Contents
Cover
Blurb
Logo
The End
The Foretelling
The Rescue
The Trees
The Choices
The News
The Lake
The First
The Station
The Recovery
The Song
The Primes
The Accords
The Administrator
The Runaway
The Code
The Detainees
The Day
The When
The Centre
The Aingl
The Sleeper
The Bunker
The Family
The Future
The Conclave
The Battle
The Ruse
The Bean
The Sixth
The Awakening
The Beginning
Author Note
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
Other Books by Ambelin Kwaymullina
A storm was stretching out across futures to swallow everything in nothing, and it was growing larger, which meant it was getting nearer …
Georgie Spider has foretold the end of the world, and the only one who can stop it is Ashala Wolf. But Georgie has also foreseen Ashala’s death.
As the world shifts around the Tribe, Ashala fights to protect those she loves from old enemies and new threats. And Georgie fights to save Ashala.
Georgie Spider can see the future. But can she change it?
The third and final thrilling book of The Tribe series.
THE END
ASHALA
I floated, adrift in my own consciousness. All alone in the peaceful dark.
Except I wasn’t really alone and I wasn’t in the dark. Or my body wasn’t. I was lying in the tunnel system beneath the caves, and there were lights enough around me, even if I wasn’t aware of them. There were people as well, plus all the other life in the Firstwood. Above the room I was in were the caverns where the spiders and moths and rock beetles lived, and outside of that was the forest itself. Towering tuart trees, and peppermints, and rivers and lakes and birds and wolves and … everything. Everyone. Life went on, even after the whole world got turned upside down.
Life went on, even when not everybody lived.
I pushed the faces of the ones I’d lost out of my head. I couldn’t focus on them now, not on the two who were gone, and not even on the one who I might still be able to save. I had to drift or this whole thing wasn’t going to work. So I did the exercise I’d been taught. First I pictured how I looked right now. A brown-skinned girl, dressed in a khaki shirt and pants that hung loosely on my frame. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much to eat regular meals lately, or to brush my hair, which was tangled around my head. There was a needle in one of my arms, attached to a tube that connected to a bag of clear fluid. And there were wires on my forehead, running to a machine that was even more of a mess than my hair. It was a muddled bunch of circuits and connections that looked like a piece of junk, but I’d been promised it would do what it was meant to do.
I imagined myself rising above it all, releasing my hold on myself until I was drifting in blackness again. It was soothing, except it seemed like I’d been waiting for something to happen for a really long time – no, don’t get impatient. I’d been warned this wasn’t going to be exactly like the other times I had shared someone else’s memories.
With the help of my best friend Ember, I’d lived through pieces of another person’s life twice before. I’d once thought Em’s power to alter or share experiences was her ability, just like Sleepwalking was mine, until I’d found out she was an Artificial Intelligence New Gaia Lifeform – an “aingl”. Ember was one of eight synthetic beings created by the legendary scientist Alexander Hoffman, and she didn’t use an ability to manipulate memories. She used miniature devices called “nanomites”. It was nanomites that were flowing into me now, not that I could see them. They were way too small for that. But the liquid running into my arm through the needle was bursting with the critters. The mites, together with the machine, were going to splice someone else’s experiences into my own. In my mind, I’d return to the start and relive every moment of the events that had led up to what people were calling “the Awakening”. Only this time around I’d see things through two sets of eyes. My own, and Georgie’s.
It had begun to dawn on me soon after everything was over that there’d been things people hadn’t told me. The more I’d thought about it, the more I realised that there’d been something big going on, something that had Georgie at its centre. Only she wouldn’t talk about it. She couldn’t seem to find the right words. But she’d said she was willing to share her memories, which was how I’d ended up here. I needed to understand, and not just for myself. Seeing the whole picture of the events of the past two months was the only hope I had left of figuring out how to reach the person I might still be able to save.
There was a flash of green light in the darkness. It was quickly followed by another, only of a different colour – the reddy-orange of wolf fur. After that came more red lights, and then more green. Memories. I was sure of it. The green were Georgie’s, and the red mine, and I knew I’d be seeing her experiences mixed in with my own at critical points. The lights circled above my head, arranging themselves into a pattern. Green, red, red, green … But I had no time to absorb more than that, because they all flashed at once. I blinked, momentarily blinded, and found I was floating up to where the lights were.
Panic shot through me. I can’t live through losing them again! But I could, because I had to. I gritted my teeth and stretched my arms upwards, reaching for the tale the memories told.
The story of how the Tribe changed the world, and what it cost us.
The story of how they died.
THE FORETELLING
GEORGIE
Two Months Ago
My name is Georgie Spider, and this is the real world.
This is the real world. I think. Unless … unless it isn’t.
