by Aria Noble
“I don’t know. Something the queen doesn’t want people to see.”
Felix swallowed and looked away from her, his curiosity warring with his brainwashing.
Ember bit the inside of her lip and waited. Hoping, dreading.
Finally, slowly, his eyes came back to her, though his head stayed bowed and his voice had gone small. “What do you think that is?”
Ember smiled. “That’s what I wanna find out. That’s why we’re building the copter, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“The one thing I do know is that it’s not the end of the world. Whatever’s over there, it can’t be the end. The world was much, much bigger than this Before. It can’t be less big now.”
They went back to work, silent for a while, before Felix finally said, “Tell me about Before.”
So Ember told him the stories she knew about Before. About the forest and grass that used to cover the land from Frost to Dusk and beyond. About animals that scampered and flew and grazed. The libraries and cathedrals that Ember had only ever seen in sketches and dreams — she guessed that Felix would be especially interested in those.
“I’ve never seen a book,” Felix admitted when Ember tried to describe a library.
“Never?”
He shook his head.
This was a shock — even Ember had seen books. Her father had a small collection, relics from Before. Bound parchment pages of maps and words that neither Ember nor her father understood but that were beautiful to look at nonetheless.
So she went on a tangent to tell Felix about books. Before, they’d been common, so common that even the workers of the cities had whole shelves full of them, and libraries as big as this cathedral would be stuffed with them.
“You could find out anything from them. Whatever you wanted to know. Language, philosophy, science, even made-up stories from faraway or imaginary places.”
Felix smiled sadly. “What happened? Do you know?”
“The Engine died.”
“What does that mean?”
Ember shook her head. “I’ve never really been sure. Sometimes, like once or twice, I heard old Korrah mention the Engine. She called it something — the Leshii, I think? Apparently it was some kind of machine that made the world work, and it died.”
“Broke?”
“I think so. That’s what it has to mean, right? But Korrah never said it like ‘broke.’ She always said ‘died.’”
Ember saw Eli less and less — half the time because she went straight from the workshop to the cathedral and half the time because he was already asleep when she went back to their apartment. She tried to talk to him sometimes, whisper things into the lengthening night, but he would only turn over and ignore her.
It frightened her, the thought that she might’ve damaged her relationship with Eli so badly that he wasn’t even willing to talk to her. Worse was the fact that she wasn’t even really sure what she’d done. Yes, she’d refused to go back to Dusk when he mentioned that they ought to, but was that really going to be the thing to end their lifelong friendship? She’d refused to marry him this summer, and even that hadn’t kept him from talking to her afterward. They’d had awkward conversations heavy with significance that Ember didn’t want to spend time examining, but they’d at least happened. Eli didn’t stop talking to her then, so why should he now?
She couldn’t even ask him to explain, because she couldn’t find him, and even when they did happen to cross paths in the halls, he didn’t look at her and kept walking wherever he was going.
Well. She would let him sulk for a few days. Maybe he needed that. But surely that didn’t mean he wouldn’t talk to her again.
Mostly she tried to put that out of her mind, and mostly she was successful. There were still plenty of other things to do, after all.
She was growing especially worried about the dolls. The number of them coming into the workshop had gone from a half dozen a day to a half dozen an hour. Ember wasn’t sure where all the deactivated ones were taken — Vallenovich just had another Envoy take them away in wheeled carts — but surely people had begun to notice by now that the dolls were acting up. Someone must’ve seen or heard something.
But if someone had, Vallenovich wasn’t talking about it.
It took nearly three weeks and dozens of cobbled-together or stripped-and-replaced parts, but Ember thought that the copter might be about ready to try running. She knew there wasn’t going to be much opportunity to practice flying the thing — she expected that, as soon as it was up in the air, she would have a couple of minutes at most to clear the wall before someone started chasing her. The noise and sight of an unauthorized copter wasn’t something that could be easily ignored, no matter how eager to ignore things Frost citizens could be.
She spent one night, maybe two or three, before she’d decided that she was going to do it, playing with the levers and switches inside the passenger bubble. She’d twist one of the levers — the one she thought connected to the tail blades and controlled direction — and watch the way the tail blades tilted just barely to one side or the other. The upper blades for lift weren’t so visible, so she had Felix stand outside of the bubble and tell her what was happening when she wiggled this lever or that.
“You’re really going to fly it,” he whispered as they closed up the cathedral behind them for the night.
“Yes. We’re going over the wall, Felix. We’re going to find out what the queen is hiding.”
He frowned. “What do you mean? She’s never hidden anything.”
Ember bit back a sigh. The safety of the cathedral, out of the way and abandoned, had cracked his curiosity wide open, until he was very nearly questioning the queen herself inside there, but as soon as they stepped outside again, he toggled back into a proper Frost boy.
She tried to think of it as a good thing. Tried to use that as a reminder for her to mind her tongue when outside of the cathedral. Tried not to find it annoying, because it wasn’t who Felix really was. Not what he wanted to be, and he was probably doing it to keep both of them safe from anyone who might be listening in.
