The Fire Sermon Read Online Free

in concealing.
    “Just the blast. The same.”
    She unclasped and reclasped her hands. “Tell me something you haven’t told me twenty times before.”
    “There’s nothing. Just the blast.”
    I searched her face, but it revealed nothing of what she knew. I’m out of practice, I thought. Too long in the cell, cut off from people. And anyway, the Confessor was inscrutable. I tried to concentrate. Her face was nearly as pale as mine had become over the long months in the cell. The brand was somehow more conspicuous on her face than on others’, because the rest of her features were so imperturbable. Her skin as smooth as a polished river pebble, except for the tight redness of the brand, puckering at the center of her forehead. It was hard to tell her age. If you just glanced at her, you might think her the same age as me and Zach. To me, however, she seemed decades older: it was the intensity of her stare, the powers that it barely concealed.
    “Zach wants you to help me.”
    “Then tell him to come himself. Tell him to see me.”
    The Confessor laughed. “The guards told me you screamed his name for the first few weeks. Even now, after three months in here, you really think he’s going to come?”
    “He’ll come,” I said. “He’ll come eventually.”
    “You seem certain of that,” she said. She cocked her head slightly. “Are you certain that you want him to?”
    I would never explain to her that it wasn’t a matter of wanting, any more than a river wants to move downstream. How could I explain to her that he needed me, even though I was the one in the cell?
    I tried to change the subject.
    “I don’t even know what you want,” I said. “What you think I can do.”
    She rolled her eyes. “You’re like me, Cass. Which means I know what you’re capable of, even if you won’t admit it.”
    I tried a strategic concession. “It’s been more frequent. The blast.”
    “Unfortunately I doubt that you can have much valuable information to give us about something that happened four hundred years ago.”
    I could feel her mind probing at the edges of mine. It was like unfamiliar hands on my body. I tried to emulate her inscrutability, to close my mind.
    The Confessor sat back. “Tell me about the island.”
    She’d spoken quietly, but I had to hide my shock that I had been infiltrated so easily. I had only begun to see the island in the last few weeks, since the last trip to the ramparts. The first few times I dreamed of it, I’d doubted myself, wondered if those glimpses of sea and sky were a fantasy rather than a vision. Just a daydream of open space, to counteract the contraction of my daily reality into those four gray walls, the narrow bed, the single chair. But the visions came too regularly, and were too detailed and consistent. I knew that what I had seen was real, just as I knew that I could never speak of it. Now, in the overbearing silence of the room, my own breathing sounded loud.
    “I’ve seen it, too, you know,” she said. “You will tell me.”
    I tried to seal my mind around those images: the island, the city concealed in its caldera, houses clambering on one another up the steep sides. The water, merciless gray, stretching in all directions, pocked by outcrops of sharp stone. I could see it all, as I’d seen it many nights in my dreams. I tried to think of myself as holding its secret inside my mouth, the same way the island nursed the secret city, nestled in the crater.
    Standing, I said, “There is no island.”
    The Confessor stood, too. “You’d better hope not.”

    As we grew older the scrutiny of our parents was matched only by that of Zach himself. To him, every day we weren’t split was another day he was branded by the suspicion of being an Omega, another day he was prevented from assuming his rightful place in Alpha society. So, unsplit, the two of us lingered at the margins of village life. When other children went to school, we studied together at the kitchen