Darren

After six days the search for Hannah and the others came to an end. Hannah’s father returned having been unsuccessful in finding their daughter. Hannah’s mother was waiting for him at the dock when he returned on the fishing boat and immediately ran to him when he disembarked onto the dock.

“Did you find her?” She asked him.

He shook his head disappointedly and took his wife into his arms when she started crying. He explained to her that he’d had to search for them by himself on foot because the trees were too dense for them to use the horses. The fact that they were searching for them on the wrong side of the mountain didn’t help either. My strategy for helping my friends by sending the Prospera search party in the wrong direction had worked; they were free to continue their travels without risk of capture.

The sight of Hannah’s mother crying in her husband’s arms did give rise to some very troubling second thoughts. Had I really saved my friends from danger? The woman crying in her husband’s arms because her daughter was missing and she was afraid of what might happen to her surely would not have done something terrible to them all for running away. Through Kevin’s paranoia and curiosity we had obtained knowledge about Prospera that we were never meant to have, knowledge that had fostered a deep distrust of Prospera in us all. But had Kevin been wrong? Had we all been wrong? Looking back, what we had learned about Prospera had been shocking but a lot of the conclusions that we’d reached had been based on pure speculation, much of what we thought we knew about Prospera then had been products of our minds, our imaginations. The scene that I had witnessed between Hannah’s parents reminded me that Prospera was at its core a deeply human place that was built on the foundations of human industry and culture. We had all allowed ourselves to be carried away by Kevin’s conspiracy theories and as a result had developed an image of Prospera that, when juxtaposed against what I had seen of Hannah’s parents, seemed a gross mischaracterisation. It simply was not possible that these parents who were out of their minds with worry for their daughter’s safety would have done something as terrible as kill her to preserve the rest of the population’s fear of the forest.

I hoped that I hadn’t made a mistake by believing Kevin and helping them to get as far away from Prospera as they could. Hannah’s mother’s reaction was not that of someone who didn’t believe there was anything dangerous in the forest or in the outside world. By sending the search party the wrong way I might have compromised the only chance for them to return safely. If they returned having suffered some kind of harm or if a second search party found them all dead in the woods I would blame myself.

Remarkably the unprecedented occurrence of four of the village’s children going missing in the space of a week did hardly anything to disrupt the normal everyday routine of Prospera. The bakers woke up extra early and went to work so that everybody in the village could have fresh bread for breakfast. The same went for the chicken farmers that collected eggs every morning, the dairy farmers who got everybody’s milk for the day ready, the butchers who cut and packaged everybody’s meat. The adults went to work and the children went to school. At school there was a lot of interest in the children that had run away but nobody talked about it openly or loudly, and nobody asked me—the only one who’d been a close friend of theirs—anything about them, almost as if they were afraid to.

Were it not for Penny, with whom I had grown much closer since the night that Kevin and the others had left, I would have been all alone with my doubts and worries. We talked privately for hours about everything that I and the others had gone through, all that we had discovered, and why Lisa, Hannah and Miranda had chosen to leave with Kevin. She couldn’t believe what she’d heard. She thought that Kevin’s temerity and the way that he got us involved in all of his expeditions for the truth was reckless; she also didn’t have a problem with Lisa and Miranda being a couple and thought that it was wrong for them to have to hide their love. I had never looked at Penny as being anything more than a friend; that changed as I started spending more time with her following my friends’ flight from Prospera. She was easy to talk to and someone with whom I could trust the secrets that I wasn’t supposed to be in possession of. Her company became my refuge. My entire life the only people I’d been close to were Kevin, Hannah, Miranda and Lisa. Penny was different from the four of them, spending time with her introduced me to a different kind of relationship, one not built on a covenant of secrecy and suspicion. Penny was completely uninterested in uncovering any secrets about Prospera beyond what I had told her about. All she wanted was to be my friend, for me to put everything about Kevin and the others behind me, and for us to work together on writing projects. I felt liberated in Penny’s company; free from Kevin’s constant talk about the outside world and what was being kept from us about it I was able to experience Prospera for the place that it was and I found myself not having many problems with it.

Everything was just easier. It was me and Penny on our own forming something new in the space that had been created by my friends’ decision to leave Prospera. There were no more meetings on the beach to discuss matters we were afraid of other people overhearing, no more walking around the village keeping an eye out for anyone that might be looking at me suspiciously. I did nothing more than go about my days as a citizen of Prospera and in the process came to appreciate the peace and calm of Prospera. The conspiracy theories with which Kevin had been so obsessed gradually left my thoughts and my perception of Prospera underwent dramatic changes. I stopped imagining what might be underneath everything I was seeing and took it at face value. Prospera was a place of extraordinary beauty, both natural and man made, where we all had a place and a purpose and lived lives of comfort free from worry. I had a much easier time accepting the idea of spending the rest of my life in Prospera and the idea of spending it with Penny grew increasingly appealing.