BEWARE, SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE PARADISE GENERATION
HELLO, KIA ORA!
This short covers a few days when Kieran and Mira are separated, from Mira’s point of view. If you haven’t yet read The Paradise Generation, go find it, read it and come back when you’re done 🙂
Hope you enjoy!
Sanna
1: Roar of water
AN EERIE WAIL WOKE me.
At first I couldn’t tell if it was real, struggling to leave sleep behind, dreams of shadowy figures looming from graves. Kieran had been there too, standing on the rough earth, his pleading gaze directed straight at me. He’d ignored the hands that grasped at him, reaching up through soil and autumn leaves. Were they all the people who’d died in the Plagues? Or the psychos who’d killed them, Doncaster and his collaborators?
I didn’t know. Wouldn’t know, the siren cutting through the haze and making the hairs on my neck stand on end. My phone began a high insistent beeping. It was on my desk across the room, to stop me picking it up and doom-scrolling for another three hours.
Earthquake? I huddled deeper into my blankets, pulling my pillow over my forehead to protect it, adrenaline thrumming through me and banishing the last shreds of sleep. Should I get in the doorway? No, people often got hurt by moving. And this house was wood, no chimney, nothing to shake apart and leave in rubble. Though I guess the whole hillside could come down…
If that happened, I’d be surfing my bed down into Aro Valley.
My stone carving collection was lined up along the windowsill, stuck down with putty, along with a framed photo of Melanie and me, but there were a few heavy, leatherbound books on the shelf by my bed — heirlooms from my grandmother. I should have left them lower down. I edged away from them, grabbing another pillow and sticking it beside my head in case anything fell. I wrapped my hand around the bedpost, ready to hang on.
The siren was still wailing, reaching a mournful peak and then dying down to the depths before dragging up again. My phone shrilled its accompaniment. It had been a few minutes now, surely, unless time was running slow. You didn’t get long for an earthquake warning. Maybe it was a tsunami warning, for an earthquake that had happened too far away to feel?
But… I craned my neck to see the time, ghostly numbers in the corner of my blank wall screen. It was only two fifty-six a.m. Kieran had left about ten, then I’d been on my phone until midnight. A tsunami would take a long time to get here if the earthquake was far away, right? If it was a tsunami, I didn’t need to do anything. We were above the tsunami line here.
Not so lucky for those lower down…
My insides clenched. Mum was staying in town tonight. I tried to remember where the tsunami line was, and the true sea level line, where her hotel was, and couldn’t. I knew the hotel was by the harbour at least, not the sea, so the tsunami would have to get over the Seatoun Dam first.
A distant boom, muffled, echoing. It sounded familiar, like maybe I’d heard it in my sleep.
Not an earthquake.
An earthquake’s noise was all-encompassing, rolling, rumbling as the shaking approached. There’d been one when I was out at Mākara earlier in the year, a five point eight on the Richter Scale. Pretty big but no damage.
Increasingly sure there was no earthquake, I shot out of bed and snatched my phone, which was still giving off that bone-drilling beeping. I didn’t even need to pull up the Wellington alerts page, there was a banner already scrolling across my screen.
Terrorist alert. Seatoun Dam. Evacuate to high ground.
I swore. Normally I’d roll my eyes at ‘terrorist alerts’, but that boom… It was still echoing in my head. Maybe this was real, no stitch-up, not a drill. And the Seatoun Dam… If that breached, it would make its own tsunami into the harbour, no earthquake needed.
Into the harbour. Where Mum’s hotel was. I knew no one lived below sea level, but did that mean no hotels too? If the dam was breached, would the water reach her?
She wouldn’t worry about you as much as you’re worrying about her, a nasty voice whispered in my head. She might even be looking for this. A chance to join Melanie.
A small whimper left me. Shut up shut up shut up shut up. I was alone in the house. No one to go to for comfort, if Mum could even offer it.
