The General drew her own weapon. “Last chance, Professor!”
Hoffman said nothing. The General fired. And the lights went out.
The enforcers started shouting as a buzzing noise filled the air, seeming to vibrate unpleasantly against my skin. There were a bunch of strange clicking noises that I didn’t understand until I heard someone yell, “The guns won’t fire! They’ve done something to them!” That was followed by sizzling sounds I understood all too well. Energy weapons. Then everything went silent, and the lights flicked back on.
I was sitting among the dead. Bodies were sprawled all around me, gazing sightlessly upwards. The enforcers. The General. And – no, no, no! Ember.
Someone was screaming. I was screaming. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself and crawled over to Em. This was all wrong. It had to be wrong. Em wasn’t dead, and Dominic hadn’t died like this. He’d been killed by someone with an ability, not by enforcers. This couldn’t be the real world.
A stricken voice spoke, “Professor, I’m so sorry! We thought we’d be in time.”
Terence? My head jerked up. Terence was standing in the middle of the bodies, wearing a pair of odd red glasses and holding an energy weapon in his hand. Beside him was a tall, black woman, and she had glasses too, but no weapon – well, not unless that metal sphere thing she was holding was a weapon.
“You almost were in time,” Hoffman said. His gaze wandered vaguely around the room, focusing on the sphere in the woman’s hand. “The jammer worked well. And the night-vision glasses also? Good. Very good. I suppose this was an opportunity for field test–” He stopped speaking as his legs went out from under him. Leo and Delta rushed forwards to catch him.
“You’re in shock, Professor,” Delta said, holding onto Hoffman with one hand and using the other to wipe at the tears streaming down her cheeks. “You need to sit d–”
“No!” Hoffman flung them off. “We must leave. The location of this base is compromised and more of them will be coming.”
“We should be safe for a while,” Terence said. “We could wait long enough to bury them.”
But Hoffman shook his head. “We pack up the essentials, we set the selfdestruct, and we go.” The aingls exchanged uncertain glances. Hoffman glared at them. “How many times do I have to tell you? Our work is the only thing that matters. Something of humanity must survive. Now move.”
They obeyed him, rushing around the room to shove papers and files and bits of technology into cases. Hoffman went to one of the screens and pressed at the keys beneath it. Whatever he did made flashing numbers appear on all the screens and I realised it was a clock, counting backwards from thirty minutes.
Hoffman turned his attention to the aingls, hurrying them along and herding them out. Leo was the last and he came to kneel at my side, bending down to press a kiss to Ember’s cheek, and then to Dominic’s. Hoffman put an impatient hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Leo! We have to get out of here before this place becomes a smoking ruin.”
Smoking ruin? The selfdestruct. I understood now what the clock was counting down to and I didn’t care. I shifted so that I was sitting between Ember and Dominic. Then I reached out my hands to hover over theirs. It was the closest I could get to holding their hands, without touching them.
“You’re not alone,” I whispered. “I’m right here with you, and you’re not alone.”
I stayed until the world exploded.
THE FAMILY
ASHALA
When the world came back I was outside the bunker, sitting on the ground, and Nicky was sitting in front of me. I sprang forwards, flinging my arms around him and burying my face in his fur. “You’re okay! Nicky, you’re okay!”
He licked the side of my head and then tried to wriggle free. I let him go and he took off, darting over the piles of wreckage towards the city.
I sprinted after him. I hadn’t even made it to the top of the pile when everything seemed to blink and I found myself right back at the bunker. I tried again only to have the same thing happen, except that this time when I was flung back I heard a faint “woof” in my head. I’m supposed to stay here? The bunker looked completely intact – had the whole thing somehow reset? I didn’t want to go back in, especially not if I was going to have to live through the same thing twice over. But maybe I hadn’t done something that I was meant to do.
A voice spoke from behind me. “Hello.”
