The Fire Sermon

CHAPTER 6

By the time Zach came to my cell, I’d counted one hundred and eighteen days. Two hundred and thirty-six meal trays. Eight visits from The Confessor.

His footsteps were as unmistakable to me as the sound of his voice, or the particular rhythm of his breath while sleeping. In the moments it took him to open the lock, it felt as if all the years without him were unspooling again. I’d sprung up at the sound of his footsteps, but by the time he’d opened the door I’d forced myself to resume my seat on the bed.

He stood for a while in the doorway. When I looked at him, I saw double: the man in front of me, and the boy he evoked. He was tall, now, and he wore his dark hair longer, swept behind his ears. His face had filled out, softening the sharp angles of his cheekbones and chin. I’d remembered that in summer he used to have freckles – a scattering of them across his nose, like the first handful of dust thrown on to a coffin. There was no sign of them now, his skin only a few degrees less pale than my own cell-blanched flesh.

He stepped in and locked the door behind him, slipping the keys into his pocket.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he said.

I didn’t dare to speak, not wanting my voice to betray how much I’d hated him, or how much I’d missed him.

Zach went on. ‘Don’t you want me to tell you why I had to do it?’

‘I know why you’ve done it.’

He gave a half-laugh. ‘I’d almost forgotten how hard you can be to talk to.’

‘It’s not my job to make this easy for you.’

He began to pace. His voice stayed calm, his words coming with the same measured rate as his footsteps. ‘You can’t let me have anything, can you? Not even the explanation. I knew what I wanted to say to you. I’d practised it. But here you are, the same as always, claiming to know everything.’

‘I can’t let you have anything?’ I echoed. ‘You got everything. You got to stay. You got Mum.’ My voice cracked on her name.

‘It was too late,’ he said, halting his pacing. ‘Alice had already killed Dad. And you’d already poisoned everything. It was like you’d contaminated me – all those years of being unsplit. The others never accepted me. Not properly. It should have been the life I’d wanted.’ He held his empty hands out, fingers splayed. ‘But you’d already ruined everything.’

‘I had nothing,’ I said. ‘There were days in the settlement when we were all going hungry. But you couldn’t even let me have that. You’ve got me locked away here, and you still think you’re hard done by?’

‘I don’t have a choice, Cass.’

‘Why are you trying to convince me? You want me to absolve you? Tell you I understand?’

‘You said you did understand.’

‘I said I know why you’ve done it. I know what your reasoning was. You’ve made enemies, now that you’re a big player in the Council. You think they could use me to get at you. That doesn’t make it right to lock me away.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘Since when have you cared what I want or think?’

He was angry now. ‘Everything’s always depended on you. My whole life was on hold – it couldn’t start until you were gone.’

‘It had started. We had a life.’ I thought, as I so often did, of those years we spent together, the two of us existing at the margins of the village. ‘You just wanted a different one.’

‘No. I wanted my life. Mine. You made it impossible. And now I’m on my way to achieving something big. I can’t let you get in the way.’

‘So you’re ruining my life, to protect yours.’

‘There’s only one life between us – that’s what you don’t realise. You’ve always acted as if we can both have what we want. That’s not how the world works.’

‘So change it. You said you want to be a big, important person and change the world. It didn’t occur to you that we were changing the world, every day we weren’t split?’

He fell quiet. After a few minutes he came and sat beside me, sighing slightly as he slumped back. When he drew his knees up in front of him, they were much higher than mine. The hair on his arms was thicker and darker than I remembered, not tinged blond from the sun as it used to be. Our bodies had changed so much in the years since I’d seen him, but these new bodies slipped automatically back into the same old symmetry: sitting side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, just as we used to sit on my bed in the village.

I whispered to him, like we used to do back then, when our parents were arguing downstairs. ‘You don’t have to be this person, Zach.’

He stood up, taking the bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘I wouldn’t have to be, if it weren’t for you. If you hadn’t made everything so hard right from the start.’

In the months of waiting for him to come to the cell, I’d thought carefully about what I would say, and I’d promised myself I’d stay calm. But as he moved toward the door, my intentions abandoned me. The prospect of being left alone again in the cell loomed in front of me, and I felt too full of blood, until my whole body was a pulse, racing. I ran at him, grabbed at the keys he held.

