Hannah (continued)
Nothing that we had learned while down in the mine was more damning of Prospera than the doctor that was brought to our cell to examine Cathy. It was Dr Lighton, Lisa’s supervisor when she was being trained to be a doctor in Prospera. Lisa and I didn’t reveal the shock that we felt at seeing him appear before our eyes in the prison to prevent Sgt Holgate from catching on to the fact that we knew him. Dr Lighton was facing away from Sgt Holgate and thus didn’t need to do the same. A look of shock plastered his face before he realized that he also needed to act like he was seeing us for the first time. Dr Lighton’s examination of Cathy was brief. He told her to stay in bed, drink fluids and eat easy to digest food like soups and stews.
“She doesn’t want to eat any food that’s from the Americans,” Lisa told him.
“In that case I’ll bring food for her to eat everyday that’s not from the Americans, starting tonight.”
He left the cell with the promise of returning in less than an hour with Cathy’s dinner. Word that we were locked up in this prison was going to get back to Prospera and soon we would find out the depth of the relationship between Prospera and the Americans.
We told Cathy everything shortly after Dr Lighton left, that he was from Prospera and that the food he was going to bring her was also from Prospera and thus okay for her to eat; we also told her not to tell anybody about any of this. Miranda found out about Dr Lighton coming to see Cathy when she returned to the cell with our dinner and made sure to restrain her amazement. She got to see him later when he brought Cathy’s dinner and just like we had done earlier she betrayed nothing to the soldier standing guard. He brought a bowl of soup for Cathy that he told us to make sure she ate, which she did. She ate the entire bowl of soup and went to sleep, after which Lisa, Miranda and I whispered about what the future might hold for us.
We all agreed that something would happen; we just couldn’t predict what that would be. They had more than enough numbers in Prospera to overwhelm the soldiers here; there were five thousand people in the village and no more than twenty soldiers here according to Miranda. Such a move made no sense though. The Americans would no doubt retaliate against Prospera should they do that and the village would stand no chance. Were they to get us out of here it would be as part of an arrangement of some sort. I had no intention of going along with such an arrangement unless everybody else who was imprisoned here was also released. That scenario, too, threw up numerous problems. Taking the prisoners here to Prospera wouldn’t work, they’d be too angry about what had been done to them on Prospera’s behalf and then there was the issue of how Prosperans would react to strangers from the outside world and the American’s would be too worried about the world discovering the location of their fragmentium mine for them to just release them back into the outside world. I couldn’t see a way out of this for us that would be acceptable to everyone involved; Miranda and Lisa couldn’t either.
We watched over Cathy as she slept and thought about the promise that Kevin had made to get her safely back to her parents. Cathy wasn’t one of us in the sense that she didn’t deserve this cruelty. She wasn’t a citizen of Prospera and didn’t bear any responsibility for this prison being here like we did. If an opportunity to get her out of here presented itself we had to take it; we shared Kevin’s sentiment that we owed it to her parents to ensure her safe return.
Dr Lighton brought a bowl of oatmeal for Cathy the next morning. He’d gotten the Americans to agree to keep Cathy out of work and to allow either Lisa or Miranda to stay with her at all times. I continued with the normal routine. I went down to the mine to clean the tracks with the other girls and washed with them in the washroom where we were joined by Lisa who was able to join us because Miranda had been excused from dinner preparation so she could stay with Cathy in the cell. Cathy was eating all of the food that Dr Lighton was bringing for her and that evening after dinner she was already looking considerably better. We were talking about it with her when Lt. Col Raymond unexpectedly appeared at our cell door.
“Hannah, come with me,” he said, unlocking the door.
“What’s this about?” I asked him.
“You’ll see when we get there, now let’s go,” he answered peremptorily.
Not having any choice in the matter I followed him up the stairs out of the prison, through the tarp covered corridor that Miranda had told us about, into the kitchen where she worked and down a hallway to a door that took us back outside, this time into the forest.
“Follow me,” he said and kept walking.
Hesitantly I walked behind him, following him in the direction of a faint light deep in the woods.
“I’ll wait here,” he stopped and said to me, leaving me to go the rest of the way on my own.
I kept walking in the direction of the light and after a few steps I was able to make out an obscure human figure holding the light, a few more steps and I could make out that the figure was garbed in a Prospera robe, a few more steps and I saw that the person waiting for me was my mother. She lowered the lantern she was holding, rushed over to me and engulfed me in a hug.
“Oh thank goodness!” She said with her arms around me, pure relief in her voice.
Unsure of what my feelings were about seeing my mother again after so long my reaction was muted. I didn’t return her hug and I said nothing, waiting for my mind and body to settle down. The feeling that rose up in me more than any other was rage. I pushed her away from me. Looking at her, she wasn’t the woman that I remembered. She’d been changed; everything that we’d learned since leaving Prospera had corrupted her in my eyes beyond redemption. There was no part of me that was relieved or glad to see her; I was angry at her for the lies that she’d brought me up on, for the existence of this prison that was robbing the people incarcerated within it of their lives, people who had done nothing wrong. There was nothing she could say that would justify what she had been a party to, nonetheless I was still interested to hear what she had to say.
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“Whatever you do, don’t lie to me; I know that everything we were told growing up was a lie,” I said to her coldly.
“How long have you been here?”
“Four days.”
“Oh good, I was worried that you’d been here much longer.”
“Why are you locking people up like this? Don’t you realize how wrong this is?”
“We had to keep them out; we couldn’t let them find out about us, nothing takes precedence over the survival of the village,” she said sternly.
“These people aren’t out to destroy Prospera, they were just curious, they’re not much older than we are; you have nothing to fear from them.”
