The Fire Sermon

Even when the drought had broken, the Council patrols continued. Mum and Dad’s vigilance didn’t change, either. The slightest difference between me and Zach was anticipated, seized on, and dissected. When we both came down with the winter fever, I overheard my parents’ long discussion about who had sickened first. I must have been six or seven. Through the floor of our bedroom I could hear, from the kitchen below, my father’s loud insistence that I’d looked flushed the night before, a good ten hours before both Zach and I had woken with our fevers peaking in perfect unison.

That was when I realised that Dad’s wariness around us was distrust, not habitual gruffness; that Mum’s constant watchfulness was something other than maternal devotion. Zach used to follow Dad around all day, from the well to the field to the barn. As we grew older, and Dad became prickly and wary with us, he began to shoo Zach away, shouting at him to get back to the house. Still Zach would find excuses to tail him when he could. If Dad was gathering fallen wood from the copse upstream, Zach would drag me there too, to search for mushrooms. If Dad was harvesting in the maize field, Zach would find a sudden enthusiasm for fixing the broken gate to the next paddock. He kept a safe distance, but trailed our father like an oddly misplaced shadow.

At night I clenched my eyes shut when Mum and Dad would talk about us, as if that would block out the voices that seeped through the floorboards. In the bed against the opposite wall I could hear Zach shift slightly, and the unhurried rhythm of his breathing. I didn’t know if he was asleep, or just pretending.

*

‘You’ve seen something new.’

I scanned the cell’s grey ceiling to avoid The Confessor’s eyes. Her questions were always like this: phrased blankly, as statements, as if she already knew everything. Of course, I could never be sure that she didn’t. I knew, myself, what it was to catch glimpses of other people’s thoughts, or to be woken by memories that weren’t my own. But The Confessor wasn’t just a seer; she used her power knowingly. Each time she came to the cell, I could feel her mind circling mine. I’d always refused to talk to her, but I was never sure how much I succeeded in concealing.

‘Just the blast. The same.’

She unclasped and reclasped her hands. ‘Tell me something you haven’t told me twenty times before.’

‘There’s nothing. Just the blast.’

I searched her face, but it revealed nothing of what she knew. I’m out of practice, I thought. Too long in the cell, cut off from people. And anyway, The Confessor was inscrutable. I tried to concentrate. Her face was nearly as pale as mine had become over the long months in the cell. The brand was somehow more conspicuous on her face than on others’, because the rest of her features were so imperturbable. Her skin as smooth as a polished river pebble, except for the tight redness of the brand, puckering at the centre of her forehead. It was hard to tell her age. If you just glanced at her, you might think her the same age as me and Zach. To me, however, she seemed decades older: it was the intensity of her stare, the powers that it barely concealed.

‘Zach wants you to help me.’

‘Then tell him to come himself. Tell him to see me.’

The Confessor laughed. ‘The guards told me you screamed his name for the first few weeks. Even now, after three months in here, you really think he’s going to come?’

‘He’ll come,’ I said. ‘He’ll come eventually.’

‘You seem certain of that,’ she said. She cocked her head slightly. ‘Are you certain that you want him to?’

I would never explain to her that it wasn’t a matter of wanting, any more than a river wants to move downstream. How could I explain to her that he needed me, even though I was the one in the cell?

I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t even know what you want,’ I said. ‘What you think I can do.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re like me, Cass. Which means I know what you’re capable of, even if you won’t admit it.’

I tried a strategic concession. ‘It’s been more frequent. The blast.’

‘Unfortunately I doubt that you can have much valuable information to give us about something that happened four hundred years ago.’

I could feel her mind probing at the edges of mine. It was like unfamiliar hands on my body. I tried to emulate her inscrutability, to close my mind.

The Confessor sat back. ‘Tell me about the island.’

She’d spoken quietly, but I had to hide my shock that I had been infiltrated so easily. I’d only begun to see the island in the last few weeks, since the final trip to the ramparts. The first few times I dreamed of it, I’d doubted myself, wondered if those glimpses of sea and sky were a fantasy rather than a vision. Just a daydream of open space, to counteract the contraction of my daily reality into those four grey walls, the narrow bed, the single chair. But the visions came too regularly, and were too detailed and consistent. I knew that what I had seen was real, just as I knew that I could never speak of it. Now, in the overbearing silence of the room, my own breathing sounded loud.

