After the Fire

by Will Hill

  I don’t think my brain is working properly.

  Why didn’t she talk to me about what she was feeling? Didn’t she trust me to keep her secret? Didn’t she love me enough to want to tell me the truth?

  Guilt pulses through me, because maybe she assumed I would go straight to the nearest Centurion if she told me the things that were in her head. It’s what I’ve been taught to do, and can I really say that I wouldn’t have?

  Can I honestly tell myself that?

  I have so many questions. Too many. Most of them are things I want to ask my mom, but I’m distantly starting to understand that I’m never going to get the chance. I don’t know how I’m supposed to carry on after she’s Gone and I don’t know what I’m supposed to think, how I’m supposed to ever be okay with this. The tears keep rolling down my cheeks and I face away from everyone and stare at the floor until the front door of the Big House opens and Angel steps through it and says that it’s time.

  Father John appears at the top of the stairs. “Very good,” he says. “Did she give you any trouble?”

  Angel shakes his head. “Quiet as a mouse, Father.”

  “And did you tell our Family of the verdict that has been passed?” he asks. “The verdict, and the sentence?”

  “I did, Father,” says Angel. “They’re waiting for you in the yard.”

  Father John nods, then walks down the staircase and across to where I’m sitting. “Take my hand, Moonbeam,” he says, reaching down towards me. I take his hand, my skin crawling at the feel of his skin on mine, and let him pull me to my feet. He walks me towards the door, the Centurions and Bella and Agavé and the rest of The Prophet’s wives following silently behind us.

  The entire Legion has gathered in the yard in front of the Chapel. At the centre of the crowd, my mom is standing next to the red pickup. The truck’s engine is running and behind its wheel is Amos, a solemn look on his lined face. Everyone is silent and everyone is looking in any possible direction apart from at my mom, until Father John’s footsteps thud across the wooden porch and the whole crowd turns to look at him.

  At me.

  Father John leads me down the steps and onto the tarmac but it might as well be happening to someone else because I can’t think and I can’t breathe. All I can do is stare at my mom.

  She’s gripping a black trash bag tightly in her hands – a single plastic bag to hold the contents of an entire life. Her eyes find mine, and she gives me a watered-down version of the look I saw when I walked into the Big House between Bear and Horizon, what now feels like a million years ago.

  Don’t cry. Be brave.

  The crowd parts to let me and Father John approach the truck, then closes up in our wake, sealing us inside. The Prophet lets go of my hand, and turns to face his Legion.

  “The Lord is hard,” he shouts, his voice booming across the yard and echoing off the buildings. “But He is always fair, and He is always just. He does not give second chances, and He does not make mistakes. He deals in right and wrong, and He deals in truth. The Lord is Good.”

  “The Lord is Good,” echoes the crowd.

  I don’t say a word. My whole body is shaking and my skin is really hot and I feel like I’m going to throw up but I can’t take my eyes off my mom. She still doesn’t look anything like her usual self, but she doesn’t look as utterly defeated as she did when Angel walked her out of the Big House – some of the life has returned to her eyes, some of the colour to her face.

  Father John looks at her. “Do you have anything to say for yourself before the sentence is carried out?” he asks.

  My mom meets his gaze. “May I hug my daughter?” she asks, her voice steady. “Please?”

  The Prophet narrows his eyes, then nods. “Be quick,” he says. “The Lord’s justice waits for nobody.”

  My mom drops her bag on the ground and walks slowly towards me. I stare up at her, my mind empty, my feet frozen to the spot. There are so many things I want to say, things I know I’m going to regret not saying later, when she’s Gone and this is all actually real, but as her shadow falls over me, I can’t find a single word.

  She pulls me carefully against her, as though she thinks I might break. For several long seconds I just hang stiffly in her arms, my body made of metal rods. Then fresh tears spill from my eyes and I wrap my arms around her back and bury my face into her shoulder and squeeze her so tightly that she won’t be able to get away.

  She won’t be able to leave me.

  “It’s all right, my little Moon,” she says, her voice low and choked. “Everything’s going to be all right. Be good, okay? You be good.”

  She squeezes me even tighter and for the briefest of moments her mouth is next to my ear as she whispers three words that only I could possibly hear.

  “Under your pillow.”

  I frown and pull my head away from her shoulder, but before I get the chance to ask her what she’s talking about she lets go of me and stands up. She picks up her bag and climbs into the back of the pickup without another word, leaving me standing completely alone in the middle of everyone I know in the world.

  Father John lowers his head and closes his eyes as his mouth moves in a brief silent prayer. Then he looks up, and nods at Amos.

  The pickup’s engine rumbles as it reverses in a slow arc towards the side of the Chapel. I watch, my mind reeling with utter impotence, as Amos puts the truck into drive and it rolls forward, crunching down off the smooth tarmac of the yard and onto the rough desert ground as he accelerates towards the Front Gate.

  My mom stares back at us as she is driven away, at the men and women she called her Family for the last decade and more. As the pickup reaches the Gate, her eyes settle momentarily on mine.

  Then the truck is out on the dirt road; it rounds the first bend, and disappears from view.

