orders in the island’s Assembly Hall, rather than squatting on a rock, his clothes torn and stained. There were times that I admired his self-assurance: its audacity, in the face of a world that did its best to show us that we were worthless. At other times, it baffled me. I’d caught myself watching how he moved. The last few weeks had left him thinner, his skin stretched a little too tightly over his cheekbones, but it hadn’t changed the defiant jut of his jaw, or the spread of his shoulders, unafraid to occupy space. It was as though his body spoke a language that mine could never learn.
“Stop what?” I said, avoiding his gaze.
“You know what I mean. You’re not eating. You barely sleep, or talk.”
“I’m keeping up with you and Zoe, aren’t I?”
“I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that you’re not yourself anymore.”
“And since when are you an expert in what I’m like? You hardly know me.” My voice was loud in the morning stillness.
I knew it wasn’t fair to snap at him. What he’d said was true enough. I’d been eating less, even now that we were out of the deadlands and the hunting was good. I ate just enough to stay well, to travel fast. On frosty days, when it was my turn to sleep, I cast the blanket off my shoulders and offered myself up to the cold.
I couldn’t explain any of this to Piper or Zoe. It would mean talking about Kip. His name, that single syllable, caught in my throat like a fish bone.
His past, too, stopped me at the brink of words. I couldn’t speak about it. Since the silo, when the Confessor had told me what Kip had been like before the tank, I carried her news with me everywhere. I was good at secrets. I’d hidden my seer visions from my family for thirteen years before Zach exposed me. I’d concealed my visions of the island from the Confessor for the four years of my captivity in the Keeping Rooms. On the island, I’d hidden my twin’s identity from Piper and the Assembly for weeks. Now I concealed what I knew about Kip. The knowledge that he had tormented the Confessor as a child, and delighted when she was branded and sent away. That he’d tried, as an adult, to track her down and pay to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
How could he be such a stranger to me, when I could identify each of his vertebrae under my fingertips, and I knew the precise curve of his hip bone against my own?
But at the end, in the silo, he’d made the choice to die, to save me. These days, it seemed that was the only gift we had to offer one another: the gift of our own deaths.
chapter 2
Halfway to the Sunken Shore, Zoe led us to a safe house, at the edge of the plains. Nothing moved in the cottage but the wind, banging the front door, which had been left open.
“Did they run, or were they taken?” I asked, as we walked through the empty rooms.
“Either way, they left in a hurry,” said Zoe. In the kitchen, a jug lay in pieces on the floor. Two bowls sat unwashed on the table, velveted with green mold.
Piper was bending to look at the door latch. “The door was kicked in, from outside.” He stood. “We have to leave now.”
And even though I’d looked forward to a night of sleeping indoors, I was glad to leave those rooms where all noise was muted by dust. We retreated into the long grass that grew right up to the house itself, and didn’t make camp until we’d walked all day and half the night.
Zoe was kneeling over a rabbit that she’d caught the day before, skinning it while Piper and I lit a fire.
“It’s worse than we thought,” said Piper, leaning forward to blow on the timid flame. “Half the network must’ve been infiltrated.”
It wasn’t the first ruined safe house that we’d seen. On the way to the silo we’d come across another safe house, where nothing remained but blackened beams, still smoking. The Council had taken prisoners on the island, and the resistance’s secrets were being wrung from them.
As Zoe and Piper took stock of what we knew, I sat in silence. It wasn’t that they excluded me from conversations—rather that their talks were full of shorthand references to people, places, and information