The Fire Sermon

I was suddenly aware of the cold boards underfoot, and the night air on my bare arms.

‘You want to show you really care about me?’ he said. ‘Then tell them the truth. You could end it right away.’

‘Do you really want me sent away? It’s me. I’m not some strange creature. Forget what the Council says about contamination. It’s just me. You know me.’

‘You keep saying that. Why should I think I know you? You’ve never been honest with me. You never told me the truth. You made me figure it out for myself.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I said. Even admitting as much to him, alone in our room, was risky.

‘Because you didn’t trust me. You want to make out that we’re so close. But you’re the one who’s lied this whole time. You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth. All these years, you left me to wonder. To fear that it might be me who was the freak. And now you think I should trust you?’

I retreated to my bed. He was still staring at me. Could things ever have been different, if I’d trusted him with the truth? Could we have found a way to share the secret, to make our way together? Had he caught his distrust from me? Maybe that was the poison I’d been carrying – not the contamination of the blast that all Omegas bore, but the secret.

A tear had settled on the top of his upper lip. It glinted gold in the candlelight.

I didn’t want him to see the matching tear on my face. I reached out to the table and snuffed the flame.

‘It’s got to end,’ he whispered into the darkness. It was half a plea, half a threat.

*

His impatience to expose me grew with our father’s illness. Dad fell sick when we’d just turned thirteen. As with the previous year, there was no mention of our birthday – our age had become an increasingly shameful reminder of our unsplit state. That night, Zach had whispered across the bedroom: ‘You know what day it was today?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said. It was only a whisper, so it was hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic.

Two days later, Dad collapsed. Dad, who had always seemed as robust and solid as the huge oak cross-beam that ran the length of the kitchen ceiling. He hauled buckets of water up the well faster than anyone else in the village, and when Zach and I were smaller he could carry us both at once. He still could, I thought, except that he rarely touched us now. Then, in the middle of the paddock on a hot day, he stumbled to his knees. From where I sat, shelling peas on the stone wall at the front of our yard, I heard the shouts of the others working near him in the field.

That night, after the neighbours had carried him back to the cottage, our mother sent for Dad’s twin, Alice, from the Omega settlement up on the plain. Zach himself went with Mick in the bullock cart to fetch her, returning the next day with our aunt lying in the hay on the back of the cart. We’d never met her before, and looking at her, the only similarity I could see between her and Dad was the fever that currently slickened their flesh. She was thin, with long hair, darker than Dad’s. The coarse, brown fabric of her dress had been mended many times and was now flecked with hay. Beneath the strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead we could make out the brand: Omega.

We cared for her as much as we could, but it was clear from the start that she hadn’t long. We couldn’t allow her in the house, of course, but even her presence in the shed was enough to enrage Zach. On the second day his fury climaxed. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he shouted. ‘She’s disgusting. How can she be here, with us running around after her like servants? She’s killing him. And it’s dangerous for all of us, having her so close.’

Mum didn’t bother to hush him, but said calmly, ‘She’d be killing him more quickly if we’d left her in her own filthy hut.’

This silenced Zach. He wanted Alice gone, but not at the expense of admitting to Mum what he had told me in bed the night before: what he’d seen at the settlement when he collected Alice. Her small, tidy cottage; the whitewashed walls; the posies of dried herbs hanging above the hearth, just as they hung above ours.

Mum continued, ‘If we save her, we save him.’

It was only at night, when the candle was out and no voices could be heard from Mum and Dad’s room, that Zach would tell me about what he’d seen at the settlement. He told me that other Omegas at the settlement had tried to stop them from taking Alice away – that they’d wanted to keep caring for her there. But no Omega would dare to argue with an Alpha, and Mick had brandished his whip until they backed away.

‘Isn’t it cruel, though, to take her from her family?’ I whispered.

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ Zach recited.

‘Not children, obviously, but people she loves. Friends, or maybe a husband.’

‘A husband?’ He let the word hang. Officially Omegas weren’t allowed to marry, but everyone knew that they still did, although the Council wouldn’t recognise any such unions.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘She didn’t live with anyone,’ he said. ‘It was just a few other freaks from her settlement, claiming they knew what was best for her.’

We’d barely seen Omegas before, let alone spent time in close quarters with one. Little Oscar next door had been sent away as soon as he was branded and weaned. The few Omegas who passed through the area rarely stayed more than a night, camping just downstream of the village. They were itinerants, on the way to try their luck at one of the larger Omega settlements in the south. Or, in years when the harvest had been poor, there’d be Omegas who’d given up on farming the half-blighted land they were permitted to settle on, and were heading to one of the refuges near Wyndham. The refuges were the Council’s concession to the fatal bond between twins. Omegas couldn’t be allowed to starve to death and take their twins with them, so there were refuges near all large towns, where Omegas would be taken in, and fed and housed by the Council. Few Omegas went willingly, though – it was a place of last resort, for the starving or sick. The refuges were workhouses, and those who sought their help had to repay the Council’s generosity with labour, working on the farms within the refuge complex until the Council judged the debt repaid. Few Omegas were willing to trade their freedom for the safety of three meals a day.

