The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

there was a crater, miles and miles wide. He said it might have been a dried-up lake, or it might be from where a bomb hit. The ground was covered with grey sand.

      ‘He brought back a handful of it, in a jar, to show us. Mum said it was disgusting, made him throw it out before it frightened me and my sisters. But I went through the bin, that night, and found the jar. There was a tooth in it, and tiny pieces that might have been stone, or bone.’

      *

      Despite the hush in her voice when she told us stories of the strike zone, of the wave and the fire, Paloma nonetheless spoke of the blast as something long gone. It had been six days since we’d left the coast to head towards New Hobart, but our warnings about the Council, and the blast machine that they had dug up from the Ark, didn’t seem to have penetrated.

      ‘She still doesn’t understand,’ I said to Zoe and Piper. We were whispering, drawn apart from the fire where Paloma was resting. ‘She asked again, yesterday. She still wants to try to set up a meeting with the Council.’

      Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘Might as well tie a bow around herself, if she wants to hand them Elsewhere like a gift.’

      There was a sound in the scrub behind Zoe. She jumped, spinning away from me, a knife already drawn. Piper had echoed her movement, pushing me behind a tree as he crouched next to Zoe, knife raised.

      Paloma gave a yelp, raising her hands as she stepped out of the cover of the trees.

      Zoe stepped back, slipping her knife back into her belt.

      ‘Be careful creeping around like that,’ she said quietly. ‘You didn’t come all the way across the sea just to get yourself skewered.’

      ‘I heard what you were saying,’ Paloma said. Her chin was tilted at a bold angle, but her hands were clenched to stop their shaking. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

      ‘Nobody said you were,’ said Zoe. ‘But you need to understand what you’re dealing with.’

      ‘I’m not afraid of your Council,’ she insisted.

      ‘You should be,’ Piper said.

      ‘Let me meet with them,’ Paloma said. ‘If I explain the trade terms that the Confederacy’s willing to negotiate, they’ll see the benefits.’

      ‘You’re not listening,’ Zoe said. ‘The Council will—’

      ‘I’m an emissary,’ interrupted Paloma. ‘Empowered by the Confederacy to make contact, establish terms for trading negotiations and mutual cooperation.’ Her voice grew faster and higher, as she repeated herself. ‘I’m an emissary, on a peaceful expedition.’

      ‘Not here, you’re not,’ I said. ‘Here, you’re the enemy. They’ll hunt you down.’ I had known Zach since birth, but even I was afraid of what he had become. And I had seen how much he feared The General, who ruled the Council. Together, with the blast in their power, they would have no mercy towards Elsewhere. There was no if or perhaps or maybe about the flames that I’d seen in my visions. They were real, and they were coming.

      I hadn’t thought it possible for Paloma to grow more pale, but now her lips seemed blue-tinged, the freckles standing out more conspicuously on her white face.

      Piper threw down his dagger. He lifted his shirt, pulling it over his head and tossing it to the ground beside the knife.

      ‘Look,’ he said, turning his back on Paloma. He reached his single arm across his body to point over his left shoulder. There, on the brown skin below his shoulder blade, was a cluster of horizontal scars, white and raised. I had seen them before, during the months of travelling together, hunching together over streams to wash, but Piper wore so many scars that I hadn’t noted these ones in particular. I stared along with Paloma: these scars weren’t like the skirmish of scars on his hand and arm, or the nicks and scratches on his face. They were faded, and unlike the jagged slash that striped his shoulder, they had a uniformity to them, all of them parallel, perfectly straight.

      ‘That was a whipping I got when I was eight,’ he said. ‘A patrol came through our village, and Zoe and I had been playing a game with a few of the other kids. There was a song we used to sing: Jack was strong and Jack was brave—’

      Zoe joined in, speaking the next words with him:

      ‘He sailed away to Elsewhere, across the mighty waves.’

      ‘It was just a kids’ song,’ Piper said. ‘But the soldiers heard it, and made an example of me. Of course it was me they chose. Even out east, back then, when it wasn’t so unusual to be split late, they were always going to pick the Omega for the whipping. I got ten strokes.’

      I saw Zoe’s jaw tighten at the memory of their shared pain.

      ‘That was just for a mention of Elsewhere in a kids’ song,’ Piper said again. He picked up and pulled on his shirt, eyes fixed on Paloma. ‘If they find Elsewhere, they will have no mercy. Do you really think they’ll leave Elsewhere in peace, when they know what your medicines can do?’

      ‘You don’t know what the Council is like,’ said Zoe, stepping closer to Paloma and speaking in a voice that was gentler than I was used to hearing from her. ‘No matter what you do, or what you offer them, they’ll see Elsewhere’s very existence as a threat.’

      Zoe was right. Elsewhere was everything that the Alphas feared. I had seen how our mutations repulsed them – heard the cries of freak and felt their spittle on my skin. I knew how hard they would fight to defend their own unmarred bodies. They ruled because they thought they were better than us. They were perfect, and we were broken, reflections in a warped mirror. That was how they saw it. To take away that difference, and their perfection, undermined everything they stood for. Especially now that they’d discovered how to eliminate the risks of the fatal bond: Omegas preserved in the Council’s tanks, trapped indefinitely in a hellish half-life, until each Alpha’s own life had run its course.

      ‘Even if we could put you on a boat tomorrow, and if Elsewhere never helped us – never shared the cure, or sought us out again,’ Zoe said, ‘the Council will keep seeking. They found the message from Elsewhere in the Ark. They know Elsewhere exists, and that it has the technology to end the twinning. We found you. Sooner or later, they will too. And they’ll destroy you all.’

      Paloma had expected to return home at some point with news, a message. What message could she carry now, even if we could get her safely home? The only message that counted now was Xander’s warning: Forever fire.

      ‘Even if we had a ship fit for the journey,’ Piper said, ‘we can’t take you back, or warn Elsewhere, until the weather clears – you’ve seen for yourself what the storms are like.’

      I saw Paloma’s lips tighten. She’d never discussed the storm that had almost sunk The Rosalind. But I’d seen the chunks hewn from the ship’s hull, and I knew that Paloma’s fellow emissary from Elsewhere had died, as well as two of Thomas’s sailors. There was a reason it had taken this long for contact to be made with Elsewhere: the sea didn’t deal in mercy. Zoe’s partner Lucia, too, had been lost to a storm, years earlier.

      Piper went on, relentless. ‘Not to mention the ice sheets further north. And the spring northerlies would mean slow progress, battling the winds the whole way. Early summer will give us the best chance.’

      ‘We can’t force you to stay,’ I said to her. ‘Nor to try to help us. If you want to go, we’ll do our best to protect you until we can get a ship ready. Nobody would blame you, if you wanted just to go back, and forget everything you’ve learned here.’

      ‘Even if I wanted to run away,’ Paloma said, ‘it won’t make a difference.’ Her voice cracked. ‘There were forty of us on our ship when we spotted The Rosalind in the spit. Caleb and I were the ones chosen to come aboard as emissaries, but our captain and all the crew know where you are. Thomas gave them the coordinates. The Confederacy will send ships.’

      She