Monsters of Men

“If it’s you doing it, Todd,” she says, “nothing can go wrong. If it’s you doing it, I know I’m safe.”

And I wait for a long minute.

And I don’t know what to say.

And I don’t know what to do.

{VIOLA}

“So you’re taking it, too, then?” Mistress Coyle says from the doorway after I click off with Todd.

I’m about to complain about her listening to a private conversation again but she’s done it so often I’m not even really mad. “It’s not decided yet.”

I’m alone with her. Simone and Bradley are preparing for tomorrow’s meeting, and Lee is out with Wilf, learning about the oxes, whose Noise he can see.

“How are the tests coming?” I ask.

“Excellent,” she says, not uncrossing her arms. “Aggressive antibiotics combined with an aloe Prentiss says he found in the weapons of the Spackle that allows for a dispersal of the medicine ten or fifteen times faster than we’d been doing it. Hitting it so fast it doesn’t have time to regroup. It’s quite brilliant, really.” She looks me square in the eye, and I swear I see sadness there. “A real breakthrough.”

“But you still don’t trust it?”

She sits down next to me with a heavy sigh. “How can I? After all he’s done? How can I not just sit here in despair at all the women who keep reaching for the cure, all the while sick with worry that they’re just walking into a trap.” She bites her lip. “And now you.”

“Maybe,” I say.

She takes a long breath and lets it out. “Not all the women are taking it, you know. There are some, a good number, who’d rather trust me to find a better cure for them. And I will, you know. I will.”

“I believe you,” I say. “But fast enough?”

She gets a look on her face so unusual for her it takes me a second to realize what it is.

She looks almost defeated.

“You’ve been so sick,” she says, “trapped in this little room, that you don’t really realize what a hero you are out there.”

“I’m not a hero,” I say, surprised.

“Please, Viola. You faced down the Spackle and won. You’re everything they want to be themselves. A perfect symbol for the future.” She shifts her weight. “Not like those of us left in the past.”

“I don’t think that’s true–”

“You went up a girl and came down a woman,” she says. “I get asked five hundred times a day how the Peacemaker is doing.”

And it’s only then I see the importance of what she’s saying.

“If I take the cure,” I say, “you think everyone else will, too.”

Mistress Coyle says nothing.

“And he’ll have completely won,” I continue. “That’s what you think.”

She still says nothing, looking at the floor. When she does speak, it’s unexpected. “I miss the ocean,” she says. “On a fast horse, I could leave right now and make it there by sundown, but I haven’t even seen it since we failed to make a fishing village. I moved to Haven and never looked back.” Her voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it. “I thought that life was over. I thought in Haven there were things worth fighting for.”

“You still can fight for them,” I say.

“I think I may be already beaten, Viola,” she says.

“But–”

“No, I’ve had power slip away from me before, my girl. I know what it feels like. But I always knew I’d come back.” She turns to me, her eyes sad but otherwise unreadable. “But you aren’t beaten, are you, my girl? Not yet.”

She nods, as if to herself, then she does it again and gets up.

“Where are you going?” I call after her.

But she keeps on and doesn’t look back.

[TODD]

I hold up my ma’s book. “I wanna read the end.”

The Mayor looks up from his reports. “The end?”

“I wanna find out what happened to her,” I say. “In her own words.”

The Mayor leans back. “And you think I’m afraid to have you hear it?”

“Are you?” I say, keeping his gaze.

“Only in how sad it will be for you, Todd.”

“Sad for me?”

“Those were terrible times,” he says. “And there’s no version of that history, not mine, not Ben’s, not your mother’s, where there’s a happy ending.”

I keep staring at him.

“All right,” the Mayor says. “Open it to the end.”

I look at him for another second, then I open her book, flipping thru the pages till I get to the last entry, my heart skipping a little at what I’ll find there. The words are the usual scramble, spilling out everywhere like a rockslide (tho I’m getting better at picking some of ’em out, it’s true) and my eyes go right to the end, the very last paragraphs, to the very last things she ever wrote to me–

And then suddenly, almost before I’m ready–

This war, my dearest son–

(there she is–)

This war that I hate because of how it threatens all yer days to come, Todd, this war that was bad enough when we were just fighting the Spackle, but now there are divisions forming, divisions twixt David Prentiss, the head of our little army here, and Jessica Elizabeth, our Mayor, who’s been rallying the women and many of the men to her side, Ben and Cillian included, over how the war’s being conducted.

“You were dividing the town?” I say.

“I wasn’t the only one,” the Mayor says.

And oh it makes my heart sick, Todd, to see us split like this, split before we’ve even made peace, and I wonder how this can be a real New World when all we do is bring our old quarrels to it.

The Mayor’s breathing is light and I can somehow tell he ain’t struggling half as hard as he used to.

(and the faint hum there, too–)

(that I know is him connecting us–)

But then there’s you, son, as of right now the youngest boy in town, maybe even in this whole world, and yer gonna have to be the one who makes it come right, you hear? Yer a native born New Worlder, so you don’t have to repeat our mistakes. You can shake off the past and maybe, just maybe, you’ll bring paradise to this place.

And my stomach pulls a little cuz she’s wished that for me from the very first page.

But that’s probably enough responsibility for one day, huh? I have to leave now for that secret meeting Mayor Elizabeth’s called.