by Jen Minkman
“He doesn’t want to run the risk you won’t come back,” Tony explains, his gaze trailing down to the floor. “And it’s possible the tests he’ll subject you to will be painful. Or fatal, even.”
Right at that moment, the president himself steps through the door. Immediately, I notice his eyes are different. They no longer look warm and gentle, but determined. “Visiting hours are over,” he nevertheless says in a friendly, calm tone. “You will be allowed another visit in two days’ time.”
“But…” I dazedly look on as William and Tony are steered out of the room by three guards who have come in after Jacob. “Wait!”
“We’ll wait here in Dartmoor,” William calls out before the door closes behind them. “The others have gone to Penzance.”
And then, the president positions himself in front of us, his posture rigid. The generous host suddenly turned into our jailor, and he’s holding all the keys.
“You can’t do this to us!” I explode. “You can’t take our freedom.”
“A noble task awaits you,” Jacob says soothingly. His mealy-mouthed words send a shiver down my back. If you ask me, this man has completely lost it. Fell of the Wall and hit his head too hard. “The two of you hold an important key position in the endeavor to better our world and our lives.”
Walt takes a step forward. “Then please just keep me here,” he begs. “But let Leia go. You only need one of us.”
I want to debate his stupid proposal, but the president beats me to it. He shakes his head. “I need a boy and a girl for my medical tests. You two are perfect. You were destined to go to Exeter together.” He folds his hands into a steeple and smiles. “Don’t you understand how special your people are? How extraordinary you are? The children who fled to Tresco a long time ago were all healthy when they left the mainland. None of them suffered from the disease that had affected the adults and some other children. And the children who died of the poisonous rains some time later never had children of their own. The others, whose immune systems were strong enough to make them survive the radiation-polluted rains, survived – and they became your ancestors. You have survivor genes. And now that you’ve been in Exeter, our doctors can study the antibodies in your blood. Finally find a cure for the disease that still casts its shadow over our lives.” He draws a deep breath and his eyes start to sparkle feverishly. “And my daughter will live. No one will die of the war disease anymore.”
I don’t really understand all the words he’s said, but I do understand what they mean for us. We’re never getting out of here.
“Now what’s left of your ideals of neighborly love?” I snap bitterly. “True, you haven’t used violence, but you are willing to keep us here against our will, make us suffer, just to save others? What would Gideon have thought if he knew? What would Jesus do?”
The Dartmoor leader looks at me with a deep sadness in his eyes. “My child, if you had grown up here, you would have understood. You would have volunteered for these tests. Jesus has given us the most glorious example of all by suffering for our sake. The greatest good,” his voice swells with a climactic crescendo, “is self-sacrifice.”
After the president has left our room, Walt and I sit on the bed, completely stunned into silence. Someone comes in to bring us food, but after that man leaves, despair envelops us. Silence and hopelessness.
“We’re in deep trouble,” Walt finally voices my exact thoughts. “That man has gone off the deep end.”
“It sounded like Tony partly agreed with him,” I say timidly. I don’t want to cry, but I hear my voice crack.
“Well, the part that didn’t agree with Jacob is waiting for us here in Dartmoor, together with my dad.” He holds me close and buries his face against my shoulder. “We’re not all alone,” he says, muffled. “You heard the president, they’ll come back to see us in two days.”
“Will I still have all my fingers and toes in two days?” A note of hysteria is creeping into my voice. “Will I still have blood running through my veins? What are they going to do to us?”
“Please, calm down.” Walt’s body quivers as he says those words to me.
I rub his back with a clammy hand. “You’re one to talk,” I grumble.
He draws a deep breath and starts to cry and laugh at the same time. Biting my lip doesn’t help me anymore – I dissolve into tears as well.
“I thought Jesse had a different face here,” he whispers at last. “But he is still the bogeyman from my nightmares.”
