The Forever Ship

‘If they’d got carried away,’ Piper spat, ‘Cass could be dead. You understand?’

‘Yes sir,’ Meera said, head lowered. I didn’t know whether she was hiding her contrition, or her lack of it.

The Ringmaster turned to give a dismissive glance at Zach. ‘I think no more of him than you do,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘But he’s under our protection. And any attack on him is an attack on our seer. She’s valuable to us.’

He looked carefully at each of the soldiers, memorising each face.

‘Get back to your barracks,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. There will be consequences for each of you.’

They left in silence. I looked at their retreating backs, red and blue tunics together. I had not wanted it to be this way; I didn’t want hatred for Zach to be the one thing that could unite our fractured army.

Piper grabbed Zach by the back of his shirt, and hauled him upright. Only then, when he came within range of The Ringmaster’s lamp, could I see what they had done to him.

They must have planned it in advance, because they’d made the brand. It lay on the dirt by the wall, just a piece of metal, crudely bent, the farrier’s tongs fallen open nearby. Zach must have struggled, so the burn sat crookedly on his forehead, a lopsided  with no crossbar. It didn’t matter that it was barely intelligible – the message was clear enough. Already, one side of the Alpha symbol was a fattening blister; the other was a red indentation, black at the edges. I remembered my dream: Zach, his forehead branded like mine. When I leant in to look more closely at his wound, he flinched away.

‘Pull yourself together,’ Piper said to Zach, releasing him to stand on his own. ‘It’s only a brand, no worse than nearly every Omega gets as a child.’

He led Zach into the main hall, and let him sit down. Elsa had followed us up the hill, slow on her bowed legs; she came in now, looked at Zach with distaste, then rummaged through her medicine bag to find a salve.

‘Put it on his burn – it’ll ease the pain,’ she said, giving me the small jar. ‘For you, I mean. I couldn’t care less about him.’

On the far side of the room, the others were talking quietly and urgently around the big table; in the corner, I stood over Zach, but he didn’t meet my eyes. The salve smelled of lard and rosemary, and it was so thick that I had to rub it between my hands to warm and soften it before I could apply it Zach’s wound. He was sweating – a hot, urgent sweat of fever and panic, dampening the underarms of his shirt.

He flinched when I put the salve onto the burn.

I looked down at him. ‘I know how it feels.’

We were both remembering the same thing: the brand on my flesh, while the Councilman held me down. Zach standing with my parents on the other side of the room, watching. I remembered him giving a grunt of pain; he must have felt, back then, a taste of my own agony. Now it was truly his.

‘I dreamed you would be branded,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. It didn’t make any sense, back then.’ I picked up a cloth and wiped the last of the salve from my fingers. It left a greasy film on my skin.

‘I would never have come to you, if I’d known you can’t even control your own soldiers,’ Zach said.

I shrugged. ‘It was your choice to come to us. You want to leave now?’ I looked at the doorway. Even if there were no guards behind it, we both knew that Zach would never dare to go. If she got hold of him, The General would not stop at branding him. The soldiers who had just attacked him were the only thing keeping us both alive.

*

It wasn’t only pain that kept me awake that night. Piper had stayed up at the Tithe Collector’s office to guard Zach himself, and even though Zoe was close by, I found it hard to sleep without Piper’s breath in the next bed, or his silhouette at the window, when he sat overlooking the courtyard.

I had been afraid, in different forms, for as long as I could remember. Afraid, when we were growing up, that Zach would expose me and I would be branded and sent away. Afraid, in the settlement, that Zach would come for me. And when he had come for me, and I was in the Keeping Rooms, I was afraid that I would never get out, and never see the sky again. The six months since my escape had been a collection of different fears: pursuit, hunger, imprisonment, battles.

For a long time after Kip’s death, I had cared little for my own life, or for anything else. But now I had fought my way through that, and found there were things in the world that I wanted, and relished. So when I’d seen Zach huddled on the ground, and felt his pain in my own skin, my fear had a new simplicity: I did not want to die. I did not want Zach and his enemies and treachery to snatch this life from me, just when I’d learned to occupy it again.

The next day, the soldiers who’d branded Zach were whipped. Piper had warned me, first thing in the morning, when he came back to the holding house.

‘Is it really necessary?’ I said. ‘Most of them are Omegas. They joined the resistance because they wanted to fight the Council, and they’ve found themselves taking orders from The Ringmaster, and now seeing Zach here too. It’s hard for them.’

‘If we can’t control our army, we’ve no hope of beating the Council’s,’ said Piper.

I couldn’t argue with him. I knew that it wasn’t only my own life, or Zach’s, that depended on our army holding together. But through those long morning hours as I worked with Elsa in the kitchen, Zach’s brand still pulsing on my forehead, the sky outside was smeared grey, as if the news of the whippings had spread an ugliness over the day.

I refused to watch the whipping. Paloma, too, had scrunched her face with distaste when Zoe asked her if she wanted to see, so she waited with Zoe in the holding house, while I went to the Tithe Collector’s office to check on Zach.

