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CHAPTER 3

I’d first heard Piper and Zoe mention Sally, and the Sunken Shore, when we were still in the deadlands. They were meant to be resting, but I could hear their raised voices from the lookout spot. It was dawn; I’d volunteered to take the first watch, but when I heard them arguing I left the lookout post and headed back to the fire.

‘I never wanted to drag Sally into this,’ Zoe said.

‘Who?’ I said.

They both turned to face me. It was the same movement, doubled. And the same expression: the same angle to their eyebrows, the same appraising eyes. Even when they were arguing, I felt like an intruder.

Piper answered me. ‘We need a base, with someone we can trust. The safehouse network’s crumbling. Sally will give us shelter, so we can start to muster the resistance and send people to Cape Bleak to seek the ships. Outfit new ships, if we need.’

‘I’ve told you before,’ said Zoe, still ignoring me and addressing only Piper. ‘We can’t get Sally involved. We can’t ask her. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Zoe told you about how we got by, as kids, after we were split?’

I nodded. They’d been raised in the east, where people used to let twins stay together a little longer. Piper had been ten when he’d been branded and exiled. She’d run away to follow him. The two of them had survived by stealing, working, and hiding, with some help from sympathetic Omegas along the way, before they’d finally joined the resistance.

‘Sally was one of the people who helped us,’ he said. ‘The first one. When we were really young, and needed it most.’

It was hard to imagine Zoe and Piper needing help. But I reminded myself of how young they’d been – even younger than I’d been when my family sent me away.

‘She took us in,’ said Zoe. ‘Taught us everything. And she had a lot to teach. She was old when we found our way to her, but years before that she’d been one of the resistance’s best agents, working in Wyndham.’

‘In Wyndham?’ I thought I must have misheard. No Omegas were allowed to live in an Alpha town – let alone in Wyndham, the Council’s hub.

‘She was an infiltrator,’ said Piper.

I looked from Zoe to Piper, and back again. ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said.

‘That was the idea,’ Zoe said impatiently.

‘It was the resistance’s most covert project,’ Piper said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible these days. This was back when the Council was less strict about branding, especially out east. We’re talking about fifty years ago, at least. The resistance had managed to recruit a few unbranded Omegas, with deformations minor enough that they could be disguised, or hidden. For Sally, it was a malformed foot. She could jam it into a normal shoe, and she trained herself to walk straight on it. It hurt her like crazy, but she got away with it for more than two years. There were three infiltrators, right inside the Council chambers. Not as Councillors, but as advisors or assistants. They were right in the thick of it.

‘The Council hated infiltrators more than anything.’ Piper smiled. ‘It wasn’t even the information that they managed to find out. It was the fact that they managed to do it – pass themselves off as Alphas, sometimes for years. Proof that we’re not that different, after all.’

‘Sally was the best of any of them,’ Zoe said. ‘Half of the current resistance was built on the information she got out of the Council.’ When she spoke of Sally, Zoe had none of her usual sarcasm, or the raised eyebrow that could sharpen a single word into a weapon. ‘But she’s ancient now,’ she went on. ‘She can hardly walk. Hadn’t worked for the resistance for years, even by the time we came to her. Too risky, apart from anything else. She was top of the Council’s wanted list for a long time, and they knew what she looked like. I don’t want to get her involved.’

‘We’re all involved, whether we want to be or not,’ said Piper. ‘The Council will come for her, soon enough. They won’t care that she’s old, or frail.’

‘She’s managed to stay hidden from them for all these years,’ Zoe said. ‘We can’t drag her into this.’

He paused, and then spoke more quietly to her. ‘You know she’d never turn us away,’ he said.

‘That’s why it’s not fair to go to her.’

He shook his head. ‘We don’t have any other options. Not after what I did on the island.’

I could see it again: the blood thickening between the stones of the courtyard.

‘The Council would never have spared the island if you’d handed Cass and Kip over to The Confessor,’ Zoe said.

‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But we can’t assume that the rest of the resistance will understand that. You saw how they reacted at the time. When that many people are killed, people cast around for someone to blame. We can’t know how they’re going to take it when we reappear, especially not with Cass. We don’t know if it will be safe for her. If we’re going to reconnect with the resistance, we need to start with somebody we know we can trust.’

