The Refuge Song (6 page)

I was amazed that he could tell so much just from the sound of their movements, but I knew what he meant. I'd noted the same thing when I met Piper for the first time on the island: the unabashed way that he held himself. Most people on the island had begun to shed the diffidence that the mainland stamped on Omegas, but Piper wore none of it. Even now, thin and with the knees of his trousers blackened and fraying, he moved with the same loose-limbed confidence as he always had.

The man turned back to Piper. “You don't move like an Omega, any more than the Alpha lady does. But if you're on the road with an Alpha, I'm guessing your story's not an ordinary one.”

“You heard what they said: their story's not our business,” said the woman, pulling his arm. “We should go.”

“Surely we've covered enough miles for a rest?” he said, planting his staff in front of him.

“Why are you so keen to stick around?” Zoe asked him. “Most Omegas keep well clear of us. Of me, anyway.”

“I told you,” he said. “I'm a bard. I collect stories, the way some people collect coins, or trinkets. It's my trade. And even a blind man can see that there's a story here.”

“It's a story we can't share with just anybody,” said Piper. “It'd mean trouble for us, as you well know.”

“I'm not one to talk to Council patrols, if that's what you mean,” said the man. “Even a bard gets a hard time from the Council these days. They're no friends of mine.”

“There's talk that the Council wants to stop Omegas from being bards at all,” the woman added. “It's all the traveling around that they don't like. They like to keep tabs on us.”

“I'd challenge the best of the Alpha bards to play as well as me,” said the man, flourishing his extra fingers.

“The soldiers would have your fingers off if they heard you say that,” said the woman.

“We're not about to tell them,” said Piper. “And if you can keep quiet about having seen us here, I don't see why we can't camp together for the day.”

The woman and Zoe still looked wary, but the blind man smiled.

“Then let's make camp. I could use a rest. I'm Leonard, by the way. And this is Eva.”

“I won't tell you our names,” said Piper. “But I won't lie to you, at least, and give false names.”

“Glad to hear it,” Leonard said. Eva sat next to him and began pulling their things from her rucksack. She had some nuggets of coal wrapped in waxed paper and still dry.

“Fine,” said Zoe. “But we need to cook quickly—we're still too close to the road to risk a fire once this fog's cleared.”

While Piper stoked the fire and Zoe sat sharpening her knives, I joined Leonard on the log.

“You said the others didn't move like Omegas.” I tried to keep my voice low enough that the others wouldn't hear. “What about me?”

“You neither,” he said.

“But I don't feel like them. They've always been so—” I paused. “So sure. So certain about everything.”

“I didn't say you were like them. I just said you didn't walk like other Omegas.” He shrugged. “Girl, you're hardly here.”

“What do you mean?”

He paused, and gave a laugh. “You walk like you think the earth begrudges you a space to plant your feet.”

I thought of the moment after Kip's death, when Zach had found me slumped on the platform at the top of the silo. The air had been so heavy. If Zach hadn't begged me to run, to save his own skin, I doubted I'd have managed to drag myself upright and leave. All these weeks and all these miles later, I hadn't realized that I was still hauling the weight of the sky with each step.

chapter 7

We ate the rabbits, as well as some foraged mushrooms and greens that Eva pulled from her bag.

“Are you a seer as well?” I asked her while we ate.

She snorted. “Hardly.”

“Sorry,” I said. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a seer. “I just couldn't see your mutation.”

Leonard's face had turned serious.

“She has the most feared mutation of all,” he said. “I'm surprised you haven't spotted it already.”

There was a long pause. I scanned Eva again but could see nothing unusual. What could be more feared than being a seer, with its promise of madness?

Leonard leaned forward, and gave a stage whisper. “Red hair.”

Our laughter startled two blackbirds that took off screeching.

“Look more closely,” Eva said. She turned her head to the side and
lifted her thick braid. There, nestled into the back of her neck, was a second mouth. She opened it briefly, baring two crooked teeth.

“Only shame is that I can't sing out of it,” she said, letting her braid drop. “Then I wouldn't need Leonard for the harmonies, and I wouldn't have to put up with his grumbling.”

When the fire was extinguished and the sun risen, Leonard cleaned his hands carefully before he took up his guitar.

“Can't get rabbit grease on the strings,” he said, weaving his handkerchief between his clustered fingers.

