The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) (17 page)

“Jaz made a mistake, Ash, and he chose to take responsibility for it, and you should’ve let him. Being a leader doesn’t mean always taking the blame for other people’s mess. Besides, Jaz begged me to help him. He knows you’re important —”

“I’m
not
more important than Jaz!”

“Yes, you are!” she snapped. “I don’t know why you can’t understand it, but you
matter,
Ash. You transform things in a way that no one else can, and I know you’re going to change everything for Illegals. If everyone has to die to protect you, so be it.”

I stared at her in shock. Ember had always said we’d make the world better for Illegals one day, but I’d never realized how big a role she’d been expecting me to play. Or how far she’d go to keep me safe. “Ember . . . you can’t . . .” I couldn’t seem to put what I was thinking and feeling into words. Then Georgie’s voice broke the silence, sounding angrier than I’d ever heard her. “You got it wrong, Ember.”

Em and I looked at her in surprise as she continued. “It’s the other way around — if
Ash
has to die to protect everyone she cares about, then so be it. You have to let her love. Because it’s the only thing more powerful than hate.”

Okay, this isn’t very helpful.
“Georgie —”

“Don’t look at me like that, Ash! I know you think I’m not making sense, but I am. It’s just that you don’t know. You don’t understand, because I never told you what you almost did.”

“What are you talking about?”

Georgie bit her lip, seeming unsure of herself. “I don’t know if this is when I tell you. I haven’t
seen
when I tell you.”

“Georgie! Tell me
what
?”

“You hated once, Ash. Back in Gull City, you hated the government for what they did to Cassie.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“No, you
don’t
know. Because what you don’t remember is how you were going to kill people. A lot of people.”

Ember and I both spoke at once.
“What?”

Georgie focused her pale green gaze on my face and explained, “After Cassie died, when you were staying at my house, there was this day. We were upstairs in my room, talking about Cassie, and you suddenly . . . changed. Your eyes went all white, and you were Sleepwalking. You told me there were bad people out there in the city and you were going to go punish them. I think you meant everyone who worked for the government. You said you wanted to kill them all.”

Ember made a choked noise, and I gaped at Georgie. She kept on talking. “You were really going to do it, Ash. So I sat on the window ledge in my room, and I said that if you left, I was going to throw myself out of it. Over and over, I said it, until your eyes went back to normal and you were yourself again.”

“Georgie, I don’t . . . I don’t remember any of that!” Except I
did
remember something. A vague recollection of a long-ago dream, when I’d wanted to go somewhere, but there’d been this shining, fragile thing, and I knew it would break if I moved.
Had that been it?
“What you’re saying isn’t even possible. I mean, I can’t use my ability when I’m awake.”

“You
might
be able to,” Ember said thoughtfully. “If you were in some sort of dissociative state.”

“Some sort of what?”

“When someone is very distressed, they can go into something called a dissociative state. Sort of like being asleep when they’re awake. That might have happened to you.”

Dissociative state? Sleepwalking while awake? The whole world was spinning around me. “I’m
not
a killer.”

“Of course you’re not,” Georgie said. “But Ash, you feel things deeply — all the way to your bones. And you were
so
angry after Cassie died. You had so much . . .”

I finished the sentence for her. “Hate.” I had. I could remember the taste of it, a constant acid on my tongue. The one thing I’d thought about had been getting back at the government. Until Georgie had gone all sad and stopped talking or eating much. Then I’d had to worry about her instead.

“Georgie,” I said wonderingly, “the way you were after Cassie died, when you went all sad, you did that on purpose, didn’t you? To get me to leave the city?”

“Yes. I knew you had to go, Ash. To get away from the hate.”

I couldn’t believe it. All this time, I thought I’d rescued Georgie when she’d been the one who rescued me. I was still trying to wrap my mind around this new version of my past when Georgie said to Ember, “You have to let Ash
be
Ash. Caring about people, helping people, that’s what brings her back to herself. It’s the reason she didn’t attack anyone that day. She wanted to help me more than she wanted to hurt them.”

Ember looked stricken. “I . . . I didn’t understand. I was . . . I think I was wrong about Jaz. I
know
I was wrong. I’m sorry, Ash! I’m so sorry.”

