The Sign of One
‘All right!’ I hoist her on to my shoulders.
The people behind us moan, but I ignore them. Cassie’s thrilled. I’m not – she stinks. She also thinks it’s okay to hold on to my ears.
‘Who’s the tall skinny woman?’
‘A High Slayer.’
I’m pretty sure, seeing how much gilt she’s got on her uniform.
The only Slayers I’ve seen before are those who come for our idents, when it’s time to cart them off to the camps. Everybody always turns out to watch because, let’s face it, nothing else happens in Freshwater. Rona says they’re stone-cold killers, the Saviour’s special forces from the war. They’ve got some other fancy names too, like Preservers of Human Purity, but I like Slayer better.
‘What’s her name?’ Cassie asks me.
‘How should I know?’
‘Commandant Morana,’ whispers Mary, Cassie’s sister. ‘High Slayer for the Barrenlands.’
‘Nasty piece of work,’ adds Mary’s mother, quiet-like, out of the side of her mouth. ‘Eats babies for breakfast.’
I shudder, and try to imagine what babies might taste like. Disgusting, if Cassie is anything to go by.
The Saviour fades away and the big screen zooms in on the woman’s face. She is beautiful, but there’s a harshness stamped into her features no creams or powders can hide. Her eyes stare back at us, so cold and bleak I shiver, even though I’m hot. And when she starts talking, her voice is impossibly loud. Her words crash around the arena, like thunder echoes around our hills. I’m gobsmacked, until I see the microphone clipped to her collar and the speakers up on poles.
‘Good afternoon, citizens of the Barrenlands,’ she booms. ‘Welcome to Deep Six on this, the last day of this year’s Peace Fair. It is . . . gratifying to see how many of you have chosen to make the difficult journey here.’
I can’t help sniffing. Chosen? Okay, so I chose, but it’s the law.
‘I would like to begin,’ she continues, ‘by asking you all to show your appreciation for our hosts, the loyal and industrious mining community of Deep Six, who once again have made this year’s Fair such a success.’
The bigdeals haul themselves up from their chairs and the crowd starts clapping. Hardly deafening though – nobody will be going home with blisters on their hands. And this lack of enthusiasm isn’t lost on Morana. Magnified on the screen above her, she stiffens and her scowling face lifts to look behind us. Uh-oh. Turns out that she isn’t the only Slayer in Deep Six today. When I look, I see loads more have spread out behind us around the rear wall of the arena. Some are only carrying non-lethal shockers, but most are armed with pulse rifles.
The clapping gets louder – some creeps even cheer.
Deep Six’s Elder, a red-faced woman with a whiny voice, makes a speech. She thanks the High Slayer, then bangs on for boring ages about new productivity records for the iron-ore mines. It’s worse than studying maths, so I’m glad when she eventually sits down and Morana returns to the centre of the stage.
The crowd, which had started muttering again, quiets.
‘We are gathered here today,’ Morana announces, ‘to celebrate thirty years of the Saviour’s peace. A peace which has allowed us to rebuild our shattered world and raise new generations of pureblood singleton children. A peace which sees us looking forward from our dark past towards an ever brighter future.’
She pauses. The speakers blast out the first verse of ‘All Hail the Saviour’.
We chant it back, like good little citizens.
What follows is a history lesson from her that makes me sigh. I mean, as if I haven’t had this drummed into my head a thousand times already by our preacher, Fod, back in Freshwater. Anyway, Morana reminds us how the outbreak of ident births was first considered a blessing as we struggled to survive in those early days after being dumped here and needed all the strong hands we could get, to clear the fields and labour in them. Then the realisation that only one twin was pureblood human, the other a less-than-human twist. And yet still we tolerated them. Only for our generosity to be rewarded by the Twist War, when the twists showed their true monster faces by rising up against us purebloods and almost wiping us out, being faster and stronger and entirely without pity. How we purebloods survived only because one man among us would not be beaten: the glorious leader we are now pleased to call our Saviour, who saved us from our doom.
Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before.
The whole time she’s talking, the screen shows grainy footage from the war. Seen that before too. Women and children torn limb from limb by half-naked soldiers, who look human, but aren’t. Slayers leading regular troops in devastating counterattacks. It looks staged to me. Why was somebody filming it instead of blasting away with a pulse rifle? But like I said before, what do I know?