He was half a head taller than me; stronger, too, after my six lean years in the settlement and the months of stagnation in the cell. With one arm stretched out, hand splayed about my neck, he kept me away from him with barely a struggle. I knew, even as I clawed and kicked at him, that it was pointless. If I were to succeed in knocking him out, or breaking his arm, I’d only find myself as incapacitated as him. But in my mind I wasn’t fighting him; I was fighting the very walls of the cell, and the concrete floor, and the indifference of the hours that came and went while I festered in that room. I threw my whole weight against him, until the bones of his hand were rasping against my jawbone as he held me at arm’s length. Still he didn’t relent, even when I felt the flesh of his forearm snag and rip under my nails.

He leaned forward so that I could hear his whisper over my own frantic breath.

‘I should almost be grateful to you. The others on the Council, they might talk about the risk posed by Omegas. The threat of contamination. But they haven’t lived it, not like I have. They don’t know how dangerous you can be.’

I was aware of my own shaking; it was only when he let his arm fall that I saw that he was shaking too. We stood like that for a long time. The space between us was quaking with our panted breaths, noisy as the night before a summer storm, when the air broils and the cicadas hiss and the whole world rattles and waits.

‘Please. Don’t do this, Zach.’ As I begged, I remembered how he’d begged me to reveal myself as the Omega, that night in the bedroom when we were children. Was this how he’d felt then?

He said nothing, just turned away. As he left, and locked the door behind him, I looked down at my still-juddering fists and saw his blood, bleeding from under the nails of my right hand.

*

The Confessor had taken to bringing a map with her. Dispensing with any preliminaries, she would lock the door behind her, spread the map out on my bed, and then look up at me. ‘Show me where the island is.’ Sometimes she’d circle particular areas with a finger. ‘We know it’s off the west or south-west coasts. We’re getting closer – we will find them.’

‘Then what do you need me for?’

‘Because your brother isn’t known for his patience.’

I tried to laugh. ‘What are you going to do? Torture me? Threaten to kill me? Any serious pain and you’re torturing Zach.’

The Confessor leaned in. ‘You think there’s nothing worse than what we’ve already done to you? You have no idea how lucky you are. And you’re only going to keep being lucky if you make yourself useful to us.’ She thrust the map forwards again. The intensity of her gaze felt physical. It was as searing as the branding iron on my forehead all those years ago.

‘Like you make yourself useful, working for them? A performing freak for your Alpha masters?’

She leaned forward, ever so slowly, until her face was so close to mine that I could see the tiny hairs on her cheeks, fine and pale as corn-silk. Her nostrils flared slightly as she took a deep, slow breath, and then another.

‘Are you so sure that they’re in charge of me?’ she whispered.

She groped more deeply into my mind. When we were children, Zach and I had levered up a large, flat stone. It had revealed all the worms and grubs underneath, ripped from darkness into light, squirming white in their fleshy nakedness. Now, under The Confessor’s gaze, I was no more than those grubs. There was nothing of me that she couldn’t see, couldn’t take.

I’d learned, after the initial shock, to clench my mind closed, like an eye. Like a fist. To block her out as I struggled to preserve anything of myself. I knew I had to keep the island safe from her. But, selfishly, I found myself just as worried about protecting those few personal memories that I treasured.

The autumn afternoon when Zach and I were practising our writing in the yard behind the house. While the chickens pecked and scuffled around us, we had squatted, sticks in hand, and scratched our clumsy letters in the dust. He wrote my name, and I wrote his.

The long days by the river, when the other children were in school, and Zach and I would pass each other the treasures we turned up in our aimless wanderings. He showed me the stone with the snail fossil etched into it. I brought to him an opened river-oyster shell, its inside like the blinded milky eye of an Omega beggar I’d seen on the road to Haven.

And the memory of all those nights, when we would pass stories and whispers between the beds, just as we swapped those riverside treasures during the day. Lying in the dark, hearing the rain’s muted spatter on the thatch, Zach offered me the story of how the bullocks in the neighbour’s field had charged at him when he took the shortcut to the well, and how he’d had to climb a tree to escape being trampled. I told him how I’d seen the other children rigging up a new swing from the oak in the schoolyard, when I’d peered over the wall we were never allowed to cross.

‘We have our own swing,’ he’d said.

It was true, though it wasn’t a proper swing – just a spot we’d found, upstream, where a willow grew so close to the water that you could grasp the low draped branches and swing out above the river. On hot days, we’d compete to see who could swing furthest out, dropping triumphant into the river below.

There were more recent memories, too, from the settlement. The evenings when I’d sit in front of my small fire and read Alice’s book of recipes, or her collection of songs, and picture her sitting in the same spot, years earlier, and writing them.

And later, the warmth on the coin from my mother’s hand, when she’d passed it to me in her attempt to warn me about Zach. It was a small thing to treasure: not even a touch – just the second-hand warmth of a coin that she’d held. But it was all I had of her, from those last few years, and it was mine.

