no doubt: many had already been filled. Hundreds of lives submerged in that thick, viscous liquid. The cloying sweetness of that fluid, creeping into their eyes and ears, their noses, their mouths. The silencing of lives, with nothing to hear but the hum of machines.
Almost all of the refuge’s sprawling complex was entombed within the walls. But at the eastern edge was a section of farmed land, surrounded by a wooden fence. It was too high to climb easily, and the posts were too closely spaced for a person to slip through, but there was room enough to show the crops in their orderly lines, and the workers there, busy with hoes amongst the beets and marrows. Perhaps twenty of them, all Omegas, bent over their work. The marrows had grown fat – each one larger than the last few meals that Piper, Zoe and I had eaten.
‘They’re not all tanked, at least,’ Zoe said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘That’s what, six acres of crops?’ Piper said. ‘Look at the size of the place – especially with that new building. Our records on the island showed that thousands of people have turned themselves in at the refuges each year. More than ever, lately, since the bad harvest and the tithe increases. This refuge alone would have upwards of five thousand people. No way they’re being fed from those fields – it’d barely be enough to feed the guards.’
‘It’s a display,’ I said. ‘Like a minstrel show, a pretty picture of what people think a refuge is. But it’s all for show, to keep people coming.’
There was something else about the refuge that unsettled me. I searched and searched for it, until I realised that it was an absence, not a presence. It was the almost total lack of sound. Piper had said that there were thousands of people within those walls. I thought of the sound of the New Hobart market, or of the island’s streets. The constant noise of the children at Elsa’s holding house. But the only sounds reaching us from the refuge were the strikes of the workers’ hoes on the frost-hardened earth. There was no background hum of voices, and I could sense no movement within the buildings. I recalled the tank chamber I’d seen at Wyndham, where the only sound had been the buzz of the Electric. All those throats stoppered with tubes like corks in bottles.
There was movement on the road that led east past the refuge. It wasn’t mounted soldiers – just three walkers, moving slowly, and laden with packs.
As they drew closer, we could see they were Omegas. The shorter of the men had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other man limped heavily, one twisted leg gnarled like driftwood. Between them walked a child. I’d have guessed he was no older than seven or eight, although he was so thin that his age was hard to tell. He looked down as he walked, guided only by his hand held tightly by the tall man.
Their heads looked too large on their thin bodies. But it was their packs that pained me most. Those bundles, tightly wrapped, would have been carefully chosen. A few treasured possessions, and all the things they thought they’d need, in the new life they’d embarked upon. The taller of the men had a shovel across his shoulders. From the other man’s pack hung two cooking pans, clattering with each step.
‘We need to stop them,’ I said. ‘Tell them what’s waiting for them in there.’
‘It’s too late,’ Piper said. ‘The guards would see us. It would all be over.’
‘And even if we could get to them without being seen, what could we say?’ Zoe said. ‘They’d think we’re mad. Look at us.’ I looked from Zoe to Piper, and down at myself. We were dirty and half-starved. Our clothes were ragged, and had never shed the grey stain of the deadlands.
‘Why would they trust us?’ Piper said. ‘And what can we offer them? Once, we could have offered them safety on the island, or at least the resistance network. Now, the island’s gone, and the network’s collapsing by the day.’
‘It’s still better than the tanks,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ Piper said. ‘But they won’t. How could we even begin to explain the tanks to them?’
A gate in the stone wall opened. Three Council soldiers in red tunics stepped forward, to await the new arrivals. They stood casually, arms crossed, waiting. And I was struck once again by the ruthless efficiency of Zach’s plan. The tithes did the work for him, driving the desperate Omegas to the very refuges that their tithes had helped to build. Inside, the tanks would swallow them, and they would never emerge.
To the east, in the field behind the wooden palings, I saw a sudden movement. One of the workers was waving. He had run close to the fence and was waving frantically to the travellers on the road. He swung both arms back the way the walkers had come. There was no mistaking his meaning: Away. Away. There was such a gulf between the violence of the action, and the silence in which it was conducted. I didn’t know whether he was a mute, or whether he was just trying to avoid the notice of the guards. The other workers in the field were watching him – a woman took a few steps towards him, perhaps to help him, perhaps to stop him signalling. Either way, she froze, looking over her shoulder.
A soldier was running from the wooden building behind the fields. He tackled the waving man quickly, felling him with a blow to the back of the head. By the time a second guard had reached them, the Omega was on the ground. They dragged his motionless body back to the building and out of sight. Three other soldiers emerged into the field, one walking along the inside of the fence, staring at the remaining workers, who bent quickly back to their tasks. From a distance the whole thing had been like a shadowplay, unfolding quickly and in silence.
It was over in moments, the soldiers’ response so efficient that I didn’t think that the new arrivals even saw the disturbance. Their heads were still down, and they were walking steadily towards the soldiers waiting at the gate, just fifty feet away. Even if they had seen the man’s warning, would it have saved them if they’d turned and run? The guards could have overtaken them in no time, even on foot. Perhaps the warning had been futile – but I admired it nonetheless, and winced to think of what would be happening to the waving man now.
The two men and the boy reached the gate. They paused there, in a brief conversation with the guards. One of the guards held out his hand for the shovel that the tall Omega carried; he handed it over. The three of them stepped forward and the soldiers began to drag the gates closed. The taller of the Omega men turned back to stare along the plain. He couldn’t even see me, but I found myself raising my hand, and I echoed the frantic wave of the farming man. Away. Away. It was pointless – my body’s instinct, as futile and as unstoppable as a drowner’s underwater gasp for air. The gates were already closing, and the man turned away and stepped into the refuge. The gates clashed shut behind him.
We could not save them. Already more would be on their way. In settlements nearby, they would be weighing the decision, and thinking of what they might pack. Closing the doors of houses to which they would never return. And this was only a single refuge – all over the land there were more, each one being equipped with its tanks. Piper’s map, on the island, had shown nearly fifty refuges. Each one, now, a complex of living death. I couldn’t look away from the new building. It would have been intimidating even if I didn’t know what it contained. Now that I did, the building was a monument to horror. Only when Piper nudged me, and began to pull me deeper into the copse, did my lungs stutter back into breath, a juddering intake of air.
*
A few miles from the refuge, Piper thought he saw a movement through the scrub to the east. But by the time he got there he could find only some trampled grass, and no trail to follow in the dry terrain. The next day, when Zoe was taking the watch while Piper and I slept in the cover of a hollow, she heard a chaffinch’s call, and woke us both, whispering that early winter was the wrong season for a chaffinch to sing, and that it could have
