Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (51 page)

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 towards me, towards 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 body so close I can smell it, the cleanliness of it, the woody odour 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 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.

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 towards 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.”

[T
ODD
]

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 thirty-metre 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 centre. 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.

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 but 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 to him.
Sometimes the rumour 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 Prentisstown.

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 two metres 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.

Two metres 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–

“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 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.

He looks over at me. “Boy–”