Cassie buries her face in my hair. ‘It’s horrible.’
The crowd starts getting twitchy and excited now. Most people will have been to Fairs before. They will know what’s coming after the speeches.
‘Yet today is not only a celebration,’ Morana says, at last. ‘Today serves another, far more important purpose. We are gathered here . . . for the Unwrapping.’
‘Un-wrapping! ’ roars the crowd.
The screen cuts to Morana’s half-smile, half-sneer.
‘For we must never relax our guard against the bane of Wrath.’
‘The bane of Wrath! ’
She glares at us and I, like everyone else, stick my believer face on.
‘There are some who claim not to believe in the curse.’ Her voice becomes menacing now, a stern mother explaining something for the very last time to a witless child. ‘To those doubters I say – BEHOLD THE BANE OF WRATH!’
There’s a disturbance at the rear of the stage, where a gap in the stacked cages forms a tunnel. Using long chains attached to a collar around its neck, four muscular guards drag out the twist we saw yesterday. They fasten the chains to anchors in the stage floor then step back, panting and sweating.
And the crowd goes mental.
‘The bane of Wrath! The bane of Wrath! ’
The stark-naked twist raves and claws at its collar. It is a monster, I do see that now. Even so, I can hardly watch – it’s too cruel. But the effect it has on the crowd is as shocking. It’s like I blink and suddenly I’m drowning in a sea of contorted red faces, eyes bulging, mouths gaping as they bay for the twist’s blood.
Even Mary, always so precious, screams her head off.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ asks Cassie.
‘It’s possessed,’ I explain, wincing. ‘Taken over by demons.’
Morana strolls towards it. The creature screams and hurls itself to meet her, skeletal arms outstretched, fingers like talons – only for the chains to snap taut, jerking its head back. The High Slayer doesn’t flinch, but stands just out of reach at a red line painted on the floor. She shakes her head as if disgusted and holds up one black-gloved hand. A guard steps forward with a disruptor tube. There’s a blue-white flash and the twist freezes, mid-snarl. On the screen I see it’s still twitching, its mad eyes full of hate, but that’s all it can do now.
‘Hard to believe,’ booms Morana, ‘that this evil, this monster, could once have passed for human. Yet I assure you it did. This is why these foul caricatures of humanity are such an insidious enemy. Why we must always remain vigilant and work so tirelessly to preserve the blessed purity of our human bloodline.’
‘Un-wrapp-ing! ’ howls the crowd, growing impatient.
‘What’s insidyus mean?’ asks Cassie.
‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘Something bad. Shut up, will you?’
Morana raises her voice, so loud it hurts. ‘Let the Unwrapping begin!’
3
UNWRAPPING
More blaring trumpets. Morana takes her place on a seat behind the altar. A tall man in a cloak, nose and mouth hidden by a black mask, emerges from the cage-tunnel and stalks centre stage, his boots thumping the wood. I overhear someone behind me telling a buddy that this guy does the Unwrapping. The masked man fumbles under his cloak and a screech of feedback almost takes our heads off.
One fool laughs out loud – he must be drunk.
‘Bring forth the first subjects!’
Subjects. I wondered what he’d call them. We try not to say words like ‘double’, or ‘couple’, or ‘two’ here on Wrath. It’s bad luck. There’s a rhyme we’re taught as kids: One, three or four, that’s the score. More than four is greedy.
Now some more guards emerge from the tunnel.
Held between them, ankles shackled so they can only hobble, are the first idents to be unwrapped. Skinny brothers, stiff with fright, both wearing a sort of sleeveless white smock, which covers them down to their knees. Thick leather belts go round their waists. If they’re any older than ten, I’d be amazed.
Scared little boys, who happen to be spitting images.
‘The family Anderson,’ declares the man in the mask, and now he turns towards the steps at the front of the stage, as if he’s expecting something.
‘What’s he waiting for?’ I ask Mary.
‘The parents.’
Oh yeah. I see a man and a woman climbing the steps now, grubbers like us, from their round shoulders and farm clothes. They bow stiffly, before shuffling to the side of the stage, away from the still-frozen twist. A murmur spreads through the crowd, which sounds like sympathy. On the screen, the mother sobs. And I see now what the belts are for – each boy has his right arm, the unbandaged arm, bound behind his back to a loop in the leather. Nobody’s taking any chances.
One of these idents may be a lot stronger than he looks.