I couldn’t deal with Ember right now, so I just nodded and walked away, wandering over the grass to the edge of the flattened area where the saurs had been. I breathed in the cold air, inhaling the faint scent of rain and absorbing everything that had happened. After a while, I heard footsteps and glanced back. Georgie was coming toward me; Ember was headed in the other direction. “She’s leaving?”

“She knows you’re still mad at her.”

“I have a right to be mad.” Although my anger was fading now. “I don’t know why she’s so convinced I’m going to change the world!”

“Because you can make dreams come true.”

“That’s just my ability.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but I wonder sometimes, is it our abilities that make us who we are? Or do we have the abilities we do
because
of who we are?”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“You bargained with saurs, Ash, and made a home in the Firstwood, and started the Tribe. You
have
changed the world, and you didn’t use your ability for any of it. So maybe Sleepwalking is an extension of who you are inside.”

“I didn’t do any of those things by myself, and I wouldn’t have even come here without you.” Thinking about how badly I’d misunderstood her, I added, “Thanks for everything you did four years ago.”

“It’s okay. And you
do
know that it wasn’t really the government you wanted to punish that day, right?”

“I know.” I’d pushed all my rage, all my hate, onto the government, but there’d always been something else underneath. “I wasn’t a good sister, Georgie.”

“You loved her, and she loved you. And if you could have saved her, you would have. Ash,
please.
You have to forgive yourself, for Cassie.”

I was quiet for a long time before I confessed the truth to my oldest friend. “Georgie. I don’t think I can.”

SEVEN WEEKS AGO

Jaz says get salt.

It had been four days since Hatches had sent the mysterious message into my mind, and I still didn’t understand what it meant.
Of course,
I thought, as I walked back from the lake with my hair still dripping wet from my swim,
Jaz probably doesn’t want salt at all.
Messages between humans and saurs sometimes got garbled, especially over long distances. I wished I could answer Hatches back, but the lizards couldn’t hear us in their heads the way we could hear them. Jaz was the only one who could have an entirely mind-spoken conversation with either human or saur, and despite months of effort, he usually had to be pretty much within sight of someone to do it.

What was really worrying me, though, wasn’t the message itself but the distressed feeling that had come with it.
You saw Jaz a couple of weeks ago,
I reminded myself,
and he was fine.
True, he’d been a bit upset, but that was because I’d given him an update on the information our new enforcer friend Connor had been giving us. Jaz hadn’t been pleased about the traitor in the Tribe.

There was the sudden sound of running feet, and Ember came bursting onto the path ahead of me, her cheeks red with exertion. “Ash! Come quick! Daniel’s back, and he’s hurt.”

I plunged into the trees, heading for the large clearing that was our warm-weather camp until Ember called, “The caves!” Switching direction, I angled upward to the trail so I could run without having to tear through the undergrowth. The Tribe had moved out of the caves about a week ago, more than willing to exchange the cold nights and mornings of early spring for open sky above our heads and the lemony scent of the tuarts in bloom. Daniel had left for Gull City before that, and must have assumed we were still there.

I’d sent Daniel to check out a series of weird rumors about a terror campaign in Gull City, some kind of attack that people had at first thought was the work of the Tribe but now seemed to be linked to the Serpent. Which was strange, since first, the Tribe wasn’t responsible for any kind of terror campaign and second, Ember had basically invented the Serpent.

My feet hit the trail, and I picked up speed, pounding along until I pelted through the northeastern entrance to the cave system. Inside, I found Daniel stretched out on the sandy floor, with Georgie on one side of him and Pen on the other. He didn’t have any wound that I could see, but he was drenched in sweat and his lean body was shaking. Georgie was smoothing his hair, while Pen had one small hand pressed to his chest. The Mender’s dark eyes were wide open, staring at nothing, and her normally smiling mouth was pressed into a thin line.
It’s bad, then.
I went still, knowing better than to distract Pen when she was Mending. After a while, Ember came in behind me and whispered, “Georgie found him. I told the others that there’d been a rockfall and some of Georgie’s spiders were hurt.”

“Good story,” I whispered back. It was, too — no one would come up here to check out what was going on if they thought there were a bunch of anxious spiders crawling around. We relied on Georgie to keep the critters away from the side of the caves that everyone lived in.