  “What was under your pillow?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  He and Agent Carlyle stare at me, their faces pale. I’m so used to seeing their expressions of shock as I talk that I barely even notice them any more.

  “I can’t imagine what that must have been like,” says Doctor Hernandez. “I’m so sorry it happened to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Nobody defended her?” asks Agent Carlyle. “Not a single one of them took her side?”

  I shake my head. “Father John said she was a Heretic,” I say. “There was no arguing with that. And I can’t blame them, I guess, because I didn’t really do anything either. I just watched it happen.”

  “You were a child,” says Doctor Hernandez. “There was nothing you could have done.”

  I shrug.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  “Do you think your mom was a heretic?” asks Agent Carlyle.

  I consider this. “It depends on what you think that means,” I say eventually. “By the Legion’s rules, the rules that Father John claimed came from The Lord, she probably was. I never got to see her journal, but she didn’t deny that it was hers, and she didn’t deny its contents. You have to understand that people raised inside the Legion were taught to not think about themselves, even before The Purge. There was a clear hierarchy: The Lord, the Legion, then everything else. Individual needs don’t matter, what you might want doesn’t matter. So I didn’t question whether what happened was fair, even though my heart broke when she was driven away and I couldn’t imagine what my life was going to be like without her. Her Heresy was still Heresy, even though she was my mom. I couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter just because I loved her. Does that make any sense?”

  Doctor Hernandez nods. “It makes perfect sense, sadly,” he says. “I’ve seen it dozens of times, although rarely in such extreme circumstances. It’s a fairly standard method of control.”

  I frown. “What does that mean?”

  He sits forward. “The intentional creation of a situation where people value something other more than they value themselves,” he says. “Where people will allow themselves to
be hurt, or even voluntarily hurt themselves, because they have been conditioned to believe that something else is more important than their own well-being. If you control that other thing, in this case the word of God, then you control the people. Father John ruled over The Lord’s Legion like a dictator, dispensing approval and disapproval, and the rest of you were programmed not to argue, or resist in any way.”

  “And even if you did,” says Agent Carlyle softly, “the Centurions had the guns. And we all know who they were loyal to.”

  I try to tell myself that I don’t recognize the world they’re describing, but the voice in the back of my head is instantly there, its tone sharp.

  Don’t. Don’t lie to yourself, not now you’ve come so far. I know it hurts to hear it, I know it makes you feel stupid and embarrassed for having been part of it for so long, but you know what he’s saying is the truth. You just have to face it.

  “Your mother told Father John that she couldn’t be guilty of apostasy because she had no faith to abandon,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Did that fit with the woman you grew up with?”

  I shake my head, as much in an attempt to clear it as to signal my disagreement. “I never doubted her,” I say. “She was never a fanatic like Jacob or Amos or Luke, but I always thought she was True. I’ve told you that I suspected she wasn’t very happy, but I always assumed that was because of my dad dying, or that it was just who she was. But I honestly never doubted her Faith, or her loyalty to the Legion. She persuaded Father John to choose me for a Future Wife, so it would never have occurred to me that she was secretly trying to leave.”

  “Maybe that’s why she did it,” says Agent Carlyle.

  I frown. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe she thought that if she put her own daughter forward to marry John Parson then her loyalty would be proven beyond doubt. Maybe she thought it would put her above suspicion.”

  “So what would have been her plan for when I turned eighteen?” I ask. “When I was supposed to actually marry him?”

  “I imagine she was counting on having escaped by then,” says Doctor Hernandez. “The two of you having escaped, I mean. She didn’t deny that she was looking for a way out for both of you.”

  “Pretty big gamble,” I say.

  He nods. “It was.”

  “Do you think she wanted to leave the whole time?” I ask. “Right from when we first got there?”

  “Do you?” he asks.

  “Maybe not the whole time,” I say. I’ve thought about this a lot since she was Banished. “But for a long time, yeah. I think she wanted to go. Wanted us to go. I just didn’t see it.”

  “You were a child,” says Doctor Hernandez. “In an exceptionally guarded environment, where nobody felt safe to say what they really thought or what they were really feeling. You couldn’t have known.”

  “She could have told me.”

  “No,” says Agent Carlyle. “She couldn’t. What if you had told the nearest Centurion?”

  That’s exactly what you would have done, whispers the voice in the back of my head. You know it is.

  I stare at them.

  “We’re not presenting any of this as fact,” says Doctor Hernandez. “We don’t know the truth, and we aren’t pretending to. But there’s something I’d like you to consider.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “I have no doubt that grief over the loss of your father was a major part of why your mother seemed distant to you, why you often felt she was unhappy,” he says. “I also have no doubt that your perception of her was influenced by the natural sense of parental disappointment that accompanies adolescence, and I need you to understand that I mean no criticism when I say that, none at all. But what if part of why she appeared to be unhappy was because she never wanted to come to Texas and join The Lord’s Legion? When the two of you did talk about it, she didn’t tell you they came for a long weekend and she experienced some profound epiphany and became a true believer. She told you they stayed because your father was very persuasive. So try and imagine yourself in the position I’m describing, just as a hypothetical. You’ve been forced to uproot your whole life, to go somewhere you didn’t want to go and join something you didn’t want to join, and then the person you did it for dies and leaves you stuck with your daughter in a place you never wanted to come to in the first place. How do you think you would feel about that?”

