by Will Hill
I’m pretty sure she’s going to die.
I stare at her, wasting seconds that the still-functional bit of my brain screams at me for wasting, then run towards the west barracks. Alice’s eyes widen as I turn away, but I don’t see anger in them. I think she understands what I have to do.
That’s what I tell myself, at least.
A figure emerges out of the swirling smoke and I skid to a halt, my hands raised. But it isn’t one of the Governments, with their black helmets and goggles and guns. It’s Amos, his eyes red and puffy, one arm limp at his side, a pistol trembling in his good hand.
“Where’s Father John?” he asks, his voice hoarse and torn. “Have you seen him?”
I shake my head and try to circle around him, but he grabs my arm and pulls me close.
“Where is he? Where is The Prophet?” he rasps.
“I don’t know!” I scream, because the tank has reached the yard and the gunfire is heavier than ever and the fire is leaping from building to building faster than I can follow.
I push Amos as hard as I can, and he stumbles backwards. He swings the pistol towards me but I’m already moving. I hear shots behind me but none of them find their target before I plunge into the smoke.
It’s instantly hard to breathe; I clamp one of my hands over my mouth and nose but the thick, bitter smoke slips between my fingers and I start to cough. I see my fallen Brothers and Sisters all around me as I run, dark shapes that I stagger left and right to avoid. A few are moving, dragging themselves across the ground or twitching and spasming like they’re having a fit, but most of them aren’t.
Most of them are still.
The west barracks appear in front of me, their walls and flat roofs wreathed in acrid smoke. The gunfire is constant behind me, and with so many bullets flying through the air it feels like a matter of time until the inevitable happens. But as long as I unlock the cabins before it does, I don’t care.
I really don’t.
I stumble out of the worst of the smoke and towards the nearest cabin, fumbling the skeleton key out of my pocket. I grab the padlock hanging from the door and there’s a sizzling sound and for the briefest of moments I don’t understand what has happened – until pain explodes through me and I wrench my hand away and most of my palm stays stuck to the metal lock. I fall to my knees, clutching my ruined left hand against my stomach, and a scream that doesn’t even sound human bursts out of my mouth.
It’s overwhelming.
The pain.
It feels like someone has pushed my hand into a jar of acid and is holding it there, and as my brain tries to process the agony everything else fades away: the smell of the smoke, the heat of the fire, the noise of the guns. Grey creeps in from all sides, like the volume on my senses is being turned down. Then something shoves me from behind and everything comes hurtling back as I tumble to the ground.
One of the Governments is standing over me, its face hidden behind its mask, the gaping muzzle of its gun pointing between my eyes.
“Hands where I can see them!” It’s a man’s voice. “Show me your hands!”
They tremble as I hold them up above me. “Please,” I say, my voice a raw croak. “Children. There are children in these cabins. Please.”
“Shut up!” he yells. “Not another word!”
“Please,” I repeat. “In the cabins. You have to help them.”
The Government glances at the buildings. My head is spinning and my stomach is churning and I feel like I’m going to pass out from the pain screaming in my hand, but I force my eyes to stay open, force my reeling mind to focus on the dark figure above me.
“Padlocks,” I whisper, and hold out the skeleton key. “Please…”
My strength fails me. The Government looks at the cabin. Looks down at me. Looks at the cabin.
“Shit!” he shouts, then grabs the key out of my hand and spins towards the door. I watch him grip the padlock with his gloved hand and slide the key home, and I wonder for an awful moment whether this is all going to have been a waste of time, whether there are some locks that even a skeleton key can’t open. Then the cylinder turns, and the padlock springs loose. The Government hauls the door open and my coughing, spluttering Brothers and Sisters come flooding out, their eyes red and streaming with tears.
“Go to the Front Gate,” I manage to croak. “Stay together. Put your hands up…”
At the back of the crowd I see Honey and I feel something in my chest that momentarily overwhelms the pain in my hand. Her eyes are swollen and puffy and her skin is pale, but her mouth and jaw are set in familiar lines of determination and she’s breathing, if nothing else.
I wasn’t sure she would be.
She helps the last few crying, panicking children out of the cabin and leads them south, towards the Front Gate. The Government races to the next cabin, shouting into his radio for backup, and I feel something break loose inside me, a surge of relief so powerful it’s almost physical. It breathes new life into my exhausted muscles, and I drag myself up into a sitting position.
The children are making their way across the yard, their little hands raised in surrender, and then there’s a rush of movement as Governments come sprinting out of the smoke and scoop my Brothers and Sisters up and carry them out through the gaping holes in the fence. I can hear them crying and shrieking for their parents and my heart breaks for them but they’re alive, they’re still alive, and that’s all that matters, that’s the only thing that matters as the world burns down.
I hear a scream, loud and high-pitched enough to cut through the gunfire and the roar of the inferno, and I turn my head towards it. Near the blazing ruins of the Chapel, two of the Governments have caught hold of Luke and lifted him off the ground by his arms and legs. He’s thrashing in their grips, screaming and bellowing for them to put him down, to let him go with the others, to let him Ascend.
