Em wanted to talk to me. She’d told Jaz that too. She hadn’t told him what about, but she was coming home today and then I’d know. Right now I was making my map.
Helper chirped a question. I was holding a piece of vine, and I must have been holding it for a while because he wanted to know when I was going to do something with it.
I let it fall. “I don’t know where it goes,” I told him. I’d been mapping all morning and couldn’t seem to get anything right. Whenever I tied futures together I had to untie them again. “None of the futures connect. Or they all do.”
Everything is and everything is not.
I turned to where Starbeauty was lounging in a patch of sunlight. “I don’t understand.”
Who is the Prime of Gull City?
“Belle Willis.” I frowned. “Except she doesn’t have the city any more.” Now I did understand. “Everything is and everything is not! Belle Willis is the Prime of Gull City, only she isn’t, because Terence Talbot is calling himself the Prime and he has the city. And the Citizenship Accords are gone, only they’re not because no one’s let all the detainees out yet.”
Exactly so. All is in motion in opposite directions.
That was why I couldn’t map. No one future was more likely than another. “When will things stop being in motion?”
The world is good. The world is bad. What is the difference?
“Choice.” I understood even more now. “We’re waiting on people’s choices. Like Jules, and … no.” This was bigger than that. “Everyone’s choices. All the people, everywhere in the world.”
Yes. When enough choices are made a direction will emerge. Then you and yours must make your choices.
“What about you?”
My choice is to help you. She rose to her feet, shaking herself off. Someone approaches.
I went to the entrance of the cave and waited for whoever was coming to get here. After a while there was a scuffling sound and Nicky bounded in. He leaped around me, trying to lick my face.
What are you?
Nicky dropped onto all fours, staring at Starbeauty with his ears pricked up and his nose quivering. “Woof!”
She turned her head away from him. You are not of cat.
Nicky whined. Starbeauty wouldn’t look at him. He whined again. She still wouldn’t look.
Nicky went running out, and I said, “He just wants to be friends.”
That which is not-cat must know its place. She tilted her head to one side. He is returning.
There was the scuffling sound again and Nicky came back in, carrying a stick. He took it up to Starbeauty, dropped it in front of her, and sat. “Woof!”
She turned a green gaze on me. Why has he brought me this wooden object?
“It’s his favourite stick,” I explained. “He likes to carry it around the forest.”
Ah! She flicked her ears at Nicky. You have presented me with your most treasured possession.
Nicky wagged his tail.
It is a worthy gift.
His tail wagged even harder, thumping steadily against the floor.
You may escort me around the Firstwood and show me the places that are not known to humans.
“Woof!”
Nicky bounced out, and Starbeauty followed. When she reached the entrance she looked back over her shoulder at me. I am trusting you to take care of my stick.
“The spiders will make sure it’s safe.”
See that they do. And this is when.
“When what?”
She stalked off without answering. Perhaps I already knew the answer. If I did, I didn’t know that I knew. I’d have to wait to understand or for Starbeauty to explain more.
I began to map again, but it was the same as before. Every time I made a connection I had to unmake it. I tried anyway, and I was still trying when there were footsteps in the passage and Ember came into the cave.
“Em, you’re back!” I hugged her and she hugged me. Then she said, “Terence has taken over the city.”
“For certain?”
She nodded. “Willis got a messenger, right before I left. Things are very serious, Georgie. Which is why I need you to tell me what’s going on. Everything that’s going on.”
I took in a deep breath for all the words I would need and said, “The Tribe is in the forest and Daniel is with the Tribe. They’re sad because we told them what you told us about Pen. They knew anyway when Mr Snuffles howled, but they didn’t know for sure and now they do. I am making my map, and Nicky and Starbeauty are visiting the places not known to humans.”
“Starbeauty? Leo’s cat is here?”
“Yes. But Leo isn’t.”
