The Deep (21 page)

I don’t really understand all the words he’s
said, but I do understand what they mean for us. We’re never
getting out of here.

“Now what’s left of your ideals of neighborly
love?” I snap bitterly. “True, you haven’t used violence, but you
are willing to keep us here against our will, make us suffer, just
to save others? What would Gideon have thought if he knew? What
would Jesus do?”

The Dartmoor leader looks at me with a deep
sadness in his eyes. “My child, if you had grown up here, you would
have understood. You would have volunteered for these tests. Jesus
has given us the most glorious example of all by suffering for our
sake. The greatest good,” his voice swells with a climactic
crescendo, “is self-sacrifice.”

After the president has left our room, Walt
and I sit on the bed, completely stunned into silence. Someone
comes in to bring us food, but after that man leaves, despair
envelops us. Silence and hopelessness.

“We’re in deep trouble,” Walt finally voices
my exact thoughts. “That man has gone off the deep end.”

“It sounded like Tony partly agreed with
him,” I say timidly. I don’t want to cry, but I hear my voice
crack.

“Well, the part that didn’t agree with Jacob
is waiting for us here in Dartmoor, together with my dad.” He holds
me close and buries his face against my shoulder. “We’re not all
alone,” he says, muffled. “You heard the president, they’ll come
back to see us in two days.”

“Will I still have all my fingers and toes in
two days?” A note of hysteria is creeping into my voice. “Will I
still have blood running through my veins? What are they going to
do to us?”

“Please, calm down.” Walt’s body quivers as
he says those words to me.

I rub his back with a clammy hand. “You’re
one to talk,” I grumble.

He draws a deep breath and starts to cry and
laugh at the same time. Biting my lip doesn’t help me anymore – I
dissolve into tears as well.

“I thought Jesse had a different face here,”
he whispers at last. “But he is still the bogeyman from my
nightmares.”

I dry his cheeks. “No, he isn’t,” I say
decidedly. “His words were full of love, but these leaders have
twisted them to use his life and his teachings the way they see
fit. Just like all other people who slavishly follow a book.”

“You think we should get rid of all the
books?” Walt muses.

“No, I don’t. But we should always keep in
mind that all of them – Luke’s book from Newexter, or the Annals of
Annabel from Hope Harbor, or the New Testament from Gideon –
they’re just paper,” I say fiercely. “They should be guidelines for
people who use their common sense and feel what’s right deep
inside. Without heart, soul, and passion, a holy book will just be
a dead husk.”

Walt lies down on the bed and loops his arms
around me when I cuddle up next to him. “You would have made a
wonderful Bookkeeper’s wife,” he says, a melancholy smile around
his lips. “Passionate and wise.”

“Please don’t talk about us in the past
tense,” I beg. “Your dad and Tony will find a solution.”

“Maybe.”

Despite the worries plaguing us, we manage to
fall asleep by the time the city that has taken us captive turns
dark and slumbers in stillness.

The next morning, Walt is picked up by two
guards. I stand there, frozen with fear, waiting for them to come
back and collect me too, but they don’t. Instead, the door slams
shut in my face and it doesn’t open until lunchtime, when they
bring me back my boyfriend together with our noon meal. Walt trails
between two guards following a servant carrying a tray of food. I
start crying when I see his pale cheeks, the blankness in his
eyes.

“What have you done to him?” I yell
rebelliously at the guards. “You criminals!”

The men look at me unperturbedly. “After
lunch, the president wants to see you,” one of them says.

A violent shiver runs through me.

When the door falls shut behind the guards,
Walt sags down on the bed, his breathing shallow. I sit down next
to him and softly caress his hair. “”What have they done to you?” I
want to know.

“They drained my blood.” His voice is
sluggish. “Loads of it. They just wouldn’t stop. I feel so
weak.”

“Eat something,” I say, but Walt turns onto
his side, pulls up his knees and closes his eyes.

“Later,” he mumbles.

