General’s better established than either of them,’ Piper went on. ‘They all started young, not that it’s unusual in the Council. That place is a snake pit – plenty of Councillors don’t live long. But The General’s the sharpest of the lot, politically. She got her start working for The Commander. The rumour was that she got her place by poisoning him.’
I remembered The Commander’s death being announced when I was still living in the settlement. Untimely, the Council’s bulletin had said. Timely enough for The General, it seemed.
‘The General’s never disputed those stories,’ Piper said. ‘True or not, it suits her to be feared. Every time she’s come up against opposition, it’s ended badly – and never for her. Scandals, disgrace, backstabbings – sometimes literally. One by one, everyone who’s opposed her has been silenced, or driven out. The only reason The Judge lasted as long as he did was because he was useful to her and the other two – a popular figurehead for them to use.’
‘Why her, as the new leader,’ I said, ‘and not The Ringmaster, or Zach?’
Piper was squatting, his elbow on his knee. ‘The Ringmaster came to the Council via the army,’ he said. ‘He’s got a huge following amongst the soldiers, but he’s less of a political operator than the other two. They need him – he’s been there longer, and he’s got the common touch, and the loyalty of the soldiers, who see him as one of their own. But the word is that he’s less radical. Don’t get me wrong – he’s still notorious. He runs the army, for one thing, so when it comes to enforcing Council rule, he’s been the driving force for years. But although he’s brutal, he’s not the one driving the big reforms. Most of the worst changes – pushing the settlements further and further from decent land; the tithe increases – they seem to have originated with The General. And the tightening up of registrations came from The Reformer. Probably The Confessor too, working behind the scenes with him.’
‘And what do you know about how Zach fits in to it all?’
‘Less than you, probably,’ Piper said.
Once, I would have agreed with him. I would have argued that I knew Zach better than anyone. Now, there was a distance between us that I couldn’t breach. Between us lay The Confessor’s body, and Kip’s. All the silent people floating in those round glass tanks.
Piper continued. ‘The Reformer’s always seemed like an outsider – it comes from being split late, and not raised in Wyndham like the other two. But he had The Confessor, and that made him hugely powerful. I think the tanks are his pet project – and the database, too. He’s never been smooth, like The General is – she can charm as well as intimidate. The Reformer’s just as ruthless, though, in his own way.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ I said.
Piper nodded. ‘But now that he’s lost The Confessor, allegiances might have shifted.’
I remembered how Zach had let me escape, after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths. I could still hear the waver in his voice, as he’d shouted at me to go before the soldiers arrived. If they find out you were involved, that’ll be it for me. Was it The General or The Ringmaster he feared? Or both? Before the silo, I might have convinced myself that, on some level, Zach had wanted me set free. But whatever part of me could have believed that had been left on the silo floor, along with Kip.
‘We need to get to Sally’s quickly,’ Piper said. ‘We don’t have a choice. From there, we start mustering the resistance, seeking the ships. They’ve wiped out the island; they’ve got rid of The Judge; they’re dismantling the resistance network, bit by bit.’
The sky above us, sulky with clouds, took on a new and pressing weight, and I felt that the three of us were very small. Just three people on the wind-scoured plain, against all the Council’s machinations. Each night, as we trudged through the long grass, there were more and more tanks being readied in the refuges. Who knew how many they’d tanked already. And more people were arriving at the refuges every day.
I couldn’t claim that I understood Zach anymore, but I knew enough to know this: it would never be enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all tanked.
The next night, well after midnight, I began to sense something. I was jittery, and found myself scanning the darkness around us as we walked. Once, when Zach and I were little, wasps had made a nest in the eaves of our house, right outside our bedroom. For days, until Dad found the nest, a buzzing and scraping had kept us awake, lying in our small beds and whispering of ghosts. What I felt now was like that: a high-pitched buzz at the edge of my hearing, a message that I couldn’t interpret, but that soured the night air.
Then we passed the first sign for the refuge. We were about halfway between Wyndham and the southern coast, skirting the wagon road. But we passed close enough to the road to see the sign, and crept nearer to read it. The wooden board was painted in large white letters:
Your Council welcomes you to Refuge 9 – 6 miles south.
Securing our mutual wellbeing.
Safety and plenty, earned by fair labour.
Refuges: sheltering you in difficult times.
It was illegal for Omegas to attend schools, but many managed to scrape together the basics of reading, learning at home, as I had, or in illicit schools. I wondered how many of the Omegas who passed the refuge’s sign could read it at all, and how many of those would believe its message.
‘In difficult times,’ Piper scoffed. ‘No mention of the fact that it’s their tithes, or pushing Omegas out to blighted land, that make the times so hard.’
‘Or that if the difficult times pass, it makes no difference,’ added Zoe. ‘Once people are in there, they’re in for good.’
We all knew what that meant: the Omegas floating in the nearly-death of the tanks. Trapped in the horrifying safety of those glass bellies, while their Alpha counterparts lived on unencumbered.
We kept clear of the road, following it from a distance amongst the cover of gullies and trees. As we approached the refuge I found myself slowing, my movements sluggish as we drew closer to the source of my disquiet. By dawn, when the refuge itself came into view, walking towards it felt as though I was wading upstream through a river. In the growing light, we crept as close as we dared, until we were peering down at the refuge from a copse at the top of a rise only a hundred feet away.
The refuge was bigger than I could have imagined – it was the size of a small town. The wall surrounding it was higher even than the wall the Council erected around New Hobart. More than fifteen feet high, it was built of brick rather than wood, with tangled strands of wire along the top like nests thrown together by monstrous birds. Within the wall, we could glimpse the tops of buildings, a jumble of different structures.
Piper pointed to where a huge building loomed on the western edge. It took up at least half of the refuge, and its walls still had the yellow tinge of fresh-cut pine, bright against the weathered grey wood of the other buildings.
‘No windows,’ Zoe said.
It was only a few syllables, but we all knew what it meant. Within