I wanted Kieran. I wanted to be with Kieran. But he was gone. Out of my house, out of my heart, out of my life.
His dad had messaged me earlier in the night, asking if he was still here. I’d said no. I’d thought he could be in hell, for all I cared, but now…
“Come on, Mira,” I muttered. “Kia kaha. Kia manawaroa. Kia māia.”
I put aside my dark thoughts about Mum. I messaged her, praying she was climbing to high ground somewhere, was already there and would check her messages soon.
A rushing hiss grew in the night, distant. The sea.
2: Evenly balanced
I GOT A REPLY back from Mum after half an hour. She was safe, on the higher levels of the hotel with the other hotel guests, waiting for the rescue boats to get to them.
My wall screen played drone footage of the city from four different angles. A late night news announcer, barely suppressing her shock, relayed emergency messages and narrated the images of the sea swelling into Pito-one, eating up the highway to Ngā Uranga that Kieran and I had cycled down to get to Horokiwi. Sheets of rain obscured the view and danced away in the wind. The sea swirled into the city, hissing at the doors of office buildings and shops, surging up streets I knew.
And then the live images. Water rippling as the wind cut across it, dappled by scattered downpours. Rescuers in their bright yellow, hunched against the rain as their boats surged through to reach second floor windows and balconies. The jagged holes torn in the Seatoun Dam.
I’d been staring at the screen for an hour, clutching my old stuffed lion to my chest, when they moved back to the studio. The announcer sat across the desk from a grey-haired man in a suit. Official-looking. I barely followed their words, but then a photo of Kieran appeared behind them. Messy-haired Kieran, a grin stretching across his face, a glint in his eye that promised fun, leaning on his bike with green leaves behind him. I remembered what it felt like to have those eyes on me, and only me. The full beam of his attention.
“We can’t say right now what the circumstances are,” the man was saying. “All we know is his chip was used to get access to the dam.”
What?
“But you can deduce that it was one of two things,” the announcer pressed. “He was there by his own free will, so a co-conspirator. Or he was there by force, so kidnapped.”
The suit hemmed and hawed but eventually agreed. “Very broadly, one of those is likely the truth, yes.”
Kidnapped? A co-conspirator?
My head spun.
“And a Pulse has turned up no sign of him?”
“None. His chip is no longer active.”
My first, heart-wrenching thought was that he was dead. But no… you could still Pulse for chips for a week after a person passed away.
The Outsiders had ways to short circuit a chip. If you needed his chip to get onto the dam, you’d be smart to short the chip afterwards.
My brain was catching up. Kieran’s chip had opened the dam to the terrorists. He’d been there, had some part in it.
And now no one knew where he was.
3: You had to try
I KEPT THINKING BACK to our argument. Could I have said something different? Should I? Was it my fault he’d got tangled up in something crazy? And how the hell had he got tangled up in something so crazy?
It was the disconnect that threw me. Ten o’clock at night, he’s telling me it’s all fine if we keep our mouths shut, if we don’t share what he found out, that we can be together now.
Somehow in that same night, he got all the way to Pencarrow, from the opposite side of the harbour, with two bombs, and then…
I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.
I’m the one who’s supposed to go first. Not him.
All I’d wanted was a future with him, a real future where we didn’t have to hide. But then I found out the price of that future, and the fact that he was willing to pay it.
Sometimes, I thought maybe it was flattering that he was willing to pay it. I’d had a boyfriend in Dunedin, briefly, but never felt anything as strong for him as I did for Kieran. I thought we could get through anything, screw the city rules, screw the world. Live a life in secret, maybe outside the Consolidation Line, maybe moles within it, until we could make some kind of difference in the world that would let us be together. That would make up for all the crap we’d been through in our lives.
I’d found my boundary, the point at which I wouldn’t go further, the point at which nothing is worth it.
