Piper for reassurance.
He nodded. ‘Simon will be here the whole time. And three guards, hand-selected, on the door.’ He gestured at the doorway, where soldiers waited. Two of them were The Ringmaster’s, but I was relieved to recognise Crispin, too.
At first, after Piper and The Ringmaster left, the massed soldiers in the square beyond the northern window were a background hubbub of noise. But at noon they fell silent. The cries of the market traders, too, were hushed. And even from where we sat, with the shutter closed, we could hear the strokes of the whip. Ten strokes each for the four soldiers who had attacked Zach. Five strokes each for Meera and the other soldier who had been guarding Zach, for failing in their duty.
Simon sat by the door. He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, but one of his hands rested on his axe hilt, and he didn’t take his eyes off Zach.
Zach and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and heard each stroke. It seemed to take a very long time: a pause after each blow, and then the crack of the next. The noisiest thing of all seemed to be the silence between me and Zach. We stared at each other, him on a chair at the table and me on the windowsill, my back against the closed shutter. Zach fidgeted from time to time, reaching up to his burn, and prodding gingerly around its edges.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’
There was another stroke of the whip. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing, a sharp intake of air through my closed teeth.
‘You can stop glaring at me,’ Zach said. ‘It’s hardly my fault that your soldiers attacked me.’
I kept my expression blank, my eyes on his. ‘It’s your fault that they wanted to.’
‘And your army’s weak discipline that meant they went ahead with it.’
Another thwack. I didn’t want Zach to know how I felt. That his arrival had left me exposed, as though the walls of New Hobart had fallen.
‘He’s whipping them himself, you know,’ Zach said. ‘Piper.’
Yet another whip stroke cracked the silence.
‘You didn’t know that?’ Zach said. His voice was like a knife, probing flesh.
‘I knew,’ I lied.
Zach just raised an eyebrow.
I ignored him. We sat there together, under Simon’s gaze. The pain in my head had lessened already, just a reminder of last night’s searing, but periodically Zach would ignite it again by touching the burn, grimacing as he tested the tautness of the blister.
When the whippings were over, Piper came back. He let the door slam behind him. He was sweaty, but I was relieved to see no blood on his clothes, or on the leather whip that he tossed to the ground. Whatever he’d done, it had not been as brutal as the whipping I’d witnessed with Kip. The length of plaited leather lay on the ground between us.
Zach had stood as soon as Piper entered; he moved to the far side of room, eyeing the whip as though it were a snake that might strike at him.
‘You can stop cowering,’ Piper said. ‘I’m done for today.’
He came to stand by me at the window. I kept my voice low, aware of Zach watching us from the far side of the room.
‘Couldn’t it have been The Ringmaster who whipped them?’ I said. ‘Or couldn’t you have got one of the other senior soldiers to do it? What about Simon?’
‘I don’t ask my men to do things I’m not willing to do myself,’ he said. ‘And it had to be me, not The Ringmaster. Can you imagine the response, if we put The Ringmaster up there, to whip mainly Omega troops, in defence of The Reformer?’ He exhaled. ‘It had to be me.’
He was probably right. But when he put his hand on the windowsill, close to mine, I couldn’t help thinking of the whip.
‘This isn’t what we wanted,’ I said in a whisper. ‘This isn’t what we’re doing this for.’ I didn’t want to say it in front of Zach – didn’t want to show him the cracks that I could see, spreading everywhere. But I was thinking of what I’d said to Piper and Zoe, back in the deadlands: that if we didn’t find Elsewhere, we would build our own. That we would find a way to make a better world here. This wasn’t what we’d dreamed of: the whip on the floor, the beaten soldiers outside.
‘You’re not different from me, Cass, for all that you’d like to think you are,’ Piper said. He was leaning forward over the sill, his weight on his arm. ‘You’ve made the same choices I have, to survive, and to do what has to be done. You think that because you can’t throw a knife, or wield a whip, that you’re somehow innocent?’
I wasn’t angry because I disagreed with him. I was angry because everything he said was true.
‘I have done only what’s been necessary,’ he said. ‘I am what the resistance has needed me to be.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Then what do you want from me?’ he said.
What could I have told him that wouldn’t have sounded wistful, impossible? A different world, in which he didn’t have to be those things. In which neither of us did.
‘Nothing,’ I replied.
‘We’re moving Zach to stay with Cass,’ The Ringmaster announced. ‘We—’
‘No,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘No way. Absolutely not.’
It had been such a relief when Simon led Zach back to his cell, and Elsa, Zoe and Paloma had joined us in the Tithe Collector’s office. Now The Ringmaster’s words struck me like a kick. I turned to Piper for support, but his face was firm.
‘I’m trying to keep you alive,’ he said. ‘We need to have both you and Zach guarded, by people we can trust. And we have Paloma to worry about as well. If Zach’s with you, that’s one location to cover instead of three. I’m posting guards outside the holding house. I’ll be there too, when Zoe’s not.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘Even if he has to be with me, he can’t come to the holding house. Not with Paloma there. And you can’t expect Elsa to have him.’
Piper’s face remained set.
‘I’ll move up here,’ I said. ‘Don’t bring him to Elsa’s.’
He lowered his voice, brought his head close to mine. ‘I want you where you can be safe.’ He looked across the room at The Ringmaster. ‘Not here, with him, in the thick of his soldiers.’
Even though we gathered daily in the Tithe Collector’s office, there was still a sense that it was The Ringmaster’s territory, and that Elsa’s was ours. Perhaps it was the residue of the building’s former role: this was a place where Omegas used to come in supplication, to hand over their tithes. Even after the battle, and the hungry months since, the rooms still
