Читать книгу The Forever Ship - Francesca Haig - Страница 15

‘We’re moving Zach to stay with Cass,’ The Ringmaster announced. ‘We—’

‘No,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘No way. Absolutely not.’

It had been such a relief when Simon led Zach back to his cell, and Elsa, Zoe and Paloma had joined us in the Tithe Collector’s office. Now The Ringmaster’s words struck me like a kick. I turned to Piper for support, but his face was firm.

‘I’m trying to keep you alive,’ he said. ‘We need to have both you and Zach guarded, by people we can trust. And we have Paloma to worry about as well. If Zach’s with you, that’s one location to cover instead of three. I’m posting guards outside the holding house. I’ll be there too, when Zoe’s not.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘Even if he has to be with me, he can’t come to the holding house. Not with Paloma there. And you can’t expect Elsa to have him.’

Piper’s face remained set.

‘I’ll move up here,’ I said. ‘Don’t bring him to Elsa’s.’

He lowered his voice, brought his head close to mine. ‘I want you where you can be safe.’ He looked across the room at The Ringmaster. ‘Not here, with him, in the thick of his soldiers.’

Even though we gathered daily in the Tithe Collector’s office, there was still a sense that it was The Ringmaster’s territory, and that Elsa’s was ours. Perhaps it was the residue of the building’s former role: this was a place where Omegas used to come in supplication, to hand over their tithes. Even after the battle, and the hungry months since, the rooms still had a scale and grandeur that marked them as Alpha territory. We were all more at home admidst the half-trashed furniture of the holding house, than on the leather-upholstered chairs of the Tithe Collector’s office.

‘It’s not just that,’ Piper said, stepping back again. ‘You can watch Zach in a way that we can’t. You know what happened when you were travelling with Zoe.’

Zoe’s face hardened at the reminder. In those weeks of sleeping close together, I had glimpsed her dreams. I’d never meant to, but each morning I’d woken with the memory of her dreams as well as my own. That was how I’d discovered her endless scouring of the sea for the drowned Lucia.

‘I can’t read minds,’ I said. ‘It’s not as tidy as that.’

‘I know that,’ Piper replied. ‘But anything that you can glean from him could still help us.’

Elsa spoke. ‘I’ll take him.’ She had stepped forward a little, chin high. ‘I can’t promise I’ll be civil to him. Or even that I won’t spit in his food. But if it’s the best way of helping, and of keeping Cass safe, I’ll take him.’

‘You don’t need to do this,’ I told her. ‘It’s asking too much.’

She shook her head. ‘I want you safe, and with me.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s just a side effect.’

I remembered how The General had said that Omegas were only side effects of Alphas – the same phrase that had been used in the Ark papers – and I smiled to hear Elsa use it now, to describe Zach.

For half a day the holding house was noisy with the sound of soldiers fitting bars on the windows, and a thicker door for the dormitory, with bolts on the outside. Elsa said nothing, just followed the soldiers with her broom and scolded them when they left iron filings and nails on the floor. A roster was drawn up, for the soldiers that we trusted, to watch the front of the holding house while Zoe and Piper guarded it from within. It wasn’t a long list. Simon, and his long-time adviser, Violet, were on it. Having seen her come to blows with Piper once, I trusted her candour, and her courage – and since their fight, she’d shown herself loyal to him. Crispin, who had served Simon and Piper on the island, and ever since, was on the list too.

The Ringmaster had offered us some of his senior soldiers as well. I doubted that we had a choice, but in the end I was glad of those he’d chosen: Tash, a tall woman from his personal guard, who spoke little but met my eyes without the disgust or evasiveness of many of the Alpha soldiers. Adam, a bluff man who was quick to laugh, and who, when stationed at the holding house door, seemed to laugh and chat as readily with Elsa and Sally as with his fellow Alphas.

Paloma and Zoe shifted their things out of the dormitory, to sleep in the small room Kip and I had once shared on the other side of the courtyard. Piper moved out too, dragging his bed out to the courtyard, under the covered porch by the main door.

‘It’s warm enough now,’ he’d said, over the scraping of the bed on the floorboards. ‘And I’ll be able to keep an eye on Zoe and Paloma’s door, as well as the dormitory.’

That was true – but we both knew that he also wanted to avoid sharing a room with Zach. I looked at the two drag marks left on the floor by the legs of his bed. It would just be me and Zach now, alone each night in the dormitory.

So he came. They kept the shackles on his wrists, and Piper and Zoe made sure that one of them was always in the holding house. At night, in the dormitory, his shackles were fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. I had measured it out myself: the chain reached just far enough for him to lie comfortably in bed, but fell short of my bed on the opposite wall.