But I also wondered what I would have done if Kieran hadn’t already made that choice for us. If someone had come to both of us, presented the deal, if we’d had a chance to talk through it together… would I have done it?
Would I have?
Was it just that Kieran had already decided something that I might have come to on my own, in time, with the right argument?
I didn’t know.
And if he never came back, if he was dead…
You could say I was part of that. All the different things that lead to one point, the chaos that weaves together into reality.
I hadn’t forgiven him. But I wanted him safe – maybe just so I could throw him a cutting glare from across the street. Work through these knotted, tangled feelings and get closure.
The way to make sure he was safe was to track down clues, ask around. But none of the Outsiders were answering my messages, and I didn’t know if that was because they didn’t want to answer or because their accounts were blocked. I left a few short messages on Kieran’s anon account, just in case, but with little hope that he’d reply.
I couldn’t just sit at home, sending messages into the void and turning crazy ideas over and over in my head. I needed to get out, and I’d have better luck at this detective work with a partner. Someone who knew Kieran better than I did. Someone who probably wanted answers just as much as me.
4: Red string and coloured squares
KIERAN HAD POINTED OUT Andrew’s house on the map, so I knew where it was. Andrew was his best friend. Surely, together we could figure out what had happened.
Turning up on his doorstep early the next afternoon took courage. I’d spent the morning scribbling ideas on my tablet, wiping them out when they seemed stupid, which was basically all of them. I used a secure notes app, which I hoped they couldn’t see, but who really knew?
They. There really was a they, people in the shadows pulling the strings.
Andrew’s mum answered the door. “Kia ora?”
“Kia ora. Um… I was wondering if Andrew was home? I’m a friend of- of Kieran’s.”
Her expression softened. “I’ll just get him.”
Andrew’s eyebrows shot high into his hairline when he saw me. His eyes were bloodshot, about the same as mine. “Mira? What are you doing here? Are you all right?”
“I- I think Kieran–” I couldn’t stop a sob rising up. “I think I pushed him–”
“Come inside,” Andrew said. I hardly knew him, just through a few classes and Kieran’s stories, but I’d hoped he’d understand. He’d known – he knew – Kieran better than I did, had known him since they were kids.
We sat in Andrew’s bedroom, door ajar as per his mum’s orders. He’d shoved clothes under the bed as I came in, moved a guinea-pig off a chair and motioned me into it, taking the bed for himself. The guinea-pig nosed about, examining a sock Andrew had missed and his school bag lying in the corner. Film posters covered one wall, old artsy ones, their edges peeling up, and the wall screen was filled with more in digital form. Sun shone through the large window, casting a bright square on the carpet, and the bush outside reflected faint leafy green on the wall.
I told him Kieran and I had been together for the past month.
He shook his head, giving a mournful laugh. “Kieran, bro. Kieran, Kieran, Kieran. I knew he was up to something. Always busy. But I thought it was about Lucas – you know about Lucas, right?”
I nodded. Yet another thing that could have pushed him over the edge.
But again, where the hell would he have got two bombs from at short notice?
The obvious answer was Outsiders. But I couldn’t believe it was the Horokiwi Outsiders. They weren’t like that. They’d never talked about violence or anything but peaceful protest.
Doesn’t mean they didn’t talk about it when you weren’t around, a voice in my head whispered.
And of course, there was Adelaide’s handiness with a gun.
“I also– I took him to meet some Outsider friends I have.” At Andrew’s blank look, I clarified. “PVAFS.”
“You know peevs?” he asked incredulously.
“Outsiders. Yeah. I came across them out at Mākara.”
“Right.”
“They’re really lovely people!”
“I’m sure.”
“Kieran liked them.”
“I’m sure.”
“Look–” But that wasn’t the point. And anyway, my next theory tore apart the whole ‘they’re really lovely people’ thing. “Okay, maybe they’re the ones with the bombs. I don’t want to think they could do it, but it’s the only answer I can think of.”
