The Disappearance of Ember Crow Read online

  A black-haired, black-eyed boy popped up from out of the grass. “No fair, Connor! Ash warned you.”

  Connor stood, brushing himself off. “I moved before she spoke, Jaz. I could hear something coming through the air. But,” he added in an approving tone, “most enforcers would have turned in the direction of the sound. You would have hit them right in the face.”

  “It’s no good getting the better of ordinary enforcers! I have to be able to beat the best. That’s you.”

  “Have you two gone insane?” I choked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Practising fighting the government,” Jaz answered. “I try to ambush Connor, and he has to escape without using his ability, as if he’s an enforcer.”

  “Since when have you been doing that?”

  “I dunno, a while. Connor’s been teaching me lots of stuff. Tactics, and camouflage – see my clothes?”

  I did. Jaz was wearing a shirt and pants of yellowy-brown that was hard to distinguish from the grass. He must have dyed them; none of the seven cities had that colour clothing. “And,” he continued enthusiastically, “check this out.”

  He pointed to one of the Five Sisters and intoned, “Hatches-with-Stars! Emerge!”

  For a second, everything was still. Then the hill moved.

  No, not the hill. A lizard the size of a pony who’d been coiled about the base.

  Hatches-with-Stars skittered over to us, claws tearing at the ground and tail sweeping behind her. She’d been born late; it meant she was little, for a saur, and her scales were pale blue instead of black. Normally. Right now, she was covered in red dust. She stopped, and reared up on her hind legs, displaying the rocks that had been – glued? – all over her body.

  “What have you done to her?” I demanded.

  Jaz rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, it all comes off.”

  Connor examined Hatches with interest. “It’s very good, Jaz. Although in most situations you’d want people to see a saur coming. It tends to encourage fleeing in terror.”

  “Yeah. I only thought of that afterwards. Plus to really make it work you have to puff up the grass to hide the saur footprints, which takes ages.”

  I looked from Connor to Jaz and back again. I’d known they were talking, but I hadn’t realised they were … really talking. What else had I missed while I’d been wolf?

  Hatches sank to her feet and lounged on the ground, licking the dirt off her scales. Jaz grabbed hold of my arm. “Come on, Ash. We need to speak.”

  He pulled me along, stopping at the very edge of the circle formed by the Five Sisters. “What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Connor. You know I’m talking about Connor. I admit I wasn’t sure about the guy at first, but he’s pretty useful. And you’re making him crazy.”

  “It’s not that simple. I hurt him.”

  “A broken arm? That’s nothing. If I lose control of my ability, I set people on fire.”

  “You’re not asleep when you use your ability! It’s not possible for you to lose control the way I can. And it could’ve been much worse than a broken arm.”

  Jaz suddenly seemed very tall for an eleven-year-old boy. “Connor is unhappy, Ash. Your whole Tribe has been unhappy ’cause you left them. You’d never let me get away with that.”

  Taken aback, I gazed into his dark, oddly grown-up eyes. This wasn’t the first time Jaz had surprised me with what he’d become. He’d literally transformed when he’d joined the saurs, gaining hair and eyes as black as saur scales. Then, when he’d been captured by the government, he’d turned his fellow detainees into a fiercely loyal band of rebels. There was hardly any trace left now of the irresponsible thief he’d been when he first joined my Tribe.

  Jaz was a leader. Right at this moment, he was a better leader than me.

  I cast a guilty glance at where Connor was sitting next to Hatches. He said something to her. She raised her head to trill at him, and he laughed. It had been a long time since I’d seen him do that.

  Jaz must have decided that he’d made his point, because he added, “Anyway, Connor wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Well, not the only thing. I’ve got news. About the Adjustment.”

  My head jerked back to him. The Adjustment was the proceeding that was going to determine the fate of my old enemies, Neville Rose and Miriam Grey. “What about it?”

  “They’re holding it at Detention Centre 3. In six weeks time.”

