‘That’s the second one of those we’ve found,’ points out Emory. ‘There was another one under the table. That was broken, as well. I thought they might be from your lab.’
‘They could be,’ agrees Thea. ‘When I woke up my first-aid kit had been ransacked.’
‘Any idea what they were being used for?’
‘It’s facts we need not ideas.’ She hands the broken syringe back to Clara. ‘Analyse this with the other samples when you’re done here.’
‘Hui brought down a metal box from the cauldron yesterday,’ says Emory, changing subject abruptly. ‘What was inside it?’
Thea snaps her gaze towards Emory, displeased with the bluntness of her tone. Mortal danger or not, she’s used to a little decorum from the villagers.
‘Why?’
‘Because Niema took that same box out to the lighthouse last night. It was obviously important to her, and now something’s happened to both of the people who handled it.’
Thea pinches the bridge of her nose, making it obvious that she believes these questions to be beneath her. She wouldn’t even consider answering them if it weren’t for the threat to the island.
‘It was a sample box,’ she explains grudgingly. ‘We use them to collect cuttings from the cauldron garden. Niema told me she’d left it up there the night before, and asked me to collect it on my way back to the village. I have no idea why she wanted it, or what was inside.’
Emory’s eyes flick to Thea’s right hand. The bandage has come loose, revealing the ragged palm beneath.
It’s an unusual injury, thinks Emory. Most people woke up with broken bones, or bruises. Nobody else has anything like this.
Clara finishes collecting her samples and starts to sweep everything back into her bag.
‘I want you out at those farms the moment you’ve run your tests,’ says Thea. ‘If the soil’s blighted, I want to know what’s causing it. There are going to be a lot more dead people if we can’t feed everybody.’
‘But –’
‘Go,’ commands Thea.
Clara casts a desperate glance at Emory, but there’s nothing her mother can do to countermand the order of an elder.
Packing her testing kit back into her bag, Clara slings it over her shoulder and slouches back to the lab.
‘I want you to let me carry on investigating,’ says Emory, once her daughter is out of earshot.
Thea crosses her arms, regarding her former apprentice through narrowed eyes.
Emory feels like she’s being brushed with metal wool. She wilts momentarily, desperate to look away, but she knows how this goes; she knows what Thea’s hoping to see. The trials she makes her apprentices undertake aren’t just about intelligence, they’re about courage.
Apprentices do dangerous things in the dark. They’re sent into ruins and across storm-tossed waters. Thea wants to know that the person she selects won’t buckle, that they’ll see their task through.
‘You order apprentices out on errands all the time,’ says Emory, buoyed by the fact that Thea hasn’t outright rejected the idea. ‘This would be the same.’
‘You were an apprentice and you quit,’ replies Thea. ‘That rather undermines your argument, don’t you think?’
There are moments in history when entire empires, whole branches of the future, rest precariously on the words of a single person. Usually, they’re not even aware of it. They don’t have time to plan, or consider. They simply open their mouths and speak, and the universe takes on a new pattern.
Emory is now one of those people.
If she says the wrong thing next, the dreams Niema had for humanity will wither on the vine. I wish I could help. I wish I could nudge or prod or influence, but I’ve played most of my cards getting her in front of Thea.
It’s all up to Emory now.
‘Do you remember why I quit?’ asks Emory, feeling the burning heat on the back of her neck. ‘Why we didn’t get on?’
‘Because you wouldn’t stop asking questions,’ replies Thea appreciatively, realising where she’s been led. ‘And you were relentless in the pursuit of answers.’ Her eyes narrow. ‘I don’t doubt your nature, Emory. It’s your temperament I call into question. Why would I trust you with something this important?’
‘Because either you or Hephaestus is more than likely the murderer,’ she responds, with only the slightest wobble in her voice.
Thea reddens, but Emory plunges on recklessly, ‘Nobody in this village has ever hurt anybody else intentionally. I don’t believe that changed last night. If I’m right, you’ll need a third party to investigate, because you can’t trust each other.’
‘Why would I murder my mentor?’ Thea asks in a low, dangerous voice. ‘Why would Hephaestus murder his own mother?’
‘I’m asking you to let me find out,’ replies Emory ‘The fog will be here in less than two days, and unless we find out who killed Niema, it’s going to tear apart everybody I love, including my daughter. I can’t sit here doing nothing.’
She searches Thea’s face for some hint of her thinking, but all she sees is disdain and doubt.
‘This is what I’m good at,’ she pleads. ‘Let me be of service.’
THIRTY-ONE
Clara climbs the four steps to Thea’s lab, her annoyance at being so casually dismissed tempered by her joy at finally being somewhere cool. The midday sun is merciless on the island, stilling all life beneath it. Nearly every animal is huddled in whatever scrap of shade they can find. Even the ocean’s cowed, lying flat, waiting for the heat to pass.
Thea’s lab is one of the few places to escape. The high ceilings are still blessed with a few working fans, which are juddering around, carving the warm air into muggy ribbons.
She glances at the machines, trying to remember which one of them she needs. She only worked in here for a couple of weeks before they set off on the expedition, and she can barely remember the names of the equipment, let alone their purposes.
In truth, she’s still intimidated by them.
Thea’s always been scornful of these patchwork contraptions, but this is as close to the old world as Clara’s ever been. These blinking lights and whooshing pipes are similar to the tools with which humanity created the fog. In this room exists the technology to destroy everything all over again, and she’s in here blindly pushing buttons.
‘The worst has already happened,’ I say. ‘The fog’s on its way. If you look at it from a certain angle, that’s actually quite liberating.’
Watching her feet to keep from tripping over the thick black wires criss-crossing the floor, Clara weaves through the tables until she arrives at the micro-sampling scanner.
Flipping a switch on the side powers it up, and briefly causes the overhead lights to dim. The lab is powered by electricity gathered from solar panels arrayed around the village, but they’re not efficient enough to keep everything running simultaneously, so she has to be careful which pieces of equipment she uses at one time.
The display flashes into life revealing the results of the blood test she ran on Ben yesterday, the little boy they collected from the cauldron garden. It already feels like it happened weeks ago. She’s still not sure why Thea wanted it tested. There was nothing unusual in his blood.
She sighs, swiping the results off the screen. Yesterday’s mysteries suddenly don’t feel quite so urgent.
She places the syringe under the scanner, but there’s not enough residue to test. She swaps it for the blood-soaked dirt she found beneath the bird bath, magnifying until it’s a lake of red and white blood cells, plasma and platelets, medical nanobots and ‘grey’ cells – microscopic laboratories, capable of battling the pandemics that had become an annual occurrence in the old world.