Chapter 18: Surveillance State

The bell on the door had a what-do-you-think-you’re-doing note to it, a thin tin thing that objected on principle to being struck, and all morning the rain had been tapping at the window so soft and steady that when anyone came in from Knockturn Alley they shook themselves like so many damp dogs and left a print of their day in the air—wet cloth, wool, hair pomade that had given up. The glass of the cabinet where the better snuffboxes lay had a bloom on it from the cold; Tom had wiped it twice already and could see in the faint oval of his sleeve the way his hand slowed infinitesimally at the groove his thumb had worn into the edge of the ledger. It was nothing, a habit, and he made it stop.

Two men had been across the way since nine, not buying, not putting themselves in the stream of the alley the way honest loiterers did when they hoped to overhear and tell. They were not Aurors. Aurors walked with a particular assertion, even when they tried to be quiet; they had boots that were always clean and a way of looking at your wand hand that announced what they would like to do to it. These two had plain coats, hat brims that drew the rain into neat beads, shoes thick enough to stand in puddles for an hour without complaint. They kept their distance from the doorway and never took shelter under the jut of the awning. There was a kind of official that preferred the difference between what was not written down and what was. The Watch Office had a corridor like that: no sign over the door and files with spines that came off in your hands and went back on again with the wrong names.

Burke came out of the back with a paper package tied neat as a gift and the look of a man who had decided to be in a temper and was now only looking for a subject suitable to begin upon. He set the package down as if he was worried the shelf would give way under it.

“Riddle,” Burke said, in his dry, thin way. “You will keep yourself out of sight. Below. No more hovering. No more talking to people you don’t know.”

Tom turned the ledger to a fresh page and took up the pen, as if he hadn’t heard. The pen was new and there was a hardness to the way it took ink that told on the hand. He preferred the old one, with a nib tamed by work, but he would not give Burke the satisfaction. “Shall I send Mr Borgin to the front to make up your numbers, sir,” he said, very mild, “or will the display cases do the speaking for us?”

Burke’s mouth pinched. He put the tips of his fingers beside the package and made a small thought with them. “Mr Borgin is about. He will do. You will not. Ministry men are about, they have spoken, and I will not have my premises treated like a schoolroom for cleverness. Below, Riddle. If I hear five words out of you to anyone in a hat, you will take your cleverness into the street and wipe it off your shoes there.”

There was nothing very dramatic about being told to go down the stairs. The stairs took his weight exactly as they had always done; the air was no colder. But the order made a kind of shape in the day that did not fit with the other shapes Tom had been arranging, and there was an itch to it he had to name and smooth. He closed the ledger, turned it so the binding sat square, and took the package, because even Burke would sooner see something carried than argued.

“Of course,” Tom said. He waited the fraction of a breath it took to be almost impolite and then gave the little bow a boy gave a headmaster he no longer had, and went.

The cellar was always more than itself. It was where the shop put what it did not like to think about too closely, a holding space for things that might be illegal in the morning and perfectly respectable by teatime if the law moved its face an inch to the left. It smelled of rot carefully arrested—oil rags, old rope, damp cabbage leaves from last October that had been helpful in keeping a certain silver from tarnish. Tom set the package on the long bench and unwrapped it; the paper left a square clean of dust like a suggestion. From upstairs came the scrape of Mr Borgin’s voice going ingratiating around a laugh. In the wall the pipe that carried the rain somewhere was clicking to itself.

He began to put things in order. It was not a way to pass the time; it was a way to keep the time from passing him. The ledger down here was the one they would show to anyone who asked to see it and took their hat off. The other one was the one that answered questions before they were asked. He reached for it and did not touch it, because Burke had a sense for scratches and fingerprints on what ought to have been left alone, and there was no pleasure in being obvious when you did not need to be.

The bell went upstairs. The voice that came after it did not belong to Mr Borgin. It had the sort of weight in it that said its owner had been given to believe he was important so early that he no longer had to think about the fact, which was the more dangerous kind. Tom set the tie string from the package between forefinger and thumb and wound it twice and unwound it again, and then he went and put his shoulders at an angle that would make them take up nobody’s attention, and went up.

