Francesca Haig - The Map of Bones

‘Even under the weight of an uninvited guest,’ added Sally. She turned away and shuffled into the kitchen. Her footsteps on the floor were hollow – only wood between her and the cliff’s plunge. ‘Since you’re all here, I suppose I’d better get some food ready.’

As she busied herself at the table, I looked at the closed door by the stove. No noise came from within, but I could feel, like a draught on the back of my neck, another presence in the house.

‘Who else is here?’ I said.

‘Xander’s resting,’ Sally said. ‘He was up all last night.’

‘Xander?’ I said.

Sally raised an eyebrow at Piper.

‘You didn’t tell her about Xander?’

‘Not yet.’ He turned to me.

‘Remember I told you, on the island, that we’d had two other seers? And the younger one had been brought to the island before he was branded?’

I nodded.

‘Xander was useful for undercover work,’ Piper went on, ‘but we didn’t want to involve him in anything too important.’

‘Was he too young?’

‘You think we had the luxury of sparing the young ones that kind of responsibility?’ He laughed. ‘Some of our scouts on the mainland were barely in their teens. No – and it wasn’t even that Xander couldn’t be trusted, really. We never thought he’d deliberately betray us. But he was always volatile.’

‘It got worse, in the last few years,’ Zoe said. ‘But even before that, he was always jumpy. Skittish, like a horse that’s seen a snake.’

‘It was a shame,’ said Piper.

‘A shame for him, to be so troubled?’ I asked. ‘Or for you, that you couldn’t use him as you’d have liked?’

‘Can’t it be both?’ Piper said. ‘Anyway, he did what he could for us. We based him on the mainland. Even without his visions, it was useful to have someone unbranded who could pass for an Alpha. And sometimes his visions came in useful, too. But we had to bring him here, in the end. He couldn’t work anymore, and Sally said she’d take him.’

‘Why do you keep talking about him in the past tense? He’s here now, isn’t he?’

‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Sally said, hobbling across the kitchen and opening the door to the room beyond.

*

A boy sat on the bed, his back to us. He had thick dark hair like Piper’s, tightly curled, but it was longer, and stood in high tufts, like the peaks of beaten egg whites. The window above the bed looked out over the water, and the boy didn’t turn away from it as we entered.

We moved closer. Piper sat next to him on the bed, ushering me to sit beside him.

Xander was perhaps sixteen. His face still had the softness of a child. Like Sally, he was unbranded. When Piper greeted him, he didn’t look at us, or respond at all. His eyes darted from side to side, as if following the flight of some invisible insect above our heads.

I wasn’t sure whether what I sensed about him was evident to everyone, or whether it was only seers that would feel it. The brokenness inside him. Sally had said that he was resting, but there was no rest here. Only terror. The frantic buzzing of Xander’s mind was like a wasp trapped in a jar.

Zoe hung back in the doorway. I saw her mouth tighten as she watched the fidgeting of Xander’s long fingers, ceaselessly kneading the air. And I remembered what she’d said to me, about how the visions affected me: I’ve seen it happen before.

Piper stilled one of Xander’s hands with his own.

‘It’s good to see you again, Xander.’

The boy opened his mouth, but no words came. In the silence, I could almost hear the discordant jangling of his mind.

‘Do you have any news for us?’ Piper asked.

Xander leaned forward, until his face was close to Piper’s. He spoke in a whisper. ‘Forever fire. Hot noise. Burning light.’ The words chased one another out.

‘He’s seeing the blast more than ever,’ Sally said. ‘Day and night, now.’

‘He never used to be as bad as this,’ Piper said. ‘What’s changed?’

‘Move over,’ I said to Piper.

‘Maze of bones,’ muttered Xander.

I looked up at Sally. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Search me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he talks almost normally. Other times, he comes up with stuff like that. The fire, most of the time. Sometimes stuff about bones.’

‘Noises in the maze of bones,’ Xander said.

His eyes had stilled a little, staring abstractedly at the corner of the ceiling. I placed my hands on the sides of his head, and stared into his eyes.

I didn’t want to force myself into his mind. I still remembered how it had felt when The Confessor had tried to probe my thoughts in the Keeping Rooms. After each session with her, my mind had felt like a dollhouse that had been picked up and shaken, everything scattered and rattling. I understood Zoe’s fury, when she learned that I’d stumbled into her dreams. But I had to admit that I was also curious about what I might discover from Xander. I was desperate to see if what he saw was the same as what I saw. To confirm, I hoped, that I was not alone in the visions of fire that my mind hurled at me. If I was searching for anything in the jumble of his mind, I suppose it was a glimpse of myself.

His eyes remained blank as I groped towards his thoughts. Occasionally his mouth seemed to be trying to form words, but they didn’t take shape. Stillborn, they stayed at his lips, empty shapes incapable of sound.

His mind was burnt out. Everything charred and gone, broken down to ashes and dust. This was what remained, after the flames had exploded too many times in his mind: ash, and smoke, and words sheared of their meanings, rattling loose in his head.

‘It’s the visions of the blast that’ve done this to him,’ I said.

It wasn’t the strangeness of his state that unsettled me, but its familiarity. I’d felt it myself, this madness, scratching around the edge of my mind like a rat in the rafters. It was always there. At times, particularly in the Keeping Rooms, or when the blast visions had become more and more frequent, it had been emboldened, almost crept into sight.

‘Flash. Fire. Forever fire,’ Xander blurted again. He didn’t say the words – they uttered him. As each word burst from him, he convulsed. He looked startled at the sounds emerging from his own mouth.

‘You know it happens to seers, eventually,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. I had lived with that knowledge for as long as I’d known what I was. But encountering the residue of Xander’s mind still left me with a chill in my guts, my fists curled so tightly that my nails cut into my palms.

He was rocking backwards and forwards now, his arms wrapped around his knees. I recognised, in his scrunched body, that futile attempt to hide from the visions, as if making yourself smaller would somehow spare you. I remembered curling like that myself, as a child, with my head tucked down towards my chest and my eyes clamped closed. It didn’t work, of course. Xander was right: Forever fire . It would never go away. The blast would haunt all of us seers, always. But why did it burst into our dreams more often now, enough to drive Xander to this?

‘Let him rest,’ Sally said, stepping forward and cupping Xander’s chin in her hand. She lifted the blanket that had fallen from him, and tucked it again around his shoulders.

As we were leaving, he opened his eyes and, for a moment, fixed them on me.

‘Lucia?’

I looked at Piper for an explanation. He’d glanced up at Zoe, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She crossed her arms in front of her. Her face shut down.

‘Lucia?’ said Xander again.

Piper looked up at me. ‘He must be able to tell you’re a seer. Lucia was a seer too.’