I’d gone out with Mum, once, to give some food-scraps to one group on their way to the refuge near Wyndham. It was dark, and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mum had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travellers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mum’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.

Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mum threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

She met his eyes clearly. ‘It’s the fever. I have the fever – your father too, now.’

He scowled. ‘But before that – what’s wrong with you?’

Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place, but neatly clipped and clean.

Zach was impatient. ‘What? What is it?’

‘Don’t they teach you to count at your school?’

I said what Zach would not. ‘We don’t go to school. We can’t – we’ve not been split.’

He interrupted quickly: ‘But we can count. We learn at home – numbers, writing, all sorts of things.’ His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

‘That’s my problem, sweetheart,’ said Alice. ‘My toes don’t add up.’ She looked at Zach’s deflated face, and stopped her grinning. ‘I suppose there’s more,’ she said, almost kindly. ‘You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped – my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead-end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.’ She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?’ He didn’t answer. She went on: ‘And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?’

Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. ‘There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumour, a lie.’

‘Then why do you look so scared?’

I answered this time. ‘On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burnt-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumours of the island.’

‘He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,’ Zach added, looking at the door again.

‘And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,’ I said, ‘where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.’

Alice shrugged. ‘Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumour. Just a lie.’

‘It is – is a lie, I mean,’ hissed Zach. ‘You need to shut up – you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.’

‘They haven’t found it yet.’

‘Because it doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘It’s just an idea.’

‘Maybe that’s enough,’ she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.

He stood. ‘I’m going to check on Dad.’

I nodded, pressed the cool flannel again to my aunt’s head. ‘Dad’ll be just the same – unconscious, I mean,’ I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.

With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the centre of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognise some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.

*

Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.

I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.

After a while, he said, ‘I saw him fall, you know.’

I should have realised, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.

‘I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,’ he went on. ‘I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.’ Zach spat out a splinter of hay. ‘He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face first, so I couldn’t see him for the wheat.’

‘I’m sorry. It must have been scary.’

‘Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.’ He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’

There was no point lying to him, so I just nodded.

‘Can’t you do anything?’ he said. He grabbed my hand. Amongst everything that had happened over those last few days – Dad’s collapse, and Alice’s arrival – the strangest of all was Zach reaching out for my hand, something he’d not done since we were tiny.

When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.

I squeezed his hand. ‘What could I do?’

‘Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair – she’s killing him.’

‘It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.’

‘It’s not fair,’ he said again.

‘Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.’

‘It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas – we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.’

I couldn’t argue with him about the illness – it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. ‘It’s not her fault,’ I offered. ‘And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.’

He dropped my hand. ‘You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.’

‘Of course I care.’

‘Then do something,’ he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I said. I knew that seers were rumoured to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world – only perceive it in crooked ways.

‘I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ he whispered. ‘If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.’

It made no difference whether I believed him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I repeated.

‘What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?’

I reached once more for his hand. ‘He’s my dad too.’

‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, snatching his hand away.

*

Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and I were in the shed, asleep, Alice’s jagged breath grating on our dreams. I woke suddenly. I shook Zach and said, without thinking of hiding my vision, ‘Go to Dad. Go now.’ He was gone before he could even accuse me of anything, his footsteps racing on the gravel path to the cottage. I stood to go too: nearby, my father was dying. But Alice opened her eyes, briefly at first, and then for longer. I didn’t want her to be alone, in the cramped darkness of an unfamiliar shed. So I stayed.

They were buried together the next day, though the gravestone bore only his name. Mum had burned Alice’s nightdress, along with the sheets from both fever-sweated beds. The sole tangible proof that Alice had existed was hanging on a piece of twine around my neck, under my dress: a large brass key. The night she died, when Alice had woken briefly and seen that she was alone with me, she’d taken the key from her neck and passed it to me.

‘Behind my cottage, buried under the lavender, there’s a chest. Things that will help you when you go there.’ She entered another coughing fit.

I handed it back, loath to receive another uninvited gift from this woman. ‘How do you know it will be me?’

She coughed again. ‘I don’t, Cass. I just hope it is.’

‘Why?’ I, more than Zach, had cared for this woman, this reeking stranger. Why would she now wish this upon me?

She pressed the key again into my resisting hand. ‘Because your brother, he’s so full of fear – he’ll never cope if it’s him.’

‘He’s not afraid of things – and he’s strong.’ I wasn’t sure if I was coming to his defence, or my own. ‘He’s just angry, I suppose.’

Alice laughed, a rasp that differed only slightly from her usual coughing. ‘Oh, he’s angry all right. But it’s all the same thing.’ She waved my hand away impatiently as I tried to pass back the key.

