The Ask and the Answer (Page 21)

There’s certainly no time for me and Maddy to look for our moment, no time to even notice that the Mayor still hasn’t come to see me. Instead, I run around a lot, getting in the way, helping out where I can, and squeezing apprentice lessons in.

I turn out not to be a natural healer.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get this,” I say, failing yet again to tell the blood pressure of a sweet old patient called Mrs Fox.

“It sure feels that way,” Corinne says, glancing up at the clock.

“Patience, pretty girl,” Mrs Fox says, her face wrinkling up in a smile. “A thing worth learning is worth learning well.”

“You’re right there, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says, looking back at me. “Try it again.”

I pump up the armband to inflate it, listen through the stethoscope for the right kind of whoosh, whoosh in Mrs Fox’s blood and match that up to the little dial. “Sixty over twenty?” I guess weakly.

“Well, let’s find out,” Corinne says. “Have you died this morning, Mrs Fox?”

“Oh, dearie me, no,” Mrs Fox says.

“Probably not sixty over twenty then,” Corinne says.

“I’ve only been doing this for three days,” I say.

“I’ve been doing it for six years,” Corinne says, “since I was way younger than you, my girl. And here you are, can’t even work a blood pressure sleeve, yet suddenly an apprentice just like me. Funny how life works, huh?”

“You’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Mrs Fox says to me.

“No, she isn’t, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says. “I’m sorry to contradict you, but some of us regard healing as a sacred duty.”

“I regard it as a sacred duty,” I say, almost as a reflex.

This is a mistake.

“Healing is more than a job, my girl,” Corinne says, making my girl sound like the worst insult. “There is nothing more important in this life than the preservation of it. We’re God’s hands on this world. We are the opposite of your friend the tyrant.”

“He’s not my–”

“To allow someone, anyone, to suffer is the greatest sin there is.”

“Corinne–”

“You don’t understand anything,” she says, her voice low and fierce. “Quit pretending that you do.”

Mrs Fox has shrunk down nearly as far as I have.

Corinne glances at her and back at me, then she straightens her cap and tugs the lapels on her cloak, stretching out her neck from right to left. She closes her eyes and lets out a long, long breath.

Without looking at me, she says, “Try it again.”

“The difference between a clinic and a house of healing?” Mistress Coyle asks, ticking off boxes on a sheet.

“The main difference is that clinics are run by male doctors, houses of healing by female healers,” I recite, as I count out the day’s pills into separate little cups for each patient.

“And why is that?”

“So that a patient, male or female, can have a choice between knowing the thoughts of their doctor or not.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And the real reason?”

“Politics,” I say, returning her word.

“Correct.” She finishes the paperwork and hands it to me. “Take these and the medicines to Madeleine, please.”

She leaves and I finish filling up the tray of medicines. When I come out with it in my hands, I see Mistress Coyle down at the end of the hallway, passing by Mistress Nadari.

And I swear I see her slip Mistress Nadari a note, without either of them pausing.

We can still only go out for an hour at a time, still only in groups of four, but that’s enough to see how New Prentisstown is putting itself together. As my first week as an apprentice comes to an end, we hear tell that some women are even being sent out into fields to work in women-only groups.

We hear tell that the Spackle are being kept somewhere on the edge of town, all together as one group, awaiting “processing”, whatever that might mean.

We hear tell the old Mayor is working as a dustman.

We hear nothing about a boy.

“I missed his birthday,” I tell Maddy, as I practise tying bandages around a rubber leg so ridiculously realistic everyone calls it Ruby. “It was four days ago. I lost track of how long I was asleep and–”

I can’t say any more, just pull the bandage tight–

And think of when he put a bandage on me–

And when I put bandages on him.

“I’m sure he’s fine, Vi,” Maddy says.

“No, you’re not.”

“No,” she says, looking back out the window to the road, “but against all odds the city’s not at war. Against all odds, we’re still alive and still working. So, against all odds, Todd could be alive and well.”

I pull tighter on the bandage. “Do you know anything about a blue A?”

She turns to me. “A what?”

I shrug. “Something I saw in Mistress Coyle’s notebook.”

“No idea.” She looks back out the window.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m counting soldiers,” she says. She looks back again at me and Ruby. “It’s a good bandage.” Her smile makes it almost seem true.

I head down the main hallway, Ruby kicking from one hand. I have to practise injecting shots into her thigh. I already feel sorry for the poor woman whose thigh gets my first real jab.

I come round a corner as the hallway reaches the centre of the building, where it turns ninety degrees down the other wing, and I nearly collide with a group of mistresses, who stop when they see me.

Mistress Coyle and four, five, six other healers behind her. I recognize Mistress Nadari and Mistress Waggoner, and there’s Mistress Lawson, too, but I’ve never seen the other three before and didn’t even see them come into the house of healing.

“Have you no work, my girl?” Mistress Coyle says, some edge in her voice.

“Ruby,” I stammer, holding out the leg.

“Is this her?” asks one of the healers I don’t recognize.

Mistress Coyle doesn’t introduce me.

She just says, “Yes, this is the girl.”

I have to wait all day to see Maddy again, but before I can ask her about it, she says, “I’ve figured it out.”

“Did one of them have a scar on her upper lip?” Maddy whispers in the dark. It’s well past midnight, well past lights out, well past when she should be in her own room.