“If you're going to be making a racket, I'd better keep watch,” said Zoe. “If anything comes along the road, we'll need to see them before they hear us.” She looked up at the tree above her. Piper dropped to kneel on one knee and she climbed, without speaking, onto his bent leg, balanced for a moment with a hand on his shoulder, and then jumped up to grasp the branch. She swung herself upward, feet pointed and body tucked. I could see what Leonard had meant, when he'd talked about the way she and Piper moved. The ease with which they inhabited their bodies.

When I envied Zoe, though, it wasn't her unbranded face I coveted, or her confidence. Not even her freedom from the visions that shredded my mind. It was the way that she and Piper moved together, without even speaking. The closeness that didn't require words. There'd been a time when Zach and I had been like that, long before we were split, and before he'd turned against me. But after all that had happened since, the intimacy of that shared childhood seemed as distant as the island. It was a place to which we could never return.

Eva took up her drum, and Leonard's right hand plucked at the strings, tickling the music out of the instrument, while the fingers of his left hand moved more slowly.

He'd been right, I knew, when he'd told me that he'd heard my
hesitant footsteps. I'd been taunting my body with cold and hunger. Avoiding every consolation, because there would be no consolation for the dead I'd left in my wake. But this music was a pleasure that I couldn't dodge. Like the ash that had plagued us in the east, the music would not be denied. I leaned back against a tree and allowed myself to listen.

It was more noise than we'd permitted ourselves for weeks. Our lives had become so muted. We crept at night, wincing at the breaking of twigs beneath our boots. We hid from patrols, and talked often in whispers. We were at risk, every moment, until it began to feel as though sound itself had become something we had to ration. Now, even the most flippant of the bards' songs felt like a small act of defiance: to hear the music ringing out. To permit ourselves something more than bare survival.

Some of the songs were slow and sad; others were raucous, the notes sizzling and jumping like corn kernels in a hot pan. Several had lyrics bawdy enough to set us all laughing. And when I glanced away from the fire, I saw that even Zoe's feet, hanging from the branch high in the tree, were swinging in time with the music.

“Did your twin have the talent for music as well?” I asked Leonard, when he and Eva stopped for a drink.

He shrugged. “All I have of her is a name on my registration papers. That and the town where we were born.” He fished the worn sheet of paper from his bag and waved it at me, laughing. “They can't make up their minds, the Council. Can't do enough to keep us separate, but then they make us carry our twins around in our pockets, everywhere we go.” He traced the paper as if he would feel the word under his fingertip. “
Elise
, it says. That's what Eva tells me—she can read a little. But that's my twin's name, on there somewhere.”

“And you don't remember anything about her at all?”

He shrugged again. “I was a baby when they sent me away. That's all I know of her: those marks on paper, that I can't even see.”

I thought again of Zach. What did I have of him, now? I had been thirteen when I was branded and sent away. Not long enough for me, and too long for him. During my years in the Keeping Rooms, he'd come to see me, but only rarely. When I'd last seen him, in the silo after Kip and the Confessor's deaths, he'd seemed fevered, frantic. He had been hissing, cut loose, like the electric wires that Kip and I had slashed.

When the next song started, my mind was still lingering in the silo with Zach, hearing again the tremor of terror in his voice when he'd told me to run. Eva had swapped her drum for a flute, so it was only Leonard's voice tracing the words. It was midmorning, the sun through the tree trunks casting stripes on the clearing. It took me a moment to realize what Leonard was singing about.

They came in dark ships

They came at night

They laid the Confessor's kiss

On each islander's throat with a knife.

Piper stood up. To my left, Zoe dropped quietly from the lookout tree to the ground. She moved closer to where we sat in a circle around the ashes.

“I heard they didn't kill them all,” Piper said.

Leonard stopped singing, but his fingers on the guitar never hesitated, the tune continuing to unfurl from his hands.

“Is that what you heard?” he said. The music played on. “Well, songs always exaggerate.”

He went back to the song.

They said there was no island

They said it wasn't true

But they came for the island in their dark ships

And they're coming next for you.

“You'd want to be careful who's listening, when you sing that song,” said Zoe. “You could bring down trouble.”

Leonard smiled. “And you haven't got trouble already, the three of you?”

“Who told you about the island?” said Piper.

“The Council themselves are putting the word out,” Leonard said. “Spreading the news that they found the island, crushed the resistance.”

“That song you're singing is hardly the Council's version, though,” said Piper. “What do you know of what happened there?”

