After the Fire

by Will Hill

  I nod at Nurse Harrow. She gives me a smaller, sadder version of her usual smile and opens the door. I step through it and seventeen pairs of eyes turn towards me at the same time.

  “Hey,” I say, hoping you can project calm without actually feeling it. “How’s everyone doing today?”

  “Luke Ascended,” says Jeremiah. His eyes are bright, and there’s a big smile on his face. “The Prophet Called him into the presence of The Lord. It’ll be our turn soon.”

  My stomach churns. “Okay,” I say. “Do you want to talk about that?”

  Jeremiah nods eagerly, as do most of our Brothers and Sisters. Near the back of the room, Honey and Rainbow and a couple of others stay absolutely still, looks of disgust on their faces.

  “Luke was the best one of us,” says Jeremiah. “He was the most True. That’s why he went first.”

  I sit down cross-legged in the middle of the floor, and gesture for the rest of them to join me. They come willingly, even Honey and Rainbow, and arrange themselves into a circle, their eyes fixed on me. Several of them automatically hold hands with the person beside them.

  “Is that what you all think?” I ask.

  Most of them nod, their small faces earnest and serious. A few don’t respond at all, and maybe half a dozen shake their heads. Of the dissenters, only Aurora is brave enough to actually speak up.

  “I don’t think Luke was the best,” she says, her voice just about steady. “I think he was mean, and I don’t think he Ascended. I think he’s in Hell.”

  A shiver dances up my spine. Her face is pale, but her eyes are full of determination, and my heart surges at the sight of it.

  “You don’t know anything,” says Jeremiah, his voice rising. “You’re just a stupid girl. Why don’t you shut up?”

  “That’s enough,” I say. “Everyone is allowed their own opinion.”

  “That’s not an opinion,” says Jeremiah, his voice high and trembling. “That’s Heresy. Luke was our Brother and he was Called Home by Father John and she can’t say he’s in Hell. She isn’t allowed.”

  Broken, whispers the voice in the back of my head.

  I ignore it, and focus all my attention on Jeremiah. He was born in The Base, both his parents and his older brother – his biological brother – died in the fire, and I remind myself that he’s grieving, that he’s just a little boy whose entire world has fallen down around him. I tell myself to be patient with him.

  With all of them.

  “Is it important to you that Luke Ascended, Jeremiah?” I ask.

  He frowns, like I’ve just asked him the stupidest question in the history of questions. “Of course it is,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s gone to sit at the side of The Lord,” he says. “Like Father John promised.”

  And if you can believe that’s what has happened to Luke, you can believe that’s what happened to your parents and your brother.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” I ask.

  “He’s looking down on us right now,” he says. “They all are.”

  “What do you want them to see?”

  “That we wish we were there with them,” he says, and I see tears in the corners of his eyes. “That we didn’t want to be left here on our own. That we want to come too.”

  “Luke didn’t go anywhere, Jeremiah,” says Honey, her voice low. “Neither did Father John, or anyone else. They’re just dead.”

  I grimace as Jeremiah turns on her, his face flushing a deep, angry pink.

  “You’re a liar!” he screams. “Take it back!”

  Honey shakes her head. “I won’t.”

  Jeremiah jumps to his feet, his hands balling into fists. “I’ll make you take it back!” he shouts. “I’ll—”

  “You won’t do anything,” I say. “Calm down, Jeremiah.”

  He looks at me, his eyes wide with outrage. “Didn’t you hear her?” he asks. “What she said about The Prophet?”

  “I heard what she said,” I say. “I can see you’re upset, and that’s okay. But violence isn’t the answer.”

  “If the Centurions were here they would—”

  “What would they do?” I ask.

  “They would beat her,” says Jeremiah, and the light in his eyes churns my stomach. “They would put her in a box until she promised not to say Heresy.”

  “Do you think that would be fair?” I ask.

  He nods. “Definitely.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what The Lord wants.”

  “How do you know that’s what He wants?” asks Honey, taking the words out of my mouth.

  Jeremiah shakes his head. “Because He told Father John.” He speaks each word really slowly, as though he’s talking to someone stupid. “And Father John told us.”

  “How do you know The Lord told Father John anything?” asks Honey.

  “Because—”

  “Because he said so,” said Honey. “Exactly. But what if he was lying, Jeremiah? What then?”

  “Why would Father John do that?” asks Jeremiah, and the innocent Faith shining on his face makes me want to go back in time to the fire and do what I did in the Big House all over again. “We’re his Family. Why would he lie to us?”

  “People lie,” says Honey, her voice noticeably softer than before. “I’m sorry, Jeremiah. I didn’t mean to upset you. But people lie.”

  There’s a moment of pregnant silence, in which I genuinely don’t know whether Jeremiah is going to launch himself at Honey or burst into tears. The rest of our Brothers and Sisters are staring at me like they’re waiting for me to do something, and I want to tell them there’s nothing I can do, that these are the conversations we need to have if any of us are going to move forward, but I don’t know how to tell them that, so I don’t say anything at all.