She turned away from me again, and looked only to Piper. ‘Sally’s been through enough,’ she said.

‘She’d want us to go to her,’ he said.

‘You brave enough to try telling her what she’d want?’ said Zoe, with a slow smile. Piper smiled back at her. He was like her reflection.

*

At each settlement we passed on the journey to the Sunken Shore, we did our best to spread the word about the Council’s plans for tanking Omegas. Above all, we tried to warn them away from turning themselves in to refuges. These huge, secure camps were supposed to be the Council’s protection for struggling Omegas – a place where any Omega would be given food and shelter, in exchange for their labour. They were a last resort for Omegas, and a reassurance for the Alphas themselves. A guarantee that however much they might restrict Omegas to blighted land, and however high they raised their tithes, we would not take them with us into starvation. But for years now, those who entered the refuge gates had not been allowed to leave. The refuges were expanding rapidly, and had become nothing more than tank complexes.

But time and again, when we tried to pass on this news at settlements, we were met with silence. Wary stares and crossed arms. I remembered how Kip and I had started the fire outside New Hobart: how it had taken on its own momentum as it built and spread. Spreading the word of the Council’s tanks was more like trying to light a fire in rain, with sodden green twigs. It wasn’t the kind of tale you could just share with a stranger in a tavern, as if it were no more than gossip about a neighbour. We could only risk raising the topic with those who were sympathetic to the resistance – and who would admit to that, after the massacre on the island? The Council, after years of denying that the island existed, was now spreading the word of the island’s defeat. The blood on its streets had rendered it safe: a cautionary tale, rather than a threat.

And the cautionary tale was working. People were warier than ever. When we approached settlements, people straightened in the fields and watched us coming, their hands firmly on their pitchforks and spades. We ventured into Drury, a large Omega town, but both times we entered taverns the noisy conversations stopped, as if the sound were a lamp suddenly extinguished. At every table, people turned to the door to assess us. Their loud conversations never resumed – whispers and mutterings replaced them. Some people would push back their chairs and leave as soon as they saw Zoe’s unbranded face. Who in the taverns within would dare to discuss the resistance with three ragged strangers, let alone a group that included an Alpha and a seer?

The most frustrating encounters weren’t with those who refused to talk to us, but those who seemed to believe us, but still did nothing. In two of the settlements, people listened to our story, and seemed to understand how it made sense of the Alpha’s treatment of us. That the tanks were the endpoint to which the Council’s policies of the last few years had been heading. But the question we heard, again and again, was What are we supposed to do about it? Nobody wanted to shoulder the new burden of this news. They had enough burdens already. We saw it, everywhere we went: the lean faces, the bones of eye sockets thrust forward as though trying to escape the skin. The settlements where shanties and lean-tos propped one another up. The people with teeth and gums stained a livid red, from chewing areca nut to distract from their hunger. What did we expect these people to do with the news we told them?

Two days after we’d found the abandoned safehouse, and my fight with Zoe, Piper left at dawn to scout a small Omega town further west on the plain. He returned before noon, sweat darkening the front of his shirt despite the cold.

‘The Judge is dead,’ he said. ‘It’s all over the town.’

‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ I said. The Judge had been ruling the Council for almost as long as I could remember, but he’d been under the control of Zach and his allies for years. ‘If he’s just a puppet, what difference does it make if he’s finally died?’

‘It’s not good news if his death only clears the way for someone more extreme,’ said Zoe.

‘It’s worse than that,’ Piper said. He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Zoe took it and opened it. I squatted on the grass next to her to read it, trying not to think about her knife at my guts, two nights before.

‘Council leader killed by Omega terrorists,’ the headline read. In smaller print, underneath, it continued: ‘Terrorists from the self-styled Omega “resistance” movement yesterday assassinated the twin of long-serving Council leader, The Judge.’

I looked up at Piper. ‘Is it possible?’

He shook his head. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Zach and his cronies have had The Judge’s twin locked up for half a decade – that’s how they’ve been controlling him ever since. It’s all a set-up. They’ve just decided they don’t need him anymore.’