“People talk to bards,” he said. “They tell us things.” He strummed a few more chords. “But I'm guessing you didn't need to be told about the island. I'm guessing you know more than I do about what happened there.”

Piper was silent. I knew that he was remembering. I'd seen it, too. Not only seen it, but heard the shouts and whimpers. Smelled the butcher's block scent of the streets.

“No song can describe it,” said Piper. “Let alone change it.”

“Maybe not,” said Leonard. “But a song can at least tell people about it. Tell them what the Council did to those people. Warn them what the Council's capable of.”

“And scare them away from getting involved with the resistance?” Zoe said.

“Perhaps,” said Leonard. “That's why the Council's telling their version. I like to think my version might do something different—perhaps help people to realize why the resistance is so necessary. All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.”

“If we gave you another story to tell,” I said, “you know it could be dangerous for you.”

“That's for us to decide,” Eva said.

Piper and Zoe didn't say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.

The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard's guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn't tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we'd destroyed with the Confessor.

When we'd finished, there was a long silence.

“There's good news in there, too,” Leonard said quietly. “About the Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from around there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumor that she'd been killed. But I hadn't dared to believe it.”

“It's true,” I said, looking away from him. I didn't want to see Leonard's answering smile. He didn't know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.

“And the rest of it—about the tanks. Is it really true?” said Eva.

Leonard answered her before we could.

“It's all true. Hell on earth, it's too far-fetched to make up.” He rubbed at his absent eyes. “It explains everything. Why the Council's been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They're pushing us toward the refuges.”

“And do you think you could put it in a song?” I said.

He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. “There's a song in your story, that's for sure, though it won't be a pretty one,” he
said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.

“Like Cass said: it'll be dangerous, spreading the word,” said Piper.

Leonard nodded. “True enough. But it's dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn't spread.”

“It's a lot to ask of you,” I said.

“You're not asking it of me,” Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke—his words were grave and quiet. “But you told me what you know. And now that I've heard it, I have an obligation.”

Ω

For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me:
No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this?
But mainly they didn't talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He'd pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.

Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading and rearranging. When Piper relieved me at the lookout post, I fell asleep listening to Leonard's singing, the graveled edge of his deep voice.

When I woke later, the moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Leonard was still playing. I walked down to the spring. The music followed me all the way to the water, which might be why Zoe didn't hear me coming. I saw her standing close to where the stream burst from the rock, about twenty feet ahead of me. She was leaning against a tree, one arm wrapped loosely around it, her head resting on the trunk as
she tilted her face upward. She swayed slightly to the music that filtered through the trees. Her eyes were closed.

I'd seen Zoe naked, when we washed at rivers. I'd seen her asleep. I'd even shared her dreams, her sleeping mind a window onto the sea. But I'd never seen her as unguarded as at that moment. I turned away, as if I'd seen something shameful, and began to retreat. She opened her eyes.

“Are you spying on me?”

“Just fetching water,” I said, lifting the empty water flask like a flag of surrender.

She turned back to the spring. When she spoke, she didn't look at me. “There used to be a bard who came through our parents' village, a few times a year. She played the violin like nobody you've ever seen. Piper and I were only tiny, then—we used to sneak out after bedtime to listen.”

She said nothing more. I hesitated before speaking—I was remembering her blade at my stomach, after she'd learned that I'd seen her dreams.

“If you want to talk—” I said, eventually.

“You're meant to be the expert on the future,” she interrupted, striding toward me and grabbing the flask. “Concentrate on that. That's what we need you for. Keep your nose out of my past.” She knelt at the spring and wrenched the stopper out before filling the flask.

We stood facing each other. I watched the water drip from her wet hand, and I tried to come up with words that she couldn't throw back at me.

Before I could speak, the music stopped suddenly. From up the hill, Piper was calling to us. Zoe strode past me and didn't look back.

“The song's not finished yet,” Leonard warned us, when we were gathered around him and Eva. A fog had descended with the darkness, and Piper had rekindled the fire. “It'll change, too,” he added, “as we
travel, and as other bards take it up. If a song's alive enough, it changes.” I remembered the different versions of songs that I'd heard. The song about the blast, which changed from bard to bard, or from season to season.

Leonard began quietly, his fingers strumming a series of almost cheerful chords on the guitar. There was none of the intricate fingerpicking that had impressed me when he'd performed for us earlier. “I've kept it simple,” he said, as if he could see me staring at his fingers. “If you want it to catch on, it has to be something that any bard could play, without fifteen fingers.”