The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

keep him with us, though,’ shouted Zoe. ‘I won’t do it.’

      ‘This isn’t about you,’ snapped Piper. ‘You think I wouldn’t like to give him a beating myself?’ Piper’s voice was rigid, but then it softened. ‘Hell on earth, Zoe. I was next to you when we pulled those kids out of the tanks. And you weren’t even on the island – you didn’t have to see what I saw there. The Confessor executing my soldiers, one after another – all on Zach’s orders. Stop acting like you’re the only one who hates him.’

      ‘If we don’t take him in, they’ll kill him?’ Paloma said. She’d been standing silently to the side while we argued. Now she spoke up. ‘Kill him, and Cass too?’ she went on.

      The Ringmaster gave a quick nod.

      ‘Then we keep him,’ Paloma said. She made it sound as if it were simple: the only choice.

      Zoe’s face twisted in disgust. ‘He’ll be spying on us. Manipulating us. And he’ll find out about Paloma—’

      ‘We need Cass,’ Paloma interrupted her. I was surprised to hear her put it like that. I’d seen how she watched me when I had a vision. How she’d avoided being close to me, since she’d first understood that I had seen Elsewhere burn.

      ‘It’s not that simple,’ I said, but I was grateful nonetheless for the certainty in her voice.

      ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said. ‘I hate your visions, hate that you’ve seen my home burn, my people massacred.’ She choked a little on those words, and pressed her lips tightly together before she could continue. ‘But I believe you. It’s coming. And you’re the one who’s warned us. You know more than anyone about the blast. We can’t save the Scattered Islands without you.’

      We were all watching her. She stood very straight, arms wrapped around herself, waiting there in the middle of us all for a response.

      ‘We keep him here,’ Piper said.

      ‘Under guard,’ The Ringmaster added. ‘And away from Paloma.’

      Zoe was about to speak again, but she looked at Paloma, and then said nothing.

      So he stayed. I thought I might feel relieved – it was true, after all, that we would both be killed if the others hadn’t agreed to take him in. But an unease had settled in my guts. Zach had come to us, bruised, desperate and alone, and still we had no option but to do what he demanded.

       CHAPTER 5

      The next morning, when I woke, I lay silently for a few minutes. I stretched, feet jammed against the bars that made up the foot of the bed, trying to forestall the moment of getting up and facing the day, which meant facing Zach.

      Piper had slipped away the night before, while the rest of us were eating in the kitchen. When he’d come back it was nearly midnight, Paloma rolling over with a half-asleep grunt as the door clattered shut and he strode to his bed. I didn’t need to ask him where he’d been – I could tell that he’d been talking to Zach. I could see it clearly enough in the way he kicked his boots off and halfway across the room, and in the way he shoved and punched his pillow into shape beneath his head. Now, even though it was barely dawn, Piper was already awake and out in the courtyard with Sally, the two of them talking in low voices.

      Zoe and Paloma were awake too, talking by the dormitory window. Paloma was nodding at something Zoe was saying. She was wearing Zoe’s shirt, too large for her, the sleeves rolled and bunched over her pale arms. I left the two of them alone.

      I found Elsa in the kitchen. While she busied herself with sifting weevils from the flour, I stirred the porridge. The pot held only a dusty handful of oats, thickened with water until it was more like paste than porridge.

      ‘Been like this ever since the last weeks of winter,’ Elsa said, seeing me grimace at the grey mixture. ‘The grain stores are nearly empty. Half the farms around here weren’t even planted last season. The Council only maintained a handful of the fields – enough for the troops stationed here.’

      The Council hadn’t planted the farms, because they’d thought that by the time the wheat was shoulder-high and ready for harvest, the thousands of Omegas who lived in New Hobart would be tanked, just as the children had been.

      ‘Even now,’ she went on, ‘some of the farmers are reluctant to work their smallholdings outside the wall. A lot of them have packed up and left.’

      I couldn’t blame them. The area surrounding New Hobart clung to a semblance of normality, but it was hard not to feel as though the town occupied a pause between battles.

      I was still hungry after I finished my porridge, every last scrap of it; I scraped my spoon against the inside of the bowl until the clay squealed.

      Walking up through the town to the Tithe Collector’s office, the four of us passed a patrol of The Ringmaster’s soldiers on their way down to the wall. A year before, if I’d passed them in the street and glanced at their faces, I’d have assumed they were Omegas. Each face had been forced to remember its skull, the bone outlines hard against the flesh. Not since the drought years, when I was a child, had I seen Alphas looking so gaunt.

      When we reached the Tithe Collector’s office I looked closely at The Ringmaster. Even he had lost weight about the face, though his mass of curly hair disguised the worst of it.

      I asked him about the rations.

      ‘I’ve secured the grain silos at Deadmeadow and Landfall. Most of the western plains are still held by garrisons loyal to me. The tithe takings, too.’

      Piper’s lips tightened – that money had all been taken from Omegas, often at the lash of a whip.

      But if The Ringmaster noticed, he paid no heed. ‘The problem is getting it here,’ he continued. ‘The Council’s holding Wreckers’ Pass – the convoys from my garrisons can’t get through any other way without getting dangerously close to Wyndham. The General’s soldiers have picked off two convoys of grain in the last month, and one of weapons. As long as The Council holds the pass, and the plains around Wyndham, we’re going to struggle to feed all the troops, let alone the townsfolk.’ He added, with a glance at the guards by the door, ‘My soldiers aren’t used to such short rations.’

      ‘Our troops have worked on less than this for years,’ sniped Zoe.

      ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ said Piper. ‘We need to do better, for all of them. We’re asking them to take on the Council, in open battle, when The General attacks – and she will, eventually. We can’t defend New Hobart with disgruntled troops. Forget about principles or loyalty – nothing breeds mutiny like a hungry army.’

      ‘And what about new recruits?’ I said. ‘Have there been more, as the news of the refuges spreads?’

      For generations the refuges had been the last resort of the Omegas: places where they would be fed and housed by the Council in exchange for their labour. Though they’d always been little more than prison camps, they were supposed to be the last safety net of a Council that could never endanger Alphas by allowing Omegas to starve. In recent years, under Zach and The General’s rule, they had become something more sinister: places where desperate Omegas in their thousands turned themselves in, only to be tanked, permanently preserved to protect their Alpha counterparts.

      ‘You can’t be the only one who’s decided not to stand for the Council breaking the taboo,’ I added.

      The Ringmaster shrugged. ‘The news of the refuges is spreading – that song you started did its job, I’ll give you that, and Omegas have been trickling in, though many are reluctant to come into a town that I’m holding. As for the Alphas – most of them don’t believe the rumours about the tanks. And even for those who do, it’s a question of what they fear most: the machines, or the Omegas and the fatal bond. Of how far they’d be willing to go