The Disappearance of Ember Crow (17 page)

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.

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 thoughts 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.”

Jules, Pepper and Wanders were waiting where we had left them. Wanders was stalking back and forth, and Pepper and Jules were skipping rocks across the river, competing to see who could make their stone go the furthest.

I called out to Pepper as we drew close. “I need to talk to Jules alone.”

Her black eyes lit up with curiosity. “I’m the one who captured him!”

“I know. And thank you. But I need you to go now.”

She shrugged, picked up another stone, and sent it flying over the water. Behind her, Wanders rolled onto the ground and lifted his head to the breeze, as if he had nothing better to do other than lounge there for the day.

I had no time for this. “I’m serious, Pepper.” In my head, I added.
This is Tribe business, and I’ll tell Jaz
what the Saur Tribe needs to know about it later
.

Her shoulders sagged. “All right, all right, I’ll go.”

She and Wanders strolled away, moving at a speed that was slow enough to be annoying but not quite slow enough for me to hurry them up. Pepper kept glancing back, her small face full of woe, while Wanders let his long neck dip to the ground. I ignored their antics, waiting until they were too far to overhear. Then I shifted my attention to Jules.

He spoke before I could. “You seem a bit upset, darling. Shocked by what Ember really is? Didn’t you ever notice there was something wrong with her?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her!”

“She’s a machine.”

“She’s my best friend. And she saved you.”

“Yeah. And I’m grateful. That’s why I brought the message.” He scratched his jaw. “Would’ve been useful to have her about too, in case Terence ever came after me, only she had other plans.”

Connor cast a quick glance at my face, and spoke to Jules in a tone that was much calmer than anything I would’ve been able to manage. “Do you have any idea where she is?”

“’Fraid not. Terence has places everywhere.” His gaze drifted to the Firstwood. “So when are you going to ask me to join your Tribe?”

“I’m not!”

“You’re going to have to, if you want to find out what I know about Terence.”

He wants to trade information for a place in the Tribe?
I spluttered, so angry I couldn’t even form words. Jules grinned that irritating crooked smile that Ember inexplicably found so attractive. “Come on, wolfgirl. I need a new place to hide out, and it’s not as if you’re very picky about who you let in. I mean, if
machines
can join–”

My fist seemed to fly out of its own volition, straight into his face. He staggered backwards, tripped over his pack, and fell. I shook out my aching hand, enjoying the sight of him sprawled on the grass. That had hurt, but it had been worth it.

“If you really want to beat him up,” Connor murmured, “I could do it much more efficiently.”

He was joking, sort-of. I played along. “True, but it would take a while. Maybe we should get the saurs to bite pieces off him until he starts talking.”