FEAR

The apple test was one of the various tests we were administered as small children. When we were five we were seated at a table by ourselves and had a bowl of four apples placed before us. The test was administered by a member of the Education Committee, who told us to imagine three other children sitting around the table with us and to decide what we wanted to do with our apples. After we’d made our decision about what we wanted to do with our apples we were told that one of the children at the table hadn’t eaten for a day and were asked to make a new decision about what we wanted to do with our apples. After that we were told that one of the children at the table had grabbed all of the apples for themselves and we were asked to say what we intended to do about it. There were other tests as well, tests that when we were older we realized were intended to evaluate certain elements of our personalities: selfishness, compassion, aggression, laziness, intelligence, leadership, inventiveness, curiosity, sociability, perceptiveness, sagacity; the list was extensive.

At the age of seven we still had no way of knowing the depth of seriousness behind the tests to which we had been subjected. This didn’t mean that the strangeness of them had not succeeded in piquing our interest. For Kevin what was behind the tests that we were being administered was a subject of insatiable fascination. He had to know what the reason was for those tests, and formulated a plan for acquiring the answers he was desperate to know. He befriended a boy named Tom, who, at four years old, would soon be beginning his testing. Kevin thought that he had developed a good enough understanding about what the Education Committee was using the tests to determine and planned to use Tom to test his theory. He told him that for the apple test he should first take all the apples for himself, then refuse to share any of them with the child that hadn’t eaten for a day and then to fight the child that grabbed all of the apples to get them back. Not knowing if the boy had followed through with what Kevin had told him to do we couldn’t be sure that his sudden death—said to have been from an aggressive infection he’d contracted—was related to his answers on his tests being the antithesis of what the Education Committee was looking for. There were no such doubts for Kevin. He was unshakeable in his conviction that the boy had been killed, and that he’d been killed because he’d failed all of his tests.

The incident with Tom changed Kevin in ways from which he would never recover. The guilt, fear and paranoia that the incident instilled in him dictated his every thought and action. He became odd. He had conspiracy theories about everything; about whether there really were sharks that would eat you if you swam beyond the end of the sea cliffs, about whether there really were bears and wolves the size of houses in the forest on the other side of Guardian Mountain, about whether there had really been a nuclear world war that had wiped out most of humanity and turned the world into a barren wasteland where chaos reigned.

There were five of us in our group: Kevin, Miranda, Lisa, Darren, and me, Hannah. Our friendship was the product of the close working relationships that our parents shared, for example my mother was a member of the Education Committee and Miranda’s father was the Head Librarian. Believing that it was essential to his survival Kevin had learned to exercise the utmost discretion with his suspicions; we four were the only ones Kevin trusted with his conspiracy theories and we took our responsibility as the repositories for them very seriously. The secrecy that being trusted by him required of us made our strong bonds of friendship even stronger. When we started school an effort was made by the school to widen our social circles. In class our teachers placed us in groups with children from different groups to encourage new friendships. This method took time to produce results; during lunch breaks and after school we’d all regroup in our original cliques and spend our time telling each other about the children with whom we’d been thrown together. Almost all of the other children responded to the program positively by making new friends and breaking away from their close knit circles. The five of us were different. The closeness of our group was such that no amount of contact with any new children could make us break away from our group or admit any new members into it.

Of the four of us I was the one that Kevin trusted the most. The two of us had a special bond that neither of us had with any of the other members of the group. I was the only one who knew about Kevin’s involvement in the incident with Tom. About a week after Tom’s death he came to me shaking and incoherent, refusing to say anything unless he was absolutely certain there was no possibility of us being overheard. The only place he said he would feel safe was the beach. We walked there along the river that flowed from the lake to the ocean. He didn’t say a word while we were walking and kept scanning our surroundings to see if we were being watched or followed. I didn’t know what to make of Kevin during this period when he was living in constant fear of things only he believed were real. Before I’d learned how to deal with him Kevin scared me a lot with the things he would say, mostly because they made him sound like a crazy person but also because a part of me thought it was possible that he wasn’t just being paranoid. The more he talked about the things he was afraid of the less irrational he sounded.

“People have been coming by our house every day.”

“That’s not unusual; everybody’s very social with each other.”

“You don’t understand, people are coming to our house as many as three or four times a day.”

“Kevin, that’s not unusual.”

“They either ask me to leave or they make sure I stay. That means they want me gone so they can talk with my parents about me or they want me to stay so they can observe me.”

“You’re seeing things that aren’t there; you need to stop this paranoia business of yours.”

“Your mother’s visited more than anybody else.”

“My mother?”

“She was also the last council representative to visit Tom’s house, it was about a week before he died; I was watching his house.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Your mother saw me, when she was visiting him. I was watching his house from behind a bank and some of the ground gave way under me; she turned toward the noise and saw me. I think they did something to Tom, and I think they want to do the same thing to me.”

For years Kevin would say things like this that made us question his mental stability. Fortunately by the time we realized that he wasn’t crazy, that Prospera was a far more dangerous place than anybody knew, nothing had happened to him yet. We were able to call on him for guidance and advice on how to navigate the situations we found ourselves in that were increasingly fraught with peril as the truth about Prospera revealed itself to us.