‘So what’s changed? You always said they needed him because people wanted the Council led by someone who seemed to be moderate.’

‘Not now. Listen.’ He grabbed the poster and read from it out loud:

‘In his fourteen years as Council leader, The Judge was a staunch protector of Omegas. This latest outrage by Omega agitators raises pressing security concerns for those serving on the Council –’

‘As if they haven’t all had their twins locked up for years, if not tanked,’ scoffed Zoe.

Piper kept reading. ‘– and indeed for all Alphas. This attack on the very head of our government is further proof that the growing threat of Omega dissidents endangers both Alphas and Omegas. The General, reluctantly stepping forward to fill The Judge’s role, expressed her sadness at his untimely demise. “Through this cowardly act, these terrorists have robbed the Omegas of a steadfast ally, and have demonstrated the ruthlessness and brutality of those who claim to be agitating for Omega ‘self-determination’, and who are willing to kill their own kind in order to undermine the work of the Council.”

‘They’ve killed two birds with one stone,’ he said, tossing the paper on to the grass. ‘They’ve got rid of him, finally, and by pinning it on us, they’ve stoked the anti-Omega sentiments, strengthened their own argument against the moderates.’

‘So it’s The General in charge now,’ I said.

‘Reluctantly stepping forward, my arse,’ said Zoe. ‘She’s been pushing for this for years. And The Reformer and The Ringmaster will be neck deep in the whole scheme.’

None of the Councillors went by their real names. In the past, they’d chosen their Council names to disguise their identities and protect themselves from attacks on their twins. These days, when nearly all the Councillors kept their twins imprisoned in the Keeping Rooms, if not in the tanks, the elaborate names were just pageantry. Each of the names was a statement, a way of announcing to the world their agenda.

The General; The Ringmaster; The Reformer. I remembered the trifecta of faces from Piper’s chart on the island: the three young Councillors who were the real power in Wyndham. The Ringmaster, his smile half-hidden by his mass of dark curls. The General’s angular face, her cheekbones unforgiving. And Zach, The Reformer, my twin. His face frozen in the artist’s pen-strokes. The person who I knew best, and not at all.

‘The three of them have already been running things for years, really,’ Piper said. ‘But it’s a bad sign, that they felt able to get rid of The Judge once and for all. They’re confident enough of their support that they don’t even need to hide behind him anymore.’

‘More than that,’ Zoe said. ‘You’ve heard it, everywhere we go – the unease after the numbers who died at the island. I’d bet that even some Alphas were a bit restive about the killings. A stunt like this with The Judge shores up their own support – makes it seem as if it’s a righteous battle, against an Omega resistance that’s ruthlessly aggressive. Justifies their own brutal tactics.’

It was a network of fear, expertly manipulated by the Council. Not only the Omegas’ fears, but the fears of the Alphas too. I had seen how they cringed away from us, how they viewed us as walking reminders of the blast, our deformed bodies a poisonous residue. The fact that my mutation wasn’t visible didn’t make any difference: the Omega brand on my face had been enough to provoke spits and insults from Alphas who’d passed through my settlement when I was a teenager. Alphas had always shunned us, even in good times. Then came the drought years, when I was a child, and even Alphas had gone hungry. And the year the harvests failed, when I was at the settlement. People turn on one another when they’re hungry and afraid, and the Council had made sure that it was the Omegas that they blamed. This lie about The Judge’s death was just the latest part of the narrative that the Council had been constructing for years: that it was us against them.

I picked up the paper, still warm from being crushed in Piper’s pocket. ‘It’s all accelerating, isn’t it. The Council’s got everyone running scared. Alphas and Omegas both.’

‘They don’t have The Confessor anymore,’ he said. ‘Or her machine. Don’t forget what we’ve achieved.’

I closed my eyes. The one thing I ought to have been grateful for – the fact that Zach no longer had The Confessor’s cruel brilliance at his disposal – I couldn’t even think of without losing my breath, the raw pain of it like a boot to the guts. Her death was Kip’s death.

‘How much do you know about The General?’ I asked them.