In the end, I took it. I kept the key hidden, but it still felt like an admission, if only to myself. Looking at Zach’s face as we stood in the graveyard, squinting in the relentless sun, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Since Dad’s death, I’d felt something shift in Zach’s mind. The change in his thoughts felt like a rusted lock that finally gives way: the same decisiveness, the same satisfaction.

With Dad gone, our house was filled with waiting. I began to dream about the brand. In my dream that first night, I placed my hand again on Alice’s head, and felt her scar burning into the flesh of my own palm.

*

Only a month after the burial, I came home to find the local Councilman there. It was late summer, the hay freshly cut and sharp underfoot as I walked across the fields. On the path up from the river I saw the blurring of the sky above our cottage, and wondered why the fire was lit on such a hot day.

They were waiting for me inside. The moment I saw the black iron handle sticking out of the fire, I heard again the hiss of branded flesh that had sounded in my recent dreams, and I turned to run. It was my mother who grabbed me, hard, by the arm.

‘You know the Councilman, Cass, from downstream.’

I didn’t struggle, but kept my eyes fixed on the brand in the fire. The shape at its end, glowing in the coals, was smaller than I’d pictured it in my dreams. It occurred to me that it was made for use on infants.

‘Thirteen years now, Cassandra, we’ve waited for you and your brother to be split,’ said the Councilman. He reminded me of my father; his big hands. ‘It’s too long. One of you where you shouldn’t be, and one missing out on school. We can’t have an Omega here, contaminating the village. It’s dangerous, especially for the other twin. You each need to take your proper place.’

‘This is our proper place: here. This is our home.’ I was shouting, but Mum interrupted me quickly.

‘Zach told us, Cass.’

The Councilman took over. ‘Your twin came to see me.’

Zach had been standing behind the Councilman, head slightly bowed. Now he looked up at me. I don’t know what I’d expected to see in his eyes: triumph, I suppose. Perhaps contrition. Instead he looked as he so often did: wary, watchful. Afraid, even, but my own fear dragged my eyes back to the brand, from its long black handle down to the shape at the end, a serpentine curve in the coals.

‘How do you know he’s not lying?’ I asked the Councilman.

He laughed. ‘Why would he lie about this? Zach’s shown courage.’ He stepped up to the fireplace and lifted the brand. Methodically, he knocked it twice against the iron grill to shake loose the ash that clung to it.

‘Courage?’ I threw off my mother’s grasp.

The Councilman stepped back from the fire, the brand held high. To my surprise, Mum didn’t grab me again, or make any move to stop me as I backed away. It was the Councilman who moved, quicker than I would have imagined, given his size. He grabbed Zach by the neck and pressed him against the wall beside the hearth. In the Councilman’s other hand, raised above Zach’s face, the brand was smoking slightly.

I shook my head, as if trying to shake the world into some sort of sense. My eyes met Zach’s. Even with the brand so close to his face that its shadow fell across his eyes, I could now see the smirk of triumph. And I admired him, as I always had: my twin; my brave, clever twin. He’d managed to surprise me after all. Could I bring myself to surprise him? Call his bluff and play along, let him be branded and exiled?

I almost could have brought myself to do it, if I hadn’t detected, beneath his triumph, that splinter of terror, insistent as the brand itself. My own face was screwed up against the sizzling heat that I could sense in front of his.

‘He lied. It’s me. I’m the seer.’ I forced my voice into calmness. ‘He knew I’d tell you the truth.’

The Councilman pulled back the brand, but didn’t release Zach.

‘Why not tell us, if you knew it was her?’

‘I tried, for years. Nobody believed me,’ Zach said, his voice half-crushed by the Councilman’s hand at his throat. ‘I couldn’t prove it. I could never catch her out.’

‘And how do we know we can believe her now?’

In the end it was a relief for me to tell it all: how the flashes of vision came to me at night, at first, and later even when I was awake. How the blast tore open my sleep with its roar of light. How I sometimes knew things before they happened: the falling branch, the doll, the brand itself. My mother and the Councilman listened carefully. Only Zach, knowing it already, was impatient.

Finally the Councilman spoke. ‘You’ve given us all quite the runaround, girl. If it wasn’t for your brother, you might have kept on playing us for fools.’ He plunged the brand back into the coals with such force that it sparked against the metal grating. ‘Did you think you were different from the rest of the filthy Omegas?’ He hadn’t let go of the handle of the brand. ‘Better than them, just because you’re a seer?’ He pulled the brand again from the fire. ‘See this?’ He had me now by the throat. The brand, only inches away, singed a few strands of my hair. The smell and the heat forced my eyes shut. ‘See this?’ he said again, waving the brand before my clenched eyes. ‘This is what you are.’

I didn’t cry out when he pressed it to my forehead, though I heard Zach give a grunt of pain. My hand was at my chest, clutching the key that hung there. I squeezed it so tightly that later, upstairs, I saw that it had left its imprint on my flesh.