The Forever Ship

I’d hoped that our news – about the Ark, and The Rosalind’s return, might reassure Xander. That he might feel bolstered by the knowledge that he’d been right about both, and that he’d been listened to. Paloma was here to prove it. But he grew ever more distant, even as we spoke directly to him, or tried to. He sat slumped, eyes closed most of the time. When he opened his eyes, they stared, but not at us.

And I understood that our news, confirming the truth of his visions, was the worst thing we could have brought him.

I looked again at Xander. His head lolled awkwardly, as if he hadn’t even the energy to hold up his own neck. How long could he have been expected to stand in the face of the blast, its certain approach, and not disintegrate?

*

When the questions finally subsided and we were readying to leave, I hung back for a second, watching The Ringmaster’s guards lay out his meal on the table while Piper and the others were talking in the doorway. It was a grey afternoon, and The Ringmaster lit a lamp, changing the colour of the room to a sickly orange. I was gratified to see that despite the silver plate, the food laid out for him was no better than what the soldiers would be eating: a piece of flatbread no bigger than my hand, a handful of nuts, and some jerky.

He turned, the lamp still in his hand, and saw me watching him.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ I said.

‘Surely you should know the answers to most questions?’ he said.

I shook my head, irritated. ‘You know better than that. You know that’s not how it works.’

‘Go ahead then,’ he said. He picked up his fork, poked ruefully at his half-bare plate.

I took a deep breath. ‘You told me, when we first met, that you had your twin locked up. I want to know where she is.’

His face hardened. ‘She has nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Where is she?’ I repeated.

‘I told you all that you need to know, when we first met. She’s not tanked,’ he said. ‘I’ve never broken the taboo. I’m not a hypocrite.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re here, fighting alongside us, talking with us while we talk of freedom for Omegas. Where is she?’

‘She’s safe,’ he said. ‘Nowhere near here. You forget that I have my own garrisons, my own guards.’

I tried to form words, but I could almost feel the walls of the Keeping Rooms sealing around me again. Those days and days and years and years of darkness, when Zach had kept me in that cell. Wherever she was, The Ringmaster’s twin must be feeling the same airless despair. The same panic that crept in when time became stripped of meaning, and days and months were no longer anything but a burden.

‘How can you fight alongside us, and against the Council, when you think it’s fair to keep her locked up?’

He looked at me coolly. ‘I never said I think it’s fair,’ he said. ‘I think it’s necessary. If Zach or The General got their hands on my twin, I’d be dead. If she’s not secure, I’m not secure. Nor is New Hobart. Do you think, for a minute, that my troops would stay here to protect this town if I weren’t here?’

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to understand me,’ he said. His voice was a door shutting. ‘We want the same thing: an end to the tanks.’

‘Is that all you want?’ I said. ‘Is that really it? What are you doing here?’

My question sat between us for a long time, before he spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. His voice sounded exhausted. I thought that for the first time he was telling me the truth.

*

It had been many years since I’d felt that I had a home, if ever. My parents’ house, before they sent me away, was too full of scrutiny and suspicion to be a home. After my exile I’d found a kind of stability at the settlement, but my neighbours had kept their distance, and whispered about my visions. Then there had been the hell of the Keeping Rooms, and the breathless months on the run with Kip.

But that afternoon, when Elsa threw open the door of the holding house, being back with her felt as close to home as I had ever known. She rushed to greet me, almost toppling me, and my face was squashed into her shirt as she hugged me. For a few moments everything else receded.

‘I heard you got back into town this morning,’ she said, holding both my arms as she stepped back to look at me, then glancing pointedly at the sun behind me; it was already sinking towards the horizon.

‘I wanted to come here sooner,’ I said.

Elsa greeted Piper and Zoe; she welcomed Paloma too, though Elsa couldn’t hide her stares. She grumbled about rations as she bustled around the kitchen, but I saw how she touched Piper’s arm as she thrust a bundle of sheets at him, and how she pushed a hunk of bread into Paloma’s hands and made her sit down and take the weight off her false leg.

