After the Fire

by Will Hill

  Agent Carlyle is staring at me with his bright blue eyes, but I ignore him; everything I have left is focused on Doctor Hernandez.

  “I’m sorry,” he says after what feels like hours have passed. “I know that it’s impossible for me to ever truly understand what you’ve been through, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always get everything right. But this, all of this, is a process for the both of us. There are things that you can’t be expected to understand, about the world you grew up in and the rest of the world outside the fences, and some of those things need to be challenged and exposed for what they really were. I’m trying to ease you into these discoveries as gently as I possibly can, although I have no doubt it doesn’t always feel like that to you. Those feelings are totally valid, and I’m not trying to diminish them, or derail you in any way. Okay?”

  My heart is pounding in my chest and my skin feels really hot and my hand suddenly hurts more beneath its bandages than it has all day, but I hear sincerity in his voice and I don’t believe – or maybe I just don’t want to believe – that he’s faking it.

  I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” he says. “But now that we’re having this interaction and we’re being emotionally open with each other, let me ask you something. Would it surprise you to know that in the vast majority of the world an adult could be sent to prison for denying a child food for three days?”

  I stare at him. “Why?”

  “The crime would likely be child neglect, or child abuse, or something similar,” he says. “Do you know what neglect is?”

  I shake my head. The word means nothing to me.

  “Neglect is when a person fails to adequately care for someone who is their responsibility,” he says. “From the perspective of a parent or a guardian, it could mean failing to ensure that a child has clean clothes, or goes to school when they’re supposed to. Not feeding them for three days would definitely qualify.”

  “It was a punishment,” I say, because it was. I broke the rules, and I was punished. That’s how things work.

  You don’t believe that though, says the voice in the back of my head. Maybe you did once, but not now. Not any more.

  “Shut up,” I whisper.

  Doctor Hernandez frowns. “Moonbeam?”

  I shake my head. “My mom was there,” I say. “When Father John announced I was being given the fast. She agreed with him.”

  Neither man says a word. They just look at me.

  “Can we stop?” I ask, and I’m ashamed by the pleading in my voice. “Please?”

  Doctor Hernandez nods. “Of course we can,” he says. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  Nurse Harrow gives me a smile before she pulls my door closed and locks it. I try to smile back at her, but I don’t think I really pull it off.

  I stand in the middle of the room for a second or two, then lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to banish the memory of Shanti’s expression when he was finally allowed out of the box, the look of awful, desperate relief on his face.

  I don’t want to see it. And I don’t want to see anything else that’s horrible today either. I really don’t think I can take it.

  Instead, I try to picture my dad.

  He died when I was barely three years old, so I shouldn’t have any memories of him at all. But the weird thing is, I do. I can see him so clearly, from angles that make me think I must have been sitting on his lap or playing at his feet and gazing up at him. I know they can’t be real, because I was three – they have to be images that I’ve created in the years since he died, that I invented and buried so deep that my brain can no longer tell the difference between them and the truth.

  It’s an unsettling thing, not being able to fully trust your own mind. There have been times – more than a few of them – when I actually wondered whether my dad really existed, or whether he was just a comforting fiction my mom made up. But I don’t – can’t – believe that she would lie to me about something so fundamental, about how I even came to exist. The only photo I had of him was burned to ash along with almost everything else inside The Base, but I still have his watch and I used to have his knives, even if I don’t know where they are now, and they are real, they are actual physical things that used to belong to an actual physical person.

  It’s harder to just accept the reality that he did exist and then he died, far younger than he should have.

  Harder, and more painful.

  But it’s the truth.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” says my mom. “Give it here.”

  I hold out the string and the jar of beads and watch as she starts threading them, alternating blue and white and pale yellow and letting them clatter together where she has twisted the string round her thumb.

  I’ve never been much good at making things. When I was little, before The Purge, Alice and some of the girls made bracelets and necklaces to sell in Town, beautiful little things that gleamed and glittered and made the women of Layfield coo and purr and tell my Sisters how clever they were.

  It used to make me feel jealous, watching them collect dollar after dollar in exchange for their jewellery while I paced back and forth along the hot sidewalk with a sweaty bunch of leaflets in my hand, trying to find someone who wanted to talk to me about The Word Of The Lord. Most people didn’t – they normally weren’t rude, because we were just kids, and adults try a bit harder to be nice when they’re dealing with children, but the majority just muttered “No thanks” and kept right on walking, barely even looking at me as they passed.

  On those rare occasions when someone did stop, it was a totally different story. I might have been no good at threading beads, pressing flowers and supergluing rhinestones, but I was good at talking to people. Most of them engaged me out of boredom, or because they saw some sport in winning an argument with a little girl, but once I had their attention, the conversation usually didn’t go how they were expecting.