‘I’ve seen it too, you know,’ she said. ‘You will tell me.’

When her mind probed mine, I was laid bare. It was like watching Dad skin a rabbit: the moment when he’d peel back the skin, leaving all the inner workings exposed.

I tried to seal my mind around images of the island: the city concealed in its caldera, houses clambering on one another up the steep sides. The water, merciless grey, stretching in all directions, pocked by outcrops of sharp stone. I could see it all, as I’d seen it many nights in dreams. I tried to think of myself as holding its secret inside my mouth, the same way the island nursed the secret city, nestled in the crater.

Standing, I said, ‘There is no island.’

The Confessor stood too. ‘You’d better hope not.’

*

As we grew older the scrutiny of our parents was matched only by that of Zach himself. To him, every day we weren’t split was another day he was branded by the suspicion of being an Omega, another day he was prevented from assuming his rightful place in Alpha society. So, unsplit, the two of us lingered at the margins of village life. When other children went to school, we studied together at the kitchen table. When other children played together by the river, we played only with each other, or followed the others at a distance, copying their games. Keeping far enough away to avoid the other children shouting or throwing stones at us, Zach and I could only hear fragments of the rhymes they sang. Later, at home, we would try to echo them, filling in the gaps with our own invented words and lines. We existed in our own small orbit of suspicion. To the rest of the village, we were objects of curiosity and, later, outright hostility. After a while, the whispers of the neighbours ceased being whispers, and became shouts: ‘Poison. Freak. Imposter.’ They didn’t know which one of us was dangerous, so they despised us equally. Each time another set of twins was born in the village, and then split, our unsplit state became more conspicuous. Our neighbours’ Omega son, Oscar, whose left leg ended at the knee, was sent away at nine months old to be cared for by Omega relatives. We often passed the remaining twin, little Meg, playing alone in the fenced yard of their house.

‘She must miss her twin,’ I said to Zach as we walked by, watching Meg chewing listlessly on the head of a small wooden horse.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I bet she’s devastated that she doesn’t have to share her life with a freak anymore.’

‘He must miss his family too.’

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, repeating the familiar line from one of the Council posters. ‘Anyway, you know what happens to parents who try to hang on to their Omega kids.’

I’d heard the stories. The Council showed no mercy to the occasional parent who resisted the split and tried to keep both twins. It was the same for those rare Alphas who were found to be in a relationship with an Omega. There were rumours of public floggings, and worse. But most parents relinquished their Omega babies readily, eager to be rid of their deformed offspring. The Council taught that prolonged proximity to Omegas was dangerous. The neighbours’ hisses of poison revealed both disdain and fear. Omegas needed to be cast out of Alpha society, just as the poison was cast out of the Alpha twin in the womb. Was that the one thing Omegas are spared, I wondered? Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.

I knew my time to be sent away was coming, and that my secrecy was only deferring the inevitable. I’d even begun to wonder whether my current existence – the perpetual scrutiny of my parents and the rest of the village – was any better than the exile that was bound to follow. Zach was the one person who understood my odd, liminal life, because he shared it. But I felt his dark, calm eyes on me all the time.

In search of less watchful company, I’d caught three of the red beetles that always flocked by the well. I kept them in a jar on the windowsill, had enjoyed seeing them crawl about, and hearing the muted clatter of their wings against the glass. A week later I found the largest one pinned to the wooden sill, one wing gone, making an endless circle on the pivot of its guts.

‘It was an experiment,’ said Zach. ‘I wanted to test how long it could live like that.’

I told our parents. ‘He’s just bored,’ my mother said. ‘It’s driving him crazy, the two of you not being in school like you should be.’ But the unspoken truth continued to circle, like the beetle stuck on the pin: only one of us would ever be allowed to go to school.

I squashed the beetle myself, with the heel of my shoe, to put an end to its circular torment. That night, I took the jar and the two remaining beetles with me to the well. When I removed the lid and tipped the jar on its side, they were reluctant to venture out. I coaxed them out with a blade of grass, transferring them carefully to the stone rim on which I sat. One attempted a short flight, landing on my bare leg. I let it sit there for a while before blowing it gently back into flight.

Zach saw the empty jar that night, beside my bed. Neither of us said anything.

