Francesca Haig - The Forever Ship

‘Not properly.’ He spoke quietly. ‘You were lying to me the whole time.’

For a while I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to agree with what he’d said, but I couldn’t argue with it. My seer visions were the only thing that revealed me as an Omega, so I’d concealed them for years, to prevent being branded and exiled.

‘I had to,’ I said eventually.

‘And I had to do what I did,’ he said. ‘I had to claim my life.’

‘Have you forgotten how close we were?’ I asked. ‘Have you convinced yourself that it never happened, because you’re ashamed of being close to an Omega?’

He laughed. ‘You talk about those years as if it was some kind of paradise – you and me, the best of friends, together against the world. It wasn’t like that. It was never like that.’

‘But we were always together,’ I said. ‘All the time.’

‘Only because we didn’t have any choice,’ he shouted. ‘Because you made the whole village think we were freaks, and nobody would come near us.’

I could hear how he forced his breath to slow, his voice to lower.

‘It didn’t end, even when you’d finally gone. The taint didn’t go with you. It should’ve, but it didn’t. For years, people didn’t trust me. That’s why I had to leave the village so young.’

‘I left it when I was younger,’ I said, acid in my voice.

He overrode me again. ‘Even when I got to Wyndham, there were rumours about me. The word had spread, about how late we’d been split. I had to prove myself more than anyone else. Had to work twice as hard, prove my loyalty, over and over. Do things that others weren’t willing to do.’

The Council chambers at Wyndham were already notorious for their viciousness and ruthlessness. I looked through the darkness towards Zach, and thought of the depths of brutality to which he had sunk.

‘I never felt safe,’ he went on. ‘Not even when you were in the Keeping Rooms. Not for a moment. You took that from me, with all those years you made me live a half-life. You were the one who showed me how dangerous Omegas could be, what a burden they are. You’re the reason I had to come up with the tanks.’

I closed my eyes. I knew his excuses and justifications were madness, and that the tanks were his madness made solid, and not my doing. But I couldn’t stop picturing the children in the tanks, their hair drifting across their dead faces. I kept my eyes closed, trying not to remember.

‘You made me what I am,’ he said.

They were the same words that The Confessor had said to Kip, all those months ago in the silo.

*

That night, I waited for his dreams to come to me. With Zoe’s dreams, it had been an accident, her dreams seeping into me as she slept close by. Even when I’d tried not to sense them, her dreams had come to me, as full of loss and longing as the sea is full of salt. But Zach didn’t dream – or if he did, his dreams meant nothing to me. We had so much in common, and so little. If he dreamed, during those nights in the dormitory, nothing of them reached me. I wondered if our childhood, when I had worked so hard to hide my seer nature from him, had built some kind of barrier. All those years of lying in my small bed and training myself not to react to my visions, not to cry out at what I had seen, meant that I couldn’t reach out to him now, asleep or awake, nor feel any sense of what passed in his mind. I felt no closer to him, lying only a few yards away in the dormitory, than I had when I’d been on the island, hundreds of miles away.

I got no glimpse of his dreams, but he could not help but know something of mine. Before dawn I woke from a glimpse of the blast, my shouts bouncing back at me from the dormitory ceiling. He made shushing noises. At first, still reeling from the shock of waking from flames to darkness, I had forgotten whose voice it was nearby, soothing me. Then, when my breathing had settled, Zach spoke: ‘What did you see?’

I had never heard a hunger like I heard in his voice, and I knew hunger well. The whole of New Hobart was hungry. Only that night, the eight of us who now lived in the holding house had shared a stew made with two squirrels that Zoe had caught on the roof – and we’d boiled the bones clean.

I didn’t answer him. After that, I tried harder than ever to keep silent when the visions came. I couldn’t always manage to quell my screams – my visions were more frequent and more vivid than they had been when we were children. But I tried. I didn’t want to give him any hint of what I saw, nor the satisfaction of seeing me scream. Some nights, when I woke from dreams of fire and ground my teeth against the screams that I would not allow myself to make, I felt like nothing had changed: that Zach and I were still there, in our childhood bedroom, me hiding my visions, him watching and waiting.

*

From the very first day, when he saw her crossing the courtyard with Zoe, Zach stared at Paloma. I wished that her appearance didn’t announce her difference quite so loudly, but everything about her stood out: the bone-white hair and skin; the washed-out blue of her eyes. I watched him watching Paloma, and I felt my fists tightening. I didn’t want his eyes on her. He had always taken everything. I saw him stare at her and I wanted to shout: Not this. Not her. You can’t have this too.

‘It’s true, then,’ he said, his eyes following her as she and Zoe walked over the gravel.

I said nothing.

‘I knew you were searching.’ He shook his head. ‘But I didn’t believe you’d succeed. Piper and his rag-tag bunch of sailors. How did you do it?’

‘I’m not talking to you about her.’

‘I’m not an idiot,’ he said.

‘I never thought you were,’ I said. ‘You’re something much worse, and much more dangerous.’

When we went to the kitchen to eat, he didn’t hide his staring, and Paloma stared back, her curiosity matching his. This was the man who had unearthed the blast that might destroy her whole family, and everything that she had known. I saw how she narrowed her eyes, head cocked a little, as if straining to understand what could make a man do terrible things. And I wanted to shout at her: Stay away. Stay away.

Zoe did the shouting. When she saw Zach’s eyes lingering on Paloma, she stepped between them.

‘Keep your distance,’ she said to him.

He raised his arms before him, shaking them so that the shackles jangled.

‘I’m just a prisoner here,’ he said. ‘It’s not my choice where you people take me.’

‘You don’t need to stare at her all the time,’ Zoe said.

‘I’m just curious,’ he said, his voice gentle as a blade. ‘Nobody’s introduced me properly to your new friend.’ His eyes were scanning Paloma, coming to rest on her face. ‘I’d love to learn more about you.’

Paloma spoke: ‘I’ve heard more than enough about you,’ she said.

‘And you believe it?’ Zach said quickly. ‘What makes you think you can trust these people?’

Zoe opened her mouth, but Paloma spoke first. ‘I make my own judgments.’

‘And you’ve judged that this is the best alliance your homeland can hope for?’ Zach cast a glance around at the rest of us, and the shabby kitchen.

Zoe shoved him backwards. It was only a light push, but with his arms chained in front of him, he could neither balance nor break his fall, stumbling and landing on his back by the fireplace.

Piper moved to pull Zoe away, but she was already leaving, Paloma beside her.

‘Keep your distance,’ she repeated to Zach, without looking back. She slammed the kitchen door behind her.

Zach raised his eyebrows, heaving himself upright and doing his best to brush the dust from his trousers with his shackled hands.