The Rosalind’s mast, spotted in the distance amongst the uninhabited and bleak islands of a spit. Maps and words exchanged on a stony shore. Such a small thing, to change the shape of the world. But it couldn’t be undone.
‘They’ll have to wait until the ice sheets melt,’ Paloma said, ‘before they can send ships south. But they will come, and the spring winds will be with them, not against them. They’re coming. A ship, or a fleet. Maybe forty people, maybe hundreds. They might not all make it, but they won’t let it go, now that they know what’s here.’
For so long, that had been a fantasy: that ships from some distant place might reach our shores. Now it was the nightmare. They would come to us, and their world would burn.
‘Why will they be so keen to come?’ I asked.
She looked down, shaking her head.
‘You assumed we could help you. Maybe you were right – we can do some things that you can’t. But we’re not some magical haven. We have our own problems. Plagues that pass through, most summers. Bandits raiding villages in the outer islands, pirates picking off ships. Failing harvests, especially closer to the strike zone.’
She looked up at me. ‘Do you really think we’ve sent ships out, year after year, because we want to help you?’ She paused, and spoke more quietly. ‘You were meant to have all the answers that we don’t have. We’re looking for help ourselves.’
Zoe gave a snort. ‘You could’ve saved yourself a long journey. There’s nothing here for Elsewhere but trouble.’
‘Stop calling it Elsewhere,’ Paloma yelled. ‘That’s not its name. And it’s not the place that you imagine. These are real people you’re talking about – my parents, my little sisters. My friends – everyone I’ve ever known. A million people. And you tell me they’re all going to burn, because of what we can offer you. Instead of finding friendship, cooperation, we’ll be turned into a new strike zone.’ She inhaled sharply. ‘It’s not your Elsewhere, some magical solution.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘It’s real. Real people live there.’
What she said was true: after all our hoping, Elsewhere didn’t exist. Not the place we’d imagined, where things would be easy, and all the answers would be waiting for us, like ripe figs begging to be plucked. That place didn’t exist. Instead we’d found the Scattered Islands, real places, infinitely more complex than our imaginings – and they could be destroyed before any of us had even seen them.
I looked across at Paloma. She was squinting against the wind, which had blown her hair across her eyes. Her eyelashes were pale, as if dusted with snow. Her arms were crossed, her hands clutching the fabric of her sleeves.
I had been thinking of her as a whole country. As the thing that changed everything. But as she stood there in the wind, shivering slightly, I saw that she was just a young woman, a long way from home, and very frightened.
Around the fire that night, when all of us had calmed down, the stories of Elsewhere spilled out of her. She described animals that I had never heard of, let alone seen: seadogs, huge swimming beasts, hunted for their rich layers of oily fat. Sleek in the water and cumbersome on land. Paloma took up a stick and drew a sketch in the sandy ground, though she ended up laughing at her own rendition: the beast was an elongated lump, whiskers at one end, fins splayed at the other.
‘They look ridiculous enough in real life,’ she said, ‘without my bad drawing.’ She scuffed the picture away with a sweep of her false leg.
There were other animals that she described: alks, beasts like huge cows but with tall, branching horns splaying from their heads. Snowfoxes, purest white. And trusses, birds so huge that if they spread their wings they would cast a shadow the length of a dinghy.
‘They’re supposed to be bad luck,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why. I love seeing them, when they come back from the Southern Archipelago after winter.’
I looked at the empty night sky, smeared with grey clouds. Since we’d left the screeching gulls of the coast, the only birds we’d seen were ravens, with their black hooked beaks and indifferent stares. Perhaps, before the blast, trusses had flown here as well.
Paloma’s words offered us a new world, waiting to be seen. But there was an urgency to the way she spoke, leaning towards the fire and almost gabbling as she rushed to tell it all. There was an urgency in our listening, too. I wanted to clutch at every word, hold them in my hands. I longed for paper and ink to write it all down. I couldn’t help feeling that every word she spoke about Elsewhere was a last testament, a record of all that she was about to lose.
*
I had thought the annihilating fire of the visions, of all the seers’ visions, could get no worse. But through Paloma I was learning a little of the reality of the Scattered Islands, and that knowledge polished the agony of the visions to a new, fierce gleam.
Paloma knew what I was. She had known by the time we met: Zoe must have told her already that I was a seer, and what that meant. It was different, though, for her to see what really happened when I had a vision. She’d witnessed this the first night after we found her. We’d been gathered around the fire on the beach, maps and charts laid out on the sand as Paloma showed us a map of the Scattered Islands, describing how the archipelago speckled the sea, so far to the north-west of us that our own maps became useless. She had placed her maps next to Thomas’s; to approximate the distance, she’d laid them several feet apart. In the gap between them, deadly sea. To comprehend the Scattered Islands, we were going to need new maps; a new scale.
Paloma had been speaking when the blast came: flames tearing through my head, and a white heat that stopped time. A fire so vast that it made everything impossible except fire.
When I’d stopped shaking, and could see again, Zoe was swearing as she patted at the smouldering edge of the map that I’d dropped in the coals of the campfire. Paloma was silent, her eyebrows drawn together as she stared.
Over the next few days, I’d tried to explain to her how the visions worked, and that I couldn’t read the future the way we could read a book. That, like the uncharted spaces between our maps and Paloma’s, the future was beyond my reach. All I got were flashes: glimpses of things that hadn’t happened yet. Awake or asleep, I had no control over when the visions came, ripping me out of the present and throwing me briefly into a future where I could not navigate. If the visions came when I was sleeping, it was hard to distinguish between them and ordinary dreams – no way of knowing whether what I had seen really was a foretelling of something to come, or just a nightmare.
The visions had sometimes been useful: warnings or clues, though rarely clear. Most, though, were nothing but a terror that ambushed me with flashes of fire. It had become worse since the Ark, and what we had found there. Now that we knew the Council had found the blast machines and was readying them to use against Elsewhere, the flames burned with an added urgency.
I didn’t tell Paloma what the visions did to seers, eventually. Lucia had been driven to the edge of madness, even before she drowned; Xander’s mind had been left a darkened room, lit only by flashes of fire.
I told Paloma none of that. But she saw, soon enough, how the blast visions burned language from my lips. How the flames left me shaking, my eyes rolled back in my head as if searching the sky for fire. I felt Paloma watching me, from behind the strands of white hair that blew across her face.
I watched myself just as carefully. Sometimes I felt there were only two certainties: the blast, and my own madness. I didn’t know which would come first.
‘Have you seen it?’ she said to me, sidling up to me at the campfire, a few days into our journey. ‘Have