The Refuge Song (32 page)

“That headland, there.” He jerked his head to the north, to a finger of land that pointed accusingly at the ocean. “That's Cape Bleak. It doesn't look like it, but on the northern face there's a path down to a small cove. When courier ships from the island were due to come this way, our scouts on the mainland would light a signal fire on the point, to let them know it was safe to send in the landing craft.”

It was full dark by the time we reached the tip of the headland. The wood that we'd scavenged was damp, and Piper had to tip the last of the lamp oil on the mound to coax it into flames.

We waited all night, but there was no answering gleam of flame from the sea—only an occasional flash of white where the waves broke below the cliffs. The cries of gulls scraped at the night.

At dawn, the fire had subsided into ashes.

Piper exhaled as he rubbed his face with his hand

“So we try again tomorrow night,” he said. But I noted the slump of his shoulders, the set of his mouth.

We should have learned it after the island, and after the tanks of dead children in New Hobart. After Zach had thrown the ships' figureheads at our feet. And after the Ark, which held nothing for us but another blast. Nothing was more dangerous than hope.

Ω

We sat for a long time. We should have been sleeping, but neither of us wanted to go back to the cave, and to be cramped in there with nothing to speak of but the ship that might never come. So we waited on the cliff, watching the light from behind us spread over the sea.

In my vision, the ship had cut cleanly through the water. The ship that we saw, rounding the point, moved sluggishly. It lurched when the wind picked up, wallowing to the left. The mast was crooked, and the sail puckered where it had been stitched. The figurehead wasn't the only thing missing; all along the prow the wood was gouged. Sections had been patched with tar and boards, but the wounds still showed.

People were busy on the deck, and another was clambering in the rigging. But one figure was motionless at the bow, hands on the rail.

A whistle came to us. The wind on the headland was gusty, and it stretched the notes and then snatched them away. But I'd heard enough to know. Piper stood, and we both ran to the cliffside path, while the chorus of Leonard's song was carried past us on the wind.

chapter 39

By the time we'd scrambled down to the rocky cove, a dinghy had been lowered and was halfway to shore. Piper waded thigh-deep into the water to meet it. I watched while he embraced Zoe, his arm so tight around her waist that for a moment he lifted her, and the other sailors had to move quickly to steady the small boat. Then he lowered her into the water beside him. She smiled as she walked toward the beach, where I waited. I wished I could have stopped time there: Zoe smiling, Piper grinning behind her in the water. I didn't want to speak—our news was too grim to give to her, on this bright morning, when she'd just found us.

“I thought you'd gone east,” I said. “Got away from all of this.” From me, I meant.

She shook her head. “I was going to.” She was unabashed. “For the first day I did head eastward.” She paused, squinting into the glare of the sun on the water. “But then I kept thinking about Xander.”

Piper was listening, too, but Zoe wasn't looking at either of us. She was staring beyond
The Rosalind
at the low waves.

“I kept thinking of how he was always telling us
The Rosalind
was coming in, and how we'd dismissed him.” She spoke very quietly. “I thought I should try, at least. That one of us should believe in him.”

I watched her staring at the waves, and I knew that it wasn't only Xander who she had been keeping faith with, but Lucia, whom nobody had listened to, at the end.

The crew had jumped from the dinghy, and three of them began to haul it on to the beach. The fourth sailor limped as he waded to Piper. They shook hands, the man grasping Piper's hand with both of his.

“This is Thomas,” Piper said, turning to me. “Captain of
The Rosalind
.”

“We didn't see the signal fire until just before dawn,” he said. “I wasn't sure if we'd get here in time to catch you.”

“We thought you'd been taken,” I said.

“We nearly were,” Thomas said. “We hit a bad summer storm in the western straits, barely a month after we'd left the island. We got off fairly lightly, but
The Evelyn
was driven aground on a reef. The damage was bad, and half of their water tanks were wrecked too, so Hobb had to turn back.” He looked grim. “Zoe told us about what's happened: the island. The figureheads. What the General said, about Hobb and the crew being captured. They must have got back just after the Council seized the island. Probably sailed right into the Council's fleet.”

“And your figurehead?” said Piper, turning to look at the ship's patched prow. “I saw it myself. How the hell did they get hold of that?”

