The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) (15 page)

I had to admit, that was a good plan. “But we won’t tell anyone, not ever — I promise.”

Georgie chimed in. “We don’t even have anybody to tell. All we want to do is live in the forest.”

You wish to live with the trees?
He gave his hissing laugh again.
Your kind call this forest the Firstwood. Do you know why?

I’m getting a history quiz from a saur?
“Because this is the first place trees began to grow again after the Reckoning. It’s the first place that anything began to grow.”

These trees grew from seeds that survived the great chaos. They carry within them the memories of their ancestors, the lost forests of the old world. They do not forget what humans have done.

He doesn’t think the trees will want us here.
“Look, if you don’t want to let both of us go, just leave Georgie alone, okay? She’s already proved that she can help you.”

“No, Ash!”

Ignoring her, I rushed on. “People in the city, other humans, think she’s crazy. She could tell everybody saurs can speak, and no one would believe her. She’s not a danger to you — I promise.”

“No!” Georgie shoved her way in front of me. “If you’re going to eat her, you have to eat me, too.”

“I’m trying to help you, Georgie!”

“I don’t want that kind of help.”

The two of us glared at each other while Wanders watched us both.
You do not seem like the humans the songs speak of, and Keeps-the-Memories will be pleased to know that her egg will hatch.

I asked, “Are you going to let us go?”

No, young one. You wish to live with trees, so it is they who must determine your fate.

He dipped his head toward me, coming closer until I could make out his individual scales and the thin line of black around the gold of his eyes. He was . . . alien. Beautiful. Terrifying.

You will make your plea to the forest. Perhaps the trees will let you stay. But be warned: whatever bargain
you make with them, the saurs will ensure you keep it. And if the forest decides that you must go, then we will finish you.

Wanders drew back, and I looked toward the trees. Those old trees that remembered how humans had caused the end of the world. They seemed to stare right back at me.

I wasn’t sure they liked what they saw.

FOUR YEARS AGO

So now it was only me, and the Firstwood.

Georgie was waiting a few paces back, and Wanders was lolling in the grass to my right, along with two new saurs who had joined him in the three days it had taken to cross the grasslands. I got the feeling Wanders was secretly cheering for us, but those other two looked hungry. If there was going to be any eating, they’d be the ones who would be doing it, and I didn’t think they’d be a bit sorry, either.

Rocking back on my heels, I stared up at the tuarts that towered over all the other plant life of the forest. They were so tall that I could barely make out the tops and so wide that Georgie and I would’ve had to join hands with about ten other people to circle the trunks. But more than that, they were seriously spooky. Standing near these trees was like being outside right before a bad storm breaks, when the air goes heavy and electric, and you know you need to get indoors fast. I reached out to touch the gray bark of the nearest tuart. My fingers tingled and grew slightly numb.
As if I need another sign that this is no normal forest.
Wanting to be sure I had the Firstwood’s attention, I pressed my whole hand to the tree and started talking.

“Um, hello, Firstwood. My name is Ashala. My friend Georgie and I would like to live here. I know you remember the bad humans in the old world, the ones that caused the Reckoning, but Georgie and I are nothing like them; I promise you we’re not. If you let us stay, we won’t eat any of the animals or cut down any trees or do anything else you don’t like.” I paused, taking a breath. The air around me seemed to have grown even heavier, more expectant, and I hurried on. “I don’t know if there’s any way we can help you, but if there is, we’ll do it. We’ve got abilities — Georgie can see the future, and I can do stuff in my dreams. We could be useful people to have around, and we’ll do
anything
to stay. Just let me know what you want.”

For what felt like forever, nothing happened. Then a fiery bolt shot up my arm and exploded into my head. I yelled, trying to pull away, but my hand was stuck to the rough bark of the tree as if it had been glued there. Images poured into my mind, nightmarish pictures of things I’d never seen before. Strange vehicles with metal jaws, weird saws with teeth that roared, and humans, always more humans, cutting and hacking and slashing and killing. I slumped to my knees, shouting in my mind,
It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me who did that!
But the pictures kept on coming, filling my body with pain and my mind with the shocked confusion of dying forests. I realized that the trees wanted to know why.

I knew what that was like. Two months ago, I’d wanted to know why, too.

