Francesca Haig - The Fire Sermon

He leaned forward so that I could hear his whisper over my own frantic breath.

‘I should almost be grateful to you. The others on the Council, they might talk about the risk posed by Omegas. The threat of contamination. But they haven’t lived it, not like I have. They don’t know how dangerous you can be.’

I was aware of my own shaking; it was only when he let his arm fall that I saw that he was shaking too. We stood like that for a long time. The space between us was quaking with our panted breaths, noisy as the night before a summer storm, when the air broils and the cicadas hiss and the whole world rattles and waits.

‘Please. Don’t do this, Zach.’ As I begged, I remembered how he’d begged me to reveal myself as the Omega, that night in the bedroom when we were children. Was this how he’d felt then?

He said nothing, just turned away. As he left, and locked the door behind him, I looked down at my still-juddering fists and saw his blood, bleeding from under the nails of my right hand.

*

The Confessor had taken to bringing a map with her. Dispensing with any preliminaries, she would lock the door behind her, spread the map out on my bed, and then look up at me. ‘Show me where the island is.’ Sometimes she’d circle particular areas with a finger. ‘We know it’s off the west or south-west coasts. We’re getting closer – we will find them.’

‘Then what do you need me for?’

‘Because your brother isn’t known for his patience.’

I tried to laugh. ‘What are you going to do? Torture me? Threaten to kill me? Any serious pain and you’re torturing Zach.’

The Confessor leaned in. ‘You think there’s nothing worse than what we’ve already done to you? You have no idea how lucky you are. And you’re only going to keep being lucky if you make yourself useful to us.’ She thrust the map forwards again. The intensity of her gaze felt physical. It was as searing as the branding iron on my forehead all those years ago.

‘Like you make yourself useful, working for them? A performing freak for your Alpha masters?’

She leaned forward, ever so slowly, until her face was so close to mine that I could see the tiny hairs on her cheeks, fine and pale as corn-silk. Her nostrils flared slightly as she took a deep, slow breath, and then another.

‘Are you so sure that they’re in charge of me?’ she whispered.

She groped more deeply into my mind. When we were children, Zach and I had levered up a large, flat stone. It had revealed all the worms and grubs underneath, ripped from darkness into light, squirming white in their fleshy nakedness. Now, under The Confessor’s gaze, I was no more than those grubs. There was nothing of me that she couldn’t see, couldn’t take.

I’d learned, after the initial shock, to clench my mind closed, like an eye. Like a fist. To block her out as I struggled to preserve anything of myself. I knew I had to keep the island safe from her. But, selfishly, I found myself just as worried about protecting those few personal memories that I treasured.

The autumn afternoon when Zach and I were practising our writing in the yard behind the house. While the chickens pecked and scuffled around us, we had squatted, sticks in hand, and scratched our clumsy letters in the dust. He wrote my name, and I wrote his.

The long days by the river, when the other children were in school, and Zach and I would pass each other the treasures we turned up in our aimless wanderings. He showed me the stone with the snail fossil etched into it. I brought to him an opened river-oyster shell, its inside like the blinded milky eye of an Omega beggar I’d seen on the road to Haven.

And the memory of all those nights, when we would pass stories and whispers between the beds, just as we swapped those riverside treasures during the day. Lying in the dark, hearing the rain’s muted spatter on the thatch, Zach offered me the story of how the bullocks in the neighbour’s field had charged at him when he took the shortcut to the well, and how he’d had to climb a tree to escape being trampled. I told him how I’d seen the other children rigging up a new swing from the oak in the schoolyard, when I’d peered over the wall we were never allowed to cross.

‘We have our own swing,’ he’d said.

It was true, though it wasn’t a proper swing – just a spot we’d found, upstream, where a willow grew so close to the water that you could grasp the low draped branches and swing out above the river. On hot days, we’d compete to see who could swing furthest out, dropping triumphant into the river below.

There were more recent memories, too, from the settlement. The evenings when I’d sit in front of my small fire and read Alice’s book of recipes, or her collection of songs, and picture her sitting in the same spot, years earlier, and writing them.

And later, the warmth on the coin from my mother’s hand, when she’d passed it to me in her attempt to warn me about Zach. It was a small thing to treasure: not even a touch – just the second-hand warmth of a coin that she’d held. But it was all I had of her, from those last few years, and it was mine.

All these things were now exposed to The Confessor’s dispassionate gaze. To her, they were no more than clutter in a drawer that she was rifling through, in search of something more valuable. Each time she moved on, she left me scrabbling to reassemble the disarranged mess of my mind.

When The Confessor stood and left, taking the map with her, I knew I should have been pleased that I’d managed to keep her from the island. But in concentrating on concealing those, I was forced to leave so much else exposed. These memories, these scraps of the life I’d lived before the cell, she just picked up, turned over, and cast aside. And although they were insignificant to her, nothing she’d touched was untarnished. After each visit, I felt I had fewer memories for her to peruse.

*

The next day, Zach came. His visits were rarer these days, and when he did come, he usually avoided my eyes, fidgeting with his keys instead. He hardly spoke, responding with shrugs to most of my questions. But every few weeks I’d hear the key in the lock, the door scrape along the floor, and in he’d come, my twin, my jailer, to sit at the far end of my bed. I didn’t know why he came, any more than I knew why I was always glad when I heard his footsteps in the corridor.

‘You need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just tell her what you see. Or let her in.’

‘Into my mind, you mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t sound so horrified. You’re like her, after all.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t do what she does. I don’t poke around in other people’s minds. And she can stay the hell out of mine – it’s the only thing I’ve got here.’ I didn’t know how to express to him what it was like when she tried to probe my mind. How it left me feeling sullied, unsafe even in my own head.

He gave a sigh that turned into a laugh. ‘I’d be impressed that you’ve held her out this long, except that I already knew how stubborn you are.’

‘Then you should know it’s not going to change. I won’t help you.’

‘You need to, Cass.’ He leaned close to me. For a moment I thought he might take my hand, as he had all those years ago when our father was dying and he’d begged for my help. His pupils flared and contracted in their own uneven pulse. When he was this close to me, I could see the bloodied flakes of skin on his lower lip. I remembered how he used to chew his lip when Mum and Dad were fighting downstairs, or when the other children in the village were taunting us.

‘What are you scared of?’ I whispered. ‘Are you afraid of The Confessor?’

He stood. ‘There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.’ He slapped at the wall. His open palm left a mark on the dusty concrete. ‘Worse things happening to some of the Omegas kept here. It’s only because you’re a seer that you get to live like this.’ Stretching his neck backwards, he dragged his hands down his face, took a few breaths with his eyes closed. ‘I told her you’d be useful.’