Hannah

I could feel nothing but guilt, I could think of nothing but how I was solely responsible for us being in this prison. We were not soon called upon like we were told we would be. We waited on our bunks for hours but no one came for us. We only saw other people again when some of the other prisoners walked by our cell. There were five of them, three men and two women. The men were bedraggled and looked drained; the women were the same, just less so. They gave us looks of curiosity and commiseration as they passed our cell. They were followed by Sgt Barry, who let them into their cells, locked the cell gates once they were in and promptly left. We learned for the first time that our cell was just one of a row of cells and that the cells where they housed the men weren’t far away. Kevin must’ve been close, in a cell that was just a stone’s throw away. My desire to call out to him was strong; my fear of how the soldiers would react was stronger. I remained silent, my separation from him agonizing. Sgt Wilcox along with another female prisoner brought us food shortly after the prisoners we’d seen had been returned to their cells. A bowl of stew, some bread and a cup of water was all they gave us.

“Its 8 p.m., you need to get to sleep soon,” the soldier said to us when he came to take our dishes away.

I never imagined when we set off from the cabin that our day would be ending this way. I had imagined us sleeping under the stars like we had done when we had fled Prospera, enjoying the feeling of freedom. Did they know in Prospera what the Americans were doing in the outside world? I wondered. If they did, I could see them not being all too concerned by it. Their only concern was for the village to continue existing in secret. My mother had to have known the truth about the outside world but she’d still brought me up to believe the most outrageous lies about it. Were I to see her again and ask her how she could ignore what the Americans were doing to the Canadians all she would say to me was that they were doing what they needed to do to ensure Prospera’s survival. She wouldn’t give me a moral argument, she would offer no defence for the Americans; she would just say that they had to think of the village first. She was just as brainwashed as everybody else in the village. I couldn’t bring change to Prospera, I’d been an idiot for thinking that I could, and now we were in this prison and I couldn’t forgive myself for getting the others involved in this.

I didn’t sleep that night. When it was bedtime they turned out the lights that hung from the ceiling of the corridor outside our cell and somebody yelled “LIGHTS OUT!” An eerie silence consumed the prison in the wake of the loud clang of the light switch being thrown. Everybody in here was afraid and spiritless, utterly devoid of hope. Could we end all of this by telling them who we were: citizens of Prospera; who I was, the granddaughter of the head of the Ethics Committee? I didn’t want to do that, at least not yet; while we were here we could acquire answers to the questions that we’d had for years about Prospera.

“We need somebody to work in the kitchen; which one of you wants to come?” Sgt Wilcox arrived at our cell and asked us in the morning.

“Miranda, you go,” Lisa said.

“Why me?”

“Better you working in a kitchen than doing whatever it is they’re doing down below.”

“That’s if she’s going to be taken to a kitchen; once she’s left the cell we won’t know what they’ve done with her,” I said to Lisa.

“We have very strict guidelines that dictate our conduct here, you can talk to any of the other prisoners here and they’ll tell you that we’ve never done anything sinister to them; and your friend is right, this is much easier work than you’d otherwise get here,” the sergeant said.

“You really think it’s a good idea for me to go?” Miranda asked.

“I do,” Lisa responded.

Miranda left with Sgt Wilcox, whose guarantee that she was perfectly safe with him hadn’t reassured me. We were in the position of having to trust the American soldiers, our captors, the very same people whose atrocities we’d spent months bearing personal witness to and who had killed Morgan.

Miranda was brought back to the cell a little while later no worse for wear. She was escorted back to our cell by Sgt Wilcox carrying a tray with our breakfast: four bowls of oatmeal. Cathy hadn’t eaten her dinner the previous night and that morning she refused to eat breakfast. Her feelings were understandable; our captors were the ones that had killed Morgan, being not only in their custody but having to rely on them to provide for us was a lot for her. We offered Cathy’s bowl of oatmeal to Miranda but she was full having been allowed to eat some of the eggs and bacon that she’d been taken to help prepare. Lisa and I shared the bowl of oatmeal between us.

