Chapter Thirty-One
“YOU ARE MAKING no sense.” April raises a textbook to obscure my face.
“April, I know what I saw! He’s been coming here for over twenty years.
Pat told me herself.” I’m not sure how I expected this to go, but April’s resistance is understandable.
The words spill out of me anyway. They have to.
I don’t know how much time we have to run. “We need to leave. It isn’t safe!”
“No, Kayla, you aren’t safe!” She snaps the book shut, heat flushing her cheeks. “I can’t leave here. I can’t!”
“We could. I figured it out.” I grab her hands, desperate to make her understand. “We’ll go to Penelakut or America. We could still visit here from those places. Or order your insulin. We could get it, even if we’re living there—”
“Stop being a paranoid idiot and think for two seconds! He didn’t recognize you.”
“He might. He might put together where he knows me from—”
“He isn’t going to care! What do you think he’ll do? Cart us back there? We would expose him. He’s got no reason to want us to come with him. If we all ignore each other, it’s going to be fine.”
“The whole island is a problem! How can we trust people who work with Astolia? How can we—”
“What makes you so sure they know what’s going on there?” she demands. “If the Astrologue is lying to everyone in Astolia, what makes you think he’s telling the truth to Salt Spring?”
Damn it. There is nothing more frustrating than having a younger sister who is smarter than I am. I don’t have a good rebuttal for that, except that my gut knows she’s wrong. If we don’t move now, he’ll get us.
“April, we can’t risk it. We can’t.”
“Sid is in politics. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I can’t.” Not after everything I’ve put him through.
“Why not?”
“Because he wouldn’t understand! I never told him about Astolia or—”
“He’s not going to care if you grew up in a cult. His was, like, ten times worse.” April tosses her ponytail over her shoulder. “Whatever. If you don’t want to ask him, I will.”
“No! What if he lies—”
“For fuck’s sake, Kayla, listen to yourself! He isn’t going to lie to us.” April swears so rarely, the outburst shuts me up. “He never has. You know that.”
“I…” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Or what to do. Or where we’re safe anymore. I want to run. I want to steal the knife from the butcher block in the kitchen. But I can’t force my sister to believe me. “Fine. Fine, I’ll talk to him.”
“Sure, go ahead, if you like. I’m still asking him myself.”
“I said I would talk to him.”
“I want to hear it from him myself. You…” April shakes her head, and it dawns on me: she’s more afraid of me lying to her than him. “I don’t understand you anymore.”
With that, she reopens her textbook, heedless of the knives her words drive through me. My sister. My own baby sister doesn’t trust me.
I can’t stay in this room. It feels as though the walls of our apartment will crash in and bury me.
On instinct, I pack my bag. There isn’t much to gather—just a few clothes and books scattered around the bedroom.
Most of our survival supplies are still packed.
I always knew this day would come and that we would need to run again.
I’ll scout a route. While I wait for April to understand the danger we’re in, I’ll come up with a plan. That way, when we run, we’ll know where we’re going. It’s how we did it in the old days and how we need to do it now.
I head outside, walk toward the road and then…
As I reach the end of the drive, the panic clutching my chest squeezes harder.
I might not feel safe here anymore, but it’s even worse out there.
I could walk toward the coast if I wanted, but then what?
There are stockades around every accessible point, plus constant patrols, keeping me in as much as they keep TNS out.
I hurry back into the acreage, my breath coming easier when I see the house and Wendell splitting wood by the back stoop.
I give him a wide berth, avoiding conversation as my head continues to swirl.
I circle the whole property—chickens, toolshed, beehives, berry bushes.
Every so often, I come across a break in the fencing that would make a good escape route. I mark each spot in my mind.
But what good is any of this? April won’t follow me. How can I ever protect her if she won’t follow me?
Finally, I give up and collapse by the duck pond, pressing my face into my knees. There, the real reason for all my fretful pacing becomes obvious, because while running around the farm might not have done any practical good, it kept the memories at bay.
I stare across Sid’s duck pond and wonder if in some other universe, there’s another version of myself who came here at the age of fourteen with her parents.
A girl who got to go to a real school and watch her sister grow up without the stress of being her caretaker.