  “What?” I shifted until I could see the centre in the distance. It sat on stony earth, about twenty metres from the far-off edge of the grasslands. It still seemed to loom. “Are you sure? How do you even know?”

  “The saurs.”

  “How do they know?”

  “People hang around the front gate of the centre and talk. If it’s quiet and the wind’s blowing the right way, the saurs can overhear what’s being said from the grasslands. They have super-good ears, you know.”

  Saur spies. And I supposed that it did make a kind of sense for the Adjustment to be held in the centre. It was supposed to restore order, to “adjust” the world back into harmony when the Balance had been seriously disturbed. The government must have figured there was no better place to restore harmony than the one where Neville and Grey had harmed the Balance to begin with. I’d been their prisoner in that place – and the fact that I’d put myself there on purpose to infiltrate the centre hadn’t made the experience any less terrifying.

  Neville and Grey were evil people.

  “Ashala?” Connor’s voice. I twisted to find he was standing right beside me. When had he moved so close? “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Jaz asked. “Because your breathing is a bit funny and you keep making a fist.”

  I looked down at my right hand, unclenched it, and spoke to Connor. “They’re holding the Adjustment at the centre.”

  “Ah.” He studied my face. “They’re coming back as prisoners, Ashala.”

  “I know.”

  He reached out and gently pried my fingers from my palm. I hadn’t even realised I’d made another fist. Connor let me go, and said, “They’re coming back to die.”

  That might well be true. It was possible that the Adjuster would decide the only way to make good the disharmony that Neville and Grey had caused was by sending them back to the greater Balance. It didn’t quite seem right to Balance life with death to me, only I couldn’t feel sorry at the thought of them being dead. Grey was a mad beast who found pleasure in causing pain, and Neville was even worse. A clever, calculating monster, taking a gleeful delight in tricking everyone into believing he was a kindly old man.

  I was still afraid of them. I hadn’t realised that until now.

  Jaz nudged me. “You know, Ash, even if the government doesn’t execute them, they’ll force them to spend the rest of their lives making things up to the Balance. They broke, what, two Accords? Three?” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Neville’s hidden stash of those streaker weapons – totally against the Advanced Weaponry Accords. Building a secret rhondarite mine – not allowed, under the Three Mines Accords. And making a memory-reading computer thing …” His voice trailed off and he threw a hopeful glance in my direction.

  I got into the spirit of it, finishing the sentence for him. “Completely and utterly against the Benign Technology Accords. No proof of that one though, since we swiped their machine.”

  “Not to mention,” Connor put in, “inspiring such terror in the detainee children in their care that they fled onto the grasslands and were tragically eaten by saurs.”

  That drew a smile from me. We’d engineered the perfect escape for Jaz and the rest of the detainees. No one came searching for Illegals they thought were dead.

  I repeated Connor’s words to myself. They’re coming back as prisoners. They’re coming back to die. And we’d got the better of them once before. With that I found I could f
ocus, directing my thoughts to what it meant to have the Adjustment here. It was a rare event – there’d only been seventeen Adjustments ever. People didn’t commit major crimes against the Balance very often. In fact, I didn’t think anyone had ever managed to break so many sets of Accords before.

  I scowled. “Having that Adjustment here means everyone’s going to be paying attention to this part of the world. I don’t like it.”

  “Nor do I,” Connor agreed. “But we’ve never been a big enough problem for the government to throw the kind of resources at the Firstwood that they’d need to in order to capture us. As long as we don’t do anything to provoke them, I think we’ll be all right.”

  “My Tribe is increasing patrols,” Jaz announced. “We’ve got it all planned. If anyone comes onto the grasslands, we’ll get the saurs to deal with them. No one’s going to blame any of us for what the saurs do.”

