Veracity (17 page)

"Though - as much as I doubt it helps to think of this right now - we should keep in mind that the energy inside Peik, the energy that created him from chaos, is something that will exist forever, carrying on eternally in different and varying forms. Although we will never see him again, what he was made of will never die." He broke off and turned around to look at Harek, who then nodded and straightened up.

"So," Chalmon said, turning back around, "We would like to move this all outside into the fresh air, and spend the rest of the day in each other's company, supporting one another in whatever way we need to be supported.

"I think it's safe to say that the next little while is going to be a difficult time for our island, and that we will need to pull together as a community more than ever." He moved to the door and opened it as quietly as he could.

"But before you go," he called out, holding a hand up as a gesture to stop people from standing just yet, "we wanted to have a quick meeting with everyone who has access to the disclosed wing of the Great Hall. It'll only be a few minutes. Everyone else: Please," he held his arm out to the open door, "Please find someone to comfort, and be comforted by."

The respective people stood and walked out, moaning and sniffling, a few arms draping over shoulders, a few people leaning on one another. Once they'd all filed through the door, Chalmon closed it as gently as he'd opened it, a tender expression on his face, leaning against the wood for a few seconds, staring down at his feet. But when he turned around, that expression was gone.

As soon as he'd mentioned the disclosed wing, Mikkel and I, the youngest people remaining in the room, had straightened up. We knew what this would be about, who they would be trying to find; just like we knew that they would be using every tool they could conceive of to do it. I'm sure that we both understood that we would have to stay unshakably calm throughout the entire ordeal, as they would be looking for the slightest nervous twitch, the smallest movement of uneasy tension. To prepare myself for this, I folded my hands patiently in my lap, and began, for some reason, to count backwards silently.

Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six...

Harek stepped forward and pulled the pieces of paper that Peik had thrown to the ground out of his pocket, and then held them up high in the air with the same ceremonious importance as that of our unbalanced friend. No one in the room (about a third of which being women) seemed to have been told what the crumpled pages were all about. Seeing this, Mikkel and I did our best to look baffled as well, even though Chalmon knew perfectly well that we'd seen them earlier.

"What these are," began Harek, infuriated, speaking through a thin space between his lips, "are three pages of encyclopaedia text, which were cut out and pilfered from the disclosed wing of the Great Hall." He lowered the evidence and took a couple of steps forward, his eyebrows sinking as low as his voice, "Understand this: I will not think of that poor boy's death as a suicide - nor will I think of it as some kind of flustered and irrational escape attempt. Because it wasn't - make no mistake. It was murder."

Harek gave the pages in his hand an aggressive flick, holding them out to the side so everyone could see them again, "The person who put these foolish, quixotic ideas into his head, the person who slipped him these pages in order to deliberately mislead him... that person is the one who led him to his grave. Does everyone understand that? That person killed one of our children." He was looking at different faces throughout the room, his chin quivering again; though he seemed determined not to let his voice break this time; it was deep and controlled.

"I can't think of anything more threatening to the life of our island than some spineless man or woman, skulking around among us, putting dangerous ideas into people's heads, and then watching the gruesome results from the sidelines. What vile, disgusting cowardice! What pathetically empty idealism one of you has!" he spat out, mostly eyeing the women, though pausing at a few of the men as well, Dana in particular.

Seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-one...

"What would we do with such a person if we knew who they were - how would we deal with them? What do you think a fair punishment would be for attempting to undermine our very existence, and taking the life of a loved one along the way?"

Fifty-six, fifty-five... fifty...

I paused. Harek didn't have to say it aloud; we all knew what he meant, we knew what would happen to that person if they were caught.

Which was something I had to stop thinking about.

Fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two... fifty-one...

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. One flickering image kept pulsing into my mind. It was a picture of Mikkel, somewhere at the bottom of the cliffs on the north shore, his body draped over the stones, limbs sprawled out in unnatural angles, a few threads of blood branching out along the dark rock, clawing their way to the thirsty water like lightening to ground.

And I should never have allowed it to enter my mind. I should have just kept counting instead. Because stopping to let this picture slip through, stopping to imagine Mikkel twirling through the air as the ground rose to meet him, the detail of the rock increasing with each millisecond, was just enough to make me shift in my seat. And that, in turn, was enough to make Harek's attention dart toward me with all of the focus of a bird of prey. Finally, he'd uncovered a lead.

He strode over to the table I was sitting at and stopped right in front of me, every eye in the room following him, already weighing my mannerisms, ready to measure the pauses between my words, and wondering if I was the one.

But - and this is the strangest thing about that whole loaded moment - I didn't really panic. In fact, I can't say I remember even being worried. I was just... detached, calm. I knew what had to be done. I was going to be asked a direct question, which, in turn, I would have to answer with a lie. And I would have to do this convincingly; my voice would have to be spoken in a tone that everyone would believe, unconditionally. Or Mikkel would die.

My ears were ringing. But my answer was ready.

"Joshua, I don't suppose you would have any idea who might have removed these papers and given them to Peik, would you?" he asked, jerking the papers in his hand again. I could see Mikkel in my periphery, being very careful not to shift uneasily in his seat.

"No, I don't," I said, my voice plain, the words not spoken too quickly or slowly.

Harek relaxed, believing it. At the same time, everyone else's shoulders in the room perceptibly loosened, some people even beginning to look around for the next person to be

grilled - one down, everyone else to go. But, as it turned out, Harek had very different ideas for this interrogation; namely to end it.

