The Map of Bones. Francesca Haig
the wagon road. But we passed close enough to the road to see the sign, and crept nearer to read it. The wooden board was painted in large white letters:
Your Council welcomes you to Refuge 9 – 6 miles south.
Securing our mutual wellbeing.
Safety and plenty, earned by fair labour.
Refuges: sheltering you in difficult times.
It was illegal for Omegas to attend schools, but many managed to scrape together the basics of reading, learning at home, as I had, or in illicit schools. I wondered how many of the Omegas who passed the refuge’s sign could read it at all, and how many of those would believe its message.
‘In difficult times,’ Piper scoffed. ‘No mention of the fact that it’s their tithes, or pushing Omegas out to blighted land, that make the times so hard.’
‘Or that if the difficult times pass, it makes no difference,’ added Zoe. ‘Once people are in there, they’re in for good.’
We all knew what that meant: the Omegas floating in the nearly-death of the tanks. Trapped in the horrifying safety of those glass bellies, while their Alpha counterparts lived on unencumbered.
We kept clear of the road, following it from a distance amongst the cover of gullies and trees. As we approached the refuge I found myself slowing, my movements sluggish as we drew closer to the source of my disquiet. By dawn, when the refuge itself came into view, walking towards it felt as though I was wading upstream through a river. In the growing light, we crept as close as we dared, until we were peering down at the refuge from a copse at the top of a rise only a hundred feet away.
The refuge was bigger than I could have imagined – it was the size of a small town. The wall surrounding it was higher even than the wall the Council erected around New Hobart. More than fifteen feet high, it was built of brick rather than wood, with tangled strands of wire along the top like nests thrown together by monstrous birds. Within the wall, we could glimpse the tops of buildings, a jumble of different structures.
Piper pointed to where a huge building loomed on the western edge. It took up at least half of the refuge, and its walls still had the yellow tinge of fresh-cut pine, bright against the weathered grey wood of the other buildings.
‘No windows,’ Zoe said.
It was only a few syllables, but we all knew what it meant. Within that building, row upon row of tanks waited. Some would be empty, and some still under construction. But the sickness loitering deep in my gut left me in no doubt: many had already been filled. Hundreds of lives submerged in that thick, viscous liquid. The cloying sweetness of that fluid, creeping into their eyes and ears, their noses, their mouths. The silencing of lives, with nothing to hear but the hum of machines.
Almost all of the refuge’s sprawling complex was entombed within the walls. But at the eastern edge was a section of farmed land, surrounded by a wooden fence. It was too high to climb easily, and the posts were too closely spaced for a person to slip through, but there was room enough to show the crops in their orderly lines, and the workers there, busy with hoes amongst the beets and marrows. Perhaps twenty of them, all Omegas, bent over their work. The marrows had grown fat – each one larger than the last few meals that Piper, Zoe and I had eaten.
‘They’re not all tanked, at least,’ Zoe said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘That’s what, six acres of crops?’ Piper said. ‘Look at the size of the place – especially with that new building. Our records on the island showed that thousands of people have turned themselves in at the refuges each year. More than ever, lately, since the bad harvest and the tithe increases. This refuge alone would have upwards of five thousand people. No way they’re being fed from those fields – it’d barely be enough to feed the guards.’
‘It’s a display,’ I said. ‘Like a minstrel show, a pretty picture of what people think a refuge is. But it’s all for show, to keep people coming.’
There was something else about the refuge that unsettled me. I searched and searched for it, until I realised that it was an absence, not a presence. It was the almost total lack of sound. Piper had said that there were thousands of people within those walls. I thought of the sound of the New Hobart market, or of the island’s streets. The constant noise of the children at Elsa’s holding house. But the only sounds reaching us from the refuge were the strikes of the workers’ hoes on the frost-hardened earth. There was no background hum of voices, and I could sense no movement within the buildings. I recalled the tank chamber I’d seen at Wyndham, where the only sound had been the buzz of the Electric. All those throats stoppered with tubes like corks in bottles.
There was movement on the road that led east past the refuge. It wasn’t mounted soldiers – just three walkers, moving slowly, and laden with packs.
As they drew closer, we could see they were Omegas. The shorter of the men had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other man limped heavily, one twisted leg gnarled like driftwood. Between them walked a child. I’d have guessed he was no older than seven or eight, although he was so thin that his age was hard to tell. He looked down as he walked, guided only by his hand held tightly by the tall man.
Their heads looked too large on their thin bodies. But it was their packs that pained me most. Those bundles, tightly wrapped, would have been carefully chosen. A few treasured possessions, and all the things they thought they’d need, in the new life they’d embarked upon. The taller of the men had a shovel across his shoulders. From the other man’s pack hung two cooking pans, clattering with each step.
‘We need to stop them,’ I said. ‘Tell them what’s waiting for them in there.’
‘It’s too late,’ Piper said. ‘The guards would see us. It would all be over.’
‘And even if we could get to them without being seen, what could we say?’ Zoe said. ‘They’d think we’re mad. Look at us.’ I looked from Zoe to Piper, and down at myself. We were dirty and half-starved. Our clothes were ragged, and had never shed the grey stain of the deadlands.
‘Why would they trust us?’ Piper said. ‘And what can we offer them? Once, we could have offered them safety on the island, or at least the resistance network. Now, the island’s gone, and the network’s collapsing by the day.’
‘It’s still better than the tanks,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But they won’t. How could we even begin to explain the tanks to them?’
A gate in the stone wall opened. Three Council soldiers in red tunics stepped forward, to await the new arrivals. They stood casually, arms crossed, waiting. And I was struck once again by the ruthless efficiency of Zach’s plan. The tithes did the work for him, driving the desperate Omegas to the very refuges that their tithes had helped to build. Inside, the tanks would swallow them, and they would never emerge.
To the east, in the field behind the wooden palings, I saw a sudden movement. One of the workers was waving. He had run close to the fence and was waving frantically to the travellers on the road. He swung both arms back the way the walkers had come. There was no mistaking his meaning: Away. Away. There was such a gulf between the violence of the action, and the silence in which it was conducted. I didn’t know whether he was a mute, or whether he was just trying to avoid the notice of the guards. The other workers in the field were watching him – a woman took a few steps towards him, perhaps to help him, perhaps to stop him signalling. Either way, she froze, looking over her shoulder.
A soldier was running from the wooden building behind the fields. He tackled the waving man quickly, felling him with a blow to the back of the head. By the time a second guard had reached them, the Omega was on the ground. They dragged his motionless body back to the building and out of sight. Three other soldiers emerged into the field, one walking along the inside of the fence, staring at the remaining workers, who bent quickly back to their tasks. From a distance the whole thing had been like a shadowplay, unfolding quickly and in silence.
It