The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig
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.
‘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.