The Last Murder at the end of the World

THIRTY-ONE

Clara climbs the four steps to Thea’s lab, her annoyance at being so casually dismissed tempered by her joy at finally being somewhere cool. The midday sun is merciless on the island, stilling all life beneath it. Nearly every animal is huddled in whatever scrap of shade they can find. Even the ocean’s cowed, lying flat, waiting for the heat to pass.

Thea’s lab is one of the few places to escape. The high ceilings are still blessed with a few working fans, which are juddering around, carving the warm air into muggy ribbons.

She glances at the machines, trying to remember which one of them she needs. She only worked in here for a couple of weeks before they set off on the expedition, and she can barely remember the names of the equipment, let alone their purposes.

In truth, she’s still intimidated by them.

Thea’s always been scornful of these patchwork contraptions, but this is as close to the old world as Clara’s ever been. These blinking lights and whooshing pipes are similar to the tools with which humanity created the fog. In this room exists the technology to destroy everything all over again, and she’s in here blindly pushing buttons.

‘The worst has already happened,’ I say. ‘The fog’s on its way. If you look at it from a certain angle, that’s actually quite liberating.’

Watching her feet to keep from tripping over the thick black wires criss-crossing the floor, Clara weaves through the tables until she arrives at the micro-sampling scanner.

Flipping a switch on the side powers it up, and briefly causes the overhead lights to dim. The lab is powered by electricity gathered from solar panels arrayed around the village, but they’re not efficient enough to keep everything running simultaneously, so she has to be careful which pieces of equipment she uses at one time.

The display flashes into life revealing the results of the blood test she ran on Ben yesterday, the little boy they collected from the cauldron garden. It already feels like it happened weeks ago. She’s still not sure why Thea wanted it tested. There was nothing unusual in his blood.

She sighs, swiping the results off the screen. Yesterday’s mysteries suddenly don’t feel quite so urgent.

She places the syringe under the scanner, but there’s not enough residue to test. She swaps it for the blood-soaked dirt she found beneath the bird bath, magnifying until it’s a lake of red and white blood cells, plasma and platelets, medical nanobots and ‘grey’ cells – microscopic laboratories, capable of battling the pandemics that had become an annual occurrence in the old world.

‘Niema’s blood,’ she murmurs, as the display automatically matches the sample to its database. ‘No abnormalities. No poisons.’

Swiping aside the results, Clara puts the second soil sample under the scanner, confirming the results of the first, but it’s the third sample that steals the breath out of her.

‘Hui’s blood,’ she says weakly, reading the display. ‘Thea was right. Hui was attacked at the bird bath, as well.’