‘It’s good to see you again, Xander.’
The boy opened his mouth, but no words came. In the silence, I could almost hear the discordant jangling of his mind.
‘Do you have any news for us?’ Piper asked.
Xander leaned forward, until his face was close to Piper’s. He spoke in a whisper. ‘Forever fire. Hot noise. Burning light.’ The words chased one another out.
‘He’s seeing the blast more than ever,’ Sally said. ‘Day and night, now.’
‘He never used to be as bad as this,’ Piper said. ‘What’s changed?’
‘Move over,’ I said to Piper.
‘Maze of bones,’ muttered Xander.
I looked up at Sally. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Search me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he talks almost normally. Other times, he comes up with stuff like that. The fire, most of the time. Sometimes stuff about bones.’
‘Noises in the maze of bones,’ Xander said.
His eyes had stilled a little, staring abstractedly at the corner of the ceiling. I placed my hands on the sides of his head, and stared into his eyes.
I didn’t want to force myself into his mind. I still remembered how it had felt when The Confessor had tried to probe my thoughts in the Keeping Rooms. After each session with her, my mind had felt like a dollhouse that had been picked up and shaken, everything scattered and rattling. I understood Zoe’s fury, when she learned that I’d stumbled into her dreams. But I had to admit that I was also curious about what I might discover from Xander. I was desperate to see if what he saw was the same as what I saw. To confirm, I hoped, that I was not alone in the visions of fire that my mind hurled at me. If I was searching for anything in the jumble of his mind, I suppose it was a glimpse of myself.
His eyes remained blank as I groped towards his thoughts. Occasionally his mouth seemed to be trying to form words, but they didn’t take shape. Stillborn, they stayed at his lips, empty shapes incapable of sound.
His mind was burnt out. Everything charred and gone, broken down to ashes and dust. This was what remained, after the flames had exploded too many times in his mind: ash, and smoke, and words sheared of their meanings, rattling loose in his head.
‘It’s the visions of the blast that’ve done this to him,’ I said.
It wasn’t the strangeness of his state that unsettled me, but its familiarity. I’d felt it myself, this madness, scratching around the edge of my mind like a rat in the rafters. It was always there. At times, particularly in the Keeping Rooms, or when the blast visions had become more and more frequent, it had been emboldened, almost crept into sight.
‘Flash. Fire. Forever fire,’ Xander blurted again. He didn’t say the words – they uttered him. As each word burst from him, he convulsed. He looked startled at the sounds emerging from his own mouth.
‘You know it happens to seers, eventually,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. I had lived with that knowledge for as long as I’d known what I was. But encountering the residue of Xander’s mind still left me with a chill in my guts, my fists curled so tightly that my nails cut into my palms.
He was rocking backwards and forwards now, his arms wrapped around his knees. I recognised, in his scrunched body, that futile attempt to hide from the visions, as if making yourself smaller would somehow spare you. I remembered curling like that myself, as a child, with my head tucked down towards my chest and my eyes clamped closed. It didn’t work, of course. Xander was right: Forever fire. It would never go away. The blast would haunt all of us seers, always. But why did it burst into our dreams more often now, enough to drive Xander to this?
‘Let him rest,’ Sally said, stepping forward and cupping Xander’s chin in her hand. She lifted the blanket that had fallen from him, and tucked it again around his shoulders.
As we were leaving, he opened his eyes and, for a moment, fixed them on me.
‘Lucia?’
I looked at Piper for an explanation. He’d glanced up at Zoe, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She crossed her arms in front of her. Her face shut down.
‘Lucia?’ said Xander again.
Piper looked up at me. ‘He must be able to tell you’re a seer. Lucia was a seer too.’
The older seer from the island, branded. She’d drowned, Piper had said. A shipwreck in a storm, on the way to the island.
‘Lucia’s gone,’ Piper said to Xander. ‘The ship went down more than a year ago. You know that already.’ His voice was too brisk, too loud: his attempt to sound casual was jarring.
We left Xander gazing out the window, watching the sea swap its colours with the sky. His hands twitched and twisted constantly. I thought of Leonard’s hands on his guitar strings. Xander’s hands were kept busy on the unseen instrument of his madness.
‘What will you do with him?’ I asked Sally, when she’d closed the door to the bedroom.
‘Do?’ She laughed. ‘You say it like I have choices. As if there’s anything I could do, other than just keep surviving. Keep him safe.’
Even from the next room, I found Xander’s presence exhausting. The churning of his mind, from behind the closed door, made me feel seasick. When Sally sent us out to gather firewood and mushrooms, I felt guilty at my own relief.
Piper and I knelt together at the base of one of the trees, where mushrooms clustered thickly. Zoe was gathering wood nearby. Piper spoke quietly, so that she wouldn’t hear.
‘You’ve seen Xander – what being a seer has done to him.’ He looked up at Zoe, twenty yards away, and dropped his voice even further. ‘It happened to Lucia too.’ At the mention of the dead seer’s name, his voice caught, his eyelids closed. For a single moment I felt as though we were standing on different islands, and the tide had swallowed the neck of land between them. ‘Towards the end,’ he added. Then he looked quickly back at me and went on. ‘Now you’re having more and more visions of the blast, too. So why hasn’t it happened to you yet?’
I had often wondered this myself. There were times when I’d felt my sanity coming loose like a bad tooth. When the flames erupted within me again and again, I had wondered how it was that I still managed to function. Now I’d seen how the words bubbled out of Xander like water from an overheated pan, and wondered how long it would take before my own visions brought me to the boil. Did I have years, or months? When it happened, would I know?
When I asked myself why it hadn’t happened already, I always came up with the same answer, though it wasn’t an answer that I could share with Piper: it was Zach. If there was some streak of certainty in me, something that held me together when the visions tried their best to tear me apart – then it had its roots in Zach. If there was a strength in me, it was my stubborn belief in him that had formed it. Zach had been the steady point in my life. Not a force for good – I’d seen too much of what he’d done to believe that. But a force, nonetheless. I knew there was no part of me that had not been shaped by him, or against him. And if I allowed myself to slip into madness, then I could neither stop him nor save him. It would all be over.
*
Back inside, we helped prepare the meal. Occasionally, from the bedroom, we could hear Xander hurling syllables at the night air. Bones and fire slipped under the door. He might be mad, but he saw clearly enough what the blast had made of our world. Bones and fire.
‘How long have you been living here?’ I asked Sally, as I helped her pluck the brace of pigeons that she’d thrown on to the table. With each tug at the feathers the greying flesh stretched, leaving a clammy film on my fingers.
‘Years. Decades. Time gets slippery, when you’re as old as me.’
It’s