  “I don’t lie,” says Rainbow thoughtfully. “I don’t think it’s very nice.”

  I let out an involuntary snort of laughter. My face instantly fills with guilty heat, but the carefully considered seriousness in her voice sucker-punched me, and the laugh was the only way my body knew how to process it.

  Rainbow frowns at me in that frustrated way children do when they don’t think they’re being taken seriously. I wave a hand in her direction, trying to reassure her that I wasn’t laughing at her, I honestly wasn’t, but then Honey starts to laugh and so does Winter and that sets me off again and I feel something give way inside me – because what else are you supposed to do when the world has burned to ash but you’re still alive, still breathing, and there’s still the prospect of a future, no matter how fragile and uncertain?

  Three people laughing is more than enough to infect anyone within earshot, and within a second almost everyone has joined in. Some are holding their sides and pressing their hands over their mouths, their cheeks turning pink, their eyes suddenly full of a joy that had seemed unimaginable ten seconds ago. Rainbow is still frowning, as though she isn’t totally convinced we aren’t laughing at her, but even Jeremiah manages the faintest of smiles, although I can’t help but think it’s more the result of Honey apologizing to him than anything close to genuine happiness.

  But that’s okay.

  It’s something.

  And for the briefest of moments, a thought occurs to me for the first time since the fire: the possibility, however faint and flickering, that maybe things will turn out all right, at least for some of them.

  Maybe.

  The blue house. The smoking chimney. The green grass. The cliffs. The wide expanse of water. The two figures.

  I draw and set the paper aside and grab a fresh sheet and draw the same thing again. The image doesn’t require any conscious thought, which is just as well, because my mind is full of Luke.

  Of all the awful things that happened because of Father John, a list that is long and full of horror, Luke’s death – right now, at this particular moment – feels like the very worst of them. My grown-up Brothers and Sisters chose to follow The
Prophet, to trust him and believe in him and dedicate their lives to him, for their own reasons: genuine Faith, or desperation, or maybe just the need to be part of something, to be able to believe that life was more than merely what they could see and touch.

  But Luke?

  He never had a choice. His was made for him, before he was even born.

  A memory surfaces. Luke when he was maybe ten or eleven, gangly and awkward and nowhere near fully formed, probably eighteen months after Father John arrived at The Base. He’s sat near the southern edge of the yard and he’s writing numbers on the tarmac with a piece of chalk, like he’s marking out a hopscotch grid. I’m walking across the yard and I stop behind him and read the numbers over his shoulder.

  21:1

  19:11

  21:8

  12:9

  20:10

  1:5

  He glances up at me, smiles, then carries on writing. I stare at the numbers for a long time until I realize what I’m looking at.

  They’re passages from the Bible.

  From the Book of Revelation.

  I reach for a new sheet of paper as tears fill my eyes. I don’t blink them back, or wipe them away. I let them come, because they’re the least Luke deserves. That all of them deserve.

  What chance did he ever have? With no parents to care for him and Father John as his surrogate father, whispering the end of the world into his ear?

  Horizon told me once that if you beat a dog from the day it’s born, it’ll whimper and hide and look scared and cowed. But he said that eventually – and you won’t ever know when it’s coming – that same dog will bite. It’ll bite, because you’ve never given it a reason not to.

  I push another page aside. The drawing is getting looser and looser; the house is now little more than an X in a square with a triangle on top, above grass that is green stab marks and water that is zigzag lines of blue.

  I think about Luke, and Honey and Rainbow and the others, and Doctor Hernandez and Agent Carlyle, and I tell myself that all I want to do is help, that all I want to do is make things better.

  Liar, whispers the voice in the back of my head, although it doesn’t sound unkind. It sounds gentle.

  I lower my head as fresh tears roll down my cheeks, because I know it’s right. I am lying, to myself – if all I really wanted to do was help, then I would have told Doctor Hernandez everything in our very first session, and to Hell with the consequences. But I didn’t, and I still haven’t, because I don’t know what will happen to me if I do and I’m scared to find out.

  But…

  What if something I haven’t told them could have saved Luke? Some small detail that would have made Doctor Hernandez and his colleagues watch him even more closely, or put him somewhere he couldn’t have hurt himself?

  No. No no no no.

  I can’t think like that. I just can’t.

  Nobody will ever know exactly why Luke did what he did, because nobody is ever going to be able to ask him, unless it turns out that Father John was right all along.

  I shiver, because that is a prospect that doesn’t bear thinking about. Not for a single second.

  I start to draw again, trying to force myself to slow down and be more careful, to create something that looks like it might actually exist in the real world, and I think again about what Doctor Hernandez and Agent Carlyle asked me to do.

  I’m grateful to them.

  I am.

  Like with everything else that has happened since I woke up inside this grey place, I have to assume there’s more going on than I know. It’s possible that their request is a calculated move, that they understand the way my brain works and can anticipate my responses and are just allowing me the illusion of free will.

  I don’t think so though.

