TWENTY-SIX
Emory hops off the pier onto the pebbled beach, where the rowboats are moored. They’re upturned to keep the rain out, and an orderly line of seagulls have gathered on their keels. If she’s to understand what really happened to Niema last night, she needs to know what caused that wound in her chest, and preferably find out where it happened.
Emory’s best guess is a knife, which is what brought her out here. There are plenty of knives in the village, but her father has a particularly sharp blade which he uses for sawing rope and making quick repairs to the boats. It’s not impossible to imagine Seth and Niema being caught in rough seas last night and Niema falling on it accidentally.
None of that would explain how her body ended up in the warehouse, but answers are elusive and asking for two at a time feels greedy.
Crunching across the pebbles, Emory notices a gap in the row of boats.
‘The Broad Bottom Packet isn’t here,’ she murmurs. ‘How did Niema get back to the village without the boat she left in?’
She waits for me to tell her what she doesn’t know, then remembers that I won’t.
Making a small sigh of dissatisfaction, Emory ducks under each boat in turn, searching their interiors. She thought she might get lucky and find the knife, but it’s not on the beach. It’s probably still in the Broad Bottom Packet, wherever that is.
She runs her finger along the sharp edges of the nearest anchor, wondering if it could be responsible.
‘She could have tripped and …’ Emory tuts, dismissing the thought. ‘The edges are too broad.’
She turns her attention to the oars, which are piled up on the pebbles. They’re too blunt and far too wide to have caused the injury she found. It has to have been a knife. Nothing else makes sense.
Stretching her back, she raises her face to the cloudy blue sky. The ocean is lapping against the pebbles, and seagulls are squawking and circling. If she had any tolerance for lying, she could convince herself it was just another Tuesday.
Her eyes drift out to sea, squinting against the glare.
Is the fog closer this morning?
For as long as she’s been alive, it’s been on the far side of a sandbank. Now it’s touching it. Climbing onto the pier, she starts walking towards the far end for a better look. Her vision is still a little bleary from the smoke in the warehouse.
Sea spray splashes her bare legs, dead fish and debris jostling against the wall, along with dozens of plastic bottles that still wash out of world’s end on a regular basis. It’s not as dirty as it would have been when battleships docked here, but it’s still not very inviting. Normally, the villagers would clean up this mess before they went to the farms, but their minds are elsewhere this morning.
Stepping over the nest of sheets she slept in last night, Emory arrives at the very end of the pier.
She shades her eyes, struggling to stare directly at it. Sunlight reacts strangely to the fog, causing it to change hue as the day progresses. In the morning, it’s a wall of shimmering white, almost like a spiderweb rippling above the water.
Is it closer?
She can’t be sure. Surely, it’s a trick of the light? Niema taught them that the barrier holding the fog back was infallible. It can’t be turned off without the three elders agreeing to it, and half of the emitters would have to be destroyed before they’d accidentally lose its protection, something that’s basically impossible because most of the machinery powering them is buried in concrete.
She’s ready to turn back for the village when she spots a shape under the turquoise water. She leaps off this pier every night to go for a swim, so she knows it wasn’t there yesterday.
Stripping off her dress and sandals, she lowers herself through the rubbish into the warm sea, then takes a deep breath and dives down towards the object, which is already surrounded by long-legged spider crabs.
She swims around it, examining it from all angles. It’s the conical contraption Hephaestus brought down from the cauldron yesterday – the one she thought looked like a hedgehog. It appears to have been badly damaged, but they’d not normally dump it in the ocean. The villagers are grateful for the beauty that surrounds them and they’d never spoil it with rubbish. Besides, Hephaestus reuses every scrap of metal and machinery he gets his hands on.
She bobs back to the surface gasping, then gracefully hauls herself out of the water. There are long scratches in the concrete marking its path from the village. Somebody must have dragged it the entire way.
After wringing the water from her hair, she dresses and strides back through the gate into the village.
People are drifting in from the rear yard mired in shock and grief. They take their places at the communal tables almost as if they’re sleepwalking, sitting there blankly, waiting for something to happen.
Her eyes dart from the kitchen to the tipped-over statue, to the stage and the rack of instruments at the back. Every one of them is in a different place from where it was before they went to bed.
She bites her lip, struggling to place the fragments of last night in a sensible order. Far as she can tell, Niema went to the lighthouse with Seth, only to come back without the boat. She then managed to get herself stabbed by a blade that’s disappeared, before a beam fell on her in a burning warehouse.
Emory kicks a rock irritably, sending it flying into the bird bath with a loud ding.
She stares at it in puzzlement. ‘The bird bath’s in the wrong place,’ she declares. ‘Why on earth would anybody have moved the bird bath?’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Numb with grief, Clara trudges down the lane near the school, the glass vials of the sample kit clinking inside her knapsack. Normally, they’d be kept company by her little wooden bird carvings, but when she packed her bag in the lab, she discovered they were all missing. She had twelve last night, and they’ve all vanished. She can’t imagine where they could have gone.
Compared to the deaths, the disappearance of her bird carvings shouldn’t be so upsetting, but it’s another thing she’s lost and can’t explain.
She arrives in the exercise yard to find that everybody’s given up on breakfast and is walking out towards the farms, carrying their tools over their shoulders. They’re talking in hushed, scared voices about the bodies in the warehouse. They’re comparing their injuries, asking me questions I can’t answer.
Their entire lives I’ve whispered in their minds, guiding them, urging them to kindness and selflessness. I’ve tended their hurts, and stripped the sharp edges from the world, by pointing out every danger. Suddenly, the certainty they’ve come to depend upon has evaporated. It’s like discovering you’ve been living on melting ice. They’re sinking, and I don’t have hands with which to pull them out of the water.
The tables are being cleared and Clara briefly considers grabbing a hunk of bread to take with her, but she feels too sick to eat. She doesn’t even have Hui’s memory gem for comfort. Her best friend has been ripped out of the world by the roots.
Halfway across the yard, she comes across her mother, who’s dripping wet and futilely shoving the bird bath with both hands. Hearing Clara’s steps, Emory glances at her daughter.
Their eyes meet.
A flicker of regret passes over Emory’s features, transforming into concern when she sees the pain on Clara’s face. Before either of them realises it, Emory is holding Clara in her arms, while her daughter sobs uncontrollably.
They don’t speak for a while, but when they do it’s Emory who initiates it, moving her head to meet Clara’s stricken eyes.