PROSPERA

Year 142

When we were twelve years old

Hannah

Prospera is a village located between the ocean and Guardian Mountain, a mountain so high it appeared to touch the sky. On the other side of Guardian Mountain was Eternal Forest, which we were told was so named because when viewed from the top of Guardian Mountain it stretched as far as the eye could see. Growing up we were told that nobody who went into the forest ever came back alive because of the giant bears and wolves that lived there. In school we were shown pictures that illustrated their ferocious teeth and claws and their size compared to us humans. These pictures along with descriptions of how their noses were able to easily pick up the scent of humans were enough to stop all of us from so much as entertaining the thought of going into the forest. Well, almost all of us. Kevin didn’t believe this story or any of the other stories we were told about what was beyond Prospera. What frightened him was what was within Prospera.

I was too busy to spend as much time speculating as to what about what we were told was true and what wasn’t. When I was twelve I was told that I had been selected to become a member of the Ethics Committee when I was twenty and had finished my schooling. To be selected to be a member of the Ethics Committee was a rare and tremendous honour. Prospera was governed by a collection of committees that oversaw every aspect of village life. There was the Ethics Committee, the Education Committee, the Committee on Public Health, the Committee on Harmonious Community Co-Habitation, the Food Committee and the Committee on Water, Energy and Infrastructure. The purview of the Ethics Committee was to oversee the rules of conduct of the village and the villagers’ adherence to those rules. It was their job to pay close attention to everything that happened in the village and to decide if it was in the village’s best interests to respond to something by enforcing the rules in such a way as to stop it or to change the rules to accommodate it; consequently the work of the Ethics Committee has a direct impact on almost every other committee and on almost every aspect of life in Prospera, making it the most powerful committee of them all. The members of the Ethics Committee were a diverse mix of ages, though most of them were either middle aged or old. To be selected to be member of the Ethics Committee meant being identified as one of the finest people in the whole village, someone with exceptional intelligence, maturity and ability. I was honoured to have been chosen and so were my parents.

My mother was especially proud of me and was determined to ensure that I remained on track for the appointment. As one of the senior members of the Education Committee and a village prefect—someone with the vested authority to inspect and advise on all village matters—she understood completely the challenge that lay ahead of me to continue to prove that I was deserving of the place for which I had been selected and had been tasked with the responsibility of overseeing my education. Every week she brought home books from the library for me to read and admonished me not to allow anybody to see them and not to tell anybody about what was in them. Her stern countenance and tone of voice when she said this to me were scary enough to me as a twelve year old to obey her without protest. I suspected that the books my mother brought home with her from the library were the much whispered about ‘Dark Books’, volumes that only the highest ranking officials in Prospera were permitted to access.

We’d only learned a small amount about the world beyond Prospera during our schooling, most of it concerning the many wars humanity had waged with particular emphasis on the nuclear world war over a hundred years ago that had driven the founders of Prospera to create a safe place far away from the madness of the rest of the world. The primary focus of our education was to equip us with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be perfect Prospera citizens. The books from which my mother taught me contained information that went far beyond the tales of war, disease, famine, hunger and slavery that were taught to all of the school children. At times the knowledge threatened to overwhelm me; it was staggering to be learning about people like Abraham Lincoln and the things they’d done which, had I not been chosen to serve on the Ethics Committee, I never would have known about. Whenever I reacted emotionally to the knowledge that I was being entrusted with my mother would have to calm me down and remind me of the importance of not allowing anybody to learn that I knew things they didn’t, that they never would.

“Mom, isn’t this wrong? There’s so much here that’s being kept from everybody.”

“That’s what was decided, it’s not our place to question it.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not wrong.”

“Hannah, you have been chosen to be a future member of the Ethics Committee because it is believed that you can handle the burden of knowing what the others don’t.”

“Who decided that? What about me led them to make that decision? How do they know that the others can’t handle this knowledge if they’ve never exposed them to it?”

“HANNAH! You need to stop this! You are not to breathe a word of this to anybody, and you cannot draw any attention to yourself by acting any differently as a result of what you’ve learnt, understand?” She asked me in the dead serious tone of voice she always used when she talked to me about the need for me to maintain secrecy.

“I understand.”

“Now, what was the primary reason for Napoleon’s defeat?”

“He underestimated the difficulty he’d have in conquering Russia; his hubris and ambition was his undoing.”

“As it was for many others throughout history; you’ll notice we don’t encourage those personality traits here.”

“Aren’t personality traits natural? What happens to those that are born with traits that you don’t want to encourage?”

“That’s a lesson for when you’re older.”

Like Kevin had done after learning of Tom’s death for which he held himself responsible, I had to learn how to keep my feelings to myself and not give anybody any reason to suspect that there was anything about me that had changed. This proved especially challenging for me when I was with my friends, in particular Kevin, who I was not at all comfortable with deceiving. In the five years since the incident with Tom, the special bond that Kevin and I shared had become even stronger. We were closer to each other than we were to anybody else, and at the sensitive age of twelve there was the blossoming of an undeniable attraction between us that neither of us had the courage to talk about; our friendship meant too much to us for us to jeopardize it by needlessly complicating things, and there was also the fact that courtships between children under the age of eighteen were against the rules. According to Freud, human sexuality, when not handled with the appropriate maturity, was a dangerous and potentially destructive thing, hence the decision by the Ethics Committee not to allow courtships under the age of eighteen. Had Kevin and I acted on our feelings and been discovered there was no telling what the consequences would be for us.

