it’s safe here. The Council’s looking for a lame old woman. I figure this place isn’t going to be an obvious choice.’
‘And your twin?’
‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘And believe me, I’m even older than I look. If there’d been registrations when Alfie and I were split, no doubt the Council would have got to me that way. But things were different then. They didn’t have us all pinned down in their records, the way they do now. And wherever he is, my brother’s had the sense to lie low, take care of himself.’
She got up and crossed to the stove. When she passed Piper, her hand paused for a while on his broad shoulder. When he first came here, as a child, his hand would have been as small as hers. Smaller, probably. Now she had to stretch up to reach his shoulder, and her hand rested there like a moth on a bough.
When we ate, Xander sat at one end of the table, swinging his legs and staring at the ceiling. Piper carved the pigeons, severing the wings with a long, curved knife. Watching him, it was hard not to think of all the knives he’d wielded. The things he’d seen, and the things he’d done.
But the meal dragged me back to the room. Sally had stuffed the pigeons with sage and lemon, and the meat was soft and moist. It bore no resemblance to the meat we’d eaten on the road, cooked quickly over furtive fires, the outer flesh scorched and the middle still cold and springing with blood. We didn’t talk much, until there was nothing left but a forlorn cluster of bones, and the moon had climbed past the window to hang above us.
‘Piper told me about how you infiltrated the Council,’ I said to Sally. ‘But he didn’t tell me why you stopped.’
She was silent.
‘They were exposed,’ Zoe said. ‘Not Sally, but the two other infiltrators working with her.’
‘What happened to them?’ I said.
‘They were killed,’ said Piper abruptly, standing and beginning to gather the plates.
‘The Council killed them?’ I said.
Zoe’s lips thinned. ‘He didn’t say that.’
‘Zoe,’ cautioned Piper.
‘The Council would’ve killed them, eventually,’ said Sally. ‘Given how much they hated infiltrators, they would never have let them live, even when they’d finished torturing them for information. They didn’t get a chance, though, with Lachlan – he managed to poison himself first. We had capsules to take if we were caught. But they searched Eloise before she had a chance, and took her capsule away.’
‘So what happened to her?’
Piper stopped clearing away. He and Zoe were both staring at Sally. Sally looked straight at me.
‘I killed her,’ she said.
‘Sally,’ said Piper quietly. ‘You don’t have to talk about this.’
‘I’m not ashamed,’ she said. ‘I know what they’d have done to her. It would have been worse than death – far worse – and they’d have killed her at the end of it anyway. We all knew the deal. We were the heart of the whole intelligence network – if we cracked, half the resistance would fall. All our contacts, all the safehouses, all the information we’d gathered and passed on over the years. It would have been disastrous. That’s why we had the capsules.’
She was still looking at me. I wanted to tell her that I understood. But it was clear that she didn’t need my understanding. She wasn’t looking for forgiveness, not from me or anyone else.
Sally’s choice had been harder even than Kip’s, perhaps, because it wasn’t her own death that she had to bestow. I thought, again, of Piper’s words to Leonard: There are different kinds of courage.
‘They were denounced in the main Council Hall,’ she said. ‘I was up in the gallery when it happened, talking to some Councillors. Lachlan and Eloise never had a chance: the soldiers were waiting to swoop. There were at least four soldiers to each of them. Lachy got to his capsule as soon as they had him cornered – he had it on a strap around his neck, like all of us. But after he started frothing and thrashing, they realised what had happened, and pinned Eloise down.’
Her voice was steady, but when she pushed her plate aside, the knife and fork clattered slightly with her hand’s tremor.
‘I was waiting for them to come for me,’ she said. ‘I’d slipped my own capsule into my mouth – had it in between my teeth, ready to bite down.’ I could see her tongue move to the side of her mouth, tasting the memory. ‘But it never happened. I was braced for it – if anyone had been watching me, they’d have seen that something was going on. But nobody was. Everyone was just staring at all the chaos down below. For a moment I just stood there, watching what was happening. Lachy was on the floor by then, thrashing around, blood coming out of his mouth. It’s not an easy death, poison. And there were four soldiers holding Eloise, arms pinned to her sides. I was staring down like everyone else. And I realised the soldiers weren’t coming for me. Whoever found out about Lachy and Eloise hadn’t discovered there were three of us.’
Piper placed his hand on her arm. ‘You don’t need to go through this all again.’
She gestured at me. ‘If she wants to throw her lot in with the resistance, she needs to know what happens. What it’s really like.’ She turned and looked squarely at me. ‘I killed her,’ she said again. ‘I threw my knife, got her in the chest. It would have been a quicker death than Lachy’s. But I couldn’t stay to watch. It’s only because of all the chaos, and because I was up on the gallery, that I managed to get out of there at all, and even then it meant going through a stained glass window and down a thirty foot drop.’
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