  “I think I’d be angry,” I say, as that exact emotion flickers into life deep inside me. “More than that, in fact. I think I’d be furious.”

  Doctor Hernandez nods. “You said she seemed happier before the purge?”

  “That’s how it felt.”

  “So maybe she was,” he says. “Maybe she thought things were okay then, that the Legion was an okay place for the two of you to be when Patrick McIlhenny was in charge, and maybe that changed after the purge. When she denied apostasy, she told Father John she had no faith in him. Not that she had no faith in God, or even in The Lord’s Legion. In him.”

  I nod. I hear her speak the words in my head, her voice laced with venom.

  “But maybe by then it was too late,” he says. “You said yourself that security was tightened after the purge, that rooms started being locked at night and the Centurions started carrying guns. Maybe she realized that she had left it too late. Maybe that’s why she was unhappy.”

  “Why wouldn’t she have just taken me and left before Father John took over?”

  He shakes his head. “I have no idea,” he says. “Maybe she was scared to go back out into the real world. Maybe she was scared of it being just you and her.”

  I stare at him.

  “It’s just something for you to think about,” he says. “Like I said.”

  He’s right, whispers the voice in the back of my head. You know he is. You never tried to look at things from her perspective. You were only concerned about how her behaviour affected you. How it made you feel.

  “That’s not fair,” I whisper.

  Doctor Hernandez frowns. “Moonbeam?”

  I hear him say my name but I don’t respond, because I’m not really in the room any more. I’m trying to imagine, if what he is saying is true, how my mother must have felt when Father John took Father Patrick’s place – how trapped, how utterly helpless. So many weeks and months and years that were still to come. So much time spent inside a prison you hadn’t even realized was a prison until it was too late to escape.

  “Are you all right?” he asks. “Do you want to stop?”

  Yes.

  I shake my head.

  “So that was the moment?” asks Agent Carlyle. “That was when your faith began to fail?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “It’s not like there was one moment, like some light bulb came on in my head or anything like that. I didn’t understand that anything was changing until a lot later. But looking back now, I guess that was it. That was when I started to think differently about things.”

  “When you realized things were starting to go bad?”

  I shake my head again. “I knew my mom getting Banished was going to make things worse for me,” I say. “I didn’t know they were going to turn bad for everyone until later.”

  “When?”

  “When Nate left,” I say. “When Luke wasn’t chosen as a Centurion. And…”

  When they gave out the guns. When Father John chose his final wife.

  “Moonbeam?” he asks.

  The last of my strength deserts me. My hand is throbbing with pain, more than it has in days, and my head feels light and drifting. “Can we stop?” I ask. “Please?”

  Agent Carlyle narrows his eyes, ever so slightly. “I know this is hard,” he says. “I get it, I really do, and I don’t want to push you. But there are things—”

  “There are things you need to know,” I say. “I know. I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m honestly not. I just can’t talk any more today. Please can that just be okay?”

  Agent Carlyle gives me a small smile an
d glances at Doctor Hernandez, who nods. “Of course it’s okay,” he says. “It’s fine. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.”

  Nurse Harrow shuts my door and I wait for the familiar sound of the lock turning before I sit down on the edge of the bed.

  My legs are trembling and my heart is racing and it took every last bit of my self-control to make it back along the grey corridor without bursting into tears or grabbing Nurse Harrow’s arm to keep myself upright.

  I lower my head between my knees and take a deep breath, then another, and another. My head swims but I close my eyes and ignore it; I focus on breathing – in, out, in, out – and I feel the pressure in my chest start to fade and after a while I open my eyes and sit up straight.

  I get slowly to my feet, then walk unsteadily across the room and sit down at the desk and start drawing. Waves of blue and white water appear on the page and I try to force my mind to go blank, to let it wander wherever it needs to, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like the destination.

  An image of my mom appears, her mouth curved downwards in the expression of constant disappointment that I grew to hate the sight of, that used to make me wonder why I so clearly wasn’t enough to make her happy, why a living daughter wasn’t enough to cancel out the memory of a dead husband.

  Oh God.

  I realize – so late, too late – how clearly she must have seen things.

  How it must have turned her stomach to watch me skipping across the yard and singing hymns and holding hands with my Brothers and Sisters in the Chapel on Sunday mornings and staring at Father John with blind, unquestioning devotion.

  How it must have hurt her to know that she couldn’t risk telling me the truth in case I sided with my Family against her, or said the wrong thing to the wrong person and brought everything crashing down.

  Oh God.

  I always believed that she urged Father John to accept me as a Future Wife because she wanted to hand over the responsibility of taking care of me, of loving me, to somebody else as quickly as she could.

  Oh God.

  But if she only pushed me towards The Prophet because she hoped it would keep her safe from suspicion while she looked for a way for us to escape, then I can pretty safely assume that the thought of me actually marrying him horrified her just as much as it did me. Otherwise she wouldn’t have tried so desperately to find a way out before the time came.