The Disappearance of Ember Crow

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  He blinked once, a slow closing of his eyelids. “You will discover that it is not wise to play games with me.”

  In the space of an instant, the air had grown thick with menace. I grasped hold of an answer and blurted it out. “Ember told me about the house she lived in when she was in Spinifex City, and I thought she might be here. So I came.”

  For a long moment, he was quiet, watching me out of those faded eyes. Then he nodded. The tension in the room eased, and I gulped in a breath.

  “And how did you get in?” he asked.

  “Your guards were no match for a Sleepwalker,” I lied.

  His face tightened in anger, and I could feel the danger again, building up like the beginnings of a king wave. “I just need to see her,” I said hastily. “To … talk to her.”

  “You will see her.”

  He said that as if it were a threat rather than a promise. I stared at him, trying to work out what was going on. He stared back, nostrils pinching like he’d smelled something bad. I knew that mixture of revulsion and fear. I’d seen it in Gull City, when I’d been growing up – it was the way some Citizens looked at Exempts. He hates people with abilities. I’d known that about him, of course, but understanding it from a distance wasn’t the same as experiencing it close up, in this little room.

  “I think you know things about me,” he said.

  My heart slammed against my ribs. “I don’t know anything. I only came here for Em.”

  “She has told you things she should not have. The location of this house, for example. Which is why she is going to make you forget.”

  “Forget?”

  He nodded. “You will lose any information you hold about my family. This house. And much of what you know about Ember.”

  Ember wouldn’t change my memories like that. But she might have lied and promised him she would as part of some plan I didn’t understand right now.

  Unless she really would do it to save me …

  No, she couldn’t. Hiding memories people didn’t want to forget made them crazy. Ember was up to something.

  I licked dry lips. “What about after she makes me forget?”

  “I will let you go.” He smiled at my expression of surprise. “You are fortunate that my sister is attached to you. She has insisted that you be allowed to leave.”

  My mind raced. Terence needs Delta, and Delta needs Em, and she’s convinced him that she’ll make me forget, even though she won’t. Then how will she escape?

  Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she was still planning on staying with him. Which meant I had to convince her to come home.

  “Let me share a story with you, Ashala,” Terence said in his soft, precise voice. “About how memory works.”

  I eyed him warily, wondering where he was going with this, and knowing it could be nowhere good.

  “Some time ago, I lived near a girl who survived a fall from a cliff when she was very young. She had no recollection of the accident. But for the rest of her life, she was utterly, mindlessly terrified of heights.” He blinked his slow blink. “Her body remembered, you see.”

  Creepy story. And I didn’t like the cold calculation in his gaze. My hand crept out towards the table beside the bed. A couple of the books on it were thick and heavy, I could do some damage with one of them, if I had to.

  “I know Ember is the reason you can survive in that forest, and survival is a powerful motivator,” Terence continued. “Potentially powerful enough for you to seek her out even after you have lost your memories.” His face twisted, slipping into madness. “And I really cannot have you find her again.”

  He exploded across the bed and wrapped his hands around my throat. I kicked out uselessly as his grasp tightened. Spots appeared in front of my eyes, and my hand jerked, clutching at the books. I managed to get hold of one of the big ones and swung, smashing it into the side of his head.

  He snarled and squeezed harder. I hit him again; it had no effect. He’s willing to endure pain to get what he wants … The book slipped out of my grasp as I struggled to drag precious oxygen into my lungs. I couldn’t get enough. My vision was going black, and my chest was burning, and I was never going to be able to get enough air to survive.

  A furious voice shouted, “Terence!”

  The hands around my throat were abruptly withdrawn. I rolled off the bed and staggered away. It hurt to breathe. I didn’t care, it meant I was still alive.

  Ember was standing in the doorway. With the light from the hallway beyond making a fiery halo of her hair, and her eyes flashing with rage, she looked like … an angel. The kind from the old world stories, the ones that had wings and rescued you from bad situations.

  She cast a worried glance in my direction. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything but lean against the wall and draw in as much air as possible. But I gave her a small nod, to let her know I was okay. Mostly.

  Em shifted her attention to Terence. He’d risen to his feet, and had one hand clapped to the back of his head. I had hurt him.

  It just hadn’t mattered.

  “We had a deal, Terence,” Ember snapped.

  “I am aware of that.” He seemed a little woozy but his voice was eerily serene. “I was merely making sure your friend understood something.” He looked me up and down, his gaze lingering on my damaged throat in a horribly satisfied way. “Your body will remember. Ashala Wolf.”

  I managed to stay upright as he walked out, listening to his footsteps disappear down the hallway. Then I stumbled over to collapse onto the bed.

  “Em,” I said hoarsely, “there is something very wrong with your brother.”

  She shut the door, her eyes huge in her pale face. “I know.”

  THE DEAL

  She ran over. “Ash, I can help, but I’ll have to use nanomites. I’m not sure how you feel about …”

  “If you have a way to fix this, do it!” At this point, Ember’s nanomites weren’t even close to being on the list of things that scared me.