His voice, full of fury and fervour and desperate, frantic panic, is the last thing I hear before everything goes dark.
The room is silent for a long time after I stop talking. I feel spent, like every last bit of me has been used up, but it’s not a bad feeling; it’s weird, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, but I imagine this is what free must feel like.
“I can’t imagine what it was like to go through all that,” says Doctor Hernandez. His voice is quiet, and he’s staring at me so intently that it’s making me a little uncomfortable. “I think you’re a remarkable young woman, Moonbeam. What you just did, telling us that like you did, took a level of bravery that almost leaves me speechless.”
“Only almost?” I say. It’s a small joke, but he smiles.
Agent Carlyle isn’t smiling. “I think your bravery is beyond question,” he says. “And I hate to have to do this, but I’m afraid we need to return to something that came up a long time ago. I didn’t push you on it then, but this time I have to. Are you sticking to the story that you didn’t go into the Big House during the fire?”
“It’s not a story,” I lie. “It’s the truth.”
He narrows his eyes, but I don’t see anger in them; I just see disappointment. “Fine,” he says. “Then let’s go through it. Did you know that nearly two hundred hours of video were shot on the morning of the seventeenth?”
“No.”
“The agents serving the warrant were wearing bodycams,” he says. “And every vehicle had at least one camera. Every single frame of the footage has been analysed, and we’ve been able to put together a clear visual record of the entire incident, from half a dozen different angles. Which is why I can say with absolute certainty that Honey didn’t come out of the west barracks after Agent Jefferies used your key to open the doors. She walked through the front gate with her hands up four minutes earlier, and was already being treated by the emergency services when the rest of the children were released.”
“I saw her come out,” I say.
“You didn’t, Moonbeam. She wasn’t in there.”
“I saw her
,” I say. I feel like a child, sticking stubbornly to a lie even when you know you’ve been caught, but it’s the only thing I can think to do. I’ve told them everything else, even though I never wanted to and it scared me to do so.
There’s only one thing left, and I can’t tell it to them.
I can’t.
Agent Carlyle doesn’t say a word. He just stares at me.
“I saw her,” I repeat. “I don’t care whether you believe me or not.”
“All right,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Let’s try to stay calm. There’s no need for this to become combative.”
“I’m calm,” I say.
“Me too,” says Agent Carlyle. “Did you know one of the cameras got a very clear shot of you pointing a pistol at Bella?”
“I told you about that.”
“You did,” he says. “You told us you left her lying on the ground and went to the western barracks to release the children who had been locked in there.”
I nod. “That’s what I did.”
Agent Carlyle shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It’s not. You did go to the western barracks, but it’s not what you did next. After you left Bella, we have a clear shot of you entering the Big House, where you stayed for almost six minutes.”
“That’s not true,” I say. My voice is starting to rise. “How many times do you need me to tell you?”
“Moonbeam,” says Doctor Hernandez. “I understand the need for you to protect yourself, I really do. But I had hoped we’d reached a place of trust.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” I say. My face feels hot, and I hope they can’t see that my hands have started to shake. “But thanks for trying to make me feel guilty. I really appreciate it.”
He winces, and his face colours what I guess is an embarrassed pink.
“I can bring a screen in here and show you the footage,” says Agent Carlyle. “Do you think that might jog your memory?”
I shake my head. “I don’t need to see any footage.”
“So you won’t tell us what happened inside the Big House?”
Stay calm, whispers the voice in the back of my head. It’s okay. If they knew what you did, they wouldn’t be pressing you like this. They would have just said so.
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened,” I say. “Because I didn’t go in there.”
“I think you did,” says Agent Carlyle. “In fact, I know you did. So I’m curious about what it is you don’t want to tell us.”
I shrug. There’s nothing I can say to that.
Doctor Hernandez sits forward. “I think we should stop here,” he says. “We know how hard this has been for you, Moonbeam, and I don’t want you to think for one moment that we don’t appreciate your honesty, or your strength. I think a good night’s rest and a little time to think things through will do us all good.”
Agent Carlyle nods. “I think you’re right,” he says. “We can carry on in the morning. Maybe we’ll all see things a little differently then.”
“Fine,” I say, although I don’t really see the point, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot longer than they have and a few hours isn’t going to change anything.
Doctor Hernandez gathers up his things and the two men head towards the door. Agent Carlyle looks over his shoulder at me before he unlocks it, and the expression on his face punches me squarely in the heart. It’s not anger, and it’s not even disappointment – it’s sympathy.
He feels sorry for me.
The door closes and I stare at the wall, trying to slow my racing heart.
They don’t know, I tell myself. It’s okay. They don’t know, and they can’t ever know unless you tell them. So you have to stay strong.
Because this isn’t like the phone call I made to the Sheriff, where it turned out I was wrong about how much trouble I thought I was going to be in. If they find out what I did inside the Big House, I’ll never get out of here.
Never.
