned the snow to gray slush.

Piper was staring out the window, too. “Lucia was good with weather,” he said. I glanced quickly at him, but he still had his face turned to the window. He rarely mentioned her, and now that he had, his voice was soft. “She would've been able to tell us when the next snow was due.”

“Well, she's not here.” Zoe's voice came down like an ax, cutting off Piper's words.

Ω

It was after sunset before the clouds made good their promise of snow. It fell thickly, fat dabs of whiteness in the dark. There was no time for long farewells. Sally embraced Piper and Zoe, and surprised me by squeezing my arm.

Xander wouldn't move from the window, where he was watching the snowflakes swarming in the gusty wind. He didn't turn as I approached. His chin rested on the windowsill, his breath blurring his reflection in the glass.

We'd thought about taking him—it was Xander, after all, who'd first sensed the Ark. But with him and Sally in tow we couldn't evade the Council soldiers, or travel quickly, let alone penetrate the tightly guarded Ark.

“We have to go,” I said to him, “and we can't take you with us.”

“Are you going to find
The Rosalind
?” he said. It was the clearest sentence he'd said in weeks. I couldn't bear to tell him about
The Rosalind
's hacked-off figurehead, left in the snow on the eastern road, or about her crew setting sail again in the Council's tanks.

“We're looking for the Ark,” I said. “The maze of bones.”

If he understood what I said, he gave no sign of it.

“I'm sorry,” I said quietly. And I was. Not sorry for leaving him behind, because we had no choice. But sorry that I'd been avoiding him. Sorry that his mind was the clapper in the bell of my own madness, and that I had not been brave enough to share more time with him.

Now, watching the snow, he was calmer than I'd seen him in a long time. I touched his hand before I walked away.

“Forever fire,” he whispered, like a promise.

chapter 29

When I hefted my rucksack onto my back, it clanked and jabbed me in the shoulder blades. Not knowing what to expect in the Ark, we'd packed a lantern and jars of oil, as well as food, water, and blankets. Sally, Simon, and the Ringmaster watched us step into the snow.

At a crossroads near the gate, six of Simon's troops were waiting for us, including Crispin, holding the reins of our horses. Piper spoke quietly with him, out of hearing of the rest of the squadron, then nodded and returned to me and Zoe.

“We'll ride out with Crispin's men,” he said. “It gives us the best chance to slip off unobserved, if the Council's soldiers are watching. Say nothing to the squadron of where we're headed, or why.”

We mounted and filed out the eastern gate. Beyond the shelter of the walls, the snow battered our faces, and I wrapped my scarf up to my eyes. For ten minutes, we followed Crispin east along the main road, before turning south to trace a broad circle around the town's walls.
Torches burned at intervals along the wall, each one illuminating a few yards of snow. In the watchtowers, lanterns glowed. The town's ring of light only made the darkness seem thicker where we rode.

At one point I could smell smoke, and Crispin pointed to the south.

“A few miles that way, there's a camp of Council soldiers,” he said. “At least a hundred of them. We've had scouts watching them since last week.” In the dark, the sole sign of them was the trace of smoke in the snow-heavy air. “The Ringmaster and Simon are planning a raid, soon,” said Crispin.

I nodded. A raid was the sensible thing to do, before more Council soldiers arrived and before New Hobart could be encircled. But the thought of another battle, however necessary, made vomit rise at the back of my throat. This was how violence worked, I was learning: it refused to be contained. It spread, a plague of blades.

The patrol rode in silence around the south of the city, the ghost of the burned forest on our left. As we began to turn to the north, I heard music. It was snatched away by the wind in an instant, and when I raised myself in my stirrups and looked around, the others were riding on as though they'd heard nothing. Fragments of music kept coming, falling around me like the snow. I called ahead to Piper, but he said he heard nothing. I knew, then, that there was nothing to hear but the wind, and the hoof-falls of our horses on snow. The music was in my head.

Our route was about to cross the main road running from New Hobart to the west. Crispin, at the front of the patrol, raised his hand to halt us. There was something in the road ahead, beneath the lone oak. Crispin's troops fanned out, weapons at the ready. It was hard to make out the shape in the thick snowfall. It looked like a figure, but it was too high, and it wavered with the confused wind. For a surreal moment I thought the man was flying, as if we'd encountered a ghost, one of the unburied bodies from the battle, grown restless. Then another gust of wind swept aside the snow for a moment.

The man hung from the tree. There was an unmistakable wrongness to the angle of the neck. Three crows took flight from the branch above him as Crispin and two of his men rode toward the body.