Midway through the school year we were assigned our optimal careers based on the aptitudes we’d displayed during our six years of school and were separated into different educational courses depending on the careers that had been selected for us. To compensate for the small number of people in the village and the amount of work that went into maintaining the standards of the village it was often the case that children were assigned more than one career. Darren had been told that he was going to be a writer and a teacher; I was going to continue being mentored by my mother; Miranda would be studying only music because of her prodigious talent on the violin and Lisa’s excellence in science made studying to become a doctor the logical choice for her. Kevin, much to all of our surprise, was to be apprenticed as a carpenter and stable hand. Surprise at this decision was not confined to our group of five, it was universal. Kevin was one of the smartest children; everybody knew that and was expecting him to be selected for one of the more important careers. I wasn’t just surprised by the decision, I was outraged. My mother was one of the senior members of the Education Committee; in all likelihood she had played a major role in the decision to banish Kevin to the stables. The second I got home from school I angrily questioned her about it and found myself once again on the receiving end of a peremptory caution.

“If he was sent to work in the stables it’s because that’s the best place for him.”

“That’s not true; he’s smarter than all of us, he should have been selected for one of the careers we were selected for.”

“It’s not all about intelligence, other personality factors are taken into account as well.”

“Like what? What is Kevin lacking that makes him so unsuitable for anything important?”

“All of the jobs in the village are important, and as to why Kevin was selected for the careers for which he’s been selected, I can’t share that with you, not yet.”

“Why not? Kevin has just been cruelly stripped of any opportunity to be anything meaningful for the rest of his life and you’re telling me you can’t tell me why! What are you keeping from me?”

“I can’t tell you Hannah, please stop this, you have no idea of what the repercussions would be were that information to get out or if you keep asking these questions without any discretion.”

“Mom, just tell me…”

“He’s going to the stables; that’s the end of it! It could’ve been a lot worse, that’s all I’ll tell you.”

Following Kevin’s assignment to the stables I saw him a lot less. The details of the schedule that he’d been put on were that he would spend the morning with us at school then go to the wood shop for two hours then to the stables for another two hours. I saw him in the mornings at school and didn’t see him again until the next morning at school. I could only think that despite our best efforts to keep Kevin’s paranoia and distrust a secret there were members of the governing authorities that knew about that side of him and decided that it was in the best interests of the village for him not to be in a position of any influence. I spent increasing amounts of time thinking about what Kevin had repeatedly said to me over the years about truths being kept from us. I walked through the village feeling distrustful of those around me, observing them with the same suspicion as Kevin. We became closer after he was sent to work in the wood shop and the stables even though we were spending a fraction of the time together than we used to. It confirmed a lot of what he’d been saying for years about the governing authorities having secret agendas upon which they based all of their decisions. I stopped thinking he was crazy and with my mother refusing to answer any of my questions he became the only person I felt I could trust. I also felt sorry for him. Jobs like working in the stables and as a carpenter were given to those who didn’t have the talent or the intelligence to pursue anything artistic or intellectual. Kevin had intelligence in abundance and should have been assigned a career that would have allowed him to play an important role in shaping Prospera’s future.

If one of the goals of sending Kevin to work in the stables was to keep us apart, it failed. Every once in a while I’d go to see him and we’d steal a couple of horses and go for a ride down to the beach, all the way to where Guardian Mountain stretched out into the ocean, which we referred to as the sea cliffs. We were as far away from the village as you could get and felt a sense of privacy and safety there that we couldn’t feel anywhere else. Kevin didn’t appear to be angry or despondent about being assigned to work in the stables. He was completely sanguine about it, as if there was nothing at all unusual about it. His behaviour didn’t make any sense; the career for which he’d been chosen was well beneath his capabilities and should have made him more paranoid and disillusioned. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t.

“Are you really okay with being a carpenter and a stable worker?” I asked him shortly after we’d dismounted and tethered our horses to a tree.

“It’s nothing I wasn’t expecting, with all of my suspicions and distrustfulness I was never going to be put in a position that allowed me to have any influence.”

“But the stables are so beneath you.”

“Don’t say that Hannah; we live in an egalitarian society, remember?” He said sarcastically.

“How can it be egalitarian if you’ve been treated so unfairly?”

“It probably could have been worse.”

“My mother said the same thing, that it could’ve been worse.”

“She knows a lot more about what goes on around here than we do, so we should trust that she’s telling the truth.”

“What do you think she meant by ‘It could have been worse’?”

“I think what she meant was that I could’ve been put on a fishing crew.”

“Why would that have been worse?”

“Remember not that long ago there was that fishing boat that returned from sea with one less crew member, they said that he fell overboard and then got eaten by a shark?”

“You think they did something to him, like Tom?”

“I’m saying working in the stables is not the worst thing.”

