in a voice that was gentler than I was used to hearing from her. ‘No matter what you do, or what you offer them, they’ll see Elsewhere’s very existence as a threat.’
Zoe was right. Elsewhere was everything that the Alphas feared. I had seen how our mutations repulsed them – heard the cries of freak and felt their spittle on my skin. I knew how hard they would fight to defend their own unmarred bodies. They ruled because they thought they were better than us. They were perfect, and we were broken, reflections in a warped mirror. That was how they saw it. To take away that difference, and their perfection, undermined everything they stood for. Especially now that they’d discovered how to eliminate the risks of the fatal bond: Omegas preserved in the Council’s tanks, trapped indefinitely in a hellish half-life, until each Alpha’s own life had run its course.
‘Even if we could put you on a boat tomorrow, and if Elsewhere never helped us – never shared the cure, or sought us out again,’ Zoe said, ‘the Council will keep seeking. They found the message from Elsewhere in the Ark. They know Elsewhere exists, and that it has the technology to end the twinning. We found you. Sooner or later, they will too. And they’ll destroy you all.’
Paloma had expected to return home at some point with news, a message. What message could she carry now, even if we could get her safely home? The only message that counted now was Xander’s warning: Forever fire.
‘Even if we had a ship fit for the journey,’ Piper said, ‘we can’t take you back, or warn Elsewhere, until the weather clears – you’ve seen for yourself what the storms are like.’
I saw Paloma’s lips tighten. She’d never discussed the storm that had almost sunk The Rosalind. But I’d seen the chunks hewn from the ship’s hull, and I knew that Paloma’s fellow emissary from Elsewhere had died, as well as two of Thomas’s sailors. There was a reason it had taken this long for contact to be made with Elsewhere: the sea didn’t deal in mercy. Zoe’s partner Lucia, too, had been lost to a storm, years earlier.
Piper went on, relentless. ‘Not to mention the ice sheets further north. And the spring northerlies would mean slow progress, battling the winds the whole way. Early summer will give us the best chance.’
‘We can’t force you to stay,’ I said to her. ‘Nor to try to help us. If you want to go, we’ll do our best to protect you until we can get a ship ready. Nobody would blame you, if you wanted just to go back, and forget everything you’ve learned here.’
‘Even if I wanted to run away,’ Paloma said, ‘it won’t make a difference.’ Her voice cracked. ‘There were forty of us on our ship when we spotted The Rosalind in the spit. Caleb and I were the ones chosen to come aboard as emissaries, but our captain and all the crew know where you are. Thomas gave them the coordinates. The Confederacy will send ships.’
She swallowed before she went on. ‘We spent two days moored alongside The Rosalind while her crew refilled their water barrels at a lake on the largest outcrop, and Thomas told us about the situation here: the twins; the Council; the Omegas. My captain, Rue, and her ship will have brought the news back to the Confederacy.’
The Rosalind’s mast, spotted in the distance amongst the uninhabited and bleak islands of a spit. Maps and words exchanged on a stony shore. Such a small thing, to change the shape of the world. But it couldn’t be undone.
‘They’ll have to wait until the ice sheets melt,’ Paloma said, ‘before they can send ships south. But they will come, and the spring winds will be with them, not against them. They’re coming. A ship, or a fleet. Maybe forty people, maybe hundreds. They might not all make it, but they won’t let it go, now that they know what’s here.’
For so long, that had been a fantasy: that ships from some distant place might reach our shores. Now it was the nightmare. They would come to us, and their world would burn.
‘Why will they be so keen to come?’ I asked.
She looked down, shaking her head.
‘You assumed we could help you. Maybe you were right – we can do some things that you can’t. But we’re not some magical haven. We have our own problems. Plagues that pass through, most summers. Bandits raiding villages in the outer islands, pirates picking off ships. Failing harvests, especially closer to the strike zone.’
She looked up at me. ‘Do you really think we’ve sent ships out, year after year, because we want to help you?’ She paused, and spoke more quietly. ‘You were meant to have all the answers that we don’t have. We’re looking for help ourselves.’
Zoe gave a snort. ‘You could’ve saved yourself a long journey. There’s nothing here for Elsewhere but trouble.’
‘Stop calling it Elsewhere,’ Paloma yelled. ‘That’s not its name. And it’s not the place that you imagine. These are real people you’re talking about – my parents, my little sisters. My friends – everyone I’ve ever known. A million people. And you tell me they’re all going to burn, because of what we can offer you. Instead of finding friendship, cooperation, we’ll be turned into a new strike zone.’ She inhaled sharply. ‘It’s not your Elsewhere, some magical solution.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘It’s real. Real people live there.’
What she said was true: after all our hoping, Elsewhere didn’t exist. Not the place we’d imagined, where things would be easy, and all the answers would be waiting for us, like ripe figs begging to be plucked. That place didn’t exist. Instead we’d found the Scattered Islands, real places, infinitely more complex than our imaginings – and they could be destroyed before any of us had even seen them.
I looked across at Paloma. She was squinting against the wind, which had blown her hair across her eyes. Her eyelashes were pale, as if dusted with snow. Her arms were crossed, her hands clutching the fabric of her sleeves.
I had been thinking of her as a whole country. As the thing that changed everything. But as she stood there in the wind, shivering slightly, I saw that she was just a young woman, a long way from home, and very frightened.
Around the fire that night, when all of us had calmed down, the stories of Elsewhere spilled out of her. She described animals that I had never heard of, let alone seen: seadogs, huge swimming beasts, hunted for their rich layers of oily fat. Sleek in the water and cumbersome on land. Paloma took up a stick and drew a sketch in the sandy ground, though she ended up laughing at her own rendition: the beast was an elongated lump, whiskers at one end, fins splayed at the other.
‘They look ridiculous enough in real life,’ she said, ‘without my bad drawing.’ She scuffed the picture away with a sweep of her false leg.
There were other animals that she described: alks, beasts like huge cows but with tall, branching horns splaying from their heads. Snowfoxes, purest white. And trusses, birds so huge that if they spread their wings they would cast a shadow the length of a dinghy.
‘They’re supposed to be bad luck,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why. I love seeing them, when they come back from the Southern Archipelago after winter.’
I looked at the empty night sky, smeared with grey clouds. Since we’d left the screeching gulls of the coast, the only birds we’d seen were ravens, with their black hooked beaks and indifferent stares. Perhaps, before the blast, trusses had flown here