“What’s she – actually, never mind, we can discuss this later. Georgie, when I said I wanted you to tell me what’s going on I meant what’s really going on. I want to know what you told Jules.”
I didn’t say anything. Sometimes if I didn’t speak for long enough people stopped expecting an answer. Only Ember still looked like she was expecting an answer, and Ember didn’t age like organic beings did. She might be able to expect an answer for a very long time.
She frowned at me. “I know there’s something happening. I’ve had the entire journey back from the city to think about this and too many things aren’t adding up. Jules lied to me, which he never does. It’s not like him to disobey Ash either, because he’s been trying to be a part of the Tribe, even though people don’t always see it. And he was talking to you and Daniel before we went to the city.”
I wished Daniel was here. If he was, he’d know how to distract Ember. I wasn’t sure what words to use and I had to be careful what I said. Ember was good at taking words apart and finding out what they meant even when you didn’t want her to know.
She sighed. “Georgie, I understand you’re not always sure when you tell people things, or if you tell people things – whatever it is, if there’s a time that you tell me, this is when!”
This is when. Starbeauty had said that. Now Ember had said it too. Only Ember had said it twice, because she’d said it once before this. No, she hadn’t. I’d heard it before, in a future. I’d been seeing this moment. I hadn’t known why it mattered. Now I did. “You’re the fourth!”
“I’m the what?”
“Jules was the first, and Penelope the second, and Starbeauty the third, and you are the fourth! So I can tell you.” I frowned. “Only I said I wouldn’t unless Jules was here.”
“Don’t stop talking now!”
But I did, because I’d made a promise to Jules. Promises were important. Except Starbeauty had said this was when, and Starbeauty understood futures better than Jules. Futures were more important than promises. I was going to have to tell her. “Ash is going to die.”
Em swayed. I caught her arm before she fell. “It’s all right! We think we can stop it.”
She grabbed on to me, her fingers digging into my skin. “How?”
So I explained about the choices and why they mattered, and about the blizzard that would come if we lost Ash or Connor, because either of them dying was the same. When I finished, she said, “And Jules knew all this?”
“Yes.”
She let me go and looked past me, staring out at the forest as if she wasn’t seeing the trees. “He never told me. He never said a word, just let me be mad at him, let me think he’d betrayed us …” Her gaze returned to me. “Do you know if he’s alive? Do you know if any of them are?”
“They’re alive. I think. I mean, if Ash or Connor were dead, the blizzard would be here, and I saw in my map when Pen died.”
“So you believe they’re alive. I’m going to believe that as well. I’m going to believe that, and I’m going to – I’m going to–”
She didn’t finish the sentence, which was strange because Ember liked sentences to have a proper ending. Maybe she hadn’t understood what she was supposed to do?
“Choose,” I said. “You have to choose.”
“I know that!”
I too
k a step away from her.
“Sorry,” Ember said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. This is a lot to cope with at once, but I shouldn’t have shouted. Are you certain they’re alive?”
“No.”
She choked back a laugh. “Sorry again. That was a stupid question.”
“They’re probably alive.”
“I should have gone with them.”
I shook my head. “Your choices didn’t matter then. They matter now, and now you’re here. So this is where you need to be.”
“I hope you’re right about that.”
I hoped I was too.
She turned away and began to pace, striding back and forth across the cave. Em always paced when she was working something out. I returned to my map, picking up the vine I’d let go of before and tying it to another one. No, that was wrong. I untied it, and tried another. No, that was wrong as well. I tried another, and another, until I started being able to make connections without having to untie them. Then I had to stop, because it was getting hard to tie the knots with my hands so numb from the cold …
I dropped the vine. My hands are cold. Only it wasn’t cold here in the real world. I scanned the connections. Ash and Connor and Jules were still alive as far as I could tell, but the blizzard was closer. So close I was feeling it through the vines that made the map. I’d been waiting on people everywhere to make choices. They had, and they were the wrong ones. The world was moving in the direction of its end. Now me and mine have to make our choices. And in this world where other people were choosing wrong, our choices were fewer and harder.
