by Patrick Ness
Their eyes looking at the ground, waiting it out.
At night, Mayor Ledger tells me the townsfolk still grumble against Mayor Prentiss, but now there’s even louder grumbles against the Answer, for blowing up the water plant, for blowing up the power stayshun, and specially for killing all the Spackle.
Better the devil you know, Mayor Ledger says.
We’re still up in that tower, me and Mayor Ledger, for some reason best known to Mayor Prentiss, but I got a key now and I lock him in when I ain’t there. He don’t like it but what’s he gonna do?
Better the devil you know.
I wonder why the only choice is twixt two devils, tho.
“I also want to express my thanks,” says the Mayor to the people, “for your continued help in coming forward with information. It is only eternal vigilance that will lead us into the light. Let your neighbour know he is watched. Only then are we truly safe.”
“How long is this gonna go on?” Davy says, accidentally spurring Deadfall/Acorn, who has to be reined back when he steps forward. “I’m effing freezing over here.”
Angharrad moves from foot to foot below me. Go? her Noise asks, her breath heavy and white in the cold. “Almost,” I say, rubbing my hand against her flank.
“Effective tonight,” says the Mayor, “curfew is pushed back by two hours and visiting times for wives and mothers is extended by thirty minutes.”
There’s some nodding in the crowd of men, some relieved crying from the crowd of women.
They’re grateful, I think. Grateful to the Mayor.
Ain’t that something.
“Finally,” says the Mayor. “It is my pleasure to announce that building work has been completed on a new Ministry, one that will keep us safe from the threat of the Answer, a building where no secret may be kept, where anyone who tries to undermine our way of life will be re-educated into understanding our ideals, where our future will be secured against those who would steal it from us.”
The Mayor pauses, to give his words maximum impact.
“Today we launch the Office of the Ask.”
Davy catches my eye and taps the sharp, silver A sewn on the shoulders of our new uniforms, the A that the Mayor picked special cuz it’s got all kinda associashuns, don’t it?
Me and Davy are now Officers of the Ask.
I don’t share his excitement.
But that’s cuz I don’t feel nothing much at all no more.
I am the Circle and the Circle is me.
“Good speech, Pa,” Davy says. “Long.”
“It wasn’t for you, David,” the Mayor says, not looking at him.
The three of us are riding down the road to the monastery.
Tho it ain’t the monastery no more.
“Everything is ready, I trust?” the Mayor says, barely turning his head. “I’d hate to be made a liar of.”
“It ain’t gonna get less ready if you keep asking,” Davy mumbles.
The Mayor turns to him, a deep frown on his face, but I speak before anyone gets slapped with Noise.
“It’s as ready as it can be,” I say, my voice flat. “The walls and roof are up but the inside–”
“No need to sound so morose, Todd,” the Mayor says. “The inside can follow in due course. The building is up, that’s all that’s important. They can look at the outside and they can tremble.”
He’s got his back to us now, riding on ahead, but I can feel him smile at they can tremble.
“Are we gonna have a part in it?” Davy asks, Noise still stormy. “Or are you just gonna find a way for us to be babysitters again?”
The Mayor turns Morpeth in the road, blocking our way. “Do you ever hear Todd complain this much?” he asks.
“No,” Davy says, sullen. “But he’s just, you know, Todd.”
The Mayor raises his eyebrows. “And?”
“And I’m yer son.”
The Mayor walks Morpeth towards us, making Angharrad step back. Submit, Morpeth says. Lead, Angharrad says in answer, lowering her head. I stroke her mane, untangling a bit with my fingers, trying to calm her down.
“Let me tell you something interesting, David,” the Mayor says, looking hard at him. “The officers, the army, the townspeople, they see the two of you riding together, in your new uniforms, with all your new authority, and they know that one of you is my son.” He’s almost side on to Davy now, pushing him back down the road. “And as they watch you ride by, as they watch you go about your business, do you know? They often guess wrong. They often guess wrong as to which one of you is my own flesh and blood.”
The Mayor looks over to me. “They see Todd with his devotion to duty, with his modest brow and his serious face, with his calm exterior and mature handling of his Noise, and they never even consider that his loud, sloppy, insolent friend is the one who’s actually my son.”
Davy’s looking at the ground, his teeth clenched, his Noise boiling. “He don’t even look like you.”
“I know,” says the Mayor, turning Morpeth back down the road. “I just thought it was interesting. How often it happens.”
We keep on riding, Davy in a silent, red storm of Noise, lagging behind. I keep Angharrad in the middle with the Mayor clopping on ahead.
“Good girl,” I murmur to her.
Boy colt, she says back, and then she thinks Todd.
“Yeah, girl,” I whisper twixt her ears. “I’m here.”
I’ve taken to hanging round her stables at the end of the day, taken to unsaddling her myself and brushing her mane and bringing her apples to eat. The only thing she needs from me is assurance that I’m there, proof I haven’t left the herd, and as long as that’s true, she’s happy and she calls me Todd and I don’t have to explain myself to her and I don’t have to ask her nothing and she don’t need nothing from me.
