The Last Murder at the end of the World

TEN

In a train carriage to the east of the village, Clara is woken by her best friend, Hui, who is practising a new concerto on her violin.

I’ve asked her to play it tonight in front of the village. Her performance this evening is one of the many crucial moments that have to occur to deliver the utopia Niema’s demanding. One bum note and the future will go rattling off on a new trajectory.

‘Hui,’ pleads Clara, flailing at her friend weakly, while keeping her eyes pressed shut. ‘I only just went to sleep.’

Hui played this canzonetta for them last night and it was so beautiful that Clara went to bed believing it was the most wonderful thing she’d ever heard. Every note carried a piece of her away, scattering her atoms to the wind, sun and ocean. This morning – with a long night behind her and a long day ahead – the music is producing a very different sensation.

‘Hui,’ she tries again, reluctantly opening a solitary eyelid.

Apprentices are exempted from the curfew while they’re on expedition, which was one of the things Clara was most excited by when they left the village three weeks ago. Every night, they’ve sat in the glow of a campfire, under a bright moon, listening to Thea talk to them like they’re equals. Increasingly, though, the torment of having to wake up early seems like too high a price for the joy of staying awake late.

Clara comes up on her elbow, scowling at Hui, who’s playing briskly, her eyes closed, lost in the avenues of her own creativity. She has short, dark hair and sharp cheeks, either side of a long, curved nose. She’s covered in a thick layer of grime, trickles of sweat eating their way through the dirt on her scratched face.

It’s been three days since any of them bathed, not that they’d be able to stay clean for long anyway. Thea’s been teaching them how to safely explore the island’s ruins and how to identify technology that can be salvaged. Their most recent lesson required them to follow a dull silver rail through a dense forest. It led them to this collapsed train carriage, graceless without any power to keep it afloat.

Fearing rain, they lit a fire and cooked a vegetable stew, while Thea conjured the past, as she has done every night. She told them how these trains used to float across the land, carrying scientists and supplies to their destinations in minutes.

‘The Blackheath Institute owned the entire island,’ she said wistfully. ‘Our labs were built into an old nuclear bunker underground, but we spent most of our free time on the surface, hiking and swimming. There were thousands of us working for Niema before the world ended, but nearly all of them went home when the fog came.’

‘What happened to Blackheath?’ asked Clara.

She’d knew the lab had been lost somehow, but that was the only information she’d ever been given.

‘It’s still down there,’ explained Thea, stamping the floor with her foot. ‘Its tunnels riddle most of the eastern coast, but the fog managed to worm its way through fissures in the island’s bedrock. We were forced to evacuate in the dead of night and close Blackheath’s doors after us; otherwise it would have overrun the entire island. Nobody’s been back since, but our labs would have been hermetically sealed the second the alarms sounded. Our equipment’s down there, waiting for us. Our experiments, too. Everything I need to destroy the fog and get off this island. I just can’t get to it.’

Realising the depth of longing that had come into her voice, an embarrassed Thea swiftly made her excuses and retired to bed.

In the carriage, the violin increases in pitch, forcing Clara to cover her ears and shout to be heard.

‘Hui!’

A string twangs, the music cutting off abruptly. The concentration on Hui’s smooth face immediately collapses into concern, as the future silently switches tracks.

‘I woke you,’ she says apologetically.

‘The violin woke me,’ clarifies Clara. ‘But you were definitely involved.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m performing tonight, but I haven’t had time to practise.’

‘Don’t worry about it, you don’t need to practise,’ counters Clara, through a yawn.

‘I do.’

‘You don’t,’ says Clara, stretching. ‘You’ve played for us every night without missing a single note.’

‘This is different. It’s the first time I’ll be playing this concerto in front of the entire village.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Abi told me that all of the elders will be there.’

‘It’s not different,’ replies Clara. ‘Everybody loves you. They always love you. It doesn’t matter how you play.’

Jealousy reveals itself in her tone, and she hurries on to cover her embarrassment.

‘You’re going to be great,’ she finishes lamely.

Hui digests this, while Clara upbraids herself for letting something so carefully hidden surface so easily.

I’ll say this in Clara’s defence: Hui isn’t always easy to love. Her talent shines so brightly it makes everything else seem dull, and that’s a difficult thing not to resent.

