Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (74 page)

When the women ran, Wilf helped. When I asked him why, all he did was shrug and say, “They were gone take Jane.” He hid the less able women on his cart as they fled, built a hidey-hole in it so others could return for missions, and for weeks on end has risked his life taking them to and fro because the soldiers have always assumed a man so transparent couldn’t be hiding anything.

All of which has been a surprise to the leaders of the Answer.

But none of which is a surprise to me.

He saved me and Todd once when he didn’t have to. He saved Todd again when there was even more danger. He was even ready the first night I was here to turn right back around to help me find him, but Sergeant Hammar knows Wilf’s face now, knows that he should have been arrested, so any trip back is pretty much a death sentence.

I take a last spoonful of my porridge and sigh heavily as I pop it into my mouth. I could be sighing at the cold, sighing at the boring porridge, sighing at the lack of anything to do in camp.

But, somehow, Wilf knows. Somehow, Wilf always knows.

“Ah’m shur he’s okay, Hildy,” he says, finishing up his own porridge. “He survives, does our Todd.”

I look up into the cold morning sun and I swallow again, though there’s no porridge left in my throat.

“Keep yerself strong,” Wilf stays, standing. “Strong for what’s comin.”

I blink. “What’s coming?” I ask as he walks on towards the dining hall, drinking his mug of coffee.

He just keeps on going.

I finish my coffee, rubbing my arms to gather some heat, thinking I’ll ask her again today, no, I’ll
tell
her I’m coming on the next mission, that I need to find–

“You’re sitting out here all by yourself?”

I look up. Lee, the blond soldier, is standing there, smiling all toothy.

I immediately feel my face go hot.

“No, no,” I say, standing straight up, turning away from him and picking up the plate.

“You don’t have to leave–” he’s saying.

“No, I’m finished–”

“Viola–”

“All yours–”

“That’s not what I meant–”

But I’m already stomping back to the dining hall, cursing myself for the redness of my face.

Lee isn’t the only man. Well, he’s hardly a
man,
but like Wilf, he and Magnus can no longer pretend to be soldiers and go to the city, now that their faces are known.

But there are others who can. Because that’s the biggest secret of all about the Answer.

At least a third of the people here are men, men who pretend to be soldiers to shuttle women in and out of the city, men who help Mistress Coyle with the planning and targets, men with expertise on handling explosives, men who believe in the cause and want to fight against the Mayor and all he stands for.

Men who’ve lost wives and daughters and mothers and who are fighting to save them or fighting to avenge their memories.

Mostly it’s memories.

I suppose it’s useful if everyone thinks it’s only women; it allows men to come and go, even if the Mayor surely knows what’s what, which is probably why he’s denying the cure to so much of his own army, why the Answer’s own supply of cure is becoming more burden than blessing.

I cast a glance quickly back to Lee behind me and forward again.

I’m not sure of his reason for being here.

I haven’t been able–

I haven’t had the
chance
to ask him yet.

I’m not paying attention as I reach the dining room door and don’t really notice when it opens before I can take the handle.

I look up into Mistress Coyle’s face.

I don’t even greet her.

“Take me with you on the next raid,” I say.

Her expression doesn’t change. “You know why you can’t.”

“Todd would join us,” I say. “In a
second
.”

“Others aren’t so sure about that, my girl.” I open my mouth to reply but she interrupts. “If he’s even still alive. Which matters not, because we can’t afford to have you captured. You’re the most valuable prize of all. The girl who can help the President when the ships land.”

“I–”

She holds up her hand. “I won’t have this fight with you again. There is too much important work to do.”

The camp feels silent now. The people behind her have stopped moving as we stare at one another, no one willing to ask her to get out of the way, not even Mistresses Forth and Nadari, who wait there patiently. Like Thea, they’ve barely spoken to me since my arrival, all these acolytes of Mistress Coyle, all these people who wouldn’t dare to dream of speaking to her the way I’m speaking to her now.

They treat me as if I’m a little dangerous.

I’m slightly surprised to find I kind of like it.

I look into her eyes, into the unyieldingness of them. “I won’t forgive you,” I say quietly, as if I’m only talking to her. “I won’t. Not now, not ever.”

“I don’t want your forgiveness,” she says, equally quietly. “But one day, you
will
understand.”

And then her eyes glint and she pulls her mouth into a smile. “You know,” she says, raising her voice. “I think it’s time you had some employment.”

[T
ODD
]

“Can’t you effing things move any faster?”

The four or five Spackle nearest to me flinch away, tho I ain’t even spoken that loud.

“Get a
move
on!”

And as ever, no thoughts, no Noise, no nothing.

They can only be getting the cure in the fodder I still have to shovel out. But why? Why when no one else is? It makes them a sea of silent clicking and white backs bent into the cold and white mouths sending out puffs of steam and white arms pulling up handfuls of dirt and when yer looking out across the monastery grounds, all those white bodies working, well, they could be a herd of sheep, couldn’t they?

Even tho if you look close you can see family groups and husbands and wives and fathers and sons. You can see older ones lifting smaller amounts more slowly. You can see younger ones helping ’em, trying to keep us from seeing that the older ones can’t work too hard. You can see a baby strapped to its mother’s chest with an old piece of cloth. You can see an especially tall one directing others along a faster work chain. You can see a small female packing mud around the infected number band of a larger female. You can see ’em working together, keeping their heads down, trying not to be the one who gets seen by me or Davy or the guards behind the barbed wire.

You can see all that if you look close.

But it’s easier if you don’t.