  I always started with a loaded question, one I knew they would say yes to. Things like “Do you worry about Hell?” or “Do you believe in the power of The Lord?” always worked well, because almost everyone in Layfield claimed they believed in God, even if most of them were a long way from the True Path. And once they said yes to my opening question, I just talked to them.

  I told them about The Serpent and his Servants, about the End Times and the Final Battle, and I pressed leaflet after leaflet into their hands before inviting them to come out to The Base and make up their own minds. It seems crazy now, after Father John’s First Proclamation banned almost all contact between The Lord’s Legion and the Outside. In Father Patrick’s time not only was the Sunday morning service in the Chapel open to anyone who wanted to come, but people from the local towns actually came, pretty regularly. Some made the trip out of genuine curiosity, some because they had nothing better to do, but most weeks would see a handful of unfamiliar faces sitting in the back row of pews. And more often than not, they would be people that I had spoken to.

  Father Patrick used to call me his little evangelist. Hearing it made me smile from ear to ear.

  My mom strings a final bead, attaches the clasps, and holds the necklace out to me. “There you go,” she says. “It’s not difficult, Moon. It just takes a little practice.”

  I nod, because there’s really nothing you can say to someone who doesn’t understand why you can’t do something they find easy, and fasten the necklace around my neck. The beads are smooth and heavy against my skin, and I smile.

  “It’s great, Mom,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “Okay,” she says, which I like to think is her way of saying “you’re welcome” without actually saying it.

  We’re sitting on a bench near the western edge of The Base, underneath the ash tree that got struck by lightning two summers ago. Its dead branches point towards the sky like broken fingers and there’s a ring of dirt around the base of its trunk where nothing has grown since, n
ot even weeds. Overhead, the sky is bright blue and absolutely enormous, without a single cloud to be seen, and the sun is beating down and making the skin on my arms tingle. Lunch finished an hour ago and normally we’d already be back at work, but today is Sunday, and we don’t work on Sundays. Father John likes us to rest, to reflect on another week spent on the True Path and give thanks to The Lord for the blessings He has bestowed upon us.

  I look at my mom. She’s staring into the distance, a familiar emptiness in her eyes, and I feel a guilty twist of annoyance in the pit of my stomach.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom.

  I really, genuinely do.

  I love her because she’s clever and pretty and she looks after me and tries really hard to keep me on the True Path. But the truth is – and it feels terrible admitting this, even to myself – that a lot of the time, I don’t actually like her very much. And it often seems as though the feeling is mutual.

  She’s never unkind to me, at least not intentionally. Some of our Brothers and Sisters are so awful to their children that I struggle to understand why they ever had them in the first place; they shout at them and insult them and – once they’ve got the permission of the Centurions – punish them harshly for the slightest little thing they do wrong. My mom isn’t like that at all, and I’m grateful.

  It’s sort of hard to explain what she is like. I think the closest I can get is that sometimes – more often than not, in all honesty – it feels like she isn’t really there. It’s as if what I see every day is more like an echo than an actual person, as though all the life and energy has been stripped out of her and all that’s left is something that walks and talks and laughs, but doesn’t seem to actually feel anything.

  This isn’t a new development. For a long time I thought her distance was something to do with grief over my dad, but he’s been dead for more than a decade now and it feels to me like there has to be a limit on how long anything is allowed to make you feel sad, because otherwise how do people manage to live their lives? Surely there has to come a day when you wake up and it just doesn’t hurt any more, like when I was seven and fell off the roof of one of the cars and broke my arm. If not, I honestly don’t understand why anyone would ever fall in love or get married or have children, because all you’re doing is guaranteeing that one day you’ll get hurt so badly that you’ll never really recover, and that doesn’t sound like a very good deal.

  “Penny for them?” I ask.

  She looks round at me. “What?”

  “Your thoughts, Mom,” I say. “Penny for them?”

  “Oh,” she says, and gives me a small smile. “Sorry. I was miles away.”

  Like usual. Like always.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “What were you thinking about?”

  “Your father,” she says, and I feel myself stiffen. She hardly ever talks about him, even when I ask her to. “I was thinking about how much he loved this place.”

  “Why did he love it?”

  “Because he was an idiot,” she says. Then she sees the frown that has appeared on my brow, and grimaces. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean that. I just mean he was easily impressed.”

  “By what?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “By everything,” she says. “People, art, music, books, places. Especially places. He grew up in Chicago, a city boy through and through, and when we moved to Santa Cruz he used to tell me how amazing the Pacific was at least once a day, like every morning he was seeing it for the first time. But how he felt about the ocean was nothing compared to how much he loved this desert. He used to tell me it was undeniable proof of God’s existence, that only The Lord could have created something so completely incredible and also made our brains powerful enough to take it for granted. He used to say this desert was the Holiest place he ever saw.”

  “What do you think, Mom?”

  She shrugs again. “It’s a desert,” she says. “As hot and empty as any other. It’s pretty enough in the mornings and evenings, and I guess there’s something to be said for the peace and quiet, but it’s just a desert. Places are only places, Moon. People make them into more than they are.”

