‘But –’
‘Enough!’ Thea slashes a hand through the air. ‘Niema served this village dutifully for over ninety years, teaching everybody assembled, including yourself. For once, could you just be grateful for all that she’s done, and simply pay your respects without making a scene?’
Emory glances around at the weeping faces, realising she’s got carried away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbles. ‘I didn’t mean to …’
‘Just go,’ says Thea.
As Emory leaves, she’s shadowed by Adil who’s following her from above, his hand on the glass ball in his pocket.
‘How worried should I be?’ he asks, staring down at her curly brown hair.
‘Emory’s the only person in the village capable of working out what really happened last night,’ I say.
‘Then you’d better distract her,’ he says. ‘Because if she figures it out, we’re all dead.’
TWENTY-FIVE
While everybody mourns in the yard, Emory charges up the rattling staircase, heading for Niema’s dorm room. Her expression is thunderous, her shoulders tense. She’s still annoyed at herself. People were grieving, but she was so desperate to reach the truth that she trampled straight over their sorrow. It’s a quality she’s always hated in herself.
She’s about to push aside the tatty curtain leading into Niema’s room, when my voice stops her in her tracks.
‘If you walk through that door, there will be terrible consequences,’ I say.
‘Then tell me the truth,’ she replies fiercely. ‘That wound wasn’t caused by rubble and you know it. There wasn’t a solitary piece that could have cut that deep, or that cleanly. I searched every bit of the warehouse, and there was nothing to explain it.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘And you’re lying,’ she says, hurt.
I’ve lied to her before, but it’s always been through omission, or an artful misunderstanding of the question. This is the first time I’ve simply denied something so obviously true. She reacts in the only way she’s capable.
‘Niema wasn’t the type to wade into a burning warehouse,’ she points out angrily. ‘Even if she was, why would she only wake up six people to help her tackle the blaze rather than the entire village? And why didn’t they get the hose out?’
I meet her questions with silence.
‘Fine,’ she says bitterly. ‘I’ll find the answers myself.’
She enters Niema’s room, and looks around. It’s gloomy inside, the shutters closed, as they were yesterday. The single bed is made, a beautiful throw across the end of it. There’s a dog-eared book on the bedside table, and one of the cupboard doors is open, revealing the long dresses and robes inside. Emory never saw Niema wear anything else. She brought her modesty with her from the old world.
Emory pulls out one of the dresses, touching the material tenderly.
It still smells like Niema. Peppermint and orange. The former to put in her tea, and the latter a mid-morning snack, eaten immediately after her students’ first break.
Emory feels a pang of grief, then a sudden burst of pity for her father. Seth was Niema’s best friend. The only person she depended upon. He’ll be devastated.
‘Does he know?’ she asks, in her thoughts.
‘He’s still asleep,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell him when he wakes up.’
Emory gets down on her hands and knees, peering under the bed. She feels ridiculous, like she’s acting out a scene in one of the books she loves, but something very bad happened last night, and Thea is either lying about it, or doesn’t realise she’s wrong. Neither explanation makes Emory very happy. Finding nothing under the bed, she searches the back of the cupboard, then feels around the edges of the portraits, trying to remember everything Sherlock Holmes taught her.
Aside from a few loose nails and a lot of dust, she comes up empty.
Going to the bookshelf, she runs a finger across the torn spines, and crinkled pages. Possessions are usually redistributed when somebody dies, but Emory can’t imagine what will happen to Niema’s detective stories. Even if Abi does let people read them, Emory can’t think of a single villager who would enjoy the experience. Nearly all of them will be horrified after the first death, then decry how unrealistic and cruel the stories are thereafter.
Emory’s never known why she’s not affected the same way, but Niema obviously saw something different in her. She sought Emory out after her mother died, taking the lost thirteen-year-old child under her wing. Charmed by her endless curiosity, Niema introduced Emory to this bookshelf, allowing her to borrow the novels whenever she wanted. As the years went on, Niema would call Emory to this room whenever she found a book hiding in an old drawer, forgotten in some dilapidated building on the island. They would read them together in secret, discussing their twists, turns and revelations in hushed voices.
Emory wipes away the tear rolling down her cheek.
She didn’t come here to cry. There’ll be plenty of that in the next few weeks. Her grief will be waiting in the dark, and quiet. It will hide behind a dozen ordinary things, ambushing her when her thoughts drift. That’s how it happened after Jack died, and her mother. Five years after she lost her husband, she still has days when she’s reminded of him so powerfully that it knocks the wind out of her.
Her last stop is the writing desk.
She opens the drawers one after another, finding nothing except dust and a few dead woodlice. She’s about to give up, when she spies the tattered remnant of a burnt letter in the gutter of Niema’s candle holder.
She picks it up carefully, wary of the charred edges crumbling beneath her touch.
My darling boy,
I know you’re disappointed, and my decision will feel like a betrayal. You must believe I’ve let you down, after asking so much of you, but
This must be the letter she was writing two days ago, thinks Emory. The one she hurriedly cleared away when I noticed it.
Flipping the charred note over, she finds that Niema scribbled ‘5:5?’ on the back, though there’s no clue what it relates to. Niema mentioned that same number to her grandfather before he died, but he didn’t know what it meant either. It was clearly on her mind for some reason.
She examines the fragment again. Niema points out that she asked a lot of Hephaestus. Could that be related to the experiment they were conducting? Emory overheard them talking about it two nights before Niema died. She claimed it was dangerous, and the candidate could die. What if they fought back?
From her pocket, she removes the note Niema left for her yesterday morning. It had indentations of this letter on it, which Emory surfaced with a pencil rubbing. She arranges the two fragments, then reads them again: ‘My darling boy, I know you’re disappointed, and my decision will feel like a betrayal. You must believe I’ve let you down, after asking so much of you, but … if I couldn’t control … better … contain … Abi wanted to … couldn’t kill’
It’s infuriating, she thinks. There’s almost sense in there. Another few words and she’s certain the meaning would be clear.
Niema did something that she knew would make Hephaestus angry, she thinks. And now Niema’s dead. I need to figure out what that was.
‘Where’s Hephaestus?’ she asks. ‘I need to find out more about this experiment.’
‘He doesn’t like villagers very much,’ I say. ‘I doubt he’ll answer your questions.’
‘That’s no reason not to ask them,’ she replies. ‘Where is he?’
‘On his way to the village,’ I reply.