Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (59 page)

But then you see that the men who move down the road never talk to each other. And women are allowed out only in groups of four and only in daylight and only for an hour at a time. And the groups of four never interact. Even the men of Haven don’t approach us.

And there are soldiers on every corner, rifles in hand.

A bell chimes as the door of the store opens. Corinne storms out, arms full of bags, face full of thunder, Thea struggling behind her. “The storekeeper says no one’s heard from the Spackle since they were taken,” Corinne says, practically dropping a bag in my lap.

“Corinne and her spacks,” Thea says, rolling her eyes and handing me another bag.

“Don’t call them that,” Corinne says. “If
we
could never treat them right, what do you think
he’s
going to be doing to them?”

“I’m sorry, Corinne,” Maddy says before I can ask what Corinne means, “but don’t you think it makes more sense to worry about us right now?” Her eyes are watching some soldiers who’ve noticed Corinne’s raised voice. They aren’t moving, haven’t even shifted from the veranda of a feed store.

But they’re looking.

“It was inhuman, what we did to them,” Corinne says.

“Yes, but they
aren’t
human,” Thea says, under her breath, looking at the soldiers, too.

“Thea Reese!”
A vein bulges out of Corinne’s forehead. “How can you call yourself a healer and say–”

“Yes, yes, all right,” Maddy says, trying to calm her down. “It was awful. I agree. You know we
all
agree, but what could we have done about it?”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Did
what
to them?”

“The
cure,
” Corinne says, saying it like a curse.

Maddy turns to me with a frustrated sigh. “They found out that the cure worked on the Spackle.”

“By
testing
it on them,” Corinne says.

“But it does more than that,” Maddy says. “The Spackle don’t
speak,
you see. They can click their mouths a little but it’s hardly more than like when we snap our fingers.”

“The Noise was the only way they communicated,” Thea says.

“And it turned out we didn’t really need them to talk to us to tell them what to do,” Corinne says, her voice rising even more. “So who cares if they needed to talk to each
other
?”

I’m beginning to see. “And the cure . . .”

Thea nods. “It makes them docile.”

“Better slaves,” Corinne says bitterly.

My mouth drops open. “They were
slaves
?”

“Shhhh,” Maddy shushes harshly, jerking her head toward the soldiers watching us, their lack of Noise among all the
ROAR
of the other men making them seem ominously blank.

“It’s like we cut out their tongues,” Corinne says, lowering her voice but still burning.

But Maddy is already getting us on our way, looking back over her shoulder at the soldiers.

Who watch us go.

We walk the short distance back to the house of healing in silence, entering the front door under the blue outstretched hand painted over the door frame. After Corinne and Thea go inside, Maddy takes my arm lightly to hold me back.

She looks at the ground for a minute, a dimple forming in the middle of her eyebrows. “The way those soldiers looked at us,” she says.

“Yeah?”

She crosses her arms and shivers. “I don’t know if I like this version of peace very much.”

“I know,” I say softly.

She waits a moment, then she looks at me square. “Could your people help us? Could they stop this?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “but finding out would be better than just sitting here, waiting for the worst to happen.”

She looks around to see if we’re being overheard. “Mistress Coyle is brilliant,” she says, “but sometimes she can only hear her own opinion.”

She waits, biting her upper lip.

“Maddy?”

“We’ll watch out,” she says.

“For what?”

“
If
the right moment arrives, and
only
if,” she looks around again, “we’ll see what we can do about contacting your ships.”

{V
IOLA
}

“But slavery is wrong,” I say, rolling up another bandage.

“The healers were always opposed to it.” Mistress Coyle ticks off another box on her inventory. “Even after the Spackle War, we thought it inhuman.”

“Then why didn’t you stop it?”

“If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.”

“War makes monsters of men,”
I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead.

“And women,” Mistress Coyle says. She taps her fingers on boxes of syringes to count them.

“But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Thirteen years now.”

“Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong.”

She finally looks at me. “Life is only that simple when you’re young, my girl.”

“But you were in charge,” I say. “You could have done something.”

“And who told you I was in charge?”

“Corinne said–”

“Ah, Corinne,” she says, turning back to her clipboard, “doing her best to love me no matter what the facts.”

I open up another bag of supplies. “But if you were head of this Council thing,” I press on, “surely you could have done
something
about the Spackle.”

“Sometimes, my girl,” she says, giving me a displeased look, “you can lead people where they don’t want to go, but most of the time you
can’t
. The Spackle weren’t going to be freed, not after we’d just beaten them in an awful and vicious war, not when we needed so much labour to rebuild. But they could be treated better, couldn’t they? They could be fed properly and set to work humane hours and allowed to live together with their families. All victories
I
won for them, Viola.”

Her writing on the clipboard is a lot more forceful than it was. I watch her for a second. “Corinne says you were thrown off the Council for saving a life.”

She doesn’t answer me, just sets down her clipboard and looks on one of the higher shelves. She reaches up and takes down an apprentice hat and a folded apprentice cloak. She turns and tosses them to me.

“Who are these for?” I say, catching them.

“You want to find out about being a leader?” she says. “Then let’s put you on the path.”

I look at her face.

I look down at the cloak and the cap.

From then on, I barely have time to eat.

