‘You can’t prove any of that!’
‘There’s only one person who could have killed Niema, and it wasn’t you,’ she declares confidently. ‘Your death won’t accomplish anything.’
Seth stares at his daughter. Under all of that brown hair, she’s tiny and filthy, vibrant and alive. Her eyes are glittering, a small smile playing at the edge of her lips.
He knows that smile. It’s been the same since she was a child. She’s crossed off a question in her notebook.
He drops his hand from the switch.
‘Mum,’ whimpers Clara, squeezing her eyes shut.
‘I’m here,’ says Emory, pulling her close as the thunder rocks the mountains. ‘I’ll always be here.’
The fog swallows them.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Seth parts the fingers he was hiding behind, to see Emory standing in the fog, holding her palm out. The insects are covering it like a glove, but they’re not doing her any harm. They’ve even dimmed their glow, making it easier to look directly at them.
‘What the –’
Emory smiles giddily, scattering the insects with a shake of her hand.
‘I should have seen it straight away. The only person who could have killed Niema …’ she says. ‘… is Niema.’
SEVENTY-NINE
The carriage rumbles back into life, resuming its ascent up the volcano.
They barely notice. Clara’s looking around in amazement, while Seth stares at Emory dumbfounded. The light from the insects is reflecting off her clothes, shining in her eyes.
Clara stands up uncertainly, laughing as the insects mimic her entire body, their glow warm and welcoming.
‘Why aren’t we dead?’ asks Seth, trying to wave the curious insects away. A golden copy of his face forms in the air, frowning back at him.
‘Thea thought you and Mum had traversed the fog using one of her suits, but she tried to escape in one herself and it didn’t work,’ says Emory. ‘That got me thinking. If there was no way under the fog, or over it, how could you possibly have got through? The answer was so obvious we never considered it. You just rowed inside. Niema tampered with our people for ninety years after the fog appeared. What if she adapted us for this new world? What if Thea survived rowing into the fog because Abi sent a few villagers to collect her?’
‘You chanced our lives on that!?’ protests Seth, his tone scattering the insects in front of him.
‘Partially,’ she admits, laughing at his shock. But there is something else that’s been bothering me. Who put that memory extractor on Niema’s head? The post-mortem revealed that there was no sedative in her system, so she was capable of resisting, but there were no signs of struggle anywhere on her body, I checked. Everybody else in the village was covered in bruises and scrapes that night, but Niema only had the stab wound and the damage to her skull. The rest of her was unblemished.’
They’re rising through the storm clouds into beautiful blue skies, the drumbeat of the rain on metal coming to an abrupt halt. For a second, Emory mistakes them for safe, then remembers that they’re dangling on the swaying roof of a hundred-year-old cable car.
‘Mum?’ says Clara, regaining her attention.
‘Sorry,’ says Emory, trying not to look down. ‘I got distracted. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, because there were no signs of a struggle, I started to wonder if somebody could have forced Niema to put the extractor on her own head, but that didn’t tally with anything we’d learned about her. That’s when I remembered that Niema had purposefully reactivated the deadman’s switch that night, because her death was the only thing capable of lowering the barrier. She’d just risked everything to give us the world, so why take it from us an hour later? Why kill all of us just to punish Hephaestus?’
Emory grins at her father.
‘You’re the one who gave me the final piece,’ she says, tapping him on the chest playfully. ‘When I saw you ready to put that memory extractor on your head to save us, it all fell into place. I started thinking about the days before Niema died, remembering all the things she’d done that were out of the ordinary. She asked Hephaestus to check the dome for any cracks, because she knew he’d be needing it. She wrote an apology letter to him, and tried to hire me to take over her job in the school. She’d been saying her goodbyes all along, we just didn’t hear them. It also explains why Niema had Thea row her to the lighthouse after she was stabbed. There was equipment in Blackheath that would have saved her life, but she went where the memory extractor was. She never had any intention of surviving the night.’
‘I spent the evening with her,’ protests Seth, shaking his head. ‘She didn’t seem … I mean she never said anything about …’
‘What did you talk about?’
He rolls his thoughts back, trying to recall their last boat ride under the moonlit sky. The last conversation they ever had.
‘Regret,’ he admits, his voice heavy with emotion. ‘Things she wished she’d done differently.’ He hangs his head, seeing the conversation from her perspective. ‘That’s why she brought up Judith. She was trying to apologise for what she’d done.’
The cable car shudders, the station coming into view. They’re out of the fog now, and the air seems astonishingly flat without the golden glow of the insects to fill it.
‘Niema wanted to give us a future, but she knew Hephaestus and Thea would never accept it,’ says Emory. ‘That’s why she was so eager for her experiment to work. It would have given her control of them, removing any threat they posed. When it failed she tried reasoning with them in the village. She had Hui perform her concerto to prove we’d evolved, but they refused to see it.’
Emory laughs giddily, adrenaline coursing through her system.
‘It was in the letter she wrote to Hephaestus,’ she continues. ‘If she couldn’t control the elders, she’d have to contain them. After the performance failed, she tried to imprison them in the cauldron garden, but Hephaestus got free while we were trying to sedate him. He ended up stabbing Niema to protect Thea, which derailed the entire plan. I think Niema decided to move the villagers into Blackheath instead, which is why the majority of our supplies were down there. The doors may not have kept out the fog, but that wouldn’t matter. They only needed to keep out Thea and Hephaestus. After the fog had chased them into the cauldron, we’d be free to come back out.’
‘If that was her plan, then why did we wake up the next morning with our memories wiped?’ asks Seth.
‘Hephaestus was knocked unconscious after stabbing Niema, but he would have been up soon enough. I think Niema saw a memory wipe as the only way to stop him hurting anybody else. By the time he worked out what was going on, we’d have been locked safely in Blackheath.’
‘But we didn’t wake up in Blackheath,’ protests Clara. ‘None of that happened.’
‘Because of Adil,’ says Emory grimly. ‘I keep thinking about why he was on the lighthouse jetty the night Niema died. He claimed she apologised to him, but why would Niema do that privately when she was about to apologise to the entire village? Why would she take the risk of being so close to a man who wanted to kill her? I reckon she called Adil there, because she knew she’d be needing him. Abi was feeding her every possible future, so she must have known had badly wrong the night could go. Adil had a neurodegenerative condition that rendered him immune to curfew, or memory wipes, making him the only person on the island capable of moving around freely. Dad saw them go up the staircase together towards the lighthouse. Why do that if you just wanted to apologise? It’s because Niema needed to show him how to bypass the lighthouse’s defences. I think she told him what she was planning to do later that night and asked him to collect the memory gem from her body, after she was dead. She wanted him to lead the villagers into Blackheath, which is why he had the key. With access to that equipment, and the knowledge on her memory gem, we’d have been given everything we needed to build a new society. Unfortunately, Adil smashed the memory gem underfoot before anybody could see it.’