“Stay back,” said Piper, throwing his arm out to stop me as I urged my horse forward. Piper had his knife out, and Zoe and the other soldiers were scanning the space around us.

“It's an Omega,” Crispin called back to Piper. “He wasn't here when the last patrol came through, but there are no tracks—they must have strung him up around sunset, before the snow.”

The horses had picked up on our unease and were snorting, backing into each other.

“It's a message,” Piper said. “They left him here for our patrols to find.”

“I need to see this,” I said.

“You want to see the inside of a Council cell again?” snapped Zoe. “Because that's where you'll end up, if you don't listen. We're a mile from the walls. It could be an ambush, for all you know.”

I ignored her and kicked my horse forward. Piper rode after me, shouting. But I wasn't listening to him. The music in my head—I knew what it was: the refuge song. The closer I got to the swinging man, the more the music was out of tune—the notes of the melody were wrong, as if played on slackened strings.

It was Leonard who had been hanged. His guitar had been smashed and then the strap looped back over his head. The arm of the guitar made a crooked scarecrow out of him. When the wind spun him, I could see his hands tied behind his back. Some of the fingers stuck out at strange angles. I wasn't sure whether they'd been broken in the struggle, or in torture, or whether it was just his body's stiffening. I didn't want to know.

Piper and Zoe flanked me, looking up at Leonard as the wind turned his face away.

It wasn't even Leonard's broken body that I mourned—it was all those tunes still inside him. All those words still to be sung.

“We need to take him down,” I said.

“It's not safe,” said Piper. “There are Council soldiers about. We need to leave the patrol and get out of here.”

I ignored him, dismounting and looping my reins around a low branch so I could set to work untying Leonard's hands. The twine was fastened tightly, the fibers rasping against one another as I tried to work the knots loose. The squeaking sound of it set my teeth on edge in a way that the touch of Leonard's cold flesh didn't.

“Can you take his body back to New Hobart, bury it properly?” I called up to Crispin, who was still surveying the road to the west.

He shook his head. “They've enough bodies to deal with. This is a patrol, not a grave-digging service. I'll send a man to the town to report, and two to scout the area. The rest of us need to finish the patrol.”

“Fine,” I said. “I'll bury him myself.”

“We don't have time for this,” hissed Zoe. I ignored her and kept on at the twine holding Leonard's hands behind his back.

When they were freed, Leonard's hands didn't fall to his sides but stayed bent behind his back, stiffened or frozen into place.

I couldn't reach the rope from which he hung. I jumped a few times, swiping at the rope with my dagger, but all I succeeded in doing was startling my horse, and setting Leonard's body spinning.

“It'd be quicker if you helped me,” I said to Piper, “instead of just watching.”

“There's no time to dig a proper grave,” he said. “We'll take him down, but then we have to move.”

“Fine,” I said, out of breath.

We did our best. From his saddle, Piper cut the rope while I held Leonard's body up, then together we lowered him to the ground, his
weight unleashing fresh pains from my half-healed arm. Zoe held Piper's horse when he dismounted and lifted the guitar from Leonard's neck. The wood creaked, splinters snapping. I leaned over him and tried to loosen the noose that clutched at his neck. I slit the rope; the flesh beneath it was dark purple, and didn't spring back, instead preserving the rope's indentations.

Together we carried him to the ditch at the side of the road. When we lowered him to the ground, his body bent at the waist with a creaking sound. Every minute on that road was a risk, and there was no time to bury him properly, with our bare hands, and in the frozen earth. In the end I cut a small section from my blanket and laid it over his face, grateful that he had no eyes to close. We were about to remount when I ran back to the tree and retrieved the smashed guitar from where Piper had let it drop. I gathered the fragments and laid them next to Leonard in the ditch.

Ω

We headed north with Crispin and two of his soldiers, as they continued their circuit around the town, but once we were half a mile from the road Piper turned his horse west, and Zoe and I peeled off to follow him. The others didn't even slow their horses, though Crispin looked back and raised a hand. “Go safely,” he said. Piper raised his hand, too.

We rode far, and fast. In the snow and the darkness, it felt like we were traveling blind, and I thought of Leonard, and his perpetually dark world. Twice my horse almost lost its footing in the snow. Once I sensed people not far to the north of us, and we sheltered in a gully, glad of the snowfall that covered our tracks as the mounted men rode along the ridge above us.

We headed west until it was light enough to negotiate the rocky gullies that lay to the north. By noon, we were approaching the foothills of the Spine Mountains. The snow that we'd been thankful for earlier was
now setting as a sheet of ice on the rocks. The horses, already tired, were shying and hesitant; several times we had to dismount and lead them.