Staggering to my feet, I sent the Firstwood a picture of my own. Me, walking in circles over the burned earth that was all that remained of my house. I’d been as bewildered as the trees, totally unable to grasp how my mom and dad could have thought it was a good idea to call in the assessor. Even though I’d always known my parents were good Citizens, I couldn’t quite believe they’d done it. For days, I’d wandered through a world that made no sense to me, feeling as if I’d gone suddenly stupid or crazy. Until I’d asked myself what I would’ve done if I were them, and it had dawned on me that I wasn’t the one who was mad, or dumb, or wrong.

I rested my face against the tree and whispered, “There is no reason. Do you hear me? There’s no reason good enough to hurt my sister or to kill a forest. I
know
that. I’m not like my mom and dad, and the government, and the humans who caused the Reckoning. I won’t hurt you or anyone else because I think you don’t count as much as me. And if anyone ever comes for you with machines or saws or axes or anything, they’ll have to get through me first.”

The Firstwood went silent. There were no more horrible pictures, and no normal forest noises, either. No birdsong, no wind in the leaves, no scurrying animals. The only thing I could hear was myself, sniffling pathetically. I couldn’t even remember when I’d started crying, and now I didn’t seem able to stop. I let my tears dribble onto the bark, and a new image came into my head, one of bare, broken earth. That picture seemed to blur into the scorched ground where Cassie had died, and all I could see or feel was an aching nothingness. For a long moment, me and the Firstwood were sad together. Then something started growing in the emptiness. Tiny green sprouts shot up out of the earth. The sprouts became saplings and the saplings mighty trees, and around them, other things grew, too. Small streams of water swelled into rivers and filled hollows in the earth to make pools. Peppermint, flowers, and shrubs sprung up beneath the shelter of the tuarts. Birds nested, wolves denned, and saurs hatched from their eggs. And beneath and within and between it all was a shining shape that was somehow the beginning and the end of everything.

The glowing thing flowed around me, and my whole body hummed with life. I found myself shouting out, giving words to the joy and defiance of the Firstwood. “I live! We live! We survive!”

I was flung back into total awareness, as if someone had shaken me awake from a deep sleep. No pictures, anymore. Just me, huddled against the base of the tree with Georgie crouched at my side. “Ash? Ash? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.” I stood up, feeling strange, kind of warm and comfortable and . . . safe. “Actually, I’m terrific, Georgie!” I lurched out onto the grasslands, looking for the saurs.
No humans for dinner today . . .
But they were far away, skittering into the distance with their awkward, super-fast run. “Hey, the saurs left?”

“Yep. The wind talked to them.”

“It did? What did it say?”

Georgie shrugged. “How I am supposed to know? The wind didn’t speak to me.”

“Then, how did you know it spoke to the saurs?”

“Because it blew, and they lifted their heads and listened.”

Guess that makes sense.

“And,” she added cheerfully, “Wanders said that it’s up to us to decide what to do with the other one.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would.”

“Why would
I
know?”

“Because you know lots of things, Ash.”

“I don’t know this, Georgie. Didn’t you ask him any questions?”

She shook her head, and I sighed.

I had no way of finding out what Wanders had been talking about, but hopefully it’d become clear, since I didn’t want to get on his bad side. I spun in a circle until I was facing the trees again. Those tall, clever,
beautiful
trees. “Come on, Georgie!”

I grabbed hold of her hand and ran into the Firstwood, pulling her with me to the top of a rise, where I let go and stopped, trying to take in the whole of the forest that was now our home. The scattered, towering tuarts, and beneath them, the twisting peppermint trees, and farther down still, a whole lot of plants I’d never seen before. My attention jumped from one odd piece of nature to the next: a flower with a yellow stalk that flared upward into curved green tips; a stumpy black trunk with long grasses spraying out the top; and a shrub hung with brown pods filled with black seeds that peered out like creepy little eyes. Everything was strange, and yet I felt I fit in here in a way that I never had among the familiar streets of Gull City. It was as if I’d come shooting up from the earth with the tuarts and the rest of the woods had grown around me, leaving an Ashala-shaped space that only I could fill.

I live. We live. We survive.

I
belong.

I glanced over at Georgie, who was twirling around and humming. “Georgie? Why didn’t you tell me about the egg and the saurs?”

“You didn’t believe me.”

“Yes, I would have —” Then I stopped, realizing what she’d said. Not “you wouldn’t have” believed me, but “you
didn’t
” believe me. So she’d seen a future where she told me the saurs could talk and it hadn’t gone well. “Um, sorry.”

