The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe)

by Kwaymullina, Ambelin

  Em and I looked at her in surprise as she continued. “It’s the other way around — if Ash has to die to protect everyone she cares about, then so be it. You have to let her love. Because it’s the only thing more powerful than hate.”

  Okay, this isn’t very helpful. “Georgie —”

  “Don’t look at me like that, Ash! I know you think I’m not making sense, but I am. It’s just that you don’t know. You don’t understand, because I never told you what you almost did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Georgie bit her lip, seeming unsure of herself. “I don’t know if this is when I tell you. I haven’t seen when I tell you.”

  “Georgie! Tell me what?”

  “You hated once, Ash. Back in Gull City, you hated the government for what they did to Cassie.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “No, you don’t know. Because what you don’t remember is how you were going to kill people. A lot of people.”

  Ember and I both spoke at once. “What?”

  Georgie focused her pale green gaze on my face and explained, “After Cassie died, when you were staying at my house, there was this day. We were upstairs in my room, talking about Cassie, and you suddenly . . . changed. Your eyes went all white, and you were Sleepwalking. You told me there were bad people out there in the city and you were going to go punish them. I think you meant everyone who worked for the government. You said you wanted to kill them all.”

  Ember made a choked noise, and I gaped at Georgie. She kept on talking. “You were really going to do it, Ash. So I sat on the window ledge in my room, and I said that if you left, I was going to throw myself out of it. Over and over, I said it, until your eyes went back to normal and you were yourself again.”

  “Georgie, I don’t . . . I don’t remember any of that!” Except I did remember something. A vague recollection of a long-ago dream, when I’d wanted to go somewhere, but there’d been this shining, fragile thing, and I knew it would break if I moved. Had that been it? “What you’re saying isn’t even possible. I mean, I can’t use my ability when I’m awake.”

  “You might be able to,” Ember said thoughtfully. “If you were in some sort of dissociative state.”

  “Some sort of what?”

  “When someone is very distressed, they can go into something called a dissociative state. Sort of like being asleep when they’re awake. That might have happened to you.”

  Dissociative state? Sleepwalking while awake? The whole world was spinning around me. “I’m not a killer.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Georgie said. “But Ash, you feel things deeply — all the way to your bones. And you were so angry after Cassie died. You had so much . . .”

  I finished the sentence for her. “Hate.” I had. I could remember the taste of it, a constant acid on my tongue. The one thing I’d thought about had been getting back at the government. Until Georgie had gone all sad and stopped talking or eating much. Then I’d had to worry about her instead.

  “Georgie,” I said wonderingly, “the way you were after Cassie died, when you went all sad, you did that on purpose, didn’t you? To get me to leave the city?”

  “Yes. I knew you had to go, Ash. To get away from the hate.”

  I couldn’t believe it. All this time, I thought I’d rescued Georgie when she’d been the one who rescued me. I was still trying to wrap my mind around this new version of my past when Georgie said to Ember, “You have to let Ash be Ash. Caring about people, helping people, that’s what brings her back to herself. It’s the reason she didn’t attack anyone that day. She wanted to help me more than she wanted to hurt them.”

  Ember looked stricken. “I . . . I didn’t understand. I was . . . I think I was wrong about Jaz. I know I was wrong. I’m sorry, Ash! I’m so sorry.”

  I couldn’t deal with Ember right now, so I just nodded and walked away, wandering over the grass to the edge of the flattened area where the saurs had been. I breathed in the cold air, inhaling the faint scent of rain and absorbing everything that had happened. After a while, I heard footsteps and glanced back. Georgie was coming toward me; Ember was headed in the other direction. “She’s leaving?”

  “She knows you’re still mad at her.”

  “I have a right to be mad.” Although my anger was fading now. “I don’t know why she’s so convinced I’m going to change the world!”

  “Because you can make dreams come true.”

  “That’s just my ability.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but I wonder sometimes, is it our abilities that make us who we are? Or do we have the abilities we do because of who we are?”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You bargained with saurs, Ash, and made a home in the Firstwood, and started the Tribe. You have changed the world, and you didn’t use your ability for any of it. So maybe Sleepwalking is an extension of who you are inside.”