Worse, Hui’s become adept at parlaying her ability into laziness. If I didn’t put my foot down, she’d have people tending her crops, cleaning her clothes and running after her, picking up the things she drops. I’ve never understood the need for people to prostrate themselves before talent, but it happens every generation.

‘You’re right,’ says Hui, relieved. ‘Of course you’re right. You always are. Thanks, Clara. What would I do without you?’

‘The same, but slower,’ suggests Clara, catching her own odour as she shifts position. ‘I desperately hope there’s a bath in my future,’ she grumbles.

‘You’re not the only one,’ agrees Hui, throwing her a jug with a cork in it. ‘Here.’

Emory unstoppers it and sniffs suspiciously. They’ve been eating boiled vegetables and broths for the last three weeks, and her stomach is considering leaving her for somebody with a better palette.

‘Orange juice!’ exclaims Clara. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘Thea found a few trees not far from here. She squeezed it this morning.’

‘Thea’s been in here?’

‘We had a nice chat.’

‘Was I snoring?’

‘And slobbering,’ confirms Hui brightly.

Clara groans, covering her face with her hands.

After five years without taking on any new apprentices, Thea suddenly announced she’d be recruiting again in March. Forty-three people applied and Niema spent the next six months tutoring them in mathematics, physics, biology and engineering. Most of the candidates were winnowed out by the difficulty of the classes, with only nineteen actually surviving to sit the trials in October.

For two days, they were given machines from the old world to disassemble and repair, problems to solve and chemical compounds to create.

Considering Thea’s fractious relationship with Emory, everybody was stunned when Clara applied for the trials, and even more stunned when she passed them. She was one of only two to be selected, along with Hui. Even more remarkable was the fact that they were the two youngest candidates by some distance.

Thea hasn’t done anything to make Clara believe her mother is a black mark against her, but she still feels she has to be perfect at everything – even sleeping.

‘I’m joking,’ says Hui, slapping her hands gleefully. ‘I went for a wee this morning and Thea gave me the orange juice on the way back. Even if she hadn’t you don’t need to worry. You’re a very charming sleeper.’

Clara blushes, and gulps the juice to cover her embarrassment, becoming very interested in their surroundings.

‘You should tell her how you feel,’ I say.

Clara ignores me, as she always does. It’s a shame, because if she’d just find a little courage she could be happy with Hui. I don’t even need to model the future to see it. Love is simply a matter of what people need, and what they lack. It’s two broken things fitting together for a time.

Unfortunately, she’s clammed up and probably won’t get another chance. By tomorrow morning, Hui will likely be dead and Clara will spend the rest of her life tormented by the things she never said, and what might have happened if she had.

Oblivious to this fork in history, Clara is wiping orange juice from her chin while inspecting the train carriage they slept in. It’s large and wide with snapped handrails and dented metal seats. A strange vine the width of Clara has burst through the floor, twisting around the empty windows with enough force to buckle them. It’s pulsing with an inner light, and is unlike anything she’s ever seen before. Its skin is marked with hundreds of criss-crossing gouges, like somebody’s taken an axe to it. Whoever it was, they didn’t penetrate very far.

Finishing the juice, Clara searches the carriage for her possessions. They were only allowed to bring what they could fit in a knapsack, but she’s always had a gift for making a mess. Her knife is under some weeds, her spare clothes are scattered everywhere and her notebooks have migrated to the furthest reaches of the cabin.

‘Did you see the names?’ asks Hui, as Clara scrambles around, searching for the small blocks of wood she uses for her carvings.

‘What names?’

‘Scratched onto the metal under the bench,’ responds Hui, placing her beloved violin in its wool-lined case. ‘It’s Thea’s last group of apprentices. Your dad is on there.’

Clara follows her pointing finger, excitedly.

‘Arthur, Emory, Tasmin, Kiko, Reiko, Jack,’ she reads aloud, her voice warming on her father’s name.

She runs her finger across the jagged edges of ‘Jack’, imagining him scratching out the letters, humming the way he always did when he worked.

‘He was seventeen when he did that,’ I say. ‘The same age you are. Thea always brings her new apprentices out here after they pass the trials. It was the first time he’d left the village. He was so excited Thea had to tell him to stop running everywhere. Your mother was deeply embarrassed.’

Clara touches her mother’s name tenderly. Unlike her father, who filled her childhood with stories about being an apprentice, Emory very rarely mentioned this time in her life.