Mr Borgin had put his smile on like a borrowed mask. The man facing him was lean without looking hungry, his hat at an angle that said he had not thought about its angle at all. He had let the rain sit where it liked on the brim. His coat had a glassy newness to it that meant it had been brushed hard to improve it. His hands were in the pockets. He did not take them out when he turned his head and looked at Tom.

“Ah,” Mr Borgin said, with a flutter, “our boy is at tasks beneath his talents. I will have him fetch that thing from the back—what was it you were asking after, sir?—and then we must let him go down again, not well, poor child, the damp you know how it gets into boys’ lungs—”

“Leave him,” the man said, not to Tom, not to Borgin, as if he was tired of telling people what to do and being obeyed and was only doing it for the sake of habit. He tapped the glass with one finger and said, to the snuffbox display, “Mr Riddle.”

Tom did not ask who told him that name, which name he had chosen to keep. He inclined his head as if to a customer who had once paid a bill on time. Burke was at Tom’s shoulder without making a sound; Tom could smell the mothballs before the hand slid into his elbow and reminded him that stairs existed and were nice places for boys.

“Below,” Burke said. His voice did not rise. “My boy has work to do.”

“Your boy has a mind,” the man said, and looked at Burke in the way an adult looked at a child who had been impudent in a drawing room and would be spoken to later. “When you want him not to use it, you should perhaps send him to someone else to have it looked after.”

“Sir,” said Burke, and put the word down like a coin he did not enjoy parting with. “If the Ministry would like to ask questions of a proprietor, it may do so by owl. Or by appointment. It will not do so by sticking a man under my nose and asking if I will like him. Riddle, go below.”

“Riddle,” the man said, and then he did take his hands out of his pockets. They were good hands. He could have been a surgeon, or a man who wrote with soft quills so that he did not have to press. He set a card on the glass. There was nothing written on it. “You take tea in the afternoons at three. You prefer a place where the tables are not too close because you do not like to be touched when other people stand up and the chairs go back. Your employer does not allow you to take a pastry because you will make crumbs on the paper. You will come out the side door and go left. You will cross the yard and not look up because you think there is a cat behind the chimney.”

“Sir,” Burke said, quite softly.

The man did not look at him. He looked at Tom. “Four o’clock,” he said. “You will go right, instead. Holborn. No hat. If you wear a hat you will put your hand to it and that will be a signal to a person you do not see to follow you. No signal. No hat. Sit down.”

Mr Borgin coughed. “Sir,” he said, and it was not deference so much as an appeal to a rule that would make men go away when they were finished. “This is a shop. We sell things.”

The man looked down at the snuffboxes. “You sell stories about the things,” he said. “A small one suited to the price. I will have one of them another day. Mr Riddle, four o’clock. We will ask for the name of the man who carved the triple-hinged oak that came through here last month. The box is gone. We are not asking for the box. We are asking for the hand that made it. You are not to bring anything with you. You are not to take anything away. Your employer does not need to know we spoke. If he is an intelligent man he will pretend he did not see us and keep his money.”

“It is an old box,” Burke said. There was a thin film on the word old; Tom could have put his thumb to it and lifted it away. “I do not recall any such thing.”

“Of course,” the man said, and put his card back into his pocket because there had been no point to it except to pick up the light. “Two years ago a pair of cufflinks was relieved of an unfortunate habit. The habit was the sort that gave people a shock. The cufflinks went home to their family without the habit. We would like to speak to the man who put his hand to that work. We do not ask for the cufflinks.”

Tom kept his face. It was not difficult to keep a face in place when you had been practising since childhood with people who wanted to put a hand under the chin and turn it. Only his breath did something under his ribs that annoyed him: a shift as if the air had changed places with the bone and the bone did not care for the arrangement. He let his gaze go half a degree to the left, away from the man’s eyes, as if he had found the hinge on the oak and did not wish to be rude enough to admire it. Four o’clock, in Holborn, without a hat. The Watch Office liked to think it did not exist; it liked to borrow men from other departments and call them Inspectors so that Aurors did not have to know; it liked names.

Burke’s fingers were still on his elbow. There was strength in them he did not often show. “No,” Burke said, to the Inspector, and then to Tom, in a voice that was suddenly intimate with cold, “below.”

“Four,” the Inspector said. The word dropped and lay there. He nodded as if to a piece of furniture he expected to see again, and went out, the brim of his hat taking the rain neatly; the bell protested at being asked to work twice in a minute. Across the way, the two men in plain coats did not move because why would you move when movement was the thing that said you were watching.