I spun around. Alexander Hoffman was standing a few paces away. He looked me up and down, and shook his head. “I must say, you’re an odd incarnation of my consciousness. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before, although I must have. At some point your face lodged in my memory, and I have reproduced it. For what purpose, I wonder?”
“You can see me?”
“Obviously. You’re oddly slow on the uptake for a manifestation of my mind.” He cast an uneasy glance around. “Strange that any part of me would be here. I don’t like to come here.”
“I’m not a part of you! I’m a friend of Ember’s, and I came here to help.” Although I was a long way away from being able to do that. The bunker had to be the key, but I hadn’t understood it. Maybe that was why this Hoffman, a Hoffman I could talk to, was here.
I waved my hand at the bunker. “What happened in there?”
“You’re me. You know that already. Why are you asking such pointless questions?”
“I already I told you, I’m not you! My name is Ashala Wolf and your daughter sent me here to help you, which I can’t do unless I understand what happened. And I don’t. How could those weapons even hurt any of you? You’re aingls; you’re supposed to be virtually indestructible. Besides, Dominic never even died like that!”
His brows drew together in a frown. “Could it be that you’re not part of my mind after all?” He walked in a slow circle around me, examining me as if I were a puzzle to be solved. “If you are not me, then say something to me I would never say to myself.”
That was easy. “You got something wrong.”
He stopped. “I did not!”
“You should never have left Em and the others all by themselves to guide humanity in the new world. If you’d been there, the Citizenship Accords might never have happened.”
He sniffed. “That is a patently ridiculous remark.” Then a gleam of humour crept into his eyes. “But it is also something I would never say to myself. Hello, Ashala Wolf.”
He held out his hand to me. “Alexander Hoffman.”
I shook it. “Hi. Now can we talk about what happened? Please? Because I really don’t want to have to go back in there.”
He sighed. “I can understand that, I suppose.” He released my hand and walked up to the bunker, his steps growing slower and more reluctant as he drew nearer to it. “This is where they died. My children.”
“Em and Dominic?”
He nodded. “I’d lost their mother in one of the floods years before, when Dom was little more than a baby. Ember and Dominic survived, until this moment.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “They weren’t aingls. There were no aingls then. I hadn’t invented that technology yet. They were organic, fragile human beings who could be killed by perfectly ordinary human weapons.”
That didn’t make sense. “How could there have been no aingls when all the others were there? Leo, and Delta, and even Terence …” I stopped, suddenly getting it. “They were organic back then too. When you built the aingls, you based them on people you knew.” No, not just people he’d known. “People you’d lost?”
“Oh yes, they all died. Those were dangerous times. There were so many, many things that could kill you … Environmental catastrophes. Religious cults. Governments, such as they were. And men and women made vicious by the simple ruthlessness of survival. Believe me when I tell you that you never want to live through the end of the world.”
They all died. But not Hoffman, because he’d still been alive to build a synthetic body for himself, and later, synthetic replicas of the others. �
�You were the last. And you were lonely.”
He gave an irritated shake of his head. “Loneliness had nothing to do with it. The work was all that mattered, and I was not as efficient without them. They were my research team and I required their assistance. And of course I left them all alone to manage things in the new world! That was what they were created for.”
“Even Ember and Dominic?”
“Especially Ember and Dominic. The two of them were based on my children, after all. They inherited their intelligence from me. Genuises, the both of them. Well, Dominic always was more like his mother. Ember though …” His lips curved into a proud smile. “She is her father’s daughter.”
Her father’s daughter. I could see that, clearer than I ever had before. Hoffman had been able to do whatever it took to survive, and so could Ember. It was how she’d created the Citizenship Accords in the first place. But, as Em herself had once said, survival wasn’t life. It was just existence, and she wanted to be a better person than the one who’d done what it took to survive. She was a better person. That was why she tormented herself over the Citizenship Accords. Hoffman was a better person too. Even if he didn’t know it. Her father’s daughter. His daughter’s father. “You never forgave yourself. For letting Em and Dominic die.”
