StAG: Chapter 3 - A quiet call (going into the ruins)

 This was it, I would have no other chance to help to her… but now I didn’t want to just help her, now I wanted to help everyone in the refugee camp, in the city, in the whole station… But I had to start by meeting the people I wanted to help, and I had to do it now, before they became suspicious of the weird guy just standing there having an existential crisis.

I got into character, a character I have used many times, The Kind Man. He’s the archetypical compassionate man. He’s old, and he’s somewhat fat, but his smile is genuine, and when he speaks you feel that he truly loves you, and when he’s sad you feel he’s full of love. I base him on Bishop Myriel from “The Misserable Ones.” I doubt anyone like him has really existed, but I could pretend to be like him, at least for a while, so I approached them.

“It smells good,” I lied, pointing at their pot, “what is it?.”

They looked at me, and then at each other.

“Tinutuan,” a woman replied.

“I've never had that, how much for one plate?.”

You have to be careful when doing something like this, because there’s a risk people may think you are insulting them or making fun of them, but if you are earnest enough, and a little bit lucky, they may be willing to accept your offer.

“Three points,” she replied, but she wasn’t talking to me, it was more like she was thinking out loud.

“Seems fair,” I replied before anything else could happen and I took a seat on a big chunk of concrete no one was using. “Oh, I’m Jacobo by the way, but you can call me Jacob, everyone does.”

They grunted or whispered sounds that just barely counted as replies.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch your names,” I said as casually as possible. It was a little risky move, but it was necessary.

Then each of them mumbled their names, almost at the same time, but I did catch them: Jeremiah, Lucas, Solveig, Mazaa, Hanu…

“And my brother’s name is Ash,” Hanu said. She was the cook, and her brother was the person helping her.

Hanu gave me a plate with food and a plastic spoon. I thanked her and tried a little. It was mostly rice with a little bit of corn and some leaves. It didn’t have any condiments but it was okay.

“I like it, how did you learn how to make it?,” I asked Hanu.

“I read a recipe,” she replied and continued to serve the food to the rest of the people around the fire.

“Well, it was a really good recipe, I can see why you are always the one who cooks."

“How do you know she always cooks?,” Mazaa asked, she was a teenage girl around half my age.

“Where else would we go?,” Solveig replied sarcastically, she was on an old woman sitting next to Mazaa.

“Over there they have another fire,” I pointed out, “and over there and over there… All over the camp there are other people cooking, but you choose to let Hanu cook, no doubt because her food is really good.”

“Thanks,” Hanu replied. I could see my compliments had succeeded in establishing a connection between us. “The cooking is also my brother’s… but he doesn’t talk, so I’m thanking you in his behalf too.”

Indeed the man hunched over the pot clearly knew what he was doing, but he seemed to be ignoring us all.

“Why doesn’t he talk?,” I asked.

“He needs a new hearing implant,” Jeremiah explained, he was an old man and he looked supremely tired. “He hit his head years ago and it stopped working.”

“Nah,” Lucas disagreed, he was old too, but he seemed angry, “his implant is fine, the accident just left him stupid.”

“My brother is not stupid!,” Hanu screamed at him with true rage. She was this close to snatching the plate out of his hands and sending him away.

“Okay,” Lucas conceded, “perhaps he can hear us but he just doesn’t wanna talk since the accident.”

That apparently satisfied Hanu who finally served herself a plate, but she wasn’t happy about it. Then her brother served himself a plate and sat next to her.

The rage was replaced with an awkward silence that took us all over, but Solveig quickly stabbed it.

“Who are you anyway?,” she accused me, “you work for her?.”

When I’m meeting people in need usually I like to take my time before getting to this point, but when things get rushed like this, it’s better to face it head on.

“I do not work for Lord Bidiga, all I want is to learn how I can help the people in this camp.”

“That's what you do?, help?,” Solveig accused me with sharp knives of sarcasm in her voice.

“Yes, that’s what I do.”

“Look son!,” Lucas replied. with corrosive anger in his voice. The energy of his voice surprised even him, so he calmed himself and then he spoke like a disappointed but loving father. "We've seen people like you, but truth is: blankets, food and aspirin are not enough.”