“Of course,” she agreed at last. “Here, there be dragons.”
Felix nodded, and then didn’t speak again until they were on the trolley back toward the palace.
When Ember woke the next morning, it was to several sharp, fast knocks on her door. She’d been up at the cathedral until the morning trolleys started running, reviewing and testing her repairs to her copter, trying to reassure herself that she understood everything well enough that she’d be able to fly it — maybe not well, but well enough to get her over the wall.
Felix had stayed up with her the whole night, helping where he could and talking to her where he couldn’t. He hadn’t even protested about missing the trolley; he’d caught the mood she was in and reflected his own anxious excitement back at her.
“We’re going over the wall,” he’d said when Ember finally declared the copter as finished as she could manage it.
Ember smiled. She liked that Felix had started using “we” without even thinking about it. That he seemed just as interested in the answer to what lay beyond the wall as she was. “Tomorrow,” she promised.
She’d barely made it back to her room before dropping into a dreamless, exhausted sleep.
And now a hand on her shoulder was shaking her even out of that.
She wrenched open one eye, already fully aware that the person on the other side was about to get an earful of her worst self and not able to summon the energy to care. The sun hadn’t even risen yet, and while it didn’t rise until late morning these days, a part of her was already determining how to best point that out.
“What?” she snapped even as she was shaking herself awake enough to speak at all.
Eli stood above her, flanked by two smiling dolls. “Where have you been?”
Ember planted herself against her pillows, letting the softness of them hide half her face, and glared with the exposed eye, firs
t at the dolls, then at Eli. “Where have I been? Where have you been?”
Eli made a sound in his throat, something halfway between a sigh and a groan, and glanced to the dolls. “Give us a minute.”
“We are supposed to remain here,” one of the dolls answered. His smile was nearly wide enough to touch each ear, but somehow it widened a little further, until it was a grotesque parody of even a doll’s smile.
“Then do that.” Eli glanced at Ember. “Come into the other room with me?”
She grumbled wordlessly into her pillow but sat up, and when Eli moved to lead her from the bedroom, she shambled along after him. The dolls, thankfully, didn’t make any move to follow, and as she shut the bedroom door behind her, she glanced first from one doll to the other. Their smiles, already that strange and terrible doll smiles, stretched until their skin pulled almost to tearing. How long would it be before she saw these dolls again, deactivated under her hands in the workshop for ranting about the wall?
If the rate at which dolls were coming in kept up, it surely wouldn’t be too long.
She shut the door and turned back to Eli. He looked out of place, uncomfortable. His clothes were Frost style, but ill-fitting, baggy over his hips and too tight across his shoulders, and he held his wide-brimmed hat crumpled between both hands.
Ember pressed back against the door, half to keep the dolls from opening it again and half because she needed the feeling of something sturdy at her back. She crossed her arms to hide the way her fingers wanted to shake. “What?”
“I just want to know where you’ve been.”
“I haven’t been the one avoiding you.”
“Ember—”
“Don’t take a tone.” She struggled not to do it herself, to keep her own voice low and firm. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for days. You don’t get to treat me like I’m the one at fault.”
“I never said anything about fault.”
“You were thinking it.”
He couldn’t deny that — it was too obviously true, and everything he was doing, the very fact that he was standing here in Frost clothes and flanked by dolls, made that clear.
“Who put you up to this?” she asked after the silence got too strained to bear. “The queen? Vallenovich?”
“I wasn’t put up to it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“You need to stop.”
“Stop what?”
He gave her a look, something she couldn’t parse. Something that didn’t seem right on Eli’s face because she didn’t recognize what it meant.
If someone had asked her just two months ago if there was anything about Eli she didn’t know, she would say no and feel thoroughly confident about the truth of that answer.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. She didn’t know what that look he gave her was supposed to mean.
“What you’re doing,” he answered. “It’s dangerous.”
“How do you know what I’m doing? You haven’t talked to me in days.”
“It’s not hard to figure out, Ember.” He took a step forward, released his hat with one hand to hold it out as if to touch her.
Ember couldn’t step back, not with the way she was already pressed against the door, but she flinched away from his hand, and he dropped it. “That’s a tone.”
“I’m not trying to … c’mon, Ember, you know that’s not what I’m trying to do.”
She relented, just a little. This was Eli, after all, and whatever had been done to him to make him practically a stranger to her, maybe it could be undone.
She thought of the copter, repaired and ready. She was going to fly over the southern wall tonight, perhaps even leave Frost entirely. Could she really do that without Eli? Without at least trying to convince him to come with her?
No. Things might be off between them, but he was still her best friend. The person she knew best and loved most in all the world.
Whatever was going on inside his head — it didn’t have to mean the end. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t still in there, the kind, warm, happy person she’d grown up with.
