The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) (24 page)

His brow furrowed in concentration, and Connor let out a startled yelp, leaping backward to escape the flames that had flared up around his feet.

“Jaz!” I growled.

The fire vanished as fast as it had appeared.

“You
told
me to use my ability, Ash,” Jaz said in a familiar tone of injured innocence.

“I didn’t mean like that, and you know it!”

Connor was checking the soles of his boots, making sure they hadn’t burned.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He nodded, his lips twitching like he was trying not to laugh. I glared at Jaz, who was holding out his hand and making tiny flames dance along the tops of his fingers. I knew I had no time to be mad at him now. “Listen, I need to explain some things to you. Later tonight, Connor is going to start a fire —”

The flames winked out. “You don’t need him for that. I can start it.”

“No,” I told him patiently, “you can’t. We need it to be in a very specific place, and you won’t be able to set it that accurately because you’ll be too far away. So Connor will light it and you’ll . . . encourage it.”

He was clearly unhappy at not having the fire-lighting job. “What exactly do you mean by ‘encourage it’?”

“Once you feel it start, count to a hundred, and then make it go big. Very,
very
big. This is super important, Jaz. Everything else depends on it. Can you do it?”

“Of course! Only,” he added in a disgusted tone, “this place is built out of composite, which is fire resistant. So if you’re trying to burn it all down . . .”

I shook my head. “We’re not. The fire’s to get people to evacuate and to act as a distraction.”

“A distraction from what?”

“I’ll tell you in a second. I just need you to test out one more thing first. Can you try to mindspeak to me?”

Jaz went pale, casting a horrified glance at Connor. “Ash!”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s okay. The saurs let me tell him all about mindspeaking. He has to know, because it’s part of the plan.”

“Oh. I guess that’s okay, then.” He shifted closer and confessed in a low voice, “Ash, I’ve been trying to contact the saurs for days, and you, too, in the park. No one hears me.”

“That was probably because of the collars. The saurs haven’t been able to reach you, either. Em thinks maybe rhondarite interferes with mindspeaking the same way it does with other abilities.”

His black eyes gleamed, and within a few seconds, words appeared in my head.

ASH! CAN YOU HEAR ME?

I winced and mind-answered him,
Yes, and you don’t have to shout! Can you hear me?

Yep!

Good! Now, can you reach the saurs, too?

His face went distant as he focused on the lizards. “I can hear Hatches! She’s so happy I’m okay. She says they’re ready for the escape.” He bounced in place. “How are we going to bust out, Ash? Are you gonna Sleepwalk? Because you could smash the walls with a fist of power and then —”

“I’m not Sleepwalking, Jaz.”

He looked disappointed. “You’re not?”

“Nope. It’s way too unpredictable. Besides, the whole idea is to do this so no one knows that anyone from the Tribe was involved. I guess you could say we’re kind of playing a trick on the government.”

“A trick? Is that all?”

“A really good trick.” Drawing in a long breath, I explained the plan, laying it out carefully to make sure he understood everything.

When I reached the end, he said in an awed tone, “That is the best trick
ever
.”

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

Connor cleared his throat, jerking his head toward the window. I understood. There wasn’t anything left to tell Jaz now, and we couldn’t risk anyone noticing that a detainee was missing. “I’m afraid you have to go, Jaz.”

“I’ve got heaps of time! The house administrator won’t check on me for ages.”

“They check in thirty-five-minute intervals,” I told him. “Believe it or not, there’s a rule about it.”

“About afternoon sleeps?”

“About
everything.
”

Jaz slid off the bed, and I did, too, then bent down to give him one last hug. It was surprisingly hard to let go. I struggled with a crazy impulse to take him and run, to forget everything and everyone else and save this one precious life. My eyes met Connor’s over Jaz’s head, and I could see he knew what I was thinking. He shrugged, as if to say,
If that’s what you want
. . . And for a second, I considered it. But I knew it wouldn’t be right, even if Jaz would leave without the other detainees. Besides, there was no safety anywhere if we couldn’t stop Neville.

I made myself release Jaz. Connor let him out the window, and he hurried across the gap into the other house. Once he was inside, he waved happily at us before pulling down his blind and vanishing from sight. I took a sharp breath as he disappeared, and another, finding it suddenly difficult to get air around the tightness in my chest.
I can’t keep saying good-bye to Jaz. I can’t!

“Connor! Tell me that we’ll save him.”

He smiled at me.

“Ashala Wolf. We will save them all.”

I was alone, waiting in yet another warehouse — this time a featureless white building that was used for storage in Detention Center 3. I’d positioned myself on the upper level of the structure, an open half-floor filled with containers, and was lying flat so I could peer through the railing into the gloom below — although the only thing to see at the moment was the faint outline of more containers. Connor had left a while back to get ready for his part in the night’s events, and it felt like he’d been gone
forever
. I’d changed into the enforcer uniform he’d left for me, and all I’d had to do while the afternoon rolled into night was torture myself by imagining all the ways in which things could go wrong. I’d done a good job of that, too, so much so that I was now twitching with anxiety. Finally, I heard a long, piercing siren, then another. The fire alarm, at last!

I spent a few happy minutes dwelling on the image of all Neville’s records about the Tribe — which was what Connor had used to start the fire — going up in flames. Then I focused on what would be happening outside, imagining how Neville and the remaining enforcers would be scrambling to locate the blaze. Everyone else would hurry through the center to the designated emergency gathering point outside the front entrance, and if things went right for us, the Inspectorate wouldn’t arrive there with the others. Because Connor would be waiting along the evacuation route, dressed in administrator beige so that he could mingle with the crowd. He’d draw the Inspectorate away with promises of revealing Neville’s secrets and bring them here.