Except that I don’t leave her.
Except that I don’t never leave.
My Noise starts getting cloudy and I think it again, I am the Circle and the Circle is me.
The Mayor looks back at me. And he smiles.
Even tho we got uniforms, we ain’t in the army, the Mayor was particular about that. We don’t got ranks except Officer but the uniform and the A on its sleeve is enough to keep people outta our way as we ride towards the monastery.
Our job till now has been guarding the men and women who’re still in prison, tho it’s mostly women. After the prisons were busted into and burnt down, the prisoners left over were moved to a former house of healing down by the river.
Guess which one?
For the past month, Davy and I’ve been escorting work crews of prisoners back and forth from the house of healing to the monastery to finish the work the Spackle started, women and men working faster than Spackle, I guess. The Mayor didn’t ask us to supervise the building this time, something I’m grateful for.
When everyone’s in for the night back at the house of healing, Davy and I ain’t got much to do except ride our horses round the building, doing what we can so as not to hear the screams coming from inside.
Some of the ones still in prison, see, are from the Answer, the ones the Mayor caught the night of the prison break. We don’t never see them, they don’t get sent out with the work parties, they just get Asked all day long till they answer with something. So far, all the Mayor’s got from ’em is the locayshun of a camp around a mine, which was deserted by the time the soldiers got there. Anything else useful is slow in coming.
There are others in there, too, found guilty of helping the Answer or whatever, but the ones who said they saw the Answer kill the Spackle and saw women writing the A on the wall, those prisoners are the ones who’ve been set free and sent back to their families. Even tho there ain’t really no way they coulda been there to see it.
The others, well, the others keep being Asked till they answer.
Davy talks loud to cover the sounds we hear while the Asking’s going on inside, trying to pretend it don’t bother him when any fool could see it
does.
I just keep myself in myself, closing my eyes, waiting for the screaming to stop.
I have an easier time than Davy.
Cuz like I say, I don’t feel nothing much, not no more.
I am the Circle and the Circle is me.
But today, everything’s sposed to change. Today, the new building is ready, or ready enough, and Davy and I are gonna guard it instead of the house of healing, while sposedly learning the business of Asking.
Fine. It don’t matter.
Nothing matters.
“The Office of the Ask,” the Mayor says as we round the final corner.
The front wall of the monastery has been rebuilt and you can see the new building sticking over the top, a big stone block that looks like it’d happily knock yer brains out if you stood too close. And on the newly built gate, there’s a great, shiny silver A to match the ones on our uniforms.
There are guards in army uniforms on either side of the door. One of them is Ivan, still a Private, still sour-faced as anything. He tries to catch my eye as I ride up, his Noise clanging loud with things he don’t want the Mayor to hear, I reckon.
I ignore him. So does the Mayor.
“Now we find out when the real war begins,” the Mayor says.
The gate opens and out walks the man in charge of all the Asking, the man charged with finding out where the Answer are hiding and how best to track them down.
Our newly promoted boss.
“Mr. President,” he says.
“Captain Hammar,” says the Mayor.
{VIOLA}
“Quiet,” Mistress Coyle says, a finger to her lips.
The wind has died and you can hear our footsteps snapping the twigs on the ground at the foot of the trees. We stop, ears open for the sounds of soldiers marching.
Nothing.
More nothing.
Mistress Coyle nods and continues moving down the hill and through the trees. I follow her. It’s just the two of us.
Me and her and the bomb strapped to my back.
The rescue saved 132 prisoners. 29 of them died either on the way to or back in the camp. Corinne was number 30. There are others unrescued, like poor old Mrs Fox, whose fates I’m probably never going to know. But Mistress Coyle estimates we killed at least twenty of their soldiers. Miraculously, only six members of the Answer on the original raid were killed, including Thea and Mistress Waggoner, but another five were captured and there was no possibility they wouldn’t be tortured for information about where the Answer was hiding.
So we moved. In a hurry.
Even before many of the injured could walk for themselves, we loaded up supplies and weapons, anything and everything we could carry on carts, horses, the backs of the able-bodied, and we fled into the woods, keeping moving all through the night, the next day, and the night after that until we came to a lake at the base of a rock cliff, where at least we might have water and some shelter.
“It’ll do,” Mistress Coyle said.
We pitched camp along the shore.
And then we began our preparations for war.
She makes a movement with the palm of her hand and I instantly duck below some shrubs. We’ve reached a narrow drive up from the main road and I can hear a troop of soldiers Noisily moving away from us in the distance.
Our own supply of cure is getting lower by the day, and Mistress Coyle has set up a rationing system, but since the raid, it’s too dangerous for any man, with or without Noise, to go into town anyway, which means they can no longer ferry us in hidden compartments to easy targets. We have to take a cart to a certain point outside of town and walk the rest of the way.
Escaping will be more difficult, so we’ll just have to be more careful.
“Okay,” Mistress Coyle whispers.
I stand. The moons are our only light.
We cross the road, keeping low.