“What do you need then?,” I begged for an answer, and in that moment I broke character. The Kind Man would never be so eager, he was always patient.

“Can you get us jobs in the city?,” Mazaa asked and immediately Solveig slapped her in the back of the head quite violently.

“You do not want the jobs they offer us,” she scolded her, perhaps with reason.

“But Kris…” Solveig slapped her again, even stronger. I nearly stood up to protect Mazaa but Krisette intervened first.

“It's fine, really,” Krisette replied and Solveig did calm down.

Mazaa was breathing angrily.

“What else should I do then?,” she demanded to know, "become an UNUM soldier and steal from poor people like us?.”

No one replied. I wondered how The Kind Man would react to this situation, how would he change the conversation, but Hanu changed it for me.

“How would you even have the money to help us?,” she asked me.

I sighed.

“Well… there are a ton of people who also want to help but they don’t know how, so when they meet me they give me money… it’s really that simple.”

They kept quiet, they didn’t believe me.

“What should I do with this money?,” I asked them, “what would help you the most?.”

“Each one of us is gonna say something different,” Hanu warned me, “I want a new cochlear implant for my brother, more than anything in the world.”

‘Easy,’ I thought.

"Listen boy,” Solveig said, but her words didn’t feel so sharp this time. “Don't go around here saying you have a ton of money you wanna spend helping us. Someone’s gonna come and torture your private key out of you, and they won’t share any of it.”

I could let go of The Kind Man now, I smiled.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I assured her.

 Finally the silence was allowed to rest among us, but it wasn’t awkward anymore. It was the silence of the relationships I had created with these people, and it was allowed to grow as we continued to eat that okayish Tinutuan.

I felt good about what I had done, even if Hanu was the only one to ask me for something concrete. I had expected Krisette to speak more, but she really didn’t, she just ate in silence, and so did her daughter. I considered asking her about her son, but that felt too much like an ambush.

I had sat in front of her and announced I wanted to help people, if she didn’t ask for my help I should respect her wish and leave it at that, I had fulfilled my obligation to Karina. When I finished the Tinutuan I gave them my contact, I said goodbye and I walked away. I wanted to see more of the camp and learn how to help the people there.

Suddenly I thought my jacket had gotten stuck on something, but when I looked down I saw Krisette’s daughter holding it. Karina had told me her name was Frasie.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“You help?.”

“I try.”

“Can you help me send a message to my brother?.”

My heart sunk in that moment.

“Sure, see, this is called praying and…”

"Praying is for the dead.”

“Well… kinda…”

“I just want to send a message to my brother.”

“…where do you think he is?.”

“In the ruins.”

Then she told me a story in the way children often do, assuming you know all the context and not explaining who anyone is and why things happened, but you have to be patient and ask the right questions. That’s how I pieced out her story.

Krisette had two children, Frasie and Urbain, he was the oldest. She told me Urbain didn’t like her mother’s job at the city. She told me he would leave their tent in the night to hang out with “the big kids,” but one day Urbain didn’t come back in the morning. He came back in the middle of the afternoon, and he was acting weird. He was very quiet, contemplative even, but after a couple of days he went back to his normal self… just to disappear again and come back acting weird again. This apparently happened many times.

One day Frasie told her mom about this and Krisette finally asked Urbain where he was going. It turned out he was jumping the fence and going into the ruins. Her mother got very sad, and very angry, and she made him promise he wouldn’t go again, but he kept doing it, and it started taking him longer and longer to come back, to the point he would be gone for days, just to be back for a second and then go away again.

Now it had been a couple of months since she had last seen him. Apparently everyone silently assumed he had finally died in the ruins, but nobody told this to Frasie. 

“I asked my mom if we can go visit him but she says she doesn’t want to,” Frasie told me.

“But do you know where he is?.”

“In the ruins.”

I was loosing my mind by this point. We had been over this already.

“Where in the ruins?, did he tell you the place he was going?, is it any building in particular?, a movie theater?, a school?, a hospital?.”

She just made a a vague motion with her hand. It gave me the impression she expected to go into the ruins and find her brother just casually sitting on a box eating an orange. 

“The short one,” she mumbled.