Miranda was quick to tell us everything about her brief time outside the cell. She’d passed three other cells on her way out and when she looked behind her she saw four more cells beyond ours, making eight cells in total. She saw only girls in the three cells that she passed, eight of them, three in each of the first two cells and two in the final third cell. The kitchen that she’d been taken to was above ground. Sgt Wilcox took her up the metal steps that we’d been carried down and through a tarpaulin covered passageway that led to a series of prefabricated interconnected units where the soldiers resided. Miranda was taken straight to the kitchen and didn’t get to see anything besides the kitchen. There were three other girls already working in the kitchen when she’d entered it, one from each of the cells that she’d passed. Two soldiers watched over them as they worked, making the girls too afraid to talk. Miranda didn’t have to do much. They told her to crack and beat eggs, butter bread and make coffee, and when the soldiers were done eating in the mess she helped wash the dishes, after which the four of them helped themselves to the leftovers. Going off the amount of food that they’d prepared Miranda surmised that there weren’t many soldiers, no more than fifteen was her guess.

More soldiers came down into the prison and walked past our cell to the other four cells on our left. All were opened and all of the male prisoners that were housed in them were led out of the prison. Kevin was one of them, one of about fourteen. He walked by our cell looking his usual self: impassive, taking the unusual set of events that had occurred in his stride. The sounds that we’d heard upon arriving the day before soon started up again, sounds of pneumatic pounding followed by sounds of the slow and steady chipping away at something followed by more pneumatic pounding. I had to find out what they were doing here. American soldiers on Canadian soil meant only one thing: that what they were doing here somehow involved the war, which made Prospera complicit in the atrocities the American military had committed in their campaign for control of Canada and its oil. Kevin would have the answer when he got back. We could find out from him, that is if we were allowed to speak with him; there didn’t appear to be much interaction between the prisoners. There wasn’t much talking in the cell. After Miranda had told us everything about her time outside the cell there was silence among us once again as we continued to come to terms with our imprisonment.

Lunch was cheese sandwiches. Sgt Wilcox came for Miranda again to assist with the preparation of the sandwiches. She brought us our sandwiches and was escorted back to the kitchen to help carry sandwiches to Kevin and the other men that had been taken earlier. I wished that it was me that was helping in the kitchen, that way I’d get to see for myself what was going on in this place. Cathy didn’t eat any of her lunch. We were worried about her; if she kept refusing to eat for much longer she was going to get sick and if she got sick enough she might die and Kevin wouldn’t be able to fulfil his pledge to return her home safely. She could also cause trouble for us with the soldiers. We begged her to eat something but she refused; she wouldn’t eat food that had been provided by the people that had killed Morgan in cold blood.

Kevin and the other men were brought back to their cells a little after lunch, all of them covered in black dust. They came for the women next. All of us, except for Miranda and the others that worked in the kitchen, were escorted by Sergeants Wilcox and Barry out of our cells to the metal steps which we were told to walk down. There were six flights of steps that took us deeper and deeper underground. The air got hotter, thicker and dustier. At the bottom of the stairs was another corridor, much longer than the one where the cells were housed. There were lights strung along the ceiling as well, rail tracks on the floor and buttresses along the walls and ceiling. The place was a mine, what we needed to find out next was what they were mining.

“For the three new arrivals I will explain what it is you will be doing here,” Sgt Barry said, “When the men are doing their work they get a lot of gravel on the tracks that makes it harder to roll the carts along them, you’re to pick up all of it and place it in the cart to be properly disposed of so the carts can run smoothly tomorrow. The others know what to do, follow their lead.”

We walked behind the other women along the tracks into the mine. We were sweating already, overwhelmed by the heat and stuffiness of the underground space. We arrived at a cart which the other girls told us was where we were to start from. Inside the cart were two brooms and three spades.

“Shovelling is harder than sweeping, if any of you have any health problems grab a broom,” one of the women said to us.

“Just Cathy,” I said to her.

“Which one of you is Cathy?”

“She is,” I said, looking at Cathy, “She’s Lisa and I’m Hannah.”

“My name’s Abbey, you’ll get to know the others soon enough. We separate into two teams and work in shifts without stopping to finish fast; which of you wants to be on the first shift?”

“Just me,” I said, and then turned to Lisa, “One of us needs to be on the same shift as Cathy to monitor her; you have medical training, it should be you.”

“Okay.”

I grabbed a shovel out of the cart and we got started. The three of us with shovels got to work shovelling the gravel from between the tracks into the cart. The two with brooms worked behind us sweeping together any gravel that we dropped onto the tracks for us to shovel into the cart. The work was hard and was made harder by the suffocating environment. Having worked for just a few minutes we were drenched in sweat, the dust that was kicked up when we shovelled gravel was choking; there was a lot of coughing while we worked.