She stopped twirling and wandered over. “You said lizards can’t talk with their minds. You said I must’ve misunderstood the shape of what I saw.”

I knew it would do no good to tell her that I’d never actually said anything like that. “I’m sorry. You were right.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” Then her eyes widened. “Hey, do you hear that?”

I did, now that she’d pointed it out. “Is that somebody singing? There’s not supposed to be anyone here but us.”

I began to move toward the distant melody, with Georgie trailing after me. The two of us picked our way through the undergrowth, following the sound of the song until we came out onto the banks of a wide river. There was a red-haired girl sitting in a tree that overhung the water. She must have seen us, but she kept on singing in a high, clear voice. Georgie waved, and called out, “Hello! HELLO!”

The girl still didn’t react, and I put my hand on Georgie’s arm, stopping her mid-wave. “She knows we’re here. I think she’s ignoring us.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s the other one Wanders was talking about?” I gazed thoughtfully at the girl. I didn’t know how she’d even got past the saurs in the first place, but somehow she had, and it seemed like the lizards thought she was now our problem.
She’s a long way above the ground, too.
I listened to the words of her song. Something about winter and being alone. Okay, so she was sitting in a high place, singing a depressing song. This probably wasn’t good.

“Georgie,” I said, “I’m going to climb that tree and try to speak to her. You stay here, okay?”

She nodded, and I strode over to the base of the tree. It was a tuart, but a young one, so there were branches low enough to reach from the ground. The girl finished her song as I began to climb, so the only thing I could hear as I went up was the wind, growing stronger as I got higher. The tree started to sway, and I held on tighter, levering myself onward until I swung onto the same branch as the girl. She was still quite a distance away from me, but there was no way I was going to edge out to her. Heights don’t bother me, but the movement of the tree in the breeze, combined with the sharp rocks sticking out of the water below, was enough to make me cautious.

Holding on to the trunk, I said, “Hi. I’m Ashala, and that’s Georgie down on the ground.”

She kept on staring at the swirling water. “This is the largest river in the forest,” she said distantly.

“Um, okay.”

“It runs for a long, long way. I don’t even know where it ends. But I’ve been thinking about how far it might go. How it could run past the tuarts and out of the Firstwood, into ordinary forests and then down to the sea. If I fell in, it would carry me away.”

“If you fell in,” I informed her in a helpful tone, “you’d probably bash your head on one of those rocks. Then your body would get stuck in the reeds, and fish would eat your face.”

She whipped her head around to frown at me out of mismatched eyes. “Who
are
you?”

“I told you, I’m Ashala. Who are you?”

“Ember. What are you even doing here?”

“Right now, I’m talking to you.”

“I
meant
in the forest. How did you get past the saurs?”

I shrugged, not wanting to share any information about the lizards. “Guess I was lucky. How did you get past them?”

She pulled at the sleeve of her top. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m wearing yellow? I came here from Spinifex City, in the other direction.”

I thought about that. Spinifex City was in desert-like country that bordered the western side of the vast Firstwood, and if what I’d learned in school was right, there were no saurs on that side. But there
were
insanely territorial big cats who killed anything wolf-size or larger and hung the body in a tree as a warning to other trespassers. “Then, how did you get past the sabers?”

“By going underground. Through the tunnels.”

“Through the
what
?”

“There are tunnels that run beneath the Firstwood. Or at least, beneath part of the Firstwood.”

A scary picture flashed into my head, of troops of enforcers bursting up from secret passages. “Does anyone else know about the tunnels?”

Ember shook her head. “Just my father and me, and he . . . he won’t tell. Besides, they’re all collapsed now. I barely made it through.” She looked me up and down. “You’re obviously an Illegal, but you don’t need to worry. No one’s coming to detain you.”

“Or you,” I retorted sharply. “You’re obviously an Illegal, too.”

She held up her hand, displaying a tattoo of three spiky blades of spinifex grass contained within a circle. “Yes, I am, but I have a Citizen tattoo.”

Impressed, I said, “You fooled an assessor? What’s your ability?”

She rolled her eyes, as if she wished I’d stop pestering her with questions. But I was pretty sure, at this point, that she was glad to have someone to talk to, so I wasn’t surprised when she decided to answer. “I manipulate memories.”

“You what?”

“I can take memories from people. And I can share them, change them, and even invent ones that never happened. Only,” she added angrily, “I can’t forget. Not anyone I meet, not anything I see or read or hear. I remember everything in perfect detail.”