Chapter 33

They ran through the woods to Simon’s cabin. Anna stubbornly tried to keep pace with Simon; she stumbled a few times but got up and snapped at him peevishly when he asked if he should slow down. When they got to his place, Anna threw herself onto the sofa, panting, as Simon sat down in his chair. He didn’t know what to say to her – he basically didn’t know her at all. Simon had avoided talking to her while he was in the cult, mostly because she was ridiculously pretty and seemed to be in completely out of his league with those high cheekbones, turned-up nose, dark eyes with even darker eyelashes, and a cascade of dark blonde hair she was always twirling around her fingers. She had seemed inaccessible and a little cold. But as soon as she caught her breath, she began to talk and didn’t stop, and Simon realized she was, in fact, perfectly nice.

‘Madde has gone crazy, I swear, she’s out of her mind. Although everyone knows he’s controlling her, sort of. She visited him in prison. And Oswald’s lawyer, that Anna-Maria Callini, she came out to the manor and acted like she owned the place. It’s like straight-up Nazi shit, Simon. Framed photos of Franz everywhere, and we’re supposed to stand in front of them and applaud before we go to bed. Some tone-deaf bastard wrote a battle song called ‘ViaTerra Victorious’ that we have to, like, shout out at morning assembly, in unison. It sounds deranged.’

Simon realized she was talking like she was still there.

‘That book he wrote, we had to read it like a hundred times, and then Madde came to check that we understood it, and anyone who didn’t understand something had to jump off the Rock. In this cold. They changed the schedule so we only get to sleep for five hours every night. If you oversleep you have to eat rice and beans for a week.’

Simon tried to get her to slow down by placing a hand on her shoulder, but she kept talking.

‘And then Franz said something about how we had to learn to march, as some sort of discipline, so we’ve been marching back and forth across the front drive several times a day. It has to be in rhythm, so we become a team. And all the girls in high heels! It looks demented.’

Simon tried to slip in that he understood exactly, but she went on before he had the chance to speak.

‘And now there are going to be new rules once he comes home. We have to salute every time we see him. And it’s somehow our fault that the media writes shitty stories about him. So we owe him fifty hours of compensation work, every damn one of us, which means we’ll have to iron his shirts, clean his room, and use our salary, which we’ve barely even gotten lately, to buy him a welcome-home present. A super-expensive camera with a big lens and everything. And we’ve been working day and night to prepare the property for his return. We’ve even polished every last fucking doorknob.’

‘Jacob told me about that,’ Simon said. ‘You must be hungry. Let’s have something to eat, and then you can tell me more.’

Once he’d fetched food from the pension restaurant, Anna was quiet for a while. She must not have eaten for a long time, the way she was bolting her meal. She ended up eating half of Simon’s portion as well.

‘But I think the worst part is his new policy,’ she said once she had finished, muffling a burp behind her hand. ‘He wrote it in prison. It’s about battling the enemies of ViaTerra. He wrote that any means of silencing the opposition is allowed, because they’re “the scum of the earth”. Yes, he really did use those words, don’t you believe me?’

‘Of course, but Anna, how long have you felt this way? How long have you known that what’s happening there is wrong?’

Then she began to cry in despair as he sat helplessly by and watched. He always felt awkward around crying girls. He didn’t know how to comfort them.

‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know even know what’s right or wrong right now. All I know is that I can’t take it anymore.’

‘Let’s deal with one thing at a time,’ Simon said, moving to sit on the sofa beside her. ‘First you can have a shower and get some sleep. You look tired. Tomorrow I’ll give you some stuff to read. A few articles, a couple of websites. Then you can form your own opinion about all this.’

Just as Anna got out of the shower, wrapped in Simon’s huge robe, Inga Hermansson came through the door. She typically knocked, but right now she was so excited that she forgot.

‘Simon, they sent us an email full of questions to respond to. It’s obvious that they have us in mind to win the competition.’

She froze when she saw Anna.

‘Oops, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had company. Oh, Simon, you got a girlfriend, how lovely!’

‘She’s not my girlfriend. She escaped from the cult up there.’

This news certainly got Hermansson moving. She embraced Anna – something Simon realized perhaps he should have done as well – and then rushed out the door. She soon returned with soup from the restaurant, some clothes, and a toothbrush.

At last Anna fell asleep on the sofa, and didn’t wake up until Simon looked in on her the next morning. By that point, Simon was well aware of the efforts to find her. He could hear shouts and the barking of a dog from the forest, where they were clearly performing a search. Motorcycles went back and forth on the road to the village.

Inga Hermansson came to the greenhouse to report that someone in a guard’s uniform had come to the pension to ask about Anna. But no one had come to Simon’s cottage, which he thought was strange. He knew why it was so important to get Anna back. She had worked directly under Oswald and knew some of his secrets. Plus, she was beautiful, so the media would jump at the chance to hear her story. Oswald certainly didn’t want to be saddled with another Sofia Bauman. And now that Simon had Anna in his cottage, he wasn’t sure whether he liked it. He wanted to live in peace and quiet. He would have to find some way to occupy Anna’s time, then send her somewhere where she would feel safe. But when he asked about her parents, she shot him down and said she didn’t want to contact them yet, that she was ashamed.

