EIGHT
Emory opens her eyes to find herself lying exactly where she fell last night, her white linen dress stained by the exercise yard’s rust-coloured soil. She’s under the dappled sunlight of the apple tree, not far from the sculpture Matis made of her. Blue and yellow roller birds are perched on her stone head, singing brightly.
Sitting upright brings a jolt of pain from her shoulder. Craning her head, she discovers a huge purple welt marking the spot where she hit the ground.
She stretches her arm and rolls her neck, trying to massage the stiffness from her limbs, noticing for the first time that a note has been pinned to her dress.
Couldn’t move you. Hope you’re not too stiff.
N
Emory’s expression hardens, recalling the conversation she overheard last night about Niema’s experiment, and the death that could result from it. She can’t let her friend hurt somebody. No matter how righteous she believes the cause.
She jumps up, determined to find Niema and talk her out of it, but she’s halted by my voice.
‘For once, trust that Niema is acting in your best interests,’ I say firmly.
‘Somebody could die.’
‘Somebody will die,’ I say, correcting her. ‘Many somebodies. Events have been set in motion that make it inevitable. Niema’s trying to minimise the loss of life, but if you delay her with pointless questions, you’re only going to increase her chances of failure. You know her. Everything she does is for the good of the village, even if you don’t understand how.’
‘People are going to die!?’ She casts her gaze this way and that, as if she’s going to spot them floundering in the flower beds. ‘Who? We have to warn them.’
‘In a closed system, psychology is destiny,’ I say. ‘Your warnings won’t stop the danger that’s coming, they’ll simply change the people who’ll be hurt. Niema understands this better than you ever will.’
The great benefit of being in somebody’s head since birth is that your voice is easily confused with their own. Over the years, I’ve displaced Emory’s conscience and better sense. I’m trusted implicitly, because she doesn’t know how alien I am.
‘Now, come on,’ I say more gently. ‘Breakfast is being served, and then you’re due at the school.’
‘I’m not going,’ she says.
‘You promised Niema.’
‘That’s before I heard what she was planning,’ replies Emory. ‘I can’t face her, knowing what she’s doing. Not until I understand it.’
‘Everything will be explained tonight,’ I say, conceding the point. ‘I’ll tell her you’ll be along tomorrow.’
Still uneasy, Emory trudges up the rattling staircase to her dorm room, which is filled with stupefying humidity. She didn’t manage to close it up for the night, so it’s wallpapered in moths, which flocked to the candle she left burning.
She crosses the floor to her bedside table, which still has the mystery book Niema gave her on it. Normally, she’d be looking forward to reading it, but she’s still uneasy after last night. Fictional murder doesn’t seem quite so entertaining when your friend is planning to commit a real one.
She opens a small drawer, removing a notepad and the stub of a pencil. Flipping through pages crammed with questions, she finds a blank spot and writes ‘What is Niema’s experiment?’ and under it ‘What does “five five” mean?’
After underlining the word ‘experiment’ a few times, she closes the pad and tosses it back into the drawer with the pencil.
She has fourteen of these notepads stored under her bed, every page stuffed with questions she’s never received answers to. She’s been writing them down for as long as she can remember. A few have been crossed out, because she’s worked them out herself, but the list grows every day. It’s a litany of ignorance.
‘You know everything you need to know to be happy,’ I say, repeating a phrase that has become a mantra between us.
‘But I’m not happy,’ she points out.
‘You’re dissatisfied,’ I argue. ‘You have no idea what unhappiness is. I’m hoping you never do.’
Emptying her pockets, she removes the note Niema left on her stomach. She’s about to throw it into the drawer with everything else when she notices faint impressions on the paper. They’re words transferred from the sheet that was on top of this one. Could they be from the letter Niema hurriedly hid in her drawer yesterday?
Emory squints, holding the page up to the bright sunshine pouring through the window, but she can’t make out any of the indents clearly.
Remembering a trick from one of the crime books she has read, she gently rubs her pencil across the paper, drawing out a string of confusing words.
if I couldn’t control … better … contain … Abi wanted to … couldn’t kill
Emory blows away the pencil dust hoping to make the words clearer, but they’re being as secretive as everything else on this island. After trying to wheedle more information from the note, she finally gives up and puts it in the drawer.
From her cupboard, she takes out a light yellow dress and underwear and considers the straw hat hanging on a nail, but it’s early enough that she can get away without it. She likes to feel the morning sun on her neck.
She examines the empty dorm room. She used to share this space with Jack and Clara, but Jack’s dead, and her daughter moved in with Hui last year. She wanted to study for her trials, without having her mother peering over her shoulder, recounting all the reasons why being an apprentice was a bad idea.
Emory suddenly feels terribly lonely.
She rests her fingers on her daughter’s untouched pillow, remembering the little girl Clara once was. They used to make up bedtime stories between them before curfew, back when love was simple. That’s the last time they got along. After Jack died, the tether holding them together snapped. They’ve been slowly drifting apart ever since.
‘How’s she doing?’ she asks.
‘She’ll be home this afternoon.’
‘Can you tell her I miss her?’
‘Of course,’ I reply.
Emory takes her clean clothes down to the old shower rooms, which are the grottiest part of the barracks. The tiles are cemented together by mould, jagged pipes poking out of the walls, the shower heads corroded away.
She quickly washes yesterday’s dirt off with a bucket of cold water and one of the blocks of jasmine soap Kelvin makes.
She thinks about Matis and lets her tears run away in the suds.
After wringing the water from her hair, Emory dresses and goes to the exercise yard, where the tables are starting to fill up with fresh fruit and orange juice, baskets of bread steaming hot from the oven. There are bowls of honey, jam and curd under muslin nets to keep the flies away.
Not far from the bird bath, Matis’s body is laid unceremoniously in the back of a two-wheeled cart. The shock of it steals her breath, but she’s the only one showing any reaction. Everybody else is laughing and chatting, walking by the dead man without a second glance, as they make their way to the communal tables.
We held Matis’s funeral last night, while he could still enjoy it. This is just flesh, nothing more than clutter. There’s a furnace in the basement of the old infirmary, which is being filled with wood. We’ll burn the corpse as soon as the fire’s hot enough.
Seth is standing nearby. His face is stricken, his eyes lost in memory. Every emotion vanishes when he sees Emory approaching.