Burke did not look out. He did not call for Mr Borgin. He did not rub his hands or do any of the things a small man does when he is afraid and wishes to make that feeling travel. He let go of Tom’s elbow. “If you go to him,” he said, “you will not come back here. I will not be made into a step. I will not have any more men than necessary standing in my alley thinking they are clever, and I will not have a boy so much as glance at them and prove them right. You will go down. You will stay down. You will go home by the back and not by the front and you will not look up at the chimneys, because there is no cat and there never was. Do you understand me?”

Tom said, “Yes,” because there was no point in anything else. The breath was obedient now; the bone had accepted the air back. He picked up the package and went back below, where the pipe clicked on and on. He set the package down and unwrapped it again because it was a good thing to do with your hands when you were not yet choosing which disobedience you would commit first.

It was the right kind of setback. It asked a cost without making a drama of itself. He would pay it or he would find someone else to pay it for him. Either way, the price would be noted on the correct page.

He spent the hour between eleven and noon in the cellar picking up and setting down the same three objects until he could feel exactly where they pressed the table and where they did not. It steadied the day. Once, his thumb found the groove again, not in the ledger this time but in the edge of the bench, and he smoothed it thoughtlessly, and then he stopped and put his hand down flat as if the wood might mistake him for a man who took comfort from furniture.

Even Mr Borgin, when he came down to say that a person had called to look at “those things we do not say out loud in the morning,” did not dare go all the way to the end of the shelf where the second ledger sat with its binding not quite true, though he wanted to. There were men upstairs with hats who did not look at wands, there was rain, there was a bell with an opinion. These were the little weather systems of Tom’s day. He moved in them as he had always done, foot to stone, breath to rib, eye to hinge.

Four o’clock sat ahead of him like a chair that had been set out in a room and you knew it had not been set there for comfort. Holborn. No hat. A name asked for. Not a box. Not a theft. A test, then, and not even an interesting one. Burke had given the order that he did not come back if he went. That was not a test; Burke was not a man who believed boys failed honestly. Burke believed boys took his property and ran.

At two, Mr Borgin sent him for his tea, because Mr Borgin could be more careful than Burke in appearing to keep his money. The place across the yard had tables too close, but the owner liked boys from the alley and wiped crumbs off their suits as if they were her own nephews. Tom did not sit. He drank standing in the corner by the umbrella stand and watched the rain go slant on the glazing. The taste of the tea was thin and a little burnt. He thought about the man’s hands and the kind of work they did on paper, and how many names could be written down in that hand before the ink began to tell on conscience.

It would have been easy to go right at four and sit and be spoken to and obey and then perhaps begin to be given lists, little errands, small safeties. Some people were comforted by being met in public and told they were brave. Tom had never been particularly interested in being brave. He was interested in outcomes.

He went back to the shop by the back as he had been told. He did not look up at the chimneys. He wondered if there was a cat anyway. He put his hand to the banister and took it away again. He would be seen at four; he would not be. He went down the stairs. He stayed down. He listened to the pipe click. He was not counting, exactly, but the pipe obliged him by taking on a pattern and keeping it, and this was enough.

Evening brought a different weather. The rain had run out of itself and left everything rinsed and raw. The alley damp had pulled back into the brick, and the lamps came up with a faint shiver of bad wiring that made the glass seem untrustworthy, as if it would go out when you needed it.

He went home by no route any of the men across the way would have expected him to take and arrived not at home at all but at the room above the shuttered hatter’s near Bloomsbury where they had begun going two months ago. The hatter had gone away to the country during the war and never come back, and her granddaughter had decided to be practical and turn the place into an office for men who never brought papers. Tom had liked her for her decisions and had given her money to decide something else. It was a good room. It had walls that knew when to keep quiet and a door that did not object to being locked.

Abraxas was there already, because Abraxas enjoyed being punctual when it could be read as superiority. He had the kind of pallor that good linen learned from; he made his chair forget it had been scuffed. His wand lay beside his hand like something that had been born with him. Rosier had brought him in, because Rosier liked to walk into places with beautiful things, and Abraxas was, in certain moods, a beautiful thing. Rosier himself had a way of sitting with his weight on one hip that made the chair think about who it had been made for. Nott had his back to the wall because Nott never trusted the bit you could not see. Avery came last, smelling faintly of hair oil and nerves, and closed the door too hard, then opened it to see if anyone had noticed, and then closed it nicely.