Despite the guard’s words, no one shows up to
take me all afternoon. The continuous wait may be even worse than
me actually being hauled off to their test room. Every time I think
I hear a sound in the corridor, I flinch, but nobody opens the door
to our prison. I only dare to relax after the sun has almost set
and the streetlamps down below in the square are lit. Apparently,
Jacob changed his mind about needing me. He was probably busy
subjecting Walt’s blood to all kinds of tests.

Walt has slept all afternoon. Now that he
wakes up again, he is famished and nauseous at the same time. “Do
we have something to drink?” he asks listlessly.

I give him the entire bottle of fruit juice
and apathetically munch on a piece of dried meat myself. I don’t
want to show him how upset I am, but I can’t help it. Salty tears
run down my cheeks and mingle with the salt on my lips left there
by the cured meat. Walt notices my sadness and gently wipes away my
tears.

“Tomorrow my dad and Tony will be here
again,” he tries to cheer me up.

“I hope they don’t visit when I’m in the
doctor’s office,” I reply bitterly.

In a hushed voice, Walt tells me how they
proceeded once he was in the medical center. He was strapped to a
chair. Nobody told him what they were planning on doing to him. He
was forced to drink two glasses of water, possibly contained with
the war disease. And tomorrow, they’ll do the same thing to me – or
even worse.

“I can’t take this.” Resolutely, I get up and
walk over to the window. “We have to get out of this place, Walt. I
don’t care how.”

He follows me and grimly stares at the square
far below. “The only way to get out of this room is through the
window.” His voice wavers. “And I’m not ready to jump into the deep
just yet. There is still hope.”

“That’s not what I meant.” I stare at him in
alarm.

His words may shock me now, but how many more
nights and days of torture will it take for me to consider those
hard paving stones below us a viable option to escape?

“Tony won’t leave us hanging,” Walt
continues. “He will help us. I know he will.”

“Okay,” I say, resting my head on his
shoulder. I don’t know anything anymore, except one thing – I’m
happy I’m not in here by myself.

In the middle of the night, we both jolt
awake because a loud noise crashes through our room. In the
darkness, I can’t see a thing, so I hold on to Walt and try to
suppress my panic.

“What in Goddess’ name was that?” he shouts,
bolting upright.

A cold blast of wind hits me in the face. Did
someone open the window?

And then I realize the sound we heard was the
noise caused by breaking glass, and that someone holding a
flashlight is busy knocking out the remaining glass from the
rabbets.

“We don’t have much time,” the man tells us.
“Tony sent me. I’m here to help you escape.”

A wave of indescribable relief sweeps over
me. When Walt and I rush over to the window, we see the man is
dangling in front of it from a thick rope. His lower body is
secured in a sort of safety harness attached to the rope.

“We need to escape over the roof,” our savior
hisses. “Here, put these on.” He tosses us two similar safety
harnesses. I don’t have time to think about the fall I’d make if
things went wrong – we just follow the man’s instructions. Once
we’re done and our ropes are pulled tight, I realize there have to
be at least three more people on the rooftop to haul us up. Maybe
even more.

“Apparently, Tony has friends in high
places,” I tell Walt, who chuckles nervously in response. He takes
my hand and helps me to climb onto the window sill.

The wind lifts my hair and blows it into my
face. One nerve-wracking second, I don’t see anything and I feel
myself teetering, my balance slipping away. But then I am slowly
and carefully pulled up by the rope tied around my waste. After I
scramble onto the roof, two unfamiliar men grab me by the arms and
pull me up.

“Leia.” A voice I know. It’s Walt’s father.
“Stay calm. All will be well.”

I look aside and see him standing near the
roof’s edge, helping Tony and another man to yank Walt up onto the
roof. Their plan worked – we were sprung from our prison.
Unfortunately we are still on the palace roof, not to mention the
impossibility to sneak out of Dartmoor undetected. How will we ever
pull that off?

“Walt, Leia, this is Bishop Aldin of the
Protester Church,” Tony introduces us to one of the men. He is
heavyset and has a bald head and a red-blond beard. “I told him
what the president was doing and he decided to step in.”

“Thank you,” we mumble in unison.

Aldin nods at us. “You are nephew to Tresco’s
president?” he asks Walt.