“We made the mistake of allowing contact with people from the outside once, we swore never to make that mistake again.”
“You built those houses that we found in the woods when we were twelve.”
“People came from the outside; we engaged with them, they said they were looking for a new start. We told them we were never going to let them into the village but that we would help them get started on the other side of the mountain. They refused to accept that, they kept pushing to be allowed into the village. One day they got violent and we had to come up with a solution.”
“What happened to those people?” I asked her, already feeling a chill run through me.
“We asked the soldiers to get rid of them for us, which they did.”
I wasn’t as shocked by the news that those people had been killed as I would have been had I learned about it years ago. Nothing I learned about Prospera could shock me anymore.
“Did you know that we’d gone into the woods that night and discovered those houses?”
“We knew that Kevin was planning to go so we placed monitors on the other side of the mountain to observe his movements; I was surprised to learn that you’d all gone with him.”
“Would you have killed him if we hadn’t been there?”
“No, Kevin had already made all of you too suspicious of us by then; if he’d disappeared it would have caused too many problems for us.”
“What about when he was struck on the back of his head on the boat and knocked overboard?”
“That was a genuine accident. Kevin is special to you, we missed our chance to disappear him when he was a child; I wanted to, your grandfather objected.”
“Are you listening to yourself? You talk about life and death like its nothing more than a game.”
“We wouldn’t have killed him; we would never treat our own so inhumanely.”
“It’s not humane to drop small children off in a place that’s a whole different world to them. That’s what you’ve been doing with the problem children, isn’t it? You’ve been abandoning them in Huntingdale?”
“You’ve learned a lot while you’ve been gone, though clearly not enough to appreciate the necessity of our ways of doing things.”
“What necessity?! There’s a whole world of eleven billion people out there that for the most part functions just fine; Prospera isn’t needed.”
“It is if you want peace and stability; you made it to the outside world so you know about the horrible war between America and Canada.”
“A war in which the Americans are using a weapon that they’re getting from you!”
“What weapons they’re using and where they got them from are immaterial; it is inevitable that people will fight wars and slaughter each other; that is why Prospera is needed.”
“You can’t rationalize away your culpability in the deaths of the people that were killed by fragmentium strikes. I found out about the Prospera orphans by meeting one of them. His name was Morgan; he was fighting the Americans as part of a resistance group because his entire family was killed in a fragmentium strike. American soldiers captured him and executed him; one of your own, as you just said.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but it doesn’t change my position that their deaths were inevitable, fragmentium or no fragmentium.”
“You know what I learned while I was away in the outside world? That Prospera is no paradise; it’s cruel, it’s racist, and its citizens are oppressed, living lives that are nothing but a giant lie!”
“Then why did you come back? If it’s so terrible why did you come back?!” She asked me, angrily and defensively.
“I thought that I could bring change, I thought that I could use the knowledge that I had acquired in the outside world to free the citizens of Prospera, if only a little, and because after my miscarriage all I could think about was seeing you again.”
“You had a miscarriage? When?” She asked, all of the anger gone from her face and voice, replaced by concern.
“A few weeks ago, I was six months pregnant, Kevin and I would have been parents but it wasn’t to be.”
“What happened?”
“I’d been feeling cramps for days, then one night I had cramps that were so bad I couldn’t move, when I started bleeding I knew that something was wrong with the baby. Lisa took charge and handled everything; she got the foetus out of me and stopped the bleeding before Cathy and her father took me to the clinic.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
She hugged me again. This time it didn’t feel like it did before, it was warm and comforting. I felt like I was once again in the company of my mother before my knowledge of the lies and heartlessness of Prospera had tainted my image of her.
“I’m going to get you out of here, soon,” she said to me when the hug was over and we’d separated.
“I’m not going anywhere unless everyone else in that prison is released as well.”
“Hannah, please, don’t make this any more complicated than it already is.”
“These people have done absolutely nothing wrong; one of them has been here for four years! I can’t leave knowing that they are going to continue to be locked up here, it’s not right.”
“I don’t know if I can make that happen, the Americans might not allow it,” then, after a pause, she asked, “Who’s this girl Cathy?”
“She and her parents took us in and looked after us when we got to the outside world, we owe them everything.”
“Why is she with you?”
“She wanted to see Prospera; she was just curious, once she’d seen it and I was back in the village they were going to go back to Huntingdale.”
“You shouldn’t have brought her with you.”
“You need to do something for her, you need to get her out of here; I can’t stand her being in this place when she and her parents have done so much for us.”
“There’s not much that we can do for her beyond what we’re already doing.”
“Take her to the village with you; let her stay there until you’ve resolved this.”
“I can’t do that! Do you have any idea the panic that an outsider appearing in Prospera would cause?”
“Mom, please! The only thing that we care about is making sure nothing happens to her, please help us with that.”
“I’ll talk to the others and come back in a few days with their answer; don’t expect much, and take care of yourselves.”
We hugged again and my mother walked off with her lantern. I was taken back to our cell where Lisa and Miranda were waiting to hear from me why I’d been taken away. Miranda was shocked to hear about my mother waiting for me to be brought to her in the woods; Lisa was mostly confused. She thought that my mother was acting impulsively and irrationally and she couldn’t make sense of what her strategy was.
“She wanted to see her daughter, that’s all there is to it,” Miranda said to her.
Lisa was like that sometimes; she’d focus too much on the bigger picture and would miss what was right before her eyes. But she was right; my mother had acted irrationally, tipping the Americans off to the fact that I was a person of importance to Prospera. She was acting like a mother, not like an administrator. She was desperate to get us out of here and that gave me hope that she was prepared to take actions she wouldn’t ordinarily take.