Miranda

The night before we set out for Prospera from the cabin Cathy and I stayed up for hours talking. She was excited to be going on this journey with us, too excited to sleep. We laid close to each other with our heads under the blanket whispering, both because we didn’t want to wake anybody up and because we didn’t want them to hear what we were talking about.

“Has Kevin always been so…in charge?” She asked me.

“Ever since we were kids, we’ve always followed him.”

“Were he and Hannah always…”

“Since they were kids, for both of them there’s never been anyone else.”

“What are they going to do when they’re separated?”

“I don’t know. When Kevin was sent to the stables it was hell on Hannah, whether she’s mature enough to handle a permanent separation, I don’t know.”

“What about Kevin?”

“He’ll be fine, he’s always fine.”

“Do you think he’ll be open to being with someone else?”

“I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking that with Hannah gone you can take Kevin for yourself, right?”

“Well why not? If they’re not together…”

“It’s okay, I understand how you feel, to be honest I felt the same way myself once.”

“About Kevin?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re a lesbian.”

“I know, but on that second camping trip we went on it was so sexy the way everybody was looking up to him, being around him I’d get this tingly feeling all over.”

“Does Lisa know?”

“We weren’t seeing each other then; it was only later during that same camping trip that we became a couple. Things could have turned out very differently though, when we were rehearsing a play that one of our friends had written we had to do a kissing scene and Kevin and I kissed for longer than was necessary; if Hannah hadn’t ran through the woods to the beach I don’t know what would have happened with me and Kevin.”

“Do you still feel an attraction to him?”

“No, the only person I feel anything romantic for is Lisa.”

The thought of Cathy and Kevin together as a couple didn’t register with me as a betrayal of Hannah; she’d made her choice to return to Prospera and it was up to the rest of us to go on with our lives without her. Kevin could do a lot worse than Cathy; in the outside world there were girls who were promiscuous and possessed a lot of other undesirable qualities. Cathy wasn’t like that and she knew the truth about us. If Cathy was serious about pursuing Kevin I decided that I would support her, for both their sakes: for Kevin to help him move on from Hannah and for Cathy to experience what it was like to be with someone who didn’t put her through the perennial torment that Morgan had.

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The more I thought about the idea the more I liked it and the more I was looking forward to returning home to the farm and continuing our lives with Prospera firmly in our past. Walking from the cabin and into the woods, the atmosphere among us frigid, I wanted us to get to Prospera as soon as possible so the four of us could return home without Hannah. Her treatment of Cathy ever since she’d shown up at the cabin had been upsetting to me and if made to choose between Hannah and Cathy I would have chosen Cathy. That changed after lunch when Hannah apologised sincerely to Cathy for the way that she’d been treating her. After that I wanted us all to go back together but Hannah’s determination to return to Prospera was undiminished. My mood dipped again while we were walking having been briefly lifted by Hannah’s apology. Lisa, walking next to me, took my hand in hers to remind me that that there was no chance of her ever leaving me like how Hannah was leaving Kevin.

The plan for the rest of the day, as Kevin laid it out, was to keep walking until we located what had been the last stop we’d made before reaching the cabin when we’d been fleeing Prospera: a comfortable spot next to the river where we’d spent the night.

To get there we had one major obstacle to navigate: a steep, moist embankment that we’d slid down the first time that was too steep and moist for us to climb. At this time Hannah’s aerial maps came in handy. One of them revealed that if we kept walking to the right we would arrive at a gentler slope that we could use to circumnavigate the steep slope. Circumnavigating the slope wouldn’t take us too far out of our way; we could still make it to the campsite before it turned dark. We headed in that direction, walking away from the river and deeper into the woods in search of Hannah’s alternate route.

“How long will it take us to get back on course?” I asked Hannah.

“Not long, only a couple of minutes.”

We kept walking in silence, apprehensive about Hannah’s route. As it turned out we had good reason to be. After walking in the direction she’d told us to we made a startling discovery: tyre tracks.

“What is this?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know, they’re not on the map,” Hannah answered, bewildered.

“Just like Prospera couldn’t be seen; these tracks are a part of that same cover up,” Lisa said.

We had a decision to make: follow the tyre tracks and learn the full truth about Prospera or turn around completely and return to Huntingdale.

“We should all go back to Huntingdale, this is too dangerous,” Lisa spoke first and said.

“We don’t know that there is any danger here, we should keep going and discover the truth,” Hannah said.

“We can’t risk that, not when we’ve got Cathy with us; I agree with Lisa, we should go back,” Kevin said.

“I told you not to worry about me, don’t make any decisions on my account. I’m with Hannah, now that I know that Prospera is real I have to see it; I want us to keep going.”

“Then Miranda and I are going back; I won’t let anything happen to her,” Lisa said.

“Lisa wait, we can’t just abandon them, we should all go,” I said to her.

“We’re not abandoning them, they’re choosing to go, and it’s a choice they don’t have to make because there’s an entire world waiting for us to go back to.”

“We have to go back together, it wouldn’t be right for us to leave them and go back by ourselves.”

“Kevin, what are you doing?” Lisa asked him.

“I’ll keep going with Hannah and Cathy to keep them safe; if you two are going back you need to do it now, if you walk fast you can maybe make it back to the cabin before it gets dark.”

“You really want to keep going with them?” Lisa asked me.

“We’ve come this far, we should keep going.”

Outnumbered four to one, Lisa acquiesced to continuing on to Prospera by following the tyre tracks that weren’t on Hannah’s map. As we walked along the tyre tracks, none of us saying anything, the only sounds being the crunching of the ground under our feet and activity in the trees above us, an eerie feeling enveloped us that grew as we progressed. Questions raced through our minds about what we were going to find out about what Prospera’s connection to the outside world was. We walked on oblivious to the fact that we’d long since passed the spot where we’d planned on setting up camp. The potential dangers of what we were walking into remained in our minds as we were propelled forward by the intrigue of what awaited us when we reached the final destination of the tyre tracks. The path we were moving along felt fated, as Prospera citizens that had seen the outside world the opportunity to learn the full truth about Prospera pulled us along inexorably like a magnet. None of us said a word as we moved forward, the strangeness of the existence of the road along which we were walking rendered us all speechless. The sense that we were drawing closer to the ultimate truth about Prospera with each step increased our curiosity and anticipation and pushed our thoughts about encountering trouble further to the back of our minds. Then everything went dark.