My sentence: We attack at new moon, midnight—be ready. And each of us added the Omega symbol that I wore on my forehead, and that had been hoisted on the flag above the island before the massacre: Ω. Even an Omega who had never learned to read wouldn’t mistake the sign that was scorched into their own flesh.
Each letter was a struggle. My blade skidded from the curved skin of the pumpkin. The darkness that shielded us from the sentries’ view made it hard to see what we were doing, so we were working as much by feel as by sight. On my first pumpkin I started too large, so that by the end of my sentence I had to cram the letters in, tiny scratches on the pumpkin’s flesh. The second one was easier—I’d learned how to angle my knife so that it cut smoothly into the toughened surface. The words took shape beneath my shaking fingers.
On the third pumpkin, I threw my head back and shudders escaped me.
“Are you OK?” Piper had whipped around to see what the sound was. I pressed my hand over my own mouth but my laughter still escaped in quiet gasps.
“It’s so absurd. The whole thing. For crying out loud: pumpkins.” I struggled for air. A tear was tickling the corner of my eye. It felt warm on my frozen face. “I thought Leonard and Eva’s song was a strange weapon, but this tops even that. This is our revolution—the pumpkin revolution.”
He grinned. “Not exactly the stuff of legend, is it?” he whispered. “Nobody’s going to write a song about this. Even Leonard couldn’t make this sound good.”
“We’re not doing it for the glamour,” said Zoe. But she was grinning, too. We all were, as we knelt in the snow, the shrinking moon above us counting down the hours until the attack.
Ω
We camped the rest of the night in the forest, and came back at dawn to watch the workers being led through the gate. From where we crouched, behind a tussock in the swamp to the east of the fields, we could see that the fresh snowfall had covered our trails from the night before. But the crops, too, were veiled with snow, our painstaking messages buried under inches of whiteness.
For the whole morning, the workers came nowhere near the pumpkins. The soldiers led them to the next field, and we watched them work for hours, on their hands and knees among rows of uprooted carrots and parsnips.
We didn’t know how long our messages would last, or whether the pumpkin flesh might already be healing over our whittled words. If they weren’t harvested soon, it would be too late to matter—there were only three more days before the new moon anyway.
At noon the gates opened again, and two soldiers drove out on an empty wagon. When it halted at the fields, the soldiers began moving the workers, with shouts and blows, across to the pumpkin field. Zoe nudged me, and the three of us edged forward, peering through the grass.
It took an hour or more for the Omegas to work their way to the corner of the field where we had inscribed our messages. Two women were making their way along the row toward the pumpkins we’d marked. The women had been allowed no scythes or knives, instead having to wrench each frozen stem free from the vine. It was heavy work; one woman had an arm that ended at the elbow; the other woman was a dwarf, the larger pumpkins reaching above her waist. A soldier stood ten yards from them, stamping his feet from time to time to shake loose the snow from his boots. As the women freed the pumpkins, they passed them to a tall Omega who carried them to where another soldier waited, leaning against the wagon into which the pumpkins were loaded.
The dwarf woman paused in her tussle with one of the pumpkins. Beside me, I heard Zoe’s breath halt. Then the woman heaved again, and the stem snapped. She tossed the pumpkin aside to wait for the tall man’s return. At the next pumpkin, she took longer, bending low as she grappled to twist and break the stem. Hundreds of yards away, through the long grass and the falling snow, I couldn’t see clearly what she was doing. Did she crouch that way just to gain a purchase on the stubborn vegetable as she wrenched it loose, or had her fingers traced the message? When