There were more comfortable accommodations at the Tithe Collector’s office, but none of us wanted to be there, close to The Ringmaster. I kept thinking about his words: I never said I think it’s fair. I think it’s necessary. What would happen when killing Zach became necessary? Would The Ringmaster even hesitate to kill me?

I was grateful when the others retreated to the front room, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Elsa. When I tried to explain to her everything that had happened, she didn’t interrupt me like The Ringmaster, Sally and Simon had. She just busied herself around me, chopping the carrots and stirring the pot over the fire, and not staring at me as I tried to find the words. I told the story backwards, starting with Paloma, and Elsewhere, and all that we’d learned about the end of twinning. When I came to describing the earlier part of my journey, and the Ark, the words came even more slowly. The meal of watery soup was ready, but Elsa didn’t hurry me; she hoisted the pot from the fire and placed it to the side. She sat quietly and waited, and I felt silence rising over me, like the water in the black corridors of the Ark.

I described finding Kip again, in the double prison of his smashed body and the tank. I told her how I had flooded the Ark, nearly killing myself and Zach and Piper, and burying Kip and The Confessor once and for all.

Elsa said nothing still, as she dished up the soup, but before she called the others in to eat, she squeezed my arm.

‘You found Kip,’ she said.

I nodded. It seemed a strange thing to be grateful for – those minutes in the Ark, with Kip’s dead body laid on the gangway in front of me. But Elsa, who had never been given back her husband’s body after the Council killed him, understood what those minutes had meant to me.

*

Later, Sally and Xander came to the kitchen as well. In the weeks we’d been away, they’d moved into the holding house, taking over the room next to Elsa’s at the front of the house, where Nina had lived before the Council killed her.

Sitting close to the fire, Xander was still silent. There were leaves in his hair, and the knees of his trousers were browned with dirt.

‘Where’s he been this afternoon?’ I asked Sally.

‘The Kissing Tree,’ Sally said.

I raised an eyebrow. The huge, hollowed-out stump in the burnt-out forest was all that remained of the hiding place where Elsa and her husband used to go when they were young. It was there that we’d found the documents for which he’d been tortured and killed: the papers that had helped to lead us to the Ark.

‘He just took off one day,’ Sally said, ‘when we were out setting snares. He went straight to it, like he knew what he was looking for. Crawled in without a word, and stayed there for hours. Since then, he goes most days.’ She shrugged. ‘It keeps him calm. I go with him if my legs are up to it, otherwise we send a guard.’

Of all the places in and around New Hobart, the Kissing Tree had the strongest link to the Ark, and to the blast machine. I wondered why the flames in Xander’s head weren’t enough, and why he made his daily pilgrimage to that place.

He wasn’t going to answer my questions. He sat without speaking, on the low stool by the fire. Beside him, Sally sat in Elsa’s chair by the window overlooking the courtyard. If anyone else had tried to claim that chair, Elsa would have jabbed at them with the broom handle, but it seemed that in the weeks we’d been away she and Sally had become friends. There was at least thirty years between them, and their lives could hardly have been more different. Elsa had spent her life caring for the children in the holding house; Sally had been a pioneer of the resistance, an infiltrator and an assassin. But I watched how Elsa filled her pipe and passed it to Sally without even looking – Sally took it without a word – and how the two of them settled into an easy silence.

I saw, too, how Elsa bent to prop a cushion behind Xander’s head, where it slumped against the wall. Again and again she wiped the drool that unspooled from his open mouth. Now that the holding house was empty, and its children dead, Elsa was always looking for something to do with her hands, and I knew that she was glad of Xander’s presence.

I wished that I could say the same – but being in the same room as Xander filled my nostrils with the scent of smoke. He was all fire now, all the time. I thought I understood, perhaps, why he went each day to the Kissing Tree. The flames had been calling him for so long that he had no choice but to answer.

Elsa was mixing some herbs to help Xander sleep through the night. She showed me how, and I ground the dried valerian myself, felt the satisfying grate of the pestle against the mortar.

When Elsa poured in some poppy tincture, she raised the glass bottle to the window light, squinting to look closely while she poured. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Four drops only. No more.’

‘Two spoons of that stuff,’ Sally said, ‘with a little henbane thrown in, and you can knock someone out entirely. A little more, and you can kill them.’