“Riddle,” Abraxas said. He did not get up. “You look as if your employer has remembered who pays him.”

“That does not happen often,” Rosier said, to the ceiling. “If it does, I try to be out.”

Tom took the chair set a fraction off centre to the rest and made it behave. “The Watch Office sent a man,” he said. “Not an Auror. They do not always call themselves anything. He had two hats across the way to watch me walk. Mr Burke thinks his premises are not the place for civil servants. He would like me to go and stay gone if I put my feet on the pavement at four of the clock and set them towards Holborn.”

Nott’s lip twitched. “Ah,” he said. “Holborn. He is trying to make you feel like an adult, then. Aurors do Kingsley’s walk round the Ministry. The other ones like Holborn because the restaurants make them think they have not made a mistake with their souls.”

Avery laughed and stopped when no one else did. “What do they want?” he asked. “Not that you will tell them. Only—if they are going to put their shoes under the table with us we should know where to put the knives.”

“Names,” Tom said. He gave them the piece of the day he had decided to give. “The man who cut the triple-hinge on a box we moved last month. Not the box. No stealing. The hand. Two years ago they noticed a pair of bad cuffs that stopped being bad and went home like gentlemen.”

Rosier closed his eyes and smiled. “They have been walking behind you for a longer time than they want you to think,” he said. “Delicious. Will you bring them a hand, then, and let them shake it, and then take it away again when they have warmed to the owner?”

“Burke says if I go to four I do not come back,” Tom said. He put his fingertips on the edge of the table between them and let them rest there, as if he felt the grain as a man might read a fortune in tea. “Burke will be angry for a day or a week and then he will decide he enjoys his money more than he enjoys his anger, but for that day and that week he will be awkward, and in that time he could make my life smaller, and small things are easier to break under someone else’s hand than they are discreet under mine.”

Abraxas moved his wand with one finger and set it straight, very precisely. “Do you want him?” he asked. “This Inspector. Does he belong to you already and you are telling me what you are going to do because it pleases you to make me think my opinion matters. Or is it the other way and you are asking because you enjoy the story where I say no and you do it anyway.”

“I am telling you,” Tom said. “Because tomorrow and the next day we will do things that would look different if a certain pair of plain coats saw them. I would prefer those coats to spend their time walking behind men who are not us.” He let that sit. He did not tap the table. He did not move his fingers. “At four, I will sit and be spoken to. I will give them a name that is not a name, because it does not exist anymore, and I will watch what they do with the emptiness. It will tell me whether they like their files tidy or only their hands.”

Avery looked at the door. “And if they follow you here,” he said. “If they put their coats in my hallway, Riddle, my mother will have an episode.”

“Nobody will follow anybody here,” Abraxas said, with the comfortable arrogance of a man whose name had always been a wall. “People in plain coats do not know how to be interested in anything that smells of old money unless they are told to be very loudly, and you do not tell them to be very loudly, you let them find themselves in the great soup of their own mediocrity and they drown.”

“Walk,” Nott said. “You sit. I will walk. Rosier, stop looking at the ceiling as if it will give you an idea; it will not. Avery, pretend to be useful and go to the window and be breath on the glass. If there is anyone cleverer than a lamppost outside I will—”

“—knock,” Rosier said. “Once for ‘lamppost,’ twice for ‘dog,’ thrice for ‘run,’ and if there are four knocks we all stand still and see what happens.”

Avery did move, to please them, and fogged the cold pane with his ridiculous conscientiousness. The street below was ordinary and full of the kind of people whose shoes remembered war and whose coats smelt of clean coal. The hatter’s sign had been taken down and put in a corner. There was a scrape on the floor where it had been dragged. Tom looked at it and thought briefly about the granddaughter and about decisions, and put that thought away as he put everything away that was not immediately useful.

“They asked for a name,” he said, and his thumb smoothed the edge of the table without his permission and then stopped. “We will give them one that is true, in the sense that it once belonged to a hand that cut good hinges and is unlikely to trouble anyone now because the hand is in the ground. It is not generous. It is not nothing. It is what they give men when they test them to see if they will obey. I will obey, a little. It amuses me to see what they think is a pass and what is a fail.”

