The Disappearance of Ember Crow

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  “You think I cared about her?” He let out a bitter laugh. “I wanted to find out if it was possible to escape from Terence. It was an experiment. A test.” He leaned closer and added in a low voice, “You know who I am, Red? I’m the person that lives when everyone else dies. I’m the one that’s okay when everyone else isn’t. And if you were as smart as you like to think, you would be too.”

  I have been that person. That’s how I know the gain isn’t worth the price. “Jules, sometimes there’s not a lot of … of honour, in the things we do to survive. But survival isn’t life. It’s just existence.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Yes, you do. Only I had no time to argue with him, not when I still had to put memories into the stone. I rose and held out my hands, pulling him to his feet. Then I stood on tiptoes, to brush a kiss against the stubble on his cheek.

  “What I’m talking about is that you’re better than the person you have been,” I whispered. But to the nanomites in his body, I whispered something else: sleep.

  He collapsed. I caught him as he fell, manoeuvering him onto the bed, and stood motionless, staring down at him. I needed to do things: leave instructions for Jules, and write a note for Ash. I couldn’t make myself move yet.

  He seemed younger when he was asleep. I could almost glimpse the Jules of long ago, the boy he’d been before he’d met my brother. Or perhaps the person he would have become, if he hadn’t been born into a world that feared abilities. I grieve for all the lost chances, and all the lost people.

  He couldn’t hear me. I still spoke as if he could. “I saved you from Terence. Now I’m going to send you to Ash, and she’ll save you from yourself.” I reached down to clasp his hand, feeling the warmth of his skin for the last time. “Goodbye, Jules. I will always remember.”

  THE DEPARTURE

  I waited at the side of the road that led into Fern City, standing beneath an oversized fan palm. It had a thin trunk that soared to a truly ridiculous height before bursting into long stalks, each one capped with a ruffled, circular leaf. Jules and I had passed the palm on the way in, and it was so large that he couldn’t fail to remember it. I’d left him a note in the hide-out, telling him that I would leave the stone here for him to collect.

  The weapon was shoved in my pocket. I would have liked to have sent it to Ash, but Terence would turn the world upside down to find the thing. All I could send to her were my memories, and Jules. I’m so sorry, Ash, for all the things I never said. When I’d left the Firstwood I’d thought I might be able to go back and explain in person; I knew now it would be a very long time before I could go home. If I could ever go home.

  A crow came flying through the air, landing in the palm above. I looked up, and he examined me out of a single gleaming eye. Then he fluffed out his feathers, and lifted his head to direct a challenging gaze at the world. I understood his message. We are tough, we crows. We were indeed. The saurs might be one of the first new species to be born after the Reckoning, but the crows had survived it. I can cope with Terence. I can cope with anything. I was a crow now, and Terence didn’t know it. My brother would remember me the way I had been before I’d gone to the Firstwood: fragile and sad.

  I lifted my head, exactly as the crow had done, and stared down the road. I’m not who I was. I was no longer as susceptible to spiralling into despair, and I could defend myself, and others, if I had to. When Terence had last seen me I’d been incapable of violence, so much so that I couldn’t have shot the girl-minion regardless of what was at stake. I’d known for almost a year now that I’d changed. When Connor had arrived in the Firstwood and we’d thought he was a government agent come to destroy us, I’d been prepared to kill him if we had to. I’d realised then that there were no limits to what I’d do to protect my Tribe.

  I lifted the cord off my neck and clasped the river stone in my hand. It would take me some time to give Ash the memories she needed and edit out the ones she didn’t. I concentrated on building a story, sending one memory after another into the rock as the hours ticked past. Finally I was done, except for the very last memory that Ash would need.

  The memory of what would happen next.

  For a while, nothing did. Then I heard an engine roaring. I stepped back into the greenery, hiding the hand that held the stone among the ferns springing up around the palm. Another few moments, and the car came into sight around a bend. I could tell the precise second the driver caught sight of me. Whoever it was slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt, twisting sideways in the middle of the road.