Only then did I fully understand the fear that Kevin had been living in since the death of Tom five years ago. He was terrified that there would come a time when it was decided that it was too dangerous to allow him to continue to be a citizen of Prospera and should that day come he would be powerless to do anything about it. His fate was not in his own hands, it was in the hands of people with enough power to arbitrarily dictate the trajectory of the life of anybody in the village. He’d spent years feeling out of place and struggling to determine if he had a place in Prospera and ultimately realized that he didn’t have one and that there was every possibility he was going to pay the price for that. He’d accepted that and had since let go of much of his fear and paranoia.

“Last week I came down here late at night and went for a swim; I swam all the way past the cliffs and spent about an hour just floating, waiting for a shark to attack me.”

“Why in the world would you do that?! You could’ve been killed!”

“Nothing happened; the sharks they warned us about were just another lie, it’s probably the same with the bears and the wolves that they told us live in the forest, which is why next week, when the moon is full, I’m planning on swimming around the sea cliffs and going into the woods.”

“That’s insane! What you’re talking about doing is far too dangerous; you mustn’t go through with it!”

“I need to know the truth Hannah; if I’m to suffer the same fate as Tom I at least want to have known the truth.”

That day at the beach was the first time I’d seen what a free person looked like. Kevin sat next to me on the beach looking out at the ocean with a look of blatant defiance on his face. The warnings about bears and sharks and wolves that we’d been given meant nothing to him, all that mattered to him was obtaining the truth behind what we as Prospera citizens had been brought up to believe.

I wasn’t too young to understand that what I felt for Kevin was love. His rebelliousness, the originality of it, drew me to him ineluctably. I wished I had his freedom, his willingness to question what was blindly accepted as truth. I didn’t know how I would cope with suddenly losing him to a mysterious illness or some freak accident; the fact that such an event could occur at any moment made my love for him all the more profound and excruciating.

Miranda

I was being pushed to the limit of what I was capable of enduring. Mr Parker, the orchestra director and conductor, was making us practice seven hours a day non-stop, all because Julie, the orchestra’s first chair violinist who I was chosen to fill in for at the last minute, fell and broke her arm. He could have at least changed the program to something like Bach and Mozart; instead he’d stubbornly chosen to stick with Bruch and Dvorak, two of my least favourite composers. It was all I could do to get through rehearsals without breaking my violin across my knee. I hated Bruch and Dvorak that much and Mr Parker’s insistence that we start again from the top every time I made even the slightest mistake was driving me crazy.

Hannah, Darren and Lisa were all that was standing between me and a complete meltdown; without their friendship I wasn’t sure if I would have lasted as long as I did, that and me constantly reminding myself that things could have been worse for me, like they were for Kevin, who’d been sent to work in the stables. I’d never had the kind of relationship with Kevin that Hannah and Darren had; honestly I found all of his paranoid ramblings about conspiracies and secrets to be annoying and a little unsettling. He sounded crazy when he talked about that stuff, enough for me to question if it was safe for us to be spending so much time with him. But Hannah liked him and couldn’t imagine him not being a part of her life and Darren with his curiosity and roaming mind enjoyed engaging Kevin in discussions about the extent of what was being kept from us and how much influence our lives were under unbeknownst to us, leaving Lisa and I with no choice but to endure him.

Just recently Hannah had told us about Kevin’s plan to swim around Guardian Mountain and explore Eternal Forest late at night. This was after she’d told us about how he’d gone swimming beyond the sea cliffs in the shark infested waters. How stupid! And Hannah had sounded proud of him when she’d told us about it! He was going to get her into trouble the same way he’d gotten himself into trouble and gotten himself sent to the stables. From the way she was talking when she was telling us about Kevin’s idiotic plan it was clear to us that she was intrigued by the idea and was thinking of going with him. Hannah and Kevin were dangerous together because she was just like him. She was every bit as curious as Kevin was about the real workings of Prospera only she didn’t have the same heedlessness that he did to seek out the answers. They had a co-dependant relationship: Kevin relied on Hannah for trustworthy companionship and Hannah relied on Kevin as a resource for uncovering truths about Prospera. Lisa had made this observation about them. She was the smartest one in our group of five; Hannah’s constant assertions that it was actually Kevin were nonsense. Lisa was also the most beautiful girl in the village, at least I thought so. When I was with her it took all I had to stop myself giving away my feelings. There was no evidence of anybody in Prospera being attracted to a member of the same gender, as such I couldn’t be sure what the reaction would be were my feelings to become public knowledge. To be on the safe side I decided to keep my feelings concealed. We all knew that what had happened to Kevin with his career placement was no accident, it was the product of him sticking his nose too many times into places it had no business being. I contented myself with Lisa’s friendship and made sure not to do anything when we were together that would arouse anybody’s suspicions.

There was one person who did have suspicions about me and my feelings for Lisa. When we were all together Kevin looked at me and Lisa with eyes that could see more than I wanted them to see. The good thing was that there was nothing malicious or judgmental in them. That was the one thing I did like about Kevin; his disdain for the rules meant that you needn’t fear him reporting anything you said or did to the governing authorities. In that regard I understood Hannah’s absolute and unwavering trust in him, but I wasn’t about to trust him to the extent that I agreed to go along with his outrageous plan to explore Eternal Forest.

