She meets Emory’s eyes, making sure she understands her warning, then departs into the storm, followed by the doomed villagers.
‘You’ve killed everybody,’ I say, in Emory’s mind.
‘Kindness first, always,’ she replies defiantly. ‘You taught us that. I just wish you understood what it meant.’
SEVENTY-THREE
Emory sprints into the school to find it completely flooded by the driving rain, Hephaestus’s sprawled body an island on the lake.
Seeing him like this, her hate evaporates.
It shouldn’t be like this, she thinks. He survived the end of the world, and saved Thea’s sister doing it. He saw humanity as its worst. There are no excuses for what he did, but he still deserves a funeral and mourning lanterns. Somebody should grieve him, terrible as he was.
‘What are we looking for, Emory?’ asks Seth, having to raise his voice over the thunder.
‘We know everything that happened up until the moment Hephaestus stabbed Niema,’ she says, standing over the body. ‘Now, we need the rest of it.’
Seth flicks a switch on the side of the memory extractor, causing the arms to spring loose. He tugs it off Hephaestus’s head, revealing the huge hole drilled into his temple.
‘If all else fails,’ he says, answering Clara’s unspoken question.
Kneeling in the water, Emory searches Hephaestus’s soaked clothes, patting his pockets, looking for anything that might help. In truth, it’s difficult to see anything beyond the gaping hole in his skull made by the drill.
‘No, no,’ she says to herself, staring at the memory extractor in horror.
‘What?’ asks Clara.
‘We’ve had this wrong from the start,’ says Emory, scrambling to her feet and bolting out into the ferocious rain.
She flies into Thea’s lab, with Seth and Clara running after her, muddy footprints tracking behind them. The tables are empty, the floor clear of wires. They moved all of the equipment into the cauldron garden this morning.
The lights are swaying, jagged shadows leaping across the walls.
The wind has already ripped away the sheet covering Niema’s body, the brutality of her injuries still shocking.
Seth hangs back at the door, his face turned away, but Emory heads straight for the body, touching the jagged edge of Niema’s shattered skull.
‘We thought the stab wound was to incapacitate her, and it was the trauma to her head that was fatal, but what if neither killed her?’
She’s talking quickly, her words tumbling out after her thoughts. ‘What if somebody used a memory extractor on her, and her skull was crushed afterwards to disguise the real cause of death.’
Seth grunts in surprise from the doorway.
‘Only the elders and the apprentices know how to use a memory extractor,’ he says, picking up the idea. ‘If Niema had turned up with a hole in the side of the head, the elders would have known exactly who they needed to be investigating. Hephaestus likely would have killed each of us in turn.’
Emory’s pacing, her hands masking her face. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been deliberate in her thinking. Confronted with something she doesn’t understand, she sifts through her experiences, indexing everything of value. Her conclusions build themselves like a ship hammering itself together.
But there’s only chaos in her mind now.
Facts, suspicions and half-remembered things are swirling inside a crackling fog, clumsily trying to graft themselves to each other. It’s like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle by throwing pieces at the floor.
‘Hephaestus said that he found the memory extractor in the lighthouse,’ she says, thinking out loud. ‘If that’s our murder weapon, we have to assume that’s where Niema actually died. What if Niema survived being stabbed in the village, then asked Thea to row her out to the lighthouse?’
‘That would explain the injuries to Thea’s palms and why Niema’s defence system was up,’ offers Clara enthusiastically. ‘Hephaestus had already attacked her once. Niema must have been worried that he’d come after her when he woke up again. She went to the place she felt safest.’
Emory peers at Niema’s body, trying to remember how she used to move, and sound. The things that drove her. Her life already seems so long ago, tangled up with everything Emory’s learned about her since. It’s impossible to conjure the kindly old woman Emory considered a friend, from the cold-hearted elder who kept everybody imprisoned with her secrets.
‘We know from Niema’s shattered memory gem that Thea had an argument with her in the lighthouse, so we know Thea was one of the last people to see her alive,’ says Emory.
‘Do you think Thea killed her?’ asks Seth, leaning out of the door to check on the progress of the fog.
‘If Thea wanted Niema dead, she could have left her bleeding in the village. That’s where she found out about Blackheath. Instead, she bandaged Niema’s wounds and rowed her all the way to the lighthouse. She must have felt horribly betrayed, and she probably let Niema know it, but I don’t think she killed her. If she’d done it, she would have been much more methodical. Knowing Thea, the only thing she was thinking about in that moment was getting back inside Blackheath.’
‘The morning after Niema died, I saw a packed bag in the corner of the silo where Thea had been sleeping,’ confirms Clara. ‘She must have been planning to move into Blackheath permanently.’
‘Only to be thwarted by the memory wipe,’ says Emory darkly.
‘If it wasn’t Thea how did her thumbnail end up lodged in Niema’s cheek?’ asks Seth.
Emory stares her father for a second, an idea spreading across her face, before she darts back into the driving rain.
Magdalene’s boarding the cable car with a dozen other villagers, and a nervous-looking cow. They’re the last batch to go up. Everybody else is already in the cauldron garden.
As it carries them away, Magdalene comes to the window, trying to shout a warning, but the howling wind whips it away.
Frustrated, she points vigorously beyond the barracks.
Seth ventures halfway down the lane for a better look. The fog has swallowed the pier, and is curling up against the high wall.
‘We don’t have long,’ he says, returning in time to see Emory and Clara disappearing into the warehouse where they found Niema’s body. It groans and heaves around them, waterfalls of rain pouring through the cracks in the ceiling. The far wall is scorched from the fire, but otherwise the damage is slight.
‘What are you thinking, Mum?’ asks Clara, pulling a face as the wet ash squirms up between her toes.
‘How does Thea’s thumbnail end up in Niema’s cheek if Thea didn’t actually commit the crime?’ asks Emory, wiping her dripping hair from her face. ‘According to our timeline, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the body.’
‘Somebody put it there?’ ventures Clara.
‘That’s right,’ says Emory, nodding. ‘Similarly, we found pieces of Niema’s skull in Hephaestus’s contraption, but why would anybody use something they could barely carry to bludgeon her when there are hundreds of heavy things in this warehouse, all of which would have been much easier to use as a weapon.’
‘Maybe she was killed in the lab and moved here afterwards?’
‘There was no blood in there, nothing to suggest a struggle. No, it happened here. The morning I searched this place, I found bits of her skull on the ground around her body.’
‘The fog’s over the wall,’ screams Seth from outside. ‘We have to go.’
The shutters on the barracks are banging in the wind, roof tiles being hurled through the sooty air as the old radar tower rocks on its ancient foundations, the skeletal metal screeching in agony.