  The door opened and someone came running out. Not Terence. A tall olive-skinned woman with almond-shaped black eyes, dressed in Cloud-City-white. Delta.

  She tore towards me, long hair flying and arms outspread for a hug. I stiffened and stepped back.

  Delta stopped, looking hurt. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  Typical Del. “I got shot with a weapon that you designed. No, I’m not glad to see you.”

  “Terence said you wouldn’t come otherwise.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he said! Since when do we kidnap each other?”

  She shrugged and pouted. You’d never know, when she behaved this way, that my sister was a genius. Or perhaps you would; my father had been a genius too, and he’d certainly had his quirks.

  “You were supposed to come to Cloud City,” she said, a petulant note in her voice. “What happened?”

  Those minions had been taking me to Del. Things were more complicated than I’d thought, if Terence and Delta were working together so closely. “You mean, why wasn’t I delivered to you in a box?”

  Her eyes widened. “They put you in a box?”

  “Yes, Del! I didn’t like it much. And I wasn’t as unconscious as they thought.” I chose my words with care, avoiding a direct untruth. “There was a crash. Two of Terence’s servants died. As for that Impersonator …”

  I paused, gathering strength for the lie. We’d each been built with a fundamental inability to deceive each other, but I could override the prohibition, provided I was convinced it was necessary to preserve someone’s life. I imagined what Terence would do to Jules if he knew that he was alive and free of the toxin, and spoke with confidence. “I haven’t seen the mimic for days. I expect he’s gone scuttling back to Terence.”

  Delta nodded, satisfied. I relaxed, and she said, “I need your help, Ember. With Dad.”

  My heart beat faster. Delta couldn’t possibly have discovered the secret I was keeping about Dad. I was almost certain of it. “What kind of help?”

  “I don’t think he’s coming back this time,” she said earnestly. “You understand that, don’t you? He’s been gone five years. He’s abandoned you, the same way he did the rest of us.”

  I looked away, allowing her to think I was flinching from the truth when really I was hiding my relief. Delta still believed that my father was off on yet another one of his adventures. Probably thinks he’s sitting on a mountain somewhere, studying some hitherto undiscovered species of plant. He wasn’t.

  Hundreds of years ago, my father had found a way to shift the essence of who he was from his original organic body into an artificial one. He hadn’t realised that doing so would cause an instability that grew progressively worse as time passed. None of the others knew how bad that instability had become. In the end, shutting him down completely had been the only way to save his mind. Dad had asked me to keep it secret. He’d worried that some of my siblings would try to revive him at any cost, and he hadn’t wanted to live if he couldn’t have full use of his immense intellect.

  I couldn’t allow myself to be drawn into a conversation with Delta about where Dad was. It would become increasingly difficult to avoid a lie. Instead I snapped, “That was a mean trick to have that Illegal imitate Dad! Was that Terence’s idea or yours?”

  “Mine,” she confessed, staring down at the ground. “I needed to see you, Ember, and I knew you’d come to speak to Dad,
if you thought he was back.”

  Her reasoning was sound, except that I hadn’t thought he was back, not in the way she meant. For the past five years, my father’s inert body had been lying in the tunnels beneath the Firstwood, waiting for me to reactivate him if I ever found a way to fix the instability. Unfortunately, it was possible that there was more than one version of my father in existence.

  Del offered me a hopeful smile. “You forgive me for the Impersonator, don’t you, Emmy?”

  No, I don’t. I don’t forgive you for a lot of things. I almost said those words out loud, purely to see if I could; if they were a lie, they should stick in my throat and be impossible to speak. I truly wasn’t sure how I felt about Del, because while she did dreadful things, she did them without appreciating that they were dreadful. We’d each lost something when the best of us died, and Delta had coped by becoming the most childlike of us all.

