The Ask and the Answer

But they’re carrying rifles.

And they’re raising them at us.

“And who the hell is this?” one barks, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and a scar down his jaw line.

“Don’t shoot!” Mistress Coyle says, hands out and up.

“We heard the explosion,” says the other soldier, a younger one, not much older than me, with blond, shoulder-length hair.

Then the older soldier says something else, something unexpected.

“You’re late.”

“That’s enough, Magnus,” Mistress Coyle says, lowering her hands and stepping forward to the cart. “And put your rifles down, she’s with me.”

“What?” I say, still frozen to my spot.

“The tracer malfunctioned completely,” the younger soldier says to her. “We’re not even sure where it came down.”

“I told you they were too old,” Magnus says.

“It did its job,” Mistress Coyle says, bustling around the cart, “wherever it landed.”

“Hey!” I say. “What’s going on?”

And then I hear, “Hildy?”

Mistress Coyle stops in her tracks, the two soldiers do, too, and stare at the man driving the cart.

“Iss you, ain it?” he says. “Hildy hoo’s also called Viola.”

My mind’s been racing so fast, so completely focused on the soldiers, that I barely took in the man driving the cart, the nearly expressionless face, the clothes, the hat, the voice, the Noise flat and calm as the far horizon.

The man that once drove me and Todd across a sea of things.

“Wilf,” I gasp.

Now everyone looks at me, Mistress Coyle’s eyebrows so high it’s like they’re trying to crawl into her hair.

“Hey,” Wilf says, in greeting.

“Hey,” I say back, too stunned to say any more.

He touches two fingers to the brim of his hat. “Ah’m glad to see yoo mayde it.”

Mistress Coyle’s mouth is moving but no sound comes out for a second or two. “There’ll be time for that later,” she finally says. “We have to go now.”

“Will there be room for two?” the younger soldier asks.

“There’ll have to be.” She ducks down under the cart and removes a panel from the underside. She motions to me. “Get in.”

“In where?” I bend down and see a compartment hidden like a trick of the eye in the width of the cart, narrow and thin as a cot above the rear axle.

“Pack won’t fit,” Wilf says, pointing at the bag on my back. “Ah’ll take it.”

I slip it off and hand it to him. “Thank you, Wilf.”

“Now, Viola,” Mistress Coyle says.

I give Wilf a last nod, duck under the cart and crawl in, forcing my way across the compartment until my head’s nearly touching the far side. Mistress Coyle doesn’t wait and forces herself in after me. The younger soldier was right. There isn’t enough room. She’s pressed right up against me, face to face, her knees digging into my thighs, our noses less than a centimetre apart. She’s barely drawn her feet inside when the panel is replaced, plunging us into almost complete darkness.

“Where are we–” I start to say but she shushes me harshly.

And outside I hear soldiers marching fast up the road, led by the clopping of horse’s hooves.

“Report!” one of them shouts as they stop by the cart.

His voice–

It’s up high and I hear the horse whinnying beneath it–

But his voice–

“Heard the explosion, sir,” the older of our soldiers replies. “This man says he saw women heading past him down the river road about an hour ago.”

We hear the real soldier spit. “Bitches.”

I recognize his voice–

It’s Sergeant Hammar.

“Whose unit you two in?” he says.

“First, sir,” says our younger soldier, after the briefest of pauses. “Captain O’Hare.”

“That pansy?” Sergeant Hammar spits. “You wanna do some real soldiering, transfer to the Fourth. I’ll show you what’s what.”

“Yes, sir,” says our older soldier, sounding more nervous than I’d want him to.

I can hear the Noise of the soldiers in Sergeant Hammar’s unit. They’re thinking of the cart. They’re thinking of the explosions. They’re thinking about shooting women.

But there’s no Noise coming from Sergeant Hammar.

“Arrest this man,” Sergeant Hammar finally says, meaning Wilf.

“We were just doing that, sir.”

“Bitches,” Sergeant Hammar says again, and we hear him spur his horse (yield, it thinks) and he and his men march off at speed.

I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “He wasn’t even punished,” I whisper, more to myself than to Mistress Coyle.

“Later,” she whispers back.

I hear Wilf snap the reins and we rock as the cart plods slowly forward.

So the Mayor was a liar. All along.

Of course he was, you idiot.

And Maddy’s killer walks free to kill again, his cure still in place.

And I’m bumping and juddering against the woman who destroyed the only hope of contacting the ships that might save us.

And Todd is out there. Somewhere. Being left behind.

I’ve never felt so lonely in my life.

The compartment is hellishly small. We share too much of each other’s air, elbows and shoulders bruising away as we ride along, the heat soaking our clothes.

We don’t speak.

Time passes. And then more. And more after that. I fall into a kind of doze, the close warmth sucking the life right out of me. The rocking of the cart eventually flattens all my worries and I close my eyes against it.

I’m awakened by the older soldier knocking on the wood and I think we’re going to finally get out, but he just says, “We’re at the rough bit. Hold on.”

“To what?” I say, but I don’t say any more as the cart feels like it drops off a cliff.

Mistress Coyle’s forehead smacks into my nose and I smell blood almost at once. I hear her gasp and choke as my stray hand is shoved into her neck and still the cart tumbles and bumps and I wait for the moment where we topple end over end.

And then Mistress Coyle is working both arms around me, pulling me close to her and bracing us in the compartment with one hand and one foot pressed against the opposite side. I resist her, resist the implied comfort, but there’s wisdom in it as almost immediately we stop knocking each other about, even though the cart lurches and stutters.