“So Kieran just decided to go on a field trip with some peevs in the middle of the night to blow up the harbour dam? I know he’s angry about Lucas, but how is that going to help anything?”
“We don’t know he was there of his own free will. Again, I don’t want to think this, but maybe the kidnapping conspiracy theorists are right. And there are also other Outsider groups that… aren’t as nice as the ones I know.”
Andrew’s brow furrowed. “Okay, so if he got kidnapped… They wouldn’t have come into the city to get him, not after that woman got killed the other night.”
“I knew her. Her name was Elspeth.”
“Oh.” His face fell. “I’m sorry. Man, you’ve been through some tough stuff.”
First Melanie. Then Elspeth. And now Kieran…
He must have seen that hit a chord, because he groaned and shook his head, pulling his hair between his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just… crazy, you know? If they didn’t come here, Kieran must have been outside the Consolidation Line. At night. Why did he leave the city? I can’t get my head around it. That Kieran might be– might be–”
“He’s not gone,” I said fiercely, though I wasn’t sure of it at all. The more times I said it, the more real I could make it.
“Then where is he?” Andrew said, his voice almost plaintive. “They haven’t found him. They haven’t found anyone. His chip’s dead–”
“Which could mean he’s shorted it. They do that.”
“Shorted–? You must be joking. Why would he ever–”
“How else do you live outside the cities? Why would you need it if you’ve been exiled?”
He shook his head helplessly.
“I– we had a fight,” I said, feeling like I was careering through the final barrier that kept my secrets safe. “Last night. Before he disappeared.”
“You–” His eyes were wide. “What about?”
To tell him? Or not to tell him?
I couldn’t do it. I’d been so angry at Kieran for deciding to keep this secret, but now… it was his secret to keep. Not mine. It didn’t feel right. “It doesn’t matter. I- I broke up with him.”
“You broke up…” He fell back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “You know, a week ago, I would have said good on you, that was the responsible, grown up thing to do. But Mira, for god’s sake, he’s just had the verdict on Lucas. How did you think he was going to take it?”
“I- I didn’t think.” I hadn’t. I’d just been so overcome with rage, with confusion. I’d thought I’d known Kieran, known the kind of person he was, and then he goes and–
I guess we never really know people as well as we think we do.
“But now… we need to find him. We might be the only ones who can. My knowledge of the Outsiders, your knowledge of all the places Kieran goes, the places he might hide out.”
“If he’s not being held hostage.”
“Yeah.”
Andrew pushed himself back up to sitting, pulling at a loose thread in a woollen throw.
“He used to cross the Consolidation Line a lot,” Andrew said slowly. “With Lucas. I don’t know all the places they went… But I know a few.”
“It’s a start. And we can piece together his timeline. We don’t have all the information the cops do, but they don’t have all our information either.”
Andrew chewed at his lip. “Should we… be telling the cops what we know?”
I laughed, bitter. “Not until we know how they’re going to treat him. We don’t want to put him right into their hands, and then never see him again.”
“You’ve got a point.”
I pulled out my tablet and opened the secure notes app, and we spent the next half hour scribbling diagrams and question marks and possibilities. Many of these places we couldn’t get to. They were outside the Consolidation Line, which made it difficult for a start, but half of downtown was underwater, cutting off some of the main roads out of the city. We’d have to go the long way round, and you’d better believe there’d be cops patrolling the Line, looking for suspicious activity, plus of course the auto-tasers.
“Right,” Andrew said after we’d filled five tablet screens’ worth of notes. “We need a better way to get these in order.” He went over to his wall screen and swiped his hand across the film posters, leaving a blank slate. “Let’s transfer it up here.”
It was a good idea. But…
“Disconnect the net,” I said. “Just in case.”
We were making progress. Maybe. Actually, I had no idea. But at least I was doing something, talking to someone who knew Kieran, sharing stories of the boy we both loved in our own ways.
Something had to come of that.