*

About a year later, gathering firewood by the river on a still afternoon, I made my mistake. I was walking just behind Zach when I sensed something: a part-glimpse of a vision, intruding between the real world and my sight. I dashed to catch up with him, knocked him out of the way before the branch had even begun to fall. It was an instinctive response, the kind I’d grown used to repressing. Later I would wonder whether it was fear for his safety that led to my lapse, or just exhaustion under the constant scrutiny. Either way, he was safe, sprawled beneath me on the path, by the time the massive bough creaked and fell, snagging and tearing off other branches on the way down, to land finally where Zach had stood earlier.

When his eyes met mine I was amazed at the relief in them.

‘It wouldn’t have done much damage,’ I said.

‘I know.’ He helped me up, brushed some leaves off the side of my dress.

‘I saw it.’ I was speaking too quickly. ‘Saw it starting to fall, I mean.’

‘You don’t need to explain,’ he said. ‘And I should thank you, for getting me out of the way.’ For the first time in years, he was smiling at me in the unguarded, wide-mouthed way that I remembered from our early childhood. I knew him too well to be glad.

He insisted on adding my own bundle of firewood to his, carrying the whole load all the way back to the village. ‘I owe you,’ he said.

In the weeks that followed we passed most of the time together, the same as always, but he was less rough in our games. He waited for me on the walk to the well. When we took the shortcut across the field, he called behind to warn me when he came across a patch of stinging nettles. My hair went unpulled, my possessions undisturbed.

Zach’s new knowledge allowed me some respite from his daily cruelties, but it wasn’t enough to declare us split. For that, he needed proof – years of impassioned but futile assertions on his part had taught him that. He waited a while for me to slip up again and reveal myself, but for nearly a whole year more I managed to hold my secret. The visions had grown stronger, but I’d trained myself not to react, not to cry out at the flashes of flame that punctuated my nights, or at the images of distant places that drifted into my waking thoughts. I spent more time alone, venturing far upstream, even as far as the deep gorge leading away from the river, where the abandoned silos were hidden. Zach no longer followed me when I went off by myself.

I never entered the silos, of course. All such remnants were taboo. Our broken world was scattered with these ruins, but it was against the law to enter them, just as it was forbidden to own any relics. I’d heard rumours that some desperate Omegas had been known to raid the wreckage, searching out usable fragments. But what would be left to salvage after all these centuries? The blast had levelled most cities. And even if there were anything salvageable in the taboo towns now, centuries later, who would dare to take it, knowing the penalty? More frightening than the law were the rumours of what those remnants could hold. The radiation, said to shelter like a nest of wasps in such relics. The contaminating presence of the past. If the Before was mentioned at all, it was in hushed voices, with a mixture of awe and disgust.

Zach and I used to dare each other to get close to the silos. Always braver than me, once he ran right up to the closest one and placed a hand on the curved concrete wall before running back to me, giddy with pride and fear. But these days I was always alone, and would sit for hours under a tree that overlooked the silos. The three huge, tubular buildings were more intact than many such ruins – they’d been shielded by the gorge that surrounded them, and by the fourth silo, which must have taken the brunt of the blast. It had collapsed entirely, leaving only its circular base. Twisted metal spars rose out of the dust like the grasping fingers of a world buried alive. But I was grateful for the silos, despite their ugliness – they guaranteed that nobody else would go near the place, so I could at least count on solitude. And unlike the walls of Haven, or the larger of the villages nearby, there were no Council posters flapping at the wind: Vigilance against Contamination from Omegas. Alpha Unity: Support Increased Tithes for Omegas. Since the drought years, everything seemed scarcer except for new Council posters.

I wondered, sometimes, whether I was drawn to the ruins because I recognised myself in them. We Omegas, in our brokenness, were like those taboo ruins: dangerous. Contaminating. Reminders of the blast and what it had wrought.

Although Zach no longer came with me to the silos, or on my other wanderings, I knew he was still observing me more intently than ever. When I came back from the silos, tired from the long walk, he’d smile at me in his watchful way, ask politely about my day. He knew where I’d been, but never told our parents, although they would have been furious. But he left me alone. He was like a snake, drawing back before the strike.