After a few days of displaying perceptible interest in the idea Hannah had decided that she was going to go with him. To my great shock Lisa told me when we were walking home from one of my rehearsals that she’d decided to go with them too.

“Why are you going with them?”

“Every time Kevin does something like go swimming in the ocean beyond the cliffs the more convinced I become that he’s right about us being lied to about everything.”

“Since when are you so interested in Kevin’s paranoid theories?”

“How can I not be interested? He’s always being proven right; there are things happening here that are being kept from us.”

“And why do you care about that?”

“If you don’t believe him then why are you so scared?”

“Did you ever consider that what’s being kept from us is being kept from us for a reason?”

“If we’re being asked to give our lives to Prospera, doing everything they tell us to do, don’t we deserve to know what those reasons are?”

“You’re going no matter what, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m coming with,” I said, my words devoid of conviction, “how does Darren feel about this?”

“He knows, but he’ll never come; he’s an even bigger coward than you are.”

“Why are you talking like this? Calling me a coward, talking about wanting to know what’s being kept from us; I’ve never heard you talk like this before.”

“I guess I’m just excited, this is my first time doing something like this.”

“When are we going?”

“Two nights from now; the full moon will give us plenty of light to help us move through the forest.”

Waiting those two days for the night to come when we’d be heading into the forest, I questioned why it was that I was the only one of us who wasn’t preoccupied with thoughts about what was being kept from us. Most likely it was because I thought Prospera was all but perfect and that part of what made it so was that there were things we weren’t made aware of. My love of music was ignited when I was a small child and my parents took me to the open air auditorium on the banks of the lake to listen to the orchestra playing a full evening of Mozart. That evening everybody was dressed in their black with white trim formal robes. The concert didn’t start until the sun had gone down, at which point the lanterns that were on the either end of each aisle and in front of and behind the orchestra were lit and the orchestra performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. Behind the orchestra, while the orchestra was performing, lanterns on lily pads floated on the surface of the lake, and the stars above us were shining more brightly than I’ve ever seen since. Everything about that evening was magnificent, from the music to the ambient lighting provided by the lanterns to the brilliance of the night sky; any place that could evoke the feelings I had that night was a place that I felt people should be thankful to be citizens of. Everybody in Prospera felt the same way I did. They went about their lives as doctors, carpenters, writers, musicians and bureaucrats without any concern for what went on behind the closed doors of the offices of the committee members. Were my friends wrong to be so concerned or were I and the rest of Prospera wrong to not be concerned? I was the least smart one in the group and wondered if that was the difference, if my lack of curiosity was the result of my intellectual inadequacy.

Whenever I felt down on myself like this it was usually Lisa to whom I turned for comforting. This time I went to Darren, the only one I hadn’t talked to yet about this insane plan of Kevin’s. Finding him wasn’t difficult. When looking for Darren the library was always the first place everyone looked, on the second floor in the reading area. Darren wasn’t the easiest person to talk to. His absorption in his writing made him an aloof and often frustrating person to talk to. Were it not for the four of us making an active effort to include him he would have been completely isolated. I in particular had difficulty communicating with Darren. Due to my intense focus on my music I wasn’t as well read as the others and often found myself unable to follow a conversation they’d be having. Ordinarily I tried to avoid being alone with Darren; the awkwardness between us when we were alone could at times be suffocating. On this occasion I had no choice, he was the only one left whose opinion on Kevin’s plan I was yet to hear. I found him, as always, sitting in a chair on the second floor and reading, that afternoon it was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Darren hated it when his reading was disturbed and he never made any effort to hide it. That day was different; he was keen to hear all about what Kevin was planning.

“I can understand their curiosity. I myself have felt similarly, what’s missing from me is the motivation to act on my feelings, they obviously don’t have that problem,” he said when I asked him what he thought of the plan.

“So you don’t think it’s crazy?”

“I think it’s understandable but I also think they’re being excessively reckless; who knows what’s out there?”

“Exactly! Can’t you talk to them, make them see that?”

“People will make their own decisions from which it’s unlikely they can be dissuaded.”

“Why did I come to you? You’re never any help.”

“The only reason you’d come to me to talk about anything is if I’m the only person left you haven’t talked to, which means Lisa and Hannah have decided to go with Kevin and you’re torn over whether to go with them.”

“Why did you say that their decision to explore the forest is understandable?”

“Look out there,” he said to me, gesturing with his head toward one of the large floor to ceiling windows. The library was situated on one of the higher plateaus at the base of Guardian Mountain. From the window I was looking out of you could see nearly all of Prospera, “what you see is all we’ll ever know, Prospera is going to be our home until we die; it’s only natural that there would be individuals for whom that is not enough.”

“Are you one of those individuals who wonder about the world beyond Prospera?”

“Yes, but I have no intention of leaving to discover it. It’s peaceful here, and I’m free to spend all of my time reading and writing.”

“The others talk as if we have no freedom, as if our lives are constantly at the mercy of others.”

“They’re right about that, but understanding Prospera requires an understanding of the concept of freedom in its entirety.”

“So who’s right? Our friends or the governing authorities?”

“They both are, but my inclination is to trust the governing authorities.”

“What should I do then?”

“It’s as I said, you have to make your own decision based on your feelings; it’s the only way you can be confident that you’re making the right decision.”