During the day, when Zoe or Piper was nearby, his shackles were kept on but we let him take some exercise in the courtyard, or eat with the rest of us.

‘I don’t want him being waited on, like he’s still in the Council chambers,’ Zoe said. ‘And I’d rather have him where I can see him.’

The clanking of Zach’s shackles quickly became a familiar sound in the holding house.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again and again to Elsa, whenever we were alone. ‘I’m sorry that you have to see him every day.’

She just smiled at me, and gripped my hand. As for Zach, she never spoke to him, but she met his gaze squarely, and filled a bowl for him at mealtimes and placed it on the table. It was a kind of courage I’d never seen before, the way she faced him each day, in her home, where the children he’d killed used to live.

I wondered, at first, how Zach himself would react to being in the holding house. Most of the children’s possessions had been destroyed in the raid when they’d been taken, and half the holding house had been trashed. But the signs of them were everywhere. Behind the dormitory door, a row of hooks barely at hip height, where the children used to hang their winter coats. In Elsa’s smashed-up kitchen, the handful of cups that had survived the raid were all the children’s, and so we drank each day from the tiny cups, our lips where their lips had been.

If any of these things made Zach uneasy, he never showed any sign. I watched him at dinner, that first night. He wrapped his long fingers around the small cup, drank, and left it on the table for Elsa to tidy away. He never mentioned the children, who were absent and present everywhere.

*

The first night, alone in the dormitory, Zach and I lay on either side of the long, narrow room. He had his back to the wall, facing me. I blew out the candle so I wouldn’t have to look at him any more.

‘Light the candle again,’ he said.

‘Go to sleep.’

His chain clanked a few times as he shifted. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

‘Get used to it,’ I said, rolling over. ‘This isn’t the Council chambers. We don’t have an endless supply of candles.’

‘I never used to mind the dark,’ he said. ‘But since you flooded the Ark, I hate it.’

I remembered it too: the total darkness of those corridors. Black water rising in black air.

‘I only just made it out,’ he said. His breathing grew faster at the memory. I listened unwillingly, my arms crossed over my chest. I had enough of my own memories of the flooded Ark, and no time to waste on his.

‘Even when I made it to the surface,’ he went on, ‘it wasn’t over. The river burst through the western door. I was nearly caught up by it. Half the camp was swept away. At least four of our soldiers died. Men were tangled up in the canvas when the tents were washed away.’

More bodies to add to the tally of the dead. There were so many people that I had killed, directly or indirectly. Sometimes I felt tangled in them, like the soldiers drowning under the sodden canvas.

‘A hell of a way to die,’ Zach continued.

‘You’ve condemned many people to worse,’ I said.

He ignored me. ‘I dream about it,’ he went on. ‘If it’s dark, I dream about the Ark. The water in the corridors, and that flash flood by the western door.’

I tried not to listen, but I was remembering how we used to talk at night when we were children, while our parents were downstairs arguing about what they could do about us, their unsplit children. We’d lain there and whispered across the gap between our beds, just as we were doing now.

‘I have worse dreams,’ I said.

‘What about?’

I was silent. I wasn’t going to explain my dreams to him – he already knew too much about the blast.

‘What about?’ he said again.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Now shut up – I’m trying to sleep.’

‘You’re lying to me,’ he said.

‘I don’t owe you the truth,’ I said. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

He spoke over me. ‘You’re lying about your dreams, just like you did when we were kids. You never really talked to me, even then.’

‘What are you talking about? We used to talk all the time.’ It had been just the two of us, after all, under the scrutiny of the whole village.

‘Not properly.’ He spoke quietly. ‘You were lying to me the whole time.’

For a while I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to agree with what he’d said, but I couldn’t argue with it. My seer visions were the only thing that revealed me as an Omega, so I’d concealed them for years, to prevent being branded and exiled.

‘I had to,’ I said eventually.

‘And I had to do what I did,’ he said. ‘I had to claim my life.’

‘Have you forgotten how close we were?’ I asked. ‘Have you convinced yourself that it never happened, because you’re ashamed of being close to an Omega?’

He laughed. ‘You talk about those years as if it was some kind of paradise – you and me, the best of friends, together against the world. It wasn’t like that. It was never like that.’

‘But we were always together,’ I said. ‘All the time.’

‘Only because we didn’t have any choice,’ he shouted. ‘Because you made the whole village think we were freaks, and nobody would come near us.’

I could hear how he forced his breath to slow, his voice to lower.

‘It didn’t end, even when you’d finally gone. The taint didn’t go with you. It should’ve, but it didn’t. For years, people didn’t trust me. That’s why I had to leave the village so young.’

‘I left it when I was younger,’ I said, acid in my voice.