  Doctor Hernandez’s eyes were full of concern as he explained what they want me to do and why, which means he was either genuinely affected by Luke’s death and what it might mean for the rest of the survivors or he’s a horribly good actor.

  There’s no way for me to know which, but it doesn’t really matter either way. Because I can’t let this be about me any more, about what I know and what I did and what will happen to me if anyone finds out.

  My Brothers and Sisters are what’s important.

  They’re what matter.

  They smile when I tell them what Rainbow said, even though I know at least one of them will have been watching when she spoke.

  “You did very well,” says Doctor Hernandez. “You stayed calm, you encouraged discussion, and you didn’t shut Jeremiah down when he started acting out. It was exactly what we were hoping for.”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” I say. “But I’m not doing it for you, or for me. I’m doing it for them.”

  Agent Carlyle smiles at me.

  “Of course,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Can you tell me why?”

  “Because there’s going to be a day when they leave this place,” I say. “And they’re going to find out, they’re going to see with their own eyes, that everything they know is wrong and that everything they were told was a lie. The ones who were born after The Purge only know about the real world secondhand.”

  “They’ll be looked after,” he says. “We’re not going to abandon them. We’ll help them every step of the way.”

  “I believe you,” I say, and I genuinely do. “But when people they don’t know start telling them what they’ve been brought up to believe is wrong, it just makes it look like Father John was right about Outsiders.”

  “So you think it has to come from you?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not saying that,” I say. “I can see the progress they’ve already made, and I know some of them are starting to trust you and your colleagues. Do I think hearing the same things from me, or from Honey, will help? Yes. I think it will. But I honestly don’t know how much good it will do, in the end. Their scars go really deep.”

  “You’re trying,” he says. “That’s all you can do.”

  He’s right, whispers the voice in the back of my head. And it matters. It’s not nothing.

  I nod.

  “Was it what happened to the kids that made you start to doubt the Legion?” asks Agent Carlyle. “The thing with Luke and Honey, and what Jacob Reynolds did to Lucy?”

  I shrug. “The thing with Honey was definitely part of it,” I say. “But Jacob beating Lucy after training was only a day or two before the fire. My Faith had failed long before then.”

  “Can you remember what first made you question things?” he asks. “Was it your mother getting banished?”

  I nod.

  “Are you ready to talk about that?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “No.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiles. “Why?”

  “Because I need to.”

  The sky is low and grey as the Centurions escort me to the Big House.

  My legs are trembling as I walk up the steps and onto the porch. Bear knocks on the door and he and Horizon stand either side of me while we wait for someone to answer it. I ask them what’s going on for probably the fiftieth time in the last two minutes, but neither of them answers and neither of them will look at me.

  “Please,” I say. “Tell me what’s happening. Please.”

  Nothing.

  “You have to come with us,” was what Bear said. I was working in the gardens, although I wasn’t really working, I was mostly daydreaming, and that’s what I thought they had noticed when I saw them coming towards me. “Your mother has been called before Father John to answer for her sins.”

  I frowned at him. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “What sins?”

  “Heresy,” said Bear, and I felt my stomach turn to water.

  Bella opens the front door and I walk into the Big House on legs made of Jell-O and I see my mom standing in the middle of the big living room and I shout her name because I’m really scared and nobody will tell me what’s happening. She
spins around at the sound of my voice and gives me a look that I know well, the same look I saw when I fell off the car and broke my arm – the one she gives me when she wants me to be brave. Panic explodes through me and I rush forward, desperate to throw myself against her, but Horizon takes a single giant stride and lifts me easily off the ground. I kick and thrash and scream but he presses my arms to my sides and holds me tight.

  “Don’t make it worse,” he whispers. “The Lord is Good.”

  “It’s all right,” shouts my mom. “It’s all right, my little Moon. Don’t cry.”

  Horizon puts me down. He keeps his hands on my shoulders, but I don’t think I could make myself move again – the look of fury on my mom’s face, her cheeks red and her eyes blazing as she stares at Father John, has frozen me to the spot. The Prophet is sat in the big armchair beneath the window with Angel and Lonestar standing silently either side of him. Bella and Star and Agavé are perched on the staircase, pinched and pale.

  Everybody apart from me belongs to Father John. There’s nobody here for my mom. I’m the only witness to whatever is about to happen.

  There’s no fear on my mom’s face. Her mouth is set in a thin line and she’s staring at Father John now, her gaze locked on his. My heart is thundering in my chest and my insides have shrivelled to the size of a walnut and I’m shaking with fear because I don’t understand, I don’t understand this at all. I woke up this morning and had breakfast and went to the gardens and everything was totally normal, and now it all seems like it’s been turned upside down.

  “Do you deny the charges that have been brought against you?” asks Father John. His voice is low and deep and full of threat.

  My mom doesn’t respond. Doesn’t move a muscle. She just stares at him.

  He stares back for a long moment, then gives her a wide smile. “Let me repeat them for you,” he says. “So that everything is perfectly clear, and The Lord’s justice may be served in full. The first charge is Apostasy. How do you plead?”

  Plead? First charge? Is this a trial?