“I’m leaving here feeling the same way I did when I came.”

“Are you going to go?”

“I think so. If they get into trouble I’d like to at least know that I was in a position to help them.”

“Good luck then.”

I realized, after I’d left the library and was walking home to my residential area that I had almost nothing in common with the other four members of our group. They were all erudite, curious, and, barring Darren, fearless. I was none of those things, I was utterly content and fearful of what would happen to us were we to cross into terrain we’d been consistently warned to avoid. Do I belong with them? I wondered as I made my way home, becoming so absorbed in the question that I almost failed to notice Hannah’s mother, Diane, approaching from the opposite direction. With their thick red sashes that they wore around their chests and shoulders the prefects of Prospera were impossible to miss. I had always been very fond of Hannah’s mother; she was encouraging about my music and was highly knowledgeable about music herself; whenever I visited Hannah at her house Diane and I enjoyed long conversations about our favourite pieces and composers and the performances of the Prospera Orchestra. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a conversation with Diane; if we spoke for too long she would know that something wasn’t right.

“Miranda,” she called to me, shaking me free from my thoughts.

“Oh, Mrs Weston, hi,” I responded distractedly.

“How are your rehearsals going? We’re all looking forward to your big debut.”

“They’re going okay.”

“That’s good to hear; Dvorak’s Violin Concerto is one of my favourite pieces so I’m especially looking forward to your performance.”

“Okay.”

“Something’s bothering you; is it the concert? Because if it is you shouldn’t let it bother you; you’re one of the most talented violinists I’ve ever seen, you’ll be just fine.”

“Thanks, Mrs Weston.”

“Okay, you just keep working hard and remember that nobody’s going to pillory you if you make a few mistakes, so just relax.”

With those final words of reassurance she continued on her way and left me to further contemplate my friends’ opinions of Prospera. It made no sense to me that anybody would entertain such dark thoughts about Prospera when everybody was as wonderful as Diane. Not wishing to suffer any more mental anguish I put all thoughts of Kevin and his ridiculous plan out of my mind and continued on home, where I resumed my preparations for the concert.

Lisa

The only way to get to the forest was the ocean, to swim around the sea cliffs and enter the forest from the beach on the other side. We weren’t going to have much time to explore the forest; we’d had to leave late and would have to return before sunrise to avoid detection. Once we were safely away from the residential areas we moved with great haste. Kevin, Hannah and I moved forward confidently and purposefully while Miranda’s fear and reluctance held her back and slowed us down. Twice she asked us if we were sure we were doing the right thing, to which Kevin responded that if she wasn’t sure she should stay behind. Having a slim window of only a few hours in which to operate, Miranda’s reservations were costing us time of which we could afford to lose little. I didn’t understand why she’d chosen to come and wished that she had changed her mind and gone back.

All the preparations for our trip had been taken care of by Kevin. He brought two lanterns for us to use in case the moonlight wasn’t enough, a machete for clearing brush, towels for us to dry off with when we returned to the Prospera side of the sea cliffs and had instructed all of us to bring along a dry change of clothes to change into when we returned that we left behind in some bushes before we swam out into the ocean. Part of me could see why Hannah was so drawn to Kevin. He was rebellious, unafraid, smart and reliable. I was impressed with him that night, with his organisation and leadership. He was like a rock you could hold onto knowing fully that it would remain solidly in place. I swam out into the sub-zero water behind him under the bright full moon without any fear of the sharks we’d been told were twenty times our size or even of what would happen to us should we be caught.

The ocean that night was calm, making it easier for us to swim. Even with the gentle tide it was still a hard swim, the sea cliffs stretched out far into the ocean and we were forced to take a rest when we reached their endpoint. The cliffs being so craggy there were places for us to slip our fingers into and hold onto while we caught our breath. The swim to the beach on the other side was less taxing and took less time due to us swimming with the tide and not against it. After reaching the shore Hannah, Miranda and I needed a break to replenish ourselves. While we were doing so Kevin lit the two lanterns with the machete and a piece of flint and got ready to go into the forest.

I still don’t know what we were expecting to find that night. We followed Kevin as he cleared a path through the forest not sure of where we were going or what we were looking for exactly. As disappointed as we were by the lack of discovery it was still a thrill to be breaking the rules in such an extreme way; we walked forward feeling a quiet sense of exhilaration despite not coming across anything out of the ordinary. After walking for what felt like half an hour without encountering anything our enthusiasm for continuing started to decline and we started entertaining thoughts about turning around and returning to Prospera. Shortly thereafter, Kevin saw something.

“What’s that?” He said, looking far in the distance to his right.

We all halted behind him, and focused our vision in the direction in which he was looking. Not far away from us was a strange stretch of darkness, completely obscuring our view of anything beyond it.

“Are we going to check it out?” Hannah asked, her tone of voice devoid of any sense of fear.

“You all wait here,” Kevin said before slowly making his way forward, holding his lantern outstretched before him and his machete above him, poised to strike.

