The Knife of Never Letting Go

“Ben said that they came to this world for the simpler life, said that there was even a fight in the early days whether to destroy the fission generators.”

Viola looks horrified. “You would have all died.”

“That’s why they weren’t destroyed,” I shrug. “Not even after Mayor Prentiss decided to get rid of most everything else.”

Viola rubs her shins and looks up into the stars coming out thru the hole in the roof. “My mother and father were so excited,” she says. “A whole new world, a whole new beginning, all these plans of peace and happiness.” She stops.

“I’m sorry it ain’t that way,” I say.

She looks down at her feet. “Would you mind waiting outside for a little while until I fall asleep?”

“Yeah,” I say, “no problem.”

I take my rucksack and go out the opening where the front door used to be. Manchee gets up from where he’s curled and follows me. When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and falls asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog.

I watch the moons rise, the stars following ’em, the same moons and the same stars as were in Prentisstown, still out here past the end of the world. I take out the book again, the oil in the cover shining from the moonlight. I flip thru the pages.

I wonder if my ma was excited to land here, if her head was full of peace and good hope and joy everlasting.

I wonder if she found any before she died.

This makes my chest heavy so I put the book back in the rucksack and lean my head against the boards of the mill. I listen to the river flow past and the leaves shushing to themselves in the few trees around us and I look at the shadows of far distant hills on the horizon and the rustling forests on them.

I’ll wait for a few minutes, then go back inside and make sure Viola’s okay.

The next thing I know she’s waking me up and it’s hours later and my head is completely confused till I hear her saying, “Noise, Todd, I can hear Noise.”

I’m on my feet before I’m fully awake, quieting Viola and a groggy Manchee barking his complaints. They get quiet and I put my ear into the night.

Whisper whisper whisper there, like a breeze whisper whisper whisper no words and far away but hovering, a storm cloud behind a mountain whisper whisper whisper.

“We gotta go,” I say, already reaching for my rucksack.

“Is it the army?” Viola calls, running thru the door of the mill as she grabs her own bag.

“Army!” Manchee barks.

“Don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”

“Could it be the next settlement?” Viola comes back, bag round her shoulders. “We can’t be too far from it.”

“Then why didn’t we hear it when we got here?”

She bites her lip. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Damn.”

And so the second night after Farbranch passes like the first, running in darkness, using torches when we need them, trying not to think. Just before the sun comes up, the river moves outta the flats and into another small valley like the one by Farbranch and sure enough, there’s Blazing Beacons or whatever so maybe there really are people living out this way.

They’ve got orchards, too, and fields of wheat, tho nothing looks near as well tended as Farbranch. Lucky for us, the main bit of town is on top of the hill with what looks like a bigger road going thru it, the left fork, maybe, and five or six buildings, most of which could use a lick of paint. Down on our dirt road by the river there are just boats and wormy-looking docks and dockhouses and whatever else you build on a flowing river.

We can’t ask anyone for help. Even if we got it, the army’s coming, ain’t it? We should warn them but what if they’re Matthew Lyles rather than Hildys? And what if by warning them we draw the army right to them cuz then we’re in everyone’s Noise? And what if the settlement knows we’re the reason the army’s coming and they decide to turn us over to them?

But they deserve to be warned, don’t they?

But what if that endangers us?

You see? What’s the right answer?

And so we sneak thru the settlement like thieves, running from dockhouse to dockhouse, hiding from sight of the town up the hill, waiting as quiet as we can when we see a skinny woman taking a basket into a hen house up by some trees. It’s small enough that we get thru it before the sun even fully rises and we’re out the other side and back on the road like it never existed, like it never happened, even to us.

“So that’s that settlement then,” Viola whispers as we take a look behind us and watch it disappear behind a bend. “We’ll never even know what it was properly called.”

“And now we really don’t know what’s ahead of us,” I whisper back.

“We keep going until we get to Haven.”

“And then what?”

She don’t say nothing to that.

“That’s a lotta faith we’re putting in a word,” I say.

“There’s got to be something, Todd,” she says, her face kinda grim. “There has to be something there.”

I don’t say nothing for a second and then I say, “I guess we’ll see.”

And so starts another morning. Twice on the road we see men with horse-drawn carts. Both times we hie off into the woods, Viola with her hand round Manchee’s snout and me trying to keep my Noise as Prentisstown-free as possible till they pass.

Nothing much changes as the hours go by. We don’t hear no more whispers from the army, if that’s what it even was, but there ain’t no point in finding out for sure, is there? Morning’s turned into afternoon again when we see a settlement high up on a far hill. We’re coming up a little hill ourselves, the river dropping down a bit, tho we can see it spreading out in the distance, what looks like the start of a plain we’re gonna have to cross.

Viola points her binos at the settlement for a minute, then hands them to me. It’s ten or fifteen buildings this time but even from a distance it looks scrubby and run down.

“I don’t get it,” Viola says. “Going by a regular schedule of settlement, subsistence farming should be years over by now. And there’s obviously trade, so why is there still this much struggle?”

“You don’t really know nothing about settler’s lives, do you?” I say, chafing just a little.

She purses her lips. “It was required in school. I’ve been learning about how to set up a successful colony since I was five.”