The Island by Jen Minkman

the stairs. Mara struggles forward and unties him. She looks up at Saul apprehensively, but he doesn’t seem to pay any attention to his captive. He’s staring at the box in Tony’s hands as if spellbound.
    “Can I hear it again?” he asks so reverently that I suddenly see him with different eyes. Here is a little lost boy – not a ruthless dictator.
    While Tony replays the message, I tiptoe past Saul and pick up the sword. Little boy or not, you can never be too careful, after all.
    We listen to the message, over and over again. Ben, Max and Cal come outside. The men from Newexter have put out their torches and are sitting on the lawn. When Tony finally switches off the device, some have tears in their eyes.
    The Eldest clears his throat and wipes his cheeks. “Tell us what happened to them. To the people who left this behind.”
    And Tony does. He tells us about his cross-country trip together with Henry, looking for the origin of the radio message they’d picked up on an old frequency one evening. It sounds like a fairytale. Their arrival in Penzance, an abandoned coastal town. The automated message that had kept playing thanks to energy from the sun. The old, yellowed logbooks and diaries they had found at the harbor, the pages filled with our history.
    “There once was a group of fifty healthy children and their parents fleeing the city of Exeter,” Tony explains. He is now using the portico as a sort of stage to address the people present. “Those parents came down to the shores of Penzance and sent their kids to Tresco by ship. It was an island that had once belonged to a very rich man who had died of the disease by then. The ship wasn’t large – it could only hold fifty people, some animals and a small selection of useful books. The captain was supposed to drop off the children and the cargo and come straight back to get the others. Or at least the adults who showed no symptoms of the disease yet. But he never came back, and there were no more ships. The childrens’ parents all got critically ill and eventually died. The very last page of the most recent diary was written by the father of a boy who had been brought to Tresco. He was the one who recorded this message, in the hopes of alerting someone to the fact that there was an island full of children waiting for their parents to show up.”
    “What were his last words?” the Eldest inquires softly. “In that diary?”
    “The last thing he wrote was the phrase: May the Force be with them. Probably because his little boy really loved the stories in which that expression is used.” Tony casts down his gaze. “And your Book… most likely it’s the little boy’s diary. It could be a notebook he brought with him to the island, which he used to write down his own stories about what had happened. He was making a book to give himself and the others around him courage through stories. To tell them that the Force would always be with them, even if their parents weren’t.”
    I swallow hard at the word ‘stories’. “How old were those kids?”
    “About six or seven years old, according to the log. But the oldest boy was ten. This man’s son.” He holds up the device.
    “They had no parents,” Colin says flatly. “They were all alone.”
    Walt shakes his head. “They probably had the captain, until he succumbed to the disease. The very first Bookkeeper. The man who taught us about the importance of knowledge in books.” He looks slightly dazed.
    One hundred and fifty years is a long time to wait. The children got divided. The Fools stubbornly maintained that help from outside would come, while the eldest boy started to believe his parents had abandoned him and turned into the first Unbeliever. Maybe he’d gathered a group of like-minded children and taken them to the other side of the island to live there and make a clean start. Maybe there had already been a Wall to vanish behind, or maybe he’d built one himself. And they wrote their own