It wasn’t working. Telling myself in my head that the world was real didn’t anchor me in the here-and-now the way it did when Ash said, “this is the real world” out loud. Maybe because she was always so sure, and I never was. How does she know which world is real? I’d have to ask her. Then I would know too. Or had I already asked, and she’d said, “There’s only one world, Georgie”? I wasn’t certain if that conversation had happened or if it was something that might happen. Ash’s answer made no sense anyway, because every moment was filled with millions of possible futures, and every future was a world of its own. Had I said any of that to Ash? I didn’t know, and I might not have explained it right even if I did. It was hard to describe things that other people couldn’t see, and Ash wasn’t a Foreteller. It was only me who could look into the future.
I was staring at futures now and they were telling me something. Only I didn’t know what, even though I’d filled up three other caves and a whole wall of this one with a map of things-that-might-be. I could never properly track futures, because possibilities were always changing and being changed by each other. But I tried my best. I used twigs or stones or other things I found in the forest to represent possibilities, and I tied them together with string or vines to show where each one connected with another, and … The map isn’t right. It had been right a moment ago but it wasn’t any more. There’d been a change … There. I separated out two pieces of vine that I’d twisted together last night. That future didn’t link to that other one now. It went somewhere else instead … The
re.
I wound the vine around a feather. A crow feather. Ember Crow. She spoke from behind me: “This is when.”
“When what?”
Em didn’t answer so I turned around. She wasn’t there. No one was there. I was getting lost in a potential future. I needed to move away from the map. So I did – no, I didn’t – yes, I did. I went to where the cavern opened onto the treetops and the warm sun streamed in. Or to where the rain was falling, pattering down on an angle to splatter against the rocky floor. Except it wasn’t raining – it was raining – it wasn’t.
I was wandering through futures. I had to find a way to make the words “this is the real world” work without Ash here to say them. Someone had told me something I could try. Someone who smiled a lot. Who had that been? Daniel. He wasn’t here either.
Daniel had gone to Gull City with Ember. He shouldn’t be in the city! Prime Talbot hated people with abilities, and there were enforcers everywhere, and – no, no, no, that wasn’t right. Prime Talbot wasn’t the boss of the Gull City government any more. Prime Belle Willis was, and she wanted to get rid of the Citizenship Accords. Then anyone with an ability wouldn’t be an Illegal, and anyone without one wouldn’t be a Citizen, and anyone with a harmless ability wouldn’t be an Exempt. We’d all just be people. I was confusing the Gull City that existed with the one that might exist, if Talbot was still the Prime. There were so many ways in which things could happen that it got hard to remember what had happened. The past looked just like the future, and the future looked just like the past, and I didn’t know what was real. What had Daniel said I could try? The mirror!
I reached into my pants pocket to take out the little mirror Daniel had brought me from his last trip into the city. Then I held it up, tilting it until I saw green eyes and olive skin and black curls. Me. That’s me. Daniel had said that if I saw my face and heard my voice it would help, because I’d know the world in which I did that was the here-and-now. Daniel was usually right. So I shouted, “This is the real world!”
It worked. The futures faded away. I was standing in a cave, and the sun was shining, and there were anxious chittering noises coming from above me. My spiders were worried. I looked up to where grey furry bodies swarmed over the ceiling. “It’s all right,” I told them. “I’m all right.”
One of them leaped down to land on my hair. He was an older spider, big enough to cover the entire top of my head. I reached upwards to stroke the fur that covered the armoured shell of his body as I walked back to my map. I could look at it now without getting lost, but I still didn’t understand it. I’d never made a map like this one before. Usually I followed small groups of possibilities, not every future I could See at once, because more possibilities meant more worlds for me to disappear into. I’d been hiding from Ash just how often I’d started drifting into futures. I’d been hiding it from Daniel as well, which was harder because he was around me more than she was. He was around me more than anybody. I’d asked him why once. He’d said that I’d know when I was ready to. So I must not be ready, because I still didn’t know.
Daniel was why I’d started the map. Four months ago, he’d nearly died helping Ash to save Prime Willis from assassins sent by Ember’s bad brother Terence, and I hadn’t Foreseen it. I’d failed him and everyone else. Especially Ash and Em, because we’d started the Tribe together and we each had different ways that we were supposed to see. Ash felt every moment all the way down to her bones, so she looked into the now. Ember held whole libraries of history in her perfect memory, so she looked back. But me? I looked ahead.
I’d begun the map a couple of weeks after Daniel nearly died, and within a day I’d found the blizzard.
That was what I called it, even though I’d never seen snow. But Ember had told a story once about a blizzard. She’d described how everything got drowned in white, making it impossible to tell where you were or which direction you should go in. Whatever the map was showing me was like that. A storm was stretching out across futures to swallow everything in nothing, and it was growing larger, which meant it was getting nearer.
“What are you?” I asked. The blizzard didn’t answer. But the spider on my head chirped. He was telling me his name. Helper. I’d never heard of a spider called that before. Spiders didn’t have forever names like Ash’s wolves did. They named themselves after whatever they happened to be doing, so most of the time they were called Weaver or Crawler.
Helper jumped from my hair onto the map. He scurried from one vine to another, and chirped again. Then to another, and chirped for the third time.
