old, any papers, to be reported straightaway. Twice his squadron was sent out to search, after tip-offs. They found nothing but a secret school—illegal, sure, for Omegas, but usually the Council wouldn’t be so zealous about stuff like that. They were told to search the whole place, and all the papers had to be packed up and taken to the HQ.” Violet shrugged. “He thought it was funny at the time—all the kids’ papers with their ABCs scrawled on them, being parceled up carefully to be examined.” Her face hardened. “He didn’t think it was so funny by the time we’d finished extracting the story from him.”
They all stared at me when I stood.
“Get Xander,” I said to Sally.
Violet rolled her eyes. “Isn’t one seer enough? What’s the point of dragging the mad one into it?”
I went to speak, but Simon spoke over me.
“You’re dismissed for tonight,” he said to Violet. “Rest, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”
She glared over her shoulder at Piper as she left. Sally stood, too. “I’ll bring Xander,” she said.
I turned to Piper. “Xander tried to tell us. He told us that it wasn’t me they were looking for in New Hobart. You’re not what they’re looking for, he’d said. I thought he’d meant that the Confessor had really been searching for Kip, not me. But that’s not what he was saying.”
It’s not finished, he’d said. I’d been trying to make the pieces fit, Elsa and the Ark paper and New Hobart, but it was all one piece. And Xander had known all along.
Sally brought Xander in, a blanket draped around his shoulders. Zoe led him to the bench and I knelt beside him.
“What’s the maze of bones?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.
He didn’t speak. His eyes began their usual surveillance of the ceiling.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I told you already,” he said.
“You did,” I said. “But we didn’t understand. Tell me again.”
“It used to feel different,” he said. “A quiet space, underground.”
I wanted to prompt him, but I forced myself to wait. His eyes did another lap of the tent’s ceiling. Sally’s hand, on his shoulder, was tensed.
“Then it got noisy,” he went on. “People rattling the bones.”
“Is it the Ark?” I said.
“It’s just a hole,” he muttered. “A place where people lost their bones. A maze of bones.”
“But now you can feel noises there? People in it?”
He nodded. “Sounds in the dark place.”
“Has the Council found it? Do you know where it is?”
He swung his head from side to side. “It’s noisy there now. But they’re still looking for pieces. Paper pieces. Word bones, from Before.”
“In New Hobart?” I asked. I remembered what Zoe had told me, the report about papers surfacing in New Hobart years ago, and the Council crushing the resistance cell before anything more could be found. “Papers from the Ark, like the one that Sally made a copy of—is that what they’re searching for there?”
Xander nodded. “They need them,” he said again. “It’s not finished.”
chapter 14
That was all we could get out of him, but it was enough. When he had descended again into aborted syllables and broken words, I turned to Simon.
“If thousands of people being tanked wasn’t enough to get you to free New Hobart, will this make a difference?”
“We had a lead from New Hobart about the Ark, years ago,” he said. “But it came to nothing. The soldiers got there first, wiped out our whole cell.”
“Whatever there was to be found, it was important to the Council,” I said. Important enough for them to move quickly, and to kill for. They’re still searching—there’s more to be found. And I think Elsa knows something about it.” I thought again of her face as we’d stood in her kitchen, when I’d asked about the resistance. She’d mentioned her dead husband, but she’d never dared to tell me what had happened to him. His story was an intake of breath that had never been exhaled. “Her husband was killed, and she hinted that it was from asking too many questions. Couldn’t he have been involved?”
Piper shook his head. “We had six people in New Hobart. I knew all of them myself. None of them was married to the keeper of the holding house. I’d never heard anything to suggest a link to her.”
“It’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?” said Zoe. “That the person who might have crucial information for you should just happen to be the person you stayed with there.”
I turned from her to Piper. “You’re