no friends of mine.’
‘There’s talk that the Council wants to stop Omegas from being bards at all,’ the woman added. ‘It’s all the travelling around that they don’t like. They like to keep tabs on us.’
‘I’d challenge the best of the Alpha bards to play as well as me,’ said the man, flourishing his extra fingers.
‘The soldiers would have your fingers off if they heard you say that,’ said the woman.
‘We’re not about to tell them,’ said Piper. ‘And if you can keep quiet about having seen us here, I don’t see why we can’t camp together for the day.’
The woman and Zoe still looked wary, but the blind man smiled.
‘Then let’s make camp. I could use a rest. I’m Leonard, by the way. And this is Eva.’
‘I won’t tell you our names,’ said Piper. ‘But I won’t lie to you, at least, and give false names.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Leonard said. Eva sat next to him and began pulling their things from her rucksack. She had some nuggets of coal wrapped in waxed paper and still dry.
‘Fine,’ said Zoe. ‘But we need to cook quickly – we’re still too close to the road to risk a fire once this fog’s cleared.’
While Piper stoked the fire and Zoe sat sharpening her knives, I joined Leonard on the log.
‘You said the others didn’t move like Omegas.’ I tried to keep my voice low enough that the others wouldn’t hear. ‘What about me?’
‘You neither,’ he said.
‘But I don’t feel like them. They’ve always been so –’ I paused. ‘So sure. So certain about everything.’
‘I didn’t say you were like them. I just said you didn’t walk like other Omegas.’ He shrugged. ‘Girl, you’re hardly here.’
‘What do you mean?’
He paused, and gave a laugh. ‘You walk like you think the earth begrudges you a space to plant your feet.’
I thought of the moment after Kip’s death, when Zach had found me slumped on the platform at the top of the silo. The air had been so heavy. If Zach hadn’t begged me to run, to save his own skin, I doubted I’d have managed to drag myself upright and leave. All these weeks and all these miles later, I hadn’t realised that I was still hauling the weight of the sky with each step.
We ate the rabbits, as well as some foraged mushrooms and greens that Eva pulled from her bag.
‘Are you a seer as well?’ I asked her while we ate.
She snorted. ‘Hardly.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a seer. ‘I just couldn’t see your mutation.’
Leonard’s face had turned serious.
‘She has the most feared mutation of all,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t spotted it already.’
There was a long pause. I scanned Eva again but could see nothing unusual. What could be more feared than being a seer, with its promise of madness?
Leonard leaned forward, and gave a stage whisper. ‘Red hair.’
Our laughter startled two blackbirds, that took off, screeching.
‘Look more closely,’ Eva said. She turned her head to the side and lifted her thick braid. There, nestled into the back of her neck, was a second mouth. She opened it briefly, baring two crooked teeth.
‘Only shame is that I can’t sing out of it,’ she said, letting her braid drop. ‘Then I wouldn’t need Leonard for the harmonies, and I wouldn’t have to put up with his grumbling.’
When the fire was extinguished and the sun risen, Leonard cleaned his hands carefully before he took up his guitar.
‘Can’t get rabbit grease on the strings,’ he said, weaving his handkerchief between his clustered fingers.
‘If you’re going to be making a racket, I’d better keep watch,’ said Zoe. ‘If anything comes along the road, we’ll need to see them before they hear us.’ She looked up at the tree above her. Piper dropped to kneel on one knee and she climbed, without speaking, on to his bent leg, balanced for a moment with a hand on his shoulder, and then jumped up to grasp the branch. She swung herself upwards, feet pointed and body tucked. I could see what Leonard had meant, when he’d talked about the way she and Piper moved. The ease with which they inhabited their bodies.
When I envied Zoe, though, it wasn’t her unbranded face I coveted, or her confidence. Not even her freedom from the visions that shredded my mind. It was the way that she and Piper moved together, without even speaking. The closeness that didn’t require words. There’d been a time when Zach and I had been like that, long before we were split, and before he’d turned against me. But after all that had happened since, the intimacy of that shared childhood seemed as distant as the island. It was a place to which we could never return.
Eva took up her drum, and Leonard’s right hand plucked at the strings, tickling the music out of the instrument, while the fingers of his left hand moved more slowly.
He’d been right, I knew, when he’d told me that he’d heard my hesitant footsteps. I’d been taunting my body with cold and hunger. Avoiding every consolation, because there would be no consolation for the dead I’d left in my wake. But this music was a pleasure that I couldn’t dodge. Like the ash that had plagued us in the east, the music would not be denied. I leaned back against a tree and allowed myself to listen.
It was more noise than we’d permitted ourselves for weeks. Our lives had become so muted. We crept at night, wincing at the breaking of twigs beneath our boots. We hid from patrols, and talked often in whispers. We were at risk, every moment, until it began to feel as though sound itself had become something we had to ration. Now, even the most flippant of the bards’ songs felt like a small act of defiance: to hear the music ringing out. To permit ourselves something more than bare survival.
Some of the songs were slow and sad; others were raucous, the notes sizzling and jumping like corn kernels in a hot pan. Several had lyrics bawdy enough to set us all laughing. And when I glanced away from the fire, I saw that even Zoe’s feet, hanging from the branch high in the tree, were swinging in time with the music.
‘Did your twin have the talent for music as well?’ I asked Leonard, when he and Eva stopped for a drink.
He shrugged. ‘All I have of her is a name on my registration papers. That and the town where we were born.’ He fished the worn sheet of paper from his bag and waved it at me, laughing. ‘They can’t make up their minds, the Council. Can’t do enough to keep us separate, but then they make us carry our twins around in our pockets, everywhere we go.’ He traced the paper as if he would feel the word under his fingertip. ‘Elise, it says. That’s what Eva tells me – she can read a little. But that’s
