that there was an Alpha girl with two Omegas. I’ve had my scouts tracking you for four days.”
“Why?” Piper interrupted him.
“Because we have things in common.”
Piper laughed, the sound somehow louder in the darkness. “Us? Look at yourself.”
The Ringmaster might have traveled away from Wyndham, but he still had the plush appearance of a Councilor. Somewhere, not far from here, would be a tent, carried and erected by his soldiers, and outfitted with clean bedding. While we’d traveled on foot, thigh-deep in drifts of ash, or footsore over rocky hills, he would have ridden. His men probably fetched him water to wash in—his face and hands showed none of the grime that marked the three of us. And by the look of his rounded cheeks, he’d never had to pick the grubs off a mushroom that was his only meal at the end of a long night of walking, or spend ten minutes scraping the last scraps of flesh from a lizard’s thorny carcass. Our hunger was a garment that we could not remove, and as I looked at his well-fed face, I joined in with Piper’s laughter. Zoe, behind me, spat on the ground.
“I know why you’re laughing,” the Ringmaster said. “But we have more in common than you know. We want the same thing.”
It was Zoe’s turn to laugh. “If you knew what I’d like to see done to you and the other bastards on the Council, you wouldn’t be saying that.”
“I’ve told you already—you’re making a mistake if you assume we’re all the same.”
Piper spoke. “You’re all happy to sleep in feather beds while Omegas suffer. What difference does it make to us if you bicker among yourselves about the best ways to screw us over? You kill one another periodically, but things don’t get any better for us.”
“Things have changed.”
“Let me guess,” Piper said. “You care about Omegas, all of a sudden?”
“No. Not at all.” His honesty stopped even Zoe, who’d been on the point of interrupting him.
The Ringmaster continued, making no pretense of shame. “I care about Alphas. I want to do what’s best for them. That’s my job, just as it’s yours to act in the best interests of your own people.”
“I’m not in charge of the Assembly anymore,” Piper said. He gestured at himself—his ragged clothes, his dirty face. “Do I look like the leader of the resistance to you?”
The Ringmaster ignored him. “What the Reformer and the General are doing now, or trying to do, is a risk to all of us—Alphas and Omegas alike.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Don’t play coy with me,” he said. “You escaped from Wyndham fort through the tank rooms. You know they’re resurrecting the machines, the Electric. And I suspect you know more than you’d admit about the Confessor’s database, too—I’ve never swallowed the Reformer’s story that it was the Confessor’s twin, alone, who killed her.”
I said nothing.
“For years I worked closely with the General, and the Reformer, too,” he said. “I was even willing to tolerate his closeness with the Confessor.” There was a curl of distaste in his upper lip. “She was useful, at least. But there came a stage when our agendas diverged. It’s become clear to me that your twin and the General no longer give any credence to the taboo. They pay lip service to it—they know that’s what the public demands. But they’re pushing at it. Always pushing.
“They’ve been working as secretively as they can, but they can’t do it all alone. Over the past year or more, some of the soldiers from their personal squadrons have come to me. They’ve seen the things they’re guarding: the tanks. The database. I rose up through the army, unlike the Reformer or the General, for all that she’s taken a soldier’s name for herself. I understand the soldiers, the ordinary people. I know how deep the taboo runs. Your twin and the General are so enthralled by their ideas, they’ve underestimated how much most people hate and fear the machines.”
“More than they fear the Omegas?” I asked.
“It’s all the same thing,” he said. “People know that. The machines caused the blast, caused the twinning, and the Omegas.”
That was how he saw us: as an aberration—a horror to be listed along with the blast. A problem to be solved.
He went on. “When the Confessor was killed, and her database trashed, I hoped that might be the end of it. But your brother’s and the General’s enthusiasm for the machines is unabated. It’s