“Nonsense! Billions would have died if I’d given up that code. I did the only thing that could have been done.”
“If you’re so sure about that, why didn’t you ever tell her?” Because I knew he hadn’t. Em carried the weight of a lot of things, but not of this.
“She has records enough of the harshness of these times. She didn’t need this as well.” He was silent for a moment, then added, “I told Dominic once. He said it was the right choice.”
I heard the defensiveness in his tone, and waited him out. Eventually he spoke, in a voice so low I had to move closer to catch his words, “The only thing is … two years later the government of the time cracked the code anyway, and used the device. So I might as well have saved them, in the end.” His mouth twisted into a bitter, self-mocking curve. “As it turns out, no one can be extraordinary enough to account for every variable. Not even me.”
I finally understood. “You’re the one who’s doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“This!” I waved my hand around at the bunker, the wreckage, and the ruins of the city beyond. “The instability. You’re doing it to yourself. Because losing your mind is the worst possible punishment for yourself that you can think of.”
“Ridiculous!” he spluttered. “Arrant nonsense!”
I knew I was right. “Maybe if you’d had a normal lifespan, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. But this has been eating away at you for hundreds of years.”
“You are a very stupid girl.”
I ignored him. I understood what was wrong with Hoffman now. I just wasn’t sure how to fix it. He wanted to be forgiven. That was why he’d told Dominic but not Em, because he hadn’t been certain she would forgive. He was safe with Dominic. I knew that because the essence of Dominic was in Nicky, and like all dogs Nicky had an infinite capacity for forgiveness. Except for the first time it occurred to me to wonder – could Nicky forgive because he was a dog, or had Dominic become Nicky because he could forgive? And do I dream because I’m a Sleepwalker, or am I a Sleepwalker because I dream … I shook my head at myself. I couldn’t be solving Grandpa’s riddles now.
I folded my arms, studying Hoffman and thinking. Dominic forgiving him hadn’t been enough. Hoffman needed to forgive himself. A grin broke over my face. I knew how to do that. Because I’d once had to forgive myself for failing to save my little sister Cassie, killed during a Citizenship Assessment. It had been Georgie who’d helped me see that hating myself for that was no way to value who Cassie had been, just as Hoffman hating himself was no way to value who Ember and Dominic had been. And I knew that Em would forgive him, or at least my Ember would, the one who’d created the Citizenship Accords. She understood what it was to regret a choice.
I closed my eyes and focused, letting myself feel the forgiveness I’d given to myself. And the forgiveness I’d given Jules for Penelope, and Em for the Citizenship Accords, and the bigger forgiveness I gave to all of the Tribe for anything that they’d done before they were Tribe. The first thing everyone got when they came to us was the chance to start over and become new. That was the chance Hoffman needed now. I held out my hands, imagining that forgiveness flowing from my heart and down my arms and into my grasp. Imagining it into reality.
When I opened my eyes again I was holding a small, shining ball.
“What is that?” Hoffman asked.
“A present.” I offered the ball to him. “Here.”
He reached out to take it. The second his fingers touched it the ball unravelled, becoming shining mist-like strands that flowed over his body and sank into his flesh. His eyes widened–
–and he vanished.
Everything vanished. Did it work? I had no idea and it didn’t seem like there was anything more I could do about it if it hadn’t. I was alone in blackness and I was grateful for the peace. My chest felt bruised, as if my heart had taken a hit, and it had. I’d seen Ember die. I’d seen Dominic die. They’re not dead. Only they were. The Ember who’d died hadn’t been my Em, and the Dominic who’d died hadn’t been my Nicky. I mourned them anyway.
I drifted for what seemed like forever, soothed by the quiet dark and with no desire to wake – until there was a sudden searing pain in my arm.
My eyes flew open and I sat up, gasping. I was on the table in the room where Hoffman had been sleeping, only he wasn’t sleeping now. He was standing a few metres away, and Jules was between us.