The way she phrased it, it didn’t sound like a warning. It sounded like advice.

‘Shut up and help,’ said Elsa, manoeuvring around Sally with the bottle. ‘We’re not in the business of killing, in this house.’

I wished she were right. Perhaps it was true for her, and for Xander and Paloma. But I looked from Zoe, to Piper, to Sally, and down at my own hands. There was not one of us who was not in the business of killing.

*

That night we all slept together in the dormitory of the holding house: me, Piper, Paloma and Zoe. Zoe and Paloma had pushed two of the small beds together; it was as close to a declaration as we were going to get.

Both Piper and Zoe were too tall for the children’s beds, and seeing Piper’s calves and feet hanging over the edge of the bed made me laugh. But then Paloma said: ‘Why are all the beds in here so small?’ and my laugh halted, and we fell silent, until Zoe explained about the children that Zach and The General had tanked and then left to drown. Paloma sat on her bed and listened, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her shins. Every day with us a new lesson in cruelty.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Paloma said to me. ‘When they kill the children, they’re killing their own as well.’

There had been a time when the twinning had stopped Alphas and Omegas from killing one another. That time was long gone. It wasn’t the first time that humans had turned on each other, and themselves, like this. Whoever had unleashed the blast, four hundred years ago, must have known that they would destroy more than just their enemies. The risk of obliterating themselves, and the world, hadn’t been enough to stop the killing then. The twinning was never going to be enough to stop it now.

*

The Ringmaster came at dawn. He led me and Piper around the outskirts of the town, so that Piper could inspect the new fortifications. The encircling wall was topped with wire, and a walkway now ran along it, with slits for archers. The watchtowers were higher, and had been strengthened, squatting solidly against thick wooden buttresses. Beyond the wall, wide ditches ringed the town, and in each ditch sat rows of logs pierced with metal spikes, offering their metal barbs to the sky. There was an orderliness about them that belied their sole purpose: to impale and to kill. I thought of the horses I’d ridden, the soft skin of their underbellies, and turned away.

The Ringmaster had noticed my expression.

‘It’s not supposed to be pretty,’ he said. ‘The Council built the wall to keep the townsfolk in, not to repel an attack. We’d never have taken the town if it had been built to keep an attacking force out.’

‘And now?’

He pressed his lips together. ‘If we have to draw back behind the walls, the fortifications will buy us some time. If they throw everything at us, we’ll still struggle. We don’t have the supplies to withstand a long siege – rations are tight enough as it is. But the Council won’t leave Wyndham undefended. Anyway,’ he said, with the beginnings of a smile, ‘the new defences have kept the troops busy. Idle troops make trouble.’

He was right. And he was right about the fortifications, too. They were impressive. Even Piper had no criticisms to make, and nodded when The Ringmaster pointed out various features.

‘When will the Council attack, do you think?’ I said.

‘I don’t know.’ The Ringmaster glanced back up the hill towards the holding house, where we’d left Zoe and Paloma. ‘We struck some major blows – the defection of my army; freeing this town; the destruction of the Ark. But they’ll strike back eventually. Sooner rather than later, if they find out we’ve got somebody from Elsewhere here.’

There was such audacity in those words: somebody from Elsewhere here. Only weeks earlier, that phrase would have been unimaginable. ‘Paloma changes everything,’ I said.

‘She’ll change everything all right,’ he grunted. ‘Bring the Council down on us like never before. All for what?’

‘For a chance to end all of this,’ said Piper, waving his arm to include the walls and the trenches below us, and the ruthless metal spikes – all the careful architecture of death. ‘Once and for all.’

The Ringmaster shook his head. ‘Someone, a few hundred years ago, thought they’d come up with a clever way to end all of this too, with the blast. Your brother—’ he turned to me, his movement so sudden that Piper stepped forward, putting his body between us ‘—he and The General think the tanks are a great way to end it all. When are you going to stop thinking that machines are the answer?’

I was about to speak when a whistle came from the wall below us, and a flurry of shouts from the watchtower. The Ringmaster yanked his gaze from me, and he and Piper moved quickly, running through the narrow streets towards the eastern gate. I ran too; by the time we reached the gate, my breath was fast and jerky from keeping up with them.

