The Disappearance of Ember Crow (15 page)

He shook his head. “I don’t want to hang around here, and I’ve got no respect for those two. Believe me, neither of them ever shed any tears over killing people. And as for hiding the bodies – take a look. Can you see them?”

I couldn’t. The vegetation was too dense. “Also,” Jules added cheerfully, “what with the humidity around here, not to mention all the little critters in the Deepwood that feast on dead things, they’ll be gone fast.”

That was an absolutely awful thing to think of, if true. I stared at the forest, which seemed to have already consumed them, the way it was consuming Fern City.
I suppose it’s not such a terrible thing, to be food for a forest. I wouldn’t mind it
.

Jules reached into his pocket and pressed something into my hand. “Here. Almost forgot.”

The neutraliser. I wasn’t sure how much rhondarite was still left in my system, but it wouldn’t hurt to help get rid of whatever remained. I gulped it down, watching as he took hold of the wheel. He was still moving a little awkwardly. “What did they do to you?”

“Riley was trying stop me from causing the crash by extracting the water from my body. It was only for a few seconds.”

I’d never heard of a Waterbaby being able to use their ability like that. It was clever, and cruel. “Are you sure you can drive?”

“I’ve been hurt a lot worse than this.” He winked at me. “You’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t find me at all charming.”

I smiled, and Jules grinned his crooked grin.

Then he started up the engine, and swung the truck around, sending us roaring in the direction of Fern City.

THE JOURNEY

We chugged along the road, swerving to avoid encroaching vegetation. The air was fragrant with the scent of ylang-ylang and warm, of course. It was always warm here; the difference between seasons in this part of the world was between “wet” and “dry”, rather than “cold” and “hot”. I preferred the cool autumn air of the Firstwood and the eucalyptus tang of tuarts, but it was pleasant to be back in any kind of forest.

The Deepwood was dense in a way that the Firstwood wasn’t – it was a jungle, dominated by the massive ylang-ylang trees and crowded out with fan palms, king-ferns, and pepper vines. A forest of dark, secret spaces, inhabited by forest animals and nobody else. I spotted a few crows, now and then. These birds didn’t know me as a friend the way my Firstwood crows did, but they still recognised me as a crow, and I had a comforting sense of familiar beady eyes watching me from the trees. I drank in the reassurance of their presence, using it to soothe my weariness and frailty.
I took a life
. I’d had to do it, but I grieved over the necessity of it. I was sad for everything the girl would never be, and for a society that drove people with abilities into horrible places and horrible choices. For all the lost chances, and all the lost people.

If I allowed myself to sink into these emotions, it would end in a kind of madness.
You had to act. And that is all there is to it
. I switched my attention to the road in front of me, and what lay at the end of it. “How far away are we from Fern City?”

“Two days.”

I’d been unconscious for longer than I’d thought. At least the journey back to the city would give me enough time to completely recover from the rhondarite, and from the effects of killing someone.

“By the time we get to Fern City, I’ll be able to help you–”

“Don’t worry about it. You should sleep or rest or … whatever it is that you do to recuperate.”

“I sleep. But I can’t, yet.”

“Why not?”

“Um.” I considered how best to explain. “You know how it is when you wake up from a nightmare, and you don’t want to go back to sleep in case you end up in the same bad dream?”

He nodded.

“If I slept now, I might get drawn back into – what I was experiencing, back there.”

“Yeah. What
was
that?”

“Something my father did to us. He made it so that we can’t kill, at least, not without consequences. If we do, we hurt.”

He snorted. “I’ve seen Terence kill people!”

“Not directly, you haven’t.” I yawned. “I don’t think he administers that toxin himself, and I’m not sure withdrawing the antidote is direct enough to count. Besides which, Terence is willing to endure some pain to accomplish his ends.”

“Kind of a big loophole, isn’t it?”

“It didn’t work out quite the way Dad intended,” I acknowledged. “At least, not once Terence realised where the limits were and how he could circumvent them. He has no trouble resolving a death, either.”

“You’re going to have to explain ‘resolving a death’, darling.”

