The Ask and the Answer (29 page)

291

"Shut up," I say, but it don't turn into a fight. Come to think of it, we ain't had a fight in a good long while.

We're just used to each other, I guess.

We don't hardly see women no more neither. When the communicayshuns tower fell, they were all confined to their houses again, except when teams of 'em are working the fields, readying for next year's planting, under guard from armed soldiers. The visits from husbands and sons and fathers are now once a week at most.

We hear stories about soldiers and women, stories about soldiers getting into dormitories at night, stories about awful things going on that no one gets punished for.

And that don't even count the women in the prisons, prisons I've only seen from the cathedral tower, a group of converted buildings in the far west of town down near the foot of the waterfalls. Who knows what goes on inside? They're way far away, outta sight of everyone 'cept for those that guard 'em.

Kinda like the Spackle.

"Jesus, Todd," Davy says, "the racket you make by
thinking
all the time."

Which is exactly the kinda thing I've learned to ignore from Davy. Except this time, he called me
Todd.

We leave our horses in the barn near the cathedral. Davy walks me back to the cathedral, tho I don't really need a guard no more.

Cuz where would I go?

I go in the front door and I hear, "Todd?"

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The Mayor's waiting for me. "Yes, sir?" I say.

"Always so polite," he smiles, walking toward me, boots clicking on the marble. "You seem better lately, calmer." He stops a yard away. "Have you been using the tool?"

Huh?

"What tool?" I ask.

He sighs a little. And then-

I am the Circle and the Circle is me.

I put a hand up to the side of my head. "How do you do that?"

"Noise can be used, Todd," he says. "If you're disciplined enough. And the first step is using the tool."

"I am the Circle and the Circle is me?"

"It's a way of centering yourself." He nods. "A way of aligning your Noise, of reining it in,
controlling
it, and a man who can control his Noise is a man with an advantage."

I remember him chanting away back in his house in old Prentisstown, how sharp and scary his Noise sounded compared to other men's, how much it felt like-Like a weapon. "What's the Circle?" I ask.

"Your destiny, Todd Hewitt. A circle is a closed system. There's no way of getting out, so it's easier if you don't fight it."

I am the Circle and the Circle is me.

But this time, my voice is in there, too. "There's so much I look forward to teaching you," he says and leaves without saying good night.

***

293

I pace the walls of the bell tower, looking out toward the falls in the west, the hill with the notch on it in the south, and to the east, the hills that lead toward the monastery, tho you can't see it from here. All you can see is New Prentisstown, indoors and huddled together as a cold night settles in.

She's out there somewhere.

A month and she ain't come.

A month and-

(shut up)

(just effing shut up your effing whiny
mouth)
I start pacing again.

We've got glass in the openings now and a heater to protect us from the autumn nights. More blankets, too, and a light and approved books for Mayor Ledger to read.

"Still a prison, though, isn't it?" he says behind me, mouth full. "You'd think he'd have at least found a better place for
you
by now."

"I sure wish everyone would stop thinking it's okay to read me all the damn time," I say, without turning around.

"He probably wants you out of the town," he says, finishing up his meal, which is just over half what we used to get. "Wants you away from all the rumors."

"What rumors?" I say, tho I'm barely interested.

"Oh, rumors of the great mind-control powers of our Mayor. Rumors of weapons made from Noise. Rumors he can fly, I don't doubt."

I don't look back at him and I keep my Noise quiet.

I am the Circle,
I think.

And then I stop.

294

***

It's after midnight when the first one goes off.
Boom!

I jump a little on my mattress but that's all.

"Where do you think that was?" Mayor Ledger asks, also not rising from his bed.

"Sounded near east," I say, looking up into the dark of the tower bells. "Maybe a food store?"

We wait for the second. There's always a second now. As the soldiers rush to the first, the Answer take the chance for a second--

Boom!

"There it is," Mayor Ledger says, sitting up in bed and looking out of an opening. I get up, too. "Damn," he says.

"What?" I say, moving next to him.

"I think that was the water plant down by the river."

"What does that mean?"

"It means we'll have to boil every stupid cup of--"
BOOM!

There's a huge flash that causes me and Mayor Ledger to flinch back from the window. The glass shakes in its frames.

And every light in New Prentisstown goes off.

"The power station," Mayor Ledger says, unbelieving. "But that's guarded every hour of the day. How could they possibly get to
that?"

"I don't know," I say, my stomach sinking. "But there's gonna be hell to pay."

295

Mayor Ledger runs a tired hand over his face as we hear sirens and soldiers shouting down in the city below. He's shaking his head. "I don't know
what
they think they're accomp-"

BOOM!

Five huge explosions, one right after the other, shaking the tower so much that me and Mayor Ledger are thrown to the floor and a bunch of our windows shatter, busting inward, covering us in shards and powdery glass.

We see the sky light up.

The sky to the west.

A cloud of fire and smoke shooting so high above the prisons it's like a giant's flinging it there.

Mayor Ledger is breathing heavy beside me.

"They've done it," he says, gasping. "They've really done

it."

They've really done it,
I think. They've started their war. And I can't help it-I can't help but think it-Is she coming for me?

296

25 THE NIGHT IT HAPPENS

***

(Viola)

"I NEED YOUR HELP," Mistress Lawson says, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

I hold up my hands, covered in flour. "I'm kind of in the middle of-"

"Mistress Coyle specifically asked me to fetch you."