‘Why are you ashamed?’

‘I’m such a failure. They warned me time and time again, but I wouldn’t listen. I wrote like a hundred letters to them where I talked about how great ViaTerra was. So to come home with my tail between my legs…’

‘Anna, I’m sure they don’t care about all that. They’ll just be glad that you left ViaTerra.’

‘Maybe. Can I stay a few more days?’

Simon couldn’t say no. He decided to let her use his computer while he worked, and got her to read everything there was to read about ViaTerra online – including Sofia’s blog and the newspaper articles he’d saved. When she was done reading, she seemed livelier. But she still walked around in Inga Hermansson’s nightgown and slept twelve hours a day.

‘I thought of something you can do,’ he said. ‘Something that helped Sofia. Write it all down, from beginning to end. From the day you first heard of ViaTerra until the day you escaped.’

When he returned after work, she was still at the computer; she turned around when she heard him coming. For the first time, she gave him a big smile.

‘This is crazy!’

‘Right? When you’re done, you can put it all online. Anonymously, if you want to. You could even write an entry for Sofia’s blog. Divide up the story into chapters. One a day.’

Simon read Anna’s story with great interest. Especially the chapter about the Sofia Bauman project. She wrote that it was a plan Oswald had dictated himself, from prison, and no one had been allowed to read it besides the security guards and the head of ViaTerra’s ethics unit. When the project hadn’t gone according to Oswald’s plan, he’d made Callini kick the security guards off it, so she could take over. Rumour had it that he’d hired private eyes and other outside contacts to get it done. Simon wondered how on earth he was doing this all from prison.

‘So Benny and Sten are in Penance?’

‘They were for a while, but now they’re just sitting in the booth and patrolling the property. Franz has other contacts looking for Sofia, I’ve heard.’

‘Anna, why is he so fixated on Sofia?’

‘You know why – after all she’s done. She was the one who got him thrown in prison, after all.’

But Simon suspected it was more complicated. He wondered if he ought to report all of this to the police. It sounded unpleasant and illegal, but convincing Anna to go to the authorities seemed rash.

After a week of blogging, surfing, and talking to Simon late into the night, Anna started to look like a normal human again. At that point, he supplied her with books from his collection – books about other cults, written by psychologists and defectors. After a week she called her parents and asked to come home. Just as Simon had expected, they were beside themselves with joy and relief.

But Anna always found a reason to stay just one more day. One morning, as Simon was working, he wondered if Anna was afraid of being stalked like Sofia. Maybe she even thought there was an ‘Anna Hedberg project.’ She’d found a safe little corner in Simon’s cottage, and she wasn’t about to let go of it.

‘Listen, Anna,’ he said when he came home that day. ‘They really can’t do anything to you. They can’t touch you – it’s illegal. Understand? I think it’s time for you to go home to your parents. They miss you.’

She didn’t have a chance to respond. Inga Hermansson hurtled through the door to say that they’d won the competition. She hugged Simon, which he found exceedingly embarrassing.

‘I’ll stay for a few days in case they want to do interviews,’ he said. ‘Then I’m taking a week of vacation, and you can take all the credit.’

Once Inga had left the cottage, Simon turned to Anna.

‘Tomorrow I’ll borrow Inga’s car and drive you home to your parents. Then I’m going to take a little trip.’

And he saw in her eyes that she was ready.

Two days before his flight to San Francisco, Simon took a walk to the manor to meet Jacob. It started snowing as Simon went along the path – a heavy snowfall that limited visibility. It seemed to take ages to reach the manor. Simon ended up so wet and cold that he was shaking. At first he assumed Jacob wouldn’t show up. But then there he was, wearing only a coverall.

‘Don’t you have a coat?’

‘It’s part of the new program to toughen us up. No outerwear, because then we’ll move faster in the cold, and walking is strictly forbidden – we have to run. Not a single one of these bastards thought about those of us who work outside sometimes. Franz will be back next week. There’s a list of about a hundred impossible tasks we have to finish before then.’

‘I can’t believe you haven’t left.’

‘It’s worse for the animals in this cold. I’ve made up my mind, Simon. As soon as spring is here for real, I’m out.’

Simon realized he had to be brief, so that Jacob wouldn’t have to stand around shivering in the snow. Simon himself had worked in the barn one winter, and it was hardly warm in there. It made him furious to think that Jacob was forced to work in there without a coat. Next time he visited, he would simply take Jacob with him when he left.

Jacob seemed to read his mind.

‘I promise, Simon. As soon as the ground thaws, I’ll escape.’

‘If you can stand it that much longer.’

‘I can. For the animals.’

Simon thought of Anna, who was with her parents now, and of how happy they had been when she returned home. He wanted Jacob to experience the same thing.

‘Listen, I’m going away for a little over a week,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll be ready for the next escapee.’