I could see nothing but the trees, their pale trunks blotched with brown like an old man’s hands. Then I saw the door. It was low, and half-concealed by the boulders that clustered at the cliff’s edge. It stood impossibly close to the end of the bluff – it looked like a doorway into nothingness, and was so faded and battered by the coastal winds that the wood was bleached to the same shade as the salt-parched grasses around it. It had been built to take advantage of the cover of the boulders, so that at least half of the building must have hung out over the edge of the cliff itself.
Zoe whistled, the same rhythm that Piper had sounded on the warning bell: two slow notes, two quick, and two slow.
The woman who opened the door was the oldest person I’d ever seen. Her hair was sparse enough that I could see the curve of scalp beneath it. Around her neck, the skin was draped like a cowl. Even her nose looked tired, drooping at the tip like melted candle wax. I was fairly sure that her forehead bore no brand, but it was hard to tell: age had branded her now, her forehead cragged with wrinkles. The loose flesh of her eyelids hung so low over her eyes that I imagined they must disappear altogether when she smiled.
But she wasn’t smiling now. She was looking at us.
‘I hoped you wouldn’t come,’ she said.
‘Nice to see you too,’ said Zoe.
‘I knew you wouldn’t come unless you were desperate,’ the woman said. She came forward, a lurch in her step. Both legs were twisted, the joints gnarled and fused. She embraced Zoe first, and then Piper. Zoe closed her eyes when Sally held her. I tried to picture Zoe and Piper as they must have been when, ten years old and on the run, they first came to Sally. I wondered how much the old woman had seen them change. The world was a flint on which they had been sharpened.
‘This is the seer?’ Sally said.
‘This is Cass,’ said Piper.
‘I haven’t stayed safe all these years by bringing strangers into my home,’ she said.
She had to balance her speech with her breathing, so the words came slowly. Sometimes she paused between each syllable, the noisy breaths taking their time. Each breath a sigh.
‘You can trust me,’ I said.
She stared at me again. ‘We’ll see.’
We followed her inside the house. When she shut the door behind us, the whole building shook. I thought again of the cliff underneath us, and the sea clawing at the rocks.
‘Relax,’ said Piper. I hadn’t even realised that I was clutching the doorframe. ‘This place has been here for decades. It’s not going down the cliff tonight.’
‘Even under the weight of an uninvited guest,’ added Sally. She turned away and shuffled into the kitchen. Her footsteps on the floor were hollow – only wood between her and the cliff’s plunge. ‘Since you’re all here, I suppose I’d better get some food ready.’
As she busied herself at the table, I looked at the closed door by the stove. No noise came from within, but I could feel, like a draught on the back of my neck, another presence in the house.
‘Who else is here?’ I said.
‘Xander’s resting,’ Sally said. ‘He was up all last night.’
‘Xander?’ I said.
Sally raised an eyebrow at Piper.
‘You didn’t tell her about Xander?’
‘Not yet.’ He turned to me.
‘Remember I told you, on the island, that we’d had two other seers? And the younger one had been brought to the island before he was branded?’
I nodded.
‘Xander was useful for undercover work,’ Piper went on, ‘but we didn’t want to involve him in anything too important.’
‘Was he too young?’
‘You think we had the luxury of sparing the young ones that kind of responsibility?’ He laughed. ‘Some of our scouts on the mainland were barely in their teens. No – and it wasn’t even that Xander couldn’t be trusted, really. We never thought he’d deliberately betray us. But he was always volatile.’
‘It got worse, in the last few years,’ Zoe said. ‘But even before that, he was always jumpy. Skittish, like a horse that’s seen a snake.’
‘It was a shame,’ said Piper.
‘A shame for him, to be so troubled?’ I asked. ‘Or for you, that you couldn’t use him as you’d have liked?’
‘Can’t it be both?’ Piper said. ‘Anyway, he did what he could for us. We based him on the mainland. Even without his visions, it was useful to have someone unbranded who could pass for an Alpha. And sometimes his visions came in useful, too. But we had to bring him here, in the end. He couldn’t work anymore, and Sally said she’d take him.’
‘Why do you keep talking about him in the past tense? He’s here now, isn’t he?’
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Sally said, hobbling across the kitchen and opening the door to the room beyond.
*
A boy sat on the bed, his back to us. He had thick dark hair like Piper’s, tightly curled, but it was longer, and stood in high tufts, like the peaks of beaten egg whites. The window above the bed looked out over the water, and the boy didn’t turn away from it as we entered.
We moved closer. Piper sat next to him on the bed, ushering me to sit beside him.
Xander was perhaps sixteen. His face still had the softness of a child. Like Sally, he was unbranded. When Piper greeted him, he didn’t look at us, or respond at all. His eyes darted from side to side, as if following the flight of some invisible insect above our heads.
I wasn’t sure whether what I sensed about him was evident to everyone, or whether it was only seers that would feel it. The brokenness inside him. Sally had said that he was resting, but there was no rest here. Only terror. The frantic buzzing of Xander’s mind was like a wasp trapped in a jar.
Zoe hung back in the doorway. I saw her mouth tighten as she watched the fidgeting of Xander’s long fingers, ceaselessly kneading the air. And I remembered what she’d said to me, about how the visions affected me: I’ve seen it happen before.
Piper stilled one of Xander’s hands with his own.
‘It’s good to see you again, Xander.’
The boy opened his mouth, but no words came. In the silence, I could almost hear the discordant jangling of his mind.
‘Do you have any news for us?’ Piper asked.
Xander leaned forward, until his face was close to Piper’s. He spoke in a whisper. ‘Forever fire. Hot noise. Burning light.’ The words chased one another out.
‘He’s seeing the blast more than ever,’ Sally said. ‘Day and night,