When Piper and Elsa and I passed the square on the way, the whipping post was being fixed in place. Months before, Kip and I had witnessed a man whipped bloody by Alpha soldiers in the same square. The raised platform they’d used had long since been torn down, and probably burned for firewood. Now, two Omega soldiers were sinking a thick post into the ground. With each pound of the mallets, the ground spat back dust. I walked faster, yanking on Elsa’s arm as she craned her neck to see. The soldiers who weren’t on patrol had all been summoned to the market square. They were gathering already, the crowd thickening as we shouldered our way through.

In the main hall, The Ringmaster was waiting, along with Simon. To my surprise, so was Zach.

The Ringmaster stood as we entered. ‘I’m leaving him here with you,’ he said. ‘Piper and I are needed in the square, and I want you both properly guarded.’

I knew I was being protected, and that I wasn’t wearing shackles like Zach, but I still looked to Piper for reassurance.

He nodded. ‘Simon will be here the whole time. And three guards, hand-selected, on the door.’ He gestured at the doorway, where soldiers waited. Two of them were The Ringmaster’s, but I was relieved to recognise Crispin, too.

At first, after Piper and The Ringmaster left, the massed soldiers in the square beyond the northern window were a background hubbub of noise. But at noon they fell silent. The cries of the market traders, too, were hushed. And even from where we sat, with the shutter closed, we could hear the strokes of the whip. Ten strokes each for the four soldiers who had attacked Zach. Five strokes each for Meera and the other soldier who had been guarding Zach, for failing in their duty.

Simon sat by the door. He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, but one of his hands rested on his axe hilt, and he didn’t take his eyes off Zach.

Zach and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and heard each stroke. It seemed to take a very long time: a pause after each blow, and then the crack of the next. The noisiest thing of all seemed to be the silence between me and Zach. We stared at each other, him on a chair at the table and me on the windowsill, my back against the closed shutter. Zach fidgeted from time to time, reaching up to his burn, and prodding gingerly around its edges.

‘Don’t touch it,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

There was another stroke of the whip. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing, a sharp intake of air through my closed teeth.

‘You can stop glaring at me,’ Zach said. ‘It’s hardly my fault that your soldiers attacked me.’

I kept my expression blank, my eyes on his. ‘It’s your fault that they wanted to.’

‘And your army’s weak discipline that meant they went ahead with it.’

Another thwack. I didn’t want Zach to know how I felt. That his arrival had left me exposed, as though the walls of New Hobart had fallen.

‘He’s whipping them himself, you know,’ Zach said. ‘Piper.’

Yet another whip stroke cracked the silence.

‘You didn’t know that?’ Zach said. His voice was like a knife, probing flesh.

‘I knew,’ I lied.

Zach just raised an eyebrow.

I ignored him. We sat there together, under Simon’s gaze. The pain in my head had lessened already, just a reminder of last night’s searing, but periodically Zach would ignite it again by touching the burn, grimacing as he tested the tautness of the blister.

When the whippings were over, Piper came back. He let the door slam behind him. He was sweaty, but I was relieved to see no blood on his clothes, or on the leather whip that he tossed to the ground. Whatever he’d done, it had not been as brutal as the whipping I’d witnessed with Kip. The length of plaited leather lay on the ground between us.

Zach had stood as soon as Piper entered; he moved to the far side of room, eyeing the whip as though it were a snake that might strike at him.

‘You can stop cowering,’ Piper said. ‘I’m done for today.’

He came to stand by me at the window. I kept my voice low, aware of Zach watching us from the far side of the room.

‘Couldn’t it have been The Ringmaster who whipped them?’ I said. ‘Or couldn’t you have got one of the other senior soldiers to do it? What about Simon?’

‘I don’t ask my men to do things I’m not willing to do myself,’ he said. ‘And it had to be me, not The Ringmaster. Can you imagine the response, if we put The Ringmaster up there, to whip mainly Omega troops, in defence of The Reformer?’ He exhaled. ‘It had to be me.’

He was probably right. But when he put his hand on the windowsill, close to mine, I couldn’t help thinking of the whip.

‘This isn’t what we wanted,’ I said in a whisper. ‘This isn’t what we’re doing this for.’ I didn’t want to say it in front of Zach – didn’t want to show him the cracks that I could see, spreading everywhere. But I was thinking of what I’d said to Piper and Zoe, back in the deadlands: that if we didn’t find Elsewhere, we would build our own. That we would find a way to make a better world here. This wasn’t what we’d dreamed of: the whip on the floor, the beaten soldiers outside.

‘You’re not different from me, Cass, for all that you’d like to think you are,’ Piper said. He was leaning forward over the sill, his weight on his arm. ‘You’ve made the same choices I have, to survive, and to do what has to be done. You think that because you can’t throw a knife, or wield a whip, that you’re somehow innocent?’

I wasn’t angry because I disagreed with him. I was angry because everything he said was true.

‘I have done only what’s been necessary,’ he said. ‘I am what the resistance has needed me to be.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Then what do you want from me?’ he said.

What could I have told him that wouldn’t have sounded wistful, impossible? A different world, in which he didn’t have to be those things. In which neither of us did.

‘Nothing,’ I replied.

CHAPTER 7

‘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.