by Patrick Ness
The Mayor has her.
“If you hurt her —” I say, the punch still aching in my belly. Mr. Collins stands in front of me, half in shadow, Mr. Collins who farmed corn and cauliflower and who tended the Mayor’s horses and who stands over me now with a pistol in a holster, a rifle slung round his back and a fist rearing up to punch me again.
“She seemed quite hurt enough already, Todd,” the Mayor says, stopping Mr. Collins. “The poor thing.”
My fists clench in their bindings. My Noise feels lumpy and half-battered but it still rises with the memory of Davy Prentiss’s gun pointed at us, of her falling into my arms, of her bleeding and gasping —
And then I make it go even redder with the feel of my own fist landing on Davy Prentiss’s face, of Davy Prentiss falling from his horse, his foot caught in the stirrup, dragged away like so much trash.
“Well,” the Mayor says, “that explains the mysterious whereabouts of my son.”
And if I didn’t know better, I’d say he sounded almost amused.
But I notice the only way I can tell this is from the sound of his voice, a voice sharper and smarter than any old Prentisstown voice he might once have had, and that the nothing I heard coming from him when I ran into Haven is still a big nothing in whatever room this is and it’s matched by a big nothing from Mr. Collins.
They ain’t got Noise.
Neither of ’em.
PATRICK NESS is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, which includes The Knife of Never Letting Go, winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize; The Ask and the Answer, winner of the Costa Children’s Book Award; and Monsters of Men. He has written two books for adults and is a literary critic for the Guardian. He says, “Even in a society where we’re constantly being told to ‘be ourselves,’ the pressure to conform is terrible, especially for the young. If the Chaos Walking trilogy is about anything, it’s about identity, finding out who you are. How do you stay an individual when the pressure to conform, to change who you are, is actually life-threatening?” Born in Virginia, Patrick Ness lives in London.