His voice has changed timbre, becoming low and threatening. The hairs are prickling on her neck and arms. She swings her legs from under the table. She doesn’t know if she’s in danger, but she knows he’s seething. His anger is quiet, radiating out of him like heat.
‘Me and the other apprentices, including your husband, were on an expedition. We went to sleep one night and the next day I woke up in a brightly lit laboratory, working equipment I’d never seen before. Incredible equipment. The other apprentices were running experiments, but they were asleep. I realised they were being controlled, like the villagers tonight.’
Emory gets to her feet without realising it.
‘Jack didn’t drown?’ she says numbly.
‘No,’ he confirms. ‘None of them did. I’m not sure why I woke up, and they didn’t, but I spent three days lost in an endless warren of corridors until Niema came to get me,’ he says. ‘She ordered Abi to wipe my memory, then sent me back to the village, but I slowly started remembering things. Nightmares, at first. Then daydreams, conversations with people who weren’t there. I started drawing things on walls. It was like my memories were leaking out.’
Emory staggers forward, her head spinning. ‘Are you telling me Jack’s not dead?’
‘The last time I saw him was when I left that lab,’ says Adil. ‘That’s why I went after Niema. I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I just wanted her to release my friends. Hephaestus chased me out of the village, but Abi managed to convince Niema to exile me, rather than kill me.’
‘Where is he?’ demands Emory.
Her every thought is of Jack, lost in the night. Jack who could be alive. Jack waiting for her to come and find him. Suddenly, nothing else seems to matter.
‘Out past the farms, on the far side of a hill with an olive tree at its summit,’ he says, nodding towards the infinite darkness beyond the walls. ‘That’s where Niema brought me out. I built my shack there near the door to keep watch, in case the others ever escaped.’
Emory doesn’t hear that last part. She’s already running for the gate.
FIFTY-THREE
It takes two frustrating hours to reach Adil’s shack in the pitch-black night, and she’s limping by the time she arrives, having twisted her ankle scrambling up the first ridge. Since then, she’s had to drag herself over the uneven ground.
She’s tired and thirsty, covered head to toe in cuts and bruises. She hasn’t stopped for anything. She’s convinced that Jack’s trapped behind that door, waiting to be rescued.
The tree Adil directed her to is on the other side of the stream, perched on top of a perfectly round hill. In the bright moonlight, the ancient trunk is twisted into a toothless, frowning face, the shining clouds hanging from its branches.
Limping around to the far side, she finds a recessed steel door built into the rock. It’s badly rusted, with huge dents marking its surface.
‘How do I get in?’ she demands, running her hands across the surface, desperately searching for a handle or a button.
‘There is no way in,’ I say. ‘This is one of the entrances to Blackheath. Niema sealed it forty years ago.’
‘Jack!’ she hollers, pounding on the metal with both of her fists. ‘Jack! Answer me.’
Her voice echoes across the plains, desperate and alone.
Unable to find a handle, she hurls her entire body against the steel, over and over again, kicking and pounding, calling his name, until finally she slumps to the ground in exhaustion.
‘You knew he was alive all this time!’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I meet her question with silence.
‘Answer me!’ she screams in impotent fury. ‘For once, just answer me!’
Clutching her knees, Emory curls up on the ground, her chest heaving, sobbing in desperation for the husband she can’t reach.
FIFTY-FOUR
In the swaying cable car, Thea grips the jagged edge of the window frame so tightly it digs into her hands, drawing blood.
Niema lied, she thinks angrily.
The report that Clara showed her earlier, proved that the chemicals that destroyed the crops were the same ones used in the stasis pods in Blackheath. They’re immediately vented when the pods are opened, flowing out of exhaust pipes into the sea. One of those pipes runs under the farms, but it has fractured. The chemicals have leaked into the soil, killing the crops.
That means one of the pods was opened last night.
There are two explanations for that. Either there was a mechanical failure, causing the pod to spring open, or Niema went down there last night and purposefully woke one of the humans from a long sleep.
If it’s the latter – and Thea’s convinced it is – Blackheath was never lost to the fog. Alongside Hephaestus, she’s spent the last few hours hiking to Blackheath’s entrances, trying each one in turn, searching for a way in, but they’re all sealed shut.
How could I have been so stupid? she thinks, trying to recall exactly what happened the night of the evacuation. It was late, and she’d been sleeping. Hephaestus had appeared in her bedroom, obviously panicked. He’d told that the fog had crept inside and they had to leave.
She went blindly, dragged behind him.
It was chaos. The alarms were blaring, the blast doors thumping shut as people screamed in terror. She yelled for Ellie, desperate to get back and free her sister from stasis, but no matter how hard she fought Hephaestus kept tight hold of her.
She never actually saw the fog, though, did she? She saw everybody’s fear as they fled outside, trampling each other to reach safety. That was enough to make the story true. Sometimes the smoke is more useful than the fire.
‘Did you know?’ she asks out loud.
Hephaestus raises his head. He’s sprawled on a seat at the back of the cable-car carriage, intertwining his hands.
Thea hasn’t spoken to him in over two hours, a maelstrom of betrayal, suspicion and anger growing steadily in her breast. He’d hoped it would blow on by, or be derailed by some new detail.
He should have known better. Some storms follow you. Some storms make sure you’re always in their path.
‘No,’ he says flatly.
‘Don’t lie to me, Hephaestus.’
‘Don’t accuse me, Thea,’ he replies, growling. ‘If I knew about Blackheath, do you think I’d be up here? I’d be sleeping in a bed, and showering under hot water. I’d be visiting Ellie every day.’
Is he lying? She can’t tell. He sounds sincere enough, but she’s always been bad with people. She was a child when she came to work at Blackheath, still trained to accept whatever adults told her.
She never learned how to read people, how to pick up the corner of a sentence and peer underneath.
More than anything, she desperately wants to believe he’s telling the truth. That’s why she hasn’t turned around to face him. What if she sees it on his face? If he’s lying, what does she have left? She’d be alone on this island, surrounded by the crums. The loneliest woman on Earth.
The cable car thumps into the village station, and they walk through the adjoining door into Thea’s lab, wrapped in uneasy silence.
The memory extractor is smashed on a chair, its pieces carefully brushed into a pile by Seth.
‘No!’ yells Hephaestus, picking it up to inspect the damage. ‘No! No! What happened?’
‘Emory happened,’ I explain.
Thea’s noticed the dead woman on the gurney. Seth’s straightened her shattered bones so they fit on the narrow surface, making her look like some particularly grotesque puzzle.