When Citizens died, their spirits were supposed to go to the greater Balance, the world soul. I thought Illegals did, too, even though the government said our fate was “uncertain,” being as we were outside the natural order. But if this was the Balance, then I was . . . dead. I supposed I should have been upset about that, but all I felt was an overwhelming sense of relief. If I’m dead, I’m free. No more worries, no more responsibilities, and no one else to save. The government couldn’t hurt me, and I couldn’t hurt anyone else, couldn’t fail anyone else, ever again.
I surveyed my surroundings. Souls were meant to either exist in the Balance as energy or be born back into a body, and it didn’t seem like I’d become energy. So I should be on my way to being reborn. I brightened, thinking it’d be great to come back as a wolf, or maybe something that could fly, like a hawk. Anything other than a Citizen. Except it wasn’t clear how I was meant to get to my new life. There didn’t seem to be any pathway to follow, or anyone to guide me, either. “Hello?” I called. “Is anybody out there?”
A twig snapped behind me, and I spun around to find myself facing a tall, olive-skinned girl. She tipped her head to one side, gazing at me out of eyes that were a peculiar shade of light green. “Hi, Ash.”
I gasped. “Georgie? You aren’t . . . You’re not . . . Georgie, are you dead?”
She shook her head, sending her long black curls flying around her shoulders. “I think I’m dreaming.”
“You can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is the greater Balance. You can’t get here by dreaming.”
“But,” she replied in a bewildered tone, “I am here.”
“I know! Are you sure you’re not dead?”
She laughed. “I’m alive — I promise. I came because you needed me.”
“I do?” An idea popped into my head. “Hey, are you my guide? Are you just appearing as Georgie, like the part of my subconscious that appears as Ember?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“Well, I don’t know!”
She shrugged. “I guess neither of us knows. Anyway, what’s important is, we have to go.”
“To the next life?”
“No, Ash! To see the Serpent.”
I gaped at her in dismay. “The Serpent? Is he dead? Did the government catch him?”
For a second, she looked very confused. Then her face cleared, and she said in a slow, careful tone, “No, Ash. Not that Serpent. The — um, other one.”
“What other one?”
“You’ll see. Come on.”
She tore off through the trees, and I ran after her, following along behind as she emerged from the undergrowth and pelted along one of the forest trails. The geography of this Firstwood seemed to be pretty much the same as the one I knew, almost as if it reflected my forest. Or maybe this is the real Firstwood, and ours is the reflection. Which was a freaky thought.
It made me happy, though, to see the familiar pathways traveled by the Tribe, and I marked each branch of the trail in my mind as we passed it. If I turned there, I’d eventually reach the clearing that was our summer camp. There, I’d find my way to where the waratahs grew, the big red flowers from which we harvested a thick, sweet honey. There, I’d go to the cave system that was our shelter in winter. The caves were also where Ember had her “laboratory,” where she mixed up her various herbal concoctions and invented stuff. I almost took the path to find her before remembering that I didn’t want to see Em in this place, since I still wasn’t sure if you could be here without being dead.
Georgie ran on until there were no more branches off the trail, and I knew where we must be going. I sped up, outpacing her slightly, and reached the sandy shore of the lake before she did. Leaning over, I rested my hands on my legs, catching my breath and looking out over the water. This was my lake. I was the only one who swam here because everyone else thought there was something spooky about the dark water. I had to admit, there was a kind of broodiness about it, but I’d always loved the way the lake was so unfathomably deep and mysterious. It was especially impressive now, the blue water lit with dazzling light where the sun hit it and colored with purple shadows where it was shaded by the overhanging trees. There was no Serpent, though. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anyone here except for us. “Are you sure this is the right place, Georgie?”
She nodded and came to stand beside me. “Yes. Because when I meet you in the Balance, this is where we come.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “You do know that makes no sense, right?” To my horror, I saw that she was starting to disappear, fading away around the edges. “Georgie, what’s happening to you?”
“This is when I wake up, Ash.”
I put my hand on her arm, as if I could keep her with me by hanging on. “Georgie, if you’re really sleeping, I need you to remember something. Tell Ember that Bry’s a traitor. Do you understand? If she ever contacts you, she can’t be trusted.”
“It’s all right. We already know.”
“You do? How can you know?” She didn’t answer, and she was disappearing quickly now. “Georgie! Don’t be dead.”
“You either, Ash.”
She smiled at me, then vanished.
I barely had time to register that she was gone before I heard a popping noise, and another. Bubbles were rising from the center of the lake, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. I took a curious step closer to the water. Suddenly a huge, sinuous shape broke the surface, sending ripples rolling outward that splashed against the shore.
An actual serpent? Run, Ash! But my legs wouldn’t obey the commands of my terrified brain. I stood trembling as the massive snake slid upward, its pale blue scales shimmering with rainbows in the light. The creature bent toward me, swiveling its head until it was upside down, and a deep, male voice rolled across my mind: Hello.
