first watch, but when I heard them arguing I left the lookout post and headed back to the fire.
‘I never wanted to drag Sally into this,’ Zoe said.
‘Who?’ I said.
They both turned to face me. It was the same movement, doubled. And the same expression: the same angle to their eyebrows, the same appraising eyes. Even when they were arguing, I felt like an intruder.
Piper answered me. ‘We need a base, with someone we can trust. The safehouse network’s crumbling. Sally will give us shelter, so we can start to muster the resistance and send people to Cape Bleak to seek the ships. Outfit new ships, if we need.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ said Zoe, still ignoring me and addressing only Piper. ‘We can’t get Sally involved. We can’t ask her. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘Zoe told you about how we got by, as kids, after we were split?’
I nodded. They’d been raised in the east, where people used to let twins stay together a little longer. Piper had been ten when he’d been branded and exiled. She’d run away to follow him. The two of them had survived by stealing, working, and hiding, with some help from sympathetic Omegas along the way, before they’d finally joined the resistance.
‘Sally was one of the people who helped us,’ he said. ‘The first one. When we were really young, and needed it most.’
It was hard to imagine Zoe and Piper needing help. But I reminded myself of how young they’d been – even younger than I’d been when my family sent me away.
‘She took us in,’ said Zoe. ‘Taught us everything. And she had a lot to teach. She was old when we found our way to her, but years before that she’d been one of the resistance’s best agents, working in Wyndham.’
‘In Wyndham?’ I thought I must have misheard. No Omegas were allowed to live in an Alpha town – let alone in Wyndham, the Council’s hub.
‘She was an infiltrator,’ said Piper.
I looked from Zoe to Piper, and back again. ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said.
‘That was the idea,’ Zoe said impatiently.
‘It was the resistance’s most covert project,’ Piper said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible these days. This was back when the Council was less strict about branding, especially out east. We’re talking about fifty years ago, at least. The resistance had managed to recruit a few unbranded Omegas, with deformations minor enough that they could be disguised, or hidden. For Sally, it was a malformed foot. She could jam it into a normal shoe, and she trained herself to walk straight on it. It hurt her like crazy, but she got away with it for more than two years. There were three infiltrators, right inside the Council chambers. Not as Councillors, but as advisors or assistants. They were right in the thick of it.
‘The Council hated infiltrators more than anything.’ Piper smiled. ‘It wasn’t even the information that they managed to find out. It was the fact that they managed to do it – pass themselves off as Alphas, sometimes for years. Proof that we’re not that different, after all.’
‘Sally was the best of any of them,’ Zoe said. ‘Half of the current resistance was built on the information she got out of the Council.’ When she spoke of Sally, Zoe had none of her usual sarcasm, or the raised eyebrow that could sharpen a single word into a weapon. ‘But she’s ancient now,’ she went on. ‘She can hardly walk. Hadn’t worked for the resistance for years, even by the time we came to her. Too risky, apart from anything else. She was top of the Council’s wanted list for a long time, and they knew what she looked like. I don’t want to get her involved.’
‘We’re all involved, whether we want to be or not,’ said Piper. ‘The Council will come for her, soon enough. They won’t care that she’s old, or frail.’
‘She’s managed to stay hidden from them for all these years,’ Zoe said. ‘We can’t drag her into this.’
He paused, and then spoke more quietly to her. ‘You know she’d never turn us away,’ he said.
‘That’s why it’s not fair to go to her.’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t have any other options. Not after what I did on the island.’
I could see it again: the blood thickening between the stones of the courtyard.
‘The Council would never have spared the island if you’d handed Cass and Kip over to The Confessor,’ Zoe said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But we can’t assume that the rest of the resistance will understand that. You saw how they reacted at the time. When that many people are killed, people cast around for someone to blame. We can’t know how they’re going to take it when we reappear, especially not with Cass. We don’t know if it will be safe for her. If we’re going to reconnect with the resistance, we need to start with somebody we know we can trust.’
She turned away from me again, and looked only to Piper. ‘Sally’s been through enough,’ she said.
‘She’d want us to go to her,’ he said.
‘You brave enough to try telling her what she’d want?’ said Zoe, with a slow smile. Piper smiled back at her. He was like her reflection.
*
At each settlement we passed on the journey to the Sunken Shore, we did our best to spread the word about the Council’s plans for tanking Omegas. Above all, we tried to warn them away from turning themselves in to refuges. These huge, secure camps were supposed to be the Council’s protection for struggling Omegas – a place where any Omega would be given food and shelter, in exchange for their labour. They were a last resort for Omegas, and a reassurance for the Alphas themselves. A guarantee that however much they might restrict Omegas to blighted land, and however high they raised their tithes, we would not take them with us into starvation. But for years now, those who entered the refuge gates had not been allowed to leave. The refuges were expanding rapidly, and had become nothing more than tank complexes.
But time and again, when we tried to pass on this news at settlements, we were met with silence. Wary stares and crossed arms. I remembered how Kip and I had started the fire outside New Hobart: how it had taken on its own momentum as it built and spread. Spreading the word of the Council’s tanks was more like trying to light a fire in rain, with sodden green twigs. It wasn’t the kind of tale you could just share with a stranger in a tavern, as if it were no more than gossip about a neighbour. We could only risk raising the topic with those who were sympathetic to the resistance – and who would admit to that, after the massacre on the island? The Council, after years of denying that the island existed, was now spreading the word of the island’s defeat. The blood on its streets had rendered it safe: a cautionary tale, rather than a threat.
And the cautionary tale was working. People were warier than ever. When we approached settlements, people straightened in the fields and watched us coming, their hands firmly on their pitchforks and spades. We ventured into Drury, a large Omega town, but both times we entered taverns the noisy conversations stopped, as if the sound were a lamp suddenly extinguished. At every table, people turned to the door to assess us. Their loud conversations never resumed – whispers and mutterings replaced them. Some people would push back their chairs and leave
