The Ask and the Answer

I can’t help but think that she’s probably right.

She frowns into her notes. “Just six?”

“Eight hundred sleeping settlers and three caretaker families in each,” I say. I’m getting hungry, but I know by now there’s no eating until she says the consultation is finished. “Mistress Coyle–”

“And you’re sure there are eighty-one members of the caretaker families?”

“I should know,” I say. “I was in school with their children.”

She looks up. “I know this is tedious, Viola, but information is power. The information we give him. The information we learn from him.”

I sigh impatiently. “I don’t know anything about spying.”

“It’s not spying,” she says, returning to her notes. “It’s just finding things out.” She writes something more in her pad. “Four thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one people,” she says, almost to herself.

I know what she means. More people than the entire population of this planet. Enough to change everything.

But change it how?

“When he speaks with you again,” she says, “you can’t tell him about the ships. Keep him guessing. Keep him off the right number.”

“While I’m also supposed to be finding out what I can,” I say.

She closes her pad, consultation over. “Information is power,” she repeats.

I sit up in the bed, pretty much sick to death of being a patient. “Can I ask you something?”

She stands and reaches for her cloak. “Certainly.”

“Why do you trust me?”

“Your face when he walked into your room,” she says without hesitating. “You looked as if you’d just met your worst enemy.”

She snaps the buttons of the cloak under her chin. I watch her carefully. “If I could just find Todd or get to that communications tower . . .”

“And be taken by the army?” She’s not frowning but her eyes are bright. “Lose us our one advantage?” She opens the door. “No, my girl, the President will come a-calling and when he does, what you find out from him will help us.”

I call out after her as she goes, “Who do you mean by us?”

But she’s gone.

“ . . . and the last thing I really remember is him picking me up and carrying me down a long, long hill, and telling me that I wasn’t going to die, that he’d save me.”

“Wow,” breathes Maddy softly, wisps of hair sneaking out from under her cap as we walk slowly up one hallway and down another to build my strength. “And he did save you.”

“But he can’t kill,” I say, “not even to save himself. That’s the thing about him, why they wanted him so bad. He isn’t like them. He killed a Spackle once and you should have seen how he suffered for it. And now they’ve got him–”

I have to stop and blink a lot and look at the floor.

“I need to get out of here,” I say, clenching my teeth. “I’m no spy. I need to find him and I need to get to that tower and warn them. Maybe they can send help. They have more scout ships that could reach here. They’ve got weapons . . .”

Maddy’s face looks tense, like it always does when I talk this way. “We’re not even allowed outside yet.”

“You can’t just accept what people tell you, Maddy. You can’t just do that if they’re wrong.”

“And you can’t fight an army on your own.” She turns me gently back down the hallway, giving me a smile. “Not even the great and brave Viola Eade.”

“I did it before,” I say. “I did with him.”

She lowers her voice. “Vi–”

“I lost my parents,” I say and my voice is husky. “And there’s no way I can get them back. And now I’ve lost him. And if there’s a chance, if there’s even a chance–”

“Mistress Coyle won’t allow it,” she says, but there’s something in her voice that makes me look up.

“But?” I say.

Maddy says no more, just walks us over to the hall window that looks out onto the road. A troop of soldiers passes by in the bright sunlight, a cart full of dusty purple grain passing by the other way, the Noise we can hear from the town coming down the road like an army all on its own.

At first it was like no Noise I’d ever heard, this weird buzzing sound of metal grinding against metal. Then it got even louder than that, like a thousand men shouting at once, which I guess is pretty much what it is, too loud and messy to be able to pick out any individual person.

Too loud to pick out one boy.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as we all think.” Maddy’s voice is slow, weighing every word as if she’s testing them out for herself. “I mean, the town looks peaceful. Loud, but the men who deliver the food say the stores are about to re-open. I’ll bet your Todd is out there working away at a job, safe and alive and waiting to see you.”

I can’t tell if she’s saying this because she believes it or because she’s trying to get me to believe it. I wipe my nose with my sleeve. “That could be true.”

She looks at me for a long time, obviously thinking something but not saying it. Then she turns back to the glass.

“Just listen to them roar,” she says.

There are three other healers here besides Mistress Coyle. Mistress Waggoner, a short round puff of a woman with wrinkles and a moustache, Mistress Nadari, who treats cancers and who I’ve only seen once closing a door behind her, and Mistress Lawson, who treats children in another house of healing but who was trapped here while having a consultation with Mistress Coyle when the surrender happened and who’s been fretting ever since about the ill children she left behind.

There are more apprentices, too, a dozen besides Maddy and Corinne, who– because they work with Mistress Coyle– seem to be the top two apprentices out of the whole house, maybe even all of Haven. I rarely see the others except when they’re trailing behind one of the healers, stethoscopes bouncing, white coats flapping behind them, off to find something to do.

Because the truth of it is, as the days go by and the town gets on with whatever it’s doing beyond our doors, most of us patients are getting better and new ones aren’t arriving. All the male patients were taken out of here the first night, Maddy told me, whether they could travel or not, and no new women have been brought here even though invasion and surrender aren’t bars to getting sick.