with each day that passed.
Piper knew better, by now, than to push against my silences. He kept staring at the sunrise, and went on. ‘When we’ve sent out ships in the past, some of them made it back to the island, months later, with nothing to show for the journey but damaged hulls and crews sick with scurvy. And two ships never came back.’ He was quiet for a moment, but his face betrayed no emotion. ‘It’s not just a question of distance, or even storms. Some of our sailors have come back with stories of things we can barely imagine. A few years back, one of our best captains, Hobb, led three ships north. They were gone for more than two months. It was nearing winter, when Hobb got back – and there were only two ships by then. The winter storms we’re used to on the west coast are bad enough – we didn’t even make crossings to the island in winter, if we could help it. But further north, Hobb told us the entire sea up there had started to freeze solid. The ice crushed one of the ships, just like that.’ He opened his hand wide, then closed his fist. ‘The whole crew was lost.’ He paused again. Both of us were looking at the frost stiffening the grass. Winter was on its way.
‘After all this time,’ he said, ‘do you still believe that The Rosalind and The Evelyn could be out there?’
‘I’m not sure about belief,’ I said. ‘But I hope they are.’
‘And that’s enough for you?’ he said.
I shrugged. What would ‘enough’ mean, anyway? Enough for what? Enough to keep going, I supposed. I’d learned not to ask for more than that. Enough to get me to fold my blanket at the end of each day’s rest, stuff it back into my rucksack, and follow Piper and Zoe once more onto the plain for another night of walking.
Piper held out the meat again. I turned away.
‘You need to stop this,’ he said.
He still spoke as he always had: as if the world was his to command. If I’d closed my eyes, I could imagine he was still giving orders in the island’s Assembly Hall, rather than squatting on a rock, his clothes torn and stained. There were times that I admired his self-assurance: its audacity, in the face of a world that did its best to show us that we were worthless. At other times, it baffled me. I’d caught myself watching how he moved. The last few weeks had left him thinner, his skin stretched a little too tightly over his cheekbones, but it hadn’t changed the defiant jut of his jaw, or the spread of his shoulders, unafraid to occupy space. It was as though his body spoke a language that mine could never learn.
‘Stop what?’ I said, avoiding his gaze.
‘You know what I mean. You’re not eating. You barely sleep, or talk.’
‘I’m keeping up with you and Zoe, aren’t I?’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that you’re not yourself anymore.’
‘And since when are you an expert in what I’m like? You hardly know me.’ My voice was loud in the morning stillness.
I knew it wasn’t fair to snap at him. What he’d said was true enough. I’d been eating less, even now we were out of the deadlands and the hunting was good. I ate just enough to stay well, to travel fast. On frosty days, when it was my turn to sleep, I cast the blanket off my shoulders and offered myself up to the cold.
I couldn’t explain any of this to Piper or Zoe. It would mean talking about Kip. His name, that single syllable, caught in my throat like a fish bone.
His past, too, stopped me at the brink of words. I couldn’t speak about it. Since the silo, when The Confessor had told me what Kip had been like before the tank, I carried her news with me everywhere. I was good at secrets. I’d hidden my seer visions from my family for thirteen years before Zach exposed me. I’d concealed my visions of the island from The Confessor for the four years of my captivity in the Keeping Rooms. On the island, I’d hidden my twin’s identity from Piper and the Assembly for weeks. Now I concealed what I knew about Kip. The knowledge that he had tormented The Confessor as a child, and delighted when she was branded and sent away. That he’d tried, as an adult, to track her down and pay to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
How could he be such a stranger to me, when I could identify each of his vertebrae under my fingertips, and I knew the precise curve of his hip bones against my own?
But at the end, in the silo, he’d made the choice to die, to save me. These days, it seemed that was the only gift we had to offer one another: the gift of our own deaths.
Halfway to the Sunken Shore, Zoe led us to a safehouse at the edge of the plains. Nothing moved in the cottage but the wind, banging the front door, which had been left open.
‘Did they run, or were they taken?’ I asked, as we walked through the empty rooms.
‘Either way, they left in a hurry,’ said Zoe. In the kitchen, a jug lay in pieces on the floor. Two bowls sat unwashed on the table, velveted with green mould.
Piper was bending to look at the door latch. ‘The door was kicked in, from outside.’ He stood. ‘We have to leave now.’
And even though I’d looked forward to a night of sleeping indoors, I was glad to leave those rooms where all noise was muted by dust. We retreated into the long grass that grew right up to the house itself, and didn’t make camp until we’d walked all day, and half the night.
Zoe was kneeling over a rabbit that she’d caught the day before, skinning it while Piper and I lit a fire.
‘It’s worse than we thought,’ said Piper, leaning forward to blow on the timid flame. ‘Half the network must’ve been infiltrated.’
It wasn’t the first ruined safehouse that we’d seen. On the way to the silo we’d come across another safehouse, where nothing remained but blackened beams, still smoking. The Council had taken prisoners on the island, and the resistance’s secrets were being wrung from them.
As Zoe and Piper took stock of what we knew, I sat in silence. It wasn’t that they excluded me from conversations – rather that their talks were full of shorthand references to people, places and information that they shared, and that I had never encountered.
‘No point in going past Evan’s place,’ Piper said. ‘If they took Hannah alive, then they’ll have got him too.’
Zoe didn’t look up from the rabbit. She stretched it out on its back, grasped its back legs with one hand, and ran her knife down the line of exposed white fur. The stomach fell open like two hands parting.
‘Wouldn’t they pick up Jess, first?’ she said.
‘No. She never dealt with Hannah directly – she should be safe. But Evan was Hannah’s contact. If she’s taken, Evan’s done for.’
The resistance network on the mainland had been larger and more intricate than I’d ever realised. At how many other safehouses did broken doors now swing onto empty rooms, the latches smashed? The network was like a woollen jumper with several loose threads, each one threatening to unravel the entire thing.
‘Depends how long Hannah held out for,’ Zoe said. ‘She might’ve bought him some time
