The Map of Bones. Francesca Haig

heads were still down, and they were walking steadily towards the soldiers waiting at the gate, just fifty feet away. Even if they had seen the man’s warning, would it have saved them if they’d turned and run? The guards could have overtaken them in no time, even on foot. Perhaps the warning had been futile – but I admired it nonetheless, and winced to think of what would be happening to the waving man now.

      The two men and the boy reached the gate. They paused there, in a brief conversation with the guards. One of the guards held out his hand for the shovel that the tall Omega carried; he handed it over. The three of them stepped forward and the soldiers began to drag the gates closed. The taller of the Omega men turned back to stare along the plain. He couldn’t even see me, but I found myself raising my hand, and I echoed the frantic wave of the farming man. Away. Away. It was pointless – my body’s instinct, as futile and as unstoppable as a drowner’s underwater gasp for air. The gates were already closing, and the man turned away and stepped into the refuge. The gates clashed shut behind him.

      We could not save them. Already more would be on their way. In settlements nearby, they would be weighing the decision, and thinking of what they might pack. Closing the doors of houses to which they would never return. And this was only a single refuge – all over the land there were more, each one being equipped with its tanks. Piper’s map, on the island, had shown nearly fifty refuges. Each one, now, a complex of living death. I couldn’t look away from the new building. It would have been intimidating even if I didn’t know what it contained. Now that I did, the building was a monument to horror. Only when Piper nudged me, and began to pull me deeper into the copse, did my lungs stutter back into breath, a juddering intake of air.

      *

      A few miles from the refuge, Piper thought he saw a movement through the scrub to the east. But by the time he got there he could find only some trampled grass, and no trail to follow in the dry terrain. The next day, when Zoe was taking the watch while Piper and I slept in the cover of a hollow, she heard a chaffinch’s call, and woke us both, whispering that early winter was the wrong season for a chaffinch to sing, and that it could have been a whistle, a signal. I drew my knife while I waited for her and Piper to circle the perimeter of our camp, but they found nothing. We struck camp early that day, leaving before sundown and avoiding open ground, even when night had come.

      At midnight, we crossed a valley pierced by the remains of metal poles from the Before. Bent but not felled by the blast, they curved above us, forty-foot ribs of rust, as though we were traversing the carcass of some vast monster, long dead. A jostling wind had blown all night, making it hard to speak; here in the valley the wind was noisier than ever as it shredded against the poles.

      We were just beginning the climb from the valley’s base when the man sprang from behind one of the rusted posts. He grabbed me by the hair, and before I could scream he had spun me around, his other hand pressing a knife to my throat.

      ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

      I dragged my eyes from the hilt of his blade. Piper and Zoe had been just a few steps behind me. Both had their knives out now, poised to throw.

      ‘Let her go, or you die here,’ said Piper.

      ‘Have your people stand down,’ the man said to me. He spoke calmly, as if Zoe and Piper, bristling with knives, were barely a concern to him.

      Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘We’re not her people.’

      ‘I know exactly who you are,’ he told her.

      The knife at my throat sat precisely where The Confessor’s knife had left its scar. Would that thickened strip of skin slow the blade, if he cut me? I craned my head to the side to try to see his face. I could make out only his dark hair, not tightly curled like Piper’s or Zoe’s, but massed in loose whorls. It reached his jaw, tickling the side of my cheek. He ignored me, except for his attentive knife. Slowly I turned my head further. Each movement pressed my neck more firmly into the knife blade, but at last I could see his eyes, fixed on Piper and Zoe. He was older than us, though still probably under thirty. I’d seen his face somewhere before, though the memory felt insubstantial.

      Piper worked it out before I did.

      ‘You think we don’t know who you are?’ he said. ‘You’re The Ringmaster.’

      I knew, now, where I’d seen him: in a sketch on the island. Those few marks on a page had become flesh. The full lips, and the smile lines outside each eye. From up close, as he clasped me tightly, each one was a ridge of moonlight on his darkened face.

      ‘Stand down,’ The Ringmaster said again, ‘or I’ll kill her.’

      Three figures stepped from the darkness behind Zoe and Piper. Two of them held swords; the third a bow. I could hear the creak of the bowstring, pulled taut, the arrow pointed at Piper’s back. He didn’t turn, though Zoe pivoted to face the soldiers.

      ‘And if we do stand down, what’s to stop you killing her then?’ Piper asked evenly. ‘Or all of us?’

      ‘I won’t kill her unless I have to. I came to talk. Why do you think I came without a big squadron? I’ve taken a risk to find you, talk to you.’

      ‘What are you doing here?’ Again, Piper’s bored, impatient tone, as he might sound when chatting in a tavern with a tiresome companion. But I could see the tendons in his hand drawn wire-tight, and the careful angle of his wrist, as he held the knife poised above his shoulder. The blade itself was a tiny dart of silver in the moonlight. If I hadn’t seen those knives in action, I might have thought it looked beautiful.

      ‘I need to talk to the seer about her twin,’ The Ringmaster said.

      ‘And do you always start a conversation with a knife to the throat?’ asked Piper.

      ‘We both know this is no ordinary conversation.’ The Ringmaster, behind me, was perfectly still, but I saw the tiny movements of his soldiers. The light moving on the blade of one man’s sword, as he inched closer to Piper; the tremor of the archer’s bow as the arrow was pulled back further.

      ‘I won’t talk to you while you’re threatening us,’ I said. With each word I felt his knife, rigid against my neck.

      ‘And you need to understand that I’m not a man who makes idle threats.’ He raised the blade, so that my chin was forced upwards. I could feel the pulse of my neck against the steel. The blade had been cold at first, but was warming now. Zoe was moving, very gradually, so that she stood back-to-back with Piper, facing the soldiers behind him. The soldier with the bow was only a few feet from her, one eye narrowed as he squinted down the line of the arrow at her chest.

      When Piper moved, everything seemed to unfold very slowly. I saw how he released the blade, his arm extending, one finger pointing at The Ringmaster like a denunciation. Zoe launched at the same time, her two knives hurled at the archer as she dived to the side. For an instant the three blades were in flight, and the arrow too, slicing through the air where Zoe had stood a moment before.

      The Ringmaster swiped Piper’s knife from the sky with his own blade. The noises came in quick succession: the clash of his blade against Piper’s; a shout from the archer as Zoe’s knife hit him, and the clang as her second blade struck one of the poles. The arrow had passed my left shoulder and been lost to the darkness.

      ‘Hold,’ The Ringmaster shouted at his men. I clutched at my neck, where his knife had sat, and waited for the pain and the gush of loosened blood, its hot spurt through my fingers. It never came. There was just the old scar, and my pulse thrashing underneath my own grip.

       CHAPTER 5

      For several seconds we were all motionless. The Ringmaster crouched in front of me, his knife pointed at Piper, who held his own dagger only an inch or two from The Ringmaster’s. Zoe, with two more throwing knives drawn, stood with her back to Piper. Beyond her, the archer was grimacing, clutching the knife lodged by his collarbone. The other