All these things were now exposed to The Confessor’s dispassionate gaze. To her, they were no more than clutter in a drawer that she was rifling through, in search of something more valuable. Each time she moved on, she left me scrabbling to reassemble the disarranged mess of my mind.

When The Confessor stood and left, taking the map with her, I knew I should have been pleased that I’d managed to keep her from the island. But in concentrating on concealing those, I was forced to leave so much else exposed. These memories, these scraps of the life I’d lived before the cell, she just picked up, turned over, and cast aside. And although they were insignificant to her, nothing she’d touched was untarnished. After each visit, I felt I had fewer memories for her to peruse.

*

The next day, Zach came. His visits were rarer these days, and when he did come, he usually avoided my eyes, fidgeting with his keys instead. He hardly spoke, responding with shrugs to most of my questions. But every few weeks I’d hear the key in the lock, the door scrape along the floor, and in he’d come, my twin, my jailer, to sit at the far end of my bed. I didn’t know why he came, any more than I knew why I was always glad when I heard his footsteps in the corridor.

‘You need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just tell her what you see. Or let her in.’

‘Into my mind, you mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t sound so horrified. You’re like her, after all.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t do what she does. I don’t poke around in other people’s minds. And she can stay the hell out of mine – it’s the only thing I’ve got here.’ I didn’t know how to express to him what it was like when she tried to probe my mind. How it left me feeling sullied, unsafe even in my own head.

He gave a sigh that turned into a laugh. ‘I’d be impressed that you’ve held her out this long, except that I already knew how stubborn you are.’

‘Then you should know it’s not going to change. I won’t help you.’

‘You need to, Cass.’ He leaned close to me. For a moment I thought he might take my hand, as he had all those years ago when our father was dying and he’d begged for my help. His pupils flared and contracted in their own uneven pulse. When he was this close to me, I could see the bloodied flakes of skin on his lower lip. I remembered how he used to chew his lip when Mum and Dad were fighting downstairs, or when the other children in the village were taunting us.

‘What are you scared of?’ I whispered. ‘Are you afraid of The Confessor?’

He stood. ‘There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.’ He slapped at the wall. His open palm left a mark on the dusty concrete. ‘Worse things happening to some of the Omegas kept here. It’s only because you’re a seer that you get to live like this.’ Stretching his neck backwards, he dragged his hands down his face, took a few breaths with his eyes closed. ‘I told her you’d be useful.’

‘You want me to be grateful? For this?’ I gestured at the cell around us. The walls had become a vice around my life, everything crushed down to these few square yards of greyness. And my mind, too, had started to feel cell-like: enclosed and murky. Worst of all was the grim indifference of time, which kept passing, while I was stuck here in this endless half-life of meal trays and relentless light.

‘You don’t know the care I take of you. Everything you eat –’ he gestured to the tray on the floor ‘– I have somebody taste it first. Every jug of water. Everything.’

‘I’m touched by your concern for me,’ I said. ‘But as I recall, when I was living my own life, in the settlement, I didn’t even have to worry about people trying to poison me.’

‘Your own life? You weren’t so keen on “your own life” all those years that you were trying to claim mine.’

‘I wasn’t trying to claim anything. I just didn’t want to be sent away, any more than you did.’ Silence. ‘If you’d just let me on the ramparts occasionally, like when I was first here. Or to talk to some of the other prisoners. Just to be able to talk to someone else.’

He shook his head. ‘You know I can’t. You saw what happened on the ramparts that time. It could have been you who that madman attacked.’ He looked at me with what could have been tenderness. ‘The whole point of having you here is to keep you safe.’

‘If we were allowed to talk to one another, that wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have gone mad. Why would the other Omegas here ever hurt me? They’re in the same situation as I am. Why deny us company?’

‘Because of who their twins are.’

‘Their twins are your friends, your Council cronies.’

‘You’re so naïve, Cass. They’re the people I work with, work for – not my friends. You think some of them wouldn’t like to get their own twins to finish you off, to get at me?’

‘Then where does it end? By your logic, we should all spend our lives in padded cells, Alphas and Omegas alike.’

‘It’s not just me,’ he said. ‘It’s always happened: using those who are close to people to manipulate them. Even in the Before. If they needed to control somebody, they could kidnap their husband, child, lover. The only difference in the After is that, now, it’s more direct. In the Before, you had to watch your back. Now, we all have two backs to watch. It’s that simple.’

‘It’s only simple because you reduce having a twin to a liability. You’re paranoid.’

‘And you’re wilfully naïve.’