  Em sat, leaning across the bed to put her hand on mine. I expected to be able to sense the tiny machines flowing into my body. I couldn’t, but after a few moments the fire in my lungs and pain in my throat vanished, along with the lingering throbbing in my head.

  I was okay. And Terence is gone, and Ember is here.

  Em let me go, and spoke in a rush. “I’m so sorry, Ash, I didn’t know he was with you. He went crazy when you came, raving that you must know things. I convinced him I could make you forget – he was supposed to leave you alone!”

  Yeah, well, he’s got this nutty theory about memories … That wasn’t important now. “We have to get out of this place, Em. Jules and Connor are in the city.”

  “I can’t come w– Jules is here?”

  “He’s the one who figured out where you were.”

  “That’s … I wasn’t even sure he’d …”

  She was getting all mixed up. Ember, who never lost her way with words. She really likes this guy.

  I wasn’t above using that.

  “He gave me a message for you. He said to tell you – he doesn’t yield you to Terence. Not body, nor soul.”

  She stared down at the bed, looking miserable. “I have to stay. If you’ve seen the memories I sent, you know the reason why.”

  “It’s because I’ve seen the memories that I know you don’t need to be here. You’ve got a way to break up Delta and Terence, Em. You thought so yourself, outside Fern City.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is too. Terence only came after you because of Delta. So break ’em up, and let’s get out of here.”

  “Will you listen to me? You know how I tell you that you can’t achieve positive change with violence, only with ideas?”

  “Yeah, you’ve said that to me about a zillion times. And I don’t see how it matters right now.”

  “What I never told you was that ideas can be violent. That they can shape violence, and justify it and perpetuate it. I once did something very bad
, Ash. And as if that wasn’t enough, I had a bad idea.”

  I frowned. “What does this–”

  “Listen!” She raised her gaze to mine. “The bad stuff I did, I’m going to tell you what it is, and I’m going to do it in front of Terence and Delta. Because it’s something so terrible that you aren’t going to want to remember it.”

  My jaw dropped. “Terence said you’d make me forget – Em, you’re not really going to mess with my mind?”

  “It’ll only be temporary, Ash. The bad thing is all tangled together with my family, and I can use it to submerge your memories of us. I’ll make Terence and Delta think it’s permanent, but I’ll do it so everything resurfaces in a few weeks, I promise.”

  Oh. This was better, she actually did have a plan. Except it was for my escape, not for hers. “I’m not leaving here without you.”

  “You aren’t going to want me to come.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Em, you can’t possibly believe that I care that you aren’t, um, organic.”

  “I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”

  “Well, just to be clear: I. Do. Not. Care! And you should have known that, Ember Crow.” I couldn’t understand how she’d been so stupid. Or, no, I could, because I’d seen the reason, in her memories. It was hard for her to believe that anyone could value her when she placed so little value on herself.

  “I’m glad that you don’t care,” she said quietly. “That’s not why you won’t want me with you, though. Once you find out what I did … Ash, there’re some things even you can’t forgive.”

  “There’re really not. At least, not when it comes to you. Tell me what you did and I’ll prove it!”

  She shook her head. “Please don’t ask me. Not yet. I’ve got to take you to Terence and Delta, and before I do I want to explain something. I want you to understand what you’ve meant to me.”

  “I know already.”

  “You don’t.” She smiled at me. It wavered at the edges. “You see, the bad thing I did was something I couldn’t live with. It made me sad. So sad that Dad had to reset me. He made me forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Everything, including that I’m synthetic. He made me think I really was a seventeen-year-old Illegal. The knowledge of everything else – everything I’d done, everything I was – came back a bit at a time. Dad thought if I learned about it slowly, I’d figure out how to live with it.”

  “And that made you better?” I asked doubtfully. It sounded awful, to have everything you believed to be true turn out to be false.

  “Only for a while. Dad ended up having to reset me a lot. The last time was about five years before I met you. And I was doing okay. The reform movement was finally gathering strength, and it helped to be doing good. Only I lost Dad, and I was sad. Really sad. I was going to shut myself down. Then you found me. And you said … you said …”

  “You’re not alone. You’ve got us.”

  She nodded. “You see, I couldn’t function in the world, not as my whole self. I couldn’t overcome the limitations of my nature. I wasn’t real. You made me real, Ash.”

  Oh, Ember. I reached over to squeeze her hand. “I know you think you’re like that puppet made of wood in the old-world story. You aren’t. You were always real. You were always human. I didn’t change that. I just helped you to see it.”

  Her lower lip trembled, and for a second I thought she was about to burst into tears. Ember, who never cried. Then she pulled her hand away and strode to the door. “We have to go, Ash.”

  Her eyes were dry and her voice was steady. I’m not going to be able to convince her to run. Not yet. All I could do now was wait to hear whatever it was she thought was unforgivable, and show her it wasn’t. After that point, we’d have to improvise.

  I followed Ember out of the room and along the hall. She led me through a door and into a big, airy lounge that was dominated by two puffy couches. Delta was reclining elegantly on one of them. Terence was sitting on an armchair in the far corner, watching me through washed-out, hostile eyes.