She unfolded her arms and pushed herself a little away from the door — not taking a step, but tilting forward so Eli could see she wasn’t trying to express any aversion to him. “We’re going over the wall.”
“What?”
“That wall to the south. I rebuilt a copter, and we’re going to see what’s on the other side.”
Eli lifted his eyebrows. “‘We?’” he repeated.
“Me and Felix.”
“You’ve been out with Felix again?”
“Well, yeah.” Why was that the detail he seemed concerned about? “Is there something wrong with that?”
“It’s never struck you as strange that you think everyone is out to get you except the boy who keeps lurking around and waiting for you to show up where he already knows you’ll be?”
Ember couldn’t help but laugh at that. “You think Felix is out to get me?”
The scowl Eli had so clearly struggled to hold back finally escaped his control. “I think you ought to be more suspicious of the kid following you around.”
She let out a breath. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I? Or am I just being cautious? That thing you’ve always said I need to be more of.”
“Ridiculous. Felix isn’t like…” She hesitated, because she didn’t know who Felix wasn’t like. The queen? Vallenovich? That was true, she was sure, but those names wouldn’t mean the same thing to Eli. He’d met the queen, sure, and even exchanged more words with her than Ember did, but he wasn’t inclined to believe Ember’s suspicions.
Obviously, or they wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
“Anyway, that’s not the point,” she said without finishing the rest of her previous thought.
“Well, then, what is?”
“The point” — she took a step toward Eli and poked his arm lightly with one finger for emphasis — “is that Frost is hiding something. Something much bigger than a few broken dolls. There’s something beyond that wall, something that someone — and my bet is on the queen — doesn’t want anyone to know about.”
Eli exhaled, loud and slow, with a noise like a groan that he managed to catch in his throat before it fully formed. The scowl relaxed a little, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes in an exaggerated indication of exhaustion. “Not this again,” he said at the tail end of his sigh.
“What do you mean, ‘this again’? I haven’t—”
“You don’t need to. I already know where this is going.”
“But—”
“Not every mystery needs you to solve it.”
She blinked, surprised by the venom leaking into his voice. She felt her dander rising, the anxious pulse of her blood zipping down the undersides of her arms, preparing her for a fight. She fought to keep her voice even, to keep herself from rising to his bait like he was so good at doing with her. “This one does.”
“No. It doesn’t. It’s not your problem what the people of Frost do or don’t believe about their city.”
“Do you think that wall is the end of the world?”
“I don’t care what anyone thinks about it.”
“That’s not an answer. Do you really think the world ends here, in Frost?”
“It’s not important.”
“Just answer the question!” Her voice was coming too loud, pitching too high; she forced it back down to a more normal level. “Please. Just yes or no.”
Eli was quiet for a moment, his eyes on hers. She wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but whatever it was, it made his shoulders relax, relenting. “No.”
“Because there’s the rest of the world beyond it. It doesn’t make sense that the world would end just here, at the southern edge of Frost, and that somehow no one outside of Frost itself would know that. But them?” She gestured toward the glass wall, hoping to indicate the entire population of the city. “They don’t know about Before. They don’t unde
rstand about electricity and machines that make the force field. They think it’s all magic that keeps their city moving and alive.” A new thought struck her, as bright and complete as the drive to see what was over that southern wall. She looked up at Eli, suddenly stunned by the thought. “And think — if Frost knew about things beyond their walls, they could be…” She swallowed. “The people here, they’re generous because they can afford it, right? If they knew about Dusk, they could save them.”
Eli didn’t answer, and this, more than any words he might’ve spoken into the silence, surprised Ember. Because this was the sort of thing that should motivate him, make him understand what she was trying to say, prove to him that what she wanted to do was important.
The walls around Frost had to come down. The people needed to know they weren’t sitting at the literal edge of the world. Because if they knew, if they understood, they could help Dusk. They could save their dying neighbors to the north. Eli could be the storybook hero he’d always secretly longed to be.
But Eli didn’t say anything. There was a closed-off sort of expression on his face, one that Ember didn’t recognize and didn’t know what to do with, like he didn’t even hear the words she was saying.
“Eli?” she ventured after a moment.
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
He reached out and took her shoulders, gentle despite the hardness in his face. “We shouldn’t have come here. You were right all along. We should go.”
She’d thought him not answering her before was stranger than anything he could’ve said. She was wrong. This was far stranger even than that. “But … our clothes. Supplies. We don’t have them anymore.”
“The packs are under the couch,” he answered with a glance back at the furniture in question. “We can find more clothes.”
“I don’t understand.”
He let his hands fall off her shoulders, one of them running down her arm to take her hand instead. “I know you, Ember,” he said. “You won’t let this go, not until we get out of here. I’m sorry it took me so long to realize that. So, let’s go home. We made it across the tundra once — we can do it again.”
She pulled away from him. It was an instinctual gesture and made mostly without her consent or control, but she knew the moment she did it that she shouldn’t have. That that one little motion might just have cost her more than she could bear to pay.