He overrode me again. ‘Even when I got to Wyndham, there were rumours about me. The word had spread, about how late we’d been split. I had to prove myself more than anyone else. Had to work twice as hard, prove my loyalty, over and over. Do things that others weren’t willing to do.’

The Council chambers at Wyndham were already notorious for their viciousness and ruthlessness. I looked through the darkness towards Zach, and thought of the depths of brutality to which he had sunk.

‘I never felt safe,’ he went on. ‘Not even when you were in the Keeping Rooms. Not for a moment. You took that from me, with all those years you made me live a half-life. You were the one who showed me how dangerous Omegas could be, what a burden they are. You’re the reason I had to come up with the tanks.’

I closed my eyes. I knew his excuses and justifications were madness, and that the tanks were his madness made solid, and not my doing. But I couldn’t stop picturing the children in the tanks, their hair drifting across their dead faces. I kept my eyes closed, trying not to remember.

‘You made me what I am,’ he said.

They were the same words that The Confessor had said to Kip, all those months ago in the silo.

*

That night, I waited for his dreams to come to me. With Zoe’s dreams, it had been an accident, her dreams seeping into me as she slept close by. Even when I’d tried not to sense them, her dreams had come to me, as full of loss and longing as the sea is full of salt. But Zach didn’t dream – or if he did, his dreams meant nothing to me. We had so much in common, and so little. If he dreamed, during those nights in the dormitory, nothing of them reached me. I wondered if our childhood, when I had worked so hard to hide my seer nature from him, had built some kind of barrier. All those years of lying in my small bed and training myself not to react to my visions, not to cry out at what I had seen, meant that I couldn’t reach out to him now, asleep or awake, nor feel any sense of what passed in his mind. I felt no closer to him, lying only a few yards away in the dormitory, than I had when I’d been on the island, hundreds of miles away.

I got no glimpse of his dreams, but he could not help but know something of mine. Before dawn I woke from a glimpse of the blast, my shouts bouncing back at me from the dormitory ceiling. He made shushing noises. At first, still reeling from the shock of waking from flames to darkness, I had forgotten whose voice it was nearby, soothing me. Then, when my breathing had settled, Zach spoke: ‘What did you see?’

I had never heard a hunger like I heard in his voice, and I knew hunger well. The whole of New Hobart was hungry. Only that night, the eight of us who now lived in the holding house had shared a stew made with two squirrels that Zoe had caught on the roof – and we’d boiled the bones clean.

I didn’t answer him. After that, I tried harder than ever to keep silent when the visions came. I couldn’t always manage to quell my screams – my visions were more frequent and more vivid than they had been when we were children. But I tried. I didn’t want to give him any hint of what I saw, nor the satisfaction of seeing me scream. Some nights, when I woke from dreams of fire and ground my teeth against the screams that I would not allow myself to make, I felt like nothing had changed: that Zach and I were still there, in our childhood bedroom, me hiding my visions, him watching and waiting.

*

From the very first day, when he saw her crossing the courtyard with Zoe, Zach stared at Paloma. I wished that her appearance didn’t announce her difference quite so loudly, but everything about her stood out: the bone-white hair and skin; the washed-out blue of her eyes. I watched him watching Paloma, and I felt my fists tightening. I didn’t want his eyes on her. He had always taken everything. I saw him stare at her and I wanted to shout: Not this. Not her. You can’t have this too.

‘It’s true, then,’ he said, his eyes following her as she and Zoe walked over the gravel.

I said nothing.

‘I knew you were searching.’ He shook his head. ‘But I didn’t believe you’d succeed. Piper and his rag-tag bunch of sailors. How did you do it?’

‘I’m not talking to you about her.’

‘I’m not an idiot,’ he said.

‘I never thought you were,’ I said. ‘You’re something much worse, and much more dangerous.’

When we went to the kitchen to eat, he didn’t hide his staring, and Paloma stared back, her curiosity matching his. This was the man who had unearthed the blast that might destroy her whole family, and everything that she had known. I saw how she narrowed her eyes, head cocked a little, as if straining to understand what could make a man do terrible things. And I wanted to shout at her: Stay away. Stay away.

Zoe did the shouting. When she saw Zach’s eyes lingering on Paloma, she stepped between them.

‘Keep your distance,’ she said to him.

He raised his arms before him, shaking them so that the shackles jangled.

‘I’m just a prisoner here,’ he said. ‘It’s not my choice where you people take me.’

‘You don’t need to stare at her all the time,’ Zoe said.

‘I’m just curious,’ he said, his voice gentle as a blade. ‘Nobody’s introduced me properly to your new friend.’ His eyes were scanning Paloma, coming to rest on her face. ‘I’d love to learn more about you.’

