style="font-size:15px;"> When her mind probed mine, I was laid bare. It was like watching Dad skin a rabbit: the moment when he’d peel back the skin, leaving all the inner workings exposed.
I tried to seal my mind around images of the island: the city concealed in its caldera, houses clambering on one another up the steep sides. The water, merciless grey, stretching in all directions, pocked by outcrops of sharp stone. I could see it all, as I’d seen it many nights in dreams. I tried to think of myself as holding its secret inside my mouth, the same way the island nursed the secret city, nestled in the crater.
Standing, I said, ‘There is no island.’
The Confessor stood too. ‘You’d better hope not.’
*
As we grew older the scrutiny of our parents was matched only by that of Zach himself. To him, every day we weren’t split was another day he was branded by the suspicion of being an Omega, another day he was prevented from assuming his rightful place in Alpha society. So, unsplit, the two of us lingered at the margins of village life. When other children went to school, we studied together at the kitchen table. When other children played together by the river, we played only with each other, or followed the others at a distance, copying their games. Keeping far enough away to avoid the other children shouting or throwing stones at us, Zach and I could only hear fragments of the rhymes they sang. Later, at home, we would try to echo them, filling in the gaps with our own invented words and lines. We existed in our own small orbit of suspicion. To the rest of the village, we were objects of curiosity and, later, outright hostility. After a while, the whispers of the neighbours ceased being whispers, and became shouts: ‘Poison. Freak. Imposter.’ They didn’t know which one of us was dangerous, so they despised us equally. Each time another set of twins was born in the village, and then split, our unsplit state became more conspicuous. Our neighbours’ Omega son, Oscar, whose left leg ended at the knee, was sent away at nine months old to be cared for by Omega relatives. We often passed the remaining twin, little Meg, playing alone in the fenced yard of their house.
‘She must miss her twin,’ I said to Zach as we walked by, watching Meg chewing listlessly on the head of a small wooden horse.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I bet she’s devastated that she doesn’t have to share her life with a freak anymore.’
‘He must miss his family too.’
‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, repeating the familiar line from one of the Council posters. ‘Anyway, you know what happens to parents who try to hang on to their Omega kids.’
I’d heard the stories. The Council showed no mercy to the occasional parent who resisted the split and tried to keep both twins. It was the same for those rare Alphas who were found to be in a relationship with an Omega. There were rumours of public floggings, and worse. But most parents relinquished their Omega babies readily, eager to be rid of their deformed offspring. The Council taught that prolonged proximity to Omegas was dangerous. The neighbours’ hisses of poison revealed both disdain and fear. Omegas needed to be cast out of Alpha society, just as the poison was cast out of the Alpha twin in the womb. Was that the one thing Omegas are spared, I wondered? Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.
I knew my time to be sent away was coming, and that my secrecy was only deferring the inevitable. I’d even begun to wonder whether my current existence – the perpetual scrutiny of my parents and the rest of the village – was any better than the exile that was bound to follow. Zach was the one person who understood my odd, liminal life, because he shared it. But I felt his dark, calm eyes on me all the time.
In search of less watchful company, I’d caught three of the red beetles that always flocked by the well. I kept them in a jar on the windowsill, had enjoyed seeing them crawl about, and hearing the muted clatter of their wings against the glass. A week later I found the largest one pinned to the wooden sill, one wing gone, making an endless circle on the pivot of its guts.
‘It was an experiment,’ said Zach. ‘I wanted to test how long it could live like that.’
I told our parents. ‘He’s just bored,’ my mother said. ‘It’s driving him crazy, the two of you not being in school like you should be.’ But the unspoken truth continued to circle, like the beetle stuck on the pin: only one of us would ever be allowed to go to school.
I squashed the beetle myself, with the heel of my shoe, to put an end to its circular torment. That night, I took the jar and the two remaining beetles with me to the well. When I removed the lid and tipped the jar on its side, they were reluctant to venture out. I coaxed them out with a blade of grass, transferring them carefully to the stone rim on which I sat. One attempted a short flight, landing on my bare leg. I let it sit there for a while before blowing it gently back into flight.
Zach saw the empty jar that night, beside my bed. Neither of us said anything.
*
About a year later, gathering firewood by the river on a still afternoon, I made my mistake. I was walking just behind Zach when I sensed something: a part-glimpse of a vision, intruding between the real world and my sight. I dashed to catch up with him, knocked him out of the way before the branch had even begun to fall. It was an instinctive response, the kind I’d grown used to repressing. Later I would wonder whether it was fear for his safety that led to my lapse, or just exhaustion under the constant scrutiny. Either way, he was safe, sprawled beneath me on the path, by the time the massive bough creaked and fell, snagging and tearing off other branches on the way down, to land finally where Zach had stood earlier.
When his eyes met mine I was amazed at the relief in them.
‘It wouldn’t have done much damage,’ I said.
‘I know.’ He helped me up, brushed some leaves off the side of my dress.
‘I saw it.’ I was speaking too quickly. ‘Saw it starting to fall, I mean.’
‘You don’t need to explain,’ he said. ‘And I should thank you, for getting me out of the way.’ For the first time in years, he was smiling at me in the unguarded, wide-mouthed way that I remembered from our early childhood. I knew him too well to be glad.
He insisted on adding my own bundle of firewood to his, carrying the whole load all the way back to the village. ‘I owe you,’ he said.
In the weeks that followed we passed most of the time together, the same as always, but he was less rough in our games. He waited for me on the walk to the well. When we took the shortcut across the field, he called behind to warn me when he came across a patch of stinging nettles. My hair went unpulled, my possessions undisturbed.
Zach’s new knowledge allowed me some respite from his daily cruelties, but it wasn’t enough to declare us split. For that, he needed proof – years of impassioned but futile assertions on his part had taught him that. He waited a while for me to slip up again and reveal myself, but for nearly a whole year more I managed to hold my secret. The visions had grown stronger, but I’d trained myself not to react, not to cry out at the flashes of flame that punctuated my nights, or at the images of distant places that drifted into my waking thoughts. I spent more time alone, venturing far upstream, even as far as the deep gorge leading away from the river, where the abandoned silos were hidden. Zach no longer followed me when I went off by myself.
I never entered the silos, of course. All such remnants were taboo. Our broken world was scattered with these ruins, but it was against the law to enter them, just as