‘Emory only lasted six more weeks after this before she quit,’ I explain. ‘It would have been sooner, but your father kept the peace.’

Sounds about right, thinks Clara. Unlike her short-tempered mother, her father never raised his voice, and never spoke in haste. Most of the time he was smiling, and if he wasn’t you knew you’d done something really wrong.

He drowned in a storm five years ago, with the rest of these apprentices. She still thinks about him every day.

Beneath the names, she can see the tops of more words, obscured by some tall weeds. Pushing them down, she finds another message.

If you’re reading this, turn back now. Niema buried us. She’ll bury you, too.

Clara’s pulse quickens. ‘What does that mean?’ she asks nervously.

‘It’s old graffiti,’ I reply. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Who did Niema bury?’

‘I told you not to worry about it.’

My evasiveness doesn’t do much to assuage her unease, but she’s distracted by Thea’s voice hollering to them from outside.

‘Clara, Hui, we’re leaving!’

‘You ready?’ asks Hui, hitching her pack. ‘Don’t forget to leave one of your birds.’

Clara searches her pockets, retrieving a tiny wooden sparrow. She whittles them absently when she’s thinking, and has a dozen of them rattling around in her pockets. She’s been leaving them behind as markers of their passing.

After placing one on a seat, she ducks outside into the glare of sunlight, scattering a colony of rabbits which bound away into the long grass, disturbing grasshoppers and sending dragonflies into the air. An extinct volcano rises up in front of her, its peak obscured by haze.

The earth is dry underfoot, a copse of dusty pine trees offering the scantest shade. The ruins of ancient stone walls demark the olive and fig groves that used to be cultivated here. They’re wild now, piles of rotten fruit littering the ground for animals to feast on.

Clara considers asking me where they are, but Thea wants them to keep a mental map so they can guide themselves in the future.

She thinks back to school, when Niema lifted up a mouldy brown sheet by the middle and explained this was the shape, and colour, of their island when viewed from above. The volcano sits at the very centre, which means the further anyone ventures inland the steeper and rockier the terrain becomes.

It takes two days to hike from north to south along the coast, and nearly the same to cross from east to west, because you have to find a way to do it without breaking a leg. Thankfully, the island is riddled with old goat trails, which can hugely speed up journeys if you know where to find them.

‘The sun’s to the left of the volcano,’ mutters Clara to herself. ‘We must have made camp at its south face.’

Her heart leaps. The village is to the south-west. It’s probably only a few hours’ walk as the crow flies, but the terrain is almost impassable. There must be another way around.

Clara flashes a glance at Thea, trying to gauge her intentions. The elder is looking at the summit of the volcano, shading her eyes. She’s as thin as the pine trees surrounding her, and appears nearly as tall. Her dark hair is cut short, her blue eyes are sharp and her pale face is pulled taut across high cheeks and a pointed chin, without a single wrinkle evident. Her beauty is cowing. The sort you bow to rather than admire.

Thea’s nearly a hundred and ten years old, which Clara still finds astonishing as she doesn’t look much older than Emory.

‘A goat trail will take us up the volcano,’ says Thea, scrawling the route in the air with her finger. ‘We’re heading for the cauldron. Matis passed away last night’ – she casts Clara an evaluating look that’s neither sympathetic nor pitying – ‘Have you had suitable time to grieve for your great-grandfather?’

‘I have,’ says Clara, knowing there isn’t another acceptable answer to the question.

Hui squeezes her hand in support, but it isn’t necessary. Jack drowned when Clara was twelve, and she didn’t stop crying for a year. Those tears washed something out of her. She’s slightly more detached than she once was, too accepting of death.

‘As is our custom, a child will take the deceased’s place,’ continues Thea. ‘It’s our task to collect that child and deliver them to the village this afternoon.’

A trill of excitement runs through Clara and Hui. The delivery of a new child is one of the most exciting days in the village’s life, but Thea usually does it alone. Nobody’s ever seen where they come from, nor can they remember it themselves.

‘Our errand will take approximately six hours, and I’ll be testing you on chemical interactions as we walk.’ Thea rubs her hands together in a rare display of enthusiasm. ‘Who’d like to go first?’

Thea sets off with Hui close behind, but Clara drags her feet, staring at Thea’s departing back, preoccupied by the warning she found inside the carriage.

‘She buried us, she’ll bury you, too,’ she murmurs, a prickle of fear running down her spine.

Who would write something so terrible?