Miranda stood a short distance behind Hannah and I, completely terrified, and I must confess that so was I. Only at that moment did it dawn on me what an insane idea this whole excursion was and how stupid we were for going along with it. Hannah, standing next to me, was clearly not feeling the same way Miranda and I were. She watched Kevin walking away from us with an expression of absolute confidence in him on her face. I found it staggering that Hannah’s faith in Kevin could be so unwavering that she would wait for him to return from unknown territory with absolute certainty that he would. Even after he went beyond the darkness and we couldn’t see the light from his lantern anymore, Hannah remained calm and patient, her confidence in Kevin’s eventual return unshakable. Her faith in him proved not to be misplaced. Kevin soon emerged from behind the darkness and signalled to us with his lantern to join him. We did, and discovered something beyond extraordinary.

The barrier of darkness that Kevin had seen was the outer walls of a house. Kevin led us into a large courtyard in which we were surrounded on three sides by houses that were all deserted and clearly had been for a very long time. The wooden walls were rotten, the doors and windows were broken with vegetation growing out of them; one house had a tree growing through the roof. The strangeness of what we were looking at was bone-chilling, the thoughts and feelings it evoked were too overwhelming for us to make sense of. We remained frozen in place, looking around us in disbelief.

As you might expect, Kevin and Hannah responded to our discovery of this ghost town very differently than the way Miranda and I did. They were fascinated by what was around us and after quickly overcoming their paralysis they wasted no time exploring the area. They inspected both the insides and the outsides of the houses, studying them thoroughly. Kevin even left us to check if there were any other groupings of houses like the one we were standing in the middle of.

“There are more over here,” he yelled excitedly when he found some.

The rest of us ran over to him and there found another set of houses in the same state of extreme disrepair. It was utterly surreal what we’d come across; several minutes had passed since we’d made the initial discovery and I was still too disconcerted to say anything.

“What do you think happened to the people here?” Hannah asked Kevin, who was examining everything more closely than she was.

“I don’t know, but if I were to guess I’d say Prospera had something to do with them not being here anymore.”

“Don’t say that!” Miranda said to him.

In all of my confusion I hadn’t given any thought to how all of this must be affecting Miranda. I turned to look at her and saw that she was deeply shaken by what was around us and went over to her to provide her with comfort.

“Whoever these people were they definitely had some sort of connection to Prospera, given that they were so close. But look at these houses; they’re nothing at all like the houses in Prospera. In Prospera the houses are two levels high with the lower level constructed of stone and the top level of Spruce. These houses are only one level high and the wood that was used to build them is of a much lower quality than what we use in Prospera,” Kevin said, knocking on the wall of one of the houses to make his point, “And look over there, the trees in that part of land that we crossed to get here are a lot lower than the others in the forest. I think that land was cleared, probably for farming purposes, which means that whoever was here had plans to stay.”

I listened to what Kevin was saying and was impressed that he was able to deduce so much in such a short space of time from so little. But what he had deduced only left me with more questions, and with a greater sense of fear of what would happen to us should we be discovered.

“Do you think the people here were all killed?” Hannah asked, amazingly calmly.

“Why do you two always have to jump to the worst possible conclusions about Prospera? The people here might have been saved from their lowly living conditions and brought to live with us in the village, maybe some of us are their descendents,” Miranda said.

“Not likely, a disruption that big would have been recorded in the village’s history. They didn’t want us to know about this place, which means that whatever happened here wasn’t good,” Kevin responded, an explanation that I agreed with.

“Stop talking!” Miranda shouted at him. I quickly lifted up my hand and placed it over her mouth to stop her from making any more noise.

My arms around her, I could feel the trembling of her body. This was a lot more than Miranda could handle. It wasn’t in her nature to be dubious of Prospera. She wouldn’t be able to withstand remaining here very much longer; for the sake of her psychological stability we had to leave.

“Hey guys, I think we should go,” I said to Hannah and Kevin, who were immersed in their exploration.

“Why? There could be more of these, and maybe even some other interesting stuff,” Hannah responded. She was enjoying herself too much to entertain thoughts of leaving.

“That’s true, but if Kevin’s right and people in Prospera are worried about others finding out what’s here it’s reasonable to assume that they’re monitoring these locations somehow to ensure that nobody takes news of the existence of everything that’s here back with them to Prospera, in which case the longer we stay and the further we explore the more likely it is that we’re going to get caught,” I said to her.

Hannah looked at me with an expression of irritation, clearly not satisfied with the reason I’d proffered for wanting to leave. Kevin looked at me and understood that what I was really worried about was Miranda and that I wanted us to leave for her sake.

“She’s right, the longer we stay here the more dangerous it is for us. We should leave,” Kevin said peremptorily, not allowing for any further debate on the issue.

We turned around and began walking back the way we came, Hannah making no secret of her frustration with the decision that Kevin had made. I’d always thought of Kevin as being so consumed by his distrust of Prospera that he didn’t concern himself very much with thoughts about us; agreeing to leave upon seeing the state that Miranda was in changed my opinion of him. From the position of the moon in the sky we were able to tell that we hadn’t spent nearly as much time in the forest as we’d planned. It didn’t matter though, not to me at least. We’d learned more than we’d hoped to learn when we’d decided to do this and were returning to Prospera, all of us, as irreversibly changed individuals. After years of listening to Kevin’s psychotic ramblings we’d all come face to face with the irrefutable proof of what Kevin had been saying for most of his life. There were lies in Prospera, and from what we’d seen they were big lies. When we returned to Prospera it would be with the knowledge that we couldn’t take anything in the village at face value.