Paloma spoke: ‘I’ve heard more than enough about you,’ she said.

‘And you believe it?’ Zach said quickly. ‘What makes you think you can trust these people?’

Zoe opened her mouth, but Paloma spoke first. ‘I make my own judgments.’

‘And you’ve judged that this is the best alliance your homeland can hope for?’ Zach cast a glance around at the rest of us, and the shabby kitchen.

Zoe shoved him backwards. It was only a light push, but with his arms chained in front of him, he could neither balance nor break his fall, stumbling and landing on his back by the fireplace.

Piper moved to pull Zoe away, but she was already leaving, Paloma beside her.

‘Keep your distance,’ she repeated to Zach, without looking back. She slammed the kitchen door behind her.

Zach raised his eyebrows, heaving himself upright and doing his best to brush the dust from his trousers with his shackled hands.

‘What are you all so afraid of?’ he said.

My vision answered: the flames burst behind my eyes. Forever fire.

*

For all the years of my childhood, I had done everything I could to stay with him. I had lied, and hidden, concealed the truth about my visions from everybody, so that I could stay with him and my family. Now he was here, and all that I wanted was to get away from him.

There were moments when I was ambushed by the similarities between us. I heard his inflections in my own words and so fell silent. At meals, sitting with my chin on my hand and the other hand rubbing the back of my neck, I’d look across the table and see that he was doing exactly the same thing. I didn’t know who was mirroring whom. But I always jerked away, placed my hands awkwardly by my sides, glancing to see if any of the others had noticed.

Often he was silent, just watching. When he did speak, it was always for a purpose.

He singled Sally out, one morning over breakfast.

‘Have you thought about the other potential uses for the tanks?’ he said.

I froze, a spoonful of porridge halfway to my mouth. Sally ignored him, and Zoe made a point of turning her body away from him to face Paloma, at the far end of the table.

‘We’ve seen enough of your tanks,’ Piper said.

‘You’ve all been so quick to dismiss the tanks.’ Zach waved his hand around the table. ‘A kneejerk reaction, because you’re afraid of the taboo. But there are other uses for them.’ His burn was healing: the blisters gone, the dried skin cracked like summer earth. Soon enough he would have a scar in the same place as mine. ‘For the sick,’ he continued, ‘to keep people alive until they can be cured. Or for the elderly.’ His voice was soft now, his focus back on Sally. ‘Who knows what medicine might achieve in future years, if this uprising of yours isn’t allowed to derail our progress? The tanks could allow you to stay alive decades longer, until we have the ability to help with your condition.’

Sally had been continuing to eat, as if he weren’t even there. Now, though, she put down her spoon and laughed loudly. ‘I’m not elderly,’ she said to him. ‘I’m old.’ She rolled the word on her tongue, relishing it. ‘And my condition is that I’ve been on this earth for more than eighty years, and I’ve seen and done things you can’t even dream of. There’s no cure for that.’ She pushed back her bowl. ‘You think I’d go into a tank, in the hope of scavenging a few more years?’

She leaned in, her face so close to Zach’s that he drew his head back, barely hiding his distaste. ‘I’m going to die, son,’ she said. ‘And so are you. The only difference between us is that I’m wise enough to know that dying’s far from the worst thing that could happen to me.’

The bench creaked as she stood up. She took Xander’s hand and led him from the room.

*

I thought it was rain that had woken me, but it was just the claws of rats on the roof. There was a plague of rats in New Hobart. It had started in the western quarter, and before long they were all through the town, scrabbling under the floorboards of the holding house. Like us, they were suffering from the absence of crops in the surrounding farmland, and so they swarmed to the town to scavenge what they could, which felt like everything. Each morning we swept their pellets from the kitchen floor. The leather upholstery in the Tithe Collector’s office had been completely gnawed away, and one day I found a nest of eight baby rats sleeping in the horsehair stuffing of the largest chair.

The Council ban on Omegas keeping animals meant there were no cats in New Hobart. Even The Ringmaster had to laugh when he reported that he’d sent two small patrols into Council territory, to steal cats from towns and villages. I was there when they returned, and when they opened the two sacks that hung, thrashing, from the rear rider’s saddle, the cats sprang out with a hiss like water on a hot skillet, scattering and howling, sending one of the horses shying into a fence. Within a few days the cats had settled in as the guards of our grain stores, and they grew fat and glossy while the rest of us grew thinner.

Despite the cats, the rats kept coming, and they grew bold. One afternoon I saw one scuttle across the courtyard in broad daylight, dragging a pilfered potato in its mouth. When I threw a stone at it, it didn’t even dodge, just turned to stare at me briefly before continuing its steady progress across the gravel.