The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) (20 page)

On it went, Ember speaking and the enforcer staring at the water, until finally he slumped, gasping, “Done.”

Ember took the cup from him and came over, holding it out to me. “You need to take out the stone.”

I hesitated, glancing over at the enforcer.
Is he even conscious?

“Don’t worry — he’ll recover. The stone, Ash.”

I fished out the pebble, feeling awed at what Ember had done. “You can put memories into water and stones?”

“Sort of. My ability works on the mind. The water and the stones aren’t that important. They’re just devices, things for the mind to focus on.”

“Oh. Um, what do I do now?”

Ember put the cup on the floor and sat down beside me. “Hold the pebble, say the keyword — which you’ll need to ask him for — and you’ll have the memories.”

I clasped my hand around the stone and turned my attention back to the enforcer, only to find that he was already watching the two of us. He seemed better, or at least not about to collapse.

“So, enforcer, what do I say?”

“The word you want is
Ashala
.”

“Very funny.”

“What makes you think I meant it as a joke?” And, astonishingly, he winked at me.

Is he flirting with me?
Uncomfortably aware that I was almost blushing, I focused on the stone, closing my eyes and saying, “Ashala.” I felt an odd buzzing sensation, one that seemed to travel from the stone all the way up my arm and into my head. Images started to form in my mind, and it was strange. Very strange.

From somewhere, Ember’s voice said, “Don’t fight it, Ash.” So I tried to stop thinking and gave myself up to Justin Connor’s memories. . . .

When I was seven, I knew my father didn’t love me.

But I didn’t mind. There was simply no room in his heart for anyone but my mother. Besides, Mom told me a lot that she loved me, her little Connor, more than anyone. It was our secret, although sometimes, from the way Dad watched me, I thought that he knew it, too.

It was Mom who insisted he take me away on the day the assessors came to Eldergull. “Go out with him on the boat,” she said. “I’ll have no son of mine near an assessor.” And because he could never refuse her anything, we went. We made a good catch, and he was happy — until we spotted the smoke billowing into the sky.

The quake had been sudden and terrible, leaving almost the entire town in ruins. Dad feared, at first, that Mom was trapped in the rubble, like so many others. But when we reached the place where our house had been, we found that she was not. She lay in the street, out in the open air, with the sun on her face. She looked almost peaceful.

She was dead.

When I was ten, I was in danger of dying myself.

Dad didn’t fish anymore. He drank instead. I’d learned to watch his moods, so that I could recognize when I was in danger. On this night, though, I’d been reading a book and was so lost in the words that I’d failed to notice his steady decline. Suddenly the book was torn from my hands, and he loomed over me with his fist in the air. His face was more twisted with rage than I’d ever seen it, and I thought, This time he really will kill me.

I had seconds to act, and I did, saying quickly, “Don’t you want to get whoever killed Mom?”

He roared, “You did, boy. If it wasn’t for you, I would’ve been there. I would have saved her.”

It was a familiar accusation, and I knew better than to respond to it. Instead I said, “But it wasn’t a natural quake.”

Dad swayed from side to side. “What do you mean, it wasn’t a natural quake?”

It didn’t surprise me that he didn’t understand what I meant. It always seemed to take other people so much longer to comprehend the simplest things. I sometimes felt like the rest of the world must be moving through water to arrive so painfully slowly at obvious conclusions. Besides, I’d been putting together the pieces of this particular puzzle for a while now, and even I still didn’t have the whole of it.

“There’s never been a quake like that in Eldergull,” I explained, “not before and not since. And Cary’s sister, Beth, was a Rumbler. She was being assessed that day.”

My father lowered his fist, and I pressed my advantage. “Beth died in the quake, but no assessors were killed. So whoever made her lose control is still out there somewhere.”

Dad stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he staggered to the table, picked up the bottle that was sitting on it, and stumbled outside. I listened, with dawning hope, to the sound of alcohol being poured onto the ground. He lurched back in, steadied himself against the doorframe, and said, “Son, we have work to do.”

When I was twelve, we finally discovered the name of Beth’s assessor.

