The Ask and the Answer

She’s wearing the same long white coat as Mistress Coyle but she’s also got on a short white cap with the blue outstretched hand stitched on it, which she told me is something apprentices wear. She can’t be more than a year or two older than me, whatever way they measure age on this planet, but her hands are sure, gentle and firm all around the wounds.

“So,” she says, her voice deceptively light. “How bad are these bad guys?”

The door opens. A short girl in another apprentice cap leans in, young as Maddy but with dark brown skin and a storm cloud hanging over her head. “Mistress Coyle says you need to finish up right now.”

Maddy doesn’t look up from taping new bandages to my front. “Mistress Coyle knows I’ve only had time to get halfway done.”

“We’ve been summoned,” says the girl.

“You say that like we get summoned all the time, Corinne.” The bandages are almost as good as the ones I had from my ship, the medicine on them already cooling my torso, already making my eyelids heavy. Maddy finishes on the front and turns to cut another set for my back. “I am in the middle of a healing.”

“A man came by with a gun,” Corinne says.

Maddy stops bandaging.

“Everyone’s been called to the town square,” Corinne continues. “Which includes you, Maddy Poole, healing or not.” She crosses her arms hard. “I’ll bet it’s the army coming.”

Maddy looks me in the eyes. I look away.

“We’ll finally see what our end looks like,” Corinne says.

Maddy rolls her eyes. “Always so cheerful, you,” she says. “Tell Mistress Coyle I’ll be out in two ticks.”

Corinne gives her a sour look but leaves. Maddy finishes up the bandages on my back, by which time I can barely stay awake.

“You sleep now,” Maddy says. “It’ll be all right, you just watch. Why would they save you if they were going to . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought, just scrunches her lips and then smiles. “I’m always saying Corinne’s got enough proper seriousness in her for all of us put together.”

Her smile is the last thing I see before I sleep.

“TODD!”

I jolt awake again, the nightmare dashing away, Todd slipping from me–

I hear a clunk and I see a book drop from Maddy’s lap as she blinks herself awake in the chair by the bed. Night’s fallen, and the room is dark, just a little lamp on where Maddy was meant to have been reading.

“Who’s Todd?” she asks, yawning, already smiling through it. “Your boyfriend?” The look on my face makes her drop the tease immediately. “Someone important?”

I nod, still breathing heavily from the nightmare, my hair plastered to my forehead with sweat. “Someone important.”

She pours me a glass of water from a pitcher on the bedside table. “What happened?” I say, taking a drink. “You were summoned.”

“Ah, yes, that,” Maddy says, sitting back. “That was interesting.”

She tells me about how everyone in the entire town– not Haven any more, New Prentisstown, a name that makes my stomach sink– gathered to watch the army march in and watch the new Mayor execute the old one.

“Except he didn’t,” Maddy says. “He spared him. Said he would spare all of us, too. That he was taking away the Noise cure, which the men weren’t too happy about and good Lord it’s been nice not to hear it yammering for the past six months, but that we should all know our place and remember who we were and that we would make a new home together in preparation for all the settlers that were coming.”

She widens her eyes, waits for me to say something.

“I didn’t understand half of that,” I say. “There’s a cure?”

She shakes her head but not to say no. “Boy, you really aren’t from around here, are you?”

I set down the glass of water, leaning forward and lowering my voice to a whisper. “Maddy, is there a communications hub near here?”

She looks at me like I just asked her if she’d like to move with me to one of the moons. “So I can contact the ships,” I say. “It might be a big, curved dish? Or a tower, maybe?”

She looks thoughtful. “There’s an old metal tower up in the hills,” she says, also whispering, “but I’m not even sure it is a communications tower. It’s been abandoned for ages. Besides, you won’t be able to get to it. There’s a whole army out there, Vi.”

“How big?”

“Big enough.” We’re both still whispering. “People are saying they’re separating out the last of the women tonight.”

“To do what?”

Maddy shrugs. “Corinne said a woman in the crowd told her they rounded up the Spackle, too.”

I sit up, pressing against the bandages. “Spackle?”

“They’re the native species here.”

“I know who they are.” I sit up even more, straining against the bandage. “Todd told me things, told me what happened before. Maddy, if the Mayor’s separating out women and Spackle, then we’re in danger. We’re in the worst kind of danger.”

I push back my sheets to get up but a sudden bolt of lightning rips through my stomach. I call out and fall back.

“Pulled a stitch,” Maddy tuts, standing right up.

“Please.” I grit my teeth against the pain. “We have to get out of here. We have to run.”

“You’re in no position to run anywhere,” she says, reaching for my bandage.

Which is when the Mayor walks in the door.

{VIOLA}

Mistress Coyle leads him in. Her face is sterner than ever, her forehead creased, her jaw set. Even having only met her once I can tell she’s not happy.

He stands behind her. Tall, thin but broad-shouldered, all in white with a hat he hasn’t taken off.

I’ve never properly seen him. I was bleeding, dying when he approached us in the town square.

But it’s him.

It can only be him.

“Good evening, Viola,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”

Mistress Coyle sees me struggling with the sheet, sees Maddy reaching for me. “Is there a problem, Madeleine?”

“Nightmare,” Maddy says, catching my eye. “I think she pulled a stitch.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” Mistress Coyle says and the calm and serious way she says it gets Maddy’s full attention. “Get her 400 units of Jeffers root in the meantime.”