  “I didn’t do any of those things by myself, and I wouldn’t have even come here without you.” Thinking about how badly I’d misunderstood her, I added, “Thanks for everything you did four years ago.”

  “It’s okay. And you do know that it wasn’t really the government you wanted to punish that day, right?”

  “I know.” I’d pushed all my rage, all my hate, onto the government, but there’d always been something else underneath. “I wasn’t a good sister, Georgie.”

  “You loved her, and she loved you. And if you could have saved her, you would have. Ash, please. You have to forgive yourself, for Cassie.”

  I was quiet for a long time before I confessed the truth to my oldest friend. “Georgie. I don’t think I can.”

  SEVEN WEEKS AGO

  Jaz says get salt.

  It had been four days since Hatches had sent the mysterious message into my mind, and I still didn’t understand what it meant. Of course, I thought, as I walked back from the lake with my hair still dripping wet from my swim, Jaz probably doesn’t want salt at all. Messages between humans and saurs sometimes got garbled, especially over long distances. I wished I could answer Hatches back, but the lizards couldn’t hear us in their heads the way we could hear them. Jaz was the only one who could have an entirely mind-spoken conversation with either human or saur, and despite months of effort, he usually had to be pretty much within sight of someone to do it.

  What was really worrying me, though, wasn’t the message itself but the distressed feeling that had come with it. You saw Jaz a couple of weeks ago, I reminded myself, and he was fine. True, he’d been a bit upset, but that was because I’d given him an update on the information our new enforcer friend Connor had been giving us. Jaz hadn’t been pleased about the traitor in the Tribe.

  There was the sudden sound of running feet, and Ember came bursting onto the path ahead of me, her cheeks red with exertion. “Ash! Come quick! Daniel’s back, and he’s hurt.”

  I plunged into the trees, heading for the large clearing that was our warm-weather camp until Ember called, “The caves!” Switching direction, I angled upward to the trail so I could run without having to tear through the undergrowth. The Tribe had moved out of the caves about a week ago, more than willing to exchange the cold nights and mornings of early spring for open sky above our heads and the lemony scent of the tuarts in bloom. Daniel had left for Gull City before that, and must have assumed we were still there.

  I’d sent Daniel to check out a series of weird rumors about a terror campaign in Gull City, some kind of attack that people had at first thought was the work of the Tribe but now seemed to be linked to the Serpent. Which was strange, since first, the Tribe wasn’t responsible for any kind of terror campaign and second, Ember had basically invented the Serpent.

  My feet hit the trail, and I picked up speed, pounding along until I pelted through the northeastern entrance to the cave system. Inside, I found Daniel stretched out on the sandy floor, with Georgie on one side of him and Pen on the other. He didn’t have any wound that I could se
e, but he was drenched in sweat and his lean body was shaking. Georgie was smoothing his hair, while Pen had one small hand pressed to his chest. The Mender’s dark eyes were wide open, staring at nothing, and her normally smiling mouth was pressed into a thin line. It’s bad, then. I went still, knowing better than to distract Pen when she was Mending. After a while, Ember came in behind me and whispered, “Georgie found him. I told the others that there’d been a rockfall and some of Georgie’s spiders were hurt.”

  “Good story,” I whispered back. It was, too — no one would come up here to check out what was going on if they thought there were a bunch of anxious spiders crawling around. We relied on Georgie to keep the critters away from the side of the caves that everyone lived in.

  “No one else saw Daniel,” Ember told me. “The others still believe he’s out scouting for a new campsite.”

  I nodded, thinking that a few months ago, our biggest problem really had been finding a campsite deeper in the Firstwood and farther from the site of the new detention center. And I wouldn’t have cared what the others knew. But that was before I’d met Justin Connor and learned about the Tribe member who was betraying us. Luckily, we didn’t have to worry about our resident traitor right now, because we knew exactly where she was, and it wasn’t in the forest. Briony was off meeting with her government contact. I wished that I could do something about her, but I couldn’t, not yet.

  Pen finally stirred and took her hand away from Daniel’s chest. He’d stopped shaking, but his eyes were still closed. She stood up and walked over to Ember and me. “He’s done too much Running and exhausted himself. He needs to sleep now. You can try talking to him, but not for too long.”

