The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

      And so it did end in fire, after all: the flame bursting from its white centre. The blast opening like an eye. I’d seen that shape in my visions so many times that the explosion felt like coming home.

      *

      The water sealed over the boat’s wake, erasing all trace of us. The sea had always been good at keeping secrets.

      There was a song that bards used to sing, about ghosts. I’d heard it when Zach and I were children. Leonard and Eva had sung it, too, the night we met them. In the song, a man had strangled his lover and then been haunted by her ghost. He’d fled across the river to escape her, because ghosts can’t travel over water.

      As I sat in the prow of the boat, I knew better.

PART 1

       CHAPTER 1

      ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Paloma said.

      ‘Like what?’ I said.

      I turned my face back to the fire, squinting against the smoke. I couldn’t deny that I’d been staring. I watched her all the time. Sometimes I woke and half expected that she would be gone – that she had never come at all, or that she’d been nothing but a shape we had conjured out of our longing for Elsewhere.

      But she had come: pale, like somebody seen through mist. Not the blondeness of Crispin, or of Elsa, who had hair with gold in it, and pink-flushed skin. Paloma’s hair was so blonde it was nearly grey, like driftwood – as if she’d washed up on the beach instead of sailing here on The Rosalind. Her skin had a bleached-straw whiteness, and her eyes were light blue – barely a colour at all.

      ‘Like I’m some kind of ghost,’ Paloma said. She leaned forward to prod the fire.

      I met her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

      She swept her hand in the air, brushing away my apology. ‘It’s not your fault. You all do it.’

      She was right. After we’d found The Rosalind, in the few days I’d spent aboard I’d seen how even the sailors who’d travelled with Paloma for months still paused in their conversations when she passed them on the deck, and followed her movements from the corners of their eyes as they worked on the ship’s repairs. Piper and Zoe stared at her too. And since we’d left the ship, and headed inland towards New Hobart, I found myself watching her all the time. She was a rumour made flesh. A person from Elsewhere. A person without a twin. Both of those ideas were so outlandish that it felt strange, sometimes, to see her picking out fish bones that had stuck between her teeth, or trimming her fingernails with her dagger. These were everyday things, and I wasn’t prepared for her to be so real.

      ‘We’re just curious,’ I said.

      ‘I know,’ she said, her accent making unfamiliar shapes from the familiar words.

      She had her own curiosity, too. As we spoke she stared at Piper and Zoe. A short distance from the fire, they were patching a water flask, using a glue that Zoe had made by rendering pine resin over the fire until the whole clearing was sharp with the stink of pine pitch. Paloma watched as Zoe stretched the leather of the flask flat on the ground, while Piper applied the patch.

      ‘When I see those two together—’ she gestured to Piper and Zoe ‘—it’s like something from a bard’s song come to life. An old story, so old you can’t be sure it was ever real.’

      We were sitting together on the ground, close to the fire, looking at each other across a gulf that was wider than the miles of sea that lay between here and her homeland. Untwinned and twinned, each of us had stepped out of the other’s myth.

      The first days of our journey inland had been hard, the snow thick on the mountain passes and turning to grey slush as we descended. Now the Spine Mountains were behind us, the snow had sunk into the ground. The days were starting earlier, and at night the sun refused to go down, lurking for hours on the horizon before sinking beyond the mountains in a red haze. Spring was coming.

      When I was a child, I used to long for spring. It meant an end to the cold, and to the annual floods that swallowed the low-lying fields. It meant summer was nearly here: there would be swimming in the river with Zach, and long days out of the house, and away from the scrutiny of our parents.

      Now, though, there were so many changes, so quickly. The tanks. The bomb. Elsewhere. Paloma. This spring’s dawning – wildflowers returning colour to the land, thistles forcing their prickly stalks above the earth – brought with it only fear of what would follow.

      Paloma was still watching Zoe and Piper.

      ‘My grandmother claimed to have seen twins,’ Paloma said.

      ‘In Elsewhere?’ I asked.

      ‘It’s not called Elsewhere,’ she snapped. She’d already corrected me several times – I knew that in her homeland they called it the Scattered Islands – but it was hard to adjust a lifetime of habit. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘nobody’s had a twin there for hundreds of years. Except for way off on some of the Northern Isles. Our expeditions only found them a century ago, so they didn’t get the treatment until then. There are people from there who say they can remember twins. My grandmother was born up there. She said her mother had a twin. But I don’t even know if that’s true.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘My grandmother was always a bit of a storyteller.’

      *

      There were only the four of us now, heading south-east towards New Hobart: me, Piper, Zoe and Paloma. Thomas and his crew had remained on the coast with The Rosalind, to continue the repairs and to keep her away from the Council fleet’s patrols.

      Each night, around the fire, we brought our questions to Paloma, like offerings. She did her best to answer, but whenever we asked her about how they ended the twinning, she ran out of words.

      ‘I don’t know the details of how it works,’ she said. ‘The doctors are in charge of all of that stuff. Nobody else is allowed to deal with it. The doctors come around and give out the medicine: an injection for all new babies, and a booster at twelve for anyone on the outer islands, where the radiation’s worse.’

      ‘And here we are—’ she looked down at her right leg, missing from just below the knee ‘—all of us, with something like this. No more twins. And nobody like you.’ She gestured to Zoe. There was naked curiosity in her eyes as she stared at Zoe, and her unmarred body, Alpha. The end of the twinning came with a price, as the dwellers of Elsewhere and the Ark had discovered. Without the twins, every single person shared in the mutations brought about by the blast. No more of the intact bodies that the Alphas prized above all.

      Paloma spoke of Elsewhere’s doctors in the same way that many here spoke of the Council: with a mixture of awe and fear. ‘There isn’t a central government – just a loose confederacy of councils from the different islands. But all the islands get the medicine from the doctors on Blackwater. And I think even the Confederacy obeys the doctors, really. They’re the ones who ended the plague of twins, and keep it from coming back.’

      ‘And other machines?’ Piper asked. ‘The Electric?’

      She shook her head. ‘We had purges, too, like you did here.’ We’d told her about the taboo: the fear that had grown out of the blast, as surely as the mutations of the survivors’ bodies. We knew little about the blast, but we knew that it had been created by machines. Those few machines that survived the blast were destroyed in the purges. Even now, four hundred years later, people shuddered away from any remnants of machines from the Before.

      ‘At home,’ Paloma continued, ‘they call it the Scouring. All the machines that couldn’t heal us, or serve us – that was the law. Most of it was gone already, in the blast, or went to ruin without the power.