“The short one?,” finally!.

“He told me once he was going to the short building to see the monkeys bringing mom from her job.”

“Actually…” I couldn’t believe it, my heart was racing, “I think I saw them, in the ruins, watching the bus go by.”

“You did!,” for a second there she was truly happy.

“I think, I’m not sure, I saw people it may not be him… I cannot promise you I’ll find him, but I’ll promise you I’ll go check, okay?.”

“You are gonna bring him back!,” she nearly started jumping and clapping.

“Frasie!, there you are!,” Krisette screamed from far away in the camp.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna bring him back…”

“Frasie come here right now!,” Krisette screamed.

“But you will tell him to come back?,” she insisted.

“I'm not sure if I’m gonna find him…”

“Let my daughter go!,” Krisette demanded, very angry.

“She was just telling me…” I began explaining.

“Go get fucking lost!,” she replied, rushing towards us, and I knew if she reached me it would be very bad for me. I was not gonna fight her.

“Goodbye,” I said to Frasie and I ran towards the gate of the camp.

People in Astoreth were lucky, many stations that went dark never turned the lights back on after the Silence. Very few people escaped form those stations, and they had stories… Part of me had always wanted to go there. Whatever people remained in those places certainly needed help. But how do you even get into a port that is not operational?, and even if you do get in, how do you find the survivors?, and even if you find them, how do you survive yourself?.

But right now I didn’t have to help all of them, I just had to find one person and give him a message, that was a task small enough for me.

There was a bored soldier in front of the gate listening to a book.

“Hello, could you please open the gate?,” I asked her. She slowly paused her book and removed her old headphones.

“…what?.”

“I need to go outside, could you please open the gate?.”

“The midday bus arrives in…”

“I'm not talking about the bus, I need to go there, to the ruins.”

“There’s people there,” she explained.

“I'm Jacobo, you can call me Jacob, what’s your name?.”

“Midra.”

“Nice to meet you Midra. I know there are people there, can you please open the gate?…” she just looked at me, confused. “I'll bribe you if that’s what you want.”

“You really want to go there?.”

“Yes!, that’s what I’ve been saying!.”

Her face became locked in an incredulous expression, but she did open the gate, for free.

“I hope someone else was here to see this,” Midra told me as she unlocked the door and opened it just enough for me to pass by, “we would bet on wether or not you will come back.”

“You can make a bet with me. If I come back you will have to listen to any book I suggest.”

“And if you don’t?.”

“In that case I’m fucking dead.”

We laughed together.

"Fair enough,” she agreed, and I was off.

I felt wrong walking through those empty dark streets, like when you enter in someone else’s house and no one is home. You see the things they left, how time has turned them into trash, you get an idea of the lives they were living before they were interrupted by tragedy, and you wonder where they are now.

More than once my foot got caught on some kind of wire hidden among all the trash and I nearly tripped, but I wasn’t completely unprepared. I had a lantern drone in one pocket and a knife hidden near my waist. I launched the little drone to light the area around me, and just in time because I found a trap. I nearly missed it under some papers and wrappers, but there it was, clearly a trap meant to hold small animals, like rats. Someone was hunting here.

I kept walking, always hopping to hear some noise, any noise, but there was nothing to hear. I was also paying attention at the buildings around me. This had been Astoreth’s main street and as such it was lined with skyscrapers belonging to hotel chains and banks, but in between them there were fancy restaurants, theaters and museums. Each of those buildings was large enough for hundreds of people to hide if they so chose. The only way to find someone there was if they wanted to be found.

Finally I was in front of the building I had seen from the bus, the one with the people on top.

This place had once had huge glass doors, but they had been shattered long ago. The lobby was oddly normal though. Maybe it was because none of the furniture could be moved, the chairs, the desk of the receptionists, even the plant pots, all of them were attached to the floor. In the times before the Silence, if an employee had returned from his vacation to find that no one had watered the plants nor vacuumed the dust, they may have seen something similar.

That illusion was broken when I passed the door besides the desk to the next room, something had definitely happened there. The desks of synthetic wood had been burned long ago. There was a corner full of dried shit. There were paintings on the wall made with blood and other… fluids. They were cartoony faces, mean words, and depictions of the same three people over and over.

