The Ask and the Answer

by Patrick Ness

  I hear the Mayor at the small table again. I hear him moving things round on the top. I hear again the scrape of metal.

  I hear him step up beside me.

  And after all that promising, here it really, finally is. My end.

  I'm sorry, I think. I'm so, so sorry.

  The Mayor puts a hand on my shoulder and I flinch away from it but he keeps it there, pressing down steadily. I can't see what he's holding, but he's bringing something toward me, toward my face, something hard and metal and filled with pain and ready to make me suffer and end my life and there's a hole inside me that I need to crawl into, away from all this, down deep and black, and I know this is the end, the end of all things, I can never escape from here and he'll kill me and kill her and there's no chance, no life, no hope, nothing.

  I'm sorry.

  And the Mayor lays a bandage across my face.

  I gasp from the coolness of it and jerk away from his hands but he keeps pressing it gently into the lump on my forehead and onto the wounds on my face and chin, his

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  body so close I can smell it, the cleanliness of it, the woody odor of his soap, the breath from his nose brushing over my cheek, his fingers touching my cuts almost tenderly, dressing the swelling round my eyes, the splits on my lip, and I can feel the bandages get to work almost instantly, feel the swelling going right down, the painkillers flooding into my system, and I think for a second how good the bandages are in Haven, how much like her bandages, and the relief comes so quick, so unexpected that my throat clenches and I have to swallow it away.

  "I am not the man you think I am, Todd," the Mayor says quietly, almost right into my ear, putting another bandage on my neck. "I did not do the things you think I did. i asked my son to bring you back. I did not ask him to shoot anyone. I did not ask Aaron to kill you."

  "Yer a liar," I say but my voice is weak and I'm shaking from the effort of keeping the weep out of it (shut up).

  The Mayor puts more bandages across the bruises on my chest and stomach, so gentle I can barely stand it, so gentle it's almost like he cares how it feels.

  "I do care, Todd," he says. "There will be time for you to learn the truth of that."

  He moves behind me and puts another bandage around the bindings on my wrists, taking my hands and rubbing feeling back into them with his thumbs.

  "There will be time," he says, "for you to come to trust me. For you, perhaps, to come to even like me. To even think of me, one day, as a kind of father to you, Todd."

  It feels like my Noise is melting away with all the drugs, with all the pain disappearing, with me disappearing along

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  with it, like he's killing me after all, but with the cure instead of the punishment.

  I can't keep the weep from my throat, my eyes, my voice.

  "Please," I say. "Please."

  But I don't know what I mean.

  "The war is over, Todd," the Mayor says again. "We are making a new world. This planet finally and truly living up to its name. Believe me when I say, once you see it, you'll want to be part of it."

  I breathe into the darkness.

  "You could be a leader of men, Todd. You have proven yourself very special."

  I keep breathing, trying to hold on to it but feeling myself slip away.

  "How can I know?" I finally say, my voice a croak, a slur, a thing not quite real. "How can I know she's even still alive?"

  "You can't," says the Mayor. "You only have my word."

  And waits again.

  "And if I do it," I say. "If I do what you say, you'll save her?"

  "We will do whatever's necessary," he says. Without pain, it feels almost like I don't have a body at all, almost like I'm a ghost, sitting in a chair, blinded and eternal. Like I'm dead already.

  Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?

  "We are the choices we make, Todd," the Mayor says. "Nothing more, nothing less. I'd like you to choose to tell me. I would like that very much indeed."

  Under the bandages is just further darkness.

  Just me, alone in the black.

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  Alone with his voice. I don't know what to do. I don't know anything, (what do I do?)

  But if there's a chance, if there's even a chance--

  "Is it really such a sacrifice, Todd?" the Mayor says, listening to me think. "Here, at the end of the past? At the beginning of the future?"

  No. No, I can't. He's a liar and a murderer, no matter what he says--

  "I'm waiting, Todd."

  But she might be alive, he might keep her alive-

  "We are nearing your last opportunity, Todd."

  I raise my head. The movement opens the bandages some and I squint up into the light, up toward the Mayor's face.

  It's blank as ever.

  It's the empty, lifeless wall.

  I might as well be talking into a bottomless pit.

  I might as well be the bottomless pit.

  I look away. I look down.

  "Viola," I say into the carpet. "Her name's Viola." The Mayor lets out a long, pleased-sounding breath. "Good, Todd," he says. "I thank you." He turns to Mr. Collins. "Lock him up."

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  27

  PART I TODD IN THE TOWER

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  1 THE OLD MAYOR

  ***

  Mr. Collins pushes me up a narrow, windowless staircase, up and up and up, turning on sharp landings but always straight up. Just when I think my legs can't take no more, we reach a door. He opens it and shoves me hard and I go tumbling into the room and down onto a wooden floor, my arms so stiff I can't even catch myself and I groan and roll to one side.

  And look down over a hundred-foot drop.