  She seemed to take my silence for agreement, because she continued eagerly, “I have a way to make a new Dad, Ember. That’s why I wanted to see you.” She stepped closer, her entire face lit up with excitement. “I’ve unlocked the other consciousness.”

  Oh no. This was exactly what I’d been afraid of. Dad had long ago preserved what was effectively a backup copy of himself on a massive computer. He’d locked it away with a complex, ever-changing code. I’d warned him Del might break it one day, but he’d said she was so easily distracted by a new project that she’d never give it enough attention. Dad, you fool. I told you to destroy it!

  I tried to reason with her. “Del, Dad deliberately locked that consciousness away to stop anyone putting it in a body and making another version of him. You know that.”

  Delta stomped her foot. “I don’t care! Dad left. Again.”

  He had to, and if you make a new dad, the same instability will eventually destroy him. Except she didn’t know that, and I couldn’t talk to her about it. I couldn’t tell her how wrenching it had been to watch the greatest mind of his generation collapse in on itself. When Dad had told me to shut him down in one of his increasingly infrequent moments of lucidity, I hadn’t hesitated to obey. It had been the last measure of dignity I could give to him. You don’t want to see him like that, Del.

  “Dad always leaves,” I pointed out. “Do you really think an alternate dad is going to be any different from the original?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Because the backup was made before.”

  I should have known she’d think of that. My father’s backup consciousness would not contain anything that he’d experienced after the point at which it was created – and it had been created before the end of the Reckoning.

  I sighed. “Dad will still be Dad. He’ll end up having the same fight with you about the Accords. And he did always leave us, to go somewhere or the other. He simply had more places to visit after the Reckoning was done.”

  “He didn’t! He won’t.”

  “Come on, Del. Do you really think that of the two of us, it’s me that doesn’t remember him properly?”

  Delta stuck out her lower lip stubbornly. She didn’t want to listen, even though she must know I was right. Like the rest of my siblings, she had the flawed memory of organic beings; I was the only one who remembered everything in complete and often unwelcome detail. Clearly, she wasn’t going to be convinced that this was a bad idea. “What do you need from me?” I demanded.

  Delta brightened. “You were the only one he ever taught to transfer a consciousness into a new body. Also, I don’t have a body yet. I thought we could build one together. It’d be faster that way.”

  “And what does Terence want from me?”

  She looked blank. I’m a colossal idiot. I’d been proceeding on the basis of an assumption that I should have questioned the moment she arrived. “You’re not helping Terence to get to me, are you? He’s helping you.”

  “I need you, Ember.”

  “And exactly what are you doing for Terence in return for having me kidnapped? Other than making him that weapon, I mean.”

  “Nothing!”

  I glared at her until she finally conceded, “Nothing yet. He’s worried about this reform movement, and he wants me to help him make sure it doesn’t get out of control.”

  The implications of that were horrifying. My father had designed each of his children to have a particular gift; mine was memory, and Delta’s was invention. There was simply no end to the devices my sister could design to hurt Illegals.

  I thought quickly. I have to break the alliance between Terence and Delta. I already had a way to do that, but I wasn’t going to try it yet. I needed to use Del to get close to Terence first, and find out what he was planning for the reform movement that my father and I had started.

  I smiled at my sister. “I’ll help you, Del.” Right up until I don’t need to anymore.

  She clapped her hands together in delight, as if I’d really had a choice about it. Then she darted to the car, opening the passenger door for me. I took the weapon from my pocket and tossed it across the road. “Put that away, will you? I can’t stand to touch it any more.”

  Delta didn’t look particularly enthused about picking it up. None of us would ever be comfortable around a weapon that could harm us. Should have thought of that before you invented it, big sister. As she bent to retrieve it, my hand clenched on the stone, and I poured these last memories in.

  This was truly goodbye: to Ash, to the Tribe and the Firstwood. Goodbye to the person I had been there. I’d have to become someone else now, to safeguard the people I loved. To make sure they survived my family. Sometimes there’s not a lot of honour in the things we do to survive. I relaxed my grip, ready to drop the stone into the undergrowth.