Dad sank into a chair, his thick arms thudding onto the small table where we ate our meals. “Talbot. Prime Talbot. No wonder it was so difficult to find him. That bastard’s
come a long way in five years.” He eyed me speculatively, and said, “There’s nothing else to be done. You’ll have to become an enforcer.”

I swallowed. “An enforcer?”

“Talbot’s terrified of being assassinated by Illegals. They say he has three body doubles, and the only ones who get close to him are his enforcer guards. And to get into the Prime’s guards, you have to be the best and brightest. So that’s what you’ll be. My son, the greatest enforcer that ever was.”

I looked at my father. He didn’t drink anymore. He didn’t eat much, either, or do anything, except plot revenge. But it was a big improvement over how he’d been, and I hadn’t yet given up on the dream of having a proper father someday. So I said, “Yes, Dad.”

“Thing is,” my father rumbled, “you’ll have to learn to control that air-shifting ability of yours. There’ll be no room for mistakes if you’re to pass for a Citizen.” He rose out of his chair and barked, “Stand up, boy! Make this table and these chairs float for me.”

I jumped to my feet and summoned my ability. It always amazed me when people talked of air as being still. Couldn’t they feel the way it was constantly moving, how it ebbed and flowed in currents, reacting to the movements of everything in it? I called to the air, speaking to it in my mind, letting it know what I needed done. The air answered, rushing up under the furniture until everything rose toward the ceiling.

Dad strolled over to stand by my side. I thought he might lay an approving hand on my shoulder. Instead, he drew back his fist and struck.

I stumbled, losing my connection with the air. The table and chairs came crashing down. “No, no, no!” my father roared. “You’ll have to do better than that. Lift them up again.”

I straightened with difficulty. Dad circled around me as the furniture drifted steadily upward. Then he hit me again.

I was a quick learner. The table and chairs did not fall.

When I was fourteen, I passed my assessment and received a Citizenship tattoo. And I began to split in two.

Connor the Illegal, Connor my mother’s son, started to recede from the surface of my consciousness, becoming safely cocooned within Justin the Citizen, Justin the enforcer-to-be. My Justin self was a mirror, a perfect reflection of the expectations of others. The Justin-me made jokes about Illegals with my enforcer classmates, won a prize for an essay about the imminent threat that abilities posed to the Balance, and passed my father’s increasingly extreme tests of control. My peers were satisfied, my instructors were satisfied, and my father was satisfied.

Deep inside, I occasionally screamed. But that was all right because nobody ever heard.

When I was sixteen, I became the youngest Citizen to ever receive an enforcer uniform and submitted my application to become a bodyguard to the Gull City Prime. I was almost through the lengthy approval process when Prime Talbot had a stroke and died.

I said to my father, “At least he’s dead.” But Dad didn’t answer.

For the next two weeks, Dad rose from his bed, sat at the table, and didn’t move again until the evening, when he went back to bed. He seemed to grow smaller every day, shrinking farther and farther into himself. Until, one day, he didn’t get up at all.

The doctor said that a blood vessel had burst in his brain. One of those awful, unexpected things that were impossible to predict. There was nothing that could have been done. And Justin-the-enforcer agreed that it was a terrible, unforeseeable tragedy.

But I knew that I had failed my father for the last time.

I celebrated my seventeenth birthday alone and adrift. My entire life had been defined by one consuming purpose, and without it, I was lost. I knew I should find another path, but it just seemed like too big an effort to do anything except continue to exist in the life I’d made. So that was what I did until the day that Chief Administrator Neville Rose came to see me.

The gray-haired man offered his sympathies on my father’s death and spoke of how proud Dad must have been of such an exemplary son. I endured it in silence. Finally, he said, “I must tell you something. This is very difficult, but I think it’s important for you to know. Justin, your mother was killed by an Illegal.”

For a mad moment, I almost shouted that I was an Illegal. But the habit of caution was too deeply ingrained, and my defense system snapped back into place. Connor sank into the shadows, while Justin sat up, white faced and staring, as Neville explained how a Rumbler had caused the Eldergull quake. Nothing about the assessor. Justin-the-enforcer was appropriately horrified, outraged, thirsty for revenge. But Connor-the-Illegal was curious. Neville Rose was going to a great deal of trouble to obtain the loyalty of someone he believed was a perfect enforcer, and I wanted to know why.

