4338.213 · August 1, 2018 AD
No Spires, No Promises
Luke returns to camp with the casual air of someone who hasn't just dismantled a family's life, and Greta Smith is in no mood to forgive the delay. When she asks where their house is, Paul delivers the truth in five words: what you see is what you get. No green lawn. No chapel. No ward. Just dust, tents, and a food storage room back on Earth that might be the only useful thing their obedience ever produced. Greta paces the camp in borrowed clothes, caught between fury and a faith too stubborn to die.
Luke's return to camp brings no apology and no clothes — Karen has already handled that, and she makes sure he knows it. The family's food storage becomes the first unexpected currency in this new world: twelve months of tins and pasta, once a quiet point of pride, now genuinely needed. Jerome and Karen head off to collect trolleys. Luke prepares to ferry supplies through the Portal. And Greta stands in the middle of it all, wearing a stranger's outfit, watching her sons organise a life she never agreed to.
When she asks Paul where their house is, the answer strips away the last shred of pretence. There is no house. There are sheds being built, tents already pitched, and the dust beneath her borrowed shoes. Paul tells her this is it, and the words land with the weight of a closing door. The New Jerusalem was a lie — or at best a misunderstanding so profound it amounts to the same thing.
Greta paces the camp, unable to sit, unable to stop. Noah and Paul try to anchor her with presence and reassurance, but her grief is not the kind that softens with a hand on the shoulder. She misses her home, her church, her community — the rituals and rhythms that made her life legible. When Noah finally explains to Paul about the Temple gathering, the Apostle's call, the plan to relocate to Salt Lake City, the full scale of the deception becomes clear. They walked through a Portal because they believed it was God's hand extended. Noah still believes they are here for a reason. Greta wants to believe it too, but her feet will not stop moving, tracing anxious paths through the dust as if searching for solid ground that does not yet exist.