I dry his cheeks. “No, he isn’t,” I say decidedly. “His words were full of love, but these leaders have twisted them to use his life and his teachings the way they see fit. Just like all other people who slavishly follow a book.”
“You think we should get rid of all the books?” Walt muses.
“No, I don’t. But we should always keep in mind that all of them – Luke’s book from Newexter, or the Annals of Annabel from Hope Harbor, or the New Testament from Gideon – they’re just paper,” I say fiercely. “They should be guidelines for people who use their common sense and feel what’s right deep inside. Without heart, soul, and passion, a holy book will just be a dead husk.”
Walt lies down on the bed and loops his arms around me when I cuddle up next to him. “You would have made a wonderful Bookkeeper’s wife,” he says, a melancholy smile around his lips. “Passionate and wise.”
“Please don’t talk about us in the past tense,” I beg. “Your dad and Tony will find a solution.”
“Maybe.”
Despite the worries plaguing us, we manage to fall asleep by the time the city that has taken us captive turns dark and slumbers in stillness.
The next morning, Walt is picked up by two guards. I stand there, frozen with fear, waiting for them to come back and collect me too, but they don’t. Instead, the door slams shut in my face and it doesn’t open until lunchtime, when they bring me back my boyfriend together with our noon meal. Walt trails between two guards following a servant carrying a tray of food. I start crying when I see his pale cheeks, the blankness in his eyes.
“What have you done to him?” I yell rebelliously at the guards. “You criminals!”
The men look at me unperturbedly. “After lunch, the president wants to see you,” one of them says.
A violent shiver runs through me.
When the door falls shut behind the guards, Walt sags down on the bed, his breathing shallow. I sit down next to him and softly caress his hair. “”What have they done to you?” I want to know.
“They drained my blood.” His voice is sluggish. “Loads of it. They just wouldn’t stop. I feel so weak.”
“Eat something,” I say, but Walt turns onto his side, pulls up his knees and closes his eyes.
“Later,” he mumbles.
Despite the guard’s words, no one shows up to take me all afternoon. The continuous wait may be even worse than me actually being hauled off to their test room. Every time I think I hear a sound in the corridor, I flinch, but nobody opens the door to our prison. I only dare to relax after the sun has almost set and the streetlamps down below in the square are lit. Apparently, Jacob changed his mind about needing me. He was probably busy subjecting Walt’s blood to all kinds of tests.
Walt has slept all afternoon. Now that he wakes up again, he is famished and nauseous at the same time. “Do we have something to drink?” he asks listlessly.
I give him the entire bottle of fruit juice and apathetically munch on a piece of dried meat myself. I don’t want to show him how upset I am, but I can’t help it. Salty tears run down my cheeks and mingle with the salt on my lips left there by the cured meat. Walt notices my sadness and gently wipes away my tears.
“Tomorrow my dad and Tony will be here again,” he tries to cheer me up.
“I hope they don’t visit when I’m in the doctor’s office,” I reply bitterly.
In a hushed voice, Walt tells me how they proceeded once he was in the medical center. He was strapped to a chair. Nobody told hi
m what they were planning on doing to him. He was forced to drink two glasses of water, possibly contained with the war disease. And tomorrow, they’ll do the same thing to me – or even worse.
“I can’t take this.” Resolutely, I get up and walk over to the window. “We have to get out of this place, Walt. I don’t care how.”
He follows me and grimly stares at the square far below. “The only way to get out of this room is through the window.” His voice wavers. “And I’m not ready to jump into the deep just yet. There is still hope.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I stare at him in alarm.
His words may shock me now, but how many more nights and days of torture will it take for me to consider those hard paving stones below us a viable option to escape?
“Tony won’t leave us hanging,” Walt continues. “He will help us. I know he will.”
“Okay,” I say, resting my head on his shoulder. I don’t know anything anymore, except one thing – I’m happy I’m not in here by myself.
