When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.
I squeezed his hand. ‘What could I do?’
‘Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair – she’s killing him.’
‘It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.’
‘It’s not fair,’ he said again.
‘Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.’
‘It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas – we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.’
I couldn’t argue with him about the illness – it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. ‘It’s not her fault,’ I offered. ‘And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.’
He dropped my hand. ‘You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.’
‘Of course I care.’
‘Then do something,’ he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I said. I knew that seers were rumoured to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world – only perceive it in crooked ways.
‘I wouldn’t tell anyone,’ he whispered. ‘If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.’
It made no difference whether I believed him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I repeated.
‘What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?’
I reached once more for his hand. ‘He’s my dad too.’
‘Omegas don’t have family,’ he said, snatching his hand away.
*
Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and I were in the shed, asleep, Alice’s jagged breath grating on our dreams. I woke suddenly. I shook Zach and said, without thinking of hiding my vision, ‘Go to Dad. Go now.’ He was gone before he could even accuse me of anything, his footsteps racing on the gravel path to the cottage. I stood to go too: nearby, my father was dying. But Alice opened her eyes, briefly at first, and then for longer. I didn’t want her to be alone, in the cramped darkness of an unfamiliar shed. So I stayed.
They were buried together the next day, though the gravestone bore only his name. Mum had burned Alice’s nightdress, along with the sheets from both fever-sweated beds. The sole tangible proof that Alice had existed was hanging on a piece of twine around my neck, under my dress: a large brass key. The night she died, when Alice had woken briefly and seen that she was alone with me, she’d taken the key from her neck and passed it to me.
‘Behind my cottage, buried under the lavender, there’s a chest. Things that will help you when you go there.’ She entered another coughing fit.
I handed it back, loath to receive another uninvited gift from this woman. ‘How do you know it will be me?’
She coughed again. ‘I don’t, Cass. I just hope it is.’
‘Why?’ I, more than Zach, had cared for this woman, this reeking stranger. Why would she now wish this upon me?
She pressed the key again into my resisting hand. ‘Because your brother, he’s so full of fear – he’ll never cope if it’s him.’
‘He’s not afraid of things – and he’s strong.’ I wasn’t sure if I was coming to his defence, or my own. ‘He’s just angry, I suppose.’
Alice laughed, a rasp that differed only slightly from her usual coughing. ‘Oh, he’s angry all right. But it’s all the same thing.’ She waved my hand away impatiently as I tried to pass back the key.
In the end, I took it. I kept the key hidden, but it still felt like an admission, if only to myself. Looking at Zach’s face as we stood in the graveyard, squinting in the relentless sun, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Since Dad’s death, I’d felt something shift in Zach’s mind. The change in his thoughts felt like a rusted lock that finally gives way: the same decisiveness, the same satisfaction.
With Dad gone, our house was filled with waiting. I began to dream about the brand. In my dream that first night, I placed my hand again on Alice’s head, and felt her scar burning into the flesh of my own palm.
*
Only a month after the burial, I came home to find the local Councilman there. It was late summer, the hay freshly cut and sharp underfoot as I walked across the fields. On the path up from the river I saw the blurring of the sky above our cottage, and wondered why the fire was lit on such a hot day.
They were waiting for me inside. The moment I saw the black iron handle sticking out of the fire, I heard again the hiss of branded flesh that had sounded in my recent dreams, and I turned to run. It was my mother who grabbed me, hard, by the arm.
‘You know the Councilman, Cass, from downstream.’
I didn’t struggle, but kept my eyes fixed on the brand in the fire. The shape at its end, glowing in the coals, was smaller than I’d pictured it in my dreams. It occurred to me that it was made for use on infants.
‘Thirteen years now, Cassandra, we’ve waited for you and your brother to be split,’ said the Councilman. He reminded me of my father; his big hands. ‘It’s too long. One of you where you shouldn’t be, and one missing out on school. We can’t have an Omega here, contaminating the village. It’s dangerous, especially for the other twin. You each need to take your proper place.’
‘This is our proper place: here. This is our home.’ I was shouting, but Mum interrupted me quickly.
‘Zach told us, Cass.’
The Councilman took over. ‘Your twin came to see me.’
Zach had been standing behind the Councilman, head slightly bowed. Now he looked up at me. I don’t know what I’d expected to see in his eyes: triumph, I suppose. Perhaps contrition. Instead he looked as he so often did: wary, watchful. Afraid, even, but my own fear dragged my eyes back to the brand, from its long black handle down to the shape at the end, a serpentine curve in the coals.
‘How do you know he’s not lying?’ I asked the Councilman.
He laughed. ‘Why would he lie about this? Zach’s shown courage.’ He stepped up to the fireplace and lifted the brand. Methodically, he knocked it twice against the iron grill to shake loose the ash that clung to it.
‘Courage?’ I threw off my mother’s grasp.
The Councilman stepped back from the fire, the brand held high. To my surprise, Mum didn’t grab me again, or make any move to stop me as I backed away. It was the Councilman who moved, quicker than I would have imagined, given his size. He grabbed Zach by the neck and pressed him against the wall beside the hearth. In the Councilman’s other hand, raised above Zach’s face, the brand was smoking slightly.
I shook my head, as if trying to shake the world into some sort of sense. My eyes met Zach’s. Even with the brand so close to his face that its shadow fell across