‘I think we understand one another,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘I came to talk, but you know now that if it comes to blades, I’ll stand my own.’
‘Touch her again and I’ll cut out your tongue,’ said Piper. ‘You won’t be talking then.’
He moved past The Ringmaster and grabbed me, drawing me back to where Zoe stood. Her knives were lowered but not sheathed.
‘Leave us,’ The Ringmaster shouted to his soldiers, with an impatient wave. They withdrew until the darkness and distance hooded their faces, and I could no longer hear the wounded archer’s laboured breathing.
‘You’re OK?’ Piper said to me.
My hand was still at my neck.
‘He could’ve slit my throat,’ I whispered, ‘when you threw the knife.’
‘He was never going to kill you,’ Piper replied. ‘Not if it was so important to him to talk to you. It was a ploy.’ He spoke up now, so that The Ringmaster could hear him. ‘Just posturing, to impress upon us what a big man he is.’
I looked up at Piper and wondered what it must be like to be so certain of everything.
Zoe was surveying the valley. ‘Where are the rest of your soldiers?’ she said to The Ringmaster.
‘I told you – I brought only my scouts. Do you have any idea what would happen if word got out that I’d met with you?’
I turned. His men were watching us warily from twenty yards away. The swordsmen still had their blades drawn. The injured man had dropped his bow and leaned against one of the bent metal poles, but then jerked upright again as though the touch of the taboo remnant was more painful than the dagger in his flesh.
‘How did you find us?’ I swung back around to face The Ringmaster. ‘The Council’s been searching for months. Why you, and why now?’
‘Your brother, him and The General, think their machines allow them to keep track of everything. Maybe it worked well enough when they had The Confessor and her visions to help out. They never had time for old-fashioned methods. They could’ve learned a lot from the older Councillors, or some of the senior soldiers, if they’d taken the time to listen, like I did. I’ve been paying urchins in half the settlements from Wyndham to the coast, for years. When you need updates from the ground, a greedy local kid with the promise of a silver coin is worth more than any machine. Sometimes it’s a waste of money – often enough they bring me nothing but rumours, false alarms. But every now and again you get lucky. There was an unconfirmed sighting of you at Drury. Then someone came to me, said three strangers had been seen in Windrush. The interesting bit was that there was an Alpha girl with two Omegas. I’ve had my scouts tracking you for four days.’
‘Why?’ Piper interrupted him.
‘Because we have things in common.’
Piper laughed, the sound somehow louder in the darkness. ‘Us? Look at yourself.’
The Ringmaster might have travelled away from Wyndham, but he still had the plush appearance of a Councillor. Somewhere, not far from here, would be a tent, carried and erected by his soldiers, and outfitted with clean bedding. While we’d travelled on foot, thigh-deep in drifts of ash, or footsore over rocky hills, he would have ridden. His men probably fetched him water to wash in – his face and hands showed none of the grime that marked the three of us. And by the look of his rounded cheeks, he’d never had to pick the grubs off a mushroom that was his only meal at the end of a long night of walking, or spend ten minutes scraping the last scraps of flesh from a lizard’s thorny carcass. Our hunger was a garment that we could not remove, and as I looked at his well-fed face, I joined in with Piper’s laughter. Zoe, behind me, spat on the ground.
‘I know why you’re laughing,’ The Ringmaster said. ‘But we have more in common than you know. We want the same thing.’
It was Zoe’s turn to laugh. ‘If you knew what I’d like to see done to you and the other bastards on the Council, you wouldn’t be saying that.’
‘I’ve told you already – you’re making a mistake if you assume we’re all the same.’
Piper spoke. ‘You’re all happy to sleep in feather beds while Omegas suffer. What difference does it make to us if you bicker amongst yourselves about the best ways to screw us over? You kill one another, periodically, but things don’t get any better for us.’
‘Things have changed.’
‘Let me guess,’ Piper said. ‘You care about Omegas, all of a sudden?’
‘No. Not at all.’ His honesty stopped even Zoe, who’d been on the point of interrupting him.
The Ringmaster continued, making no pretence of shame. ‘I care about Alphas. I want to do what’s best for them. That’s my job, just as yours is to act in the best interests of your own people.’
‘I’m not in charge of the Assembly anymore,’ Piper said. He gestured at himself – his ragged clothes, his dirty face. ‘Do I look like the leader of the resistance to you?’
The Ringmaster ignored him. ‘What The Reformer and The General are doing now, or trying to do, is a risk to all of us – Alphas and Omegas alike.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Don’t play coy with me,’ he said. ‘You escaped from Wyndham fort through the tank rooms. You know they’re resurrecting the machines, the Electric. And I suspect you know more than you’d admit about The Confessor’s database, too – I’ve never swallowed The Reformer’s story that it was The Confessor’s twin, alone, who killed her.’
I said nothing.
‘For years I worked closely with The General, and The Reformer too,’ he said. ‘I was even willing to tolerate his closeness with The Confessor.’ There was a curl of distaste in his upper lip. ‘She was useful, at least. But there came a stage when our agendas diverged. It’s become clear to me that your twin and The General no longer give any credence to the taboo. They pay lip service to it – they know that’s what the public demands. But they’re pushing at it. Always pushing.
‘They’ve been working as secretively as they can, but they can’t do it all alone. Over the past year or more, some of the soldiers from their personal squadrons have come to me. They’ve seen the things they’re guarding: the tanks. The database. I rose up through the army, unlike The Reformer or The General, for all that she’s taken a soldier’s name for herself. I understand the soldiers, the ordinary people. I know how deep the taboo runs. Your twin and The General are so enthralled by their ideas, they’ve underestimated how much most people hate and fear the machines.’
‘More than they fear the Omegas?’ I asked.
‘It’s all the same thing,’ he said. ‘People know that. The machines caused the blast, caused the twinning, and the Omegas.’
That was how he saw us: as an aberration – a horror to be listed along with the blast. A problem to be solved.
He went on. ‘When The Confessor was killed, and her database trashed, I hoped that might be the end of it. But your brother’s and The General’s enthusiasm for the machines is unabated. It’s already gone too far. The Judge was the last one on the Council with the power to openly oppose them. Even when they had his twin, towards the end, he still stood firm on the taboo, because he knew the public wouldn’t stand for it if he didn’t. So they killed his twin, and him, as soon as they figured they didn’t need him anymore.’
‘What about the others on the Council?’ Piper said. ‘Do they know what The Reformer and The General are doing? What they’re planning?’
‘Not many. Most have given their