Veracity (15 page)

After a while, he broke the silence with a voice as gentle as water. "You know - if you uh... if you ever told anyone about this conversation, I think it's safe to say that I'd be hung out to dry."

I rolled my eyes at him, "Come on - give me some credit here. It's not as if I'm about to run off and 'report you'. I mean - I think it's almost natural for ideas like this to come up once in a while. But we both know they're just that: ideas. So... don't worry. I won't repeat a word of it to anyone. Promise."

"Good. And - I mean - I think you're right: it
is
natural. It's exactly like the Elders say; we're waging a lifelong battle against our deepest nature here, having to fight our every thought before we win it over. So it only makes sense that if we get tired and lower our guard, even if it's for a couple seconds, sometimes, our nature is bound to get the best of us, which is when everything gets mixed up in our heads. Like it was for me a few minutes ago. And like it probably is for all of us from time to time."

I had to stop chewing my bottom lip to speak, "Yeah. Probably."

We left soon after that, saying an awkward goodbye, and then turning to descend in opposite directions, meandering through the trees, our paces slowed by encumbering thoughts. For my part, I could only hope that this would be the end of it, that this whole weighty discussion would turn out to be one of those things in our lives, which seems so pivotal and important when it first surfaces, but that then somehow manages to sink into our past without ever having much of a rippling effect on the world around us.

But, of course, it wasn't one of those things. And, in fact, everyone on the island would be impacted by it before the month was through. All of us, bouncing on the surface of our reality, shocked by the magnitude of the waves that a single battered corpse can make, rolling in the swells among us.

13

At any given time, there was a lot happening on the island. People were fishing, picking fruit, growing vegetables, gathering shellfish, building and maintaining huts, and making clothing; and amid all of these chores, the Elders also had to find time to teach things and allot the younger people with time to be taught. So, for the sake of efficiency, we all had a schedule that was organized, structured, and synchronized with everyone else's, and we kept on this schedule by flipping the hourglasses that were waiting at every important site, the very moment we arrived. Every day there was a total of exactly one and a half hours - a half hour in the morning, afternoon, and evening - which were free of assigned responsibilities or meal times. These were given to us as a means of dealing with unforeseen things that had come up, to reorganize ourselves, to rest, or to simply chat with other people (provided, of course, that they were of the same sex, not the same people we'd gathered with the day before, and in groups of three or less). As might be expected, there was a lot of frenzied activity during these breaks, and the braid of trails connecting the different sites on the island were swarming with people moving in every direction.

Obviously, if one were interested in doing something secretive, this would not be the best time to do it. In fact, it would be the absolute, categorically worst time to do it. Which, I guess, shows the state of mind he was in better than anything; that and the fact that he sent - of all people - Niels to spread the word.

Niels was one of those unfortunate children, and then one of those adolescents, and finally one of those younger men, who permanently looked suspicious. Even if he was doing something that
couldn't
have a clandestine nature to it, like pulling in a fishing net or tying a knot, he still managed to look like a thief; his gawky neck kinking around, hunched over, busy eyes darting from side to side. He was dark, lanky, and constantly fidgeting, often balancing on the balls of his feet as if he were just about to break into a sprint to save his life. When we were younger, we avoided him as much as we could, and not because he was a bad guy, but because wherever he was, so were the Elders - always investigating the area around him, wondering if he'd actually done something as conniving as his manner suggested. The interesting thing was that he was never really mischievous (though this might only have been due to the fact that he didn't stand a chance of getting away with anything had the inclination ever struck him.)

That afternoon, he was walking toward me on one of the busy trails and had stopped the person in front of me, mumbled something in his ear, and then quickly moved on. I was the next one he came to. "Hey," he whispered, grabbing onto my elbow and looking up and down the trail as if to check that the coast was clear. Incidentally, it wasn't, but he didn't seem to mind, "Peik wants to talk. He's in the clearing." He let go of my arm and continued gangling down the trail, stopping every young man he saw along the way. By the time he'd disappeared around the corner, I'd seen him telling four different people in plain view. Not good.

Peik had left the community to Come of Age only about a week and a half before that, and, as he wasn't in the dining hall at breakfast, I imagined he'd been released only hours, if not minutes before. So the obvious question was: Why would a person who had just been drilled at length, and made to understand the absolute importance of abiding by all the rules, set out to break them the very first second he could? Of course, every answer I could come up with to this question was only a variation of the same worst-case scenario. Which is to say that I understood perfectly well that some kind of disastrous event was probably beginning to unravel before us. But that didn't mean that I ran off to tell the Elders about it, nor did I try and seek out
any
way of preventing it from happening. No. Not me. Instead, I went to watch. Because, let's be honest, preaching to Mikkel about consequences was one thing, but we all know that practicing it is quite another (especially when the consequences don't really involve us).

As I walked into the clearing, my pace slowed as if I'd hit a pocket of air that was so thick I had to wade through it like mud. My mind - actually, every one of our minds - was trained to see the entire scene as simply 'wrong'. Peik was squatting down on the top of a fallen tree, his arms wrapped around his knees, presumably waiting for a few more people before he began, while a scattering of young men were peppered across the grass in front of him. There wasn't an Elder in sight, and I could see that I wasn't the only one to be put on edge by this. People were visually anxious, arms crossing over their chests, feet thumping impatiently, heads twitching to look over their shoulders at the sound of every new person that appeared from between the leaves. We were as jittery as scavengers low on the food chain, which just happened to be the first to stumble across a prized piece of carrion, white-rimmed retinas scanning the shadows around us, knowing that something bigger was bound to emerge soon.