After we moved to the lake, after the rescue of all those people, after the death of Corinne–
After I joined the Answer–
I began to learn things.
“Basic training,” Mistress Coyle called it. Led by Mistress Braithwaite and done not only for me but for every patient who improved enough to join in, which was most of them, more than you’d think, we were taught how to load a rifle and fire it, basics of infiltration, night-time manoeuvres, tracking, hand communications, code words.
How to wire and set a bomb.
“How do you know how to do this?” I asked one night at dinner, my body weary and aching from the running and diving and carrying we’d done all throughout the day. “You’re healers. How do you know how–”
“To run an army?” Mistress Coyle said. “You forget about the Spackle War.”
“We were our own division,” Mistress Forth said, down the table, snuffling up some broth.
The mistresses talked to me, now that they could see how hard I was training.
“We weren’t very popular,” giggled Mistress Lawson, across from her.
“We didn’t like how some of the generals were waging the war,” Mistress Coyle said to me. “We thought an underground approach would be more effective.”
“And since we didn’t have Noise,” said Mistress Nadari, down the table, “we could sneak into places, couldn’t we?”
“The men in charge didn’t think we were the answer to their problem, though,” Mistress Lawson said, still giggling.
“Hence the name,” Mistress Coyle said.
“And when the new government was formed and the city rebuilt, well,” Mistress Forth said, “it wouldn’t have been sensible not to keep important materials available should the need ever arise.”
“The explosives in the mine,” I said, realizing. “You hid them there years ago.”
“And what a good decision it turned out to be,” Mistress Lawson said. “Nicola Coyle always was a woman of foresight.”
I blinked at the name Nicola, as if it was hardly possible that Mistress Coyle had a first name.
“Yes, well,” said Mistress Coyle. “Men are creatures of war. It’s only prudent to remember that.”
Our target is deserted, as we expect it to be. It’s small, but symbolic, a well above a tract of farmland east of the city. The well and the apparatus above it only bring water for the field below, not any huge system or set of buildings. But if the city goes on allowing the Mayor to imprison, torture and kill, then the city won’t eat.
It’s also a good way away from the city centre, so no chance of me seeing Todd.
Which I won’t argue about. For now.
We’ve come up the cut-off road, keeping to the ditch beside it, holding our breaths as we move past the sleeping farmhouse, a light still on in the upper floor but it’s so late it can only be for security.
Mistress Coyle makes another hand signal and I move past her, ducking under a wire carriage of laundry, hung outside to dry. I trip on a child’s toy scooter but manage to keep my balance.
The bomb’s supposed to be safe, supposed to be impervious to any kind of jostling or shaking.
But.
I let out a breath and keep on towards the well.
Even in the weeks when we hid, when we didn’t approach the city at all, the weeks where we laid low and kept quiet, training and preparing, even then a few escapees from the city found us.
“They’re saying what?” Mistress Coyle said.
“That you killed all the Spackle,” the woman said, pressing the poultice against her bleeding nose.
“Wait,” I said. “All the Spackle are dead?”
The woman nodded.
“And they’re saying we did it,” Mistress Coyle repeated.
“Why would they say that?” I asked.
Mistress Coyle stood and looked out across the lake. “Turn the city against us. Make us look like the bad guys.”
“That’s exactly what he’s saying,” the woman said. I found her on a training run through the woods. She’d tripped down a rocky embankment, managing
to break only her nose. “There’s rallies every other day,” she said. “People are listening.”
“I’m not surprised,” Mistress Coyle said.
I looked up at her. “You didn’t do it, did you? You didn’t kill them?”
Her face could’ve lit a match. “Exactly what sort of people do you think we are, my girl?”
I kept her gaze. “Well, I don’t know, do I? You blew up a bunker. You killed soldiers.”
But she just shook her head, though I didn’t know if that was an answer.
“You’re sure you weren’t followed?” she asked the woman.
“I was wandering in the woods for three days,” she said. “I didn’t even find you.” She pointed at me. “She found me.”
“Yes,” Mistress Coyle said, eyeing me. “Viola’s useful that way.”
There’s a problem at the well.
“It’s too close to the house,” I whisper.
“It’s not,” Mistress Coyle whispers back, going behind me and unzipping my pack.
“Are you sure?” I say. “The bombs you blew up the tower with were–”
“There are bombs and there are bombs.” She makes a few adjustments to the contents of my pack, then turns me around to face her. “Are you ready?”
I look over to the house, where anyone could be sleeping inside, women, innocent men, children. I won’t kill anyone, not unless I have to. If I’m doing this for Todd and Corinne, well, then. “Are you sure?” I ask.
“Either you trust me, Viola, or you do not.” She tilts her head. “Which will it be?”
The breeze has picked up again and it blows a bit of the sleeping Noise of New Prentisstown down the road. One indefinable, snuffling, snoring ROAR, almost quiet, if such a thing could be.
Todd somewhere in it all.
(not dead, no matter what she says)
“Let’s get this done,” I say, taking off the pack.