The first time he tried to expose me, he took my favourite doll, Scarlett, the one in the red dress that Mum had sewn. When Zach and I had first been given separate beds, I’d hung on to that doll for comfort at night. Even at twelve, I always slept with Scarlett under one arm, the coarse, plaited wool of her hair reassuringly scratchy against my skin. Then one morning she was gone.

When I asked about Scarlett at breakfast, Zach was buoyant with triumph. ‘It’s hidden, outside the village. I took it while Cass was asleep.’ He turned to our parents. ‘If she finds where I buried it, she has to be a seer. It’ll be proof.’ Our mother chided him, and put a hand on my shoulder, but all day I saw how my parents watched me even more carefully than usual.

I cried, as I had planned. Seeing the hopeful alertness of my parents made it easy. How keen they were to solve the riddle that Zach and I had become, even if it meant being rid of me. In the evening, I pulled from the small toybox an unfamiliar-looking doll with awkwardly chopped short hair and a simple white smock. That night, tucked under my left arm, Scarlett was returned from the toybox exile that I’d imposed on her a week before, when I’d swapped her red dress onto an unfavoured doll, and hacked off her long hair.

From then on Scarlett remained secret, in full view, on my bed. I never bothered to go to the lightning-charred willow downstream and dig up the doll in the red dress that Zach had buried there.

CHAPTER 3

Downstairs, Mum and Dad were fighting again, the sound of their argument drifting up through the floorboards, insidious as smoke.

‘It’s more of a problem every day,’ Dad said.

Mum’s voice was quieter. ‘They’re not “a problem” – they’re our children.’

‘One of them is,’ he replied. A pot clattered loudly on the table. ‘The other one’s dangerous. Poison. We just don’t know which one.’

Zach hated to let me see him cry, but the dregs of the candle threw out enough light for me to see the slight shuddering of his back under the blanket. I slipped out from under my quilt. The floorboards creaked slightly as I took the two steps to the edge of Zach’s bed.

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ I whispered, putting a hand on his back. ‘He doesn’t mean to hurt you when he says things like that.’

He sat up, shrugging off my hand. I was surprised to see he didn’t even try to wipe away the tears. ‘I’m not hurt by him,’ he said. ‘What he says, it’s all true. You want to pat me on the back, comfort me, act like you’re the caring one? It’s not them hurting me. Not even the other kids, the ones who throw stones. See all of this?’ The sweep of his hand took in the sounds from the kitchen below, as well as his own tear-streaked face. ‘It’s all your fault. You’re the problem, Cass, not them. You’re the reason we’re stuck in this limbo.’

I was suddenly aware of the cold boards underfoot, and the night air on my bare arms.

‘You want to show you really care about me?’ he said. ‘Then tell them the truth. You could end it right away.’

‘Do you really want me sent away? It’s me. I’m not some strange creature. Forget what the Council says about contamination. It’s just me. You know me.’

‘You keep saying that. Why should I think I know you? You’ve never been honest with me. You never told me the truth. You made me figure it out for myself.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I said. Even admitting as much to him, alone in our room, was risky.

‘Because you didn’t trust me. You want to make out that we’re so close. But you’re the one who’s lied this whole time. You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth. All these years, you left me to wonder. To fear that it might be me who was the freak. And now you think I should trust you?’

I retreated to my bed. He was still staring at me. Could things ever have been different, if I’d trusted him with the truth? Could we have found a way to share the secret, to make our way together? Had he caught his distrust from me? Maybe that was the poison I’d been carrying – not the contamination of the blast that all Omegas bore, but the secret.

A tear had settled on the top of his upper lip. It glinted gold in the candlelight.

I didn’t want him to see the matching tear on my face. I reached out to the table and snuffed the flame.

‘It’s got to end,’ he whispered into the darkness. It was half a plea, half a threat.

*

His impatience to expose me grew with our father’s illness. Dad fell sick when we’d just turned thirteen. As with the previous year, there was no mention of our birthday – our age had become an increasingly shameful reminder of our unsplit state. That night, Zach had whispered across the bedroom: ‘You know what day it was today?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said. It was only a whisper, so it was hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic.

Two days later, Dad collapsed. Dad, who had always seemed as robust and solid as the huge oak cross-beam that ran the length of the kitchen ceiling. He hauled buckets of water up the well faster than anyone else in the village, and when Zach and I were smaller he could carry us both at once. He still could, I thought, except that he rarely touched us now. Then, in the middle of the paddock on a hot day, he stumbled to his knees. From where I sat, shelling peas on the stone wall at the front of our yard, I heard the shouts of the others working near him in the field.

