Page 9 of That Defining Moment

Lysander had spent the past twelve hours calling Cassian annoying, manipulative, and a creepy little weirdo. All of those labels were still perfectly accurate, but none of them had accounted for the possibility that the boy had earned every last one of his oddities the hard way.

“Tell me about him.” Lysander pulled his coffee closer, and settled in for a long conversation.

Chapter Five

They talked for a long time, hunched over the kitchen island with their voices pitched low beneath the sound of the telly, until Hamish drained the last of his coffee and tipped his head towards the back door. “Come on. It’ll be easier to show you.”

The back garden was small and half-wild, a strip of lawn losing its border dispute with a lemon tree, and at the end of it stood a shed that Hamish had converted into an office. It was a fully soundproofed edit suite with a desk, two monitors, a wall of labelled hard drives, and a projector mounted to the ceiling beam, aimed at a blank stretch of white wall.

“This is nicer than your media set-up in the house,” Lysander commented.

“The house doesn’t need colour-accurate lighting.” Hamish pulled a second chair over from the corner, woke the desktop, and scrolled through a folder of files with names like FOL_ASSEMBLY_v11_LOCKED. “This is the broadcast cut. It goes to air in six weeks.”

The projector hummed on, and the wall filled with light.

It opened on a hillside in the Dandenongs, mist still caught in the treetops, and a crowd of perhaps sixty adults standing naked and barefoot on wet grass with their faces turned up to the sky. As one, they began to yell.

“I WELCOME THE BLESSINGS OF THIS LIGHT-FILLED DAY.”

Lysander’s skin prickled. It was the same words, the same cadence, the same absolute conviction he’d heard through the kitchen window an hour ago, but multiplied by sixty voices. And there, in the centre of the crowd, was Cassian.

The camera drifted naturally to him. His blond hair caught the early light, his arms were flung wide, and he was beaming up at the sky, surrounded by his people.

“The Family of Light believe the Universe provides for anyone willing to open themselves to receive it,” Hamish’s voiceover said, over footage of members hoeing rows of vegetables. “They grow their own food, school their own children, and share everything that comes through the gate. It is, by their own account, a life without want.” Not once did he say the word ‘cult’. Lysander glanced sideways at him in the projector light. Hamish didn’t look away from the screen, but reached out and squeezed his hand tight.

Then Cassian was on screen again, seated this time, in a sunlit room with a jar of wildflowers on the windowsill behind him.

“They put him up for the headline interview,” Hamish said quietly. “The elders chose who I got access to, and he was their showpiece.”

Cassian looked painfully young, though the footage was less than a year old. His face was clean-scrubbed and glowing pale over his white linen shirt.

“I never just had parents,” on-screen Cassian was saying, his hands moving gracefully as he spoke. “I had the whole Family. Forty people who fed me and taught me and held me when I cried. Outside, you ration love out in these little units. Mother, father, child, and you keep your front door shut. But we’re all part of the Cosmos. Why should love stop at a nuclear family?”

“Some people would say,” Hamish leaned towards Cassian, “that what a child needs isn’t a dozen carers, but one or two who are strongly bonded to them. That when everyone is responsible for a child, no one really is, and that a community which raises children collectively is also a community where no single adult has the standing to say stop when something goes wrong.”

Cassian’s smile held, serene as the wildflowers behind him. “Nothing goes wrong when you trust the Universe,” he said. “The Universe provides the care each of us needs, in the season we need it. I was never once alone. Can you say that?”

The camera cut wide, and there was Hamish, sitting opposite him in a wicker chair, nodding along as though Cassian had made a reasonable point.

“Having some time alone is a good thing, though,” Hamish said. “Especially when you’re growing up. That’s when you benefit the most from privacy and having a room of your own. That gives you space to work out who you are without anyone watching.”

“Why would I need to work out who I am?” Cassian shrugged. “The Family told me who I was from the day I was born. They named me Calyx when I presented, the Divine Receiver. I’ve never had to wonder. Do you know how much suffering there is, out there, in all that wondering?”

“But if someone’s always watching —”

“Being alone is when you open yourself to wrongdoing,” Cassian said gently. “Darkness can’t take root in a person who is witnessed. When my Family sees everything I do, I’m protected from my own worst impulses. Your world calls that a loss of privacy. We call it being held in the Light.”

Beside Lysander, Hamish took a slow breath through his nose. “That’s the answer that kept me up at night,” he said. “Because to him every explanation he’d been given is airtight. Every objection I raised, his elders had already fed him. Loneliness is proof you’ve closed yourself off. Surveillance is love. Doubt is contamination.” He rubbed his beard. “You can’t argue someone out of it, because from the inside, it doesn’t feel like a cage. It’s warm arms holding you close and keeping you safe.”

On the projector, Hamish continued: “You were married in March. Was the marriage provided by the Universe as well?”

“Of course.” Cassian’s smile widened, furiously happy in its brightness. “I chose it, just as the Universe chose my husband for me. That’s what people outside never understand. Choice and providence are the same thing, when you’re receptive.”

“Charles Townsend is fifty-one years old. You were twenty-one when you married him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a thirty-year age difference.”