Hannah （And After）
Jules was shouting, that was the first thing. Someone held him up, grabbing both his arms. He wanted them to let him go. Buck was hollering, as well, and two other men lifted him, holding his limbs while he thrashed about.
Hannah blinked, held her hand over her eyes, though it wasn’t very bright.
Soldiers—Roger’s men, and she knew who Roger was—surrounded her, dragging Jules and Buck toward their jeeps and tanks.
Lilly knelt next to Hannah, next to the neuroscanner.
But she was checking on someone, checking for a pulse.
Glenn lay on his back. He was still, and Lilly’s shirt was soaked with blood.
The neuroscanner still buzzed, but it was slowing down now. Low on power. Hannah knew that somehow, too.
A few other Portuguese soldiers were barking at Kellington and the other knights, who had taken cover at the ridge. The guildsmen had run off, but there were still some rebels hiding in the tree line. Hannah could see them, so she stood up.
“My queen!” Kellington yelled at her, but the soldier kicked him. “Hannah, stay down! It’s not safe!”
When she had run toward the line, as Glenn and Jules were facing off, she wanted to save Kellington, save her guard. She didn’t want them to get surrounded and trapped, so she had ordered them to attack. But now she didn’t want the rebels harmed, either. Nobody needed to fight.
She walked toward the trees. “Come here! Please! I must show you something!”
The man who walked out was old. Hannah remembered when he was implemented, years ago. He was a schoolteacher, or used to be. Aaron. What was his name now? Hannah remembered. When Lilly tried to fix him and failed. And she remembered when he came to the castle, pleading for her help.
“Jasper,” she said. “I want to show you something. Please, come here. I won’t harm you.”
Jasper slowly walked out of the trees. “Truce?”
“Truce,” she said. She led him back toward the neuroscanner. “Let those men go,” she shouted at the soldiers. “Let them come here.”
One of the officers turned toward her. “Desca!”
“No, they have to see. Kellington, come here. I have to show you.” She leaned over the neuroscanner but the officer grabbed her and pulled her up. He threw her toward a younger soldier, who carried her toward a jeep. Someone else was lifting Lilly, and the neuroscanner was packed into a bag.
Hannah looked at Jasper, about to run back to the woods for cover. She looked at Kellington. “The Citadel,” she shouted. “You have to go there. Take everybody. You will see.” And to Jasper she yelled, “Aaron! Remember! Aaron!”
The helicopter was idling behind the jeeps, and they threw her inside. Her head pulsed, the lights were still bright. Something fell beside her. The helicopter roared to life. At first Hannah thought she was falling, but she was rising up.
Below her she could see the whole stretch of the battlefield from the Morlon Kastaun through the forest and back toward the monastery. The jeeps and tanks corralled the remaining fighters away. Everything looked very small.
Hannah felt the helicopter’s angle shift, and she sat up from the cold floor. Buck, still spouting gibberish, was tied up on the other end next to Jules, whose mouth had been muffled. The Chinese pilot sat in a chair, weeping.
There was another clank, and Hannah saw a man holding the neuroscanner.
“Assets secured,” he said into a radio. “Tell everyone to pull back.” It was Roger, who was taller than in her memory.
He set the scanner on the floor and wrapped a securing strap around it, then smiled with the confidence of a man who had never failed.
“Roger, you better see this,” said another soldier.
Roger walked past Hannah to two other bodies.
“Ah, shit,” Roger said. “What the hell happened?”
Hannah stretched out her poor leg, just far enough that she could touch the edge of the scanner. Roger can’t have it. Nobody can have it. She looped her foot around the strap holding it down, and pulled. The strap came free.
“Is he dead?” The voice was soft, but Hannah recognized Lilly. “Please, Roger, tell me.”
“Looks like it. You’ve lost a lot of blood yourself.”
The floor heaved forward, and Hannah knew they were flying fast now. She gave the box a strong kick and it slid away.
The floor tilted in the other direction and the scanner fell toward the open door. It smashed into the doorframe, the glass display screen shattering.