As we rode, I kept thinking of what Piper had said:
Lucia was good with weather.
It was the first time he'd willingly raised the subject of the dead seer. Usually, he and Zoe edged around Lucia's name as though it were a thornbush. When Piper had spoken of her, back in the tithe collector's office, Zoe had snapped at him. I remembered the loaded glances he and Zoe exchanged, whenever Lucia was mentioned. When Xander had asked after Lucia, Zoe had stiffened, while Piper's voice had been thick with grief.
She's gone
, he'd said.

It was like the Ark: it had been there the whole time, beneath the surface. And now I understood it, it changed everything. Now that I'd realized how Piper had felt about Lucia, so many things fell into place. How quickly he'd warmed to me on the island. His willingness to free me, against the will of the Assembly. It wasn't me who he'd warmed to: it was his memories of Lucia.

It explained, too, so much about Zoe. Her hostility to me, and her frustration with my visions. Even with Xander, she had been silent and brittle in the face of his brokenness.

All their lives it had been just the two of them: Zoe and Piper. I knew that bond, because I'd lived it myself, with Zach, before we were split. How much more intense the bond must have been for Zoe and Piper, who had chosen to stay together, even after he'd been branded and sent away. For Zoe, especially, who had made that choice, leaving her parents, and the ease of an Alpha life, to follow him. Choosing him, even though it meant a lifetime as a fugitive. And then he'd left her. He'd not only gone to the island, where she could never follow, but had also found a closer bond with somebody else. I understood how Zoe might still feel unmoored by this. I knew from experience that there were different kinds of intimacy, no less binding than the kind shared by lovers. I re
membered Zoe's face when I'd come across her at the spring, listening to the bards' music with her eyes closed. It was the only time I'd caught her looking so unguarded. Her face had been turned upward, showing her loneliness to the sky. Before she'd snapped at me and stormed away, she'd told me about how she and Piper used to sneak out together, as children, to hear a bard play.

When the dark came, we stopped in a copse through which a stream ran, frozen at the edges. We tethered the horses downstream and managed to get a fire started, though winter had stripped the trees and they gave little cover from the snow.

I waited until we'd eaten before I broached the subject. Zoe was sitting beside me, reaching her gloved hands so close to the fire that I could smell the singed wool. Piper sat with his back to us, looking out between the trees.

“I know what it's like to be close to your twin,” I said to Zoe. “And I know you two are closest of all, sticking together the way you did.”

“What are you going on about?” She poked the fire with a long stick. Sparks darted upward and were snuffed out by the darkness.

“I understand that it wasn't easy for you,” I went on. “How the two of you must always have depended on each other.”

“Is there a point to this little monologue?” She still grasped the stick. The end had caught fire, and she held it upright, like a torch.

“I understand, now, about Lucia.”

She raised an eyebrow. Piper had turned so quickly that the knives on his belt clattered. I waited. The words I was about to speak were stones, and I tested their weight before I dropped them into the pool.

“You're jealous,” I said to Zoe. “Because Piper loved her. You didn't want to share him then, and you don't want to share him now. Piper and I aren't even lovers, but having another seer around is too much for you, isn't it? That's why you always snap at me, always criticize me.”

“Cass,” said Piper, his voice measured as he stood and stepped toward us. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Zoe had dropped the flaming stick. It glowed, half an inch from my foot. Piper bent and tossed it back onto the fire.

I'd thought that Zoe might hit me, but she just shook her head slowly. “You think you understand my life? You think you understand me and Piper? Screaming about the blast in your sleep doesn't give you any special insights.” She leaned closer, speaking very slowly and clearly. “You're pathetic. You think you're so wise, and so special, so much better than Xander and Lucia. I wish you'd hurry up and lose your mind entirely. You're harder to be around than Xander—at least
he
doesn't think he's special, and he shuts up sometimes.”

I had to raise my voice to compete with the wind. “Did you hate Lucia as much as you hate me?” I asked. “I bet you were glad when she died. Then you could have your precious Piper to yourself.”

Her hand moved toward her belt, and I wondered whether she would throw a knife, and whether Piper would defend me. If it came to blades and blows, who would he choose?

She turned her back on me and walked away. I watched her go until the night claimed her, and I could see nothing but the fire's light thrown against the tree trunks.

Piper took a few steps, too, as if to follow her.

“I'm sorry,” I called after him. “Not sorry about what I said to her. She's had it coming for months. But I'm sorry for you.” I paused. “I know how hard it is. I'm sorry that you lost Lucia.”