A man with a camera scurries forward to get close to the action as the guards force the boys to kneel facing each other, either side of the altar. The boys hold their bandaged arms out, palm down on the cloth. The big screen switches to a view looking down from above. It zooms in nice and tight so we can see the bloodstained dressings on their puny, hairless forearms, then tracks along to show us their hands.
Only four fingers, of course. Little finger gone.
Bile fills my mouth. Guess I see now why they use a red altar cloth.
‘My money’s on leftie,’ whispers Mary.
‘You what?’
Stunned, I hear whispered wagers and watch as credits change hands around me.
‘Five says it’s the left one. He looks meaner.’
‘I’ll take that. Check out the eyes of the one on the right.’
On the stage, the masked man steps up to the altar. He pulls a curved knife from his robes and brandishes it for our inspection. Steel glints in the bright dayshine. And the crowd roars, nearly deafening me. ‘Un-wrapp-ing! ’
The man turns, his cloak swirling, and bends over the altar. His back is to us, but the screen shows us what he’s doing. I watch, cringing, as he slips the blade under each boy’s bandage and slashes it loose. With a practised flourish, he rips both bandages off at the same time, then leans in and inspects. After he steps aside, the camera lingers, teasing, then zooms in. Both boys have a single bloody slit across their forearm. An ugly, still-open wound. No signs of any healing.
The crowd sighs with obvious disappointment.
Thank the Saviour, I think, biting my lip.
‘First-timers,’ says Mary. ‘They hardly ever manifest that young.’
‘What’s that mean?’ a voice says in my ear.
I’d almost forgotten Cassie who’s still on my shoulders; she’s been so quiet. ‘It means we can’t tell which one is evil yet.’
‘Why can’t we?’
Quick as I can, I tell her how twists are sneaky – exactly the same as us purebloods when they’re little, so impossible to tell apart, but how when they’re older they start to show signs of the monsters they will one day turn into.
‘Like being faster and stronger than us?’ says Cassie.
‘Yup. And they heal quicker too. Impossibly fast. That’s how we tell.’
She shuts up at last, seemingly satisfied.
I catch myself rubbing my forearm as the parents are led away, both sobbing. They aren’t allowed to visit their children in the camps, so this is the one time they get to see them every year. How must this feel? Relief that both their children are spared for another year, or regret they don’t get one son back today? Or just despair at the whole proceedings? Despair – it’s got to be.
‘Bo-ring!’ sings Cassie.
That does it – heartless little maggot. I yank her off my shoulders.
She complains loudly, like I care. I fend her off as she tries to clamber back up again. In the relative hush, this makes quite a commotion. When I look up, my heart pounds. I hold my breath and freeze. Morana is looking towards our section of the crowd. I can’t be sure, but it seems like she’s staring straight at me.
Cassie kicks me again, but I hardly notice.
The High Slayer looks away and I breathe again.
The guards drag both boys to the front of the stage. They parade them around together now, holding their arms up to the crowd, making sure we all get a solid look at their unhealed wounds before they pull them offstage, back through the tunnel, back to their cage and another year in the ident camps.
Next up, two much older boys are hauled out for their unwrapping.
‘The family Bachmann.’
I crane over the heads of the people in front of me, but this time there’s nothing to see. No slope-shouldered, sad-eyed parents haul themselves on to the stage. Which makes me wonder – do these idents have no parents, or have their parents chosen to stay away? I’ll never know. But, for some reason, it matters.
Me, I’d have thought it impossible to look defiant in leg irons, dragged along by four brute men to be tested for evil. I’m scared half to death just watching them, safe out here in the crowd. But these lads manage it. Where the Andersons were white-faced and petrified, these idents hold their heads high and meet the curious gaze of the crowd. I stare up at the expressions on their identical faces, magnified massively on the big screen. I shouldn’t be impressed, but I can’t help it. I see scorn and contempt, but not a flicker of fear.
‘One good, two e-vil, one good, two e-vil,’ chants the crowd.
The ident on the left, just before he’s forced on to his knees before the altar, pulls away from his guard and sends a big gob of spit into the front row of the crowd. The people there don’t appreciate it. They howl and throw stuff at him.
The guards drag him back to the altar.
Mary’s dad grins at me. ‘A credit says it’s the spitter.’
‘You’re on,’ I say. What else can I do? I can’t look like I feel sorry for twists.