He was trying to show me something and the places he was going weren’t where the blizzard was. Helper was going to what came before, the thing that caused the blizzard, only I didn’t know what that was either. But he must be helping me, otherwise he wouldn’t be called Helper. I looked across futures, focusing on what made the blizzard instead of the blizzard itself. Whatever it was, it was something bad. Something scary and sad and … No.
“Be something else!” I whispered. Be anything else. But futures didn’t change just because I wanted them to.
I knew what would start the storm that would make the whole world lose its way.
Ashala Wolf was going to die.
THE RESCUE
ASHALA
I crouched down in the thick scrub, peering through the trees and out of the Firstwood. Ahead of me was a rolling landscape of yellowy grasses and rocky red hills, dotted with wildflowers of purple and blue and pink. The grasslands were especially pretty in spring, but I didn’t have any time to admire them today. Not when a Tribe member had been stolen from me.
From here I could just make out a small figure tethered to the top of a hill. I was too far away for any details beyond that, but I didn’t need to see a pair of almond-shaped eyes or pink ribbons wound into plaits to know the captive was Penelope. It wasn’t going to be easy to get her back. Our enemies had to be hiding out there somewhere and they’d strike the second I went for the hill. I wouldn’t be hard to spot, either, because the mottled clothes the Tribe wore to blend in with the Firstwood didn’t work nearly so well against the grasslands. It was going to be next to impossible to rescue her alone. So it was a good thing I wasn’t.
I looked at the Tribe members who were crouched alongside me. The furthest away was freckled Coral, who was twitching in place and pressing her lips together as if she was trying to stop words from escaping. Chirpers always tended to be as fluttery and talkative as the birds they communicated with, and Coral was more restless than most. Then Rosa, my chubby, golden-skinned little Waterbaby. Serious and steady, and the youngest but strongest of the Waterbabies among us. Next to her was dark-eyed Micah, quick to smile and a quick thinker too. I was confident he wouldn’t freeze in a fight, and while there were Leafers with more raw power, Micah had by far the most control. And the final member of my team – a big black labrador, nosing at my leg.
I petted Nicky’s silky ears. “You stay here and help if I need it. Okay?”
He licked my hand. I was pretty sure he did understand, but that didn’t mean he was going to obey me. He could be making secret plans of his own. Or just thinking about chasing something. It was hard to tell, because in some ways, Nicky was a dog the same as any other, and in other ways, he wasn’t. Like Ember, Nicky was an artificial lifeform, and he had a link to my mind that no one really understood.
I gave him one last pat, and looked over at Coral. “Ready?”
“I’m ready, Ash, I’m ready, ready, ready!”
“Then do it.”
Coral threw back her head to let out a high-pitched warbling sound. I shot to my feet and ran, bursting out of the trees.
Dozens of birds came with me. Hawks, mudlarks, crows, magpies, yellowcrests and honeyeaters swooped and dived through sky and grass, hiding me in a storm of wings. For a few minutes it seemed to be enough to hold my enemies off. Then one of the yellowcrests let out a shrill cry of alarm. The other birds joined in and veered away, leavi
ng me exposed.
I was running towards a wall of flames. One of Pen’s captors was a Firestarter.
I swerved to the right, trying to dodge past the wall. It swerved too, hovering impossibly in the air as it shifted directly into my path. I went left – the wall went left. This isn’t working!
A massive ball of water barrelled over my head to slam into the fire.
I’d never seen Rosa shift so much water before. She must be throwing everything she had into this fight. Water tried to drown fire and fire fought back, blazing brighter and hotter. The water began to turn into steam, filling the air with vapour.
I sprinted onwards to the hill, arms and legs pumping and grass whipping around me. As I got close I could see that Pen was tied to a heavy rock. She was shouting something, but it took a few seconds for me to get near enough to hear what she was saying: “Runner!”
Runner? I glanced about frantically. Whe–
Someone slammed into my back, knocking me to the ground. I lurched up, and staggered around to face my attacker. There was no one there, not any longer. Then I heard the swishing sound of someone racing through the grass.
The Runner crashed into my side, sending me stumbling before they sped away. I regained my balance and began to turn in an awkward circle, trying to find them – and heard a startled shout from somewhere to my right. A black-haired boy was struggling furiously against … grass. Dozens of writhing strands had risen up to snake around his body, trapping the Runner in a prison of vegetation. Leafer to the rescue. Thank you, Micah.
I resumed my journey, slower now that I’d been hurt, reaching the hill and beginning to climb. I’d only managed to get about halfway up when there was a thumping sound and the hillside shook, sending me skidding backwards. Rocks and pebbles showered down on my bruised body as I dug in my fingers and toes, trying to stop myself from sliding further. Thump! Thump! Thump! There had to be a Pounder smashing their fist against the base of the hill, only I couldn’t see them from here. They’re on the other side. And I couldn’t save Pen until I’d dealt with them.
The Foretelling of Georgie Spider Page 1