Finally I found the stairs and I made my way up.

The stairs told a story too. I may be wrong, but I think there were two groups in this building. Every floor or so I would find furniture sprinkled with dried blood blocking the stairs. There were also weapons: cue sticks, metal tubes and wrenches.

The fact there were several blockades like this seemed to tell the story of a group of people going up the building against a second group of people who wanted to stop them, and apparently they kept loosing.

This way I finally reached the top of the building, but I didn’t see anyone there. I took some time to watch the dark ruins around me and it felt exhilarating, like if my lungs were bottomless. I had conquered a tiny section of this world and from here I could see there was so much more to explore, an ocean of ruins.

Then I finally stepped on a trap which in my opinion was way too complex. It consisted of a piece of metal, probably from a window frame, that had been sharpened and connected to a spring, probably form a mattress. The spring had been held in place with a small hook and when I stepped on the trap the spring was released sending the improvised spear straight to my leg. It would have probably lodged itself deep in my bone if I hadn’t caught it right on time. It had only pierced some layers of skin and muscle, but I couldn’t let them know that, they had to think they had gotten me, so I stayed hunched over my leg, as if in pain.

Next they went for the lantern drone by dropping a net over it, of course they didn’t want to damage it.

Only then they revealed themselves.

There were seven people, four adults and three teenagers. Some had been hiding in the trash that littered the rooftop, the others were hanging from the ledge, but all of them were waiting for me to activate one of their traps. They walked slowly towards me, holding make shift spears and bows.

“The question now is: how will you collect the ransom?,” I said. I wanted them to know I knew exactly what their plan was.

They wanted Lord Bidiga to send people after them, then they would attack and hold those people hostages for whatever ransom it was they wanted.

“Come on, knock him out,” one of them said, a boy. He couldn’t contain the adrenaline, his breathing was too fast, this was his first time.

“Wait,” a man ordered him. He had experience, he could tell something was wrong. He was clearly the leader.

“We have to kill him,” another one replied, a girl. There was an insecurity about her that told me how much was expected of her.

"Shut up,” another woman ordered her.

“Maybe we kill him,” the leader conceded.

"That was not the plan,” a man said. He was trying to be careful not to challenge his leader, but express his disagreement nonetheless.

“He’s right there!,” another boy exclaimed, moving from side to side, changing grasp on his club over and over.

“She’s right,” a man with a gentle voice said to his leader, “let me kill him.”

I had probably overplayed my hand. Even in the low light they could tell I wasn’t badly hurt, and my acknowledgement of their plan worried them too much.

The leader gave the slightest nod and the man with the gentle voice threw his spear towards me. However I did see the nod and I reacted first. I sprinted from my position, the spear missing me entirely, and before his companions could react I was holding him hostage, keeping the sharp piece of metal form the trap next to his neck.

There is no way I can prove this to you, but I was never gonna hurt him, he wasn’t in any real danger. They key was that he didn’t know this and his companions didn’t know it either.

I scanned the group of people in that moment. They were ready to fight, and to be honest I wanted to fight them too. In an instant I made a plan of how I would take them out as quickly as possible, of how I would use their hidden traps against them, of how I would need to avoid the two people with arrows until they had fired and missed.

But my goal was not to fight them, I just needed to find out if Urbain had really died in the ruins.

“I'm looking for someone,” I told them, “that's it, that’s all I want.”

They ignored me, as if I hadn’t spoken. They stayed in position, ready to attack. Someone had trained them well.

The leader ran at me. He was a large man, but his muscles gave him speed and grace in combat. I had to throw my hostage away and avoid the swing from my opponent’s club. It seemed to be some kind of specialized long wrench, the kind used by spaceship mechanics.

When he realized how quick I was he switched from swinging his club to using it as a sort of staff, trying to hit me with both ends at different times, a technique which is much quicker and equally as deadly if used correctly. I could not stop his attacks without breaking my hands, so I was mostly just dodging them and taking any opportunity I had to hit him, much like boxing.

The knife in my waist itched to be unsheathed, but I had come here willingly, knowing full well what to expect. Using a weapon would have felt too much like hunting.

