The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

mentioned the children, who were absent and present everywhere.

      *

      The first night, alone in the dormitory, Zach and I lay on either side of the long, narrow room. He had his back to the wall, facing me. I blew out the candle so I wouldn’t have to look at him any more.

      ‘Light the candle again,’ he said.

      ‘Go to sleep.’

      His chain clanked a few times as he shifted. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

      ‘Get used to it,’ I said, rolling over. ‘This isn’t the Council chambers. We don’t have an endless supply of candles.’

      ‘I never used to mind the dark,’ he said. ‘But since you flooded the Ark, I hate it.’

      I remembered it too: the total darkness of those corridors. Black water rising in black air.

      ‘I only just made it out,’ he said. His breathing grew faster at the memory. I listened unwillingly, my arms crossed over my chest. I had enough of my own memories of the flooded Ark, and no time to waste on his.

      ‘Even when I made it to the surface,’ he went on, ‘it wasn’t over. The river burst through the western door. I was nearly caught up by it. Half the camp was swept away. At least four of our soldiers died. Men were tangled up in the canvas when the tents were washed away.’

      More bodies to add to the tally of the dead. There were so many people that I had killed, directly or indirectly. Sometimes I felt tangled in them, like the soldiers drowning under the sodden canvas.

      ‘A hell of a way to die,’ Zach continued.

      ‘You’ve condemned many people to worse,’ I said.

      He ignored me. ‘I dream about it,’ he went on. ‘If it’s dark, I dream about the Ark. The water in the corridors, and that flash flood by the western door.’

      I tried not to listen, but I was remembering how we used to talk at night when we were children, while our parents were downstairs arguing about what they could do about us, their unsplit children. We’d lain there and whispered across the gap between our beds, just as we were doing now.

      ‘I have worse dreams,’ I said.

      ‘What about?’

      I was silent. I wasn’t going to explain my dreams to him – he already knew too much about the blast.

      ‘What about?’ he said again.

      ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Now shut up – I’m trying to sleep.’

      ‘You’re lying to me,’ he said.

      ‘I don’t owe you the truth,’ I said. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

      He spoke over me. ‘You’re lying about your dreams, just like you did when we were kids. You never really talked to me, even then.’

      ‘What are you talking about? We used to talk all the time.’ It had been just the two of us, after all, under the scrutiny of the whole village.

      ‘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.

      *

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