  Ember nodded at her brother. “I’ve brought her here, like we agreed. To tell her what I did.”

  “Then let us begin,” he replied coldly. “This business has already taken up too much of our time.”

  The two of us sat down on the couch opposite Delta. I perched on the very edge of the seat in case I had to move fast; I had no faith in Terence’s self-control. As for Delta – Ember’s sister was examining me with the bright-eyed interest of a child being given a new toy. I split my attention between her and Terence, trying to keep watch on them both.

  Ember spoke. “Ash, to understand what happened, you need to know how things were hundreds of years ago. Right after the Reckoning, when there were only a few people with abilities, and everyone was starting over. Back then, my family was trying to create a perfect society.”

  “Each of us took responsibility for a city,” Delta chimed in. “It was so much fun! Only …” Her voice trailed off, and she directed an angry glare at me. “Human beings messed it up. We needed them to unite so everyone could survive, and they wouldn’t. They fought over everything.”

  Terence shifted, drawing my attention, and I tensed at the sight of the anticipatory gleam in his face. We were getting near to whatever it was Ember had done, and it was going to cause me pain. “Then one of us had an idea. A perfect idea for an imperfect species.” He looked at Ember. “Will you tell her, or shall I?”

  My best friend seemed to have hunched in on herself, becoming very small.

  “Em?”

  She lifted her head. I’d never seen her look more sad, or more determined. “Ash. I invented the Citizenship Accords.”

  I stuttered out an instinctive denial. “You – you couldn’t have!”

  “I did. I came up with the idea that Illegals were unnatural, that they weren’t part of the Balance. People needed something to bind them together, or humanity wasn’t going to make it. So I gave them an enemy.”

  I shook my head. “No. No. I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.” I sorted through history in my mind. “Besides … besides, you couldn’t possibly have been solely responsible! The Accords were made after that Skychanger flooded Vale City.”

  Ember’s face was a mask of misery. Delta was watching me with creepy fascination. And Terence was smiling. It was the only warning I had that something even worse was coming.

  “I’m afraid you still haven’t understood, Ashala,” he said, shaking his head in mock sympathy. “There was no Skychanger.”

  I opened my mouth. Words wouldn’t come out. All I could do was stare at Terence as he continued, “We diverted a river to flood the valley, and when it was done, we told everyone that it was the work of a Skychanger. We gave humanity an enemy.”

  I turned to Em. I almost expected her to have changed, to look different. She didn’t. She was still my Em.

  Only not. “Ember? Weren’t … weren’t there people in that city?”

  “It wasn’t the same as cities are now,” she said defensively. “It was only a little collection of houses.”

  “But you drowned it?”

  She met my gaze squarely. “Yes.”

  My head was pounding again, so hard that I could barely see. It was too much. It was all too much. I clutched at the arm of the couch, clinging onto something solid in a world tipped upside down.

  Ember’s eyes went wide. “Ash? Are you okay?”

  No, I’m not okay! How could I be okay after what I’d just heard? Everything was coming apart, and the room was growing dim, and there was a roaring in my ears. No, not a roaring. Barking. I was hearing a dog barking.

  How strange. Something was obviously very wrong. Maybe Ember’s nanomites hadn’t fixed my head after all. Or maybe this knowledge was too great a burden for my mind to bear.

  I fell, slipping from the couch onto the floor. Ember shouted out my name. Delta said, “She seems to be having some kind of seizure.”

  And then I
was somewhere else.

  I was standing amid yellow grasses, beneath a clear blue sky. I’m on the grasslands? I can’t be! I waited for what had to be a hallucination to dissolve. It didn’t. Instead there was movement in the distance, and a labrador came tearing towards me.

  I was so happy to see Nicky, to see any friend at all, that I didn’t care he wasn’t real. I crouched down as he came close, hugging his neck and pressing my face to his soft fur. He let me hold him for a moment before wriggling free. I straightened, watching as he dug for something in the grass.

  He returned to drop a bone at my feet.

  This was … familiar. I’d seen something very like this scene before when I’d been hooked up to the black box in Detention Centre 3. The machine had made me think I was on the grasslands when I’d really been inside my own mind. There’d been a dog there too, a half-metallic hound that was actually the machine itself, trying to get at my secrets. And bones … bones had represented memories.

  So why was I seeing all this again now?

  Nicky nosed the bone towards me. I stared down at it, noticing that there was something wrapped around one end. A lock of hair.

  A lock of red hair.

  I sat on the grass and thought furiously. Before I went into the centre, Ember had buried one of her memories in my head. A moment that defined her, although I’d never known which one. It hadn’t mattered then. What had been important was that having the memory meant I’d carried a fragment of Ember with me into that terrible place.

  Was that fragment somehow reaching out to me, trying to show itself? And if it was, did I want to experience it? Nicky obviously thought it was a good idea, but I didn’t know what he represented, here in my head. It doesn’t matter. Because if there was any chance this was the memory that defined Ember, I had to see it.

  To know, for once and all, who my best friend was.

  I picked up the bone. There was a familiar shifting sensation as the memory took hold of me, and I became someone else.

  I became Ember as she had been, hundreds of years ago.