“Where are you guys from?” Abbey asked me.

“Huntingdale.”

“Is it just the four of you?”

“There are five of us; Kevin’s with the men.”

“You came here looking for Prospera?”

“We did.”

“Us too; there were three of us: me, Clarissa, who’s back with the other team, and Vaughn, who’s also with the men.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About a year; I still can’t believe that we’re in this situation.”

“Do you know what they’re mining here that’s so valuable that the military is guarding it?”

“Fragmentium; this mine is where they get it from.”

I stopped moving the second I heard from Abbey what was being mined here. As much as we had been disillusioned about Prospera it was still shocking to learn that Prospera was involved in something as heinous as helping to arm the Americans with fragmentium, the destructive power of which had destroyed countless lives.

“Hey, keep working!” Abbey said to me.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, snapping out of my short daze.

It was just as I suspected, when it came to keeping the village a secret there were no lengths to which they wouldn’t go, no depths to which they wouldn’t sink. Not even helping the American military to slaughter thousands of innocent people was too big a price to pay for their secrecy. I felt sick to my stomach to think that I had called such a place home and such people family. My desire to return evaporated that instant, any belief I had left that Prospera could change went with it.

“Where are you from?” I asked Abbey.

“San Fransisco; I read rumours about Prospera on the internet and I was curious, and I was sick of living in a country that was being ruled by a brutal dictator.”

“What about the others?”

“Most of them are Canadians.”

“Were they victims of the war?”

“Some of them, others were afraid they would be so they left their towns and came up here.”

“Who’s been here the longest?”

“That would be April, she’s been here four years; she’s also in the other group.”

“Four years?!” I said, incredulous.

“You know what makes it worse? None of us even knows if Prospera is real or not.”

The work moved fast. Once we’d gotten into a groove the physically demanding nature of the work became bearable and we had no trouble maintaining a high level of productivity. This isn’t to say I wasn’t relieved when our shift came to an end and it was time for the other team to take over. The heat and dust had taken its toll on me; I was desperate for a drink of water from the large cooler that the soldiers had provided us with. I helped myself to two quick cups and then a third which I planned to drink slowly. The six of us sat on the tracks behind the second team that had continued clearing the gravel. Abbey sat next to me and introduced me to the other girls: Lauren, Michaela, Christina and Kate. They were all Canadians that had come across rumours about the existence from Prospera through different sources and had come in search of it, mostly out of curiosity. Being a Prospera citizen their stories were difficult for me to listen to. They’d sought out Prospera believing it to be a place of hope, far from the madness of the world from which they’d fled. If only they’d known the truth, that Prospera was every bit as corrupt and uncaring as the world that they had been fleeing. I felt enormous guilt sitting amongst them; more than anything I wanted to bring their nightmare to an end, as a citizen of Prospera I felt responsible for them being in this awful situation. My guilt kept me silent. The others had nothing new to say to each other so we all sat in silence. I took the opportunity to observe them. They were all wearing the same clothes, white pants and a white T-shirt. None were undernourished or unhygienic at all. They were being well taken care of, all things considered. I wondered if that was something that those in Prospera that knew about this place had insisted upon. Were that to be the case it would do nothing to redeem Prospera in my eyes; what was going on here with this prison, this forced labour camp, was unforgivable.

It took us four shifts in total to clear the tracks of gravel. Cathy had done okay for someone who hadn’t eaten for almost a full day. I talked to Lisa and she said that for now Cathy was okay but it was important that she eat something soon. Sergeants Wilcox and Barry inspected the work that we had done and when they decided that it was satisfactory they escorted us back to our cells. During our second break after our second shift Abbey told me that when we were done working we would be taken back to our cells and would be collected again to be taken for a bath and then dinner would be brought to us in our cells. The bath that Abbey talked about wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it would be. We were taken to another room in the caves that was behind a curtain. Inside the floor was concreted and there were four metal basins stacked on top of each other, four stools, four wooden buckets, a fifth basin full of water sitting on a fire, a tap, four bars of soap, towels and a change of clothes for all of us.

“You three will go first with me,” Abbey said to Cathy, Lisa and me.

We each took a basin and filled it halfway with water from the tap then used our buckets to scoop hot water from the basin on top of the fire into our basins, after which we filled the hot water basin with water from the tap and placed it back on the fire for the others.

“Did Miranda and the others arrange all of this?” I asked Abbey.