  “Thanks, Pen. Don’t say anything about this to the others, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ember chimed in. “Remember, as far as they know, you were doing a favor for Georgie, helping out her spiders. This is very important.”

  “Don’t worry,” Pen answered earnestly. “You can count on me.”

  She left, and Ember and I walked over to Daniel, kneeling beside him. Georgie didn’t take any notice of us. She wasn’t paying attention to anyone but Daniel, and I could see why. He still looks bad.

  “Daniel,” I said, “can you hear me? Can you tell me what happened?”

  His eyelids fluttered open, revealing green eyes murky with fatigue. “It’s Jaz. The government has him.”

  My chest felt like it was being crushed in a vise, the air choked out of my lungs. I was dimly aware of Ember asking Daniel urgent questions and Daniel responding, but I couldn’t really hear anything over the roaring in my ears. Ember reached over and squeezed my arm. “Ash, I’ll do this. Go wait outside.”

  I stumbled out, down the trail, and into the forest. I pressed my back against a tuart, slid to the ground, and curled against the comforting presence of the tree. To my horror, I realized I was whimpering. Get ahold of yourself, Ashala! You’re no good to him like this. I’d just barely managed to get my panic under control when Ember arrived.

  “It’ll be okay, Ash,” she said, sitting at my side. “We’ll get him out.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was picked up by a patrol in Gull City.” I opened my mouth to ask what Jaz was even doing in the city, but she held up a hand to stop me. “It’s complicated, so you have to let me tell it in order.”

  I subsided into silence as Ember began. “When Daniel arrived in the city, the streets were crawling with enforcers searching for an Illegal waging what the government was calling psychological warfare. Except the so-called warfare was nothing but clouds.”

  “Clouds?”

  “Yep. A Skychanger was changing clouds into shapes that looked like saurs. That’s why people thought the Tribe might be involved. Daniel dodged the patrols and made it to our storage unit, which is where Jaz came to see him. He wanted Daniel’s help to rescue his sister. His Skychanger sister.”

  “His . . .” I put my hand to my head. “I didn’t even know he had a sister! But, wait — Daniel thought Jaz was dead, and the saurs . . .”

  “I know, I know. Apparently, it took Jaz quite a while to convince Daniel that he truly was Jaz.” Ember sighed. “It’s a mess, and Jaz’ll have to answer to the saurs for telling the secret, I suppose. But, Ash, Jaz was indirectly responsible for the entire psychological-warfare situation. He discovered that the saurs who can talk to each other over the longest distances were from the same hatching, as in siblings. So he tried to mindspeak to his sister, and it worked, sort of. Jaz managed to pick up on what Phillipa was feeling — which is pretty good, considering how far away Gull City is — but he didn’t realize what effect the contact would have on her. She started having recurring saur dreams, and since she’s all of eight years old, and a Skychanger . . .”

  I groaned, seeing how everything had started to go wrong. “She can’t control her ability.”

  “Nope. It’s leaking out of her. Probably had been for a while, but I suppose nobody reacted to clouds that looked like dogs or cats or whatever else she made them into. But big scary lizards?” Ember shook her head. “When the hunt for the Skychanger started, Phillipa panicked. Jaz felt her fear and decided to go to Gull City to see what was wrong.”

  “He should’ve asked me for help.”

  “He didn’t even ask the saurs, Ash.”

  “Because they wouldn’t have let him go. Of all the stupid, reckless —” I stopped and drew in a shaky breath, knowing it was pointless to be mad at Jaz now. “Okay, tell me what happened next.”

  Ember studied my face, clearly wanting to make sure I was all right, then continued: “Once Jaz reached the city and saw how many enforcers were around, he did something sensible and hid out. Fortunately, being closer to Phillipa meant he could mindspeak with her better. He couldn’t get her to stop making the shapes at first — you know how much practice it takes to control an ability — but he did get her to make the shapes less like saurs and more like snakes.”

  “That’s why everyone started thinking it was the Serpent!” I felt a surge of pride. “That was smart.”

