Читать книгу The Forever Ship - Francesca Haig - Страница 9

Zoe gave a snort. ‘You could’ve saved yourself a long journey. There’s nothing here for Elsewhere but trouble.’

‘Stop calling it Elsewhere,’ Paloma yelled. ‘That’s not its name. And it’s not the place that you imagine. These are real people you’re talking about – my parents, my little sisters. My friends – everyone I’ve ever known. A million people. And you tell me they’re all going to burn, because of what we can offer you. Instead of finding friendship, cooperation, we’ll be turned into a new strike zone.’ She inhaled sharply. ‘It’s not your Elsewhere, some magical solution.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘It’s real. Real people live there.’

What she said was true: after all our hoping, Elsewhere didn’t exist. Not the place we’d imagined, where things would be easy, and all the answers would be waiting for us, like ripe figs begging to be plucked. That place didn’t exist. Instead we’d found the Scattered Islands, real places, infinitely more complex than our imaginings – and they could be destroyed before any of us had even seen them.

I looked across at Paloma. She was squinting against the wind, which had blown her hair across her eyes. Her eyelashes were pale, as if dusted with snow. Her arms were crossed, her hands clutching the fabric of her sleeves.

I had been thinking of her as a whole country. As the thing that changed everything. But as she stood there in the wind, shivering slightly, I saw that she was just a young woman, a long way from home, and very frightened.

Around the fire that night, when all of us had calmed down, the stories of Elsewhere spilled out of her. She described animals that I had never heard of, let alone seen: seadogs, huge swimming beasts, hunted for their rich layers of oily fat. Sleek in the water and cumbersome on land. Paloma took up a stick and drew a sketch in the sandy ground, though she ended up laughing at her own rendition: the beast was an elongated lump, whiskers at one end, fins splayed at the other.

‘They look ridiculous enough in real life,’ she said, ‘without my bad drawing.’ She scuffed the picture away with a sweep of her false leg.

There were other animals that she described: alks, beasts like huge cows but with tall, branching horns splaying from their heads. Snowfoxes, purest white. And trusses, birds so huge that if they spread their wings they would cast a shadow the length of a dinghy.

‘They’re supposed to be bad luck,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why. I love seeing them, when they come back from the Southern Archipelago after winter.’

I looked at the empty night sky, smeared with grey clouds. Since we’d left the screeching gulls of the coast, the only birds we’d seen were ravens, with their black hooked beaks and indifferent stares. Perhaps, before the blast, trusses had flown here as well.

Paloma’s words offered us a new world, waiting to be seen. But there was an urgency to the way she spoke, leaning towards the fire and almost gabbling as she rushed to tell it all. There was an urgency in our listening, too. I wanted to clutch at every word, hold them in my hands. I longed for paper and ink to write it all down. I couldn’t help feeling that every word she spoke about Elsewhere was a last testament, a record of all that she was about to lose.

*

I had thought the annihilating fire of the visions, of all the seers’ visions, could get no worse. But through Paloma I was learning a little of the reality of the Scattered Islands, and that knowledge polished the agony of the visions to a new, fierce gleam.

Paloma knew what I was. She had known by the time we met: Zoe must have told her already that I was a seer, and what that meant. It was different, though, for her to see what really happened when I had a vision. She’d witnessed this the first night after we found her. We’d been gathered around the fire on the beach, maps and charts laid out on the sand as Paloma showed us a map of the Scattered Islands, describing how the archipelago speckled the sea, so far to the north-west of us that our own maps became useless. She had placed her maps next to Thomas’s; to approximate the distance, she’d laid them several feet apart. In the gap between them, deadly sea. To comprehend the Scattered Islands, we were going to need new maps; a new scale.

Paloma had been speaking when the blast came: flames tearing through my head, and a white heat that stopped time. A fire so vast that it made everything impossible except fire.

When I’d stopped shaking, and could see again, Zoe was swearing as she patted at the smouldering edge of the map that I’d dropped in the coals of the campfire. Paloma was silent, her eyebrows drawn together as she stared.

Over the next few days, I’d tried to explain to her how the visions worked, and that I couldn’t read the future the way we could read a book. That, like the uncharted spaces between our maps and Paloma’s, the future was beyond my reach. All I got were flashes: glimpses of things that hadn’t happened yet. Awake or asleep, I had no control over when the visions came, ripping me out of the present and throwing me briefly into a future where I could not navigate. If the visions came when I was sleeping, it was hard to distinguish between them and ordinary dreams – no way of knowing whether what I had seen really was a foretelling of something to come, or just a nightmare.

The visions had sometimes been useful: warnings or clues, though rarely clear. Most, though, were nothing but a terror that ambushed me with flashes of fire. It had become worse since the Ark, and what we had found there. Now that we knew the Council had found the blast machines and was readying them to use against Elsewhere, the flames burned with an added urgency.

