The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

kept burning for more than eight years. And there’s a coal seam north of Blackwater that they say burned underground for more than fifty. They say there was nothing they could do to stop it.’

      ‘And now?’ Piper said.

      ‘There’s not a lot of machines left. The comms machines stopped working a long time ago. Maybe the Confederacy didn’t bother to keep them going – not after centuries of transmitting messages, and hearing nothing back. The only ones who have machines these days are the doctors. They work on things like this—’ she looked again at her leg, the false limb neat in its socket. ‘And they do what they can against the plagues that come most winters.’

      ‘How many people are there, living in Elsewhere?’ Zoe asked.

      ‘Counting the Northern Isles? About a million. Hard to know exactly. Like I said, it’s hundreds of islands, some of them days’ sailing from Blackwater – and for the Northern Isles or the Southern Archipelago it’s a voyage lasting weeks.’

      She tugged the blanket that we were sharing a little closer to her side, and leaned forward to take off her false leg. It unfastened just below her knee with a firm click. Her trousers were rolled to her knees, and the tip of a pole protruded through the skin, like a steel bone emerging from the flesh, onto which the false leg fitted. There was scarring around the pole, but not the thick battle-scarring of Piper’s arm and hand; instead, it was a neat line, pink on her white flesh. The scar wasn’t raised; so smooth that if you ran a finger over it, I doubted that you would be able to feel it. It made me think of Kip, and how cunningly his scar had been hidden, so that even my curious hands had never discovered it.

      The first few times Paloma had taken her leg off, and laid it near her on the ground, I’d found it disconcerting. I’d seen limbs severed before, and the sight of the leg tossed onto the ground made me wince at memories of the battle on the island, or of the wreckage of bodies in the snow outside New Hobart. But there was a sterile neatness to her false leg: no blood, no hair, no toenails. Just the precisely contoured surface.

      She saw me looking at it. ‘You can touch it. I don’t mind.’

      I leaned forward and picked it up. It looked like flesh but was hard and cold to the touch. It was lighter, too, than flesh would be.

      ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked, looking at the steel pole below her knee.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘It did when they fitted it. It was a big operation. My parents took me to Blackwater, where the doctors are. We knew there were risks. But it’s been worth it. I can walk more easily. The old false leg, the one I used to strap on, used to hurt me. I’d get ulcers here—’ she touched the end of her stump.

      It felt strange holding her limb. If I were to toss it on the fire she would feel nothing. It was less a part of her than Zach’s body was a part of mine.

      *

      That night I dreamed of him. Zach stood facing me. It was dark, barely light enough to see, so I reached out a hand to his face. When I trailed my thumb across his forehead, I felt a burn: a blistered shape, hot and fat with fluid, precisely where my own brand sat. I could smell the cooked flesh.

      ‘It hurts,’ he said, flinching from my touch.

      ‘I know,’ I said.

      I woke, my hand on my forehead, where the Omega brand had left its mark, a puckered, pinking scar. I could still remember how it had felt, the day that Zach had finally exposed me as the Omega twin, and watched me being branded. In the twenty-something years of my life, I’d learned a little of the vocabulary of pain. The pain of a burn has a unique urgency, the whole body recoiling against it, the same way a finger jerks back from a hot skillet. When I remembered the branding, I could still feel the Councilman’s hand on my neck, holding me in place as he forced the brand against my forehead.

      All through that day’s travelling, I thought of Zach, and the brand he had worn in my dream. It had felt so real – I could feel the blister’s texture under my fingertips.

      ‘Better than your usual nightmares, at least,’ Zoe said, when I told her what I’d dreamed. ‘Zach being branded makes a nice change from the end of the world.’

      I laughed, but I knew that the two were connected: Zach’s branded face, and the blast he was trying to unleash.

      *

      When Paloma talked of Elsewhere, there was so much that I couldn’t recognise. The twinless people. The scattering of islands, spread over hundreds of miles. The mysterious doctors, and their medicines. But there was one thing that was all too familiar: the blast.

      She didn’t call it that – instead, she called it the bomb. But she spoke of it in the same way that it was spoken of here: the same silences, and the same gaps, where words faltered on the brink of the flames.

      ‘It wasn’t just the fire,’ she said. ‘It was the force of the explosion – that’s what they say. Entire islands just disappeared: the bomb shattered them. My mum showed me an old map – there are whole islands on it that just aren’t there now.’

      The bomb had made the map into nothing but a story: a careful rendering of islands that didn’t exist any more. Merely outlines on paper, meaning nothing in our scorched world.

      ‘They say that there was a wave, afterwards,’ she said. ‘So high that any low-lying islands that had survived the bomb were swept clean. Nothing left at all.’ She exhaled slowly. ‘Imagine that: surviving the bomb somehow, and thinking that you might be OK, and then seeing the sea coming for you.’

      She was quiet for a few moments.

      ‘Some survived both, though – the fire and the water. Not many, and for years it was nearly impossible to keep going. Not just the darkness, and the lack of food – all the babies were horribly sick. Even if they managed to live, they could barely walk when they grew up, let alone farm, or fish. And all the fish were dead, anyway. For months after the bomb, and after the wave, the dead fish were washing up. Piles of them, rotting on the beaches, and floating in the shallows.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘It’s funny – in all the stories that come down to us, that’s one of the things they always mention: the stink of all those fish. You’d think, after the bomb and the wave and everything that had happened, that somehow it wouldn’t matter – but so many of the stories mention it. How the world stank of dead fish, for months.’

      Paloma told us stories of how, when the fish finally came back, they’d changed. They had bulbous growths on them, or more fins, more eyes. Some that had been striped or silver were pure white after the blast, as if even underwater they’d been bleached by the flash of the bomb.

      And on land, too, the children were born into new bodies, in shapes that their parents didn’t recognise. Babies who looked half-formed, and refused to live. Then came what Paloma called the plague of twins: the doubling, the flawless babies paired with those who carried the burden of the mutations. The ones who were born together, and died together.

      ‘Nobody could believe it, at first,’ she said. ‘Even when they knew it was real, nobody fully understood how it worked, despite all the doctors’ research. But it only lasted a few generations. Then the doctors found a way to treat it, eventually, and it was over: no more twins.’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Finished.’ It seemed such a casual thing – a single word, to describe the end of everything that we knew.

      Late into each night, we swapped stories; we told her about the deadlands, the stretch of land to the east, where nothing grows, and nothing moves but lizards and the drifts of ash. She told us about a place called the strike zone, an area to the south-east of Blackwater, where most of the islands had disappeared altogether. ‘And not even the birds will land on the few islands that are still there,’ she said. ‘On the Southern Archipelago, closest to the strike zone, the mutations are worse than anywhere else. Some of them can’t have children, even after the injections.’

      ‘Have you ever been there?’ Zoe said. ‘To the strike zone?’

      Paloma shook her head.