There was something about the way he was watching me from his upturned silver eyes that was strangely comic, and I suppressed a hysterical urge to laugh as I replied, “Hello, yourself.”
You are very small.
“You . . . you’re kind of big.”
I am, aren’t I? He turned his head the right way up. You do not tend to your pain.
“Um, I’m not in pain.”
Yes, you are.
“No, I’m —” I stopped, abruptly aware of a deep, throbbing ache in my chest.
You give up too easily. Because you will not forgive.
My chest was burning now, and I was starting to feel hot all over, kind of feverish. “Who am I supposed to forgive?”
Yourself.
“I can’t.”
Why not?
“B-Because,” I stuttered, “Jaz and C-Cassie are dead.”
Death is a great transformation. But it is not an end.
The shivers racking my body were getting so bad that I could barely stand, and I was in no condition to argue the meaning of life — or death — with a giant snake. “I think I’m sick.”
It is your pain.
“Can you help me?”
Yes.
“So, help me!”
His long tongue flicked out and coiled around my body. Alarmed, I tried to fight free of his grasp. “What are you doing? Let go!” The Serpent lifted me up and flung back his head, sending me soaring through the air. I hit the lake with a tremendous splash, still yelling, and swallowed a mouthful of water as I plunged downward. I tried to struggle up to the air and found myself suspended in the depths, unable to move as the water I’d gulped flowed through me like an electric wave. My entire body continued to shake, but now it was from the inside out, as if every tiny cell within me were rattling against the ones next to it. Then something broke free inside my chest, streaming out to vanish into the lake, and I shot to the surface, gasping for air.
Flailing and treading water, I searched for the Serpent and found him coiled high above me. I started swimming, keeping a wary eye on him as I made my way to the shore.
“What did y
ou do that for?” I demanded as I squelched out.
I was helping.
“You were not.”
I made you better.
“No, you didn’t.” Except the second I spoke, I realized that the pain was gone and my body wasn’t shaking anymore. More than that, I felt lighter, as if a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying had been lifted. “What is that, some kind of magic water?”
It’s not the water. It’s what’s in it.
“And what’s that?”
Me.
I suppose I should have expected that answer. “You’re like a Mender?”
There was a liquid, tinkling sound in my head. Laughter?
In a way. He preened in the sunlight. You will see them clearly now.
“See who clearly?”
The transformed ones.
I remembered his earlier words: Death is a great transformation. “Do you mean Cassie and Jaz?” I peered around eagerly. “Are they here?”
Yes. And no.
“Which is it?”
Which is what?
“Yes or no?”
I cannot tell you what you do not wish to know, Granddaughter.
“Of course I wish to know!” Then my brain caught up with what he’d said. “Hang on. What do you mean, ‘Granddaughter’?”
He didn’t make the laughing sound again, but I got the distinct feeling that he was enjoying my reaction. I am your many-times grandfather, one of the creators of your people.
“That’s . . . that’s impossible.” It was ridiculous to be telling a giant snake that anything he did was impossible. “You made Illegals?”
Not Illegals. Your people in the world that was, before the great chaos you call the Reckoning.
Before the Reckoning? There weren’t any Illegals back then. Although there were different peoples — different races, they were called. Ember had told me about it, once — how things like my skin not being the same color as hers or the way Pen’s eyes were almond-shaped used to mean something. After the end of the old world, when there were so few humans left, everyone stopped worrying about things like that.
“Are you saying that in the old world, my, um, people were made by giant snakes?”
My kind took many forms, Granddaughter. He sighed deeply, and that sigh seemed to flow out of him and through the Firstwood, stirring the leaves in the trees. When the great chaos began, I was sleeping deep in underground water. My resting place broke apart, and I was cast out into the end of everything. I journeyed for a long time, gathering all the scraps of life that I could find. He rose higher and added softly, I brought them here. Then I sang, reminding life of its shapes, strength, and its many transformations. Until life remembered its nature and grew.
I choked. “You made things start to grow again after the Reckoning?”
I made things grow here. There may be other creators elsewhere. I am one of the old spirits of the earth, Granddaughter. I do not know how many of us survived the great chaos. He dipped down, coming so close that I could see tiny drops of water on his shimmering scales. But yes, this one place is mine. The trees were the first to return. Then I sang the lizards into being, to guard what I had created. And everything else followed.
This couldn’t be true. Somehow, though, I knew it was. “Do you live here — in my world, I mean?”
I live in all worlds, and in the spaces between them.
“I swim in this lake all the time. Why haven’t I seen you before?”
I’ve been sleeping.
“Sleeping?”
I required much rest.
“It’s been more than three hundred years since the Reckoning.”
It was not an easy task to make life grow. I began to stir from my slumber when you came to the Firstwood, and I woke completely when you began to speak of me.
Speak of him? Then it dawned on me what he meant. The Serpent. “I’m afraid I wasn’t exactly talking about you.”
He made the laughing noise again. Weren’t you?
“No, there’s this Illegal, you see, and he . . .” I let my voice trail off, realizing the uselessness of trying to explain.
