The Knife of Never Letting Go

“But before I even understood what was going on with the Noise and with Prentisstown and with whatever your story was, I could tell about you. People can tell, Todd. We can see that you won’t hurt us. That that’s not you.”

“You hit me in the face with a branch,” I say.

She puts her hands on her hips. “Well, what did you expect? You came at me with a knife. But I didn’t hit you hard enough to hurt you badly, did I?”

I don’t say nothing.

“And I was right,” she says. “You bandaged my arm. You rescued me from Aaron when you didn’t have to. You took me out of the swamp where I would have been killed. You stood up for me to that man in the orchard. You came with me when we needed to leave Farbranch.”

“No,” I say, my voice low, “no, yer not reading the story right. We’re only having to run cuz I couldn’t–”

“I think I’m finally understanding the story, Todd,” she says. “Why are they coming after you so fiercely? Why is a whole army chasing you across towns and rivers and plains and the whole stupid planet?” She points to Mr Prentiss Jr. “I heard what he said. Don’t you wonder why they want you so badly?”

The pit in me is just getting blacker and darker. “Cuz I’m the one who don’t fit.”

“Exactly!”

My eyes go wide. “Why is that good news? I have an army who wants to kill me cuz I’m not a killer.”

“Wrong,” she says. “You have an army who wants to make you a killer.”

I blink. “Huh?”

She takes another step forward. “If they can turn you into the kind of man they want–”

“Boy,” I say. “Not a man yet.”

She waves this away. “If they can snuff out that part of you that’s good, the part of you that won’t kill, then they win, don’t you see? If they can do it to you, they can do it to anyone. And they win. They win!”

She’s near me now and she reaches out her hand and puts it on my arm, the one still holding the knife.

“We beat them,” she says, “you beat them by not becoming what they want.”

I clench my teeth. “He killed Ben and Cillian.”

She shakes her head. “No, he said he did. And you believed him.”

We look down at him. He’s not twitching no more and the steam is starting to lessen.

“I know this kind of boy,” she says. “We have this kind of boy even on spaceships. He’s a liar.”

“He’s a man.”

“How can you keep saying that?” she asks, her voice finally snappy. “How can you keep saying that he’s a man and you’re not? Just because of some stupid birthday? If you were where I came from you’d already be fourteen and a month!”

“I’m not where yer from!” I shout. “I’m from here and that’s how it works here!”

“Well, how it works here is wrong.” She lets go of my arm and kneels down by Mr Prentiss Jr. “We’ll tie him up. We’ll tie him up good and tight and we’ll get the heck out of here, all right?”

I don’t let go of the knife.

I will never let go of this knife, no matter what she says, no matter how she says it.

She looks up and around. “Where’s Manchee?”

Oh, no.

We find him in the bushes. He growls at us without words, just animal growls. He’s holding his left eye shut and there’s blood around his mouth. It takes a bunch of tries but I finally catch him while Viola takes out her medipak-of-wonders. I hold him down as she forces him to swallow a pill that makes him go floppy and then she cleans out his broken teeth and puts a cream in his eye. She tapes a bandage to it and he looks so small and beaten that when he says “Thawd?” thru one-eyed grogginess I just hug him to me and sit for a bit, under the bushes, outta the rain, while Viola repacks everything and gets my rucksack outta the mud.

“Your clothes are all wet,” she says after a while. “And the food is smashed. But the book’s still in the plastic. The book’s all right.”

And the thought of my ma knowing what a coward her son would be one day makes me want to throw the book in the river.

But I don’t.

We go to tie up Mr Prentiss Jr with his own rope and find that the electric shock has blown the wooden stock right off of his rifle. Which is a shame cuz it coulda come in handy.

“What was that you shocked him with?” I ask, huffing and puffing as we drag him to the side of the road. Knocked out people are heavy.

“A device for telling the ship in space where I am on the planet,” she says. “It took forever to pull apart.”

I stand up. “How will yer ship know where you are now?”

She shrugs. “We just have to hope that Haven’ll have something.”

I watch her go to her own bag and pick it up. I sure hope Haven has half what she’s expecting.

We leave. Mr Prentiss Jr was right about the stupidity of staying on the road, so we keep twenty or thirty metres away from it on the non-river side, trying to keep it in sight as best we can. We take turns carrying Manchee as the night passes.

We don’t talk much neither.

Cuz she might have a point, right? Yeah, okay, maybe that’s what the army’s after, maybe if they can make me join, they can make anyone join. Maybe I’m their test, who knows, the whole town’s crazy enough to believe something like that.

If one of us falls, we all fall.

But for one that don’t explain why Aaron’s after us and for two I’ve heard her lie now, ain’t I? Her words sound good but who’s to know if she’s making truth up rather than just saying it?

Cuz I’m never going to join the army and Mayor Prentiss must know that, not after what they did to Ben and Cillian, the truth of Mr Prentiss Jr’s Noise or not, so that’s where she’s dead wrong. Whatever they want, whatever the weakness is in me that I can’t kill a man even when he deserves it, it’s got to change for me to be a man. It’s got to or how can I hold my head up?

Midnight passes and I’m twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

Cuz if I’d killed Aaron, he couldn’t’ve told Mayor Prentiss where he’d seen me last.

If I coulda killed Mr Prentiss Jr back at the farm, he wouldn’t’ve led the Mayor’s men to Ben and Cillian and wouldn’t’ve lived to harm Manchee so.

If I’d been any kinda killer, I coulda stayed and helped Ben and Cillian defend themselves.