I didn’t tell Paloma what the visions did to seers, eventually. Lucia had been driven to the edge of madness, even before she drowned; Xander’s mind had been left a darkened room, lit only by flashes of fire.

I told Paloma none of that. But she saw, soon enough, how the blast visions burned language from my lips. How the flames left me shaking, my eyes rolled back in my head as if searching the sky for fire. I felt Paloma watching me, from behind the strands of white hair that blew across her face.

I watched myself just as carefully. Sometimes I felt there were only two certainties: the blast, and my own madness. I didn’t know which would come first.

‘Have you seen it?’ she said to me, sidling up to me at the campfire, a few days into our journey. ‘Have you seen them bombing my home?’

I couldn’t lie to her. I had seen the fire, and the crumbling of the world.

After that, she was never quite the same around me. We had all told her what would happen if the Council found Elsewhere, but I was the one who had seen her homeland burn, and when she chose to share a blanket with Zoe the next day, instead of me, and to look down hurriedly if our eyes should meet across the campfire, I didn’t blame her.

The first time I noticed what was happening between Zoe and Paloma was the morning when Zoe, without being asked, picked up the detached leg from where it lay beside Paloma’s blanket, and held it for a moment, in both hands, before handing it to Paloma. I almost missed it – it lasted only a second or two. Zoe’s hands, usually decisive, lingered for a moment, and those fingers, so quick to dispatch death with a knife, were soft against the false flesh.

After that, I watched more carefully. I came to understand that when Paloma stared at Zoe and Piper, it wasn’t the unspoken unison of their movements that she was staring at, any more – or Piper at all.

It was as natural and as unhurried as moss claiming a rock. They were both the moss; they were both the rock. We’d all seen it happening, but hardly realised it: Paloma’s blanket edging closer to Zoe’s at night. Zoe reaching to free a twig snared in Paloma’s hair.

No one spoke of it. Once or twice Piper and I exchanged a glance, or a smile, when we saw Paloma lean in towards Zoe, or when the two of them walked or rode together and Zoe’s laugh burst from her, louder than caution would usually allow.

There were many things Piper and I didn’t talk about, during those long nights and days of travelling. We didn’t mention the blast machine, Leonard’s broken neck, the drowned children. All the things that we didn’t want to conjure with language. But this, between Zoe and Paloma, was different: it was a bright bird that had come to land near us, and neither of us wanted to startle it away with words.

*

We seers are not all the same. Zoe had told me that Lucia had been good at predicting weather. The Confessor had had an aptitude for machines, allowing her to find her way through the wreckage of the taboo machines, and to create new and terrible ones. Xander, Piper had told me, used to have an instinct for whether somebody was lying or telling the truth. But whatever our particular aptitudes, all of us woke screaming from visions; all of us were busy patting down the fires that the blast ignited in our minds.

With me, it was an instinct for places. I could feel them, even if I wasn’t there. It was all part of the same thing: the unreliability of time. Just as I could sometimes see things that hadn’t happened yet, I could sometimes sense places I hadn’t yet been. I’d found the tunnels that had led me from the Keeping Rooms, where Zach had imprisoned me; I’d found my way to the island; with Piper’s help, I’d found the Ark.

So I turned my mind, now, with all the concentration I could muster, to the blast machine. In the Ark, Piper and I had seen how the machinery had been painstakingly disassembled and taken away. One of the soldiers had referred to about the new bunker. So I searched. It felt strange to want to find this thing – to seek it out, when every sense in my body jarred at the thought of it. The residue alone, four hundred years later, was enough to keep the deadlands barren, and to make the Alphas shy in disgust from Omega bodies.

I sat up, while the others slept, and forced myself to seek the connections, follow where they led. I strained to trace the source of the visions that blazed in the night, the blast machine in its bunker. But I would instead find myself with eyes scrunched closed and teeth clenched, unable to get a steady trace of its location.

One morning, halfway between the coast and New Hobart, I woke with a certainty that the blast machine was to the north. I felt its pull, drawing me. I ran to Piper, breathless with the news. But by the next day, my sureness was gone: the tug that I had felt was shifting. I felt like a sail, snatched by capricious winds. By that night, I could have sworn that the blast machine was to the west. The next day, I had no sense of it at all. When Piper asked me, I muttered about time, and distance, and that the machine might still be in transit, in many parts.

‘Cass – stop.’ Piper cut me off mid-excuse. ‘I know all that. But I also know that you’ll find it eventually.’

‘Eventually’s too late,’ I said, looking ahead to where Paloma rode, Zoe walking beside her horse, her hand resting on Paloma’s foot. ‘We need to seek it out. It’s too important for us to just wait.’