Instead I focused on keeping the leader between me and his people, that way they couldn’t use their spears and arrows for the fear of hitting their leader by accident. But the man with the gentle voice was much less risk adverse and he tried to tackle me, getting in the way of his leader.

He failed, of course, I moved away and in that instant the three of us could see what would happen.

The gentle man would fall near the ledge, but he would not have enough space to stop himself and regain his balance. The inertia would make him fall off the roof. I saw it in his face, the disappointment, the realization that your life has come to an end, regardless of what you had planned, regardless of how incomplete this leaves the narrative of your life.

I stretched my hand, risking it to be broken by a swing of the staff, I grabbed the gentle man by his shirt, and with one spinning motion threw him away from the ledge, loosing my own balance in the process and reopening the wound from yesterday.

The leader saw the blood staining my jeans and he came on top of me, holding my shoulders with his hands and pressing his knee on the wound. I am good, but I am not that good, he had me. His people cheered for him to kill me.

“You were telling the truth,” he finally said.

“I am looking for someone,” I confirmed. We were both gasping for air.

He doubted. He knew he shouldn’t care, he knew nothing had changed, but he simply was not the kind of person to ignore the actions of others.

“Who are you looking for?.”

“Kill him Niklo!,” someone clamoured.

“Silence!,” he ordered, and he was obeyed.

“His name is Urbain, he was a refugee.”

He tightened his grasp on my shoulders, still doubting to listen me at all.

“Why?.”

“I have a message from his sister.”

The leader, whose name was apparently Niklo, gave himself a moment to consider my answer, perhaps contemplating whether to kill me or not one last time.

“Bidiga didn't sent me here, a child did. No one is gonna pay a ransom for me, and the lantern drone is all I had of value.”

“Okay,” he said. Niklos lowered his guard and walked away, letting me stand up. “Do we have anyone named Urbain?.”

“I don’t know,” the adults replied.

“Yeah,” the girl answered, “he’s the one who wanted to come but you said no, remember?.”

"Tell him he can come now, and to hurry.”

I sat on the ground and the others stayed away from me, whispering, not taking their eyes off of me. Niklos was the only one ignoring me.

The girl ran away. I could hear her going down the stairs, and later I heard the echoes of her footsteps through the empty streets getting quieter into the distance. Then, after an hour and a half, I could her the echoes of two sets of footsteps getting louder.

She came into the rooftop again, and behind her came a boy, gasping for air, still not entirely used to this world. He looked around, confused. I stood up and approached him.

“Are you the son of Krisette?,” I asked him.

I tried to imagine what he was thinking. He had wanted to come to ambush the soldiers, but he was rejected, only for that girl to come back saying he was needed after all. He was confused, he couldn’t imagine why they needed him, but he was excited nonetheless, and he ran as fast as he could. Instead he was met by me, a strange man he had never seen before, asking about his mother.

“Yes."

"People think you died Urbain,” I said.

This was not what he expected to hear. He pretended to be tough in front of the other teenagers and adults, but his shame forced him to pull his sight away from me every time.

“What?.”

“In the camp, in the city, people say you are dead. Karina thinks a cult sacrificed you.”

“I’m not!.”

“I can see that, and I imagine your mother and your sister will be very happy when I tell them.”

“You know them?.”

“Why else would I be here?. In fact Frasie asked me to find you. They all miss you Urbain. Karina, Hanu, Mazaa, even Lucas.”

I could tell I was really fucking with his head. Who was this stranger who knew all the people important in his life?, why was he summoned to this rooftop?.

“What do you want?,” the girl asked. She was focused on solving the problem of getting rid of me without getting distracted with tangential details. If she was in charge she would have just killed me.

“Ideally I want to convince Urbain to go back to his family.”

“We are his family now,” another boy replied, in such a way that I could almost hear the voice of the person who indoctrinated him.

“Now he has two families,” I replied. It’s better to not contradict these kind of beliefs at first. “I just want him to visit the first one, just so they know you are taking good care of him.”

Then I looked at Urbain again, without saying anything, just letting my words float in his mind. It's a lot like fishing, come to think of it. You put the bait, and you just wait for them to bite.