  Mr. Collins laughs as I scrabble back away from it. I'm on a ledge not more than five boards wide that runs round the walls of a square room. In the middle is just an enormous hole with some ropes dangling down thru the center. I follow em up thru a tall shaft to the biggest set of bells I ever saw, two of 'em hanging from a single wooden beam, huge things, big as a room you could live in, archways cut into the sides of the tower so the bell-ringing can be heard.

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  I jump when Mr. Collins slams the door, locking it with a ker-thunk sound that don't brook no thoughts of escape.

  I get myself up and lean against the wall till I can breathe again.

  I close my eyes.

  I am Todd Hewitt, I think. I am the son of Cillian Boyd and Ben Moore. My birthday is in fourteen days hut I am a man.

  I am Todd Hewitt and I am a man.

  (a man who told the Mayor her name)

  "I'm sorry," I whisper. "I'm so sorry."

  After a while, I open my eyes and look up and around. There are small rectangular openings at eye level all around this floor of the tower, three on each wall, fading light shining in thru the dust.

  I go to the nearest opening. I'm in the bell tower of the cathedral, obviously, way up high, looking out the front, down onto the square where I first entered the town, only this morning but it already feels like a lifetime ago. Dusk is falling, so I musta been out cold for a bit before the Mayor woke me, time where he coulda done anything to her, time where he coulda--

  (shut up, just shut up)

  I look out over the square. It's still empty, still the quiet of a silent town, a town with no Noise, a town waiting for an army to come and conquer it.

  A town that didn't even try to fight.

  The Mayor just turned up and they handed it right over

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  to him. Sometimes the rumor of an army is just as effective as the army itself, he told me and wasn't he right?

  All that time, running here as fast as we could, not thinking bout what Haven'd be like once we got here, not saying it out loud but hoping it'd be safe, hoping it'd be paradise.

  I'm telling you there's hope, Ben said.

  But he was wrong. It wasn't Haven at all.

  It was New Prentisstow
n.

  I frown, feeling my chest tighten and I look out west across the square, across the treetops that spread out into the farther silent houses and streets and on up to the waterfall, smashing down from the rim of the valley in the near distance, the zigzag road zipping up the hill beside it, the road where I fought Davy Prentiss Jr., the road where Viola-

  I turn back into the room.

  My eyes are adjusting to the fading light but there don't seem to be nothing here anyway but boards and a faint stink. The bell ropes dangle about six feet from any side. I look up to see where they're tied fast to the bells to make 'em chime. I squint down into the hole but it's too dark to see clearly what might be at the bottom. Probably just hard brick.

  Six feet ain't that much at all, tho. You could jump it easy and grab onto a rope to climb yer way down. But then-

  "It's quite ingenious, really," says a voice from the far corner.

  I jerk back, fists up, my Noise spiking. A man is standing up from where he was sitting, another Noiseless man.

  Except--

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  "If you try to escape by climbing down the ropes left so temptingly available," he continues, "every person in town is going to know about it."

  "Who are you?" I say, my stomach high and light but my fists clenching.

  "Yes," he says. "I could tell you weren't from Haven." He steps away from the corner, letting light catch his face. I see a blackened eye and a cut lip that looks like it's only just scabbed over. No bandages spared for him, obviously. "Funny how quickly one forgets the loudness of it," he says, almost to himself.

  He's a small man, shorter than me, wider, too, older than Ben tho not by much, but I can also see he's soft all over, soft even in his face. A softness I could beat if I had to.

  "Yes," he says, "I imagine you could."

  "Who are you?" I say again.

  "Who am I?" repeats the man softly, then raises his voice like he's playing at something. "I am Con Ledger, my boy. Mayor of Haven." He smiles in a dazed way. "But not Mayor of New Prentisstown." He shakes his head a little as he looks at me. "We even gave the refugees the cure when they started pouring in."

  And then I see that his smile ain't a smile, it's a wince.

  "Good God, boy," he says. "How Noisy you are."

  "I ain't a boy," I say, my fists still up.

  "I completely fail to see how that's any sort of point."

  I got ten million things I wanna say but my curiosity wins out first. "So there is a cure then? For the Noise?"

  "Oh, yes," he says, his face twitching a bit at me, like he's tasting something bad. "Native plant with a natural

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  neurochemical mixed with a few things we could synthesize and there you go. Quiet falls at last on New World."

  "Not all of New World."

  "No, well," he says, turning to look out the rectangle with his hands clasped behind his back. "It's very hard to make, isn't it? A long and slow process. We only got it right late last year and that was after twenty years of trying. We made enough for ourselves and were just on the point of starting to export it when ..."

  He trails off, looking firmly out onto the town below.

  "When you surrendered," I say, my Noise rumbling, low and red. "Like cowards."

  He turns back to me, the wincing smile gone, way gone. "And why should the opinion of a boy matter to me?"

  "I ain't a boy," I say again and are my fists still clenched? Yes, they are.

  "Clearly you are," he says, "for a man would know the necessary choices that have to be made when one is facing one's oblivion."

  I narrow my eyes. "You ain't got nothing you can teach me bout oblivion."

