The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

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      ‘It’s not just that,’ Piper said, stepping back again. ‘You can watch Zach in a way that we can’t. You know what happened when you were travelling with Zoe.’

      Zoe’s face hardened at the reminder. In those weeks of sleeping close together, I had glimpsed her dreams. I’d never meant to, but each morning I’d woken with the memory of her dreams as well as my own. That was how I’d discovered her endless scouring of the sea for the drowned Lucia.

      ‘I can’t read minds,’ I said. ‘It’s not as tidy as that.’

      ‘I know that,’ Piper replied. ‘But anything that you can glean from him could still help us.’

      Elsa spoke. ‘I’ll take him.’ She had stepped forward a little, chin high. ‘I can’t promise I’ll be civil to him. Or even that I won’t spit in his food. But if it’s the best way of helping, and of keeping Cass safe, I’ll take him.’

      ‘You don’t need to do this,’ I told her. ‘It’s asking too much.’

      She shook her head. ‘I want you safe, and with me.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s just a side effect.’

      I remembered how The General had said that Omegas were only side effects of Alphas – the same phrase that had been used in the Ark papers – and I smiled to hear Elsa use it now, to describe Zach.

      For half a day the holding house was noisy with the sound of soldiers fitting bars on the windows, and a thicker door for the dormitory, with bolts on the outside. Elsa said nothing, just followed the soldiers with her broom and scolded them when they left iron filings and nails on the floor. A roster was drawn up, for the soldiers that we trusted, to watch the front of the holding house while Zoe and Piper guarded it from within. It wasn’t a long list. Simon, and his long-time adviser, Violet, were on it. Having seen her come to blows with Piper once, I trusted her candour, and her courage – and since their fight, she’d shown herself loyal to him. Crispin, who had served Simon and Piper on the island, and ever since, was on the list too.

      The Ringmaster had offered us some of his senior soldiers as well. I doubted that we had a choice, but in the end I was glad of those he’d chosen: Tash, a tall woman from his personal guard, who spoke little but met my eyes without the disgust or evasiveness of many of the Alpha soldiers. Adam, a bluff man who was quick to laugh, and who, when stationed at the holding house door, seemed to laugh and chat as readily with Elsa and Sally as with his fellow Alphas.

      Paloma and Zoe shifted their things out of the dormitory, to sleep in the small room Kip and I had once shared on the other side of the courtyard. Piper moved out too, dragging his bed out to the courtyard, under the covered porch by the main door.

      ‘It’s warm enough now,’ he’d said, over the scraping of the bed on the floorboards. ‘And I’ll be able to keep an eye on Zoe and Paloma’s door, as well as the dormitory.’

      That was true – but we both knew that he also wanted to avoid sharing a room with Zach. I looked at the two drag marks left on the floor by the legs of his bed. It would just be me and Zach now, alone each night in the dormitory.

      So he came. They kept the shackles on his wrists, and Piper and Zoe made sure that one of them was always in the holding house. At night, in the dormitory, his shackles were fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. I had measured it out myself: the chain reached just far enough for him to lie comfortably in bed, but fell short of my bed on the opposite wall.

      During the day, when Zoe or Piper was nearby, his shackles were kept on but we let him take some exercise in the courtyard, or eat with the rest of us.

      ‘I don’t want him being waited on, like he’s still in the Council chambers,’ Zoe said. ‘And I’d rather have him where I can see him.’

      The clanking of Zach’s shackles quickly became a familiar sound in the holding house.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again and again to Elsa, whenever we were alone. ‘I’m sorry that you have to see him every day.’

      She just smiled at me, and gripped my hand. As for Zach, she never spoke to him, but she met his gaze squarely, and filled a bowl for him at mealtimes and placed it on the table. It was a kind of courage I’d never seen before, the way she faced him each day, in her home, where the children he’d killed used to live.

      I wondered, at first, how Zach himself would react to being in the holding house. Most of the children’s possessions had been destroyed in the raid when they’d been taken, and half the holding house had been trashed. But the signs of them were everywhere. Behind the dormitory door, a row of hooks barely at hip height, where the children used to hang their winter coats. In Elsa’s smashed-up kitchen, the handful of cups that had survived the raid were all the children’s, and so we drank each day from the tiny cups, our lips where their lips had been.

      If any of these things made Zach uneasy, he never showed any sign. I watched him at dinner, that first night. He wrapped his long fingers around the small cup, drank, and left it on the table for Elsa to tidy away. He never mentioned the children, who were absent and present everywhere.

      *

      The first night, alone in the dormitory, Zach and I lay on either side of the long, narrow room. He had his back to the wall, facing me. I blew out the candle so I wouldn’t have to look at him any more.

      ‘Light the candle again,’ he said.

      ‘Go to sleep.’

      His chain clanked a few times as he shifted. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

      ‘Get used to it,’ I said, rolling over. ‘This isn’t the Council chambers. We don’t have an endless supply of candles.’

      ‘I never used to mind the dark,’ he said. ‘But since you flooded the Ark, I hate it.’

      I remembered it too: the total darkness of those corridors. Black water rising in black air.

      ‘I only just made it out,’ he said. His breathing grew faster at the memory. I listened unwillingly, my arms crossed over my chest. I had enough of my own memories of the flooded Ark, and no time to waste on his.

      ‘Even when I made it to the surface,’ he went on, ‘it wasn’t over. The river burst through the western door. I was nearly caught up by it. Half the camp was swept away. At least four of our soldiers died. Men were tangled up in the canvas when the tents were washed away.’

      More bodies to add to the tally of the dead. There were so many people that I had killed, directly or indirectly. Sometimes I felt tangled in them, like the soldiers drowning under the sodden canvas.

      ‘A hell of a way to die,’ Zach continued.

      ‘You’ve condemned many people to worse,’ I said.

      He ignored me. ‘I dream about it,’ he went on. ‘If it’s dark, I dream about the Ark. The water in the corridors, and that flash flood by the western door.’

      I tried not to listen, but I was remembering how we used to talk at night when we were children, while our parents were downstairs arguing about what they could do about us, their unsplit children. We’d lain there and whispered across the gap between our beds, just as we were doing now.

      ‘I have worse dreams,’ I СКАЧАТЬ