We can’t give ’em shovels, of course. They could use ’em against us as weapons and the soldiers on the walls get twitchy if a Spackle even stretches its arms up too high. So there they all are, bending to the ground, digging, moving rocks, silent as clouds, suffering and not doing nothing about it.

I got a weapon, tho. They gave me the rifle back.

Cuz where am I gonna go?

Now that she’s gone.

“Hurry it
up
!” I shout at the Spackle, my Noise rising red at the thought of her.

I catch Davy looking over at me, a surprised grin on his face. I turn away and cross the field to another group. I’m halfway there when I hear a louder click.

I look round till I find the source.

But it’s only ever the same one.

1017, staring at me again, with that look that ain’t forgiveness. He moves his eyes to my hands.

It’s only then I realize I’ve got them both clenched hard around my rifle.

I can’t even remember taking it off my shoulder.

Even with all this Spackle labour, it’s still gonna take a coupla months to even come close to finishing this building, whatever it is, and by that time it’ll be mid-winter and the Spackle won’t have the shelter they were sposed to be building for themselves and I know they live outside more than men do but I don’t think even they can live unsheltered in the winter frost and I ain’t heard of nowhere else they’re gonna be going yet.

Still, we had all the internal walls torn down in seven days, two ahead of schedule, and no Spackle even died, tho we did have a few with broken arms. Those Spackle were taken away by soldiers.

We ain’t seen ’em since.

By the end of the second week after the tower bomb, we’ve nearly dug all the trenches and blocks for the foundayshuns to be poured, something Davy and I are sposed to supervize even tho it’s gonna be the Spackle who know how to do it.

“Pa says they were the labour that rebuilt the city after the Spackle War,” Davy says. “Tho you wouldn’t know it from this bunch.”

He spits out a shell from the seeds he’s eating. Food’s getting a bit scarce what with the Answer adding supply raids to the ongoing bombs but Davy always manages to scrounge up something. We’re sitting on a pile of rocks, looking out over the one big field, now dug up with square holes and ditches and so full of rock piles there’s barely any room for the Spackle to crowd into.

But they do, cramming onto the edges and huddling together in the cold. And they don’t say nothing about it.

Davy spits out another shell. “You ever gonna talk again?”

“I talk,” I say.

“No, you scream at yer workforce and you grunt at me. That ain’t talking.” He’s spits out another shell, high and long, hitting the nearest Spackle in the head. It just brushes it away and keeps on digging out the last of a trench.

“She left ya,” Davy says. “Get over it.”

My Noise rises.
“Shut up.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

I turn to look at him, eyes wide.

“What?”
he says. “I’m just saying, you know? She left, don’t mean she’s dead or nothing.” Spit. “From what I remember, that filly can take plenty care of herself.”

There’s a memory in his Noise of being electrocuted on the river road. It should make me smile, but it don’t, cuz she’s standing right there in his Noise, standing right there and taking him down.

Standing right there and not standing right here.

(where’d she go?)

(where’d she effing
go
?)

Mayor Ledger told me just after the tower bombs that the army had gone straight for the ocean cuz they’d got a tip-off that that’s where the Answer were hiding–

(was it me? did he hear it in me? I burn at the thought–)

But when Mr. Hammar and his men got there, they didn’t find nothing but long-abandoned buildings and half-sunken boats.

Cuz the informayshun turned out to be false.

And I burn at that, too.

(did she lie to me?)

(did she do it on purpose?)

“Jesus, pigpiss.” Davy spits again. “It’s not like any of the
rest
of us got girlfriends. They’re all in ruddy
jail
or setting off bombs every week or walking around in groups so big you can’t even talk to ’em.”

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” I say.

“Not the point,” he says. “All it means is that yer just as alone as the rest of us, so get over it.”

There’s a sudden, ugly strength of feeling in his Noise, which he wipes away in an instant when he sees me watching him. “What’re you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Damn right.” He stands, takes his rifle and stomps back into the field.

Somehow 1017 keeps ending up in my part of the work. I’m mainly in the back part of the fields, finishing up digging the trenches. Davy’s near the front, getting Spackle to snap together the pre-formed guide walls we’ll be using once the concrete gets poured. 1017’s sposed to be doing that, but every time I look up, there he is, nearest me again no matter how many times I send him back.

He’s working, sure, digging up his handfuls of dirt or piling up the sod in even rows, but always looking for me, always trying to catch my eye.

Clicking at me.

I walk towards him, my hand up on the stock of my rifle, grey clouds starting to move in overhead. “I sent you over to Davy,” I bark. “What’re you doing here?”

Davy, hearing his name, calls from far across the field. “What?”

I call back, “Why do you keep letting this one back over here?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Davy yells. “They all look the same!”

“It’s 1017!”

Davy gives an exaggerated shrug.
“So?”

I hear a click, a rude and sarcastic one, from behind me.

I turn and I swear 1017 is
smiling
at me.

“You little piece of–” I start to say, reaching my rifle round my front.

Which is when I see a flash of Noise.

Coming from 1017.

Quick as anything but clear, too, me standing in front of him, reaching for my rifle, nothing more than what he’s seeing with his eyes–

Except a flash as he grabs the rifle from me–

And then it’s gone.

I’ve still got the rifle in my hands, 1017 still knee-deep in the ditch.

No Noise at all.

I look him up and down. He’s skinnier than he used to be, but they
all
are, they never get quite enough fodder of a day, and I’m wondering if 1017’s been skipping meals altogether.

So he don’t take no cure.

“What’re you playing at?” I ask him.

But he’s back at work, arms and hands digging for more dirt, ribs showing thru the side of his white, white skin.