‘Not enough,’ said Zoe. ‘We’ve been monitoring her since she came on the scene. But it’s been decades since infiltrators were able to penetrate the Council fort. It’s harder than ever to get into Wyndham, let alone close to the Council.’

‘What we do know is all bad news,’ Piper said. ‘She’s militantly anti-Omega, just like The Ringmaster and The Reformer.’

It still jarred, to hear Zach spoken of by his Council name. In the silo, The Confessor had said, I had another name once. I wondered if my twin ever thought of himself as Zach anymore. I suspected not – he would have wanted to leave it behind, along with the unsplit childhood that he’d been forced to share with me.

‘The General’s better established than either of them,’ Piper went on. ‘They all started young, not that it’s unusual in the Council. That place is a snake pit – plenty of Councillors don’t live long. But The General’s the sharpest of the lot, politically. She got her start working for The Commander. The rumour was that she got her place by poisoning him.’

I remembered The Commander’s death being announced when I was still living in the settlement. Untimely, the Council’s bulletin had said. Timely enough for The General, it seemed.

‘The General’s never disputed those stories,’ Piper said. ‘True or not, it suits her to be feared. Every time she’s come up against opposition, it’s ended badly – and never for her. Scandals, disgrace, backstabbings – sometimes literally. One by one, everyone who’s opposed her has been silenced, or driven out. The only reason The Judge lasted as long as he did was because he was useful to her and the other two – a popular figurehead for them to use.’

‘Why her, as the new leader,’ I said, ‘and not The Ringmaster, or Zach?’

Piper was squatting, his elbow on his knee. ‘The Ringmaster came to the Council via the army,’ he said. ‘He’s got a huge following amongst the soldiers, but he’s less of a political operator than the other two. They need him – he’s been there longer, and he’s got the common touch, and the loyalty of the soldiers, who see him as one of their own. But the word is that he’s less radical. Don’t get me wrong – he’s still notorious. He runs the army, for one thing, so when it comes to enforcing Council rule, he’s been the driving force for years. But although he’s brutal, he’s not the one driving the big reforms. Most of the worst changes – pushing the settlements further and further from decent land; the tithe increases – they seem to have originated with The General. And the tightening up of registrations came from The Reformer. Probably The Confessor too, working behind the scenes with him.’

‘And what do you know about how Zach fits in to it all?’

‘Less than you, probably,’ Piper said.

Once, I would have agreed with him. I would have argued that I knew Zach better than anyone. Now, there was a distance between us that I couldn’t breach. Between us lay The Confessor’s body, and Kip’s. All the silent people floating in those round glass tanks.

Piper continued. ‘The Reformer’s always seemed like an outsider – it comes from being split late, and not raised in Wyndham like the other two. But he had The Confessor, and that made him hugely powerful. I think the tanks are his pet project – and the database, too. He’s never been smooth, like The General is – she can charm as well as intimidate. The Reformer’s just as ruthless, though, in his own way.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ I said.

Piper nodded. ‘But now that he’s lost The Confessor, allegiances might have shifted.’

I remembered how Zach had let me escape, after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths. I could still hear the waver in his voice, as he’d shouted at me to go before the soldiers arrived. If they find out you were involved, that’ll be it for me. Was it The General or The Ringmaster he feared? Or both? Before the silo, I might have convinced myself that, on some level, Zach had wanted me set free. But whatever part of me could have believed that had been left on the silo floor, along with Kip.

‘We need to get to Sally’s quickly,’ Piper said. ‘We don’t have a choice. From there, we start mustering the resistance, seeking the ships. They’ve wiped out the island; they’ve got rid of The Judge; they’re dismantling the resistance network, bit by bit.’

The sky above us, sulky with clouds, took on a new and pressing weight, and I felt that the three of us were very small. Just three people on the wind-scoured plain, against all the Council’s machinations. Each night, as we trudged through the long grass, there were more and more tanks being readied in the refuges. Who knew how many they’d tanked already. And more people were arriving at the refuges every day.

I couldn’t claim that I understood Zach anymore, but I knew enough to know this: it would never be enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all tanked.