The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) Read Online Free Page A

forced to do a few bad things for the sake of the Balance.
    And it was horrifying how tempted I was to make a deal.
    I quashed the wounded and exhausted part of myself that was desperate enough to trade a scrap of information for a scrap of kindness and said, “You say that you care, but you don’t. You don’t care enough, and you don’t care the
same
.”
    “The same as what, Ashala?”
    “The same as you would about one of your own.” The smiling face of my lost little sister beamed up at me from the photo, and I rubbed my thumb across her cheek. “If some ordinary kid had died the way Cassie did, there would’ve been an outcry and an investigation. There wasn’t, though, not for a girl killed during an assessment. You set us apart, and you tell yourself it’s for the good of the Balance.”
    “It
is
for the good of the Balance.”
    “How can it be,” I demanded, “when Illegals are part of the Balance?”
    He stiffened, recognizing where those words came from. “You shouldn’t let yourself be taken in by the ravings of a few dissidents. I know you’d like to believe otherwise, but I’m afraid the answer to the Question is no.”
    He seemed a bit nettled, and it occurred to me that the growing strength of the reform movement must get to people like Neville Rose. When I’d left Gull City, there’d been barely a handful of people at each Friends of Detainees rally. Now there were hundreds.
    “What makes you so sure Illegals aren’t part of the Balance? A two-hundred-fifty-eight-year-old flood?”
    “That flood was a warning. It was a demonstration of the unnatural effect abilities can have on the harmony of the world —”
    “That flood,” I interrupted, “was an accident, and one that could never even happen again.” I looked away from him to gaze at Cassie one last time. Then, gathering up every ounce of willpower I possessed, I tossed the photo casually onto the desk and the handkerchief after it. “The answer to the Question is
yes
. Which means it isn’t going to be people like me who will cause the end of the world, Neville. It’ll be people like you.”
    His lips tightened in the first hostile reaction I’d seen from him.
Anger
. It wasn’t my words or my actions he was responding to — it was the fact that I was smiling. He probably thought I was laughing at him. In truth, I wasn’t thinking about him at all. In my mind, I was in another place entirely.
    About a year ago, Ember and I had sat together on a hillside on a sunny day. We’d just heard that Neville Rose had been appointed as the Chief Administrator of the new detention center that was being built far too close to the Firstwood for my liking. Ember had been running over everything we’d ever heard about Neville — or at least, she’d started out that way, but then she’d rapidly detoured into imparting deep thoughts about the nature of humanity. I guess it’s hard to stay on track when you have an ability that effectively makes you a walking library. Finally, though, she’d come back to Neville again. “There’s a word,” she told me, her pale face serious, “to describe people who believe so fervently that Illegals are a threat to the Balance that they can do the kinds of appalling things to us Neville is supposed to have done.”
    “There’re two words,” I said.
“Nasty. Bastards.”
    She smiled and shook her head. “No.
Mad
.” Her strange eyes — one brown and one blue — grew shadowed. “It’s even a
necessary
insanity, for a society like ours. They couldn’t keep the detention system going without it.”
    I shrugged, then wiped a patch of ground clean and drew on it with a stick. “Here, tell me what you think of this.” It was my latest idea for how we could attack the new center.
    Ember groaned. “Not this again! First, we don’t have enough Illegals with the right kinds of abilities for something like this. Second, even if we did, you know as well as I do that very few of them could