I sit at my desk and make a conscious effort to draw something that isn’t the cliffs and the water and the blue house. I try to draw Nate, the way I remember him.
It seems like hardly any time has passed since he woke me up in the middle of the night to give me the phone and the key and tell me he was leaving, but there must be something weird going on inside my head because I can’t really remember what he looked like.
I was so sure I was never going to see him again that I wonder if some bit of my subconscious decided there was no point in holding onto him, that keeping him alive in my memories would be too painful. I scratch a pencil across a sheet of paper, trying to magic him out of thin air – the handsome lines of his face, the green of his eyes, the wide mouth that was usually curled into a smile that poured molten heat into my stomach.
My first attempt looks literally nothing like him, so I crumple up the paper and throw it aside. The second and third are no better, and I can feel the first hot embers of frustration starting to grow inside me. But the fourth drawing captures something.
It’s little more than a jumble of lines, but at their centre, if I look in just the right way, I can see the curve of Nate’s chin, can see the hard angles of his jaw. I let the pencil slide up the page, trying to picture his eyes and the warmth I always saw when I looked into them, but my brain betrays me. It screams that he was a liar, a professional liar, who never cared about me in the slightest, and the drawing instantly loses whatever truth it briefly contained.
I crumple up the sheet of paper and hurl it at the wall. It bounces down to the floor beside the others as I sit back in my chair and try to think.
What must it be like to pretend to be something you aren’t? What kind of person do you have to be to do that, and do it so convincingly for so long?
You should know, whispers the voice in the back of my head. For how long after they Banished your mom did you pretend to be a True and Faithful Legionnaire? Three years? Until the very end?
I grimace, and tell the voice to shut up because that’s not the same thing at all. It really isn’t. Maybe I didn’t tell my Brothers and Sisters that my Faith was starting to fail me, but I was still the person they’d always known. I was still me. Whereas Nate lived inside The Base for more than two years, and he was never who he claimed to be. People trusted him, and liked him, and welcomed him into their Family, and all that time he was watching and listening and lying and plotting.
You don’t know that. You don’t know whether he was really the person you thought he was or whether he was someone else. All you know for sure is that he was pretending to believe in Father John and the Legion. Just like you were.
I push the voice away again, harder this time, because I want to be angry with Nate and I’m not remotely in the mood to be told what to do or how to think. Even if he didn’t lie about the person he was, he lied about why he joined the Legion and he lied every time he called someone Brother or Sister, because people don’t spy on their Family. Not normally anyway.
Was he filing reports on us? I guess he must have been, because there would have been no point sending him in if he wasn’t sending information back out.
Did he write reports about me? About the stupid little girl who followed him around like a puppy and was so pathetically grateful for his attention that she never saw what was right in front of her?
The thought stabs at my chest like a knife.
You can’t believe that. Doctor Hernandez said he was mostly himself, and what would he gain by lying to you? You have to believe that he was your friend.
I think back to all the time I spent with Nate. Moments that were warm and happy now feel cold and empty, like dark clouds have settled over them. The colour and light are gone, replaced by monochrome grey, and part of my brain marvels at its ability to undermine my memories, to so rapidly rewrite my own history. To use the truth about Nate to hack and tear so viciously at the deepest parts of myself, at the fragile, precarious centre of whoever I really am.
I have to believe he w
as my friend. I have to.
I get up from the desk and lie down on my bed.
Nurse Harrow will bring my lunch in a few minutes and then it will be time for SSI, unless it’s cancelled again. Then the evening will stretch out into the distance, long and relentless, and then night will come and maybe my sleep will be free of bad dreams, and maybe it won’t. And then it will be morning and I’ll be sat in Interview Room 1 again and they’ll be asking me the same questions they ended today’s session with, over and over and over.
I know they won’t stop, because what happened inside the Big House is the last thing that I know and they don’t. And that’s fine. I don’t blame them, I really don’t, but I’m not going to tell them what I did.
Not just because I’m scared of what will happen to me if I do.
But because it’s the only thing I have left that’s mine.
Doctor Hernandez steps into Interview Room 1 and shuts the door behind him.
I’m scratching the new bandage that Nurse Harrow wrapped around my hand when she brought me my breakfast; the skin underneath is still a little shiny but it looks almost normal now and it’s itching like crazy. I frown as he sits down and opens up his leather satchel.
“Where’s Agent Carlyle?” I ask.
He smiles as he arranges his pens and notebooks. “He had to go to Dallas for the day,” he says. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Bullshit.
“If you say so.”
His eyes narrow, ever so slightly. “I’m telling you the truth, Moonbeam.”
“I believe you,” I say. “I just wonder if people are telling you the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Agent Carlyle has been in all of our sessions apart from the first few,” I say. “Then the two of you decide I’m lying about the fire and the next day he gets called away to Dallas? Just all of a sudden?”
“I would never claim to know everything,” he says. “I have no law enforcement role, so I’m sure there are a great many things I’m being kept in the dark about. All I can tell you is that I watched Agent Carlyle get into his car this morning, after he told me he’ll be back tomorrow.”