to his knees. From where I sat, shelling peas on the stone wall at the front of our yard, I heard the shouts of the others working near him in the field.
That night, after the neighbours had carried him back to the cottage, our mother sent for Dad’s twin, Alice, from the Omega settlement up on the plain. Zach himself went with Mick in the bullock cart to fetch her, returning the next day with our aunt lying in the hay on the back of the cart. We’d never met her before, and looking at her, the only similarity I could see between her and Dad was the fever that currently slickened their flesh. She was thin, with long hair, darker than Dad’s. The coarse, brown fabric of her dress had been mended many times and was now flecked with hay. Beneath the strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead we could make out the brand: Omega.
We cared for her as much as we could, but it was clear from the start that she hadn’t long. We couldn’t allow her in the house, of course, but even her presence in the shed was enough to enrage Zach. On the second day his fury climaxed. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he shouted. ‘She’s disgusting. How can she be here, with us running around after her like servants? She’s killing him. And it’s dangerous for all of us, having her so close.’
Mum didn’t bother to hush him, but said calmly, ‘She’d be killing him more quickly if we’d left her in her own filthy hut.’
This silenced Zach. He wanted Alice gone, but not at the expense of admitting to Mum what he had told me in bed the night before: what he’d seen at the settlement when he collected Alice. Her small, tidy cottage; the whitewashed walls; the posies of dried herbs hanging above the hearth, just as they hung above ours.
Mum continued, ‘If we save her, we save him.’
It was only at night, when the candle was out and no voices could be heard from Mum and Dad’s room, that Zach would tell me about what he’d seen at the settlement. He told me that other Omegas at the settlement had tried to stop them from taking Alice away – that they’d wanted to keep caring for her there. But no Omega would dare to argue with an Alpha, and Mick had brandished his whip until they backed away.
‘Isn’t it cruel, though, to take her from her family?’ I whispered.
‘Omegas don’t have family,’ Zach recited.
‘Not children, obviously, but people she loves. Friends, or maybe a husband.’
‘A husband?’ He let the word hang. Officially Omegas weren’t allowed to marry, but everyone knew that they still did, although the Council wouldn’t recognise any such unions.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘She didn’t live with anyone,’ he said. ‘It was just a few other freaks from her settlement, claiming they knew what was best for her.’
We’d barely seen Omegas before, let alone spent time in close quarters with one. Little Oscar next door had been sent away as soon as he was branded and weaned. The few Omegas who passed through the area rarely stayed more than a night, camping just downstream of the village. They were itinerants, on the way to try their luck at one of the larger Omega settlements in the south. Or, in years when the harvest had been poor, there’d be Omegas who’d given up on farming the half-blighted land they were permitted to settle on, and were heading to one of the refuges near Wyndham. The refuges were the Council’s concession to the fatal bond between twins. Omegas couldn’t be allowed to starve to death and take their twins with them, so there were refuges near all large towns, where Omegas would be taken in, and fed and housed by the Council. Few Omegas went willingly, though – it was a place of last resort, for the starving or sick. The refuges were workhouses, and those who sought their help had to repay the Council’s generosity with labour, working on the farms within the refuge complex until the Council judged the debt repaid. Few Omegas were willing to trade their freedom for the safety of three meals a day.
I’d gone out with Mum, once, to give some food-scraps to one group on their way to the refuge near Wyndham. It was dark, and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mum had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travellers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mum’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.
Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.
After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.
I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.
My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mum threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.
One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
She met his eyes clearly. ‘It’s the fever. I have the fever – your father too, now.’
He scowled. ‘But before that – what’s wrong with you?’
Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place, but neatly clipped and clean.
Zach was impatient. ‘What? What is it?’
‘Don’t they teach you to count at your school?’
I said what Zach would not. ‘We don’t go to school. We can’t – we’ve not been split.’
He
