The Last Murder at the End of the World

Hephaestus shows Thea that he found a memory extractor. The device looks like a helmet, but when Hephaestus pushes a button, multiple drills activate that burrow into the skull. Thea knows that the extractor will kill anyone who wears it. Hephaestus suggests that they use it on the villagers because the memory of the murder exists somewhere in their brains. Thea tells Hephaestus that they cannot use it on a villager without evidence, otherwise Abi will not put the barriers back in place. Thea tells him that she found metal fragments in Niema’s head, which suggests that someone placed the beam on her head to make it look like an accident.

Thea informs Emory that the postmortem shows that Niema’s cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, not stabbing. Emory shows Thea the contraption that she found in the water, and Thea orders the villagers to bring it to her lab so she can examine it.

Emory and Clara go to the infirmary while Abi warns them about the memory extractor. They discover a locked door on the second floor. Clara types the number on her wrist in the keypad, and the door opens. Inside, they find a row of 12 gurneys with dead bodies on them wearing Blackheath uniforms.

Emory tells Clara about the argument between Hephaestus and Niema that she overheard. If Thea found out that Niema lied to her about Blackheath, Thea may have murdered her.

Emory thinks they should visit Hephaestus. Clara offers to row her, and the two reminisce about Jack. Emory apologizes to Clara about not supporting her desire to be an apprentice.

In Hephaestus’s room, Emory finds a broken memory gem and presses it to her temple. She sees a jumble of memories from Niema’s life including a final memory of Thea rushing Niema in a rage. Afterward, Clara presses the memory gem to her temple and sees the same images. Clara finds Jack’s knife, which he would have been wearing the night that he drowned.

Clara rows Emory back to the village, and Emory rushes off to confront Hephaestus about the knife.

Emory finds Hephaestus and Thea in the lab, and when she asks him why he has Jack’s knife, Hephaestus attacks her. Emory chokes, and Clara screams for Thea to help. Thea arrives and tells Hephaestus to let Emory go. Hephaestus releases Emory, and Thea tells them to leave until they have more evidence.

Clara cannot believe that Hephaestus acted so violently and asks Abi why she did not intervene. Abi explains that she cannot control humans, but she did tell Thea to stop Hephaestus. Emory finally realizes how violence comes naturally to humans. Abi tells Emory that she has to stop Seth before he does something stupid.

Seth tells Emory that he found a body on the rocks. Emory sees the body of a woman in the boat and says that they need to take it to Thea’s lab.

Seth wants to give himself over to the memory extractor for the good of the village because he must know something about Niema’s murder. He tells Emory that he does not believe that she can save them from the fog.

Clara finds something strange in the soil sample and asks Thea to examine it. Thea shows the results to Hephaestus and tells him that she needs to check the entrances to Blackheath.

Seth arrives at the lab, but the elders have left. Emory takes a portion of Seth’s clothes to Clara to examine the blood. Clara tells Seth that the elders are not who they thought they were, but Seth says that it does not matter because Niema designed them to serve. Emory realizes that Seth is wearing Shilpa’s boots. Clara says that must mean that the three of them took the cart to Adil’s cottage for some reason. Clara gets the result from Seth’s shirt and finds that the blood is from Hui.

Emory asks Seth to tell them what he remembers from the previous night, and Seth says that Niema got out of the boat and walked up to the lighthouse with Adil. He hands Emory a piece of paper that he found, and Emory recognizes it as one of Magdalene’s drawings. The drawing shows the villagers dancing. On the other side, Emory finds a strange diagram. Seth says that Adil used to make diagrams like that before Niema exiled him, but he never knew what they meant. Emory asks Clara to run the knife through the sampler, and Clara finds that there are traces of Hui and Niema’s blood on it. Emory smashes the memory extractor against the ground.

Emory believes that whoever attacked Hui and Niema must have grabbed the knife from Clara. Emory thinks that they took Hui to Adil’s cottage, and Seth must have tried to help Hui since he knows first aid.

Emory tells the villagers about their origin in the cauldron garden. She also informs them about Niema’s murder and the dead man’s switch. Some of the villagers tell Emory that they have had dreams about attacking Hephaestus and Thea.

Emory wakes up in the middle of the night and sees the villagers filing out to their night jobs. Abi tells her that she works through the villagers as they sleep, using them like tools to perform their jobs.

Emory goes to Magdalene’s house and waits until Adil enters. When Adil arrives, he tells Emory that he comes to visit Magdalene and Sherko in their sleep. Adil went to the lighthouse with the intention of killing Niema, but Niema told him that she was going to explain everything to the villagers and hope that they forgive her. She told him that he could come home that night and no longer be in exile.

Adil plays with a glass ball in his hands, and Emory realizes that she saw him the night Mathis died. When Emory confronts him about this, Adil says that he came to say goodbye to Mathis. Emory realizes that he is lying about something, but she does not know what. Adil says that Niema went into the lighthouse where Hephaestus was waiting with another woman. Later, he heard the woman screaming. Adil went back to the boat because he did not want Niema to change her mind about his exile. When he got back to the village, he saw Thea kneeling over Niema with a knife.

Adil gives Emory the bloody shirt that Thea was wearing that day. Thea tried to destroy it, like she destroyed her thumbnail that she found in Niema’s cheek. Emory takes in the information but asks about Hui.

Adil seems irritated that Emory does not immediately confront Thea but responds that Hui was lying next to Niema. Emory thinks that Adil set the warehouse on fire and wrote the code to the morgue on Clara’s wrist so that they would find what was inside.

Niema exiled Adil because he began to remember things. He was with the group of apprentices he went missing, including Jack, but he woke up in Blackheath and saw the other apprentices working on equipment in their sleep. When Niema found him, she wiped his memory, but afterward, he began to remember things.

Adil knows that Jack is still alive with the other apprentices and that he attacked Niema because she would not release them. Emory asks where Jack is, and Adil tells her that the entrance to Blackheath is near his cottage. Emory rushes out of the house, desperate to find Jack.

Emory rushes to Adil’s cottage and finds the door to Blackheath. She pounds on the door, screaming for Jack.

From Clara’s soil test results, Thea knows that the chemicals that killed the crops are the chemicals from the stasis pods. The only way that the chemicals could have gotten out is if a mechanical failure caused a pod to open or if someone opened the pod.

Thea believes that Niema woke up one of the humans because she lied about the fog infiltrating Blackheath. Thea asks Hephaestus if he knew about Niema’s betrayal, but he says that he did not. Thea and Hephaestus enter Thea’s lab, where they find the smashed memory extractor. Thea looks at the body that Seth laid out on the gurney. She recognizes the Blackheath uniform and tells Hephaestus that this must have been the person that Niema woke up. Thea tells him that she found fragments of the machine he used to check the cauldron for fissures in Niema’s skull. Hephaestus tells her that he never would have killed Niema, even if he found out she was killing humans from Blackheath. Thea realizes that she would have killed Niema if she discovered that and wonders if she killed Niema.