“No, no, no, no!” Roger jumped and reached for it, but the box fell out of the helicopter, a long way down. Roger cursed and slammed his fist. Glass shards vibrated and slid across the metal floor.
Through the helicopter door Hannah could see the Malicarn stretch out before her, its green hills dotted by huts and homes and villages. Then they passed through a cloud, and the land dissolved like a dream upon waking.
2.
The queen was gone. They had taken her, and the wizards. The metal beasts and the men with wands of fire retreated back the way they had come. The Guild’s leader was dead, too, and so the reenactors ran off somewhere into the hills. Those who were left did not know why they were fighting.
“She knew my name,” Jasper said. “Aaron. I remember that somehow.”
“We do as she said,” Kellington said. “We go to the Citadel.”
They joined together, men and women of the Malicarn, and walked all day to the great black fortress.
The wizards were gone. There was no one to stop them.
In the lobby mobs had smashed glass and turned over tables, but no one had explored further.
One by one they entered the recesses of the Citadel, tentatively at first but then with a zealous determination to discover its secrets.
They wandered the halls and the offices, the conference rooms and the lab.
They saw the camera feeds and the props and the piles of paper scrawled with story notes.
The outsiders, the Madeiran youth who had joined their fight, showed them the computers.
Together they found files with information about their lives, their homes, their whole country.
Here was a database with a day-by-day accounting of Kellington’s activities.
Here was a video of Jasper working in his forge this week, last week, a year ago, ten years.
They found personnel files, movie clips, promotional posters.
Emails with producers. Inventories of food, livestock.
Interviews conducted with versions of themselves when they had different names.
They saw who they were now and who they had been. Once they saw, they remembered.
It did not happen all at once. Guildsmen were still fighting in the hills.
Outsiders were pouring into the countryside, young and old alike.
But word spread throughout the realm and more came to the Citadel.
The truth, horrible but clarifying, became known.
As the violence faded, plans were made and strategies devised.
They pulled the cameras out of the walls and ceilings and trees and rocks, and they smashed the computers and the servers and made it impossible to track anyone anymore.
The outsiders helped, showed them how to spot a hidden camera, explained where it led, what it captured.
The older ones, those who had lived in the Malicarn since the beginning, read about their past lives.
It was all in the files, electronic and paper, and in audio and video.
Some eventually remembered who they used to be.
Once they knew their old names and heard their old memories, they could pull into the deep recesses of their minds and recall what their lives had been like.
Jasper remembered Thanksgiving dinners and the way the cold whipped off Lake Michigan in the winter.
Others didn’t know, didn’t want to know.
The Malicarn was all they wanted to remember.
And some were sad to discover that there were no other lives for them, that they had lived in the Malicarn since they were born and had nothing else to return to.
Kellington was just Kellington. The Malicarn was all.
Powerful outsiders arrived in planes and drove out to the Citadel, ministers from the government.
They negotiated with the Malicarn. How can we provide for you?
they asked. Many Madeirans demanded their old homes back, land they had been forced to sell and leave.
Some in the Malicarn wanted cars and phones and electricity.
Others did not. They liked their old ways.
They wanted to live on their farms and in their stone homes and have nothing to do with the outsiders.
No one asked the Cameroon farmers what they wanted.
A Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Lisbon spent years mediating the rights of everyone on the island.
Would there be justice for those killed by the mobs?
Who would pay to give a Malicarn man his old life back?
Who would be responsible for the transfer and retransfer of property?
What would be done with the migrant workers?
Could the government provide subsidies, stimulus, some way to remodernize the economy?
Nobody came away satisfied from these judgments, so there were more hearings in Brussels that took even longer to adjudicate.
Massive poverty across the island began to abate only when the tourists arrived.
Many locals thought these new visitors could use their dollars to help revive Madeira.
They took driving tours of old Malicarn villages and castles and battlefields.
The Citadel became a visitor center. Some of the Malicarn traditionalists, who still lived as in the old days, didn’t mind when outsiders came and gawked at them, but sometimes there was violence, shoving and shouting when a college kid from Ohio or South Carolina tried to take a picture while making a lewd gesture in front of a market stall.