The day after women were allowed to move again, there were eighteen new patients, all female, who’d been suffering all kinds of things– appendicitis, heart problems, lapsed cancer treatments, broken bones– all trapped in houses where they’d been stuck after being separated from husbands and sons. The next day, there were eleven more. Mistress Lawson went back to the children’s house of healing the second she was able, but Mistresses Coyle, Waggoner and Nadari were suddenly rushing from room to room, shouting orders and saving lives. I don’t think anyone’s been to sleep since.

There’s certainly no time for me and Maddy to look for our moment, no time to even notice that the Mayor still hasn’t come to see me. Instead, I run around a lot, getting in the way, helping out where I can, and squeezing apprentice lessons in.

I turn out not to be a natural healer.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get this,” I say, failing yet again to tell the blood pressure of a sweet old patient called Mrs Fox.

“It sure feels that way,” Corinne says, glancing up at the clock.

“Patience, pretty girl,” Mrs Fox says, her face wrinkling up in a smile. “A thing worth learning is worth learning well.”

“You’re right there, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says, looking back at me. “Try it again.”

I pump up the armband to inflate it, listen through the stethoscope for the right kind of
whoosh, whoosh
in Mrs Fox’s blood and match that up to the little dial. “Sixty over twenty?” I guess weakly.

“Well, let’s find out,” Corinne says. “Have you died this morning, Mrs Fox?”

“Oh, dearie me, no,” Mrs Fox says.

“Probably not sixty over twenty then,” Corinne says.

“I’ve only been doing this for three days,” I say.

“I’ve been doing it for six years,” Corinne says, “since I was
way
younger than you, my girl. And here you are, can’t even work a blood pressure sleeve, yet suddenly an apprentice just like me. Funny how life works, huh?”

“You’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Mrs Fox says to me.

“No, she isn’t, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says. “I’m sorry to contradict you, but some of us regard healing as a sacred duty.”

“I regard it as a sacred duty,” I say, almost as a reflex.

This is a mistake.

“Healing is more than a
job,
my girl,” Corinne says, making
my girl
sound like the worst insult. “There is nothing more important in this life than the preservation of it. We’re God’s hands on this world. We are the opposite of your friend the tyrant.”

“He’s not my–”

“To allow someone,
anyone,
to suffer is the greatest sin there is.”

“Corinne–”

“You don’t understand anything,” she says, her voice low and fierce. “Quit pretending that you do.”

Mrs Fox has shrunk down nearly as far as I have.

Corinne glances at her and back at me, then she straightens her cap and tugs the lapels on her cloak, stretching out her neck from right to left. She closes her eyes and lets out a long, long breath.

Without looking at me, she says, “Try it again.”

“The difference between a clinic and a house of healing?” Mistress Coyle asks, ticking off boxes on a sheet.

“The main difference is that clinics are run by male doctors, houses of healing by female healers,” I recite, as I count out the day’s pills into separate little cups for each patient.

“And why is that?”

“So that a patient, male or female, can have a choice between knowing the thoughts of their doctor or not.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And the real reason?”

“Politics,” I say, returning her word.

“Correct.” She finishes the paperwork and hands it to me. “Take these and the medicines to Madeleine, please.”

She leaves and I finish filling up the tray of medicines. When I come out with it in my hands, I see Mistress Coyle down at the end of the hallway, passing by Mistress Nadari.

And I swear I see her slip Mistress Nadari a note, without either of them pausing.

We can still only go out for an hour at a time, still only in groups of four, but that’s enough to see how New Prentisstown is putting itself together. As my first week as an apprentice comes to an end, we hear tell that some women are even being sent out into fields to work in women-only groups.

We hear tell that the Spackle are being kept somewhere on the edge of town, all together as one group, awaiting “processing”, whatever that might mean.

We hear tell the old Mayor is working as a dustman.

We hear nothing about a boy.

“I missed his birthday,” I tell Maddy, as I practise tying bandages around a rubber leg so ridiculously realistic everyone calls it Ruby. “It was four days ago. I lost track of how long I was asleep and–”

I can’t say any more, just pull the bandage tight–

And think of when he put a bandage on me–

And when I put bandages on him.

“I’m sure he’s fine, Vi,” Maddy says.

“No, you’re not.”

“No,” she says, looking back out the window to the road, “but against all odds the city’s not at war. Against all odds, we’re still alive and still working. So, against all odds, Todd could be alive and well.”

I pull tighter on the bandage. “Do you know anything about a blue
A
?”

She turns to me. “A what?”

I shrug. “Something I saw in Mistress Coyle’s notebook.”

“No idea.” She looks back out the window.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m counting soldiers,” she says. She looks back again at me and Ruby. “It’s a good bandage.” Her smile makes it almost seem true.

I head down the main hallway, Ruby kicking from one hand. I have to practise injecting shots into her thigh. I already feel sorry for the poor woman whose thigh gets my first real jab.

I come round a corner as the hallway reaches the centre of the building, where it turns ninety degrees down the other wing, and I nearly collide with a group of mistresses, who stop when they see me.

Mistress Coyle and four, five,
six
other healers behind her. I recognize Mistress Nadari and Mistress Waggoner, and there’s Mistress Lawson, too, but I’ve never seen the other three before and didn’t even see them come into the house of healing.

“Have you no work, my girl?” Mistress Coyle says, some edge in her voice.

“Ruby,” I stammer, holding out the leg.