I waited, but no one replied, no one said anything. They just looked at each other hoping I would just finally go away, so I tried something else.

“I've always wondered how it is to live in the ruins, eating only rats and your own excrement.”

“We don’t eat excrement!,” one of the adults replied, offended at my stupidity.

“What else is there?.”

“We grow meat, and plants,” another adult explained, with the indignation that comes from stating the obvious.

“Yeah, with machines I fixed!,” Urbain exclaimed, proud and angry at the same time.

“You fixed the machines?,” I asked Urbain, “they must certainly appreciate you for that. Sadly, you surely have to at least drink your own urine, right?,” I continued, amused.

“How stupid can you be?,” the girl was genuinely offended, “we find pools and restrooms, we collect that water and we purify it. We have purifiers.”

“Oh, so it is the same as living in the city, I always wondered,” I was wrong again, but this time no one corrected me. “I can see why you want to stay here Urbain. In the camp you guys depend only on what is given to you, here you depend only on yourselves, it must be nice.”

“I won’t go back,” he finally said.

“I'm not asking you to stay, just to pay them a visit.”

“I can’t. I don't want to see my mother again.”

“Are you ashamed she's is a prostitute?.”

He laughed.

“I wish she was a whore, that would be so much easier.”

Now it was my turn to be confused. If Krisette wasn’t a prostitute, what was her job?. But I couldn’t linger on that now.

“Whatever she does, she’s still your mother, and she loves you, and she thinks you are dead.”

“She thinks I’m weak.”

“Go back and prove her you are not.”

“I can’t.”

I considered taking him by force. I could grab him and run… but no, they were too many and Urbain would be shaking and kicking all the time. Besides, the girl gave me a reckless vibe, she would try something stupid and we all would be worse off because of it.

On the other hand, I could tell Urbain missed his family and he wanted to go back, but I didn’t know his whole story, I wouldn’t discover it in one afternoon. Maybe, over time, I would be able to convince him to come back, but not today.

“Can I at least take a picture of you?, to show it to your mother?.”

“Okay,” he replied.

“Hey!,” the adults complained, except the gentle man.

“Urbain!,” the girl scolded him.

“It doesn’t break the rules,” Urbain argued.

“They already know he exists,” the gentle man elaborated. I really liked his voice. “They know he is here, and it’s not like they can come and get him.”

“He might,” Niklos pointed out.

I took Urbain's picture.

“Thanks a lot Urbain, do you want me to give them a message from your part?.”

“No, just tell them what you saw.”

That confidence made me smile.

“Sure, I will, and now let me just give you some advice…” I wanted to say so much, how could I put it all into a single phrase?. I couldn’t, obviously, but I had to try. “Be well, okay?.”

“Okay,” Urbain replied quietly.

“I'll get going, nice to meet you.”

I extended my hand to Niklos after I said that, looking at him in the eyes, the same hand he chose not to break.

He gave a strong handshake and he didn’t say anything. 

Making my way back down I realized I liked it here, I wanted to stay. I wanted to earn the trust of the ruin dwellers, I wanted them to take me to their village, I wanted to see the places where they grew food. I liked the aggression too, stepping into a trap on purpose, disarming an enemy, being alert… I wanted to keep doing it. 

As I approached the refugee camp I saw a small crowd gathering on the other side of the fence to see me, among them were a bunch of soldiers pointing their guns at me. At least I was getting more aggression.

“Midra!, it’s me!, Jacobo!,” I screamed, but I couldn’t tell if she was there because they quickly turned on some huge lamps mean to blind people temporarily.

“It’s fine!,” I heard her screaming, “it's fine!, I let him outside!.”

I couldn’t hear all the conversations happening around me, too many people were screaming, but eventually two people came and dragged me into the camp and searched me.

“Why the fuck did you go outside!,” a man screamed at me, a soldier. “Are your their contact?, did you sell them drugs?.”

My eyes still had not recovered from the bright lights.

“I went to find someone… call Krisette, and her daughter Frasie.”

“Who?.”

“Ooooh, you mean Krisette?, the one who works in the city?,” someone asked.

“Yes.”

I heard someone running away, they went to look for her.

“He just has a knife and a cellphone, sir,” a soldier explained.

