The Last Murder at the end of the World

FIFTY-NINE

Five minutes after Emory’s confrontation with Thea, the lighthouse still feels like a live circuit.

Thea and Hephaestus are yanking open drawers, and spilling their contents across the floor, searching for a key to Blackheath, which they believe is hidden amongst Niema’s possessions. Emory and Clara are swiping through the black screens, hunting for any information on the experiment Niema was running the night she died.

Seth’s watching them from the door, feeling his own world being equally upended.

He’s revered the elders his entire life, believing they knew what was best for the villagers – even when their decisions appeared self-serving.

Emory always thought this faith came naturally, but it didn’t. It was hard won over many years, requiring him to swallow his doubts and bite back his questions.

That was his sacrifice.

He thought turning a blind eye was the best way to serve the village, but the last couple of hours have revealed him for a fool. Thea openly described his people – his friends and family – as ‘disposable’. It wasn’t just the word that stung. It was the venom in her tone when she said it. The hatred, and contempt.

The naked attempt to hurt Emory.

As for Niema … His chest tightens just thinking about her. He’s held her in his heart since she died, armouring her memory against the accusations being flung by his daughter, and even Clara.

This is different, though. Thea has confirmed those accusations, using proof he peeled off the rocks himself. Niema killed that woman, and plenty more over the years, and she laughed with him as he rowed her to do it.

He feels like he helped her, like he was complicit.

How could he have loved somebody with that much malice in them? How could she let him?

‘What does the key to Blackheath look like?’ asks Emory suddenly. She’s kneeling down, inspecting the underside of one of the machines.

‘It’s small glass ball with a reddish hue,’ replies Thea, from across the room. Eagerness comes into her voice. ‘Do you have it?’

‘No,’ replies Emory, lowering her gaze to the floor once more. ‘I just wanted to know in case I came across it.’

Thea looks away, disappointed, but Seth recognises that tone. Emory knows more than she’s saying.

A few hours ago, he would have told Thea what he suspected. He would have seen Emory’s actions as petty and small-minded, designed to simply embarrass Thea, but that was before the mask came off.

‘If you find that key, let me know,’ continues Thea, pulling down a box from a shelf and spilling it across the floor. ‘There’s equipment in Blackheath that might help get the barriers back up. If we’re lucky we may even be able to shelter everybody down there.’

There’s a squeak from the opposite corner, where Clara is wheeling away the medical screen they saw earlier. Behind it is a high-backed wooden chair, with wrist and ankle straps, and a metal headband that can be tightened with a few twists of a large screw.

Seth’s stomach turns immediately. He doesn’t know what the chair is for, but the restraints speak clearly to the suffering it’s witnessed.

On a small table beside it is the metal box Hui brought down from the cauldron. The latch on the side is open, a glass canister half withdrawn from the padded interior. Clara pulls it out fully, revealing a strange plant with jagged leaves, and a few yellow buds.

‘That’s Nyctanthes prumulla,’ says Thea, who’s been watching her for the last minute. ‘Its buds can be turned into a very powerful sedative.’

‘How powerful?’ queries Emory, from behind them.

Thea casts her gaze around the room, then walks over to a small machine. There’s a vial spinning inside a red halo, a few drops of a yellow liquid circling inside.

‘This tiny amount would be capable of rendering a subject unconscious for a few hours,’ she says. ‘Given the amount of buds harvested from that cutting, Niema could have created enough sedative to knock out the entire village.’

Emory murmurs, an idea suggesting itself. ‘Would it need to be inserted or ingested?’ she asks.

‘Inserted,’ replies Thea. ‘Why?’

‘Do you think the sedative was used on the dead woman Seth found?’ asks Emory, ignoring Thea’s question. ‘Adil told me that he overheard Niema talking to another woman in here the night she died.’

Hephaestus takes an angry step towards her, forcing Seth to step quickly between them. He flashes a warning glance at his daughter, but he can understand her impatience. She’s trying to save the entire island, while Hephaestus is protecting the memory of the woman who put it in danger.

‘I overheard Niema talking about an experiment she was going to conduct, and how risky it was for the subject,’ says Emory, staring past her father at Hephaestus. ‘If it worked, she said it would give humanity a better future.’

Thea snorts contemptuously.

‘Is that what she thought she was doing!?’ she exclaims, shaking her head. ‘At least that explains why the dead woman’s blood was full to bursting with conidia.’

‘What’s conidia?’ asks Clara.

‘It’s the fungus which connects us to Abi,’ she says briskly. ‘A few hundred spores will allow her to access our thoughts, but for anything more – say enforcing a curfew, or taking control of a body – there needs to be around a thousand in somebody’s system. I ran a post-mortem on the dead woman you left in my lab, Seth. She had double that number. That’s what killed her. Your people were engineered from the ground up to handle huge quantities of conidia, but such a quantity is lethal to humans. It always has been.’

‘Why would Niema intentionally flood a human system with something she knows will kill them?’ asks Seth, horrified.

Thea is studying the chair, running her fingers along the rivets, her disgust at its purpose plain.

‘If you came to work at Blackheath, a condition of employment was that you had to have Abi implanted, which is why myself and Hephaestus can hear her,’ she explains. ‘Our research was worth billions, and it was Abi’s job to monitor our thoughts and make sure we weren’t stealing secrets, or committing corporate espionage for a rival. Anybody who left the company had their memories wiped, so they couldn’t take their research with them, but that was the limit of what she could do. Niema always talked about giving Abi greater control over her employees, but she could never find a way to make it work without killing the host. About fifty years ago, she came to me, claiming she had the answer and wanted my help to start human trials. I reviewed her research, and disagreed with her assessment. I told her plainly that anybody she tried her procedure on would be dead within a few days. Moreover, I would end my life before giving control of my body to Abi. Niema listened, and seemed to agree. Naively, I thought she’d dropped the idea.’

She flicks the chair’s metal headband. ‘Evidently, that was another thing she was lying about.’

‘Why would she carry on with an experiment that dangerous?’ asks Emory.

Thea taps the console of one of the machines absently. ‘Niema had everybody under her thumb for so long, that she couldn’t stand the idea of going back to a world where she wasn’t in control. She wanted the same authority over humanity that she had over you. She didn’t want to let them out, and watch them destroy her precious island, or build a civilisation that wasn’t exactly to her specification. She didn’t want to feel threatened again.’

‘She was afraid,’ says Seth softly.

‘Powerful people usually are,’ replies Thea. ‘They have the most to lose.’