Free The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) by Ambelin Kwaymullina Page B

you’ve done.” The guilt that flashed across her features was gone so fast that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it. But I
was
looking for it.
    I pushed her away. “Traitor!”
    She immediately started babbling. “I’m sorry, Ash. I didn’t mean for it to be like this. I’m sorry you got hurt, and about Jaz and everything, but honestly, he should never have eaten that rabbit. . . .”
    What was she blathering about? “What does this have to do with —? Wait,
you’re
the one who told the government about the pact?”
    “I didn’t think anything would happen — you have to believe me. I wanted to go home. They said I could go home!”
    “You
were
home, Bry!” I was so overwhelmed with rage, I was almost sputtering with it. Briony had betrayed us all, selling the Tribe out to the government and for nothing more than an illusion. In a single angry moment, I shouted out the truth she couldn’t bear to acknowledge: “And it was a better home than you’d ever had with your parents, because they don’t love you. They think you’re some unnatural thing, and they’ll
never
love you.”
    The color drained out of her face, and for a second, she just sat there, pale and trembling. Then her eyes went flat and scarily mindless and she leaped for me, knocking the two of us to the ground. Bry was screaming, over and over, “They do love me. They do! They do!” We rolled across the floor, banging into furniture and toppling books as Neville jumped to his feet, calling for the enforcers. She was shrieking and clawing and kicking, really trying to hurt me, and I was so enraged that I was fighting right back. She tried to scratch my eyes, and I slapped her hand away, striking the edge of her jaw, which was painful in a satisfying kind of way. She howled, throwing a vicious punch at my side, and another. Something sharp dug into me, and Connor and Evan charged in, dragging the two of us apart.
    Briony clung to Evan, clutching her face as if she’d sustained some severe injury, which I knew she hadn’t. For some reason, Connor kept trying to get me to sit down in the chair. He was shouting something, but it took me a second to understand what it was. “Ashala! You’re hurt!”
    What?
I looked down, puzzled to find my white shirt marred by a spreading red stain.
I’m bleeding? How?
But then I realized.
    They hadn’t taken away all her possessions after all. Briony had still been carrying her little knife.

I slid to the floor, the world shattering into fragmented images: Evan hustling Briony out of the room, Neville screeching for someone to fetch Wentworth, and Connor’s hands pressed to the wound in my side to stop the bleeding. He’d done this before, I thought vaguely, when I’d received that other injury. Had it really only been two days ago? Then everything faded into darkness.
    When I regained consciousness, blurry figures wearing red robes were swarming everywhere. Someone spoke urgently. “Doctor, the blade was poisoned!”
    Wentworth shouted, “Somebody get that collar off her!”
    Confused, I thought,
My neck isn’t hurt.
Then I realized that she must want to Mend me, and the rhondarite would stop her ability from working on my wounded body.
    The stone band was pulled away, and I tried to fall asleep and Sleepwalk. But I couldn’t. Instead, I drifted, sometimes rising to the surface of consciousness and sometimes falling beneath it, as if I were being carried along on the tides. It would have been peaceful, except that the connections my mind had made in Neville’s office spread out around me like a net floating on water, trapping me among painful truths.
    I’d thought I’d been unlucky when I was captured in Cambergull. Now it seemed a bit
too
unlucky that a troop of enforcers — including the one who knew exactly what I looked like — had happened to be there at the same time I was.
Briony told them where I was going to be.
And her story about how Ember hadn’t sent anyone