  “Yeah. But Jaz was stuck. He wanted to take Phillipa out of the city, except he couldn’t rescue her on his own. He decided to wait, figuring that the patrols would eventually stop or you’d send someone you trusted to investigate when you heard about the so-called terror campaign.”

  “So Daniel and Jaz tried to rescue Phillipa, and Jaz got caught?”

  “Not exactly. Daniel wouldn’t help him.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because it was still dangerous to be out on the streets. Daniel had trouble making it to Dockside without being stopped, and Jaz’s family lives in the Hub. Daniel wanted to Run back here and get me. With my genuine tattoo, I could’ve passed any Citizenship inspection. He thought he’d convinced Jaz it was a good idea . . .”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Jaz tried to get his sister himself.”

  “He crept out while Daniel was asleep. When Daniel woke up, he went after him, but by then it was too late. Jaz had been picked up by a patrol.”

  “Of course he was picked up!” I snapped. “He looks like a Scaly now! It’s a miracle he wasn’t detained before. When did this happen?”

  “Three days ago. Daniel almost killed himself Running back here, Ash. He feels really bad.”

  He should have known what Jaz was planning! But I could hardly blame anyone for believing Jaz was going to do one thing when he was going to do another, not when I’d fallen for that once myself. “Jaz will be locked up by now.”

  “Yes, but think. He was detained in the city. They’ll never match his new face with his old photo, and he’s clever enough to give a false name. They’ll assume he’s an orphan.”

  “And,” I said with rising hope, “orphans get sent to Detention Center 3. Which is where Connor is.”

  “Exactly! The government is probably going to put Jaz in the one place where we have a friend on the inside. The next time we see Connor, we can get hi
m to make sure Jaz is on the list of detainees to be transferred there.”

  The icy feeling of dread that had seized me since I’d heard Jaz had been taken eased a little. “We can save him!”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Only — there’s something else.”

  More bad news? I wasn’t sure I could stand it. “What is it?”

  “Jaz’s sister. Her name is Phillipa. But she calls herself Pepper.”

  She said that last word as if it were very important. “What does that . . .? The message! Jaz says get salt. Jaz says get Pepper?”

  “I think so, yes. He must have made contact with Hatches after he was caught.”

  It would have taken a superhuman effort on Jaz’s part to reach Hatches all the way from the city, and it made me feel like whimpering again to think of him being so desperate. “Of course we’ll go get her. You and me, Em. We’ll need a plan.”

  “I’m already thinking about it, Ash.”

  It was ridiculous, but the prospect of a dangerous rescue mission was improving my mood. I levered myself to my feet and stared out through the trees in the direction of faraway Gull City. Wherever Jaz was, I knew he couldn’t hear me. But I sent my thoughts out anyway, along with the wish that they’d somehow reach him.

  We’ll get Pepper, Jaz. Then we’re coming for you.

  FIVE WEEKS AGO

  I shivered, pulling my coat more tightly around myself as I peered out the doorway of storage unit number 338. From where I was standing, I could smell the sea and see dozens of units facing one another across a wide aisle, their smooth composite surfaces glowing eerily in the moonlight. The unit I was in belonged to an upstanding eighty-two-year-old Citizen named Elizabeth Douglas. Or, as we knew her, Daniel’s grandma Bessie.

  It was weird to be back in Gull City, and the weirdest thing of all was that I’d forgotten there were things I love about it — the winding streets, the quotes from Hoffman etched into walls and over doorways, and the tang of salt in the air. I also like the way you can read the history of the city in its architecture. The oldest parts are cobbled together out of bits and pieces of the old world, while the newer sections are filled with gleaming composite structures, built once people had gotten the recyclers working. But none of that was enough to make up for the constant creeping terror that I would be detained. I didn’t know how Em had been able to stand it in the week that she’d been here. Her genuine tattoo let her ride the Rail without fearing the close scrutiny of a spot Citizenship inspection, so she’d made it to the city much quicker than I had. I’d only arrived this morning. But every moment in this place had been a scary one, even with a fake tattoo on my wrist and the security of knowing that Briony believed Ember and I had gone deep into the Firstwood to check out a new campsite.