  He was right about that. Everyone knew being eaten was a basic hazard of walking onto saur territory, and the lizards themselves were in no danger from the government. Their armoured scales made them virtually indestructible. Plus, saurs were generally held in awe and respect as one of the first new species to be born after the end of the Reckoning. It was part of the reason we’d used the lizards when we’d been engineering the escape … Uh-oh.

  “Jaz,” I said urgently, “there will be people at the Adjustment who were at Detention Centre 3 when you escaped.” Everyone who’d been there was a witness to Neville and Grey’s crimes and the Adjuster would want to hear from them. “You can’t let any of them spot you, not when you’re supposed to be dead. If anybody ever finds out we faked the detainee deaths …”

  “I’m not an idiot, Ash! I’ll stay too far away for anyone to get a good look. Besides, no one cared enough to remember our faces.”

  “Doctor Wentworth cared,” I pointed out. Rae Wentworth was a Mender who’d worked in the centre. She had an Exemption from the Citizenship Accords, so she could openly use her ability, and she’d done her best to take care of everyone being held there. I was positive that she’d remember every last detainee, which made me grateful the others had changed so much that there was no danger of her recognising any of them. They’d been adopted by the saurs after they’d escaped and they were all black-haired and black-eyed now. But Jaz had joined the saurs before he went to the centre, so he looked exactly the same as when he’d been in there. “You have to be careful, Jaz.”

  “I will,” he answered cheerfully. “You worry way too much, Ash.”

  He was probably right about that. Except the whole situation disturbed me and not only because of Neville and Grey. Everything felt … unstable. Not just in the Tribe with Ember missing and my ability going wrong, but everywhere. Ember had warned me after Belle Willis won the Prime election not to get complacent simply because things had started improving for Illegals. She’d said that the most dangerous times to be a member of an oppressed group was when the oppression began and when it ended. Those were the moments when everyone who’d gained from the oppression had the most to lose. And, she’d said, her mismatched eyes brooding and sad, threatened people are dangerous people, Ash.

  A trilling noise broke into my troubled thoughts. I blinked at Hatches, who’d risen to her feet and was prancing in place.

  Jaz nodded at her. “I know, I know.” To me, he said, “I’ve got to go. Hatches and I have things to do. I’ll mindspeak you if the saurs hear anything else about the Adjustment.”

  I hugged him, and he hugged me back. Then he stepped away, frowning slightly. “You know what Georgie says about you, Ash? She says you’re like a mother bird that’s terrified of her chicks falling out the nest.”

  “I am not!”

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Except she says the only real way to keep anyone from falling is to teach them how to fly.” His gaze flicked to Connor. “And he already knows how to fly. So get over it.”

  “Jaz!”

  He grinned at me, winked at Connor, and ran over to leap onto Hatches’s back.

  Another second, and the two of them were gone, skittering off onto the grasslands.

  THE NUMBERS

  There was a moment of awkward silence.

  “Jaz had no right …” I stammered. “He’s not – he doesn’t think things through!”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He made a lot of sense to me.”

  I glared at Connor. There was a gleam of laughter lurking in his eyes, and his lips were curved into the hint of a smile.

  I felt my mouth twitch upwards in response. Tried to make it turn back down again.

  Failed.

  I giggled, then laughed. Connor laughed too, and the sound of our shared merriment rang out across the grasslands. Something seemed to fly out of me with that laughter, lifting from my chest and making it easier to breathe. I tipped my head to the sky and inhaled, savouring the sweet scent of the grass, the solidity of the ground beneath my feet, and Connor’s steadying presence beside me. I felt … human. And glad to be so.

  I threw Connor a smile that was partly leftover from laughing, and partly from sheer joy at seeing him as he was right now: shoulders relaxed, hair falling over his face, eyes alight. I wanted to reach out to him, only doing that would remove all distance between us, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Instead I said, “Let’s walk.”

