problem, sweetheart,’ said Alice. ‘My toes don’t add up.’ She looked at Zach’s deflated face, and stopped her grinning. ‘I suppose there’s more,’ she said, almost kindly. ‘You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped – my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead-end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.’ She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?’ He didn’t answer. She went on: ‘And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?’
Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. ‘There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumour, a lie.’
‘Then why do you look so scared?’
I answered this time. ‘On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burnt-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumours of the island.’
‘He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,’ Zach added, looking at the door again.
‘And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,’ I said, ‘where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.’
Alice shrugged. ‘Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumour. Just a lie.’
‘It is – is a lie, I mean,’ hissed Zach. ‘You need to shut up – you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.’
‘They haven’t found it yet.’
‘Because it doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘It’s just an idea.’
‘Maybe that’s enough,’ she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.
He stood. ‘I’m going to check on Dad.’
I nodded, pressed the cool flannel again to my aunt’s head. ‘Dad’ll be just the same – unconscious, I mean,’ I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.
With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the centre of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognise some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.
*
Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.
I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.
After a while, he said, ‘I saw him fall, you know.’
I should have realised, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.
‘I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,’ he went on. ‘I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.’ Zach spat out a splinter of hay. ‘He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face first, so I couldn’t see him for the wheat.’
‘I’m sorry. It must have been scary.’
‘Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.’ He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.
‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’
There was no point lying to him, so I just nodded.
‘Can’t you do anything?’ he said. He grabbed my hand. Amongst everything that had happened over those last few days – Dad’s collapse, and Alice’s arrival – the strangest of all was Zach reaching out for my hand, something he’d not done since we were tiny.
When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.
I squeezed his hand. ‘What could I do?’
‘Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair – she’s killing him.’
‘It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.’
‘It’s not fair,’ he said again.
‘Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.’
‘It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas – we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.’
I couldn’t argue with him about the illness – it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. ‘It’s not her fault,’ I offered. ‘And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.’
He dropped my hand. ‘You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.’
‘Of course I care.’
‘Then do something,’ he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I said. I knew that seers were rumoured to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world – only perceive it in crooked ways.
‘I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ he whispered. ‘If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.’
It made no difference whether I believed him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I repeated.
‘What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?’
I reached once more for his hand. ‘He’s my dad too.’
‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, snatching his hand away.
*
Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and