  He blinks a little, seeing the truth of it in my Noise as if it were bright flashes trying to blind him, and then his stance slumps. "Forgive me," he says. "This isn't me." He puts a hand up to his face and rubs it, smarting at the bruise around his eye. "Yesterday, I was the benevolent Mayor of a beautiful town." He seems to laugh at some private joke. "But that was yesterday."

  "How many people in Haven?" I say, not quite ready to let it go.

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  He looks over at me. "Boy-"

  "My name is Todd Hewitt," I say. "You can call me Mr. Hewitt."

  "He promised us a new beginning-"

  "Even I know he's a liar. How many people?" He sighs. "Including refugees, three thousand, three hundred."

  "The army ain't a third that size," I say. "You coulda fought."

  "Women and children," he says. "Farmers."

  "Women and children fought in other towns. Women and children died."

  He steps forward, his face getting stormy. "Yes, and now the women and children of this city will not die! Because I reached a peace!"

  "A peace that blacked yer eye," I say. "A peace that split yer lip."

  He looks at me for another second and then gives a sad snort. "The words of a sage," he says, "in the voice of a hick."

  And he turns back to look out the opening.

  Which is when I notice the low buzz .

  Asking marks fill my Noise but before I can open my mouth, the Mayor, the old Mayor, says, "Yes, that's me you hear."

  "You?" I say. "What about the cure?"

  "Would you give your conquered enemy his favorite medicine?"

  I lick my upper lip. "It comes back? The Noise?"

  "Oh, yes." He turns to me again. "If you don't take your daily dose, it most definitely comes back." He returns

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  to his corner and slowly sits himself down. "You'll notice there are no toilets," he says. "I apologize in advance for the unpleasantness."

  I watch him sit, my Noise still rattling red and sore and full of askings.

  "It was you, if I'm not mistaken?" he says. "This morning? The one who the town was cleared for, the one the new President greeted himself on horseback?"

  I don't answer him. But my Noise does.

  "So, who are you then, Todd Hewitt?" he says. "What makes you so special?"

  Now that, I think, is a very good asking.

  Night falls quick and full, Mayor Ledger saying less and less and fidgeting more and more till he finally can't stand it and starts to pace. All the while, his buzz gets louder till even if we wanted to talk, we'd have to shout to do it.

  I stand at the front of the tower and watch the stars come out, night covering the valley below.

  And I'm thinking and I'm trying not to think cuz when I do, my stomach turns and I feel sick, or my throat clenches and I feel sick, or my eyes wet and I feel sick.

  Cuz she's out there somewhere.

  (please be out there somewhere)

  (please be okay)

  (please)

  "Do you always have to be so bloody loud?" Mayor Ledger snaps. I turn to him, ready to snap back, and he holds up his hands in apology. "I'm sorry. I'm not like this."

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  He starts fidgeting his fingers again. "It's difficult having one's cure taken away so abruptly."

  I look back out over New Prentisstown as lights start coming on in people's houses. I ain't hardly seen no one out there the whole day, everyone staying indoors, probably under the Mayor's orders.

  "They all going thru this out there, then?" I say.

  "Oh, everyone will have their little stockpile at home," Mayor Ledger says. "They'll have to have it pried out of their hands, I imagine."

  "I don't reckon that'll be a problem when the army gets here," I say.

  The moons rise, crawling up the sky as if there was nothing to hurry about. They shine bright enough to light up New Prentisstown and I see how the river cuts thru town but that there ain't nothing much north of it except fields, empty in the moonlight, then a sharp rise of rocky cliffs that make up the north wall of the valley. To the north, you can also see a thin road coming outta the hills before cutting its way back into town, the other road that Viola and I didn't take after Farbranch, the other road the Mayor did take and got here first.

  To the e
ast, the river and the main road just carry on, going God knows where, round corners and farther hills, the town petering out as it goes. There's another road, not much paved, that heads south from the square and past more buildings and houses and into a wood and up a hill with a notch on the top.

  And that's all there is of New Prentisstown.

  Home to three thousand, three hundred people, all

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  hiding in their houses, so quiet they might be dead.

  Not one of them lifting a hand to save theirselves from what's coming, hoping if they're meek enough, if they're weak enough, then the monster won't eat 'em.

  This is where we spent all our time running to.

  I see movement down on the square, a shadow flitting, but it's only a dog. Home, home, home, I can just about hear him think. Home, home, home.

  Dogs don't got the problems of people.

  Dogs can be happy any old time.

  I take a minute to breathe away the tightness that comes over my chest, the water in my eyes.

  Take a minute to stop thinking bout my own dog. When I can look out again, i see someone not a dog at all.

  He's got his head slumped forward and he's walking his horse slow across the town square, the hoofs clopping against the brick and, as he approaches, even tho Mayor Ledger's has started to become such a nuisance I don't know how I'm ever gonna sleep, i can still hear it out there. Noise.

  Across the quiet of a waiting city, I can hear the man's Noise.

  And he can hear mine.

  Todd Hewitt? he thinks.

  And I can hear the smile growing on his face, too.

  Found something, Todd, Todd, he says, across the square, up the tower, seeking me out in the moonlight.