“Justifying it. We have to be certain the death was unavoidable. Necessary. Problem is, what we each think is justifiable depends on where we draw our boundaries of right and wrong.”

“That was why you wanted me to tell you that you saved me.”

“Yes.”
I don’t want to talk about that moment
. “Where is this place in Fern–”

“What happens if you can’t justify it?”

I sighed. “It causes a systemic failure, and we shut down. For all intents and purposes, we’re dead.”

Jules slammed on the brakes. The truck screeched to a stop. He twisted to face me. “You’re saying that you could have
died?
”

He seemed very upset. I suppose the prospect of my death must come as a shock if he’d thought I was invulnerable, and he probably had. That was certainly the impression Terence liked to give. “Not dead, precisely. More like the equivalent of being in a coma.”

“And Isabelle knew that.” My confusion must have been apparent, because he added, “The girl who shot you. She knew, and she didn’t think you’d risk it. Not for me.”

“She was wrong.”

“I didn’t even know it was possible for you to be hurt!”

I shrugged. “It’s hard to permanently damage us. Otherwise, we function as if we’re organic, feeling everything a normal human being would.”

He paled. “When I crashed their truck …”

“I wasn’t in pain for long.”

Jules’s hands clenched on the steering wheel, turning his knuckles white. “I’m sorry.”

“You weren’t to know.”

He muttered something to himself. It sounded like, “You’re really something, Red”, but I couldn’t be sure.

We resumed our journey along the road, and I curled up in the seat, angled towards Jules. “Tell me about those Illegals.”

“You mean the minions? They are what they are. Terence’s devoted slaves. He recruits them young, and indoctrinates them in his own special brand of insanity.”

I frowned. “He’s never done anything like this before. And that girl, Isabelle – Terence must have told her I had a problem with violence. He’s never shared information about our family like that before, either.”

“Belle always was one of his special pets. He has a few, among the minions. The ones who worship him the most. And hate what they are the most.”

Obedience is service, and service is redemption
. That was what the boy had said, back on the train. It sounded as if Terence had started some kind of cult, which was both disturbing, and unexpected. Terence had never been very good with people, and manipulation on this scale required an in-depth understanding of human nature.
The amount of time he must have put in to thinking this up, and making it work …
although I could see how much it would appeal to him to have an army of utterly loyal Illegals. He’d consider that outcome to be worth any amount of effort. “How many minions does he have?”

“Ten that I’ve met. I don’t think there are that many more. I was supposed to be one of them.”

“You?”

“Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But he tried to twist me up along with the rest, using all the usual crap everyone says about people with abilities – you know, we’re unnatural, we’re dangerous, we’re unworthy. Basically wanted me to believe that my only shot at ever being part of the Balance was to obey his every whim.” He shook his head with mock regret. “I guess I’ve just always loved myself too much for it to work.”

I laughed, and he added, “Truth is, he didn’t try that hard with me. I think he realised he might have a use for someone who could operate independently. Except I always knew he’d kill me for it, one day.”

“He’s missed his opportunity.” I replied in satisfaction. “You’re going to be free of him.”

“Thanks to you.” He cast a quick glance in my direction. “Tell me something. Are you
really
hundreds of years old? Because you don’t seem like it.”

“Does Terence?”

“No,” he answered thoughtfully. “I guess not. In fact, sometimes he’s really childish, in a scary kind of way.”

“It’s because we were built with the intellects of adults – very smart adults – and the emotional capacity of infants. For us, ‘aging’ is our emotional maturity catching up with our mental maturity, and that means learning to process emotions.” I spotted another crow, and gave it a little wave. “Unfortunately, only one of us was ever very good at it.”

“Not Terence, I take it.”

“No, not Terence. Someone else – the youngest of us, and the best. The most human. He was the one who taught us how to grow up. Or started to.”

“Why did he stop?”

I shouldn’t have let myself be drawn into this conversation. “He died.”

Jules made a startled exclamation. “From killing someone?”