That night, after the neighbours had carried him back to the cottage, our mother sent for Dad’s twin, Alice, from the Omega settlement up on the plain. Zach himself went with Mick in the bullock cart to fetch her, returning the next day with our aunt lying in the hay on the back of the cart. We’d never met her before, and looking at her, the only similarity I could see between her and Dad was the fever that currently slickened their flesh. She was thin, with long hair, darker than Dad’s. The coarse, brown fabric of her dress had been mended many times and was now flecked with hay. Beneath the strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead we could make out the brand: Omega.

We cared for her as much as we could, but it was clear from the start that she hadn’t long. We couldn’t allow her in the house, of course, but even her presence in the shed was enough to enrage Zach. On the second day his fury climaxed. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he shouted. ‘She’s disgusting. How can she be here, with us running around after her like servants? She’s killing him. And it’s dangerous for all of us, having her so close.’

Mum didn’t bother to hush him, but said calmly, ‘She’d be killing him more quickly if we’d left her in her own filthy hut.’

This silenced Zach. He wanted Alice gone, but not at the expense of admitting to Mum what he had told me in bed the night before: what he’d seen at the settlement when he collected Alice. Her small, tidy cottage; the whitewashed walls; the posies of dried herbs hanging above the hearth, just as they hung above ours.

Mum continued, ‘If we save her, we save him.’

It was only at night, when the candle was out and no voices could be heard from Mum and Dad’s room, that Zach would tell me about what he’d seen at the settlement. He told me that other Omegas at the settlement had tried to stop them from taking Alice away – that they’d wanted to keep caring for her there. But no Omega would dare to argue with an Alpha, and Mick had brandished his whip until they backed away.

‘Isn’t it cruel, though, to take her from her family?’ I whispered.

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ Zach recited.

‘Not children, obviously, but people she loves. Friends, or maybe a husband.’

‘A husband?’ He let the word hang. Officially Omegas weren’t allowed to marry, but everyone knew that they still did, although the Council wouldn’t recognise any such unions.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘She didn’t live with anyone,’ he said. ‘It was just a few other freaks from her settlement, claiming they knew what was best for her.’

We’d barely seen Omegas before, let alone spent time in close quarters with one. Little Oscar next door had been sent away as soon as he was branded and weaned. The few Omegas who passed through the area rarely stayed more than a night, camping just downstream of the village. They were itinerants, on the way to try their luck at one of the larger Omega settlements in the south. Or, in years when the harvest had been poor, there’d be Omegas who’d given up on farming the half-blighted land they were permitted to settle on, and were heading to one of the refuges near Wyndham. The refuges were the Council’s concession to the fatal bond between twins. Omegas couldn’t be allowed to starve to death and take their twins with them, so there were refuges near all large towns, where Omegas would be taken in, and fed and housed by the Council. Few Omegas went willingly, though – it was a place of last resort, for the starving or sick. The refuges were workhouses, and those who sought their help had to repay the Council’s generosity with labour, working on the farms within the refuge complex until the Council judged the debt repaid. Few Omegas were willing to trade their freedom for the safety of three meals a day.

I’d gone out with Mum, once, to give some food-scraps to one group on their way to the refuge near Wyndham. It was dark, and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mum had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travellers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mum’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.

Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mum threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

She met his eyes clearly. ‘It’s the fever. I have the fever – your father too, now.’

He scowled. ‘But before that – what’s wrong with you?’

Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place, but neatly clipped and clean.

Zach was impatient. ‘What? What is it?’

‘Don’t they teach you to count at your school?’

I said what Zach would not. ‘We don’t go to school. We can’t – we’ve not been split.’

He interrupted quickly: ‘But we can count. We learn at home – numbers, writing, all sorts of things.’ His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

‘That’s my problem, sweetheart,’ said Alice. ‘My toes don’t add up.’ She looked at Zach’s deflated face, and stopped her grinning. ‘I suppose there’s more,’ she said, almost kindly. ‘You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped – my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead-end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.’ She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?’ He didn’t answer. She went on: ‘And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?’

Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. ‘There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumour, a lie.’