‘I completed the post-mortem. The cause of death wasn’t the stab wound; it was the injury to her head. She was bludgeoned with something heavy that was made of metal. I inspected the warehouse, but there was nothing matching that description in there.’
‘No, there wouldn’t be,’ says Emory, turning on her heel and pushing through the villagers to reach the end of the pier. The other two follow her.
She leans over the edge, pointing towards the strange metal object under the water that she found this morning. ‘There are fresh gouges in the concrete. I think it was dragged to this spot and dumped last night.’
‘Hephaestus was using that machine to inspect the cauldron,’ says Clara. ‘He brought it down to the village with him when we collected Ben. Could that be the murder weapon?’
Thea doesn’t answer. Hephaestus left it in her lab last night. If it is the murder weapon, it incriminates her as much as him.
She calls to some nearby villagers, ordering them to fetch rope, so they can lift it out of the water. ‘Once it’s back in my lab, I’ll see if I can find something that connects it to the body.’
As Thea oversees the recovery, Emory and Clara head back through the gate, finding the village half dressed for the funeral, with beautiful decorations draped in the boughs of the trees, and mourning lanterns strung along a length of rope between the two wings of the barracks.
Emory never realised how much this place depended on the joy of the villagers to soften it. Without their spirit, it’s like she’s noticing the high walls and crumbling barracks for the first time. Even the garden, which Emory’s always loved, suddenly appears a sad little thing, a few wretched plants cowering in the shadow of something monstrous.
Having not eaten all day, Emory grabs some bread and cheese from the table, sharing it with Clara as they walk towards the infirmary. There’d usually be a feast out, but word has obviously gone around about the missing stores. They’re having to eat whatever was already in the kitchen, and what few vegetables can be plucked out of the ground.
‘Thea’s right,’ says Emory, staring back at the meagre spread. ‘I need to be working faster.’
‘You’ve only been at this for a day,’ replies Clara.
‘Which means I only have one more left, but I’m not getting anywhere. Every question I ask has ten more behind it. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.’ She rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, at all.’
‘Mum –’
‘I begged her for this, Clara. I told her I could do it, but what if I can’t?’
Clara stares at her mother. It’s like she’s standing at the edge of dark, dangerous water, terrified of what’s swimming below.
‘Then you can’t,’ replies Clara levelly. ‘And maybe nobody can, but you’re trying. Nobody’s expecting anything more than that.’
They enter the infirmary, finding the lobby filled with rusted gurneys and wheelchairs, broken glass crunching under their feet.
Emory points to a fresh footprint in the dust.
‘They go that way,’ she says, gesturing along the corridor. ‘That has to be Niema. The rest of the floor is undisturbed.’
As they walk, I warn them about the memory extractor Hephaestus brought back from the lighthouse, and his plans for it.
Emory shivers, recalling how many hours she spent hunched over one of those things during the trials. Thea used to make potential apprentices take it apart and put it back together, until they had a fundamental understanding of how the power units, circuitry and neural gel interacted.
‘We need to investigate the lighthouse,’ says Emory. ‘Niema took the metal box out there last night, and Hephaestus found a memory extractor there this morning. That can’t be a coincidence.’
At the end of the corridor, they climb a staircase to a long ward on the second floor, where beds sit patiently expecting wounded soldiers who’ll never arrive. The window frames are empty, jagged pieces of glass still held in the corners of the frame. Everything’s covered in thick spiderwebs.
The tracks lead them through a ward to a large metal door with a heavy handle that’s freezing cold to the touch. It’s newer than everything else, tarnished but solid.
A keypad lights up as they approach.
‘We need a code,’ says Emory disappointedly. She punches in a few random numbers, causing it to flash red and reset. Her thoughts go back to Niema’s room. Did she see any codes in there, while she was looking through Niema’s things?
She taps ‘5’ twice, remembering the number on the back of the charred note, and the message Niema gave to Matis before he died.
Nothing happens.
Stepping back, she examines the length of the corridor, wondering if there’s another way inside.
Clara frowns at the keypad, then checks the numbers on her wrist, punching them in. A mechanical click sounds from within the door as the lock is released.
‘How did you do that?’ asks Emory, in surprise.
‘I used the code,’ replies Clara, showing it to her mother. ‘We must have come here last night.’
‘No, we didn’t. There were no other footprints in the dust.’
‘Somebody wrote that code on your wrist. They wanted us to find this place.’
She raises the handle, which despite its size lifts easily, activating some internal mechanism, which causes the door to open with a whoosh.
Ceiling panels crackle into life, bringing a harsh white light. Inside they find a tiled room with X-ray projectors on the walls and twelve gurneys lined up in rows, each with a dead body lying on it.
The air is frosty enough to fog their breath.
Hugging herself to keep warm, Emory meanders between the gurneys, unsure of what she’s seeing. Bodies are clutter in the village and burned immediately after they die. Why would Niema be collecting them?
There’s a chart at the foot of each gurney listing some medical information she understands, and a lot she doesn’t.
‘Hallucinations, followed by inability to discern reality from memory,’ she reads off one chart, her teeth chattering. ‘Drank bleach. Implant rejected after five days.’
‘What’s bleach?’ asks Clara.
‘No idea,’ replies Emory, passing her the chart. ‘It was probably delicious, though.’
‘They’re human,’ says Clara, leafing through the notes. ‘Or, at least, I’m assuming they are, judging by these scans of their internal organs. They’re in completely different locations from ours, and there’s a lot more of them.’ She bites the inside of her lip, a habit of hers when she’s thinking. ‘They’re much more complicated than we are.’
Emory peers at the chart. The villagers are wrapped in ribs and tough cartilage, their internal organs encased in bone, with multiple redundancies in case any of them get damaged. This woman was just flesh and blood, and a thin layer of skin. How terrifying must the world seem to somebody with this little armour? Why would any species that dies so easily invent something as terrifying as murder?
Clara taps the nearest gurney. ‘Niema was taking blood samples and genetic material for analysis. Whoever this is, they died twenty years ago.’
‘Why haven’t they decayed?’ asks Emory.
‘There are chemicals that could preserve the bodies indefinitely,’ I explain, speaking in both of their heads simultaneously. ‘The cold is intended to keep insects and rodents away.’
Clara puts down the chart she’s reading and picks up another.
‘Patient reported having pleasant conversations with dead relatives, before … urgh, slitting their throat. Implant rejected after two days.’ She flips to the last page. ‘This one died four years ago.’
She returns the chart to the bed.
‘Most of this is gibberish to me. The only person who can make sense of what Niema was doing to these people is Thea.’