Sobbing, he tosses the twitching bird aside, then sinks to his knees.
I should try to comfort him, but there’s no optimal way of handling extreme emotion in humans, which I’ve come to regard as the greatest of evolution’s failures.
Thea squeezes Hephaestus’s enormous shoulder. It’s a simple gesture, but it lays bare their entire history together; everything they’ve endured and overcome since the world ended.
This tenderness would surprise the villagers who’ve rarely seen Thea laugh, or smile, or offer a kind word to anybody.
In truth, it still surprises Thea.
The first time she met Hephaestus he was the typical billionaire’s son, spoiled and spiteful, flailing through the world, mistaking notoriety for success. His mother was the most famous woman on the planet. The most successful. The most driven. The most debated. The most adored, and the most despised. Hephaestus was the most ‘her son’.
He was a gifted biologist, but her shadow draped the entire world. Unable to escape it, he decided to crash sports cars and sleep with models instead; anything to temporarily turn the tide of conversation his way. For a very long time, Thea thought him pitiful, but then the fog came.
Hephaestus dragged himself across a crumbling world for seven months to escape it, watching humanity tear itself apart. Somehow, he managed to find Thea’s sister, Ellie, along the way, protecting her as though she were family.
Ellie arrived scarred and bleeding, a little jumpy, but no worse for wear. Hephaestus, on the other hand, was almost an entirely different man. He never spoke in detail about what he experienced, but – in the first years especially – he barely spoke and never laughed; preferring the dark to the day. Even the surfeit of malignancy and entitlement that had once defined him was gone, replaced by the humbleness of the hunted.
For that first decade, the only people he really trusted were Ellie and Niema. He kept a wary eye on the other scientists, refusing to live in Blackheath with them. He was so paranoid, he wouldn’t even tell them where he slept. He came and went at unpredictable hours spending most of his time in hushed conference with his mother.
Gradually, he became more comfortable with other people, but never large groups and never with laughter. He didn’t trust laughter any more. He knew how malevolent it could be.
Through Ellie he slowly warmed up to Thea, the three of them growing closer as their fellow scientists started to die. Buried under his scarred exterior, she found a deep well of empathy. A steadfast friend.
After Ellie gave up, they only had each other.
It was Hephaestus who dragged Thea out of bed when the fog seeped through the island’s bedrock, worming its way inside Blackheath. They ran through the alarms together, sealing the blast doors after themselves, trapping it underground. If he hadn’t been there, she’d have been torn apart in her sleep.
Hephaestus finishes crying, then wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand. His eyes are snares, his fists clenched.
‘What happened?’ he growls, assuming his full height.
‘She was in the warehouse last night and a beam collapsed, crushing her skull,’ says Thea.
Hephaestus glares at the smouldering warehouse. Thea’s surprised it isn’t trying to scramble up the volcano away from him.
‘My mother went in there?’ he asks sceptically. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she was looking for something. Does it matter?’
‘It might,’ he says darkly. ‘When she first put the call out for refugees, she created a deadman’s switch that was designed to automatically turn off the barrier if her heart stopped. She’d seen the lawlessness and the rapes on the mainland, and she was worried that same violence would find its way here. The deadman’s switch was her deterrent. She wanted every new arrival to know that if she was killed, the fog would swallow the island whole.’
Thea stares at him, her pulse quickening with fear. ‘We’ve been on this island for nearly a century. You can’t be telling me that she never got round to turning it off?’
‘I’ve got equipment monitoring the fog,’ he says bleakly. ‘For ninety years, it hasn’t made a peep, but when I woke up this morning, every light was flashing red. The barrier’s down, Thea. The fog’s closing in. At this rate, it will swallow the island in thirty-eight hours.’
TWENTY-NINE
‘Abi, you need to get the barriers back up,’ demands Thea, loud enough to startle the vultures, whose hungry eyes have turned to their dying comrade.
‘The deadman’s switch is not a protocol I can bypass,’ I explain. ‘Niema’s orders are clear.’
‘Damn the orders!’ she snaps. ‘Stop the fog!’
‘I cannot disregard an instruction from Niema any more than your arm could disregard your desire to scratch your nose,’ I say. ‘If it’s any consolation, you’ll be able to live in the cauldron garden. The fog cannot penetrate the dome.’
Thea turns her terrified eyes towards the volcano, its summit lost in clouds.
In the decades after the fog first appeared, they’d catch occasional broadcasts from survivors holed up in fallout shelters on the mainland, or underground bunkers. At first, they were normal distress calls, but as time wore on they became pleas for help, people sobbing as they described the cults and cannibalism unfolding in the concrete tombs they’d sealed themselves in. The lucky ones simply starved to death, but they all went silent eventually.
‘There has to be something else we can do.’ She stares at Hephaestus, pleadingly. ‘Can’t you jerry rig the emitters?’
‘I inspected a couple of them on my way here,’ he says, rubbing a hand across his stubbled scalp, sweat fleeing ahead of it. ‘Each one has hundreds of fail-safes, but her death bypassed them completely. It’s the only thing that could have stopped them working. They’re bricks now, the way she intended. Mother didn’t want her killers to have any way of saving themselves.’
He blows out a breath. ‘The thing is, she told me she’d deactivated the deadman’s switch years ago, which means she must have turned it back on last night.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘The only reason I can come up with is that she thought she was in danger.’ He scratches his nose, staring at the barracks, levelly. ‘She told me she was planning to wake the villagers after curfew and tell them the truth about this island. You remember how Adil reacted when he found out? He stormed the school with a knife and tried to take her head off. I think one of the villagers – maybe all of them – chased her into that warehouse and set it alight. She probably wiped everybody’s memories while hoping to save herself, but the beam fell and killed her before she could get out.’
He nods at this account, obviously satisfied with his own reasoning, but Thea’s more sceptical. Aside from Adil, no villager has ever hurt another. They’ve never had a physical fight. The children don’t even play rough. They’re pacifistic to the point of evolutionary incompetence. The idea they could be responsible for something as brutal as Niema’s death strikes her as wildly implausible.
‘You can’t honestly be suggesting she was murdered?’ she says.
He lifts the sleeve of his T-shirt, showing her the scratches on his arms.
‘These are made by fingers raking the skin,’ he says. ‘It usually happens in fights, and I have dozens of them, all over me. Bruises like those on your upper arms and wrists are made when you’re being restrained and are struggling to get free.’