Time dragged on endlessly, and no one came. I was starting to worry when the door below swung open. The downstairs lights flicked on, and I exhaled in relief to see Connor, ushering the two members of the Inspectorate into the warehouse.

I examined the Inspectorate.
Jeremy Duoro and Belle Willis
. Both were dressed in standard-issue Gull City–blue shirts and pants, but other than that, they seemed nothing alike. He was short, thin, and dark-haired, while she was tall, stout, and blond, and the differences between them didn’t end there. Duoro was youngish, maybe mid-twenties, and his bright gaze darted all over the place as he shifted from foot to foot. Willis, on the other hand, was a lot older, and she moved with a purposeful energy, scanning her surroundings in a single glance. They were each wearing small badges on their sleeves with some kind of symbol printed on them, and I had to clap my hand over my mouth to hold back a giggle when I realized I was looking at red question marks.
They wore Question pins into a detention center? Neville must have been furious!

Willis spoke in a low, powerful voice that seemed to roll out across the warehouse. “This appears to be nothing more than a storage area. What exactly are we doing here?”

“I’ll show you,” Connor answered. He walked over to a big crate and pulled back the canvas cloth covering the top. The Inspectorate hurried after him and stared down at the mottled chunks of rock inside the crate. When I’d first seen the stuff, I hadn’t known what it was. It took a lot of time and effort to transform raw rhondarite into the smooth white material that the collars were made from.

Belle Willis picked up one of the pieces, weighing it in her hand. “What could Chief Administrator Rose possibly want with unprocessed rhondarite?”

“It’s not just that it’s unprocessed,” Connor explained. “That rhondarite does not come from any of the mines allowed under the Three Mines Accords.”

He clasped his hands behind his back, drawing out the moment before delivering the terrible truth. “The Chief Administrator has built a secret rhondarite mine in the Steeps.”

The Inspectorate looked every bit as appalled as I’d been when Connor first told me.

“But,” Duoro said in a stunned voice, “what about the Balance? We all know what a disaster the exhaustion of the earth’s resources was for the old world!”

“I’m afraid the Chief Administrator believes that almost anything is justified to stop the Illegal threat.”

Belle Willis subjected Connor to a searching stare. “I can’t imagine this is common knowledge. How did you find out about it?”

Connor pulled open the top buttons of his administrator robes to show the black uniform beneath. “I found out because I’m an enforcer.” Duoro made an astonished noise, and Connor continued, doing a good job of sounding genuinely troubled. “It’s the enforcers who mine and process the rhondarite. They were all personally recruited by Neville Rose himself, including me. However I simply
cannot
condone what he is doing.”

“I should think not!” Duoro spluttered. “The man is even more of a raving fanatic than Prime Talbot was.” Waving an arm at the rhondarite, he demanded, “What does he even imagine he’s going to do with all this?”

“Reserves,” Connor replied. “He thinks we need much more than we have. Because rhondarite wears out.”

Interestingly, that information didn’t seem to be news to the Inspectorate. Neither of them looked particularly surprised. “We’d heard rumors about that,” Willis said, “although it’s good to have it confirmed.”

“Except,” Duoro put in, “according to our sources, it takes years for a collar to become ineffective, and the government’s stockpiled more than enough rhondarite to compensate for it.”

Connor nodded. “At the current rate of detentions, yes. But Rose wants to increase detentions threefold by means of random assessments, more enforcer patrols, and fewer Exemptions. If he wins the Prime election, he’s going to start putting those measures into place.”

Willis and Duoro exchanged worried glances, and I thought,
Good.
They were reacting pretty much as we’d expected them to. They also seemed to have no difficulty believing that Connor was a rebel enforcer, betraying Neville for the sake of the Balance — which was just as well, because we were hardly going to let them in on
all
our secrets.

I was feeling quite smug until I noticed something coming down the side of one of the boxes to my right.

Spider!

I leaned to my left, trying to get away from the thing without making any noise as Duoro’s voice floated upward.

“We’ve heard other things about Rose. Rumors of an interrogation device, and something about a girl being killed in Cambergull a few days ago?”

My pulse skyrocketed. I swung my attention back to what was happening below. It was not part of our plan to have the Inspectorate go chasing after the machine, or me.

“I’ve heard about the device, too,” Connor told them, “but I’ve never seen it. As to Cambergull, I don’t know. There was a prisoner here, a member of the group of runaways living in the Firstwood. She was shot while trying to escape.” The Inspectorate seemed to accept that artful mixture of truth and lie, and I relaxed.

Then something furry brushed against my hand.

Before I could stop myself, I scooted backward, my knees scraping against the floor.

Willis spoke sharply. “What was that?”

I forced myself to be still, staring at the spider that was meandering toward me and wondering if I could try to flick it away. Was that a yellow mark on its back? I couldn’t be sure in the dark, but if it was a yellowback, the thing was deadly poisonous.
Which means coming into contact with it isn’t a good idea. . . .

Connor answered Willis dismissively. “We’ve got an ongoing problem with rats. No need to be afraid — they rarely come out into the light.”

“I wasn’t —”

“And,” Connor said, interrupting him, “there is something else you need to see here.”

I let out a breath as I heard Connor striding toward the front of the warehouse and the Inspectorate following along behind. The spider was getting closer, but I didn’t dare move, not while everything was so quiet. Except, it was almost upon me.
A few seconds more and it . . .
From below, there was the sound of a lid being taken off a container.
Now!

I rolled to the side until I was well away from the spider, any noise I made more than covered by the Inspectorate’s gasps of dismay.