In the middle of the night, we both jolt awake because a loud noise crashes through our room. In the darkness, I can’t see a thing, so I hold on to Walt and try to suppress my panic.
“What in Goddess’ name was that?” he shouts, bolting upright.
A cold blast of wind hits me in the face. Did someone open the window?
And then I realize the sound we heard was the noise caused by breaking glass, and that someone holding a flashlight is busy knocking out the remaining glass from the rabbets.
“We don’t have much time,” the man tells us. “Tony sent me. I’m here to help you escape.”
A wave of indescribable relief sweeps over me. When Walt and I rush over to the window, we see the man is dangling in front of it from a thick rope. His lower body is secured in a sort of safety harness attached to the rope.
“We need to escape over the roof,” our savior hisses. “Here, put these on.” He tosses us two similar safety harnesses. I don’t have time to think about the fall I’d make if things went wrong – we just follow the man’s instructions. Once we’re done and our ropes are pulled tight, I realize there have to be at least three more people on the rooftop to haul us up. Maybe even more.
“Apparently, Tony has friends in high places,” I tell Walt, who chuckles nervously in response. He takes my hand and helps me to climb onto the window sill.
The wind lifts my hair and blows it into my face. One nerve-wracking second, I don’t see anything and I feel myself teetering, my balance slipping away. But then I am slowly and carefully pulled up by the rope tied around my waste. After I scramble onto the roof, two unfamiliar men grab me by the arms and pull me up.
“Leia.” A voice I know. It’s Walt’s father. “Stay calm. All will be well.”
I look aside and see him standing near the roof’s edge, helping Tony and another man to yank Walt up onto the roof. Their plan worked – we were sprung from our prison. Unfortunately we are still on the palace roof, not to mention the impossibility to sneak out of Dartmoor undetected. How will we ever pull that off?
“Walt, Leia, this is Bishop Aldin of the Protester Church,” Tony introduces us to one of the men. He is heavyset and has a bald head and a red-blond beard. “I told him what the president was doing and he decided to step in.”
“Thank you,” we mumble in unison.
Aldin nods at us. “You are nephew to Tresco’s president?” he asks Walt.
“Something like that, yes. And Leia was the leader of the rebellion on her side of the island. She’s my girlfriend.”
“I suggest we save getting better-acquainted for a later time,” Aldin continues. “Let’s get off this roof without breaking any limbs.”
The part of the roof we’re standing on is flat, but when we follow the bishop he escorts us to a sloping section. Aldin points at a rope ladder dangling down. It seems to lead to a different part of the palace we just fled from. “Our chapel,” he explains. “For now.”
After some heart-tripping moments on the flimsy rope ladder, which sways from left to right in the strong winds, I tumble through an open window and drop down to the floor, my knees wobbly. Then I close my eyes and don’t open them again before everyone else is inside and someone shuts the window. That’s when I get up and walk over to Tony to hug him briefly. “Thank you so much for saving us,” I say in a muffled voice. Walt was right – he and William have figured out how to make things right again. By recruiting a sort of priest who is brave enough to oppose his president.
“We have to get out of here,” Aldin announces. “One of my assistants will make sure those tell-tale ropes are taken down from the roof, or they’ll find out we were involved in no time. There aren’t that many possible escape routes, though. They’ll find out soon enough. So you’re not safe here.”
“Where are you taking us?” Walt asks.
“To Plymouth, on the coast.”
“Why not to Penzance?”
“The presidential guard is keeping watch along the road leading there. We have a freight ship hidden in Plymouth. One of our followers has been busy restoring it for a while now. We were planning on sailing along the coastline to discover new land.”
Aldin doesn’t sound like he adheres to the religion we have come to know. On the contrary, he strikes me as a man with a plan of his own. Yet another influential figure who wants to debate whether the strict rules of Dartmoor make sense. It’s music to my ears.
“How will we get out of Dartmoor unseen?” I ask, my forehead creased with worry.
