Hannah

“I lied earlier when I said that we were yet to make a decision on the prisoners, the truth is that we have. The Americans have agreed to leave, release the prisoners and close the mine. In exchange they’re going to stop masking us from satellite surveillance, stop guarding the forest against intruders and we’re going to give them back half of the money that they’ve paid us for the fragmentium.”

“They’ve been paying you?”

“We know how much the fragmentium is worth; the services that they’ve been providing us aren’t nearly enough compensation for it.”

“What do you even need the money for?”

“There are things we need that we can’t produce ourselves, medicines mostly, we buy them in the outside world and bring them back into the village.”

“How much money are you giving back to the Americans?”

“About $200 million.”

“That much?!”

“I told you, the fragmentium is worth a lot.”

“Is anything we were told growing up true?”

“You saw war and the effects of it with your own eyes; you’ll never see that here. Everything that we do is to ensure that what you experienced is never experienced by anyone here.”

“I knew that’s what you’d say.”

“What are you going to do when you’re freed? Are you going to come back like you’d planned or has everything that you’ve learned about our relationship with the Americans soured your opinion of us?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“We all want you back, you have no idea how worried Miranda’s parents have been about her.”

“Have you told them about us yet?”

“Not yet; I’ll tell them when this has all been brought to an end.”

“How long before we’re freed?”

“No more than a couple of weeks, the Americans need time to get all of their stuff out of here. You all need to take care of yourselves until then.”

“I want you to give some money to the prisoners here, as an act of penance.”

“The Americans are going to take care of that for us. I’ve known for a long time that what we were doing here was wrong but I’ve always assuaged my conscience by telling myself that we had to do it for the village. When I heard from Dr Lighton that you were locked up here I felt what all of their families must have been feeling all of these years. They’ll be taken care of; I’ve made sure of that.”

My mother’s decision to do this, which she’d made on her own, did a lot to redeem her in my eyes. She’d shown me a side of herself during this period that I’d never seen before, that I didn’t know she had. I knew the kind of risks that she was taking by doing things like allowing Cathy to see Prospera and pushing for a deal to get us freed. The steps that were being taken to get us out of prison were going to expose Prospera to the outside world in a way it hadn’t been for years; Cathy, an outsider, was going to have knowledge of Prospera; Philip would be returning to Prospera having met an outsider, all for something as simple as a mother wanting to help her child and the children that she’d watched grow up. I wanted to spend time with my mother and get to know this other, compassionate side of her better, but she was right, our time as prisoners and all of the revelations about Prospera’s dirty deals with the US military had done considerable damage to my opinion of the village and its governing authorities, of which my mother was a high ranking member.

“Is it okay, Philip meeting Cathy?” I asked her.

“You know Philip, he’s a puppy; if I tell him not to say anything he won’t say anything.”

Cathy and Philip came down from the mountain and my mother and I stopped talking. The time had come for us to go back. The ride back was silent; we had much to think about. Lt. Col Raymond was waiting for us at the base to escort us back to our cell. My mother hugged both me and Cathy before we were separated and said to Cathy in her most peremptory tone that she wasn’t to say a word of any of this to anybody, to which a mildly frightened Cathy responded that she understood.

Our responsibilities in the mine changed the very next day. The men were taken down to the mine to work and the women weren’t, not even Miranda and the others who worked in the kitchen were called upon, which Cathy and I knew was because above ground they were packing up. The food that we were brought to eat by the soldiers was from Prospera, we knew that in the cell and I suspected that Kevin had figured it out as well. Different sounds resonated from the mine than we were used to. There was no more pneumatic pounding and no more chipping; what we heard were explosions. They were few and relatively far between and every one of them startled me near to death; the thought that Kevin could be the victim of an accident worried me to no end. I waited all day to see him walk by our cell and breathed a huge sigh of relief when he did.

We spent our time in our cell thinking. After telling Lisa and Miranda while Cathy was sleeping about everything that my mother had told me about the terms of our release they had their own thoughts and questions to ruminate on. Our experiences as children of Prospera were the foundations of much of who we were and with every discovery of every lie those foundations eroded further, forcing us to rethink everything we thought we knew. That meant more for me than it did for Lisa and Miranda; I was the one who was being raised to have the responsibility of being a member of the Ethics Committee. I wondered if the sense of right and wrong that had compelled me to seek the release of the other prisoners would have been compromised enough had I stayed in the village for me to ignore their plight the way my mother and the others had been doing for years. Understanding that it was more likely than not I was glad I had left and had learned enough about the people of the outside world not to think of them as inferior beings whose freedom and lives were worth less than Prospera’s secrecy. By getting captured and imprisoned before making it to Prospera I had learned more about it than I would have had I made it back to the village, enough for me to decide that I wasn’t going to return to Prospera. I didn’t want to find myself in the position that my mother had been in for years of having to make decisions that changed the course of people’s entire lives. In the outside world there were no such decisions to be made. People were free to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wanted. My mother and the other governing authorities had their reasons for doing what they did and on the surface at least Prospera appeared to function better than the outside world. The price that the peace and stability of the village came at, I learned during our time in the prison, was much steeper than I’d previously thought, and was, I decided, too steep. When I thought about Prospera and Huntingdale it was the latter that felt like home; the thought of Frank and Kristin welcoming us back filled me with warmth and it was that thought that occupied my mind whenever I wasn’t worrying about Kevin being down in the mine where explosions were going off.