The Knife of Never Letting Go

I stand up, hold out my arm and give him two fingers but he’s already disappearing behind big clouds of smoke.

I cough and spit blood again. “We gotta keep moving,” I say, coughing some more. “Maybe they’ll turn back, maybe there’s no other way across, but we shouldn’t wait to find out.”

I see the knife in the dust. Shame comes right quick, like a new pain all its own. The things I said. I reach down and pick it up and put it back in its sheath.

The girl’s still got her head down, coughing to herself. I pick up her bag for her and hold it out for her to take.

“Come on,” I say. “We can at least get away from the smoke.”

She looks up at me.

I look back at her.

My face burns and not from the heat.

“I’m sorry.” I look away from her, from her eyes and face, blank and quiet as ever.

I turn back up the path.

“Viola,” I hear.

I spin around, look at her.

“What?” I say.

She’s looking back at me.

She’s opening her mouth.

She’s talking.

“My name,” she says. “It’s Viola.”

I don’t say nothing to this for a minute. Neither does she. The fire burns, the smoke rises, Manchee’s tongue hangs out in a stunned pant, till finally I say, “Viola.”

She nods.

“Viola,” I say again.

She don’t nod this time.

“I’m Todd,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

She’s not quite meeting my eye.

“So you can talk then?” I say, but all she does is look at me again quickly and then away. I turn to the still burning bridge, to the smoke turning into a fogbank twixt us and the other side of the river, which I don’t know if it makes me feel safer or not, if not seeing the Mayor and his men is better than seeing them. “That was–” I start to say, but she’s getting up and holding out her hand for her bag.

I realize I’m still holding it. I hand it to her and she takes it.

“We should go on,” she says. “Away from here.”

Her accent’s funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown’s. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they’re swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they’re sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

Manchee’s just in awe of her. “Away,” he says lowly, staring up at her like she’s made of food.

There’s this moment now where it feels like I could start asking her stuff, like now she’s talking, I could just hit her with every asking I can think of about who she is, where she’s from, what happened, and them askings are all over my Noise, flying at her like pellets, but there’s so much stuff wanting to come outta my mouth that nothing is and so my mouth don’t move and she’s holding her bag over her shoulder and looking at the ground and then she’s walking past me, past Manchee, on up the trail.

“Hey,” I say.

She stops and turns back.

“Wait for me,” I say.

I pick up my rucksack, hooking it back over my shoulders. I press my hand against the knife in its sheath against my lower back. I make the rucksack comfortable with a shrug, say “C’mon, Manchee”, and off we go up the trail, following the girl.

On this side of the river the path makes a slow turn away from the cliffside, heading into what looks like a landscape of scrub and brush, making its way around and away from the larger mountain, looming up at us on the left.

At the place where the trail turns, we both stop and look back without saying that we’re gonna. The bridge is still burning like you wouldn’t believe, hanging on the opposite cliff like a waterfall on fire, flames having leapt up the entire length of it, angry and greenish yellow. The smoke’s so thick, it’s still impossible to tell what the Mayor and his men are doing, have done, if they’re gone or waiting or what. There could be a whisper of Noise coming thru but there could also not be a whisper of Noise, what with the fire blazing and the wood popping and the whitewater below. As we watch, the fire finishes its business on the stakes on the other side of the river and with a great snap, the burning bridge falls, falls, falls, clattering against the cliffside, splashing into the river, sending up more clouds of smoke and steam, making everything even foggier.

“What was in that box?” I say to the girl.

She looks at me, opens her mouth, but then closes it again, turning away.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

She looks at me again and my Noise is full of just a few minutes ago when I was just about to hurt her, when I was just about to–

Anyway.

We don’t say no more. She turns back onto the path and me and Manchee follow her into the scrub.

Knowing she can speak don’t help with the silence none. Knowing she’s got words in her head don’t mean nothing if you can only hear ’em when she talks. Looking at the back of her head as she’s walking, I still feel my heart pull towards her silence, still feel like I’ve lost something terrible, something so sad I want to weep.

“Weep,” Manchee barks.

The back of her head just keeps on walking.

The path is still pretty wide, wide enough for horses, but the terrain around us is getting rockier, the path twistier. We can hear the river down below us to our right now but it feels like we’re tending away from it a bit, getting ourselves deep into an area that feels almost walled, rockface sometimes coming up on both sides, like we’re walking at the bottom of a box. Little prickly firs grow out of every crevice and yellow vines with thorns wrapping themselves around the firs’ trunks and you can see and hear yellow razor lizards hissing at us as we pass. Bite! they say, as a threat. Bite! Bite!

Anything you might want to touch here would cut you.

After maybe twenty, thirty minutes the path gets to a bit where it widens out, where a few real trees start growing again, where the forest looks like it might be about to restart, where there’s grass and stones low enough for sitting on. Which is what we do. Sit.

I take some dried mutton outta my rucksack and use the knife to cut strips for me, for Manchee, and for the girl. She takes them without saying anything and we sit quietly apart and eat for a minute.

I am Todd Hewitt, I think, closing my eyes and chewing, embarrassed for my Noise now, now that I know she can hear it, now that I know she can think about it.