Francesca Haig - The Forever Ship

I looked at the empty night sky, smeared with grey clouds. Since we’d left the screeching gulls of the coast, the only birds we’d seen were ravens, with their black hooked beaks and indifferent stares. Perhaps, before the blast, trusses had flown here as well.

Paloma’s words offered us a new world, waiting to be seen. But there was an urgency to the way she spoke, leaning towards the fire and almost gabbling as she rushed to tell it all. There was an urgency in our listening, too. I wanted to clutch at every word, hold them in my hands. I longed for paper and ink to write it all down. I couldn’t help feeling that every word she spoke about Elsewhere was a last testament, a record of all that she was about to lose.

*

I had thought the annihilating fire of the visions, of all the seers’ visions, could get no worse. But through Paloma I was learning a little of the reality of the Scattered Islands, and that knowledge polished the agony of the visions to a new, fierce gleam.

Paloma knew what I was. She had known by the time we met: Zoe must have told her already that I was a seer, and what that meant. It was different, though, for her to see what really happened when I had a vision. She’d witnessed this the first night after we found her. We’d been gathered around the fire on the beach, maps and charts laid out on the sand as Paloma showed us a map of the Scattered Islands, describing how the archipelago speckled the sea, so far to the north-west of us that our own maps became useless. She had placed her maps next to Thomas’s; to approximate the distance, she’d laid them several feet apart. In the gap between them, deadly sea. To comprehend the Scattered Islands, we were going to need new maps; a new scale.

Paloma had been speaking when the blast came: flames tearing through my head, and a white heat that stopped time. A fire so vast that it made everything impossible except fire.

When I’d stopped shaking, and could see again, Zoe was swearing as she patted at the smouldering edge of the map that I’d dropped in the coals of the campfire. Paloma was silent, her eyebrows drawn together as she stared.

Over the next few days, I’d tried to explain to her how the visions worked, and that I couldn’t read the future the way we could read a book. That, like the uncharted spaces between our maps and Paloma’s, the future was beyond my reach. All I got were flashes: glimpses of things that hadn’t happened yet. Awake or asleep, I had no control over when the visions came, ripping me out of the present and throwing me briefly into a future where I could not navigate. If the visions came when I was sleeping, it was hard to distinguish between them and ordinary dreams – no way of knowing whether what I had seen really was a foretelling of something to come, or just a nightmare.

The visions had sometimes been useful: warnings or clues, though rarely clear. Most, though, were nothing but a terror that ambushed me with flashes of fire. It had become worse since the Ark, and what we had found there. Now that we knew the Council had found the blast machines and was readying them to use against Elsewhere, the flames burned with an added urgency.

I didn’t tell Paloma what the visions did to seers, eventually. Lucia had been driven to the edge of madness, even before she drowned; Xander’s mind had been left a darkened room, lit only by flashes of fire.

I told Paloma none of that. But she saw, soon enough, how the blast visions burned language from my lips. How the flames left me shaking, my eyes rolled back in my head as if searching the sky for fire. I felt Paloma watching me, from behind the strands of white hair that blew across her face.

I watched myself just as carefully. Sometimes I felt there were only two certainties: the blast, and my own madness. I didn’t know which would come first.

‘Have you seen it?’ she said to me, sidling up to me at the campfire, a few days into our journey. ‘Have you seen them bombing my home?’

I couldn’t lie to her. I had seen the fire, and the crumbling of the world.

After that, she was never quite the same around me. We had all told her what would happen if the Council found Elsewhere, but I was the one who had seen her homeland burn, and when she chose to share a blanket with Zoe the next day, instead of me, and to look down hurriedly if our eyes should meet across the campfire, I didn’t blame her.

The first time I noticed what was happening between Zoe and Paloma was the morning when Zoe, without being asked, picked up the detached leg from where it lay beside Paloma’s blanket, and held it for a moment, in both hands, before handing it to Paloma. I almost missed it – it lasted only a second or two. Zoe’s hands, usually decisive, lingered for a moment, and those fingers, so quick to dispatch death with a knife, were soft against the false flesh.

After that, I watched more carefully. I came to understand that when Paloma stared at Zoe and Piper, it wasn’t the unspoken unison of their movements that she was staring at, any more – or Piper at all.

It was as natural and as unhurried as moss claiming a rock. They were both the moss; they were both the rock. We’d all seen it happening, but hardly realised it: Paloma’s blanket edging closer to Zoe’s at night. Zoe reaching to free a twig snared in Paloma’s hair.

No one spoke of it. Once or twice Piper and I exchanged a glance, or a smile, when we saw Paloma lean in towards Zoe, or when the two of them walked or rode together and Zoe’s laugh burst from her, louder than caution would usually allow.

There were many things Piper and I didn’t talk about, during those long nights and days of travelling. We didn’t mention the blast machine, Leonard’s broken neck, the drowned children. All the things that we didn’t want to conjure with language. But this, between Zoe and Paloma, was different: it was a bright bird that had come to land near us, and neither of us wanted to startle it away with words.

*

We seers are not all the same. Zoe had told me that Lucia had been good at predicting weather. The Confessor had had an aptitude for machines, allowing her to find her way through the wreckage of the taboo machines, and to create new and terrible ones. Xander, Piper had told me, used to have an instinct for whether somebody was lying or telling the truth. But whatever our particular aptitudes, all of us woke screaming from visions; all of us were busy patting down the fires that the blast ignited in our minds.

With me, it was an instinct for places. I could feel them, even if I wasn’t there. It was all part of the same thing: the unreliability of time. Just as I could sometimes see things that hadn’t happened yet, I could sometimes sense places I hadn’t yet been. I’d found the tunnels that had led me from the Keeping Rooms, where Zach had imprisoned me; I’d found my way to the island; with Piper’s help, I’d found the Ark.

So I turned my mind, now, with all the concentration I could muster, to the blast machine. In the Ark, Piper and I had seen how the machinery had been painstakingly disassembled and taken away. One of the soldiers had referred to about the new bunker . So I searched. It felt strange to want to find this thing – to seek it out, when every sense in my body jarred at the thought of it. The residue alone, four hundred years later, was enough to keep the deadlands barren, and to make the Alphas shy in disgust from Omega bodies.

I sat up, while the others slept, and forced myself to seek the connections, follow where they led. I strained to trace the source of the visions that blazed in the night, the blast machine in its bunker. But I would instead find myself with eyes scrunched closed and teeth clenched, unable to get a steady trace of its location.