The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig

to talk to one another, that wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have gone mad. Why would the other Omegas here ever hurt me? They’re in the same situation as I am. Why deny us company?”
    “Because of who their twins are.”
    “Their twins are your friends, your Council cronies.”
    “You’re so naive, Cass. They’re the people I work with, work for—not my friends. You think some of them wouldn’t like to get their own twins to finish you off, to get at me?”
    “Then where does it end? By your logic, we should all spend our lives in padded cells, Alphas and Omegas alike.”
    “It’s not just me,” he said. “It’s always happened: using those who are close to people to manipulate them. Even in the Before. If they needed to control somebody, they could kidnap their husband, child, lover. The only difference in the After is that, now, it’s more direct. In the Before, you had to watch your back. Now, we all have two backs to watch. It’s that simple.”
    “It’s only simple because you reduce having a twin to a liability. You’re paranoid.”
    “And you’re willfully naive.”
    “Is that why you come down here?” I asked him as he stood and unlocked the door. “Because you can’t trust anybody else up there, in the Council?”
    “That would imply I could trust you,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him. I heard the key turn.

    I calculated that it must have been at least a year since I’d seen the sky. In the artificially lit world of the Keeping Rooms, even my dreams changed; my daytime visions, too. When I’d first started to have visions of the island, I’d wondered if they were just a fantasy to alleviate the horror of my confinement. Now that new, darker visions began to intrude, for a long time I thought they might just be morbid imaginings, that the horror of my long isolation had seeped into my dreams. As my tally of days in the Keeping Rooms crept upward, I was growing distrustful of my own mind. But what I saw was too alien, and too consistent, for me to believe that I’d come up with it myself. The details, too, were so vivid that I was convinced I couldn’t have created them: the glass tanks, real right down to the dust on the rubber seals at the base. The wires and panels above the tanks, each panel speckled by tiny lights, red or green. The tubes, flesh-colored and rubbery, emerging from the top of each tank.
    How could I have invented such a sight, when I couldn’t even decipher what it was? All that I knew for sure was that it was taboo, like the glass ball of light in my cell. The tubes and wires that I saw surrounding the tanks matched the stories of the Before, and all its electric alchemy. The lights, too, were the same unnatural spark as the light in my cell. Each light, unwavering, was a dot of pure color, without heat. This was a machine—but a machine for what? It was both messier and more awesome than the whispers about the Before had led me to believe. The tangle of wires and tubes looked disordered, improvised. But the whole, the pulsating mass of connections, lights, and tanks, was so huge and so complex that it couldn’t help be impressive, despite the shudder it provoked in me.
    At first, the tanks were all that the visions showed me. Then, floating within the tanks, I saw the bodies, suspended in a viscous liquid that seemed to slow everything until even the waving of their hair was lethargic. From each drooping mouth, a tube. But the eyes were the worst. Most had their eyes closed, but even those few with open eyes wore entirely blank expressions, their eyes utterly empty. These were the ruins of people. I thought of Zach’s words, when I’d complained about the cell: There are worse things we could do to you than this cell, you know.
    I sensed the tanks most acutely when Zach came, though he did this rarely now. The tank room was like a smell that clung to him. Even as I heard his key in the lock I could feel the faces looming into sight. After