  There are a thousand ways to disappear.

  THE LOCATION

  I was sitting at the base of a hill, surrounded by cold air and yellow grass.

  This was wrong. I had been outside Fern City – no. Ember had been outside Fern City.

  I am Ashala Wolf. I have never been to Fern City.

  My best friend is an aingl.

  “Ashala?” Connor’s voice. He was sitting beside me. I shifted to face him. Opened my mouth to speak.

  No sound came out. I couldn’t find words big enough to wrap around what I’d experienced.

  I swallowed and tried again. This time the words came. Slow and halting at first. Then so fast they spilled out, tripping each other up and jumbling together. Now and then Connor interrupted, asking a question or getting me to explain something again. It took a long time to tell it all. At the end of it, we were both silent, staring out over the familiar grass and hills. The world looked the same.

  The world was different.

  “So,” Connor said, astonishment echoing through his voice, “Ember is one of the aingls. And Alexander Hoffman is lying in the tunnels beneath the Firstwood?”

  “Apparently. Except he’s all shut down. Oh, and plus there’s some other copy of his consciousness out there somewhere!” I put my hands to my head, which was aching from having to absorb so much impossible knowledge.

  “He really did write all the Histories,” Connor said. “This is …”

  “Yeah. Nothing makes sense.”

  “And in a strange way, everything does.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The way people revere Hoffman, for a start. He was here, after the Reckoning. He and the aingls must have had a tremendous influence on the way society developed, even if no one knew he was still alive.”

  I supposed so. I wasn’t really up to considering the bigger implications of any of this. I was still struggling to fit Ember’s real past with what I’d known about her before. Although some of what she’d told me had been true, in a way. Her father had kind-of died on the way to the Firstwood, and he’d been in the reform movement – actually, he’d started the reform movement. The fragments of truth she’d given me didn’t make it any easier to reconcile the Hoffman I’d always heard about with Ember’s though
ts and feelings about him. I’d been told about a visionary, a hero; to Ember he was just … her dad.

  “He’s nothing like the paintings of him, or the sculptures.”

  “Hoffman?”

  I nodded. “He’s an ordinary guy. In the paintings he’s got that long flowing hair, and he’s so tall, you know?” I sighed. “I guess people painted him how they imagined him.”

  “I wonder if he wrote the angel poem?” Connor mused. “About his children.”

  Count the angels, one by one. “Seven to remember has got to be Em.”

  “And six to invent – Delta?”

  “Must be.” 87543621. From the most trustworthy to the least, Ember had said. Why hadn’t she begun with herself?

  Eight to bring the rest together. “I think the eighth is the one who died. And if Terence is the least trustworthy, that makes him number one. As in, one to lead!” I shook my head. “Guess he must’ve been a big disappointment to his dad.” I picked up a handful of rocks and sent them flying into the grass. “She should have told me!”

  “I’m fairly certain she was afraid.”

  “Of Terence?”

  “Of what you would think of her. When you knew she was synthetic.”

  “She can’t have believed I would care!” Then a horrible thought occurred to me. “Connor, do you care?”

  He shook his head. “What I care about is whether people help the Tribe or hurt us. If anything, Ember’s knowledge makes her an asset. At least, it would have if she’d told us the truth. To other people though … it might matter.”

  Jules had called her a collection of circuits without a heart. That had hurt her. It had hurt her a lot. Em, you idiot. As if I’d ever think you didn’t have a heart. I’d tell her that if she were here. Only she wasn’t. Jules was.

  The guy who’d kidnapped her.

  In her note, Ember had asked me not to judge him until I’d seen him through her eyes. I had now. And I thought he was a smug, self-interested, unscrupulous excuse for a human being.

  I lurched to my feet. “Let’s go deal with the Impersonator.”