The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

the holding house, being back with her felt as close to home as I had ever known. She rushed to greet me, almost toppling me, and my face was squashed into her shirt as she hugged me. For a few moments everything else receded.

      ‘I heard you got back into town this morning,’ she said, holding both my arms as she stepped back to look at me, then glancing pointedly at the sun behind me; it was already sinking towards the horizon.

      ‘I wanted to come here sooner,’ I said.

      Elsa greeted Piper and Zoe; she welcomed Paloma too, though Elsa couldn’t hide her stares. She grumbled about rations as she bustled around the kitchen, but I saw how she touched Piper’s arm as she thrust a bundle of sheets at him, and how she pushed a hunk of bread into Paloma’s hands and made her sit down and take the weight off her false leg.

      There were more comfortable accommodations at the Tithe Collector’s office, but none of us wanted to be there, close to The Ringmaster. I kept thinking about his words: I never said I think it’s fair. I think it’s necessary. What would happen when killing Zach became necessary? Would The Ringmaster even hesitate to kill me?

      I was grateful when the others retreated to the front room, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Elsa. When I tried to explain to her everything that had happened, she didn’t interrupt me like The Ringmaster, Sally and Simon had. She just busied herself around me, chopping the carrots and stirring the pot over the fire, and not staring at me as I tried to find the words. I told the story backwards, starting with Paloma, and Elsewhere, and all that we’d learned about the end of twinning. When I came to describing the earlier part of my journey, and the Ark, the words came even more slowly. The meal of watery soup was ready, but Elsa didn’t hurry me; she hoisted the pot from the fire and placed it to the side. She sat quietly and waited, and I felt silence rising over me, like the water in the black corridors of the Ark.

      I described finding Kip again, in the double prison of his smashed body and the tank. I told her how I had flooded the Ark, nearly killing myself and Zach and Piper, and burying Kip and The Confessor once and for all.

      Elsa said nothing still, as she dished up the soup, but before she called the others in to eat, she squeezed my arm.

      ‘You found Kip,’ she said.

      I nodded. It seemed a strange thing to be grateful for – those minutes in the Ark, with Kip’s dead body laid on the gangway in front of me. But Elsa, who had never been given back her husband’s body after the Council killed him, understood what those minutes had meant to me.

      *

      Later, Sally and Xander came to the kitchen as well. In the weeks we’d been away, they’d moved into the holding house, taking over the room next to Elsa’s at the front of the house, where Nina had lived before the Council killed her.

      Sitting close to the fire, Xander was still silent. There were leaves in his hair, and the knees of his trousers were browned with dirt.

      ‘Where’s he been this afternoon?’ I asked Sally.

      ‘The Kissing Tree,’ Sally said.

      I raised an eyebrow. The huge, hollowed-out stump in the burnt-out forest was all that remained of the hiding place where Elsa and her husband used to go when they were young. It was there that we’d found the documents for which he’d been tortured and killed: the papers that had helped to lead us to the Ark.

      ‘He just took off one day,’ Sally said, ‘when we were out setting snares. He went straight to it, like he knew what he was looking for. Crawled in without a word, and stayed there for hours. Since then, he goes most days.’ She shrugged. ‘It keeps him calm. I go with him if my legs are up to it, otherwise we send a guard.’

      Of all the places in and around New Hobart, the Kissing Tree had the strongest link to the Ark, and to the blast machine. I wondered why the flames in Xander’s head weren’t enough, and why he made his daily pilgrimage to that place.

      He wasn’t going to answer my questions. He sat without speaking, on the low stool by the fire. Beside him, Sally sat in Elsa’s chair by the window overlooking the courtyard. If anyone else had tried to claim that chair, Elsa would have jabbed at them with the broom handle, but it seemed that in the weeks we’d been away she and Sally had become friends. There was at least thirty years between them, and their lives could hardly have been more different. Elsa had spent her life caring for the children in the holding house; Sally had been a pioneer of the resistance, an infiltrator and an assassin. But I watched how Elsa filled her pipe and passed it to Sally without even looking – Sally took it without a word – and how the two of them settled into an easy silence.

      I saw, too, how Elsa bent to prop a cushion behind Xander’s head, where it slumped against the wall. Again and again she wiped the drool that unspooled from his open mouth. Now that the holding house was empty, and its children dead, Elsa was always looking for something to do with her hands, and I knew that she was glad of Xander’s presence.

      I wished that I could say the same – but being in the same room as Xander filled my nostrils with the scent of smoke. He was all fire now, all the time. I thought I understood, perhaps, why he went each day to the Kissing Tree. The flames had been calling him for so long that he had no choice but to answer.

      Elsa was mixing some herbs to help Xander sleep through the night. She showed me how, and I ground the dried valerian myself, felt the satisfying grate of the pestle against the mortar.

      When Elsa poured in some poppy tincture, she raised the glass bottle to the window light, squinting to look closely while she poured. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Four drops only. No more.’

      ‘Two spoons of that stuff,’ Sally said, ‘with a little henbane thrown in, and you can knock someone out entirely. A little more, and you can kill them.’

      The way she phrased it, it didn’t sound like a warning. It sounded like advice.

      ‘Shut up and help,’ said Elsa, manoeuvring around Sally with the bottle. ‘We’re not in the business of killing, in this house.’

      I wished she were right. Perhaps it was true for her, and for Xander and Paloma. But I looked from Zoe, to Piper, to Sally, and down at my own hands. There was not one of us who was not in the business of killing.

      *

      That night we all slept together in the dormitory of the holding house: me, Piper, Paloma and Zoe. Zoe and Paloma had pushed two of the small beds together; it was as close to a declaration as we were going to get.

      Both Piper and Zoe were too tall for the children’s beds, and seeing Piper’s calves and feet hanging over the edge of the bed made me laugh. But then Paloma said: ‘Why are all the beds in here so small?’ and my laugh halted, and we fell silent, until Zoe explained about the children that Zach and The General had tanked and then left to drown. Paloma sat on her bed and listened, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her shins. Every day with us a new lesson in cruelty.

      ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Paloma said to me. ‘When they kill the children, they’re killing their own as well.’

      There had been a time when the twinning had stopped Alphas and Omegas from killing one another. That time was long gone. It wasn’t the first time that humans had turned on each other, and themselves, like this. Whoever had unleashed the blast, four hundred years ago, must have known that they would destroy more than just their enemies. The risk of obliterating themselves, and the world, hadn’t been enough to stop the killing then. The twinning was never going to be enough to stop it now.

      *

      The Ringmaster came at dawn. He led me and Piper around the outskirts of the town, so that Piper could inspect the new fortifications. The encircling wall was topped with wire, and a walkway now ran along it, with slits for archers. The watchtowers were higher, and had been strengthened, squatting solidly against thick wooden buttresses. Beyond the wall, wide ditches ringed the town, and in each ditch sat rows of logs pierced with metal spikes, offering their metal barbs to the sky. There was an orderliness about them that belied their sole purpose: to impale