  We wandered in the direction of the Firstwood. It was good to walk, to fall into the familiar rhythm of striding side by side with Connor. I didn’t speak, and nor did he; I think we were both wary of saying something that would shatter the fragile peace between us. Besides, I needed some time to think about what had happened since I’d heard the words “Ember is missing”.

  I tried to be wolf-like about it, sifting through things one at a time. The news about the Adjustment had been a blow. But it didn’t seem as if there was anything that could be done, other than the plans we’d already made. Then there was my malfunctioning ability. I’d handled the whole thing badly by running away, I could admit that. But I still didn’t know how to get past the crippling fear of harming Connor worse than I already had. Which left Ember’s disappearance, and I was no further along in finding her. I didn’t even have anything to go on, other than Grandpa’s cryptic message. Beware the angels.

  My first instinct had been that he was warning me about hurting Connor. But what if he wasn’t? After all, he’d said angels with an “s”, and there was only one Connor. Except I couldn’t see how angels were a clue to finding Ember. Angels were old-world beings that probably didn’t exist anymore, if they ever did exist. Connor had never thought they were real. But Alexander Hoffman had written about them, in the Histories of the Reckoning. And there was a poem about them too, although it was only a kids’ counting rhyme.

  “Do you remember exactly what Hoffman said about angels?” I asked. “In the Histories?”

  Connor looked startled, and I realised it must seem like a really weird question. I cast about for a reason to have asked it. If I told him about Grandpa’s warning, he’d want to know why I hadn’t said anything before, and that conversation wasn’t going to go well. “Ember said something about angels once,” I lied. “Probably nothing important. I just don’t want to ignore anything that might help her.”

  He gazed at me for a second longer. Then he shrugged and said, “It’s a couple of lines about angels walking the Earth during the Reckoning.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And that they would guide humanity in the new world that would emerge from the old. I’ve told you before–”

  “You don’t believe they exist. I know.”

  “They were supposed to be messengers of some sort of god, Ashala. So it’s unlikely that Hoffman was talking about actual angels. Because he certainly didn’t believe in gods.”

  No, he didn’t. The first line of the “Instructions for a Better World” was There are no gods. Only an inherent Balance between all life …

  “If he wasn’t talking about actual angels,
what was he talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Some scholars think he meant extraordinary people who would be leaders once the Reckoning ended. Or maybe he was a little confused.”

  “He couldn’t have been confused! He was Hoffman.”

  “The reference to the angels is in the eighth volume of the Histories. He would have been pretty old by the time he was writing that one.”

  He had a point there. People were fairly certain the ninth volume was the last one Hoffman had actually written himself and the remaining six had been put together by his followers writing under Hoffman’s name. The Reckoning had lasted over a hundred years; Hoffman couldn’t possibly have lived through the whole thing. “Just because he was old doesn’t mean he was crazy.”

  “I didn’t say crazy, I said confused.”

  There was a note of amusement in his voice. I eyed him suspiciously.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “The way you talk about Hoffman. The way everyone does. As if he was an all-seeing, all-knowing saviour.”

  “He was a saviour! He foresaw the Reckoning, and he tried to save people – and no one would’ve been able to rebuild a society when it ended without all the inventions and writings he left behind.”

  “I know that. Except … they ram Hoffman down our throats in enforcer training, because they use his work to justify the Citizenship Accords.”

  “Hoffman didn’t think Illegals were a threat to the Balance, Ember told me that. The government just tries to make out as if he did. Ever since the flood.” That was what had started the Citizenship Accords in the first place – a Skychanger had caused a flood that drowned a city, back when the world’s ecosystems had still been unstable in the aftermath of the Reckoning.

  “I’m not saying he was against Illegals,” Connor replied. “But most of what they told me during training was wrong, and I knew it. Hearing all about Hoffman in that context – I guess it made me question him too.” He sighed. “You know, our entire society is based on his vision of a perfect existence, and we all take every word he wrote as absolute truth. Which makes Alexander Hoffman kind of like the type of religious figure that our society doesn’t have.”