As he stood in front of me, I watched his expression distort into something appalled, saddened, as if he wanted to apologize for the state he'd let himself digress into - that he'd let us
all
digress into. He shook his head and returned to the front of the hall where he stood with his side to us, his eyes lowered to the ground. "No," he began, his voice tired, "I shouldn't have started us looking for blood. We all know that 'an eye for an eye' isn't any way to balance things - it only enforces the imbalance in us all that caused the incident in the first place. No. I will not have our island ripped apart by a witch-hunt. This will end here. Whoever it is, they will live the rest of their days with the blood of an innocent boy on their hands, which is punishment enough - though a punishment well-deserved." He looked down at the pieces of paper and gave them a sad, ironic smirk, as if they were covered with the repetitive scribblings of a single tactless joke. Then he ripped them in half, and in half again, and again, his motions sluggish, exhausted. He folded the pieces tight into his palm and put them in his pocket.

"Besides - how could we even be sure that it was somebody in this room? As vigilant as we are about the security of the disclosed wing... anything's possible.

"No. What we need to do is be there for our community." He turned to face us, his arms dangling limply at his sides, "One of our children died today. Now the rest of them will need us more than ever. Come," he gestured toward the door, and then turned and walked out, his feet slow and dragging. We all stood and followed.

As we filed through the doorway, people took advantage of the uncommon closeness of our bodies to pass on a gesture of consolation, touching one another on the shoulders, some people patting others' backs. At one point, I was pressed up against the door for a moment, unable to move as everyone squished against my other side, which was when, among all the knots of limbs and torsos, I felt someone squeeze my arm incredibly tightly, and then tap it twice before letting go. I knew that it was Mikkel, and I knew that, given the circumstances, he was thanking me in the loudest way he could.

It wasn't until I stepped out into the fresh air, and could finally begin to let my guard down (as the atmosphere of suspicion receded) that I realized, of all things, I was proud of what I'd done. After all, Harek was right; Mikkel would have Peik's death on his head for the rest of his life, and as far as I was concerned, that was more than enough 'justice' for one day. He didn't deserve more.

After we'd fanned out into the forest, Dana pulled me to the side and asked, as it seemed I wasn't having too many problems coping with things, if I might be able to 'support' Anu. Of course, he was really asking me to be on damage control, hoping that I might prevent him from running around as wildly as he usually did, distressing everyone at such a sensitive time. I agreed and pulled Anu as far to the side as I could, and, feeling as if I should at least
see
if he wanted to talk about things, I asked him if he knew what was going on. He looked at me deadpan and told me that Peik went into the sea. I nodded and asked if he knew that Peik would never come back, at which point he looked me up and down as if I were stupid - of course he wasn't coming back, he went into the sea. Then he looked around for something to destroy and found it almost instantly; a line of large ants moving across a piece of exposed soil right in front of us. He quickly set out to squash them all, lunging forward and thumping his sandals flat on the earth, a hand on his knee to help with the pressure.

Generally speaking, I didn't much enjoy Anu's company.

"Would you stop that please?" I asked, trying to keep my volume down.

"Why?" he shot back at me, his voice as loud as normal.

"Because," I whispered, bending closer to him, "it's disturbing."

He looked at me slantwise for a moment, suspicious; then turned defiantly and continued quashing the life from the line of insects. I sighed, and in the end, just let him - at least he wasn't running wild through the mourning community.

I looked out at the tiny clusters of people spread throughout the trees, and tried to listen above the stamping of earth behind me. I could hear people crying, mumbling, consoling one another - talking. And I had to admit: I thought there was something strange in the sound of the murmurs; or maybe it was just in the air, around us, in the very back of everyone's mind. Something had changed above and beyond the fact that one of our lifelong companions had died, and it wasn't distinct, it was remote and nameless; it was the type of thing that I'd probably never be able to put my finger on, yet somehow still knew was there.

This made me think back to what Peik had said to everyone. True, it was only a few sentences that he managed to get out, and thankfully those sentences were openly rejected as delusional and paranoid, but that didn't change the fact that every word of them was true. It was a bit unnerving - because, if you think about it, there are no words that can ever
really
be ignored. No. They're still there; regardless of how much we'd refused them at the time, they are still buried in our minds, resting in one of the derelict acres of our memory. And in many respects, those words that we dismiss are like seeds, biding dormant, waiting, quavering with life beneath the surface, until the moment comes when the conditions are just right, and then, suddenly - they make perfect sense.

15

Understandably, quite a few things changed on the island after Peik's death. Just as Harek promised, there was never a formal attempt to find out who'd stolen the infamous pieces of paper, but that didn't mean that precautions weren't taken to prevent the mysterious smuggler from doing any more damage. For one, they developed a new system of going into the disclosed wing, which allowed everyone to monitor one another more closely. Instead of certain people being in there at different times, it was decided that it would be safer to unlock it for a few hours every couple of days, and have everyone who had access to be in there at once; the more wary eyes the better, I guess. They also became even stricter about keeping track of where people were and who they were with, especially Mikkel and I - and not because they were suspicious of us, but because we would be the obvious targets of that 'malignant individual' among us, just as Peik had been. But, as far as I was concerned, of all these things, the biggest change that was made was in something that
wasn't
done.

From what was explained to me, the Elders had wanted to train all of the most promising young men on the island, and then choose the leader from within that pool. But - and this was contrary to Mikkel's theory - besides the three of us who'd already been selected, I thought there were a couple of other young men on the island who had the potential to run the expedition as well. However, after Peik died, they must have decided not to risk giving anyone the truth again. Because knowing that the paper cutter was still at large, and was probably just as willing to throw the wrench of his or her conflicting beliefs into the works, the last thing they wanted to do was give them an opportunity to throw it. After all, there was the potential for a much larger scale disaster to unfold - an undermining conspiracy, for example, a revolt. Which meant that this great talented 'pool' they'd planned on forming, would have to remain a measly two people: Mikkel and myself. And of those two people, it was quickly becoming clear which one of us was going to be chosen.