The Last Murder at the end of the World

FORTY

It’s late afternoon by the time Clara and Emory return to the village, and everybody is packed together on the pier, staring silently across the sea at the approaching fog. It’s over the sandbank now, far closer than anybody’s ever seen it before. Hundreds of dead fish are floating in the bay, along with a few seabirds and a torn-apart turtle.

Thea’s under the gate arch, her arms folded.

‘You told them,’ says Emory, approaching her.

‘I had no choice,’ she confirms. ‘We’re basically living in a snow globe now. Even they couldn’t ignore it. Did you find Adil?’

‘His shack was empty, but we know he was following Niema before she died,’ says Clara. ‘He took a painting from the warehouse before it burned.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not yet,’ replies Emory.

Thea pinches the bridge of her nose. ‘That’s a remarkably meagre collection of facts considering the faith I’ve put in you,’ she says, dripping disdain. ‘The fog is coming, Emory. There’s no time for your usual lackadaisical approach.’

‘What did you discover?’ demands Emory, who’s much too footsore for this kind of condescension.

‘I completed the post-mortem. The cause of death wasn’t the stab wound; it was the injury to her head. She was bludgeoned with something heavy that was made of metal. I inspected the warehouse, but there was nothing matching that description in there.’

‘No, there wouldn’t be,’ says Emory, turning on her heel and pushing through the villagers to reach the end of the pier. The other two follow her.

She leans over the edge, pointing towards the strange metal object under the water that she found this morning. ‘There are fresh gouges in the concrete. I think it was dragged to this spot and dumped last night.’

‘Hephaestus was using that machine to inspect the cauldron,’ says Clara. ‘He brought it down to the village with him when we collected Ben. Could that be the murder weapon?’

Thea doesn’t answer. Hephaestus left it in her lab last night. If it is the murder weapon, it incriminates her as much as him.

She calls to some nearby villagers, ordering them to fetch rope, so they can lift it out of the water. ‘Once it’s back in my lab, I’ll see if I can find something that connects it to the body.’

As Thea oversees the recovery, Emory and Clara head back through the gate, finding the village half dressed for the funeral, with beautiful decorations draped in the boughs of the trees, and mourning lanterns strung along a length of rope between the two wings of the barracks.

Emory never realised how much this place depended on the joy of the villagers to soften it. Without their spirit, it’s like she’s noticing the high walls and crumbling barracks for the first time. Even the garden, which Emory’s always loved, suddenly appears a sad little thing, a few wretched plants cowering in the shadow of something monstrous.

Having not eaten all day, Emory grabs some bread and cheese from the table, sharing it with Clara as they walk towards the infirmary. There’d usually be a feast out, but word has obviously gone around about the missing stores. They’re having to eat whatever was already in the kitchen, and what few vegetables can be plucked out of the ground.

‘Thea’s right,’ says Emory, staring back at the meagre spread. ‘I need to be working faster.’

‘You’ve only been at this for a day,’ replies Clara.

‘Which means I only have one more left, but I’m not getting anywhere. Every question I ask has ten more behind it. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.’ She rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, at all.’

‘Mum –’

‘I begged her for this, Clara. I told her I could do it, but what if I can’t?’

Clara stares at her mother. It’s like she’s standing at the edge of dark, dangerous water, terrified of what’s swimming below.

‘Then you can’t,’ replies Clara levelly. ‘And maybe nobody can, but you’re trying. Nobody’s expecting anything more than that.’

They enter the infirmary, finding the lobby filled with rusted gurneys and wheelchairs, broken glass crunching under their feet.

Emory points to a fresh footprint in the dust.

‘They go that way,’ she says, gesturing along the corridor. ‘That has to be Niema. The rest of the floor is undisturbed.’

As they walk, I warn them about the memory extractor Hephaestus brought back from the lighthouse, and his plans for it.

Emory shivers, recalling how many hours she spent hunched over one of those things during the trials. Thea used to make potential apprentices take it apart and put it back together, until they had a fundamental understanding of how the power units, circuitry and neural gel interacted.

‘We need to investigate the lighthouse,’ says Emory. ‘Niema took the metal box out there last night, and Hephaestus found a memory extractor there this morning. That can’t be a coincidence.’

At the end of the corridor, they climb a staircase to a long ward on the second floor, where beds sit patiently expecting wounded soldiers who’ll never arrive. The window frames are empty, jagged pieces of glass still held in the corners of the frame. Everything’s covered in thick spiderwebs.

The tracks lead them through a ward to a large metal door with a heavy handle that’s freezing cold to the touch. It’s newer than everything else, tarnished but solid.

A keypad lights up as they approach.

‘We need a code,’ says Emory disappointedly. She punches in a few random numbers, causing it to flash red and reset. Her thoughts go back to Niema’s room. Did she see any codes in there, while she was looking through Niema’s things?

She taps ‘5’ twice, remembering the number on the back of the charred note, and the message Niema gave to Matis before he died.

Nothing happens.

Stepping back, she examines the length of the corridor, wondering if there’s another way inside.

Clara frowns at the keypad, then checks the numbers on her wrist, punching them in. A mechanical click sounds from within the door as the lock is released.

‘How did you do that?’ asks Emory, in surprise.

‘I used the code,’ replies Clara, showing it to her mother. ‘We must have come here last night.’

‘No, we didn’t. There were no other footprints in the dust.’

‘Somebody wrote that code on your wrist. They wanted us to find this place.’

