Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (73 page)

“The Answer,” he says, turning back to the
A
. “If that’s who they want to be, then let them.” He looks back at us. “But if there’s an Answer, then someone must first . . .”

He lets his voice fade and he gets a faraway smile on his face, like he’s laughing at his own private joke.

Davy unfolds the big white scroll onto the grass, not caring that it’s getting wet in the cold morning dew. There’s words written across the top and diagrams and squares and things drawn in below it.

“Measurements mostly,” Davy reads. “Too effing many. I mean,
look
at that.”

He holds the scroll up to me, trying to get me to agree.

And, well–

Yeah, okay, I–

Whatever.

“Too effing many,” I say, feeling sweat come up under my arms.

It’s the day after the tower fell and we’re back at the monastery, back to putting teams of Spackle to work. My escape seems to be forgotten, like it was part of another life and now we’ve all got new things to think about. The Mayor won’t talk to me about Viola and I’m back working for Davy, who ain’t too happy.

So it’s like old times.

“There’s fighting to be done and he’s got us building an effing
palace,
” Davy frowns, looking over the plans.

It ain’t a palace but he’s got a point. Before it was just gonna be rough shacks to shelter the Spackle for the winter but this looks like a whole new building for men, taking up most of the inside of the monastery.

It’s even got a name written across the top.

A name my eye stumbles over, trying to–

Davy turns to me, his eyes widening. I make my Noise as Noisy as possible.

“We should get started,” I say, standing up.

But Davy’s still looking at me. “What do you think about what it says right here?” he asks, putting his finger on a block of words. “Ain’t that something amazing what it says?”

“Yeah,” I shrug. “I guess.”

His eyes get even wider with delight. “It’s a list of materials, pigpiss!” His voice is practically celebrating. “You can’t read, can you?”

“Shut up,” I say, looking away.

“You can’t even
read
!” Davy’s smiling up into the cold sun and around at all the Spackle watching us. “What kinda idiot gets thru life–”

“I said,
shut up
!”

Davy’s mouth drops open as he realizes.

And I know what he’s gonna say before he says it.

“Yer ma’s book,” he says. “She wrote it for you and you can’t even–”

And what can I do but hit him across his stupid lughole of a mouth?

I’m getting taller and bigger and he comes off worst in the fight but he don’t seem to mind all that much. Even when we get back to work, he’s still giggling and making a big show outta reading the plans.

“Mighty complicated, these instruckshuns,” he says, a big smile across his bloody lips.

“Just effing get on with it!”

“Fine, fine,” he says. “First step is what we were already doing. Tearing down all the internal walls.” He looks up. “I could write it down for you.”

My Noise rages red at him but Noise is useless as a weapon.

Unless yer the Mayor.

I didn’t think life could turn more to crap but it always does, don’t it? Bombs and towers falling and having to work with Davy and the Mayor paying me special attenshun and–

(and I don’t know where she is)

(and I don’t know what the Mayor’s gonna do to her)

(and did she plant the bombs?)

(did she?)

I turn back round to the work site.

1150 pairs of Spackle eyes are watching us, watching
me,
like they’re just effing farm animals looking up from their grazing cuz they heard a loud noise.

Stupid effing
sheep
.

“GET TO WORK!” I shout.

“You look like hell,” Mayor Ledger says, as I fall onto my bed.

“Stuff it,” I say.

“Working you hard, is he?” He brings me over the dinner that’s already waiting for us. It don’t even look like he ate too much of mine before I got here.

“Ain’t he working
you
hard?” I say, digging in to the food.

“I think he’s forgotten about me, truth to tell.” He sits back on his own bed. “I haven’t spoken to him in I don’t know how long.”

I look up at him. His Noise is grey, like he’s hiding something, tho that ain’t unusual.

“I’ve just been doing my rubbish duties,” he says, watching me eat. “Listening to people talk.”

“And what’re they saying?” I ask, cuz it seems like he wants to talk.

“Well,” he says. His Noise shifts uncomfortably.

“Well what?”

And then I see the reason his Noise is so flat is cuz there’s something he don’t wanna tell me but feels like he has to, so here it comes.

“That house of healing,” he says. “That one in particular.”

“What about it?” I say, trying not to make it sound important, failing.

“It’s closed down,” he says. “Empty.”

I stop eating. “What do you mean, empty?”

“I mean
empty,
” he says gently, cuz he knows it’s bad news. “There’s no one there, not even the patients. Everyone’s gone.”

“Gone?” I whisper.

Gone.

I stand up tho there ain’t nowhere to go, my stupid plate of dinner still in my hand.

“Gone where? What’s he done with her?”

“He hasn’t done anything,” Mayor Ledger says. “Your friend ran. That’s what I heard. Ran off with the women just before the tower fell.” He rubs his chin. “Everyone else was arrested and taken to the prisons. But your friend . . . got away.”

He says
got away
like that’s not what he means, like what he means is she was planning to get away all along.

“You can’t know that,” I say. “You can’t know that’s true about her.”

He shrugs. “Maybe not,” he says. “But I heard it from one of the soldiers who was guarding the house of healing.”

“No,” I say, but I don’t know what I mean. “No.”

“How well did you really know her?” Mayor Ledger says.

“You shut up.”

I’m breathing hard, my chest rising and falling.

It’s good that she ran, ain’t it?

Ain’t it?

She was in danger and now–

(but)

(but did she blow up the tower?)

(why didn’t she tell me she was going to?)

(did she lie to me?)

And I shouldn’t think it, I shouldn’t think it, but here it comes–

She promised.

And she left.

She left
me
.

(Viola?)

(did you leave me?)