“Yeah; they would have done yesterday’s laundry and taken their baths already, now they’d be working on dinner in the kitchen.”

We sat on our stools and rinsed ourselves with our buckets, stood up and lathered with soap, sat down and rinsed ourselves again and that was it. Toothpaste and toothbrushes were also provided for us. We brushed our teeth, changed into our new white clothes and we were done. We stayed in the room with the others after we were done so we could talk some more; I wanted Abbey to get to know Cathy and Lisa.

“What medical problem do you have?” Abbey asked Cathy.

“She hasn’t eaten anything since we arrived here; I didn’t want her doing anything that would drain too much of her energy,” I answered.

“Why won’t you eat?”

“American soldiers killed my boyfriend; I’m not going to eat their food.”

“How did he die?”

“He was a member of the #OverthrowImperialism movement, US marines captured and executed him,” Lisa said.

“I used to follow those guys online, I even donated money to them a few times; they were really cool.”

“They’re gone now, Mattis stepped up his offensive and they just weren’t strong enough to survive,” I said.

“The war is still going on then?” Abbey asked.

“No, it ended a few weeks ago; the Canadians had to surrender, Mattis committed thousands more troops to the fight and overwhelmed them,” I said.

“Does that mean they’re going to let us out of here soon?” Michaela, who was busy washing, asked.

“They probably want to mine as much fragmentium as they can and stockpile it, so probably not,” I said to her.

“I think so too,” Abbey said.

The brief moment of hope that Michaela’s question gave rise to quickly faded, replaced by the usual resignation they all felt.

“Your hunger strike won’t achieve anything, they won’t care if you die,” Abbey said to Cathy.

“It’s not a hunger strike; I just can’t bring myself to eat their food.”

“You need to get over that if you want to live.”

“Have people died here?” Lisa asked.

“Only men; all of them mining accidents.”

“You’re saying that Kevin could die down in that mine?” I asked Abbey.

“Yes, he could.”

There was a routine in the prison that the prisoners had become accustomed to; everything moved like clockwork. There was no dissent from the prisoners, they were broken, the swiftness of the disappearance of Michaela’s hope of release was proof of that. The rest of the day proceeded as Abbey said it would. Miranda wasn’t in our cell when we returned to it and we only saw her again when she brought us our dinner and had the cell door locked behind her. Fried meat and mashed potatoes was on our plates. Hungry after the work that we’d been doing we got stuck into the food straight away. Cathy ignored her food and went another meal without eating. We tried again to convince her to eat and again she refused, telling us to drop it and to leave her alone. We did, giving her food to Miranda, and our worries about Cathy grew.

By our third day we were used to the routine that they had in the prison. We went to sleep early every night tired from the work we did in the mine and woke up in the morning in time for breakfast. Cathy continued not eating.

Time passed slowly in the cell. Our anxiety over being locked up had dissipated and we weren’t spending hours fretting about the situation that we were in. We hardly talked and had nothing to read and nothing to do. The hours until we were taken down to the mine crawled by; we spent them looking forward to when they’d come for us so we’d have something to do. Down in the mine we separated into the same teams and worked the same shifts.

“Do they ever give you books to read or something to pass the time with?” I asked Abbey while we were shovelling.

“Sometimes they bring us books; they haven’t for a couple of weeks, I’ll ask one of the soldiers when they’ll bring books again.”

Cathy started having problems shortly after, during her and Lisa’s shift. Lisa came and spoke to me and told me that there was trouble with Cathy, she was complaining about her stomach and couldn’t work. I took her place on Lisa’s team and told her to sit out the rest of the shifts. When we were done and it was time for us to be taken back to our cell Lisa and I had to help her through the mine and up the stairs.

“Is she okay?” A new soldier, Sgt Holgate, asked when we were helping her.

“Her stomach is sore; she hasn’t been eating,” Lisa told him.

“Does she need a doctor?”

“You can get one for her?”

“There’s a doctor that comes when we need him; I’ll have him come and have a look at her.”

We got Cathy back to the cell and onto her bunk. Lisa and I chose to stay with her rather than going to wash with the others. The doctor would arrive to have a look at her within the next couple of hours we were told. Part of me couldn’t help thinking that Cathy’s refusal to eat was a stupid and selfish decision that could have made things very difficult for us. Some of my old feelings about Cathy not being one of us were returning to me, until I remembered that here in the prison things were different, we were all prisoners and our captors were all Americans; that was the only distinction that mattered.