She raises the handle, which despite its size lifts easily, activating some internal mechanism, which causes the door to open with a whoosh.

Ceiling panels crackle into life, bringing a harsh white light. Inside they find a tiled room with X-ray projectors on the walls and twelve gurneys lined up in rows, each with a dead body lying on it.

The air is frosty enough to fog their breath.

Hugging herself to keep warm, Emory meanders between the gurneys, unsure of what she’s seeing. Bodies are clutter in the village and burned immediately after they die. Why would Niema be collecting them?

There’s a chart at the foot of each gurney listing some medical information she understands, and a lot she doesn’t.

‘Hallucinations, followed by inability to discern reality from memory,’ she reads off one chart, her teeth chattering. ‘Drank bleach. Implant rejected after five days.’

‘What’s bleach?’ asks Clara.

‘No idea,’ replies Emory, passing her the chart. ‘It was probably delicious, though.’

‘They’re human,’ says Clara, leafing through the notes. ‘Or, at least, I’m assuming they are, judging by these scans of their internal organs. They’re in completely different locations from ours, and there’s a lot more of them.’ She bites the inside of her lip, a habit of hers when she’s thinking. ‘They’re much more complicated than we are.’

Emory peers at the chart. The villagers are wrapped in ribs and tough cartilage, their internal organs encased in bone, with multiple redundancies in case any of them get damaged. This woman was just flesh and blood, and a thin layer of skin. How terrifying must the world seem to somebody with this little armour? Why would any species that dies so easily invent something as terrifying as murder?

Clara taps the nearest gurney. ‘Niema was taking blood samples and genetic material for analysis. Whoever this is, they died twenty years ago.’

‘Why haven’t they decayed?’ asks Emory.

‘There are chemicals that could preserve the bodies indefinitely,’ I explain, speaking in both of their heads simultaneously. ‘The cold is intended to keep insects and rodents away.’

Clara puts down the chart she’s reading and picks up another.

‘Patient reported having pleasant conversations with dead relatives, before … urgh, slitting their throat. Implant rejected after two days.’ She flips to the last page. ‘This one died four years ago.’

She returns the chart to the bed.

‘Most of this is gibberish to me. The only person who can make sense of what Niema was doing to these people is Thea.’

‘No!’

‘Mum –’

‘Do you honestly believe that somebody in the village killed Niema last night?’ Emory asks. ‘Do you really think Adil is capable of it?’

Doubt ripples across Clara’s face.

‘If I’m right, Niema was killed by either Hephaestus or Thea, and until we know why, we need to keep all of this to ourselves.’

‘But they’re elders!’ argues Clara, shocked. ‘They would never –’

She snaps her mouth shut, her conviction sounding strange, even to herself. After everything she’s learned today, why does she still think the elders are perfect? Why does she believe that? She traces the idea back, finding it wrapped through her thoughts like a shining thread. The elders are wise and kind and fair and entirely without flaw. Do not question them.

It’s scripture.

It’s not just me who believes that, she thinks. If she asked anybody in the village to describe an elder, they’d probably recite that line verbatim. The only person who never did was her mum. She can’t imagine how hard that was for her; to be full of doubt in a world of conviction.

Clara suddenly feels ashamed. She was always so embarrassed by her mother, even as a little girl. She wanted her to act like every other mum. She wanted her quiet, and diffident, and soft. After her father died, in the darkest of her thoughts, she sometimes wished that it had been Emory, not Jack, in that boat.

‘The night before she was murdered, I heard Niema arguing with Hephaestus about an experiment she was conducting,’ says Emory, drifting between the tables. ‘She told me that the experiment had failed every time she’d tried it previously, but if it failed that night, she’d be forced to do something terrible. I think this is what she was talking about. These poor people are her failures. Is there anything in those records that explains what she was doing to them?’

‘Nothing I can decipher. I can tell you that whoever Niema was experimenting on the night she died isn’t in this room. The charts indicate that the last body was delivered three years ago.’

‘Hephaestus can explain all of this.’

‘Should be an easy conversation,’ says Clara wryly, taking a grey jumpsuit off a peg and holding it up by the shoulders. ‘Those are pre-apocalypse clothes. This was the uniform employees of Blackheath wore. I saw tatters of these jumpsuits while I was on my expedition, but nothing like this.’

She runs the material between her thumb and forefinger.

‘It’s made from a breathable fabric that doesn’t stain and is designed to keep your body temperature stable no matter what the weather. This is probably the most sophisticated piece of equipment on the planet. What’s it doing in here?’

‘Niema probably wore it to keep warm,’ says Emory, shivering. ‘This place is freezing.’

She casts her gaze across the bodies, which are long-limbed and pale, spindly and soft. They look like something dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. How could she have ever believed the villagers and elders were the same?

‘Thea told me there were a hundred and forty-nine humans sleeping in Blackheath, but there was no way to reach them,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Between these clothes and these bodies, I’d say she’s either lying to me, or somebody’s been lying to her.’

‘Thea’s obsessed with getting inside of Blackheath,’ says Clara. ‘It was all she talked about on our trip. If she knew how to reach her old lab, I’m not sure we’d ever see her again.’

Emory raps one of the gurneys. ‘How angry would she be if Niema knew Blackheath was open, but hadn’t told her?’

‘She’d be furious.’

‘Angry enough to kill?’

‘Yes,’ says Clara. ‘I think so.’