  “Didn’t you want to come here?” I ask. I’ve never asked her that question – or any others like it – before, but it seems like she’s in an unusual mood, like she wants to really talk to me, and I don’t want to let it go to waste.

  She frowns at me. “That’s a very dangerous question, my little Moon,” she says. “Are you implying Heresy on my part? Are you suggesting that I didn’t welcome the Call of the True Path?”

  My stomach drops like a stone. “No, Mom,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t—”

  Her frown disappears, replaced by a gentle smile. “I’m just teasing you,” she says. “Although I want you to promise me right now that you’ll never ask anyone else that question.”

  I shake my head. “I won’t.”

  “Promise me, Moon.”

  “I promise, Mom.”

  “Good girl,” she says. “And no, I didn’t want to come here, to tell the truth. I loved our house in Santa Cruz, and I loved the ocean too, even if I didn’t mention it as often as your father did. You were only eighteen months old and you weren’t exactly the easiest baby, so I wasn’t with your father when he heard Horizon speak, in the mission hall near the boardwalk. I had just put you to bed when he came home and announced that he had met a True messenger of The Lord, and that we needed to go to Texas.”

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  She laughs. It’s a lovely sound, one I don’t hear very often. “I told him not to be so ridiculous,” she says. “I told him that I wasn’t going to uproot our family and move to the middle of nowhere because some travelling preacher said so.”

  “So how did we end up here?”

  Her eyes go dim for a moment. “Your father could be very…persuasive,” she says. “He knew that he would get nowhere by trying to convince me to change my mind, so he made it seem like he had let it go. But he kept mentioning things Horizon had said, things that I had to admit made a certain amount of sense, and when he eventually suggested that we come down here for a long weekend, just to see what it was like, no pressure, I said yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “We came,” she says, “and we never left. On the Sunday afternoon I moved you and me into Building Nine and your father started the drive back to Santa Cruz to pack up our things.”

  “So what changed your mind?” I ask.

  “I heard Father Patrick and some of the others speak,” she says. “I talked to some of our Brothers and Sisters. And like I said, your father could be very persuasive.”

  The ceiling of my room is made of square grey panels, each one maybe two feet long.

  Four of them meet right above me, at the point I’ve been staring at for I don’t know how long. There’s a stain across the corners of two of them, a smear of pale orange that fades as it bleeds into whatever the panels are made of. I guess there must be a leak above the ceiling, something dripping and spreading a tiny fraction further every day.

  It’s a weird feeling to be allowed to think about my mother without worrying that someone is somehow going to peer inside my head and report me to a Centurion. After she was Gone, she joined the long list of people whose names were never to be spoken out loud, who had been relegated to the status of non-persons, as though they had never actually existed at all. But she did exist, and there’s nobody to stop me thinking about her now.

  I stare at my room’s tiny window and wonder if she’s out there somewhere, living a life that doesn’t include me. I wonder if part of her was relieved when she was Banished; whether it gave her a chance to get away from everything, including her daughter and the ghost of her husband. For the longest time I believed, with all my heart, that she would come back for me; that one day I would hear her call my name and I would look round and see her standing outside the Front Gate and I would climb over it and run to her and she would take me a
way and we would never look back.

  But that didn’t happen.

  I thought about it a lot, in the darkness of my room in Building Nine after the door was locked and the lights were out – about what her never coming back actually meant. Did it mean that she was scared of Father John, of what he might do to her, or to me? Or – and this would be much, much worse – did it mean that she simply never really loved me at all, that my worst fears, the ones that crept into my head at my weakest moments, were true all along?

  Almost the worst part was that there was nobody I could ask about her, nobody I could talk to – even the Brothers and Sisters I felt closest to would have reported me straight away. They might not have enjoyed doing so, but they would have done it, without thinking twice.

  Now though? Now there is someone I can talk to. But I still have no idea whether I can trust Doctor Hernandez or not. He may well be telling me the truth, that he doesn’t know anything about my mom, about where she is or whether she’s even still alive. He may well have asked his colleagues whether they know anything, and if they do, he might even tell me, like he promised he would. Or…

  Maybe he knows where she is but isn’t telling me because I’m more likely to cooperate so long as there’s something I want.

  Maybe she’s dead and he knows she is but he doesn’t want to upset me, because of my fragile state.

  Maybe.

  Tears well in the corners of my eyes as I hear footsteps come to a halt outside my room. I wipe them away, because I really don’t want Nurse Harrow to see me crying when she brings in my lunch. But the tears keep coming – it’s like something inside me has sprung a leak that isn’t going to stop.

  Because a single thought is filling my head as I swing my legs off the bed, a thought that is both deeply profound and completely obvious, a thought that I have so rarely allowed myself to acknowledge.

  I miss my mom.