part of me could have believed that had been left on the silo floor, along with Kip.
“We need to get to Sally’s quickly,” Piper said. “We don’t have a choice. From there, we start mustering the resistance, seeking the ships. They’ve wiped out the island; they’ve got rid of the Judge; they’re dismantling the resistance network, bit by bit.”
The sky above us, sulky with clouds, took on a new and pressing weight, and I felt that the three of us were very small. Just three people on the wind-scoured plain, against all the Council’s machinations. Each night, as we trudged through the long grass, there were more and more tanks being readied in the refuges. Who knew how many they’d tanked already. And more people were arriving at the refuges every day.
I couldn’t claim that I understood Zach anymore, but I knew enough to know this: it would never be enough. He wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all tanked.
chapter 4
The next night, well after midnight, I began to sense something. I was jittery, and found myself scanning the darkness around us as we walked. Once, when Zach and I were little, wasps had made a nest in the eaves of our house, right outside our bedroom. For days, until Dad found the nest, a buzzing and scraping had kept us awake, lying in our small beds and whispering of ghosts. What I felt now was like that: a high-pitched buzz at the edge of my hearing, a message that I couldn’t interpret but that soured the night air.
Then we passed the first sign for the refuge. We were about halfway between Wyndham and the southern coast, skirting the wagon road. But we passed close enough to the road to see the sign, and crept nearer to read it. The wooden board was painted in large white letters:
Your Council welcomes you to Refuge 9—6 miles south.
Securing our mutual well-being.
Safety and plenty, earned by fair labor.
Refuges: sheltering you in difficult times.
It was illegal for Omegas to attend schools, but many managed to scrape together the basics of reading, learning at home, as I had, or in illicit schools. I wondered how many of the Omegas who passed the refuge’s sign could read it at all, and how many of those would believe its message.
“In difficult times,” Piper scoffed. “No mention of the fact that it’s their tithes, or pushing Omegas out to blighted land, that make the times so hard.”
“Or that if the difficult times pass, it makes no difference,” added Zoe. “Once people are in there, they’re in for good.”
We all knew what that meant: the Omegas floating in the nearly-death of the tanks. Trapped in the horrifying safety of those glass bellies, while their Alpha counterparts lived on unencumbered.
We kept clear of the road, following it from a distance among the cover of gullies and trees. As we approached the refuge I found myself slowing, my movements sluggish as we drew closer to the source of my disquiet. By dawn, when the refuge itself came into view, walking toward it felt as though I was wading upstream through a river. In the growing light, we crept as close as we dared, until we were peering down at the refuge from a copse at the top of a rise only a hundred feet away.
The refuge was bigger than I could have imagined—it was the size of a small town. The wall surrounding it was higher even than the wall the Council erected around New Hobart. More than fifteen feet high, it was built of brick rather than wood, with tangled strands of wire along the top like nests thrown together by monstrous birds. Within the wall, we could glimpse the tops of buildings, a jumble of different structures.
Piper pointed to where a huge building loomed on the western edge. It took up at least half of the refuge, and its walls still had the yellow tinge of fresh-cut pine, bright against the weathered gray wood of the other buildings.
“No windows,” Zoe said.
It was only a few syllables, but we all knew what it meant. Within that building, row upon row of tanks waited. Some would be empty, and some still under construction. But the sickness loitering deep in my gut left me in no doubt: many had already been filled. Hundreds of lives submerged in that thick, viscous liquid. The cloying sweetness of that fluid, creeping into their eyes and ears, their noses, their mouths. The silencing of lives, with