“I’m glad,” she said, stepping to the railing beside me. I raised my eyebrows. “Not about the blast, obviously,” she went on. “But I’m glad I know now. It makes me understand Lucia more, I think.” She paused. “Why the visions of the blast damaged her the way they did. On some level, she must have known that it was coming.”
I nodded, thinking of Xander, too, and his scattered mind. He, Lucia, and I had all borne witness to what was coming.
“Piper told me about Kip, too,” said Zoe. “That you found him.”
“It wasn’t Kip that I found,” I said. “It was just his body.”
She offered me no words of comfort, and I was grateful. She had dispensed enough death herself to know that it wasn’t something that could be softened. Instead, she stood with me and watched the sea.
“Even though he looked so different,” I went on, “it was the first time, since The Confessor told me about his past, that I could remember him properly.”
“It wasn’t Kip she was telling you about,” she said impatiently. “Any more than it was him who you found in the Ark. Why don’t you get it? Whoever he was when they put him into that tank, he wasn’t the same person when they took him out. Nobody could be.”
She turned to face me. “The Confessor didn’t know him,” she said. “That was her big mistake. She let you and Kip find her, in the silo that night, because she thought her twinship with him meant you’d be helpless. She thought she was drawing you into a trap. The Kip that she grew up with wouldn’t have done what he did. He wouldn’t have jumped to save you.”
A gull swooped low over the water.
“If you assume that Kip’s past defines him,” she said, “you’ll be making the same mistake the Confessor made. And you’ll be letting her take him from you twice.”
Farther out, beyond the breaking waves, the sea reflected the clouds. A doubled sky.
“I know what you’re doing, when you focus on Kip’s past,” she said. “Because I did it, too. I focused on the bad stuff, so I wouldn’t have to mourn Lucia.”
She closed her eyes for a few moments. When she opened them, she spoke quietly. “Instead of dreaming about the sea every night, I wish I could dream about her. Not her death, or her madness, but who she actually was. About the way her nose wrinkled when she smiled. How she could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. How, when she’d been sweating, the back of her neck smelled like pine shavings.” She gave half a smile. “The madness took her away from me, and then the sea did it again. But I betrayed her, too, when I only remembered the bad parts. I should have remembered her properly, even though it’s harder.”
Ω
The sun was high before Piper came to join us at the railing. He stood on the other side of me, his feet planted wide on the shifting deck.
“Did Paloma tell you?” Zoe asked him.
He nodded and turned to me. “She confirmed what we heard in the Ark: they found a way to end the twinning. Just like the people in the Ark did, except that in the Scattered Islands they actually went through with it. It’s not simple, and it’s not a magic cure. It’s the same as it said in Joe’s papers: no fatal bond, but everyone has mutations. Maybe they always will have. And they can’t undo existing twins—only the next generation. But we already knew that.”
“And you’ve told her about the Council,” I said, “and the blast?”
He nodded. “I don’t know if she’s taken it in properly yet. But she said she’s staying. She said she wants to help.”
My life was a map of other people’s sacrifices. Bodies marked it like wayposts. Now all of Elsewhere was in jeopardy.
“There’s something else,” Piper said. “Thomas told me something, about Leonard’s song. You know Thomas said he sent some of his sailors inland, to the safe house? They heard the song in a settlement along the way. And that’s how they first heard about the battle of New Hobart—there was a verse about how the Council was defeated there.”
“That wasn’t in the song,” I said. “Leonard wrote it a month before we freed New Hobart.”
Piper smiled. “It’s changing, like Leonard said it would. Growing. More and more people hearing it, and adding to it.”