“Something like that, yes. And Leia was the
leader of the rebellion on her side of the island. She’s my
girlfriend.”

“I suggest we save getting better-acquainted
for a later time,” Aldin continues. “Let’s get off this roof
without breaking any limbs.”

The part of the roof we’re standing on is
flat, but when we follow the bishop he escorts us to a sloping
section. Aldin points at a rope ladder dangling down. It seems to
lead to a different part of the palace we just fled from. “Our
chapel,” he explains. “For now.”

After some heart-tripping moments on the
flimsy rope ladder, which sways from left to right in the strong
winds, I tumble through an open window and drop down to the floor,
my knees wobbly. Then I close my eyes and don’t open them again
before everyone else is inside and someone shuts the window. That’s
when I get up and walk over to Tony to hug him briefly. “Thank you
so much for saving us,” I say in a muffled voice. Walt was right –
he and William have figured out how to make things right again. By
recruiting a sort of priest who is brave enough to oppose his
president.

“We have to get out of here,” Aldin
announces. “One of my assistants will make sure those tell-tale
ropes are taken down from the roof, or they’ll find out we were
involved in no time. There aren’t that many possible escape routes,
though. They’ll find out soon enough. So you’re not safe here.”

“Where are you taking us?” Walt asks.

“To Plymouth, on the coast.”

“Why not to Penzance?”

“The presidential guard is keeping watch
along the road leading there. We have a freight ship hidden in
Plymouth. One of our followers has been busy restoring it for a
while now. We were planning on sailing along the coastline to
discover new land.”

Aldin doesn’t sound like he adheres to the
religion we have come to know. On the contrary, he strikes me as a
man with a plan of his own. Yet another influential figure who
wants to debate whether the strict rules of Dartmoor make sense.
It’s music to my ears.

“How will we get out of Dartmoor unseen?” I
ask, my forehead creased with worry.

Aldin’s face falls. “Well, we can’t drive off
immediately,” he replies. “That would be suspicious. Fishing crews
usually don’t set out in the middle of the night. My assistants
will hide you inside a van, and that van will take you across the
border in a few more hours. Until that time, you need to keep
absolutely quiet in the loading compartment, whatever you hear or
feel. Jacob will turn this city upside down stone by stone in order
to find you. Everybody will be looking for you.”

“But will that van even be allowed to leave
Dartmoor County?” Tony frowns.

Aldin grins deviously. “I have an
acquaintance who mans the south gate twice a week. Without him, I
wouldn’t have been able to supervise the restoration of our vessel
in Plymouth. If the president had found out what I was doing there,
he’d have thwarted that plan at once.”

“Why do you keep secrets from the president?”
Walt poses the exact same question that has been burning on my
lips.

“Jacob wants to rig the church in his own
favor,” Aldin says with a dark look. “Tell us how things should be
done. So I started a Protester Church with a few like-minded
people. That’s what they called it in the old world, if church
leaders went against the established order. And when I heard Tony
desperately needed help, to liberate the future leader of Tresco of
all things, I offered my assistance.”

“Aldin was going to use his ship to explore
the coast of the land previously known as England,” William
enthuses. “Broaden his horizon. And now we will use that ship to
sail back to Penzance and meet up with the others at the
harbor.”

Walt solemnly shakes Aldin’s hand. “I won’t
forget this,” he says.

In the dark of night, we leave the chapel,
which has a back door leading to a quadrangle invisible to prying
eyes on the main street. When we step outside, it’s already obvious
that something stirs in the city – disconcerted voices rise up,
bouncing off the stone surface of the paved square. They don’t
sound aggressive or hostile, but they do seem rather anxious.

“Over here,” Aldin hisses, pointing at a van
that looks similar to the vehicle Walt and I hid in when we were
trying to get back into Dunsford. The only difference is that this
van contains a hidden compartment. A hatch is skillfully integrated
into the wood paneling in the back, opening up to a hollow space
underneath the front seats.

“The next couple of hours won’t be
comfortable,” Aldin warns us. “Normally speaking we hide supplies
in here to take to Plymouth, so it’s not really made for people.
Certainly not four.”