Piper threw his arm wide. ‘Seek it where?’ he said. Behind us, the Spine Mountains, still snow-covered, cut off the horizon to the west. Ahead of us, plains and forests spread out to the east, until the morning haze blurred them with the sky. Where to begin?

‘We have Paloma to protect now,’ he said. ‘We can’t just run off on a whim. Once we’re back at New Hobart, we can give orders to our scouts – The Ringmaster’s network, too. We can put out word to report on any sign of unusual activity – any bunkers, any new installations. But without something to go on, we can’t just wander in search of the blast machine.’

I tried not to hear a criticism in his words: without something to go on. What did I offer, if I couldn’t even be relied on to harness my talent for locations? Many times I had felt useless compared to Piper and Zoe, as they fought and hunted and planned. My sense of places was one of the few things I’d been able to offer. Without it, was I still useful to the resistance? Useful enough that my life was worth more than the chance to kill Zach by killing me?

*

It was a hard journey. We’d started with only three horses for the four of us, and then lost one on Gallows Pass, where patches of ice still clung to the shale. Even though we’d dismounted and led the horses slowly, the grey horse had slipped and gone down thrashing, one of its front legs broken. Zoe was the only one who could get close enough to put it out of its misery. I watched how she spoke soothingly to it, right up to the moment that she slit its throat. We ate horse meat for five days, but our pace was slower with two of us walking. We had to travel at night whenever we were in Alpha territory, and Paloma’s false leg pained her if she walked for too long, so she rode one horse while the rest of us took turns on the other.

I was grateful whenever it was my turn to ride – I felt sluggish under the increasing onslaught of blast visions, each one an outburst of flame behind my eyes. One morning, a few days before we reached New Hobart, I woke from a vision with my whole head shrieking, a soreness in my temples and jaw that didn’t dissipate even as the vision dispersed. All day I found myself touching the tender spots on my face, wondering if my visions had somehow spread to my body now, as well as my mind.

We came within sight of New Hobart, two weeks after we’d left the coast and The Rosalind. We finally crested the western ridge at dawn, and there was the ring of torches around the town, and the troops massed at the gates and sentry posts. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved or afraid.

We were leading Paloma into a town held by The Ringmaster, until recently on the Council himself. I didn’t know how long our uneasy alliance with him would hold, or how he would respond to Paloma, and her news of the Scattered Islands. With The Ringmaster’s help, the resistance army had freed New Hobart from the Council occupation. But although Simon and what was left of our army were waiting for us in New Hobart, The Ringmaster had greater troop numbers, and the town was under his control.

Sally, Xander and Elsa were in there, too, at The Ringmaster’s mercy. He knew exactly what they meant to me – he’d made that clear before Piper and I left, when he’d threatened me not to betray him.

But we needed him. It wouldn’t be enough just to run, and hide, and keep Paloma away from the Council. We needed to outfit a fleet of ships; we needed money, and soldiers. We needed to strike back at the Council. Descending from the western ridge towards New Hobart with Piper, Zoe and Paloma, I knew that this thing was bigger than the four of us.

Despite the fortifications around the town, I was surprised to see signs of ordinary life continuing. Farmers were tilling the earth in fields to the city’s north and east, breaking the soil for planting when it was warm enough. Some of the houses beyond the town walls, on the open plains, had smoke coming from their chimneys. At intervals a mile or two beyond the walls, sentry posts encircled the town, and we saw two patrols making a slow lap of the perimeter, but New Hobart had once again spilled beyond its walls, and people were coming and going. I saw a hunchbacked silhouette in the driver’s seat of a wagon, heading for the western gate, and couldn’t help but smile. The Council’s laws prohibited Omegas from owning animals, so even that wagon, hitched to an ageing donkey, was a small act of defiance.

Nonetheless, for an hour or more we laid low and watched the sentry post on the western road. The soldiers wore red Council uniforms, but we could see the black armband that distinguished The Ringmaster’s men. Even then, we held back; only stepping out of cover after we’d watched a passing patrol of Omega troops, in their blue tunics, conferring with The Ringmaster’s soldiers.

When we rode up to the watch post, we were greeted calmly enough, though they didn’t conceal their stares as they took in Paloma. The Omega troops saluted Piper, while the Alphas gave grudging nods. Their matter-of-fact greeting felt strange. To them, we were just returning, as expected, after a few weeks, albeit with a pale stranger. They could not possibly know all that we had seen and learned in that time: the Ark. The blast. Elsewhere. They could not know that the whole world had changed in those weeks.

Word of our return had straight away been sent to The Ringmaster, and when the western gate was dragged open he was there to meet us, arms crossed over his chest, curly hair pulled back from his face. It had only been a month since we’d left this place, but he’d grown thinner, and older, in that time.

He was staring at Paloma. We waited what felt like a long time for him to speak. Then he turned away, dragging his eyes from Paloma to me.

‘Looks like you have a lot to tell me,’ he said.