“No. This was before Dad made it hard for us to kill. It was – something else.” And I didn’t want to think about that long ago death, any more than I wanted to contemplate the deaths earlier today. “It’s not important how. What’s important is, after that, we found it difficult to learn how to process what we felt. We’ve been a bit unstable ever since.”

He frowned. “You seem fine to me, Red.”

“That’s because you’re comparing me to Terence.”
And Terence’s unstable emotions are directed at other people. Mine are directed at myself
.

“How old
were
you when your brother died?”

“It depends on how you count. I’d … existed for a while, or my body had. But I’d only been awake and aware for seventeen years.”

He nodded. He wasn’t surprised by that answer.
Smarter than he likes to pretend
. Good at reading people, as well. I wondered whether that was itself an aspect of his ability; if he was able to mirror emotions, the same way he mirrored appearances. Whatever it was, he’d understood me sufficiently to realise that, in so many ways, I really was seventeen years old.
And not just because that’s the age I was when I lost my baby brother
. But I was too tired, now, and too low, to launch into any further explanation of the complicated mess of my long life.

We sat in silence for a while, winding our way along the meandering road. Eventually I did sleep, and felt the better for it. When I woke, the afternoon light was fading to the grey of early evening. I persuaded Jules to let me take the wheel for a while, giving him a chance to get some rest.

He dozed in the seat beside me. I kept stealing glances at his face, thinking about everything that had happened since I met him, and the last time I’d seen him on the train. Finally he said, without opening his eyes, “Stop watching me, sweetheart.”

“Sorry. I was wondering what made you change your mind.”

“Change my mind about what?”

“Helping me.”

He blinked, seeming confused.

“You let the minions take me,” I explained, “but then you changed your mind.”

“Is that what you think?” He sat up. “Guess I can see why. It took me a while to figure you out, but I wasn’t – look, those two caught me by surprise, back on the train, and they were between me and the weapon before I knew it. I only let them take you because I couldn’t win, not until I got my hands on something that would give me a fighting chance.”

“Such as a very large truck?”

“Yeah. Well. I would’ve tried something else, if I’d known you could be hurt. But I was always coming for you, Red.”

If I continued to stare at him, I was going to drive right into the forest. I redirected my attention to the road. “Well that’s … I mean – it’s good to know that.” There was a very silly smile pulling up the corners of my mouth. I forced it away. It was foolish, and I could feel his gaze on me. “Stop watching me, Jules.”

He laughed, and sank back into the seat.

I drove on, listening to Jules’s breathing grow steady and deep. He really was asleep this time.

There was no one to witness my foolishness now, except perhaps for the crows, and crows kept each other’s secrets.

I was always coming for you, Red
.

I let myself smile.

THE HIDE-OUT

“Exactly
where
is this hide-out?” I asked.

Jules and I had been wandering the narrow backstreets of Fern City for some time now, and I was tired. I still needed more rest to recover from the after-effects of killing someone, and I wished we could have driven through the city rather than walked. But the truck wouldn’t fit down these streets. Besides, we were trying to blend in and the truck was far too noticeable.

“We’re nearly there,” Jules replied.

“You said that twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah, and it’s even truer now.” He stopped in front of a laneway. “Actually – here we are.”

I peered into the alley, which ended in a dark tangle of king-ferns and pepper vines. This was obviously one of the parts of the city that had been abandoned to the Deepwood when the vegetation became too aggressive to tame. “I think you’ve taken a wrong turn.”

“I never take wrong turns. Come on.”

He dived into the forest, and I hurried after him. We forced our way through the plants until he stopped in front of a gnarled tree that was growing against a crumbling wall.

“Now we climb,” he said, and scrambled upwards. I followed, pausing to watch as he uncoiled something from a high branch and sent it dangling down the other side of the wall.
Rope ladder?
My day was not improving. I hauled myself up the tree, along the branch, and – slowly – down the ladder. Then Jules and I pushed through yet more forest until we reached another wall. This one was completely covered with pepper vines, and Jules took hold of a handful, yanking them aside to reveal a door. “Welcome to my Fern City hide-out.”