Niels finally came into view with Mikkel, who was walking somewhat cautiously behind him. Mikkel and I had been quite aloof, if not cold with one another, in the time that followed our meeting at the vantage point. In fact, for a couple of weeks prior to that day in the clearing, we'd ceased really acknowledging each other unless we absolutely had to. But this was different. Things were not what they should've been, and he sought me out in the crowd to exchange a worried glance.

As usual, it was also Mikkel's presence that signified the beginning of things, and Peik finally stood up to speak, which prompted all of our eyes to rise with him, following his shape into the air above the log, the whispers instantly fading into silence.

But before he even began, we could see that something was wrong. He didn't look so well. His shoulders were tweaking erratically, as if he were trying to shake a number of unseen insects off his back, his face pallid, chest rising and falling with quick little breaths, beads of sweat clotted onto his forehead. He was petrified; as anyone would be really, standing in front of a throng of expectant faces, all the while trying to summon up the courage to do the stupidest thing in your life.

"Thanks for getting everyone, Niels," he said, speaking under his breath. Niels nodded and smiled, his eyes flitting in every direction, his quirky mannerisms finally matching the situation.

"Okay," Peik began, addressing us in a much louder voice than he needed to. "As you probably all figured out, I've... just Come of Age. And uh... I wanted to... speak to everyone... uh - because..." he paused to swallow and draw in a long, worrying breath, "because... it's time everyone knew the truth about the island."

My mouth dropped wide open. Instantly, everyone broke into mutters of amazement, their eyebrows raised, heads spinning to look at one another. Mikkel's posture had stiffened into a rigid stick, a look of appalled disbelief on his face.

The crowd recovered from its restlessness as quickly as it could, people shushing each other, becoming quiet, waiting for him to continue, already hanging on the claims he was about to utter. I remember noticing a few complacent grins dragging across people's faces as they realized that this was going to be well worth coming for.

"But..." he carried on, "you have to know that... what I'm going to tell you... isn't easy to hear. And that is... that..." He stopped as if to think about the right words to use, the tension quickly escalating around him, people leaning in, ready, waiting. Meanwhile, Peik had fixed his eyes on the ground a ways beneath him, thinking, straining, looking for a quick sentence that would express what he'd learned over the course of several days (because, realistically, that was probably all he would have time for). But concise words seemed to be hard to come by in his mind, and, finally, unable to find them, he shook his head at himself, let his arms drape at his sides, and decided to summarize
everything
as quickly and crudely as he could - and unwisely deeming it best to start from the last line, and work backwards from it. "The Elders... the Elders want to kill everyone in the world."

Silence. People stood blinking for a second or two, before an invisible hand seemed to reach out to everyone at exactly the same time and push their faces back in puzzlement.

"What?"

"Huh?"

"What did he say?"

"What the hell?"

Everyone began mumbling among themselves, shaking heads, clicking their tongues disappointedly, even giggling; a wave of letdown gestures and expressions, people realizing that they'd just taken a huge risk to listen to the ramblings of someone who was obviously mentally unbalanced, who, it seemed, 'couldn't take' Coming of Age, and so had cracked. It all hardly seemed worth their effort anymore.

For my part, I could only let out a sigh of relief. It was incredibly lucky, for all of us, that Peik had been too flustered to choose the right words; and I could easily imagine why he'd fallen apart at the last second. He'd been through a lot. Let alone had he mustered up the energy to resist every one of the Elders' arguments in his mind, he'd also managed to fool them into believing that he hadn't resisted them at all; and actually succeeded, because, as sceptical as they were, they'd felt confident enough to release him. Which could only mean that, at that exact moment, while he stood up in front of us all, after having been through the long, taxing ordeal of convincingly being two people at once under the most intense scrutiny, he probably didn't have a lot of wit left to draw from. I almost felt sorry for him.

"No! Listen!" he called out in an effort to redeem himself, his voice obnoxiously loud. The group of young men, some of which were already turning to leave, decided to give him their attention again; albeit reluctantly, hands on their hips, heads slanted to the side in disappointment - or pity. "I know that this sounds crazy. Okay? I know that. But just listen for a second. I... I have something. I have proof." He reached into his back pocket and brought something out from behind his back, carefully, neurotically, fingers cradled delicately around it, his face knotted with concentration, eyes focusing on his hands as they moved through the air, until he held it out in front of us. It was a rectangle of folded pages (which had evidently been sat on for quite a while). He smiled slightly, satisfied that we were all beholding the glory of this flattened, discoloured, wad of text, and then he proceeded to unfold them with meticulous care, handling them as if they were just about to disintegrate into a million illegible pieces, or burst into sudden flame. If Peik's psychological status was dubious before this little ritual, after it, there was no question whatsoever: he was most definitely 'not well'.

But at that point, a strange thing started happening to me. As he held out the sheets of paper, obscure references and details in the back of my mind started to pull together, amassing themselves into something coherent. I looked at the edges of the glossy pages, which had obviously been taken from a book. They were cleanly cut.

"See: brainwashing. Do you know what they do when we Come of Age? They program us - well... some of us anyway. And... and then... everyone else... they just tell lies to."

I turned to look at Mikkel. It was him. It was
his
blade that I'd used, his blade that he somehow found, then stole, then hid, all so he could leak information to Peik, sell the poor sap on his romantic notions of saving the world. This was what he meant when he mumbled something about 'wishing he'd heard of programming
before
going into the shelter'. In fact, had I not pounced on the stupidity of his ideas, he probably would have told me all about how he was busy 'informing' Peik - and that he was being very careful about it. Because it was clear that he'd understood the risks involved, which was why he'd found an anonymous way of handing the information over, so that, if Peik snapped, or decided to tell someone about the strange sheets of paper that probably appeared under his pillow one day, Mikkel would still be safe. I could see it all perfectly. I could suddenly understand every detail of the sequence of events that had led us all to that pathetic scene in the forest.