shoulder to wake me for my shift as lookout, or when Piper kicked dirt over the fire and said it was time to move again. This is my life now.
After our raid on the silo, the whole Wyndham region was so thick with Council patrols that before we could travel back to the west we had to head south, picking our way through the deadlands, that vast canker on the earth.
Eventually we had to let the horses go—unlike us they couldn’t survive on lizard flesh and grubs, and there was no grass where we traveled. Zoe had suggested eating them, but I was relieved when Piper pointed out that they were as thin as us. He was right: their backbones were sharpened like the peaked spines of lizards. When Zoe untied them they galloped off to the west on legs that were nothing more than splints of bone. Whether they were fleeing us, or just trying to get away from the deadlands, I didn’t know.
I’d thought I knew the damage that the blast had wrought. But those weeks showed me the wreckage anew. I saw the skin of the earth peeled back like an eyelid, leaving scorched stone and dust. After the blast, they say most of the world was like that: broken. I’d heard bards singing about the Long Winter, when ash had shrouded the sky for years, and nothing would grow. Now, hundreds of years later, the deadlands had retreated to the east, but from our time out there, I understood more of the fear and rage that had driven the purges, when the survivors had destroyed any of the machines that were left after the blast. The taboo surrounding the remnants of the machines wasn’t simply a law—it was an instinct. Any rumors or stories of what machines had once been able to do, in the Before, was overshadowed by the evidence of the machine’s ultimate achievement: fire and ash. The Council’s strict penalties for breaking the taboo never had to be enforced—it was a law upheld by our own revulsion; we shuddered away from the fragments of machines that still surfaced, occasionally, in the dust.
People shuddered away from us, too, we Omegas in our blast-marked bodies. It was the same fear of the blast and its contagion that had led the Alphas to cast us out. To them, our bodies were deadlands of flesh: infertile and broken. The imperfect twins, we carried the stain of the blast in us, as surely as the scorched earth of the east. They chased us far away from where they lived and farmed, to scratch an existence from the blighted land.
Piper, Zoe, and I had emerged from the east like blackened ghosts. The first time we washed, the water downstream ran black. Even afterward, the skin between my fingers was stained gray. Piper and Zoe’s dark skin took on a grayish tone that wouldn’t wash away—it was the pallor of hunger and exhaustion. The deadlands weren’t something that could easily be left behind. When we headed west, we were still shaking ash from our blankets each night when we unpacked them, and still coughing up ash in the morning.
Ω
Piper and I sat near the entrance to the cave, watching the sun shrug off the night. More than a month earlier, on the way to the silo, we’d slept in the same hidden cave and perched on the same flat rock. Next to my knee, the stone still bore the scuff marks from where Piper had sharpened his knife all those weeks ago.
I looked at Piper. The slash on his single arm had healed now to a pink streak, the scar tissue raised and waxy, puckered where stitches had held the wound closed. At my neck, the wound from the Confessor’s knife had finally healed, too. In the deadlands, it had been an open wound, edged with ash. Was the ash still there, inside me, specks of black sealed beneath the scar’s carapace?
Piper held out a piece of rabbit meat skewered on the blade of his knife. It was left over from the night before, coated with cold fat, congealed into gray strings. I shook my head and turned away.
“You need to eat,” he said. “It’ll take us three more weeks to get to the Sunken Shore. Even longer to get to the west coast, if we’re going to search for the ships.”
All of our conversations began and ended at the ships. Their names had become like charms: The Rosalind. The