“It’d only be remarkable if you didn’t, Mrs Fox.”
“Just by the window–”
“Soldiers smoking their cigarettes.”
“No, I’m sure it was–”
“I’m really very busy, Mrs Fox, if you don’t mind.”
I replace her pillows and empty her bedpan. She doesn’t speak again until I’m almost ready to go.
“Things aren’t like they used to be,” she says quietly.
“You can say that again.”
“Haven used to be better,” she says. “Not perfect. But better than this.”
And she just looks out of her window.
I’m dying with tiredness at the end of my rounds but I sit down on my bed and take out the note that hasn’t left my pocket. I read it for the hundredth, thousandth time.
My girl,
Now is the time you must choose.
Can we count on you?
The Answer
Not even a name, not even her name.
Almost three weeks I’ve had this note. Three weeks and nothing, so maybe that’s how much they think they can count on me. Not another note, not another sign, just stuck here in this house with Corinne– or Mistress Wyatt, as I have to call her now– and the patients. Women who’ve fallen sick in the normal course of things, yes, but also women who’ve returned from “interviews” with the Mayor’s men about the Answer, women with bruises and cuts, women with broken ribs, broken fingers, broken arms. Women with burns.
And those are the lucky ones, the ones who aren’t in prison.
And every third or fourth day, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
And more are arrested and more are sent here.
And there’s no word from Mistress Coyle.
And no word from the Mayor.
No word about why I’m being left alone. You’d think I’d be the one who’d be taken in first, the one who’d have interview after interview, the one who’d be sitting rotting in a prison cell.
“But nothing,” I whisper. “Nothing at all.”
And no word from Todd.
I close my eyes. I’m too tired to feel anything. Every day, I look for ways to get to the communications tower but there are soldiers everywhere now, way too many to find a pattern, and it only gets worse with each new bomb.
“I’ve got to do something,” I say out loud. “I have to or I’ll go crazy.” I laugh. “I’ll go crazy and start talking to myself.”
I laugh some more, a lot more than how funny it actually is.
And there’s a knock at my window.
I sit up, my heart pumping.
“Mistress Coyle?” I say.
Is this it? Is it now?
Is this where I have to choose?
Can they count on me?
(but is that Noise I can hear . . .?)
I get to my knees on the bed and pull the curtains back just far enough to look through a slit outside, expecting that frown, those fingers going over her forehead–
But it’s not her.
It’s not her at all.
“Todd!”
And I’m throwing back the sash and lifting up the glass and he’s leaning in and his Noise is saying my name and I’m putting my arms around him and dragging him inside, actually lifting him off the ground and pulling him through my window and he’s climbing up and we fall onto my bed and I’m on my back and he’s lying on top of me and my face is close to his and I remember how we were like this after we’d jumped under the waterfall with Aaron right behind us and I looked right into his eyes.
And I knew we’d be safe.
“Todd.”
In the light of my room, I see his eye is blacked and there’s blood on his nose and I’m saying, “What happened? Are you hurt? I can–”
But he just says, “It’s you.”
I don’t know how much time passes with us just lying there, just feeling that the other is really there, really true, really alive, feeling the safety of him, his weight against mine, the roughness of his fingers touching my face, his warmth and his smell and the dustiness of his clothes, and we barely speak and his Noise is roiling with feeling, with complicated things, with memories of me being shot, of how he felt when he thought I was dying, of how I feel now at his fingertips, but at the front of it all, he’s just saying, Viola, Viola, Viola.
And it’s Todd.
Bloody hell, it’s Todd.
And everything’s all right.
And then there are footsteps in the hall.
Footsteps that stop right outside my room.
We both look towards the door. A shadow is cast underneath it, two legs of someone standing just on the other side.
I wait for the knock.
I wait for the order to get him out of here.
I wait for the fight I’ll put up.
But then the feet walk away.
“Who was that?” Todd asks.
“Mistress Wyatt,” I say, and I can hear the surprise in my own voice.
“And then the bombs started going off,” I finish, “and he only called for me twice, early on, to ask me if I knew anything and I didn’t, I truly didn’t, and then that was it. Nothing. That’s all I know about him, I swear.”
“He ain’t barely spoken to me since the bombs neither,” Todd says, looking down at his feet. “I was worried it was you setting ’em off.”
I see the bridge blowing up in his Noise. I see me being the one to do it. “No,” I say, thinking of the note in my pocket. “It wasn’t me.”
Todd swallows, then he says simply, clearly, “Should we run?”
“Yes,” I say, betraying Corinne so fast I feel a red blush of shame already coming over me, but yes, we should run, we should run and run.
“Where, tho?” he asks. “Where is there to go?”
I open my mouth to answer–
But I hesitate.
“Where are the Answer hiding?” he asks. “Can we go there?”
And I notice some tension in his Noise, disapproval and reluctance.
The bombs. He doesn’t like the bombs either.
I see a picture of some dead soldiers in the wreckage of a cafe.
But there’s more, too, isn’t there?
I hesitate again.
I’m wondering, just for the briefest moment, just as if it’s a fly I’m brushing away, I’m wondering–
I’m wondering if I can tell him.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t. They didn’t tell me in case I couldn’t be trusted.”
Todd looks up at me.
And for a second, I see the doubt on his face, too.