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 didnothave 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.”
“I’m sure they were firing blanks. Though how they had that much powder to burn...” He shakes his head. “TNS made us use that shit sparingly. It’s possible to melt down bullets and cast more, but a lot harder to manufacture proper, modern gunpowder.”
“Probably should have thought of that when we were still there.” I had my suspicions back then, but it seems so obvious now that it was part of the manipulation. The Grand Astrologue excelled at the theatre of fear.
Eventually, I get to the end of the story. Our escape. How my father died protecting me from people who wanted to hand me over to be someone’s teenaged wife. Sid’s grip tightens around my shoulders. I tell him how the day we broke out of the compound, my dad held back the guards so Mum and I could keep running. Curtis managed to squeak past too, tying his fate to ours for a few years. I go all the way to the end, describing our time in the wilderness. And finally, I reach the second attack.
“When I really think about it, I’m not even sure it was TNS,” I say. “Just… people with guns. April and I managed to avoid the whole thing. Sometimes I think… TNS wouldn’t have killed Mum. She wasn’t that old. Early forties. Young enough that someone might have wanted her for… you know. But if Astolia found them, and me and April weren’t there? They would have wanted to punish her. They would have…”
“Kayla.” He wraps his other arm around me.
I cling to him, my eyes screwed shut as I go on. We’re getting to the worst part. The bit I’ve never said out loud, not even to April. The death I can hardly acknowledge.“April and I got away. We lost most of our supplies and almost starved, but we made it. But… only us. A couple weeks later, I miscarried.”
The hand stroking my hair goes still. “You were…”
“Just a couple months. Curtis knew, but no one else. We were trying to find the right moment, because we knew my mum wasn’t going to be thrilled when she found out. A pair of stupid teenagers, thinking we were old enough to…” I swallow hard, but there are fewer tears to repress than one might think. It’s always been the thing I couldn’t cry about. There was no one to share it with. No way to connect to the life I lost before it ever began. “I wanted that baby, Sid. I know it doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t have kept me and April alive while pregnant. It was all for the best, but I wanted it. I wanted some piece of him. Of them. Of what we lost. It didn’t seem fair that I couldn’t even save the life inside of me. I couldn’t do anything.”
“Fuck.” He doesn’t say much, but it’s enough. I’m so unaccustomed to sharing the story, I don’t think I could have listened to comforting sermons on the topic anyway. “I wish—I wish I could fix it for you.”
Something between a sniff and a laugh emanates from me as I shift in his arms to lean against his side. “It is what it is.”
“Have you talked to anyone about this?”
“That’s literally what we’re doing right now.”
“I mean like counselling.”
I wrinkle my nose. “You mean like a… therapist?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
I’ve read about them in books. They were something of a fixture in pre-Quake communities. But I can’t picture what they did or how it would help. I barely managed to talk about this with Sid.
“It’s not like you have to do it tomorrow,” he says,sensing my hesitance. “But therapy helps more than you think. I had to do it when I came here. It’s mandated for former TNS members; part of the rehabilitation program. I fought against it for the first few months, but eventually, stuff they said started to break through. If nothing else, it helped me figure out how to keep going.”
“I can’t tell anyone, Sid. I didn’t mention Astolia on my papers. I’ll get another demerit.”
“Therapists have to keep patient confidentiality.”
“And youbelievethem?”
The silence that follows reassures me he’s not foolish enough to trust a promise blindly. “I think so,” he says, lukewarm but hopeful. For all his crabbiness, Sid is inherently optimistic.
“I’m not telling anyone.” Sid opens his mouth to argue with me further, but I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. Telling you was bad enough.”
“How are we going to expose what’s going on in Astolia if you don’t say anything about it? I can’t go up to Council spouting a bunch of hearsay.”
I spring away from him. “You want to tellCouncil?”
“Well, we should, shouldn’t we? If there are people suffering there—”
“Youcan’t. If they figure out I’m here, they’ll come for me and April, or Council will send us back or—”
