The Last Murder at the end of the World

THIRTY-THREE

Emory walks back towards the cable car in a daze, the world passing by unseen.

Her thoughts are churning, but it’s shame she feels more than anything else. The notebooks under her bed are filled with questions, but, for some reason, she never thought to wonder why the elders were so much taller and thinner than them, or why every villager was so instinctively deferential.

We were made to serve them, she thinks. Of course they’d want us to be smaller. Nobody wants to feel inferior to the thing they’ve made.

‘Why did Niema lie to us?’ she asks eventually. ‘Why sit us in a classroom and pretend we’re people?’

‘Believe it or not, she was trying to be kind,’ replies Thea. ‘The first few generations of your people were clumsy and stupid, impossible to mistake for human, but after we got stuck here, Niema started tampering with your DNA: changing you, making you more lifelike. I think she fooled herself in the end. She started feeling guilty. She wanted you to have real lives.’

Emory’s heart feels like a fist has closed around it. Her entire life she’s hated lies, priding herself on confronting them no matter how awkward it was. And, yet, she was the biggest lie of all. Everything about her was chosen by somebody else. Even the curiosity she’s so proud of was the result of Niema turning a dial on a machine.

‘Frankly, I’ve always thought her obsession with your people was a little perverse,’ says Thea, splashing through a stream. ‘For all her work, you’re still not people. You can’t be creative, or original. Everything you are is mimicry. You can’t be anything more than we designed you to be. You can’t even procreate. If those pods break your entire species dies out. It felt like she’d fallen in love with her dolls. I assumed there was something she wasn’t telling me, some greater purpose to it all, but maybe she was just lonely.’

There’s an inflection in the word: a withering contempt not for the emotion, but the people on the end of it.

Emory extends her palms, catching the moisture falling from the roof, feeling it soaking her T-shirt. She watches it roll down her skin, finding its way through the prickling hairs.

She closes her eyes and breathes.

I’m alive, she thinks. Made, or not, I’m alive. I have value. We all have value.

She thinks about Clara’s birds, and her father’s boats. She remembers Matis chipping away at his statues, and Magdalene’s blackened hands, covered in charcoal from her sketches. She remembers the laughter, and the food, and how much everybody cares for each other. None of these experiences were made by Niema.

Her world still feels like it’s made of paper, but it’s steadier than it was, less likely to collapse beneath her. Questions come bounding across it.

‘Why did Niema decide to tell us the truth last night?’ she asks, sounding a little more like her old self. ‘Was there something that provoked it?’

Thea rolls her head, debating the question.

‘Niema didn’t think in straight lines,’ she says eventually. ‘She solved problems by coming at them from right angles, seeing things we’d never have thought about. Your question shouldn’t be why she did it. It should be what problem was she trying to solve?’

Thea jabs a green button, causing the glass door to swoosh open. The humidity of the cauldron garden is immediately replaced by the cable-car station’s concrete walls and hot, swirling wind. It’s raining again, dark spots blotting the grey platform.

‘Why did you show me this?’ asks Emory.

‘Back in the village, you told me that only two people could have killed Niema, but you’re wrong. That’s why I brought you up here. The ability to kill is as much a part of your DNA as it is mine, perhaps more so. Your people were built to be soldiers long before we converted you into labourers.’

‘We’re not capable of violence,’ disagrees Emory stubbornly.

‘Of course you’re capable,’ scoffs Thea. ‘You only think you’re not because Abi’s been in your head since you were born, conditioning your behaviour. Be kind, be nice, be polite. Have you ever wondered what you’d be like without her in there, prodding you to be better all the time?’

Her stare is withering. ‘If you’re to investigate, I don’t want you blinded by loyalty, or a lack of facts. You need an open mind. Start with Adil. He learned what you really are five years ago, and immediately went after Niema with a scalpel. I’m certain he would have tried again if he was given the chance.’

‘How did Adil find out the truth?’

‘He saw something he wasn’t supposed to, but that’s all Niema ever told me.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘He has a shack beyond the farms. About an hour’s walk.’

Gesturing for Emory to enter the carriage, Thea pushes the lever and hops neatly inside after her.

The cable car shudders and stops, swaying ominously in the breeze.

‘There’s a loose connection,’ she sighs, stepping over the yawning gap onto the platform, before walking over to a large metal box next to the winding wheels. One of Clara’s carved birds is sitting on top of it, offering a little joy to scatter the gloom enveloping Emory.

Thea yanks open the door, revealing a complicated tangle of electronics repaired with whatever components Hephaestus could scavenge.

Frowning, she starts searching through the wires.

‘Once you’re back on the ground, I’m giving you free rein to follow this investigation wherever it takes you,’ she calls out. ‘No curfew, no restrictions and no interference. You’ll report directly to me and keep your involvement a secret from Hephaestus. If he finds out you’re involved, it’s going to go badly. If I were you, I’d learn how to live without food or sleep for the next two days. You’re going to need every second you’ve got.’

‘If I find the murderer, you’ll kill them, won’t you?’ calls out Emory, from inside the cable car.

‘Hephaestus will take care of that,’ Thea replies dispassionately, prodding a loose bit of metal back into place with a long forefinger.

‘What happens if I find it was you? Do you really think he’d be willing to hurt his only friend?’

Thea’s body tenses, her hands stopping their work.

‘I’d never put him in that position,’ she says bleakly. ‘If you find evidence that I killed Niema, I’ll row myself into the fog.’