Hannah (continued)

We were greeted with a surprise upon our return to the farm. Cathy’s boyfriend Morgan had dropped by to pay her a visit. From my talks with Frank during our trip I was aware of his reservations about the relationship that his daughter was in; after taking my first look at Morgan I completely understood his feelings. He had long black hair that went all the way down to his shoulders, multiple piercings in his ears as well as one in his eyebrow and one in his tongue, and tattoos all over his right arm. The most alarming things about him though were his facial expression and the look in his eyes; there was a real instability about him that was deeply disturbing. He’d lost his whole family in a fragmentium strike and had allowed the tragedy he’d suffered to take him in a very dangerous direction. He had acquired a thirst for revenge that had taken control of him and dictated everything he did. He was obsessed with the Americans and their military campaign and constantly placed himself in incredible danger by volunteering to participate in as many guerrilla attacks as he was able to. Frank’s great worry was his daughter’s tendency to develop feelings that were borderline maternal for the people she came into contact with that were in need of help. That being the case, Morgan, who was often away and could die at any time, was a less than ideal partner for her. Cathy obviously didn’t see things that way. Standing in the kitchen she had her arms around him and was hanging onto his lanky frame like there was nothing in the world that meant more to her. The mood in the kitchen turned tense the instant we walked in; Frank’s disapproval of Morgan and his dismay at seeing him in his home were palpable to us all. Kevin, Lisa and Miranda were there as well as it was dinner time.

“Hey Mr S,” Morgan said to Frank, S being in reference to their surname, Sherman.

The tension that was so palpable had apparently not registered with Morgan, who evinced no discernible discomfort whatsoever.

“Morgan, to what do we owe this rare appearance?” Frank asked, his voice thick with displeasure.

“I was stocking up on supplies at a town about an hour away, and I was missing my babe so I thought I’d drive out here and see her,” Morgan answered, a response that made Cathy cling to him even tighter.

“I won’t ask you what supplies you were stocking up on because I know I won’t like the answer; anyway, since you’re here you should join us for dinner, it would be rude of me not to offer you at least that much hospitality,” Frank said before starting to walk off.

“You’re Hannah, right?” Morgan said to me.

“That’s right.”

“I know what happened to your families; too many people have had to live through the same tragedy, those Americans are a bunch of dogs, but don’t worry, every bit of pain that they’ve made us feel we’re going to make sure they feel it too and that they never stop regretting what they’ve done to us!”

“That’s enough!” Frank boomed, “I’ve told you before not to talk that way when you’re here, don’t you go trying to put any of your ideas into their heads, these four are moving on from what happened to them, I won’t have you making them a part of your suicide mission.”

I was actually quite curious to hear about the #OverthrowImperialism movement directly from one of its members but to avoid the risk of further angering Frank I chose to wait for a more opportune moment to ask Morgan about the group.

“What’s that on your necklace?” I asked a few seconds after Frank had left the room.

“It’s fragmentium; this piece is from the attack that killed my family, I wear it so I never forget what we’re fighting for.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure; here,” he answered, lifting the necklace up over his head and handing it to me.

Had I not known about all of the damage that it had caused I would have thought that the piece of fragmentium I was holding was rather beautiful. The thin piece of fragmentium was attached to the string with a metal clasp. It was black with speckles of white and grey that sparkled when they caught the light. The grey and white speckles couldn’t be seen on the other side of the fragmentium because it had a splash of blood on it from one of its victims.

“Be careful around the edges, they’re sharp enough to cut you.”

He was right; I ran my finger around the edges very slowly and was amazed by how sharp they were. Equally amazing was how strong the fragment was. I held it between my thumb and my index finger and applied pressure to it with my thumb and didn’t feel it so much as bend in the slightest.

“Try as hard as you want, you’ll never break that, its durability is otherworldly.”

“Where did you get this?”

“Pulled it out of a wall, once they travel a certain distance they lose enough speed and get stuck in whatever surface they strike. If we could just find out where they’re getting it from, the hell we’d rain down on them!”

Morgan said this clenching his fist so tightly that the veins in his arm were throbbing. The experience that he’d gone through had scarred him psychologically, the scarring was so extensive that I wasn’t sure it was possible for him to abandon his desire to exact the maximum possible revenge he could on the Americans, meaning it was more likely than not that eventually he would be killed; what was that going to do to Cathy? She had developed the same attachment to him as she had to us; were he to die the impact of his death on her would be enormous. I had to agree with her father, she shouldn’t be with him.

Dinner was a relatively quiet affair. Frank hadn’t cooled down in the time that he’d been away from us; he exuded displeasure sitting at the table and with the reason for his displeasure sitting at the table with us conversation was difficult; the meal of pork chops, peas and carrots and mash and gravy went by with barely a word spoken. Frank was quick to repair to his room for the night having finished his meal, affording us the opportunity to talk with Morgan about his involvement with the resistance movement. We all went outside with him to his truck after dinner; we couldn’t talk inside when there was every chance Frank would overhear us. Morgan dropped the tailgate on his truck and took a seat on it with Cathy taking her place next to him. He pulled what looked like a cigarette from the breast pocket of his T-shirt and lit it. The strong smell from it told us immediately that what he was smoking was not a cigarette.

“You guys want some?” He asked, holding what he was smoking out to me, Miranda, Lisa and Kevin.

“What is that?” Miranda asked.

“You guys don’t know what weed is?” Morgan asked, surprised by our lack of knowledge of the substance.

“They’re good kids, of course they wouldn’t know,” Cathy said, taking the weed out of Morgan’s hand and inhaling from it.