The snake’s eyes swirled. You have forgotten my story. But then, you have forgotten many things, haven’t you?
“I haven’t forgotten anything!” But that didn’t sound right. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything.”
It does not matter. A wave of emotion seemed to flow out from him and wash over me, a feeling of affection mixed with a sort of proprietary pride. What matters is that you can call upon me if you ever need my help. You might be the last to carry the bloodline of those I created in the world that was.
“Can you help me become a wolf?”
You are not going on, Granddaughter. You are going back.
“What do you mean, ‘back’?”
The Serpent didn’t answer, but light flashed, so bright it seemed to burn my eyes. For a few seconds, all I could see was a blue glow. When my vision cleared, there was no Serpent, no lake, and no Firstwood. Instead, I was lying on a bed in a white-walled room. Sunlight streamed in through a large window, and the air was filled with a clinical scent. The hospital.
I was still alive.
I blinked, hoping my surroundings would change. They didn’t. It isn’t fair! How can I be alive? And what had that experience with Georgie and the Grandfather Serpent been if not the Balance? Surely, it couldn’t have been a dream. It had felt so real.
Connor was standing at the end of the bed, arms folded across his chest. He moved to stand beside me, and I hastily levered myself into a sitting position. I was wearing the collar and a crisp white shirt. I felt underneath it where Briony had stabbed me and found the faint ridges of a scar. Wentworth must have worked her magic again.
Sighing, I looked up at Connor. “You know, for a dangerous Illegal surrounded by enforcers, I’m having a very difficult time getting myself killed.”
And Connor said quietly, “Ashala. Briony is dead.”
“Dead?” I gasped. “She can’t be dead. I just saw her.”
Connor shook his head. “You’ve been unconscious for some time.”
I pointed to the window. “But it’s still afternoon.”
“Yes. Thursday afternoon.”
It was the next day. “It didn’t feel like that long.”
He pressed his lips together into a thin line. “It did to me.”
“What happened to Bry?”
“She was killed while attempting to escape.”
I tried to make sense of that and couldn’t. “Why would she want to escape? She was working for you.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged tiredly, “but the Chief Administrator was only prepared to give her an Exemption if she could persuade you to ask the Tribe to surrender. Until then, she was being treated like any other Illegal.”
“Where’d she get the knife, then?”
“She had a . . . relationship with her guard. He allowed her to keep the knife.”
“A relationship? With some enforcer she’d known for a couple of days?”
“She’d known him far longer than that. Since they were children.”
I snorted. “Exactly how many future enforcers could Bry have grown up with? . . .” But my voice trailed off as I made the obvious connection.
When Briony had introduced Connor to me, she’d claimed she’d been friends with him when she was young, and that she’d recently run into him again on a trip into Stonygull. I’d realized yesterday that she’d probably always known he wasn’t an administrator. Now it seemed she’d been lying about other things, too.
“It wasn’t you she knew as a kid, was it?” I asked. “It was Evan. He was the one who was her friend.”
He nodded, and I mentally reevaluated every assumption I’d made about Bry’s enforcer guard. Small moments replayed themselves in my head, like the way he’d been so focused on her at the park, and the glance he’d given her before he’d left her in Neville’s office. I’d thought he’d b
een concerned about doing his job. Now it seemed as if he might have actually been concerned about Briony. “So, Evan was the one she ran into in Stonygull?”
“It would be more correct to say that she sought him out in Stonygull.”
“And he reported to the government that she was willing to inform on us. Only,” I added bitterly, “they didn’t send him to the Firstwood when it came to it. They sent you.”
“Yes.”
“Because they trusted you. Because you’ll do whatever is necessary.”
Connor didn’t respond to that, just gazed at me with something like his usual cool reserve. But he wasn’t quite as statue-like as normal. There were faint shadows under his eyes, like smudges on marble. I got the sense that he was feeling almost as exhausted and edgy as I was, and I was glad of it. Because it was right, that Bry’s death should cause Connor and the government some pain. Especially since something else must have happened in the time I’d been unconscious for her to have run.
“Exactly what did you do to her?” I demanded.
Connor raised an eyebrow in surprise. “What?”
“You must have done something. Bry believed she’d get an Exemption. She wouldn’t have tried to break out without a reason.”
“She thought she’d killed you, Ashala! There was some kind of plant toxin on the knife. Not even Wentworth was certain that she would be able to save your life. If you’d died . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Bry wouldn’t have had anything to bargain with. Plus she’d have been the only Illegal from the Tribe left for Neville to interrogate. “She must have been terrified.”
Connor shrugged, as if he didn’t particularly care if Bry had been scared or not. I did, though. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. Even after everything she’d done, she was still one of my own, and I knew she hadn’t truly meant to kill me. She’d simply lost control when I’d shoved the truth about her parents in her face. I was pretty sure the poison hadn’t been meant for me, either, or for anyone particularly. It had been Bry’s way of protecting herself. Somewhere in that dreamy brain of hers, she’d realized how dangerous it was to come here.
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) Page 7