{V
IOLA
}

I open my eyes to the sound of wings flapping outside the door, something I already know in the few days I’ve been here means that the bats have returned to the caves after their night’s hunting, that the sun is about to rise, that it’s almost time to get myself out of bed.

Some women start to stir, stretching in their cots. Others are still dead to the world, still snoring, still farting, still drifting on in the empty nothing of sleep.

I spend a second wishing I was still there, too.

The sleeping quarters is basically just a long shack, swept earth floor, wood walls, wood door, barely any windows and only an iron stove in the centre for not enough heat. The rest is just a row of cots stretched from one end to the other, full of sleeping women.

As the newest arrival, I’m at one end.

And I’m watching the occupant of the bed at the other end. She sits up straight, body fully under her command, like she never actually sleeps, just puts herself on pause until she can start work again.

Mistress Coyle turns in her cot, sets her feet on the floor, and looks over the other sleepers straight at me.

Checking on me first.

To see, no doubt, if I’ve run off sometime in the night to find Todd.

I don’t believe he’s dead. And I don’t believe he told the Mayor on us, either.

There must be another answer.

I look back at Mistress Coyle, unmoving.

Not gone,
I think.
Not yet.

But mainly because I don’t even know where we are.

We’re not by the ocean. Not even close, as far as I can tell, though that’s not saying much because secrecy is the watchword of the camp. No one gives information out unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s in case anyone gets captured on a bombing raid or, now that the Answer has started running out of things like flour and medicine, raids for supplies as well.

Mistress Coyle guards information as her most valuable resource.

All I know is that the camp is at an old mine, started up– like so many other things seem to have been on this planet– with great optimism after the first landings but abandoned after just a few years. There are a number of shacks around the openings to a couple of deep caves. The shacks, some new, some from the mining days, serve as sleeping quarters and meeting rooms and dining halls and so on.

The caves– the ones where there aren’t bats, anyway– are the food and supply stores, always worryingly low, always guarded fiercely by Mistress Lawson, still fretting over the children she left behind and taking out her fretting on anyone who requests another blanket for the cold.

Deeper in the caves are the mines, originally sunk to find coal or salt and then when none were found, diamonds and then gold, which weren’t found either, as if they’d do anyone any good in this place anyway. The mines are now where the weapons and explosives are hidden. I don’t know how they got here or where they came from, but if the camp is found, they’ll be detonated, probably wiping us all off the map.

But for now it’s a camp that’s near a natural well and hidden by the forest around it. The only entrance is through the trees at the bottom of the path Mistress Coyle and I bumped our way down, and it’s so steep and hard you’d hear intruders come from a long way away.

“And they’ll come,” Mistress Coyle said to me on my first day. “We’ll just have to make sure we’re ready to meet them.”

“Why haven’t they come already?” I asked. “People must know there’s a mine here.”

All she did was wink at me and touch the side of her nose.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” I asked.

But that was all I got, because information is her most valuable resource, isn’t it?

At breakfast, I get my usual snubbing by Thea and the other apprentices I recognize, none of whom will say a word to me, still blaming me for Maddy’s death, blaming me for somehow being a traitor, blaming me for this whole sodding war, for all I know.

Not that I care.

Because I don’t.

I leave them to the dining hall, and I take my plate of grey porridge out in the cold morning to some rocks near the mouth of one of the caves. As I eat, I watch the camp start to wake itself, start to put itself together for the things that terrorists spend their days doing.

The biggest surprise is how few people there are. Maybe a hundred. That’s all. That’s the big Answer causing all the fuss in New Prentisstown by blowing things up. One hundred people. Mistresses and apprentices, former patients and others, too, disappearing in the night and returning in the morning, or keeping the camp running for those that come and go, tending to the few horses the Answer has and the oxes that pull the carts and the hens we get our eggs from and a million other things that need doing.

But only a hundred people. Not enough to have a whisper of a prayer if the Mayor’s
real
army comes marching down towards us.

“All right, Hildy?”

“Hi, Wilf,” I say, as he comes up to me, a plate of porridge in his hands, too. I scoot over so he can sit near me. He doesn’t say anything, just eats his porridge and lets me eat mine.

“Wilf?” we both hear. Jane, Wilf’s wife, is coming for us, two steaming mugs in her hands. She picks her way over the rocks towards us, stumbling once, spilling some coffee and causing Wilf to rise halfway up, but she recovers. “Here ya go!” she practically shouts, thrusting the mugs at us.

“Thank you,” I say, taking mine.

She shoves her hands under her armpits against the cold and smiles, eyes wide and searching around, like she eats with them. “Awful cold to be eating outside,” she says, like an overly friendly demand that we explain ourselves.

“Yup,” Wilf says, going back to his porridge.

“It’s not too bad,” I say, also going back to eating.

“Didja hear they got a grain store last night?” she says, lowering her voice to a whisper but somehow making it louder at the same time. “We can have
bread
again!”

“Yup,” Wilf says again.

“D’you like bread?” she asks me.

“I do.”

“Ya gotta have bread,” she says, to the ground, to the sky, to the rocks. “Ya gotta have bread.”

And then she’s back off to the dining hall, not another word, though Wilf doesn’t seem to much mind or even notice. But I know, I
definitely
know that Wilf’s clear and even Noise, his lack of words, his seeming blankness doesn’t describe all of him, not even close.

Wilf and Jane were refugees, fleeing into Haven as the army swept behind them, passing us on the road as Todd slept off his fever in Carbonel Downs. Jane fell ill on the trip and, after asking directions, Wilf took her straight to Mistress Forth’s house of healing, where Jane was still recovering when the army invaded. Wilf, whose Noise is as free of deception as anyone’s on this planet, was assumed by the soldiers to be an idiot and so allowed to visit his wife when no other man was.