The Map of Bones
‘Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their ‘weaker’ Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection’ GuardianThe second book in Francesca Haig’s incredible Fire Sermon series.The Omega resistance has been brutally attacked, its members dead or in hiding.The Alpha Council’s plan for permanently containing the Omegas has begun.But all is not entirely lost: the Council’s seer, The Confessor, is dead, killed by her twin’s sacrifice.Cass is left haunted by visions of the past, while her brother Zach’s cruelty and obsession pushes her to the edge, and threatens to destroy everything she hopes for.As the country moves closer to all-out civil war, Cass will learn that to change the future she will need to uncover the past. But nothing can prepare her for what she discovers: a deeply buried secret that raises the stakes higher than ever before.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016
Copyright © De Tores Ltd 2016
Jacket design by Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Wendy Stevenson / Arcangel Images (front cover, skull).
Jacket photography © Johnny Ring. Branding iron made by Nick Moran at London Forge. All other images © Shutterstock.com.
Author photograph © Andrew North.
Francesca Haig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007563098
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007563111
Version: 2016-08-04
This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents, Alan and Sally, who shared with me their enduring passion for words.
Contents
Each time he came to me in dreams, I saw him as Iâd seen him the first time: floating. He was a silhouette, blurred by the tankâs thick glass, and by the viscous fluid in which he was submerged. I could see only glimpses: his head slumped against his shoulder; the curve of his cheek. I couldnât see his face clearly, but I knew it was him, the same way that I would know the weight of his arm across my body, or the sound of his breath in the darkness.
Kipâs torso curled forwards, his legs hanging. His suspended body was a question mark that I couldnât answer.
I would have preferred anything to those dreams â even the memory of his jump. That came to me often enough in the daytime: his half-shrug, before he leapt. The long fall. How the silo floor was the mortar that made his bones a pestle, grinding his own flesh.
When I dreamed of him in the tank it was a different kind of horror. Not the spreading blood on the silo floor, but something worse: the immaculate torture of the tubes and wires. I had freed him from the tank myself, months ago. But ever since Iâd watched him die in the silo, my dreams encased him once again within the glass.
The dream shifted. Kip was gone, and I was watching Zach sleeping. One of his hands was thrust out towards me. I could see the gnawed skin around his fingernails; I could see his jaw, roughened by stubble.
When we were very small weâd shared a cot, and slept each night curled together. Even when we were older, and heâd begun to fear and despise me, our bodies never unlearnt that habit of closeness. When weâd outgrown our shared cot, I would roll over in my own bed and watch how he, sleeping on the far side of the room, would roll too.
Now I stared again at Zachâs sleeping face. There was nothing on it to show what he had done. I was the branded one, but his face should have worn some kind of mark. How could he have built the tanks, and ordered the massacre on the island, and still sleep like that, open-mouthed and oblivious? Awake, he had never been still. I remembered his hands, always moving, tying invisible knots in the air. Now he was motionless. Only his eyes were twitching as they followed the movements of his own dreams. At his neck, a vein pulsed, keeping count of his heartâs beats. My own, too â they were the same thing. When his stopped, so would mine. He had betrayed me at every opportunity, but our shared death was the one promise that he couldnât break.
He opened his eyes.
âWhat do you want from me?â he said.
I had fled from him all the way to the island, and back to the deadlands of the east, but here he was, my twin, staring at me across the silence of my dream. It was as if a rope bound me to him, and the further we ran from each other, the more we felt it tighten.
âWhat do you want from me?â he said again.