Hoffman was holding up one hand and sparks were dancing between his fingers. “It was merely a small electric shock. I assure you, she hasn’t been permanently damaged. She’s awake now, see?”
Jules cast a quick glance back at me and came striding over. “Are you okay? I only took my eyes off the guy for a second, I swear!”
“I’m fine. I think.” I looked down at my arm. It didn’t seem to be injured, and the burning sensation was fading.
“I told you,” Hoffman said. “No permanent damage. And really, how long were you intending to allow her to sleep?”
“How long have I been asleep?” I asked.
“Four days.”
My mouth fell open. That was a long time. The Conclave was less than a week away, and … where is everybody? The room was empty except for Hoffman, Jules and me. “Where did everyone go?”
“Leo turned up,” Jules replied. “He ran into Pepper, and Em and Connor went to bring him here.”
In other words, Pepper and Wanders had taken Leo prisoner and Em and Connor were going to free him.
“And,” Jules continued, “if you’re wondering where the dog is, Georgie took him out for a walk.”
So Nicky was all right, and Hoffman didn’t know a thing about him or Jules wouldn’t be talking in code. Everything’s all right. Everyone’s all right.
“If the two of you are quite finished catching up,” Hoffman said, “I have some important questions to ask.” He walked over, holding out his hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alexander Hoffman. You probably know me better as the saviour of humankind.”
I shook his hand. Again. But he didn’t seem to remember the first time. And this Hoffman wasn’t the same as the one I’d met inside his mind. That had been Hoffman when he was wounded and vulnerable. This was Hoffman when he was healed.
So far I liked the hurt Hoffman better.
“I’m Ashala Wolf.” I noticed he wasn’t wearing the disc on his head that Em had been using to monitor his instability, and glanced at Jules, raising my eyebrows in a question.
Jules snorted. “Oh yeah, he’s all better. Aren’t you, Professor?”
“I am indeed recovered. Now, Ashala, you really must tell me about Neville Rose.”
Neville? I stared at Hoffman in bewildermen
t. “Um, he used to be the chief administrator of a det–”
“I know all that! I need to know who he is, not his employment history. It’s vital information if we are to prevent Terence from doing more damage to this world than he already has.”
I couldn’t understand why Hoffman was so focused on Neville with the Conclave looming over us. “Do you know about the Conclave? We’re worried about the other aingls.”
Hoffman waved an impatient hand. “You need have no fear of my children; none of them will touch you once they realise you are under my personal protection.”
I exchanged a glance with Jules, who shrugged. “Em says it’ll probably be enough to stop Katya and Delta from coming after you. Not Terence, though, and possibly not Nova or Maleki.”
“She might be correct in that,” Hoffman conceded. “But we can deal with Terence and Nova and Maleki. It is most important that we look beyond the Conclave. We stand at a critical point in human history. This is the closest we’ve been to the end of the Citizenship Accords in over two hundred years, and I need to understand Neville Rose.”
It must have been obvious that I still wasn’t getting it because he heaved a sigh and said, “I believe Rose to have been largely responsible for many of Terence’s actions. The creation of these – minions, I believe you call them? – and the takeover of Gull City? It would never have occurred to Terence to do either without someone putting the idea into his head. The first requires too much subtlety, and the second is too bold.”
Now he was making sense to me. “You think Neville is the key to stopping Terence.”
Jules rolled his eyes. “You could’ve just said that before, you know.”
“If I paused to explain my thought processes to lesser minds it would consume my existence. Ashala – tell me about Neville. My daughter says you understand him better than anyone.”
“He’s – well, he’s …” I thought for a moment. “I had a taffa dream about him once.” Hoffman would know about taffa dreams; he’d lived in Spinifex City. “I saw him standing on a hill of bodies, not just humans but animals and plants as well. The death of the world.” I shivered at the memory. “Only I don’t think he’ll actually kill everything. I think he’ll do it by making it okay to kill.”
The Foretelling of Georgie Spider Page 19