The gate was open; I recognised the dwarf sentry whose arrival had been signalled, and who now rode up from the gate to meet us: Crispin, one of Piper’s soldiers from the island.

‘It’s an Alpha,’ he said as he dismounted. ‘They’re bringing him in now.’ Crispin was out of breath, and we all had to bend to hear him speak. ‘He came to the sentry post on the eastern road, wouldn’t give his name. Handed over his knife, willingly. We’ve searched him – no other weapons. But he says he’ll only speak to Cass.’

Behind him, three more Omega soldiers rode through the gate. Hemmed between them was a tall man, hooded.

The gate was heaved shut, the crossbar dropped into place with a weighty thud. The soldiers dismounted and dragged the hooded man to where we stood.

I knew it was him, even before one of the soldiers wrenched back his hood. He kept his head low, face all but buried in the scarf bundled around his neck. There was a bruise on his cheek, a cut on his temple, and his bottom lip was swollen and split.

I stared at Zach, and he stared back.

‘I had nowhere else to go,’ he said.

PART 2

CHAPTER 4

Piper charged at him – for a moment I thought he would punch him. But he just grabbed hold of Zach and, under the gaze of the soldiers, dragged him off the street and into the shadow of a narrow alley nearby. I followed with The Ringmaster and Crispin.

‘And put that hood back up, for crying out loud,’ Piper said, pushing Zach back against the wall. ‘You think there’s a soldier in this town who wouldn’t knife you if they knew who you are?’

Zach pulled his hood forward, but kept his eyes on me.

‘You need to take me in,’ he said. His words were slightly blurred by his swollen lip. I ran my tongue across my own lip, expecting to taste blood.

‘Did your men do this to him?’ I asked Crispin.

‘We weren’t overly gentle when we searched him,’ said Crispin. ‘But someone else had got to him first.’

Mixed with my shock at seeing Zach was an element of relief: the pains I’d felt a few nights earlier, in the thick of my visions, had been Zach’s pains, and not another step in my mind’s disintegration.

The Ringmaster dismissed Crispin with a jerk of his head, but before Crispin had reached the end of the alley, Piper called him back.

‘Not a word, do you understand? Not a word to anybody, if you value your life. You’ve seen nothing, heard nothing, and you don’t know who this man is. Clear?’

Crispin nodded.

‘And wake the second watch early,’ The Ringmaster added. ‘I want an extra squadron on the perimeter, and three more mounted patrols out, now.’

Crispin left at a trot.

Piper let go of Zach’s arm. There was nowhere for Zach to run, backed against the wall in the cramped alley, with me, Piper and The Ringmaster facing him.

‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ Zach said to me, his voice a hiss.

‘What I’ve done?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? Why are you here?’

‘The General’s trying to kill me, to get rid of you.’

‘And you’ve come to me for help?’ I said, incredulous.

‘Where else am I supposed to go?’

He looked from me to Piper and The Ringmaster and back again. I thought of the half-strangled rabbit I’d found once, thrashing around in one of Piper’s snares – the wire noose had snagged and failed to kill it. Zoe had leaned past me and swiftly broken its neck, but I’d seen the trapped animal’s eyes. Zach’s eyes were like that now.

‘Say it,’ I said.

‘What?’ Zach said. His eyes were still flicking from me to the others. ‘Say what?’

‘Admit it,’ I said. ‘Say that you need our help.’

‘You want to play games?’ Zach said. ‘There’s no time. They’re coming for me, and if you let them catch me, you’ll die.’

‘But so will you,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘And there are times I think that might be worth it.’

He stared at me for a long time. I felt the warmth of Piper, who stood close beside me; I heard the impatient breathing of The Ringmaster on my other side.

‘Fine,’ Zach said, his voice cracking. ‘Help me.’