Abraxas’s mouth curled, not unkindly. “You are like a boy with a new set of paints,” he said. “You will get colour everywhere. My mother will be furious with you, you know. She asked again about your work. I told her something dull on purpose and she said she did not raise me to be dull.”

“You did not raise yourself to be dull, Abraxas,” Rosier said, without opening his eyes. “We will all be dead from your interest in being interesting if we are not careful.”

Tom let them be themselves for a minute. It had its uses when men reminded you of their weaknesses with no prompting. Nott tapped the table once, twice, three times, to no pattern at all, and Tom found his eyes moving to the door and coming back again. Someone in the room breathed a little too loudly and remembered not to. The lamp hissed.

“Tomorrow,” Tom said, “we will visit Mr Nott’s cousin in Farringdon and remind him that there are times when one puts letters on paper and times when one does not. We will show him our little plan for the North Dock and we will let him think it is his idea so that he will get out in front of it and take the impact with his body when anything comes back. We will not use wands. We will not wear anything that looks like it can be bought in a shop where someone wipes things to make them shine. We will walk as though we have always walked there. It is nothing for the Watch Office to be excited about unless it likes to be bored.”

“Good,” Nott said, and set his chair back on four legs. “I hate using wands. It makes the mind lazy. If you do not have to find a back door, you never learn where the hinges are.”

Rosier laughed, very low. “I like the front door,” he said. “I like it when people open things for me and look pleased to have done it.”

“And yet your hands are very good at doors that do not wish to be opened,” Abraxas said. “Riddle. Burke.”

“Burke,” Tom said, and only when he said the name did it occur to him that a part of him had been waiting to be asked about it. His jaw did something faint by the ears and stopped. “He was explicit. If I go to four I do not come back. He believes I will select loyalty to my employer over interest in the things my employer does not pay me enough to ignore. He is wrong about that. But he is right about the cost of being right if I am thought careless. I am not careless. We make other arrangements. Borgin will understand being bribed; Burke will pretend he knows nothing about it. For a week we do not let Burke be implicated in anything.”

“You are generous,” Abraxas said, dry. “To a man who keeps you in a cellar and shouts about boys.”

Tom looked at him and did not smile. “We will need the cellar again,” he said. “It is a place where things can be put briefly that do not like to be looked at. I do not break places I mean to use. Not when it is not necessary.”

“Riddle,” Avery said from the window, with a kind of urgency that made the word hatch an echo. “Lamp post, dog, lamppost again, no—sorry—oh. No.” He turned back, his face eager with wanting to be useful and also with not being certain what he had seen. “A man took off his hat.”

“We are in Bloomsbury,” Nott said. “They take their hats off to the Queen and to lunch. Sit down.”

Rosier opened his eyes and tipped his head back and looked at Tom with a kind of speculative affection. “Four,” he said, as if he liked the number. “Do you need a shadow. Or shall we all trust your shoulders.”

“I prefer not to be touched when chairs go back,” Tom said. “I will go alone. If I do not come out in an hour and a half, you will not come in. You will go to the dock and do the thing with Nott’s cousin and you will not change our day around because a civil servant has discovered he mislikes the person he is.”

“Do they want to buy you?” Abraxas said. He did not say it with a sneer. He said it as a man might inquire whether a particular horse was intended for stud or for battle.

“Only the parts I’ll sell,” Tom said, and that made something in Rosier’s eyes spark, and put a line beside Nott’s mouth that could have been a smile or could have been the beginning of some other expression altogether. Tom reached out and adjusted the little map of the North Dock that lay folded under a glass. He put it straight, then crooked, then straight again. “I will see them,” he said. “I will give them the weight of a name buried neatly long enough ago to be respectable. I will see how they carry it. There is a difference between a man who puts a thing in a pocket and a man who puts it in a file. When I know which, we will decide how much of our dinner to let them eat.”

“Tomorrow,” Abraxas said. He stood because it pleased him to order the night as if it knew what was good for it. “Nine,” he said, “for Farringdon. Waltzing shoes not required. Bring your faces. Nott, find out if my cousin’s friend is still sleeping with the shipping clerk; if so, we will press him like a flower. Avery, go home to your mother. Rosier, if you smile at his mother she will faint and then she will scold you after. Try it.”