Would I have chosen Curtis, if we’d had the option of meeting hundreds of other people?
Or one day, would I have gone to the exchange and seen a trio of young men, recently returned from the border patrol, and spotted Sid leading them?
Neither story is likely. A third Kayla would exist. A girl I can’t even imagine, except that I suspect she’s happier than I am. A girl who got to keep all the people who mattered most to her. Mum, Dad, Curtis, even…
“Kayla?”
A shudder steals down my spine. I look over my shoulder and see Sid staring back, unsure if I want him to approach.
After my behaviour last night, I can’t blame him for keeping a healthy distance.
It’s almost enough to make me regret what I do next, because I can’t be certain I won’t hurt him again.
“Sid.” My arms reach out, beckoning. A few hours ago, I’d convinced myself even he could be lying to us, but in the flesh, my fractured heart sees something different.
In many ways, love is nothing but a survival mechanism, something we use to manipulate people into helping us.
My throbbing pulse identifies him not as a foe, but as my last chance for defence.
If I can make him love me, he’ll have to protect me.
“You disappeared again.”
“I know.”
“You scared the shit out of me when you didn’t come home. And the worst part is, I didn’t know if I would make it worse by looking for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
He takes a single step forward. “April said we needed to talk?”
At least she gave me a chance to explain things to him.
Maybe I haven’t lost her completely. I flex my fingers, arms still outstretched, and sure enough, he slides a hand into one of mine.
I pull him closer, letting heat flood my body, bidding goodbye to all the other lives I might have lived.
This one, with him, is the only one left.
I tug at him, trying to make him sit. “You were right about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cult trauma. All of that. I’m screwed up. And… I don’t know if it’s going to get any better. I saw someone today. Someone I thought I escaped a long time ago.”
That gets his attention. Whatever awkwardness might exist between us, it’s less important than what I’m hinting at.
He sits next to me on the bench, and when I tuck myself against his side, there’s only a second’s pause before he gives in and puts his arm around me. “Go on,” he says, voice soft.
I could kiss him. But I hold off, knowing I need to get this out first. I twine my arms around his waist and let the closeness anchor me. “I was born in Port Alberni,” I say. “I lived there until I was nine, when TNS attacked.”
His stomach muscles stiffen, but he doesn’t pull away.
“After that, my parents were desperate to find somewhere safe to live. Mom was pregnant, so… we headed east and joined the next colony we found. Astolia.”
“Astolia?” he repeats.
“Heard of them?”
“Yeah, but…” There’s nervousness in his voice. “They’re a cult?”
“What have you heard about them?”
He shrugs. “Fledgling colony. One of the few on Vancouver Island that hasn’t gone down to TNS, so… Council tries to support them. No one’s ever said anything about them being a cult. But they’re really well fortified for only fifty people, so—”
“Fifty people?” I look up at him. “That’s the estimate they give for Astolia? Just fifty people?”
“That’s what Council reported when they took a tour of it a few years back,” says Sid.
“Shit.” It wouldn’t be hard to make it look true for a day or two.
During the summer, most of us led the goats quite far from the colony to pasture on the surrounding hills.
If they timed a visit from Salt Spring correctly, there would be no reason for most of the population to know about any alliance. How perfect.
“Were there more than that when you were there?”
“Well over six hundred.”
“Six hundred? Crammed into that tiny compound?”
“Have you been?” I ask.
“No, but I’ve seen the specs. I try to keep up with all our international partners. So, what happened to you?”
I wish I didn’t have to answer. But how can I expect him to trust me without the full truth?
I start at the beginning, with April’s birth and how for a moment, we thought we might be safe.
I talk about Beth-Anne and herding goats and how I started hating turnips.
It doesn’t seem so bad. Not until I tell him about the Grand Astrologue. And the “attacks.”
TNS, they told us, was always waiting. Practically once a month, there would be gunfire on the hills, and we would all have to huddle inside the compound for safety.
The Grand Astrologue would lead us in chants until the shooting stopped and miraculously, we were safe.
That gets under Sid’s skin more than any other detail I’ve shared.
“TNS did not have enough bullets to waste them on one random colony, over and over again.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I would love to know what they were actually shooting at.”