There were more meetings, in which Neville spoke of how he feared the government would lose its way after the death of the great prime Talbot, especially with the reform movement gaining increasing support. He told me about his own political ambitions, and how he wanted to carry on Talbot’s vision for the future. Eventually, he explained that in his new role as the head of Detention Center 3, he needed enforcers who were willing to bend the rules in the interests of countering the Illegal threat. What was more, he wanted my help with a special project
, something to do with the runaways living in the Firstwood.

I was given a file about the leader of the runaways and told to study the contents. I did, and my Justin-self displayed only those emotions that Neville expected to see — outrage and disgust that anyone would so blatantly defy the Citizenship Accords. Deep inside, though, I reacted differently. I read that file over and over, until I knew by heart the story of a girl who, like me, had lost someone to the government. It seemed almost as if her voice were speaking to me from the crisp white pages. I told myself that it was absurd to think that, and yet I could not escape the growing conviction that she was someone I had always been destined to know, or even that I somehow knew her already. That was absurd, too. But I began to miss her, just the same.

Then it occurred to me that there was more information in the file than there should have been. How could they have such a detailed description of someone who had run away from the city four years before? How could they know how many people were in the Tribe or about the pact with the saurs?

I thought,
She is being betrayed.

The sense of aimlessness that had plagued me since my father’s death vanished, burned away by the fire of a new purpose, a single, simple mission.

Save Ashala Wolf.

The memories evaporated, leaving me blinking and disoriented in the dim light of the cave.

Ember was sitting right in front of me. “Ash? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re crying.”

I lifted my hand to my cheek, surprised and yet not surprised to find it wet with tears. “I’m okay. Promise.” Grabbing hold of Ember’s arm, I asked, “Can you do that in reverse? Give one of my memories to him?”

“Yes. But why?”

“Because I’m asking you to. Get the water and the stone and whatever else you need. Please.”

“Ash —”

“Don’t argue with me, Ember! I need you to do this.”

She pressed her lips together and stalked off to the corner of the cave, leaving me looking right at Connor.

“I think,” I said, “you can untie yourself now.”

Ember froze in amazement as the ropes around his wrists and ankles began to unwind, and I asked, “Have you got that water yet, Em?”

She came over to me, picked up the cup that she’d left on the floor, and tipped out the old water. Then she filled it again and dropped in a new stone. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yep.” I smiled at her. “This is important. And thank you.”

She sniffed, looking mollified, and handed me the cup. We went through the whole thing, as she had with Connor and — wow, it
hurt
! It felt like I was literally shaking apart. When we were done, I slumped forward, gazing at Connor with new respect. I’d put
one
memory into the stone, and my head was pounding fiercely. How much worse must he have felt when he’d already been hit with a very large piece of firewood?
Swung with a lot of force, too.
At this point, I was starting to feel quite bad about that.

I dragged myself over to him. I couldn’t have stood up if my life depended on it, so I half crawled across the floor with the cup in my hand, held it out, and watched as he took the stone. Then I tossed the cup away, careless of the water running onto the floor, and pressed his hands closed around the pebble.

“The word you want,” I told him, “is
Connor
.”

He laughed, an unexpectedly joyful sound that echoed around the cavern, and said, “Connor.”

His face went blank, staring at something I couldn’t see, although I knew what it was. He was experiencing the moment I’d come to the Firstwood, and the things I’d felt when I’d touched the tuart. I started talking — even though I knew he probably couldn’t hear me — wanting to explain what it all meant. I liked to believe that I understood the Firstwood’s message better, now that I’d had years to think about it. “People, animals, trees — everything grieves, and regrets, and mourns what’s passed. But nothing is ever truly gone forever. This is the place where life began again, where
I
began again. Whatever we were before, whoever we were before — it doesn’t matter. Because we’re all made new here. We live. We survive. We belong.”