Avery coloured absurdly and made as if to set his hair more carefully. Rosier crooked a finger at him and made him flush deeper. Nott picked up his hat and set it down again and set it down differently, and Tom watched the small movements people made with the things they had when they were thinking about the things they did not yet have.

The scrape in the floor where the hatter’s sign had been moved was just to the left of the door; he stepped over it, without looking, and smiled to himself, not because there was any pleasure in the evening except that of choosing it, but because the choice had put them all a step forward and that was, in its way, a taste like salt at the back of the tongue—necessary, plain, and what you kept.

Outside, the rain had lost interest in being tedious and was only wet. He kept to the pavements that did not carry their own histories in puddles. A man with a newspaper went past, folded, his hat in his hand, his hair flattened where it had been. Tom did not look at the lampposts. He turned right at four without wearing a hat and sat. The chair was the sort that had been made for writing letters in; it said nothing when it took his weight. Across him, the Inspector sat, and the table knew that two men with very different pockets had put their elbows on it, and said nothing as well.

“You are on time,” the Inspector said. He did not speak as if it pleased him.

“I dislike making other people wait,” Tom said. He did not say what it did to him when he waited. The breath under his ribs had made a home for itself. He let it settle. “Shall we begin.”

“You will not say my name and I will not say yours,” the Inspector said. “You will not bring paper and I will not bring anyone with a badge. You will tell me the name of the carver who cut that hinge and the man who took the habit off those cufflinks. You may tell me lies if you like. We will know.”

Tom looked at the man’s hands and thought about ink and where it soaked into skin, and he tipped his head half a degree the other way as if the hinge was on this side and needed attention. He gave him a name, and it was not a lie. It was true in the way that mattered for tests and for men who took pride in their checking. The hand that had cut the hinge had been good and was in the ground now, and the dirt did not give up what it had learnt under it.

“Thank you,” the Inspector said, as if he were being ordinary about it. “And thank you, in advance, for what we will ask you next.” He folded his fingers. There was a scar along the nail of his little finger. It was not an important scar. It was the kind you only got from carelessness and then kept because you had decided there was nothing to be done about it. Tom put the information away without ceremony. “We do not want you,” the Inspector said. “We want the way you look at things. Consider this, Mr Riddle. Your establishment—your drawing room—these boys—” he waved a hand as if there were several of them around their table and not four blocks away, “—all very impressive. But the world is changing. The establishment does not like to say so, because it is still arranging its hair in the mirror. Men who know how to move through rooms like yours are useful to men like me. We propose a mutually beneficial arrangement of—what did you call it—?”

“Outcomes,” Tom said. He sat very still. There was no part of him that wished to put his hand to his hat. “You will ask me for names that are not boxes. I will decline to steal for you. You will give me things you think are of value and I will take only the ones that can be spent in the place I prefer to be.”

The Inspector considered his hands. “A pity,” he said, not as if he meant it. “Some boys like biscuits. You do not seem to.”

“I have never cared for crumbs,” Tom said. He breathed in and out and let the breath behave. “Will that be all.”

“For today,” the Inspector said, and he said the word today in such a way that it was a door set very carefully on its hinges to swing easily when asked. “Not for the week.”

Tom stood; the chair exhaled. He had not spilt anything. He had left no grease. The four o’clock men across the room had newspapers and mouths like purses. No one took a hat off. He put his hand in his pocket as if to warm it and felt only the inside of his coat and the little emptiness where something was going to go once he had decided which thing it would be.

He did not go back to Burke’s. He went to the long street where the bomb sites had been tidied into gardens and walked it until the cold in his hands said enough. He thought about Abraxas’s question. Do they want to buy you. The answer had been correct. There were always pieces. He would spend one piece tomorrow on a cousin in Farringdon; he would spend another on a dock. He would keep the rest in his pocket where they could not be counted, not yet.

He went home at last, by a way that would have bored the plain coats senseless. The door he chose opened. There was nothing mysterious about it. He had put the key in himself. The city held its breath, as cities do when they believe they are alone. He leaned his back against the wood in a way a boy did who had learned that blankets could mean two different things and that only one of them was the kind he wanted, and then he pushed off and set about the evening’s work, which was to do nothing that would surprise anyone but him. There would be time enough for surprises. There always was, when men believed themselves watchful and forgot to remember why.