“Corinne and her spacks,” Thea says, rolling her eyes and handing me another bag.
“Don’t call them that,” Corinne says. “If we could never treat them right, what do you think he’s going to be doing to them?”
“I’m sorry, Corinne,” Maddy says before I can ask what Corinne means, “but don’t you think it makes more sense to worry about us right now?” Her eyes are watching some soldiers who’ve noticed Corinne’s raised voice. They aren’t moving, haven’t even shifted from the veranda of a feed store.
But they’re looking.
“It was inhuman, what we did to them,” Corinne says.
“Yes, but they aren’t human,” Thea says, under her breath, looking at the soldiers, too.
“Thea Reese!” A vein bulges out of Corinne’s forehead. “How can you call yourself a healer and say–”
“Yes, yes, all right,” Maddy says, trying to calm her down. “It was awful. I agree. You know we all agree, but what could we have done about it?”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Did what to them?”
“The cure,” Corinne says, saying it like a curse.
Maddy turns to me with a frustrated sigh. “They found out that the cure worked on the Spackle.”
“By testing it on them,” Corinne says.
“But it does more than that,” Maddy says. “The Spackle don’t speak, you see. They can click their mouths a little but it’s hardly more than like when we snap our fingers.”
“The Noise was the only way they communicated,” Thea says.
“And it turned out we didn’t really need them to talk to us to tell them what to do,” Corinne says, her voice rising even more. “So who cares if they needed to talk to each other?”
I’m beginning to see. “And the cure . . .”
Thea nods. “It makes them docile.”
“Better slaves,” Corinne says bitterly.
My mouth drops open. “They were slaves?”
“Shhhh,” Maddy shushes harshly, jerking her head toward the soldiers watching us, their lack of Noise among all the ROAR of the other men making them seem ominously blank.
“It’s like we cut out their tongues,” Corinne says, lowering her voice but still burning.
But Maddy is already getting us on our way, looking back over her shoulder at the soldiers.
Who watch us go.
We walk the short distance back to the house of healing in silence, entering the front door under the blue outstretched hand painted over the door frame. After Corinne and Thea go inside, Maddy takes my arm lightly to hold me back.
She looks at the ground for a minute, a dimple forming in the middle of her eyebrows. “The way those soldiers looked at us,” she says.
“Yeah?”
She crosses her arms and shivers. “I don’t know if I like this version of peace very much.”
“I know,” I say softly.
She waits a moment, then she looks at me square. “Could your people help us? Could they stop this?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but finding out would be better than just sitting here, waiting for the worst to happen.”
She looks around to see if we’re being overheard. “Mistress Coyle is brilliant,” she says, “but sometimes she can only hear her own opinion.”
She waits, biting her upper lip.
“Maddy?”
“We’ll watch out,” she says.
“For what?”
“If the right moment arrives, and only if,” she looks around again, “we’ll see what we can do about contacting your ships.”
{VIOLA}
“But slavery is wrong,” I say, rolling up another bandage.
“The healers were always opposed to it.” Mistress Coyle ticks off another box on her inventory. “Even after the Spackle War, we thought it inhuman.”
“Then why didn’t you stop it?”
“If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.”
“War makes monsters of men,” I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead.
“And women,” Mistress Coyle says. She taps her fingers on boxes of syringes to count them.
“But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Thirteen years now.”
“Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong.”
She finally looks at me. “Life is only that simple when you’re young, my girl.”
“But you were in charge,” I say. “You could have done something.”
“And who told you I was in charge?”
“Corinne said–”
“Ah, Corinne,” she says, turning back to her clipboard, “doing her best to love me no matter what the facts.”
I open up another bag of supplies. “But if you were head of this Council thing,” I press on, “surely you could have done something about the Spackle.”
“Sometimes, my girl,” she says, giving me a displeased look, “you can lead people where they don’t want to go, but most of the time you can’t. The Spackle weren’t going to be freed, not after we’d just beaten them in an awful and vicious war, not when we needed so much labour to rebuild. But they could be treated better, couldn’t they? They could be fed properly and set to work humane hours and allowed to live together with their families. All victories I won for them, Viola.”
Her writing on the clipboard is a lot more forceful than it was. I watch her for a second. “Corinne says you were thrown off the Council for saving a life.”
She doesn’t answer me, just sets down her clipboard and looks on one of the higher shelves. She reaches up and takes down an apprentice hat and a folded apprentice cloak. She turns and tosses them to me.
“Who are these for?” I say, catching them.
“You want to find out about being a leader?” she says. “Then let’s put you on the path.”
I look at her face.
I look down at the cloak and the cap.
From then on, I barely have time to eat.
The day after women were allowed to move again, there were eighteen new patients, all female, who’d been suffering all kinds of things– appendicitis, heart problems, lapsed cancer treatments, broken bones– all trapped in houses where they’d been stuck after being separated from husbands and sons. The next day, there were eleven more. Mistress Lawson went back to the children’s house of healing the second she was able, but Mistresses Coyle, Waggoner and Nadari were suddenly rushing from room to room, shouting orders and saving lives. I don’t think anyone’s been to sleep since.