My biggest concern was the lasting effect this was going to have on Miranda. She had been deeply shaken by the events of the night and I doubted her ability to recover from them. Our whole lives we’d been told that as citizens of Prospera we would never need fear anything or any person. We couldn’t go on believing that and for someone like Miranda that was disturbing. She needed to feel that she was in a place where she was safe, that she was surrounded by people she could trust. What happened as we were making our way out of the forest destroyed any chance there was of her feeling that way about Prospera ever again.

“What was that?” Kevin asked, stopping in his tracks and turning around.

“What was what?” Hannah asked, perplexed.

Being so focused on comforting Miranda I hadn’t heard anything either, and Miranda was in no frame of mind to have picked up on any subtle noises either.

“There was a rustling, it was faint but I definitely heard it.”

“Maybe it was just the wind, or an animal,” Hannah said.

Her suggestion was quickly followed by a second rustling sound, one which we all heard.

“That was not the wind. Blow out the lanterns, we don’t want them seeing our faces, and RUN!” Kevin said.

With only the moonlight illuminating our path forward we ran like our lives depended on it, which it was entirely possible they did. The sound of the ocean was our guide out of the forest. We followed behind Kevin who charted a course for us free from impediments. Per his instructions when we got to the beach we threw the lanterns far into the ocean and wasted no time getting into the water and commencing the swim back. Depleted from our run through the forest and the swim earlier we were forced to once again grab hold of the cliffs at their turning point and catch our breaths before undertaking the second half of the swim back to Prospera. Being stationary for the first time since Kevin had said ‘RUN!’, Hannah took it as an opportunity to find out why he’d done so.

“What did you see?” She asked him, her breathing heavy from the run, the swim and the freezing water we were in.

“Something darted from behind one tree to another.”

“Was it human?”

“I don’t know, it moved too fast, but from the shape of the silhouette I saw I’d say yes.”

“So those areas were being monitored,” I said, shocked to learn that what I’d said to get us to leave for Miranda’s sake was actually true, “Do you think they saw us?”

“I don’t know. They were far away and they were behind us so there’s a good chance they didn’t get a good enough look at us. But we did turn around when we heard that first rustling and we were holding the lanterns, so maybe they did.”

“Oh my God, we’re in trouble! We’re in so much trouble!”

“Miranda, calm down. Kevin’s probably right; it’s highly likely they didn’t see us given how far away they were, if it even was a person,” I said to her, hoping to calm her down so that her anxiety didn’t cause any trouble for us when we got back.

“But what if we were seen? What’s going to happen to us?”

“We’re just going to have to wait and see, since we don’t have any choice but to return to Prospera,” Kevin said calmly.

“This is all your fault, you and your crazy suspicions, if it weren’t for you we wouldn’t be in danger.”

“As we all just saw they were more than suspicions, and nobody forced you to come with us, you said you wanted to,” Hannah snapped at Miranda.

Hannah’s reprimand was enough to silence Miranda for the remainder of our journey back to Prospera. We completed our swim to the shore, changed out of our wet clothes, dried ourselves and changed into our dry clothes without any of us saying a word to each other. Kevin changed separately behind the bushes where we’d all left our dry clothes. The anxiety among the three of us was palpable. Hannah tried to hide hers but I could see it; as much as she wanted to be like Kevin she wasn’t.

“Be careful on your way home, be very quiet and keep an eye out for anybody that might be watching you; if in the coming days you feel that something is off you need to talk to one of us about it so that we can deal with it,” Kevin said to us when we were all changed and ready to leave.

We agreed and walked along the beach in silence until we reached the edge of the corn fields through which we’d walked when we were leaving Prospera. Unlike earlier that night when we’d all walked together, on our way back home we split up in different directions due to us living in different residential areas. Because we lived in the same residential area Miranda and I walked home together.

Having gone through such a terrifying experience in the forest we made our way home greatly aware of the possibility that we were being watched the way we were possibly being watched in the forest. Miranda’s distress, having been forced by Hannah to keep it contained, had increased to an unmanageably high level ever since she’d been silenced by her at the cliffs. When we were safely on our own deep inside the corn fields she released everything she’d been holding in and with no one else around it fell to me to help her through the enormity of her outpouring.

“I’m scared, Lisa. I think we’re in trouble, I think something’s going to happen to us like what Kevin says about that boy that died when we were younger or the other one that didn’t come back on the fishing boat; I don’t want to die,” she cried into my shoulder as I held her against me.

Miranda had every right to be scared. We had seen things we were never meant to see, things that pointed to an episode in Prospera’s history that was never meant to be uncovered. If it was a person that Kevin had seen in the forest and if they had seen our faces we were definitely going to have some form of action taken against us, the question was what the nature of that action would be. Could we place our faith in Prospera being a place of compassion? Or should we be as concerned as Kevin was about the mysterious deaths in the village? This was what I was thinking as I was comforting Miranda, because I was worried too. The four of us were on our own in a village of five thousand people, all of whom we were going to need to be on constant guard against with only each other to turn to, as Miranda had turned to me that night in the corn field.