The Forever Ship
‘Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their ‘weaker’ Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’ GuardianPaloma’s arrival, with news of Elsewhere and the possibility of a world free of the fatal bond between twins, has given Cass and the resistance a hope worth fighting for.But they are facing a Council more powerful and ruthless than Cass could ever have imagined, willing to unleash weapons from the long-buried past to maintain their power over Alphas and Omegas alike.As the stunning Fire Sermon trilogy comes to a close, a struggle has begun not only for the future of Elsewhere but for the future of the whole world. And what started with fire may end with fire.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2017
Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007563166
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780007563159
Version: 2017-12-14
This book is dedicated to Paul de Tores,
braver and funnier than any character from a book.
Contents
And so it did end in fire, after all: the flame bursting from its white centre. The blast opening like an eye. Iâd seen that shape in my visions so many times that the explosion felt like coming home.
*
The water sealed over the boatâs wake, erasing all trace of us. The sea had always been good at keeping secrets.
There was a song that bards used to sing, about ghosts. Iâd heard it when Zach and I were children. Leonard and Eva had sung it, too, the night we met them. In the song, a man had strangled his lover and then been haunted by her ghost. Heâd fled across the river to escape her, because ghosts canât travel over water.
As I sat in the prow of the boat, I knew better.
âStop looking at me like that,â Paloma said.
âLike what?â I said.
I turned my face back to the fire, squinting against the smoke. I couldnât deny that Iâd been staring. I watched her all the time. Sometimes I woke and half expected that she would be gone â that she had never come at all, or that sheâd been nothing but a shape we had conjured out of our longing for Elsewhere.
But she had come: pale, like somebody seen through mist. Not the blondeness of Crispin, or of Elsa, who had hair with gold in it, and pink-flushed skin. Palomaâs hair was so blonde it was nearly grey, like driftwood â as if sheâd washed up on the beach instead of sailing here on The Rosalind. Her skin had a bleached-straw whiteness, and her eyes were light blue â barely a colour at all.
âLike Iâm some kind of ghost,â Paloma said. She leaned forward to prod the fire.
I met her eyes. âSorry.â
She swept her hand in the air, brushing away my apology. âItâs not your fault. You all do it.â
She was right. After weâd found The Rosalind, in the few days Iâd spent aboard Iâd seen how even the sailors whoâd travelled with Paloma for months still paused in their conversations when she passed them on the deck, and followed her movements from the corners of their eyes as they worked on the shipâs repairs. Piper and Zoe stared at her too. And since weâd left the ship, and headed inland towards New Hobart, I found myself watching her all the time. She was a rumour made flesh. A person from Elsewhere. A person without a twin. Both of those ideas were so outlandish that it felt strange, sometimes, to see her picking out fish bones that had stuck between her teeth, or trimming her fingernails with her dagger. These were everyday things, and I wasnât prepared for her to be so real.
âWeâre just curious,â I said.
âI know,â she said, her accent making unfamiliar shapes from the familiar words.
She had her own curiosity, too. As we spoke she stared at Piper and Zoe. A short distance from the fire, they were patching a water flask, using a glue that Zoe had made by rendering pine resin over the fire until the whole clearing was sharp with the stink of pine pitch. Paloma watched as Zoe stretched the leather of the flask flat on the ground, while Piper applied the patch.
âWhen I see those two togetherââ she gestured to Piper and Zoe ââitâs like something from a bardâs song come to life. An old story, so old you canât be sure it was ever real.â
We were sitting together on the ground, close to the fire, looking at each other across a gulf that was wider than the miles of sea that lay between here and her homeland. Untwinned and twinned, each of us had stepped out of the otherâs myth.