The masked man wields his knife again. When he steps back, we have a winner. Or a loser, I should say. And I’m shiny, up a credit. The kid who spat has five scars and one open wound. His brother – or the twist pretending to be – only has five scars. A big yellow crust comes away, stuck to the bandage. Where the cut would have been is smooth, pink skin. A deep cut healed overnight.
Don’t need to be a healer’s son to know that’s unnatural.
The arena erupts. A thousand little fingers slash the air with the Sign of One. All around me, people jump up and down, emptying their lungs in an orgy of hysterical shouting and screaming. I scream too. I yell nonsense until my throat is raw from yelling. It’s impossible not to – fear needs a way out.
Suddenly, the crowd starts chanting something new.
‘Pu-ri-fy! Pu-ri-fy! ’
Now what? This time, only the twist is paraded. On the screen, I see his brother watching, mouth turned down, as a guard removes his leg irons. They push him towards a fire basket, but he struggles so they have to force him.
‘If I was him,’ I say, ‘I’d be jumping for joy that my blood isn’t twisted.’
‘You don’t have a brother, do you?’ says Mary’s mother.
‘He’s not a real brother,’ says Mary.
Her father scowls and hands over my credit. Mary winks at me, obviously delighted, maybe hoping I’ll spend it on something for her later. She’ll be lucky. Up on the stage, one guard holds the innocent youth. Another, leather gloved and aproned, pulls an iron rod from the hot coals. Without any hesitation, he plants the glowing tip on to the boy’s left bicep. I wince, seeing smoke curl and hearing the amplified hiss. The boy staggers, but doesn’t cry out.
‘Scabb-er! ’ chants the crowd now.
Scab. That’s what we call the pureblood ident. The lucky one.
‘Why’d they burn him?’ asks Cassie, as guards haul the boy off the stage.
I let go a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. ‘Now they’re sure he’s pureblood, they brand him with a big P. Like your dad brands fourhorns.’
‘So they can tell who owns him?’
‘Nobody owns him.’ I sigh. ‘It’s so he can prove he’s pureblood. He gets his life back today, but if we didn’t mark him people would see his missing little finger and think maybe he’s an ident on the run. This way, he can just roll his sleeve up, show his brand and you know he’s all right. Now do you get it?’
‘But won’t the mark heal and go away?’
I scowl down at her. ‘It won’t, mud for brains. You saw him unwrapped. Only twists can heal a scar away. That mark’ll be on him till the day he dies.’
Cassie sucks her thumb doubtfully.
‘What will he do with no family to go to?’ I ask Mary.
‘Who cares?’ She laughs. ‘It’s what happens now that makes it worth dragging ourselves all this way. You get to see what the Peace Fair is all about!’
Even as she says this, a tall frame hisses up from the floor of the stage. I stop wondering when I see the noose hanging down from the cross member. It’s a gallows. The guards drag twist-boy over, both his hands bound behind his back now. He struggles, his bare feet hammering the stage, but they stand him up, slip the rope round his neck and give it a vicious tug to tighten it.
No way – I’m going to witness an execution.
‘Pu-ri-fy! Pu-ri-fy! Pu-ri-fy! ’
Desperate to see, Cassie starts climbing up me, but I push her away.
Commandant Morana stands. She holds her fist out, palm down. The crowd shuts up in a heartbeat. After the uproar, the silence is so empty, I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of a cliff. A lammerjay caws high overhead.
She opens her hand.
Thunnkkk! A trapdoor opens in the stage.
The boy drops like a stone into the dark hole and out of sight. The rope jerks iron-bar taut, then twitches and swings as he kicks his life away. I want to look away, but I can’t. The crowd around me hoots and applauds.
Twists are fighters, I’ll say that. It’s a minute before the rope goes still.
In the Barrenlands nobody dies from old age, so I’ve seen plenty of death. Like that old guy gored by a bull blackbuck, who died screaming, still trying to shove his guts back in. Or my mate Keane, after they pulled his fish-gobbled body out of the lake. I thought I was used to death, but this is just so . . . cold-blooded. Sweat stings my eyes. I can’t stop my legs shaking.
This I did not see coming.