I frown. I don't like the word
fetch.
"Then who's going to finish these loaves for tomorrow? Lee's out getting firewood-"

"Mistress Coyle said you had experience in medical supplies," Mistress Lawson interrupts. "We've brought a lot more in and the girl I have now is hopeless at sorting them out."

I sigh. It's better than cooking, at least.

I follow her out into the dusk, into the mouth of a cave and through a series of passages until we get to the large cavern where we keep our most valuable supplies.

"This might take a while," Mistress Lawson says.

We spend most of the evening and into the night counting just how many medicines, bandages, compresses, bed

297

linens, ethers, tourniquets, diagnostic bands, blood pressure straps, stethoscopes, gowns, water purification tablets, splints, cotton swabs, clamps, Jeffers root pills, adhesives, and everything else we have, sorting them out into smaller piles and spreading them across the supply cavern, right up the lip of the main tunnel.

I wipe cold sweat from my forehead. "Shouldn't we be stacking these up already?"

"Not just yet," Mistress Lawson says. She looks around at the neat piles of everything we've done. She rubs her hands together, a worried frown creasing her face. "I hope it's enough."

"Enough for what?" I follow her with my eyes as she goes from pile to pile. "Enough for
what,
Mistress Lawson?"

She looks up at me, biting her lip. "How much of your healing do you remember?"

I stare at her for a second, suspicions rising and rising, then I take off running out of the cavern. "Wait!" she calls after me, but I'm already out into the central tunnel, running out of the main mouth of the cave and shooting into the camp.

Which is deserted.

"Don't be angry," Mistress Lawson says after I've searched every cabin.

I stand there, stupidly, hands on my hips, staring around at the empty camp. Having found a distraction for me, Mistress Coyle left, along with all the other mistresses except for Mistress Lawson. Thea and the apprentices are gone, too.

And everyone else. Every cart, horse, and ox.

298

And Lee.

Wilf's gone, too, though Jane is here, the only other one who stayed behind. Tonight's the night. Tonight's the night it happens.

"You know why she couldn't take you," Mistress Lawson says.

"She doesn't trust me," I say. "None of you do."

"That's neither here nor there right now," she says, her voice taking on that stern mistress tone I've grown to hate. "What matters is that when they come back, we're going to need all the healing hands we can get."

I'm about to argue but I see how much she's still wringing her hands, how worried her face looks, how much is going on beneath the surface.

And then she says, "If any of them make it back at all."

There's nothing left to do but wait. Jane makes us coffee, and we sit in the increasing cold, watching the path out of the woods, watching to see who returns down it.

"Frost," Jane says, digging her toe across the small breath of ice frozen on a stone near her foot.

"We should have done it earlier," Mistress Lawson says into her cup, face over the rising steam. "We should have done it before the weather turned."

"Done
what?"
I ask.

"Rescue," Jane says simply. "Wilf tole me when he was leavin."

"Rescue of who?" I say, though of course it can only be-

299

We hear rocks fall on the path. We're already on our feet when Magnus comes barreling over the hill. "Hurry!" he's shouting. "Come on!"

Mistress Lawson grabs some of the most urgent of the medical supplies and starts running after him up the path. Jane and I do the same.

We're halfway up when they start to come out of the forest.

On the backs of carts, across the shoulders of others, on stretchers, on horseback, with more people pouring down the path behind them and more cresting the hill behind
them.

All the ones who needed rescuing.

The prisoners locked away by the Mayor and his army.

And the
state
of them-

"Oh, m'Gawd," Jane says, quietly, next to me, both of us stopped, stunned. Oh, my God.

The next hours are a blur, as we rush to bring the wounded into camp, though some of them are hurt so bad we have to treat them where they are. I'm ordered from one healer to another and another, racing from wound to wound, running back for more supplies, going so fast it's only after a while that I start to realize that most of the wounds being treated aren't from fighting.

"They've been beaten," I say.

"And starved," Mistress Lawson says angrily, setting up a fluid injection into the arm of a woman we've carried into the cave. "And tortured."

300

The woman is just one of a growing number that threatens never to stop. Most of them too shocked to speak, staring at you in the most horrible silence or keening at you without words, burn scars on their arms and faces, old wounds left untreated, the sunken eyes of women who haven't eaten for days and days and days.

"He did this," I say to myself. "He did this."

"Hold it together, my girl," Mistress Lawson says. We rush back outside, arms full of bandages that don't begin to cover what's needed. Mistress Braithwaite waves me over with a frantic hand. She tears the bandages from me, furiously wrapping up the leg of a woman screaming beneath her. "Jeffers root!" Mistress Braithwaite snaps.

"I didn't bring any," I say.

"Then bloody well get some!"

I go back to the cave, twisting around healers and apprentices and fake soldiers crouched over patients everywhere, up the hillsides, on backs of carts, everywhere. It's not just women injured either. I see male prisoners, also starved, also beaten. I see people from the camp wounded in the fighting, including Wilf with a burn bandage up the side of his face, though he's still helping carry patients on stretchers into the camp.

I run into the cave, grab more bandages and Jeffers root, and run back to the gully for the dozenth time. I cross the open ground and look up the path, where a few more people are still arriving.

I stop a second and check the new faces before running back to Mistress Braithwaite.

Mistress Coyle hasn't returned yet.

Neither has Lee.