“No one else saw Daniel,” Ember told me. “The others still believe he’s out scouting for a new campsite.”

I nodded, thinking that a few months ago, our biggest problem really had been finding a campsite deeper in the Firstwood and farther from the site of the new detention center. And I wouldn’t have cared what the others knew. But that was before I’d met Justin Connor and learned about the Tribe member who was betraying us. Luckily, we didn’t have to worry about our resident traitor right now, because we knew exactly where she was, and it wasn’t in the forest. Briony was off meeting with her government contact. I wished that I could do something about her, but I couldn’t, not yet.

Pen finally stirred and took her hand away from Daniel’s chest. He’d stopped shaking, but his eyes were still closed. She stood up and walked over to Ember and me. “He’s done too much Running and exhausted himself. He needs to sleep now. You can try talking to him, but not for too long.”

“Thanks, Pen. Don’t say anything about this to the others, okay?”

“Yeah,” Ember chimed in. “Remember, as far as they know, you were doing a favor for Georgie, helping out her spiders. This is very important.”

“Don’t worry,” Pen answered earnestly. “You can count on me.”

She left, and Ember and I walked over to Daniel, kneeling beside him. Georgie didn’t take any notice of us. She wasn’t paying attention to anyone but Daniel, and I could see why.
He still looks bad.

“Daniel,” I said, “can you hear me? Can you tell me what happened?”

His eyelids fluttered open, revealing green eyes murky with fatigue. “It’s Jaz. The government has him.”

My chest felt like it was being crushed in a vise, the air choked out of my lungs. I was dimly aware of Ember asking Daniel urgent questions and Daniel responding, but I couldn’t really hear anything over the roaring in my ears. Ember reached over and squeezed my arm. “Ash, I’ll do this. Go wait outside.”

I stumbled out, down the trail, and into the forest. I pressed my back against a tuart, slid to the ground, and curled against the comforting presence of the tree. To my horror, I realized I was whimpering.
Get ahold of yourself, Ashala! You’re no good to him like this.
I’d just barely managed to get my panic under control when Ember arrived.

“It’ll be okay, Ash,” she said, sitting at my side. “We’ll get him out.”

“What happened?”

“He was picked up by a patrol in Gull City.” I opened my mouth to ask what Jaz was even doing in the city, but she held up a hand to stop me. “It’s complicated, so you have to let me tell it in order.”

I subsided into silence as Ember began. “When Daniel arrived in the city, the streets were crawling with enforcers searching for an Illegal waging what the government was calling psychological warfare. Except the so-called warfare was nothing but clouds.”

“Clouds?”

“Yep. A Skychanger was changing clouds into shapes that looked like saurs. That’s why people thought the Tribe might be involved. Daniel dodged the patrols and made it to our storage unit, which is where Jaz came to see him. He wanted Daniel’s help to rescue his sister. His
Skychanger
sister.”

“His . . .” I put my hand to my head. “I didn’t even know he had a sister! But, wait — Daniel thought Jaz was dead, and the saurs . . .”

“I know, I know. Apparently, it took Jaz quite a while to convince Daniel that he truly was Jaz.” Ember sighed. “It’s a mess, and Jaz’ll have to answer to the saurs for telling the secret, I suppose. But, Ash, Jaz was indirectly responsible for the entire psychological-warfare situation. He discovered that the saurs who can talk to each other over the longest distances were from the same hatching, as in siblings. So he tried to mindspeak to his sister, and it worked, sort of. Jaz managed to pick up on what Phillipa was feeling — which is pretty good, considering how far away Gull City is — but he didn’t realize what effect the contact would have on her. She started having recurring saur dreams, and since she’s all of eight years old, and a Skychanger . . .”

I groaned, seeing how everything had started to go wrong. “She can’t control her ability.”

“Nope. It’s leaking out of her. Probably had been for a while, but I suppose nobody reacted to clouds that looked like dogs or cats or whatever else she made them into. But big scary lizards?” Ember shook her head. “When the hunt for the Skychanger started, Phillipa panicked. Jaz felt her fear and decided to go to Gull City to see what was wrong.”