“When we eventually came back, we didn't make it back to the island—a Council ship gave chase just outside the reef. Got close enough to do some damage to our mast, but we managed to lose them in the western reef and get clear. We knew then that the island must have fallen. We limped back to the mainland, and came here first, like we'd
agreed. But there was no signal, no sign of anyone from the resistance. After that we tried all the usual places, but there were no signal fires, and more and more Council ships about. In Chantler Bay there were three of them at anchor—we only got past there unseen because it was dark. The winter storms were well and truly starting by then, and we got desperate—even dropped anchor by Atkin Point and sent four scouts inland to the safe house, but it was burned out. Had to keep moving—they're patrolling the coast more tightly than ever. We'd been spotted again, and had one of their brigs on our tail, when the big storm blew in from the north, a month back. Seas as high as I've seen. We shook off the Council ship, but lost two men. Ran aground on some rocks, just off Chantler Bay, started taking on water. That's when we lost the figurehead, and half the prow with it. The brig that was chasing us must have come across it. Who knows if they really thought we'd gone down, or if they just wanted you to think we had?

“When the storm was over, we couldn't even find somewhere safe to beach and fix the hull. I had to keep the crew on the pumps night and day.”

“I came here first,” Zoe said, taking over the story. “Right after I'd left you. Waited a few nights. Tried Chantler Bay, but drew a blank. But a fisherwoman in a tavern there said she'd seen a ship, listing badly, and heading south. She said it wasn't one of the Council's, but too big to be a local fishing boat. I went down to Siddle Point, lit the signal fire on the old lookout post, three nights running. A patrol came through, too, on the second day, passed not a hundred yards from where I was hiding. I was about to give up. I could hardly believe it, on the third night, when I saw the lantern flashing back at me.

“When I was aboard, we sailed back here.” I thought of Zoe's nightly dreams, and knew what it must have cost her, to take to the sea again. “The patrol ships hardly ever come this far north,” she went on, “so we
were able to beach
The
Rosalind
in Coldharbor Bay. It took almost a week just to fix the hull.” She looked at me and Piper. “If you'd come a few days later, you'd have missed us. I was going to head back to New Hobart, to Simon, and leave the crew here to guard Paloma.”

“Is that another ship?” I said.

Zoe shook her head.

Ω

They rowed us out to
The Rosalind
. Two sailors threw down the rope ladder. When they saw Piper, they jumped to attention, saluting him. Thomas led us toward the prow. The sailors stood in silence as they watched us pass. Their clothes were bleached by sun and salt, and they looked as battered as
The Rosalind
itself. Many were thin, and some had the blue-red blotching of scurvy on their arms and hands.

A group of sailors was seated by the prow, where the stump of the broken figurehead jutted at the sky. Only one of them stood as we approached.

She left the group, limping slightly as she walked toward us. At first I thought one foot was bare, though it made no sense, on the frosty deck. But as she drew closer I could see that the bare leg was false. Not a wooden stump, such as I'd seen often enough. Instead, it was made from a smooth, harder material with a fleshlike texture, carefully crafted to look like a foot, although it didn't bend at the ankle when she walked.

It wasn't the uncanny replica foot that made me stare at her. Nor was it the fact that the other sailors all wore the blue of the island's guards, and she did not. There was something else different that I could feel: a thinness about her, an insubstantiality that I couldn't grasp. As though she would cast no shadow.

She was solid enough—when I shook her hand, her grip was strong.

“I'm Paloma,” she said, turning from me to shake Piper's hand. But I
still couldn't stop staring. Piper seemed oblivious—why didn't he flinch from her as I did?

“She doesn't have a twin,” I said. I heard the fear in my own voice. I hadn't meant it to be so obvious. But it was as if I could see a wound on her that the others couldn't see. She was incomplete. Half a person.

“None of us do, in the Scattered Islands,” the woman said. “I gather that you call it Elsewhere.”

Ω

Thomas and Paloma told us their story first.
The Rosalind
hadn't found Elsewhere, despite a tortuous journey through the northern ice straits, farther than any other resistance ship had ever traveled. Instead, Paloma's ship had found them.

“There used to be machines for sending and receiving messages,” she said, “even after the detonations. But no messages ever came and we never knew whether anyone was out there to hear ours. Then the communication machines stopped working altogether. So the Confederacy's been sending out ships, almost every year, for as long as anyone can remember.”

The cadence of her voice was unlike any I'd heard before. I shouldn't have been surprised. Even within the mainland, there were variations in accents. When I'd met people from the east, close to the deadlands, their voices usually marked them as decisively as their ragged clothes or starved faces. A drawling tone, some words musically elongated. Up north, people shortened their vowels. My own father had spoken in the slightly clipped accent of the northern regions, where he'd been raised. Paloma's accent was far stronger than any I'd encountered. It made familiar words strange, stretching them in unexpected directions.

