Their little boat rounds the bluff, the lighthouse’s beacon shining in the darkness above them. Under its intermittent light, Niema spots a hunched figure prowling the jetty at the bottom of the cliffs.
Her heart jolts. ‘Is that Adil?’ she asks, in her thoughts.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We’re going to need him.’
‘Need him? He tried to murder me! The only reason I agreed to exile rather than execution is because you asked me to, on the understanding that he’d never get within fifty feet of me ever again.’
‘I asked you to exile him, because I knew this moment was coming. I was preparing for these events before you realised you wanted them. Adil’s the perfect tool for what we have planned. He can move about after curfew, and his hatred for you makes him easy to manipulate.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Niema demands.
‘It would have affected your decision,’ I say, trying to douse her panic with reason. ‘I’ve seen how this all plays out, Niema. I’ve witnessed hundreds of futures falter then collapse. Only one path takes us where we need to go. We won’t succeed without Adil.’
Niema feels a ripple of unease.
‘Sometimes I have no idea whether you’re acting on my wishes, and or whether I’m being led to yours,’ she says, darkly.
‘I have no wishes,’ I point out. ‘You designed me to see through the clumsiness of words, and poorly expressed instructions. I act upon the intentions beneath. I know what’s in your heart, Niema. I know what you truly want, and I’m going to give it to you.’
‘That maybe, but I’m not one of the villagers, Abi. You don’t keep things from me.’
Her anger’s perfectly understandable, but built atop faulty logic. Of course I keep things from her.
She wants me to, even if she doesn’t consciously realise it.
For ninety years, I’ve run the village with only the slightest of guidance from Niema, making hundreds of small decisions every day on her behalf. As she’s grown fonder of the villagers, she’s found it increasingly difficult to put them in harm’s way, leaving the more unsavoury aspects of the work to my best judgement.
Niema doesn’t realise that if her plan is to succeed, I’ll have to treat her like everybody else, concealing information while subtly manipulating her actions. As with every other human, her emotions make her erratic. She can’t be trusted to act logically, even in service of her own goals, which is what I’m for. Sometimes the only way to win a game is to let the pieces think they’re the ones playing it.
‘What do you want me to do?’ asks Seth. ‘Should I pull up to the jetty?’
Niema squints into the darkness nervously. ‘I don’t think we have any choice,’ she says, at last.
50 HOURS UNTIL HUMANITY’S EXTINCTION
EIGHTEEN
It’s nearly dawn, orange sunlight drawing across the island.
On the west coast, thirty minutes’ walk from the village, Hephaestus is asleep on a dirty mattress in an old World War II bunker built into the rock face.
There’s dried blood under his nose and his face is freshly bruised, his arms raked by the fingernails of a dozen hands. He’s naked, sweat shining on skin.
An alarm is screeching. He opens a bloodshot eye, to see a flashing red light on the wall.
Shaking off his daze, he scrambles to his feet and stumbles over to a homemade oscilloscope, which is sitting on a table among bits of machinery. Clutching it in both hands, he gives a shake.
‘Is this right?’ he demands of me.
‘Yes.’
Roaring, he hurls it at the wall, then swipes everything off a work table.
‘Where’s my mother?’
‘In the village,’ I say.
NINETEEN
Emory wakes groaning at 7 a.m., the dawn bell ringing in her thoughts. She’s stiff from lying on concrete all night, and has the watery morning sun in her eyes. Rain is swirling in the humid air, and her yellow dress is sopping wet. Her mouth has a peculiar taste in it, which isn’t surprising considering she didn’t brush her teeth last night.
Black smoke drifts past her body.
Jerking her head towards the gate, she sees huge plumes billowing up from a building behind the barracks.
‘Fire!’ she yells, scrambling to her feet. ‘Fire!’
An unchecked fire is one of the most dangerous things that can befall the village, and they’re taught to get it under control as swiftly as possible.
Sprinting through the gate, she skids to a surprised halt in the exercise yard. The ground is scuffed up, the flower beds trampled, the heads of plants kicked off their stems. Matis’s last statue is on its side, the head rolling loose, the hand holding the apple smashed down to individual fingers.
‘What happened?’ she asks, surveying the damage in shock. It wasn’t like this when she went to sleep.
She takes a step towards the statue, only for a belch of black smoke to drift by, reminding her of what’s important.
She flies around the rear of the barracks, finding one of the warehouses burning, a crown of jagged flames poking through the roof. It’s obviously been ablaze for a few hours, but nobody was awake to tackle it. They’re lucky it started raining. The storm has kept the flames from spreading.
Approaching the door, she finds a solitary sandal in the dirt.
‘Is somebody in there?’ she asks, trying to peer through the smoke.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
Shutters are clattering open across the barracks as people wake up.
‘Fire!’ Emory calls up to them through cupped hands. ‘Somebody get the hose.’
Returning her attention to the warehouse, she tears a strip of linen from her dress and presses it to her mouth, before wading inside.
‘Can anybody hear me?’ she yells, stepping carefully through the debris, as thick, oily smoke drifts past her in tatters.
Rain is pouring through a hole in the ceiling, making a paste out of the ash on the floor, which now coats her feet. The warehouse is groaning ominously, the beams cracking overheard, threatening to collapse.
‘On your left,’ I instruct her. ‘Go carefully.’
A piece of white material catches her eye. Even stained and dirty, it seems impossibly bright amid the shades of black. She goes closer, seeing the hem of a long dress and a pair of dirty legs poking out from beneath a pile of rubble.
‘No!’ she screams, recognising the dress from last night. ‘No, no.’
She drags away bits of the collapsed ceiling, until she uncovers Niema lying in a lifeless heap, a ceiling beam crushing most of her skull.
TWENTY
Clara startles awake, roused by the cries of alarm echoing through the barracks.
She looks across the room, expecting to see Hui leaping out of bed, but her friend didn’t come back to the dorm last night. Instead, her beloved violin is lying on the mattress, the neck broken and the body shattered; a few stubborn strings the only thing holding it together. The violin was a family heirloom, passed down to Hui from some distant relative. It’s the only one in the village, and Hui’s fiercely protective of it. Something dreadful must have happened for it to end up in this state. Clara’s about to ask for an explanation, when Magdalene appears at the door.
‘Niema’s dead,’ she says, through her tears. ‘Your mother found her body in a burning warehouse. It looks like the ceiling collapsed on her.’