Aldin’s face falls. “Well, we can’t drive off immediately,” he replies. “That would be suspicious. Fishing crews usually don’t set out in the middle of the night. My assistants will hide you inside a van, and that van will take you across the border in a few more hours. Until that time, you need to keep absolutely quiet in the loading compartment, whatever you hear or feel. Jacob will turn this city upside down stone by stone in order to find you. Everybody will be looking for you.”
“But will that van even be allowed to leave Dartmoor County?” Tony frowns.
Aldin grins deviously. “I have an acquaintance who mans the south gate twice a week. Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to supervise the restoration of our vessel in Plymouth. If the president had found out what I was doing there, he’d have thwarted that plan at once.”
“Why do you keep secrets from the president?” Walt poses the exact same question that has been burning on my lips.
“Jacob wants to rig the church in his own favor,” Aldin says with a dark look. “Tell us how things should be done. So I started a Protester Church with a few like-minded people. That’s what they called it in the old world, if church leaders went against the established order. And when I heard Tony desperately needed help, to liberate the future leader of Tresco of all things, I offered my assistance.”
“Aldin was going to use his ship to explore the coast of the land previously known as England,” William enthuses. “Broaden his horizon. And now we will use that ship to sail back to Penzance and meet up with the others at the harbor.”
Walt solemnly shakes Aldin’s hand. “I won’t forget this,” he says.
In the dark of night, we leave the chapel, which has a back door leading to a quadrangle invisible to prying eyes on the main street. When we step outside, it’s already obvious that something stirs in the city – disconcerted voices rise up, bouncing off the stone surface of the paved square. They don’t sound aggressive or hostile, but they do seem rather anxious.
“Over here,” Aldin hisses, pointing at a van that looks similar to the vehicle Walt and I hid in when we were trying to get back into Dunsford. The only difference is that this van contains a hidden compartment. A hatch is skillfully integrated into the wood paneling in the back, opening up to a hollow space underneath the front seats.
“The next couple of hours won’t be comfortable,” Aldin warns us. “Normally speaking we hide supplies in here to take to Plymouth, so it’s not re
ally made for people. Certainly not four.”
I turn around to Tony. “You’re coming with us?”
He nods. “I’m afraid I have to. Now that you’ve escaped, I’ll be the prime suspect. I know the city and I’m your friend. It’s time for me to leave Dartmoor.”
One by one, we fold ourselves into the cramped, concealed space. No matter how tight and stuffy this compartment is, to us it means freedom. We’re inside a van that will take us to a ship sailing out with us on board, far away from an existence as test subjects in some medical center.
22 – Leia
Pounding, hurried footsteps populate my dreams when I finally fall asleep in Walt’s arms. After Aldin and his assistants disappeared and locked the van behind them, we heard scores of people running past us outside, shouting orders and searching high and low. Someone even opened the van at some point, but they didn’t find us in our hiding place.
I remember that night I came back to our camp after stealing The Book. What Saul did then to find back his treasure is eerily similar to what Jacob is doing now. The president sees us as his property – as lab rats in a cage. And frankly, it’s not even personal. He doesn’t hate us – he just doesn’t understand why we wouldn’t willingly sacrifice ourselves to save many others. He said his God would have done the same.
I wonder why Aldin wants to help us if he believes in the very same God.
After what seems like an eternity, the doors of the van’s cab are opened and someone starts the engine. A feeling of relief floods me as the van starts to move. Now all Aldin needs to do is get out of the city and make it to the south gate, and then we’ll be safe.
I freeze when a radio suddenly crackles to life right next to me. Tony suppresses a curse and fumbles around in the darkness to dig up the device he is apparently carrying. “What’s up?” he mumbles very quietly after pressing the connection button.
“Some ten odd cars have just showed up on the quay,” I hear Captain Tom’s voice, high with panic. “They’re taking up position in the harbor. What should we do?”