“Hey, Midra, I won the bet,” I still could only see vague shapes, but I assumed she was there.

“What book do I have to read?.”

"A book that you have written.”

“I haven’t written any books.”

“Then I suppose you have to write one now.”

She was confused for a second. I could make out her headphones in her hand and her cellphone in the other. As my sight recovered I could tell the screen had a list of audiobooks.

“…can I write a book?,” she wasn’t asking me, nor her, she was just asking, and I smiled, because I knew I had planted a seed that would grow in her.

After a few minutes my sight was recovering, my irises were getting smaller again, and I could see more figures coming towards me, among them I recognized Krisette. She stood in front of me, very angry.

“I have something to show you… who has my cellphone?.”

A soldier gave me back my cellphone and I showed Krisette the photo of Urbain.

“He wants you to know he is okay, he’s learning to repair machines to grow food.”

Krisette slowly reached for my cellphone and she looked very closely at the picture.

“It's him, I had never seen this picture of him, when did you take it?.”

“Less than an hour ago, in the ruins.”

“Did you find him?,” Frasie asked me.

“I did.”

Then Krisette showed her the picture. Her hands were shaking, her eyes were filling with water, her mouth was trembling.

“Did you give him my message?,” Frasie asked me.

“I did, but I couldn’t convince him to come back, I’m sorry.”

“What's in the cellphone?,” a soldier asked, the one who was screaming at me earlier.

“A picture of her son,” I explained.

"The one who was sacrificed?.”

“He wasn’t sacrificed, I found him.”

“Alive?, let me see.”

Now there was a small crowd of soldiers and refugees looking at the picture over Krisette’s shoulder and the soldiers had forgotten everything about me. Krisette wasn’t saying anything, but I could see she had a difficult combination of peace, grief, worry and relief.

“Why didn’t you bring him back?,” her voice trembled, choking with tears.

“He didn’t want to come, I thought about forcing him but…”

“No, no… you did right, he’ll come back when he wants to…” she looked at the picture with such love… I couldn’t comprehend it, but I admired it.

“You should also talk with Karina, she’s gonna be happy to know Urbain is alive.”

“Karina…” she said, slowly, remembering. “She asked you to do this?.”

“She only asked me to talk to you, but you are not very talkative. Then your daughter asked me to give a message to Urbain.”

A laughter pushed through the knot in her throat.

“Do you go around doing what people tell you to do?,” she mocked me.

“Today I do…”

“He helps!,” Frasie explained to her mom.

The soldiers started screaming again, but not at me this time, but at the crowd of people. I want to think they knew Krisette and me needed a moment of to talk alone, but most likely they just didn’t like so many people close to the gate.

Krisette sent herself the pictures of Urbain, then she approached me and gave me back my phone.

“Thanks,” she said, then the real crying started. She turned around and walked away.

Tomorrow I would come back to the refugee camp. I wanted to meet more people here. I would ask them about the ruins, Urbain couldn’t be the only one who had abandoned the camp to go there. I would find out what Krisette’s job was. I would try to find more jobs in the city for the refugees. I would find out why they weren’t allowed in the city. I would meet Lord Bidiga. I would try to exert pressure on her. It would take time, but eventually she and I would compromise… but first I had to meet the community leaders. There had to be a guy around the camp everyone listed to, right?. There was so much work to do here.

“Oh, Father Jacob, what a coincidence to find you here,” Oakley said. She and Sagira were carrying tools and were dirty.

“Oh, hi, what are you doing here?.”

“We were working on the ship, getting it ready for your mission,” Sagira explained. “We saw the commotion, what are you doing here?.”

“I was… doing some favors, making new friends, like this woman named Krisette…”

“We are familiar,” Oakley informed me. There was animosity in her voice, like if she and Krisette were enemies, or rivals at the very least.

“Anyway…” Sagira announced to get us back on track. “We are going to leave Astoreth tomorrow, but before that we need you to come with us to seal the deal, okay?.”

For a second I had forgotten everything about my quest and why I was here, I was getting too distracted by the lives of the people of Astoreth. I had to remember my mission.

“Okay, tell me the details while we are in the next bus. This is the last one back to the city today, right?.”