There was something unsettlingly different about Cathy that I had observed during the time that I had been back. She seemed more like Morgan’s pet than his girlfriend, that imbalance in their relationship made for an unhealthy dynamic when Morgan was so unstable.

“Where are you going next?” Cathy asked him.

“Down south, there’s an army convoy that’s going to be leaving New Hampshire and making its way up north, the plan is to hit them on the road while they’re in transit.”

“Is it going to be dangerous?” Cathy asked, concerned.

“They’re all dangerous babe.”

“I read that most of the resistance fighters that participate in these attacks get killed,” I said.

“Yeah that’s true, but for every one of us that gets killed we take out a bunch of them, just last week there was an attack that killed forty American soldiers, only twelve of ours got killed.”

“How many of these attacks have you been a part of?” Lisa asked him.

“Seven.”

“How have you survived all of them?” Miranda asked.

“I’m just lucky I guess.”

“Promise me you’ll come back from this one,” Cathy pleaded with him.

“Don’t worry babe, I’m not dying until those American dogs have left our country and I’ve killed as many of them as possible.”

Morgan genuinely wasn’t afraid of the danger that he was placing himself in. Bravery wasn’t the reason; it was that he didn’t care if something happened to him. He was suicidal, realizing that made me worry about Cathy even more.

“What’s in those boxes?” I asked about the crates on the back of his truck.

“What I went to pick up; what we’re going to be using when we attack that convoy.”

Morgan pulled back the tarpaulin covering the back of the truck, revealing a stack of crates, two of which he pulled out onto the tailgate.

“These are magnet grenades, they stick to metal surfaces,” he said, opening one of the crates, “we’ll use these to blow the convoy vehicles off the road, and when the soldiers climb out of them, we’ll take them out with these.”

He opened the second crate and inside was six guns neatly stacked in a row.

“M8 Carbines, fresh from Germany, as deadly as anything the Americans have.”

A chill ran through me as I looked at the weapons that Morgan was transporting; what we were looking at were implements of death. Morgan was relishing the opportunity to unleash their destructive power on the Americans that had taken his family from him; I could see the bloodlust in his eyes as he looked at the crates. My mother told me once, when explaining to me the history of this world, that there had never been a moment in human history when there hadn’t been a war going on somewhere. Existing in an unending cycle of violence was the inevitable state of things in this world; in Prospera such an existence was guarded against militantly. In Morgan I was seeing the living proof of the ineluctable tendency toward violence that they had in this world. Those who killed did so because they believed it was justified, never mind the fact that their motivations were wholly their own. The absence of collectivity in this world was responsible for more than just a simple disconnect between people, it produced much more dangerous attitudes as well, like belief in the righteous justification of acts of violence when objectively no such justification existed. This wasn’t to say that I thought Morgan was wrong to be doing what we was doing; my issue was with the non-existence of a social structure that prevented these cycles of violence from getting started in the first place. I suppose there were too many people for them to make that work, people with competing interests, varied experiences, unique ambitions, diverse cultures and different economic pressures. Forgetting the very serious questions about racism, homophobia, thought and knowledge suppression, genetic selection, censorship, forced abortions, emotional manipulation and near perpetual surveillance, there was an undeniable genius to the homogeneity of Prospera. The values that the structure of their manufactured society had managed to preserve were strong enough to prevent the societal afflictions born of the organic development of this world from taking root in Prospera.

“When will I see you again?” Cathy asked Morgan, her voice shaky.

“I can’t say; maybe I won’t survive this one, in which case you won’t be seeing me again.”

It was heart-wrenching to see Cathy’s reaction to her boyfriend talking so casually about the possibility of his imminent death. She maintained her composure until he’d left but couldn’t maintain it any longer. As soon as he’d driven out of their driveway and onto the road she started crying. We were all expecting Miranda to be the one who would comfort her, when that didn’t happen Lisa went to her and gave her a shoulder to cry on. We were seeing for the first time the harsh reality of war as it was being experienced firsthand by our friend.

Cathy came with us to the cottage instead of returning to the main house where she’d have to face her father having been brought to tears by Morgan yet again. Kevin made tea for everybody and we sat in the living room talking. I paid close attention to Miranda and Cathy and I noticed that something was definitely different about them; their relationship had undergone an odd sudden change. We were curious to know more about Morgan, and Cathy, desperate for distraction from the dangerous mission he was off to, answered all of our questions unguardedly. She told us that the reason the loss of his family had been so hard on him was that they were his adoptive family. As a child he’d been abandoned in Huntingdale and had been taken to the orphanage from which his parents had adopted him. He wasn’t the only child that had suddenly and mysteriously appeared in Huntingdale and in every case the child had not been able to say where they’d come from. Was it possible that Morgan and the other children like him were actually from Prospera, and that they were the children that we thought were being killed because of their behavioural traits, like Tom, whose death Kevin blamed himself for? On the one hand it was relieving to think of Prospera as not being so cold and cruel as to kill small children, on the other hand abandoning small children in a strange far away place was by no means an act of compassion. There was also the question of whether, given the way that Morgan had allowed animus to take over him, they were right in identifying children like him as threats to the stability of Prospera.

I wasn’t able to be of any help at all to Cathy during her time of distress; I was too preoccupied with my latest suspicion about Prospera. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t write Prospera off as a terrible place and put it behind me. For all of its flaws it was still our home, and I couldn’t categorically say that it was inferior to this world. When I started working to help the refugees it was possible that I would start to feel more like I belonged here and my attachment to Prospera would start to fray but in all honesty I didn’t see that happening. In the time that I had spent with my mother accompanying her on her rounds I had developed a deep and intimate connection with Prospera and what it stood for and represented; in this random world I wasn’t sure if it was possible for anyone to feel that way.