Francesca Haig - The Map of Bones

The older seer from the island, branded. She’d drowned, Piper had said. A shipwreck in a storm, on the way to the island.

‘Lucia’s gone,’ Piper said to Xander. ‘The ship went down more than a year ago. You know that already.’ His voice was too brisk, too loud: his attempt to sound casual was jarring.

We left Xander gazing out the window, watching the sea swap its colours with the sky. His hands twitched and twisted constantly. I thought of Leonard’s hands on his guitar strings. Xander’s hands were kept busy on the unseen instrument of his madness.

‘What will you do with him?’ I asked Sally, when she’d closed the door to the bedroom.

‘Do?’ She laughed. ‘You say it like I have choices. As if there’s anything I could do, other than just keep surviving. Keep him safe.’

Even from the next room, I found Xander’s presence exhausting. The churning of his mind, from behind the closed door, made me feel seasick. When Sally sent us out to gather firewood and mushrooms, I felt guilty at my own relief.

Piper and I knelt together at the base of one of the trees, where mushrooms clustered thickly. Zoe was gathering wood nearby. Piper spoke quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear.

‘You’ve seen Xander – what being a seer has done to him.’ He looked up at Zoe, twenty yards away, and dropped his voice even further. ‘It happened to Lucia too.’ At the mention of the dead seer’s name, his voice caught, his eyelids closed. For a single moment I felt as though we were standing on different islands, and the tide had swallowed the neck of land between them. ‘Towards the end,’ he added. Then he looked quickly back at me and went on. ‘Now you’re having more and more visions of the blast, too. So why hasn’t it happened to you yet?’

I had often wondered this myself. There were times when I’d felt my sanity coming loose like a bad tooth. When the flames erupted within me again and again, I had wondered how it was that I still managed to function. Now I’d seen how the words bubbled out of Xander like water from an overheated pan, and wondered how long it would take before my own visions brought me to the boil. Did I have years, or months? When it happened, would I know?

When I asked myself why it hadn’t happened already, I always came up with the same answer, though it wasn’t an answer that I could share with Piper: it was Zach. If there was some streak of certainty in me, something that held me together when the visions tried their best to tear me apart – then it had its roots in Zach. If there was a strength in me, it was my stubborn belief in him that had formed it. Zach had been the steady point in my life. Not a force for good – I’d seen too much of what he’d done to believe that. But a force, nonetheless. I knew there was no part of me that had not been shaped by him, or against him. And if I allowed myself to slip into madness, then I could neither stop him nor save him. It would all be over.

*

Back inside, we helped prepare the meal. Occasionally, from the bedroom, we could hear Xander hurling syllables at the night air. Bones and fire slipped under the door. He might be mad, but he saw clearly enough what the blast had made of our world. Bones and fire.

‘How long have you been living here?’ I asked Sally, as I helped her pluck the brace of pigeons that she’d thrown on to the table. With each tug at the feathers the greying flesh stretched, leaving a clammy film on my fingers.

‘Years. Decades. Time gets slippery, when you’re as old as me.’

It’s slippery for seers, too, I wanted to say. I was jerked between different times, without any say in it. After each vision I’d wake, gasping, as if the future were a lake I’d been dragged down into, before surfacing back in the present.

‘I’ve thought about leaving here, sometimes. It’s no place for an old woman. I used to be able to scramble down to the shore and do some fishing. These days I just set snares, and grow what I can. I never want to eat another potato, that’s for sure. But it’s safe here. The Council’s looking for a lame old woman. I figure this place isn’t going to be an obvious choice.’

‘And your twin?’

‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘And believe me, I’m even older than I look. If there’d been registrations when Alfie and I were split, no doubt the Council would have got to me that way. But things were different then. They didn’t have us all pinned down in their records, the way they do now. And wherever he is, my brother’s had the sense to lie low, take care of himself.’

She got up and crossed to the stove. When she passed Piper, her hand paused for a while on his broad shoulder. When he first came here, as a child, his hand would have been as small as hers. Smaller, probably. Now she had to stretch up to reach his shoulder, and her hand rested there like a moth on a bough.

When we ate, Xander sat at one end of the table, swinging his legs and staring at the ceiling. Piper carved the pigeons, severing the wings with a long, curved knife. Watching him, it was hard not to think of all the knives he’d wielded. The things he’d seen, and the things he’d done.

But the meal dragged me back to the room. Sally had stuffed the pigeons with sage and lemon, and the meat was soft and moist. It bore no resemblance to the meat we’d eaten on the road, cooked quickly over furtive fires, the outer flesh scorched and the middle still cold and springing with blood. We didn’t talk much, until there was nothing left but a forlorn cluster of bones, and the moon had climbed past the window to hang above us.

‘Piper told me about how you infiltrated the Council,’ I said to Sally. ‘But he didn’t tell me why you stopped.’

She was silent.

‘They were exposed,’ Zoe said. ‘Not Sally, but the two other infiltrators working with her.’

‘What happened to them?’ I said.

‘They were killed,’ said Piper abruptly, standing and beginning to gather the plates.

‘The Council killed them?’ I said.

Zoe’s lips thinned. ‘He didn’t say that.’

‘Zoe,’ cautioned Piper.

‘The Council would’ve killed them, eventually,’ said Sally. ‘Given how much they hated infiltrators, they would never have let them live, even when they’d finished torturing them for information. They didn’t get a chance, though, with Lachlan – he managed to poison himself first. We had capsules to take if we were caught. But they searched Eloise before she had a chance, and took her capsule away.’

‘So what happened to her?’

Piper stopped clearing away. He and Zoe were both staring at Sally. Sally looked straight at me.

‘I killed her,’ she said.

‘Sally,’ said Piper quietly. ‘You don’t have to talk about this.’

‘I’m not ashamed,’ she said. ‘I know what they’d have done to her. It would have been worse than death – far worse – and they’d have killed her at the end of it anyway. We all knew the deal. We were the heart of the whole intelligence network – if we cracked, half the resistance would fall. All our contacts, all the safehouses, all the information we’d gathered and passed on over the years. It would have been disastrous. That’s why we had the capsules.’

She was still looking at me. I wanted to tell her that I understood. But it was clear that she didn’t need my understanding. She wasn’t looking for forgiveness, not from me or anyone else.

Sally’s choice had been harder even than Kip’s, perhaps, because it wasn’t her own death that she had to bestow. I thought, again, of Piper’s words to Leonard: There are different kinds of courage.

‘They were denounced in the main Council Hall,’ she said. ‘I was up in the gallery when it happened, talking to some Councillors. Lachlan and Eloise never had a chance: the soldiers were waiting to swoop. There were at least four soldiers to each of them. Lachy got to his capsule as soon as they had him cornered – he had it on a strap around his neck, like all of us. But after he started frothing and thrashing, they realised what had happened, and pinned Eloise down.’