“Georgie?”
I turned. Ember was standing behind me with a small silver box in her hands. I’d never seen it before. Had it been somewhere in the cave? I glanced around but I couldn’t see any other boxes. The light coming in through the opening was softer though, which meant it was much later in the day. I’d been mapping for a long time. Ember must have been thinking for a long time. Maybe she’d brought the box from somewhere else. Or built it herself. “Did you make that, Em?”
“My dad did, a long time ago. It’s a type of – communicator. I’m going to use it to send a message to my family.”
“But aren’t your family bad, except for Leo and Nicky and your dad?” Only then I remembered that Ash thought Hoffman was bad too, only not a bad person. A bad father.
“My family is … complicated,” Ember said. “But this isn’t really about them. It’s about getting more time. We need time for Ash’s ability to come back, and for her and Connor to fully recover from the injuries they got in the city, and for Willis to gather allies and support. Only I think Terence’s next move is going to be coming here, and we’ll be all out of time.”
“You think he’ll come to get Ash?”
“Or Willis, and then Ash. Or both of them at once. We need to stop him coming for as long as we can, and this …” She held up the box. “This will do that.”
I stared at the box in amazement. “It makes time?”
“Ah – in a way. It summons my family to a special sort of meeting called a Conclave. Once a Conclave’s been set, none of us can act against the interests of any of the others, not before the meeting and not for one week afterwards. And since I’m part of the Tribe, coming after us counts as acting against me. Coming after Willis does as well, because the Tribe is known to be sheltering her.”
That meant Ash would be safe from Terence until the meeting. Perhaps Ash could be safe for a long time. “Maybe you could make the meeting a hundred years from now!”
“I wish I could. But I can only make it four weeks from now. That’s the maximum amount of time there can be before a Conclave.”
It was still a good idea. Only there was something I didn’t understand. “Why does it make you sad?”
“What makes you think I’m sad?”
“Your mouth looks like an upside-down smile.”
Em straightened her mouth out. She wasn’t fooling me. “You’re still sad, Em.”
She sighed. “I know. Conclaves … they’re special, Georgie. None of us have ever broken the rules of one, not even Terence, because – well, we’re family. We all need to know that whether it’s now or hundreds of years from now, there’ll always be a way for us all to come together. But after this Conclave, there probably won’t be another one.”
“Why not?”
“Because my dad won’t be there.” She bent to the box on the ground. “Dad’s the one who calls Conclaves. This is his device, and everyone will be expecting to see him. They don’t know I’ve got the device, and he’s … sleeping.”
Ember’s dad was in the tunnels somewhere beneath the Firstwood because something had gone wrong with his head, and Em had shut him down when she hadn’t been able to fix him. “Couldn’t you tell the others he had to be somewhere else?”
Em shook her head. “There’s no excuse good enough to miss a Conclave. Well, the truth perhaps – but I can’t tell them that. Dad made me promise I never would. He didn’t want to live without his mind, and he was terrified the others would wake him even though they couldn’t repair what was wrong.” She sighed. “When he’s not there … we won’t have come together as a family, and the promise of the Conclave will be broken.”
Her mouth had gone upside down again. “I’m sorry, Em.”
She shrugged. “It has to be done.”
“I’m sorry anyway.”
“I know you are. And thank you.” She sat on the floor beside the box, reaching out for it. Then she stopped. “I don’t suppose it’s possible for you to tell me if this will change things without me doing it?”
I shook my head. “You have to make the choice before the choice matters.”
“Just thought I’d ask.” She opened a panel in the top of the box. There were buttons inside and Ember pressed them. She pressed them until the box lit up with swirling lights. Then she closed the panel and stood up.
“Is that it?” I asked. “How do your family see the lights?”
