Francesca Haig - The Forever Ship

At first, I thought The Ringmaster had been right about Xander. I watched the younger seer in the corner: he sat unmoving where he was placed, mouth slightly open, a thread of drool dangling from his lip. No more muttering and yelling, rocking back and forth, moving his hands endlessly. But several times, during the hours that we were around that table, his whole body jerked, like somebody waking suddenly from a dream of falling. I was sure that he was still having visions, though he never cried out. He didn’t make a noise. Even Sally could raise no response from him, other than persuading him to open his mouth when she raised a mug of water to it.

I’d hoped that our news – about the Ark, and The Rosalind ’s return, might reassure Xander. That he might feel bolstered by the knowledge that he’d been right about both, and that he’d been listened to. Paloma was here to prove it. But he grew ever more distant, even as we spoke directly to him, or tried to. He sat slumped, eyes closed most of the time. When he opened his eyes, they stared, but not at us.

And I understood that our news, confirming the truth of his visions, was the worst thing we could have brought him.

I looked again at Xander. His head lolled awkwardly, as if he hadn’t even the energy to hold up his own neck. How long could he have been expected to stand in the face of the blast, its certain approach, and not disintegrate?

*

When the questions finally subsided and we were readying to leave, I hung back for a second, watching The Ringmaster’s guards lay out his meal on the table while Piper and the others were talking in the doorway. It was a grey afternoon, and The Ringmaster lit a lamp, changing the colour of the room to a sickly orange. I was gratified to see that despite the silver plate, the food laid out for him was no better than what the soldiers would be eating: a piece of flatbread no bigger than my hand, a handful of nuts, and some jerky.

He turned, the lamp still in his hand, and saw me watching him.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ I said.

‘Surely you should know the answers to most questions?’ he said.

I shook my head, irritated. ‘You know better than that. You know that’s not how it works.’

‘Go ahead then,’ he said. He picked up his fork, poked ruefully at his half-bare plate.

I took a deep breath. ‘You told me, when we first met, that you had your twin locked up. I want to know where she is.’

His face hardened. ‘She has nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Where is she?’ I repeated.

‘I told you all that you need to know, when we first met. She’s not tanked,’ he said. ‘I’ve never broken the taboo. I’m not a hypocrite.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re here, fighting alongside us, talking with us while we talk of freedom for Omegas. Where is she?’

‘She’s safe,’ he said. ‘Nowhere near here. You forget that I have my own garrisons, my own guards.’

I tried to form words, but I could almost feel the walls of the Keeping Rooms sealing around me again. Those days and days and years and years of darkness, when Zach had kept me in that cell. Wherever she was, The Ringmaster’s twin must be feeling the same airless despair. The same panic that crept in when time became stripped of meaning, and days and months were no longer anything but a burden.

‘How can you fight alongside us, and against the Council, when you think it’s fair to keep her locked up?’

He looked at me coolly. ‘I never said I think it’s fair,’ he said. ‘I think it’s necessary. If Zach or The General got their hands on my twin, I’d be dead. If she’s not secure, I’m not secure. Nor is New Hobart. Do you think, for a minute, that my troops would stay here to protect this town if I weren’t here?’

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to understand me,’ he said. His voice was a door shutting. ‘We want the same thing: an end to the tanks.’

‘Is that all you want?’ I said. ‘Is that really it? What are you doing here?’

My question sat between us for a long time, before he spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. His voice sounded exhausted. I thought that for the first time he was telling me the truth.

*

It had been many years since I’d felt that I had a home, if ever. My parents’ house, before they sent me away, was too full of scrutiny and suspicion to be a home. After my exile I’d found a kind of stability at the settlement, but my neighbours had kept their distance, and whispered about my visions. Then there had been the hell of the Keeping Rooms, and the breathless months on the run with Kip.

But that afternoon, when Elsa threw open the door of the holding house, being back with her felt as close to home as I had ever known. She rushed to greet me, almost toppling me, and my face was squashed into her shirt as she hugged me. For a few moments everything else receded.

‘I heard you got back into town this morning,’ she said, holding both my arms as she stepped back to look at me, then glancing pointedly at the sun behind me; it was already sinking towards the horizon.

‘I wanted to come here sooner,’ I said.

Elsa greeted Piper and Zoe; she welcomed Paloma too, though Elsa couldn’t hide her stares. She grumbled about rations as she bustled around the kitchen, but I saw how she touched Piper’s arm as she thrust a bundle of sheets at him, and how she pushed a hunk of bread into Paloma’s hands and made her sit down and take the weight off her false leg.

There were more comfortable accommodations at the Tithe Collector’s office, but none of us wanted to be there, close to The Ringmaster. I kept thinking about his words: I never said I think it’s fair. I think it’s necessary. What would happen when killing Zach became necessary? Would The Ringmaster even hesitate to kill me?

I was grateful when the others retreated to the front room, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Elsa. When I tried to explain to her everything that had happened, she didn’t interrupt me like The Ringmaster, Sally and Simon had. She just busied herself around me, chopping the carrots and stirring the pot over the fire, and not staring at me as I tried to find the words. I told the story backwards, starting with Paloma, and Elsewhere, and all that we’d learned about the end of twinning. When I came to describing the earlier part of my journey, and the Ark, the words came even more slowly. The meal of watery soup was ready, but Elsa didn’t hurry me; she hoisted the pot from the fire and placed it to the side. She sat quietly and waited, and I felt silence rising over me, like the water in the black corridors of the Ark.

I described finding Kip again, in the double prison of his smashed body and the tank. I told her how I had flooded the Ark, nearly killing myself and Zach and Piper, and burying Kip and The Confessor once and for all.

Elsa said nothing still, as she dished up the soup, but before she called the others in to eat, she squeezed my arm.

‘You found Kip,’ she said.

I nodded. It seemed a strange thing to be grateful for – those minutes in the Ark, with Kip’s dead body laid on the gangway in front of me. But Elsa, who had never been given back her husband’s body after the Council killed him, understood what those minutes had meant to me.

*

Later, Sally and Xander came to the kitchen as well. In the weeks we’d been away, they’d moved into the holding house, taking over the room next to Elsa’s at the front of the house, where Nina had lived before the Council killed her.

Sitting close to the fire, Xander was still silent. There were leaves in his hair, and the knees of his trousers were browned with dirt.

‘Where’s he been this afternoon?’ I asked Sally.