‘What happens if I find it was you? Do you really think he’d be willing to hurt his only friend?’
Thea’s body tenses, her hands stopping their work.
‘I’d never put him in that position,’ she says bleakly. ‘If you find evidence that I killed Niema, I’ll row myself into the fog.’
THIRTY-FOUR
It’s only a nine-minute walk to the farms, along a pleasant track which narrows and widens, dipping down towards the water, before climbing high above it. Most of the villagers are trudging back after spending the morning on the farms. They’re heavy-limbed, talking in a hush, bowed beneath the weight of their dead.
‘We need to tell them what we really are,’ says Clara, hitching the knapsack on her shoulder. ‘It’s not fair keeping them in the dark.’
‘Thea’s going to do it tonight,’ says Emory.
Clara was waiting when the cable car returned from the cauldron garden. Emory managed to hold herself together until Thea had left for her lab, before giving herself to the flood of emotion that had been building on the journey back. She cried for nearly twenty minutes, huddled in the corner of the cable car, unable to speak, while her daughter sat at her side, pressed close and quiet.
It wasn’t until the tears dried up that Emory could tell Clara what she discovered. Her daughter took the information with surprising calmness.
Unlike Emory – who’s always felt distant from the other villagers – Clara long ago accepted the pull towards the centre; towards the twin comforts of conformity and authority. She knows she’s more compliant than her mother. She knows she takes orders better. Finding out she was designed that way is soothing, truthfully. A part of her feels like she’s been excusing something that always felt like a flaw.
They walk side by side in silence, awkward around each other after so long at odds. Emory’s on her way to see Adil, while Clara’s going to collect samples of the blighted soil that Thea asked for.
‘What are those numbers?’ asks Emory, gesturing to Clara’s wrist.
‘I woke up with them,’ she explains. ‘I must have written them down last night, but I don’t remember why.’
‘You didn’t put them there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They’re on your right wrist, and you’re right-handed.’
Barking draws Emory’s attention to the rocks, where seals are lounging in the sun, while guillemots, jaegers, skuas and shearwaters whirl overhead, their vibrant colours streaking the blue sky. Most of the species are non-indigenous, and they’ve adapted their migratory cycle and diet over the last two hundred years, becoming something entirely different from their ancestors.
‘You know what’s bothering me?’ she asks suddenly.
‘After the morning you’ve had, I probably couldn’t narrow it down to a list of ten,’ replies Clara, still inspecting the numbers.
‘The instruments,’ declares Emory, barely listening. ‘They were in the wrong places this morning, suggesting the band used them last night. That feels celebratory to me.’
‘Maybe the band were playing first, then Niema told us the truth afterwards?’
‘Does that feel like Niema to you? Why would she let us sing and dance, then hit us with news like that?’
Clara stares at the sparkling sea, wishing she could swim. She’s hot and dusty, and overwhelmed. The cool water would be a welcome reprieve, but she has her assignment. Even if she didn’t, the sea around here thrashes with sharks. Nobody goes near it.
‘I ran those soil samples I took from under the bird bath,’ she says, putting aside her yearning for the water. ‘There were traces of Hui’s blood and Niema’s. They were together when …’ She trails off, unable to finish the sentence.
Emory examines her daughter, red-faced in the heat, freckles strung across her face like a string of islands.
She badly wishes she knew what to say, but she’s never been good at comforting people. She has that in common with her father. She opens her mouth and the truth pours out, which is very rarely what people want to hear.
Reassurance was always Jack’s job, or her grandfather’s. They didn’t even need to speak. They just had that presence. They made people feel safe.
Much to her relief, Magdalene hurries towards them through the throng of villagers, casting worried glances over her shoulder at Ben, who’s playing with Sherko in the rock pools.
‘You okay?’ asks Emory, as the artist wrings her hands.
‘We’ve just spent an hour searching for Ben,’ she says, under her breath. ‘We found him up by the boundary of the farms, in a world of his own, drawing in the dirt with his finger.’
Emory stares at the little boy. She remembers him arriving in the cable car yesterday, but she didn’t really pay him much attention as she was there for Clara. He has sandy hair and a snub nose, and spindly arms and legs waiting for hard work to fill them out. He’s roughly the same size and shape of every little boy who’s ever been delivered to the village, and there’s nothing to suggest why he would be causing Magdalene such consternation.
From her bag, the artist retrieves her sketchpad and flips to the last page, which is covered in formulas and equations, strange symbols imperfectly recorded.
‘I copied his drawings down,’ says Magdalene, shoving it into Emory’s arms, as if offended by them. ‘Not that I know what any of it means.’
‘This is incredibly advanced maths,’ says Clara, taking the paper from her mother. ‘I’ve seen Thea working on equations like this, but never anybody else.’ She licks her lips, salty from the sea spray. ‘Thea asked me to take a sample of Ben’s blood the day we brought him down from the cauldron. This must be why. There’s no way he should know any of this.’
‘I don’t think he does,’ says Magdalene. ‘After we found him, I asked him what he was doing and it was like he was coming out of a daydream. He didn’t seem to recognise any of it.’
The breeze catches the page, flipping it over. The one before it has been ripped out, leaving only the tattered edge of a drawing.
‘I thought you hated tearing pages out of your books,’ says Emory.
‘I do,’ says Magdalene idly. ‘It must have happened after curfew, because I don’t remember doing it.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t very good,’ teases Clara.
‘If quality bothered me, this entire book would be frayed at the edges,’ she replies cheerfully.
‘What are these?’ asks Emory, squinting at a couple of numbers on the ragged page.
‘I always put the date and time down,’ explains Magdalene. ‘Apparently, I was awake and sketching around midnight.’
‘I wonder what you drew?’ asks Clara.
‘We’ll probably never know,’ replies Magdalene wistfully. ‘It’s a shame. I’ve never seen the night, but I’ve heard it’s beautiful.’
Emory tugs her friend away from the crowd, down towards the tidal pools on the coastline. They’re littered with fresh seaweed, fish stranded in tiny lakes, waiting for their world to come and reclaim them.
‘I’m going to see Adil,’ she says. ‘I wanted to know if you had a message you wanted passed along.’
‘Adil?’ Magdalene’s face shimmers with hope. ‘He’s alive?’
‘Apparently so. Thea told me he’s living in a shack, east of here.’
Magdalene touches her heart, overjoyed. There hasn’t been a day that’s gone by, in which she hasn’t thought about her grandfather.
‘Why are you going to see him?’ she asks, twisting her head along the track. ‘Can I come along?’
Emory quickly explains everything that’s happened since this morning, though she leaves out the part about the barrier being down. Magdalene frets about finding too many raisins in a bun. She might as well enjoy one more carefree afternoon, before she discovers the island’s doomed.