‘Is that why you come down here?’ I asked him as he stood and unlocked the door. ‘Because you can’t trust anybody else up there, in the Council?’

‘That would imply I could trust you,’ he said, pulling the door shut behind him. I heard the key turn.

*

I calculated that it must have been at least a year since I’d seen the sky. In the artificially lit world of the Keeping Rooms, even my dreams changed; my day-time visions too. When I’d first started to have visions of the island, I’d wondered if they were just a fantasy to alleviate the horror of my confinement. Now that new, darker visions began to intrude, for a long time I thought they might just be morbid imaginings, that the horror of my long isolation had seeped into my dreams. As my tally of days in the Keeping Rooms crept upwards, I was growing distrustful of my own mind. But what I saw was too alien, and too consistent, for me to believe that I’d come up with it myself. The details, too, were so vivid that I was convinced I couldn’t have created them: the glass tanks, real right down to the dust on the rubber seals at the base. The wires and panels above the tanks, each panel speckled by tiny lights, red or green. The tubes, flesh-coloured and rubbery, emerging from the top of each tank.

How could I have invented such a sight, when I couldn’t even decipher what it was? All that I knew for sure was that it was taboo, like the glass ball of light in my cell. The tubes and wires that I saw surrounding the tanks matched the stories of the Before, and all its Electric alchemy. The lights, too, were the same unnatural spark as the light in my cell. Each light, unwavering, was a dot of pure colour, without heat. This was a machine – but a machine for what? It was both messier and more awesome than the whispers about the Before had led me to believe. The tangle of wires and tubes looked disordered, improvised. But the whole, the pulsating mass of connections, lights, and tanks, was so huge and so complex that it couldn’t help be impressive, despite the shudder it provoked in me.

At first, the tanks were all that the visions showed me. Then, floating within the tanks, I saw the bodies, suspended in a viscous liquid that seemed to slow everything until even the waving of their hair was lethargic. From each drooping mouth, a tube. But the eyes were the worst. Most had their eyes closed, but even those few with open eyes wore entirely blank expressions, their eyes utterly empty. These were the ruins of people. I thought of Zach’s words, when I’d complained about the cell: There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.

I sensed the tanks most acutely when Zach came, though he did this rarely now. The tank room was like a smell that clung to him. Even as I heard his key in the lock I could feel the faces looming into sight. After he left, they crowded me for hours with their closed eyes and open mouths. They were all Omegas, all suspended in the timelessness of those glass vats. As the months passed, even as Zach’s visits grew rarer, my awareness of the tank room became near-constant. Far from being abstract, it felt not only real but close. It became so pressing a physical presence that I felt as if I could navigate by it: the sure pull of that room, perhaps only hundreds of feet away, had become my compass point. Just as the river had once been the basis of my mental map of the valley where I grew up, now my imagination’s map of the fort was oriented by two locations: the cell, and the tank room. Beneath it all, the river was still there. I could sense it running deep underfoot, its ceaseless movement taunting me with my own stagnation.

*

One day The Confessor unlocked the door, but didn’t step inside the cell.

‘Get up,’ she said, holding the door open.

I hadn’t been out of the cell for more than a year. I wondered if she was taunting me. In the last few months, I’d sometimes begun to fear I was going mad. Looking through the open door, I distrusted even the strip of corridor I could make out. To my space-starved eyes, the concrete passageway seemed as far-fetched as a mountain vista under sunlight.

‘Hurry up. I’m going to show you something. We don’t have long.’

Even with three armed soldiers standing by, and The Confessor watching me impatiently, I couldn’t hide my excitement as we stepped through the door.

She refused to tell me where she was taking me, or to respond at all to any of my questions. She walked briskly, a few steps ahead of me, the guards following closely behind. As it turned out, it wasn’t far: just to the end of the corridor, through another locked door, then down a flight of stairs to another row of doors.

‘We’re not going outside?’ I asked, facing the row of cell doors that mimicked my own: the grey steel; the narrow slot for meal trays near the base; the observation hatch at eye-level, which could be opened only from the corridor, not within.

‘This isn’t a picnic excursion,’ she said. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

She walked to the third door and slid open the hatch. Like the one in my cell, it clearly hadn’t been opened often – it slid awkwardly, shrieking with rust.

The Confessor stepped back. ‘Go on,’ she said, gesturing at the hatch.

I stepped towards the door, leaned closer to the opening. It was darker inside the cell, the single Electric light no match for the rows of them in the corridor. But even as my eyes were adjusting, I could see that the cell was just like mine. The same narrow bed, the same grey walls.