Will everything be all right now? Time will tell, but already I’m not sure everything is good. Like all the new technology flooding in from outside now that the borders are open, all the endless internet channels, the portable devices and plug-ins so you’re always linked in. The travelling curious from other nations rushing to see how quaint we are before we become just like them. Gregory says that is why the world stepped in: not to save anybody, but to have a new market to sell their toys.
With repeal of the YP laws I’m now sharing a flat in Keswick with Madison. She was in Astrid’s slate mine prison like Len thought she might be, and released with all the other illegally held prisoners. Finley had gone into hiding not long after I left Keswick; he came out when it was safe again. Madison’s not the same, but with Finley’s help, she’s getting better all the time.
I see Stella once or twice a week; a fragile trust is beginning to grow between us. She is slowly coming to terms with all that Astrid did; with Dad not being behind my disappearance. With how much she had it wrong. She’s had trouble accepting my refusal to let Dr Lysander try to return my memories, but they’ve been mucked around with enough. From now on nobody but me has any say in what I choose to remember, what I choose to forget.
For now I’m working with Parks as a fell checker. Len is on the list of those missed: he died in the struggle against Astrid’s faithful. Being alone in the high places above the world in all weather, the mountains under my feet that have been, are, and will be long after I’m gone, I feel a release never felt anywhere else: it is really why I came back to Keswick, despite Mum and Amy. It is the only place I can think about anything and not be overwhelmed.
I still might go back to school myself, then get into teacher training one day and be an art teacher, like Gianelli, but not now. The happy little faces are too much for me, after all the Slated children from Astrid’s orphanage experiment were found: dead. Killed by Astrid’s minions to hide what they’d done, but they were caught before they could destroy the bodies.
At least I know Edie survived, and that Ben never told the Lorders where she was: their house was empty that day because they’d heard what happened at All Souls and bolted in a hurry, gone into hiding. When they reappeared, I went to see them. Edie said I could keep Murray, that I was more alone than she was.
That is one place where I know Ben told the truth, after all the lies that followed. He kept up an act long enough to get out of hospital, and then some of the truth came out. He’d committed crimes worthy of Slating before we’d even met, to add to the ones later at All Souls. He said the only time he was ever happy was when he was Slated.
And then he stole a car and disappeared. No one knows where he has gone. All I know is he doesn’t want to be with me. For whatever reason, good or bad, at the end that is the truth.
Should I have seen it coming? I could never really hurt anyone, Slated or not. Ben could, and did: with the Lorders he may have been experimented on, manipulated and escaped legal responsibility because of it, but in the end it was still him who caused and took part in the All Souls massacre. Did that say something about who he was to start with? Dr Lysander hinted as much; she warned us again and again, but left the choice to Ben.
Sometimes I wonder if he ever really was mine, or was it all illusion from the start. Like Aiden said: how can you truly love somebody when you don’t know who they really are?
But most of the time I know we did. Back in that time and place when we were just what we were then: blank slates. Innocents. Before my memories started to return; before Lorders manipulated and changed him, and Dr Lysander returned his past. It was real, at least to me. My evidence is the pain left behind.
Seeing how Finley is with Madison tells me it is possible for love to last, to grow. Just not for me, not now. One final lesson the Lorders have taught me is this: there are no second chances. I chose Ben, turned my back on Aiden, and I can’t take it back. But Aiden was right, wasn’t he? Ben was the past. I don’t miss him the way I do Aiden: with Ben it is more grieving for something that was. Not something that could have been.
That should have been.
One last climb and I finally reach my destination: Astrid’s slate mine prison. She is the only prisoner there now. Behind it are unmarked graves, with flowers and a memorial; a public ceremony today to unveil it. Mum is here, and Stella. Gregory and Dr Lysander also. There are survivors, women newly released from the prison along with Madison, wearing both the marks of their ordeals and nervous joy at unexpected freedom on their faces. Along with survivors are family and friends, like us, of those who didn’t make it.
And one surprise. I almost stop breathing when Aiden walks up to me, gives me a hug. He doesn’t say anything, just holds me a moment, and I cling to him, tight.
The ceremony begins. Gregory had been as good as his word: he’d found his daughter. Turns out she died just weeks after I was born – natural causes. If you can call dying of untreated infection after childbirth ‘natural’. Maybe, it was an escape? Though I like to think she would have stayed with me if she could.
I stand with Mum and Stella for the two minutes of silence, but as if that isn’t enough, it persists long after the time is marked. More sinned against than sinning: I stare at the words carved in the memorial over the graves that include the mother I’ll never know, standing between the two that I did.
Afterwards, I feel eyes on me – a woman, thin, hunched, skin a papery grey, the determined eyes of a survivor. She draws me aside.
‘I was there when you were born. Sam refused to say who was the father, but what options are there in a woman’s prison with male guards? I know what your mother named you,’ she says, then whispers it in my ear as if it can’t be said out loud.
It didn’t come that day, but on other days, as the sun shines down to melt the ice of another winter, to summon spring wildflowers from the earth; as the sky darkens with sudden, drenching showers before the sun returns, I know that both pain and joy are needed for life to grow. As Skye bounds about my feet, as Aiden comes to walk beside me, against all logic I can almost feel it.
My mother Sam must have been an amazing woman. So much circled around her: Gregory’s guilt at not having pardoned her made him a rigid Lorder ruler for most of his life. Dr Lysander’s grief at her supposed execution led her to invent Slating: a way to stop execution of underage criminals, yes, but look at all that it led to? And Sam, herself, imprisoned for years by Astrid, in that horrible place: I can’t imagine what she went through. Yet somehow, she still had it within her to give me a name that reaches out and bridges the years lost between us.
I have both been given and taken so many identities, but at last I am beginning to grow into my one true name. More will come with surviving, and time. With standing on my own feet now; with Aiden and me finding our way together in the future. Because sometimes there are second chances.
This was the gift my mother gave to me:
Hope.