*

On the way to the Tithe Collector’s office Piper gripped Zach’s arm and The Ringmaster flanked him. The hood was pulled so low over his face he could barely see, and once or twice he stumbled, but Piper hauled him onwards. The streets were getting busier: a woman was beating a mat out of an upstairs window; three soldiers were chatting in a doorway, scrambling to attention as they saw Piper and The Ringmaster approach. Outside the bakery a man was unloading flour from a barrel, and flour dust settled on the shoulders of Zach’s dark cloak as we passed. I couldn’t reconcile it: such an ordinary, everyday thing, when I felt as though Zach’s arrival had brought the whole world to a stop.

When we reached the partly-burnt building where the children had been tanked and then drowned, I looked back at Zach, and saw Piper’s knuckles standing out white, his fingers crushing Zach’s arm. If it hurt, Zach made no noise.

At the Tithe Collector’s office, The Ringmaster dismissed the guards with a sweep of his hand, and pulled the door of the main chamber shut behind us.

In that large room, I was no closer to Zach than I had been outside, but it somehow felt worse, and more intimate, to be sharing a room with him, away from the noise of the soldiers and the streets. I already shared too much with Zach. I didn’t want to share the same air, the same enclosed space.

‘Who knows you’re here?’ demanded Piper.

‘Nobody,’ Zach said. He pushed the hood back.

The last time I’d seen him had been in the Ark, but the space had been barely lit, and I’d never got close to him. Now I stared at his changed face. It wasn’t only the bruises and scabs that made it different. There were new lines under his eyes, and between his eyebrows, and a long-healed scar on his jaw. So much of his life was unknown to me, now. How far our stories had diverged since the days of our childhood, when I could have drawn a map of every freckle on his cheekbones.

The Ringmaster moved closer to Zach. They were the same height, but The Ringmaster was broader, stronger. Once, these two had sat together on the Council, living and working in luxury that I could barely imagine. Now they faced off across the bare room. It had once been the Council’s Tithe Collector’s office, so it was plusher than anything else in the Omega town, but it wore the marks of the last few months. One wall was patched where it had burned during the battle. A broken window had not been mended – just nailed shut with slats. The planks of the balcony outside, where the townspeople used to line up to pay their tithes, had been ripped up for firewood during the coldest weeks of winter. In the next room, where the Tithe Collector used to dine, the floor was covered with sleeping rolls for The Ringmaster’s personal guards.

‘You should never have come here,’ The Ringmaster said to Zach.

‘I don’t want this any more than you do,’ Zach replied. ‘You think I’d be here—’ he waved a hand at the shabby room ‘—if I had a choice?’

His shoulders slumped. ‘The General’s turned on me. She’s trying to kill me.’ He turned back to me. ‘You’ve gone too far now, done too much. Destroying the database. Warning the island that we were coming. Freeing New Hobart. Then trashing the Ark. You did too much,’ he said again, his voice rising, ‘and you found out too much. Until getting rid of you was worth the cost of getting rid of me.’

This was the kind of calculation that should have been familiar to him: he’d spent years weighing up the value of lives, and making choices he had no right to make. But he looked frantic, his voice swerving between rage and disbelief.

‘Didn’t you have anyone else you could turn to?’ I said. ‘You must have your own soldiers. Won’t they protect you?’

‘Against The General?’ he said.

I remembered her: the way she kept her head still while her eyes roamed indifferently over us. How even Zach had obeyed her every command.

Zach continued. ‘Ever since you took New Hobart, The General’s been trying to push me out. She tried to hide it at first, but I knew. She was manoeuvring in the Council, making sure she had the support she needed. Talking more and more about the threat posed by the resistance. By you, especially. Then you drowned the Ark, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. Six nights ago she came for me – sent her soldiers to my chambers before dawn. I wasn’t there – I had a source who tipped me off. I got out through the kitchens, a few hours before the raid, but even then I had to fight my way past a sentry. One of my own soldiers – he said he had orders not to let me leave the fort. Me.’ He closed his eyes and took two breaths. I didn’t know who the anger on his face was aimed at: his soldiers; The General; me.

‘You should have known this was coming,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’

‘And I should have trusted you instead?’ Zach shot back. ‘You, who proved yourself so loyal, so trustworthy?’

‘I’ve been loyal to the principles the Council was supposed to uphold. The taboo. Protecting our people from the machines.’