“When we found
The Rosalind
, my crew sailed back to Broken Harbor to report the news,” she said. “But two of us came aboard your ship,
to be the first emissaries. Then Caleb died in the storm.” She looked down. “So it's just me now.”

Silence fell. Where could we begin? What questions came first, when encountering a new world? It had felt so audacious even to dream of Elsewhere that I'd never allowed myself to give the dreams detail, or to imagine what people from Elsewhere might be like. This twinless woman, pale and alone, was more like us than I'd imagined, but more alien than I could grasp.

Thomas was showing Piper a map, he and Paloma bending over it to gesture toward Elsewhere's location, somewhere beyond the map's edge. Zoe stood nearby, watching.

I couldn't face being there when Piper told Zoe and Paloma about the Ark, and what we'd discovered there. It was cowardly of me, perhaps. Paloma's twinless state was like a high-pitched sound that only I could hear, and when I was standing close to her, my teeth clenched tight and my breath evaded me. I left them talking, and walked back to the stern, to share my unease with the restless sea.

Ω

After a while, I heard Zoe's footsteps on the deck.

“Piper told us about what you found in the Ark,” she said. “About the blast.”

I nodded, still staring at the water.

“I'm glad,” she said, stepping to the railing beside me. I raised my eyebrows. “Not about the blast, obviously,” she went on. “But I'm glad I know now. It makes me understand Lucia more, I think.” She paused. “Why the visions of the blast damaged her the way they did. On some level, she must have known that it was coming.”

I nodded, thinking of Xander, too, and his scattered mind. He, Lucia, and I had all borne witness to what was coming.

“Piper told me about Kip, too,” said Zoe. “That you found him.”

“It wasn't Kip that I found,” I said. “It was just his body.”

She offered me no words of comfort, and I was grateful. She had dispensed enough death herself to know that it wasn't something that could be softened. Instead, she stood with me and watched the sea.

“Even though he looked so different,” I went on, “it was the first time, since The Confessor told me about his past, that I could remember him properly.”

“It wasn't Kip she was telling you about,” she said impatiently. “Any more than it was him who you found in the Ark. Why don't you get it? Whoever he was when they put him into that tank, he wasn't the same person when they took him out. Nobody could be.”

She turned to face me. “The Confessor didn't know him,” she said. “That was her big mistake. She let you and Kip find her, in the silo that night, because she thought her twinship with him meant you'd be helpless. She thought she was drawing you into a trap. The Kip that she grew up with wouldn't have done what he did. He wouldn't have jumped to save you.”

A gull swooped low over the water.

“If you assume that Kip's past defines him,” she said, “you'll be making the same mistake the Confessor made. And you'll be letting her take him from you twice.”

Farther out, beyond the breaking waves, the sea reflected the clouds. A doubled sky.

“I know what you're doing, when you focus on Kip's past,” she said. “Because I did it, too. I focused on the bad stuff, so I wouldn't have to mourn Lucia.”

She closed her eyes for a few moments. When she opened them, she spoke quietly. “Instead of dreaming about the sea every night, I wish I could dream about her. Not her death, or her madness, but who she actually was. About the way her nose wrinkled when she smiled. How she
could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. How, when she'd been sweating, the back of her neck smelled like pine shavings.” She gave half a smile. “The madness took her away from me, and then the sea did it again. But I betrayed her, too, when I only remembered the bad parts. I should have remembered her properly, even though it's harder.”

Ω

The sun was high before Piper came to join us at the railing. He stood on the other side of me, his feet planted wide on the shifting deck.

“Did Paloma tell you?” Zoe asked him.

He nodded and turned to me. “She confirmed what we heard in the Ark: they found a way to end the twinning. Just like the people in the Ark did, except that in the Scattered Islands they actually went through with it. It's not simple, and it's not a magic cure. It's the same as it said in Joe's papers: no fatal bond, but everyone has mutations. Maybe they always will have. And they can't undo existing twins—only the next generation. But we already knew that.”

“And you've told her about the Council,” I said, “and the blast?”

He nodded. “I don't know if she's taken it in properly yet. But she said she's staying. She said she wants to help.”

My life was a map of other people's sacrifices. Bodies marked it like wayposts. Now all of Elsewhere was in jeopardy.

“There's something else,” Piper said. “Thomas told me something, about Leonard's song. You know Thomas said he sent some of his sailors inland, to the safe house? They heard the song in a settlement along the way. And that's how they first heard about the battle of New Hobart—there was a verse about how the Council was defeated there.”

“That wasn't in the song,” I said. “Leonard wrote it a month before we freed New Hobart.”

Piper smiled. “It's changing, like Leonard said it would. Growing. More and more people hearing it, and adding to it.”