herself that I was still the same person. Then she gave my hand a squeeze.
“It doesn’t change who you are,” she said.
I wished it were true. But Zach had changed who I was. He, and all that he had done, had shaped me, as much as I had shaped him. One of us was the blade, the other the whetstone.
I kept hold of her hand while I explained what we had learned about the tanks, and Zach’s plans for them.
“I’m not stupid,” she said, her voice low. “I knew it was bad, when they took the kids. But this place, and what you’ve told me—it’s even worse than I feared.”
“You tried to stop them, when they came for the children?” I said.
Elsa turned her face to me, raising the eyebrow above her blackened eye. “What do you think?”
“And Nina?” I asked.
She looked down. “She was hurt worse than me, when we tried to stop them taking the kids. Took a blow to the head, and then blood started coming out of her ears.” She took a slow breath. “She died two days later.”
We sat together, the shrouded children laid out in rows at our feet.
“Maybe they didn’t suffer,” I said.
Elsa reached for my hand again. “When you and Kip first came here, I understood why you had to lie to me about your names, and where you’d been. But you don’t need to lie to me now. I’m too old for it. There’s no time for it anymore.”
Ω
We were watching the troops load the children’s bodies onto wagons when Piper’s name was shouted from up the hill, and then mine. Zoe rounded the corner, running. She was sweating, and her haste had reopened the wound on her thigh; fresh blood seeped through the leg of her trousers.
“A messenger, from the Council,” she said. “He came alone, ten minutes ago, to the eastern gate.”
Elsa squeezed me again, hard, before we left, and I told her I’d return soon. Piper, Zoe, and I rushed together through the town, as fast as her injured leg and my broken arm would allow.
“It’s your brother.” The Ringmaster stood when we entered the tithe collector’s office. “Sent a message: he wants to talk.”
“He’s coming here?”
“Him and the General. They’re to the east, with a squadron. The messenger asked us to meet them in the middle, on the eastern road.”
“All of us?”
“You want to see your twin alone?” The Ringmaster was watching my face. Suspicion coated everything in this room. It lay thicker than the snow outside.
I shook my head. “I don’t want to see him.” My hands were still sticky with the tank fluid that had dripped from the hair of the dead children. It was Zach and the General who had given those orders. Their decision to have the children taken and tanked. Their decision to have them drowned in the dark.
“We’re all angry about the children,” the Ringmaster said. “But we need to meet both of them, and make the most of this opportunity. They know how much of the army has defected to me. This is our strongest chance to negotiate.”
I shook my head. “They haven’t come to negotiate,” I said.
“How do you know?” Sally said. “Have you seen it in your visions?”
I shook my head. “No. But I know Zach.” I had seen his ruthlessness. The same ruthlessness that had led him to risk everything, as a child, in order to expose me as the Omega, and that now led to those mounds of sodden bodies in the tanks. So much had changed since then, and so little. “I know what he is,” I said, “because I made him what he is.”
They’d been the Confessor’s words to Kip, in the silo: You did this to me. You made me what I am. I saw how our childhood had formed him. It wasn’t a question of blame, now—only of knowledge.
We rode out to meet them when the sun was at its highest. Twenty soldiers accompanied us—ten of the Ringmaster’s troops, and ten of Simon’s. At the front rode the five of us: me, Piper, Zoe, Simon, and the Ringmaster. Half an hour’s ride from New Hobart, we saw them coming the other way: twenty or more riders.
Zach rode at the front. Even from that distance, I could see the sharp line of his jaw, and the way he moved his head: sudden, jerky movements, between the long stillness of his stares.
The sun glared off the snow. I squinted at the outline of that