Maybe I should’ve done. Twists are the bane of Wrath. If we take our foot off their necks, they’ll gang up again to slaughter us. I do get that. That’s why the Saviour’s law demands we mark idents and cage them and test them when they’re old enough. All this, when the simplest thing would be to kill both. Proof of the Saviour’s infinite benevolence, Fod likes to preach. A system put in place to protect us, while sparing the innocent. Harsh and cruel perhaps, but merciful.
I knew all this before I handed over my credits.
But knowing is one thing; seeing the grim limits of the Saviour’s mercy another. I swallow hard, grateful at least for not having to watch the twist thrashing at the rope end. Why the hell hadn’t Rona told me about this Purification?
‘What’s with you?’ says Mary, eyeing me. ‘The thing was evil.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I say. ‘Sure.’
My eyes stray to the back of the stage. The idents are making some kind of fingers-crossed salute to the dead kid through the bars of their cages. Slayer guards are rushing up and down, clubbing at them with their rifles to stop them.
The crowd sees and jeers even louder. All part of the fun.
But the screen shows none of this. It sticks with the bigdeals on stage clapping their delicate hands, then pans to Morana, hiding a yawn with her gloved hand. Over the next hour, twenty more pairs of idents are unwrapped. Seven more twists test positive and make the drop into the trapdoor, three of them girls. The youngest, a girl with a face full of freckles, looks about eleven. Even she gets a cheer from the crowd when she drops. The scabs are branded, but only four are claimed by their families. Mary, enjoying herself hugely, pulls my leg about my long face. Cassie stuffs her face with sweets and pesters me to try one as Maskman summons the Lynch family. The crowd has a big laugh at the unfortunate surname, but I can’t join in. The Lynches are those redhead ident girls I saw yesterday. A woman, an older image of the girls, hauls herself on to the stage, but collapses. Last time I saw these girls they were petrified, but now they look calm and resigned. It’s the loving look they give each other as they’re forced to kneel at the altar that undoes me. I can’t watch any more – just can’t. I’ve had it with the Unwrapping.
I peer round at the Slayers, wondering if they’ll blast me if I make a run for it back to camp. I don’t care what people think. I have to get out of here, away from this madness. And that’s when Cassie’s greed does me a favour.
She pukes her guts up, all down her front.
‘Oh, Cassie, no!’ says her mother.
‘No bother,’ I say, hastily. ‘I’ll take her back and clean her up.’
4
THE ROAD BACK
Such a nice young man. That’s what Cassie’s mother is telling everyone, ever since I hauled her puking daughter out of the arena for her. I reckon she’s got her eye on me as a match for her Mary. Well, one person who disagrees is Nash.
Surprise, surprise – he isn’t taking his split lip well.
It’s three days after the Peace Fair and we’re almost back to Freshwater. Five klicks back, we crested the pass through the foothills. Nash is still picking on me every chance he gets, which is loads. Thing is, the few men with enough spine to tell him to leave me be are out on the trail, scouting ahead for trouble.
I’m looking forward to seeing my girl Jude. Okay, she might not be quite so pretty as Mary, but she likes a good time and I can talk to her about anything. She’ll kill herself laughing when I tell her about the windjammer girl.
I wonder, does she miss me like I miss her?
The trail drops down, following the bank of a tumbling peaty river through forests of hash-willow. By midday, we’re less than ten klicks out. Even the fourhorns hauling our wagons – the dumbest animals on Wrath – sense this and pick their pace up without me prodding. Best of all, the sun comes out at last. These past days we’ve been battered by storms; now we can put our rain gear away.
I sniff the air. ‘Do you smell that?’ I ask the Zielinski woman.
She says she doesn’t.
A musky stink, but it’s gone now. Animal maybe?
Apart from this, the forest smells fresh after its scrubbing by hail and rain. There’s plenty of shade here too, so we don’t go from cold to boiling hot. The hash-willow leaves look incredibly yellow. Wildflowers sway in the ever-present breeze. Reds and pinks and whites and blues. I even recognise some of them too, the ones Rona grinds into her healing pastes. I don’t know their names, but they look so bright and cheerful you’d swear some kid’s been at them with a brush.
I’m not going to sing or anything, but I’m cheering up.
And I need to. I picture our isolated little shack, tucked away under the trees, and me walking through the door with a long face on. Soon as she sees this, Rona will launch straight into one of her I told you so routines. You won’t listen to me, what do you expect? On and on. I mean, as mothers go, Rona and I get along pretty well, way better than most, but still. I’ll never hear the bogging end of it.