The Ask and the Answer

And as ever, no thoughts, no Noise, no nothing.

They can only be getting the cure in the fodder I still have to shovel out. But why? Why when no one else is? It makes them a sea of silent clicking and white backs bent into the cold and white mouths sending out puffs of steam and white arms pulling up handfuls of dirt and when yer looking out across the monastery grounds, all those white bodies working, well, they could be a herd of sheep, couldn’t they?

Even tho if you look close you can see family groups and husbands and wives and fathers and sons. You can see older ones lifting smaller amounts more slowly. You can see younger ones helping ’em, trying to keep us from seeing that the older ones can’t work too hard. You can see a baby strapped to its mother’s chest with an old piece of cloth. You can see an especially tall one directing others along a faster work chain. You can see a small female packing mud around the infected number band of a larger female. You can see ’em working together, keeping their heads down, trying not to be the one who gets seen by me or Davy or the guards behind the barbed wire.

You can see all that if you look close.

But it’s easier if you don’t.

We can’t give ’em shovels, of course. They could use ’em against us as weapons and the soldiers on the walls get twitchy if a Spackle even stretches its arms up too high. So there they all are, bending to the ground, digging, moving rocks, silent as clouds, suffering and not doing nothing about it.

I got a weapon, tho. They gave me the rifle back.

Cuz where am I gonna go?

Now that she’s gone.

“Hurry it up!” I shout at the Spackle, my Noise rising red at the thought of her.

I catch Davy looking over at me, a surprised grin on his face. I turn away and cross the field to another group. I’m halfway there when I hear a louder click.

I look round till I find the source.

But it’s only ever the same one.

1017, staring at me again, with that look that ain’t forgiveness. He moves his eyes to my hands.

It’s only then I realize I’ve got them both clenched hard around my rifle.

I can’t even remember taking it off my shoulder.

Even with all this Spackle labour, it’s still gonna take a coupla months to even come close to finishing this building, whatever it is, and by that time it’ll be mid-winter and the Spackle won’t have the shelter they were sposed to be building for themselves and I know they live outside more than men do but I don’t think even they can live unsheltered in the winter frost and I ain’t heard of nowhere else they’re gonna be going yet.

Still, we had all the internal walls torn down in seven days, two ahead of schedule, and no Spackle even died, tho we did have a few with broken arms. Those Spackle were taken away by soldiers.

We ain’t seen ’em since.

By the end of the second week after the tower bomb, we’ve nearly dug all the trenches and blocks for the foundayshuns to be poured, something Davy and I are sposed to supervize even tho it’s gonna be the Spackle who know how to do it.

“Pa says they were the labour that rebuilt the city after the Spackle War,” Davy says. “Tho you wouldn’t know it from this bunch.”

He spits out a shell from the seeds he’s eating. Food’s getting a bit scarce what with the Answer adding supply raids to the ongoing bombs but Davy always manages to scrounge up something. We’re sitting on a pile of rocks, looking out over the one big field, now dug up with square holes and ditches and so full of rock piles there’s barely any room for the Spackle to crowd into.

But they do, cramming onto the edges and huddling together in the cold. And they don’t say nothing about it.

Davy spits out another shell. “You ever gonna talk again?”

“I talk,” I say.

“No, you scream at yer workforce and you grunt at me. That ain’t talking.” He’s spits out another shell, high and long, hitting the nearest Spackle in the head. It just brushes it away and keeps on digging out the last of a trench.

“She left ya,” Davy says. “Get over it.”

My Noise rises. “Shut up.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

I turn to look at him, eyes wide.

“What?” he says. “I’m just saying, you know? She left, don’t mean she’s dead or nothing.” Spit. “From what I remember, that filly can take plenty care of herself.”

There’s a memory in his Noise of being electrocuted on the river road. It should make me smile, but it don’t, cuz she’s standing right there in his Noise, standing right there and taking him down.

Standing right there and not standing right here.

(where’d she go?)

(where’d she effing go?)

Mayor Ledger told me just after the tower bombs that the army had gone straight for the ocean cuz they’d got a tip-off that that’s where the Answer were hiding–

(was it me? did he hear it in me? I burn at the thought–)

But when Mr. Hammar and his men got there, they didn’t find nothing but long-abandoned buildings and half-sunken boats.

Cuz the informayshun turned out to be false.

And I burn at that, too.

(did she lie to me?)

(did she do it on purpose?)

“Jesus, pigpiss.” Davy spits again. “It’s not like any of the rest of us got girlfriends. They’re all in ruddy jail or setting off bombs every week or walking around in groups so big you can’t even talk to ’em.”

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” I say.

“Not the point,” he says. “All it means is that yer just as alone as the rest of us, so get over it.”

There’s a sudden, ugly strength of feeling in his Noise, which he wipes away in an instant when he sees me watching him. “What’re you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Damn right.” He stands, takes his rifle and stomps back into the field.

Somehow 1017 keeps ending up in my part of the work. I’m mainly in the back part of the fields, finishing up digging the trenches. Davy’s near the front, getting Spackle to snap together the pre-formed guide walls we’ll be using once the concrete gets poured. 1017’s sposed to be doing that, but every time I look up, there he is, nearest me again no matter how many times I send him back.

He’s working, sure, digging up his handfuls of dirt or piling up the sod in even rows, but always looking for me, always trying to catch my eye.

Clicking at me.

I walk towards him, my hand up on the stock of my rifle, grey clouds starting to move in overhead. “I sent you over to Davy,” I bark. “What’re you doing here?”