“They don’t need to see the lights. I’ve just sent a signal that only they will receive. In four weeks, my family is going to meet at the Prime’s Residence in Gull City. Until then, Ash is safe.” Her gaze went to my map, and she asked hopefully, “Can you tell now? Whether it’s made a difference?”
“I can try.”
I went back to my map and began connecting futures. Only there were too many possibilities. Things were … complicated. Helper suddenly scurried across the wall, getting in my way and making me lose hold of the vine I had in my hand.
My hands. I looked at one and then the other, and pressed them both together to make sure. “My hands are warm!”
“Does that mean something?”
“It means the blizzard’s further away.” I grinned at Em. “You did it!”
She sagged. “Good. Except, Georgie, I don’t believe it’s a blizzard you’re Seeing.”
“It isn’t?”
Em shook her head. “It’s an apt description though, because in a blizzard people can’t see anything but snow or hear anything but wind, and they become so cold they can’t feel anything either. That’s what’s going to happen to the world without Ash, only it’s not a storm. It’s disconnection.”
That made such complete sense I didn’t know why I hadn’t understood it before. “That’s why only Ash can stop it! Because Sleepwalking is her ability and not her power. Her power is to connect.”
“Yes.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “Listen, Georgie, I don’t know if you’ve thought about how all this ends. There’s probably going to come a time when you’ll have to tell Ash about what we’ve been doing. Once she’s safe, I mean, when all this is over and there’s no more blizzard. And she’ll be mad. She’ll say she wasn’t worth it.”
Her face shifted. She was still Ember but this was an Ember I hadn’t seen before. This Ember was old, so much older than me. “I carry human history in my head, and that means I know what the world looks like when people
don’t care for each other and the earth. So I want you to know that there is no price – and I mean none – that’s too high to pay to stop that world from happening again.”
Ash looked into the now. I looked ahead. But Ember? She looked back.
I gazed into her eyes, letting her see that I’d listened, and said the words I always hoped people would say to me. “I understand you.”
THE CENTRE
ASHALA
I was soaring across the grasslands with Connor at my side, on our way to meet with the Prime.
It was two and a half weeks since we’d returned from Detention Centre 1 to find the Tribe was well and Georgie and Daniel were together. I was glad of it; they were a good match and they’d taken good care of everyone while we’d been gone, especially Mr Snuffles. The little pug waddled around the forest with the Pack, fat and glossy and healthy, and seemed to think he was a wolf himself now.
Today’s meeting with Willis would be the third one we’d had since we’d come back, and so far she hadn’t had much good news to share. In the city, Neville was stamping out any remaining resistance with the same ruthless efficiency with which he’d once run a detention centre, and it seemed like any of Willis’s supporters who hadn’t died in the initial battle had been arrested since. Terence had moved into the Prime’s Residence and was spreading nasty stories that Willis had allied herself with a group of renegades who’d blown up the station, murdered Prime Grant, and led an uprising at Detention Centre 1. But at least Neville and Terence hadn’t come here. Em’s Conclave idea had worked, even though I hadn’t been sure about it at first and still wasn’t happy about her going to Gull City for it. In fact, I was hoping to talk her out of going at all. Or see if Jules would, although the two of them hadn’t quite worked things out between them yet. I knew because they were having lots of low-voiced, intense conversations that always stopped when I approached.
Connor and I began to descend, drifting downwards until we landed among the grass. We never flew directly into or out of the centre; there was too much chance of getting accidentally shot by one of the sentries on the walls who were on the lookout for a minion attack. So we walked, strolling over the long stretch of white gravel that separated the centre from the edge of the grass. The place looked much the same as it always had from the outside, except for the green flag that flew from the top of the composite wall. Green was good, because it meant no one had breached the barricade that had been set up across the road that ran from the highway to the centre. If any kind of army ever did come this way, the enforcers on the barricade would use their radios to get a message back here, and a red flag would be flown.
The Foretelling of Georgie Spider Page 15
