“How well did you really know her?” Mayor Ledger says.
“You shut up.”
I’m breathing hard, my chest rising and falling.
It’s good that she ran, ain’t it?
Ain’t it?
She was in danger and now–
(but)
(but did she blow up the tower?)
(why didn’t she tell me she was going to?)
(did she lie to me?)
And I shouldn’t think it, I shouldn’t think it, but here it comes–
She promised.
And she left.
She left me.
(Viola?)
(did you leave me?)
{VIOLA}
I open my eyes to the sound of wings flapping outside the door, something I already know in the few days I’ve been here means that the bats have returned to the caves after their night’s hunting, that the sun is about to rise, that it’s almost time to get myself out of bed.
Some women start to stir, stretching in their cots. Others are still dead to the world, still snoring, still farting, still drifting on in the empty nothing of sleep.
I spend a second wishing I was still there, too.
The sleeping quarters is basically just a long shack, swept earth floor, wood walls, wood door, barely any windows and only an iron stove in the centre for not enough heat. The rest is just a row of cots stretched from one end to the other, full of sleeping women.
As the newest arrival, I’m at one end.
And I’m watching the occupant of the bed at the other end. She sits up straight, body fully under her command, like she never actually sleeps, just puts herself on pause until she can start work again.
Mistress Coyle turns in her cot, sets her feet on the floor, and looks over the other sleepers straight at me.
Checking on me first.
To see, no doubt, if I’ve run off sometime in the night to find Todd.
I don’t believe he’s dead. And I don’t believe he told the Mayor on us, either.
There must be another answer.
I look back at Mistress Coyle, unmoving.
Not gone, I think. Not yet.
But mainly because I don’t even know where we are.
We’re not by the ocean. Not even close, as far as I can tell, though that’s not saying much because secrecy is the watchword of the camp. No one gives information out unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s in case anyone gets captured on a bombing raid or, now that the Answer has started running out of things like flour and medicine, raids for supplies as well.
Mistress Coyle guards information as her most valuable resource.
All I know is that the camp is at an old mine, started up– like so many other things seem to have been on this planet– with great optimism after the first landings but abandoned after just a few years. There are a number of shacks around the openings to a couple of deep caves. The shacks, some new, some from the mining days, serve as sleeping quarters and meeting rooms and dining halls and so on.
The caves– the ones where there aren’t bats, anyway– are the food and supply stores, always worryingly low, always guarded fiercely by Mistress Lawson, still fretting over the children she left behind and taking out her fretting on anyone who requests another blanket for the cold.
Deeper in the caves are the mines, originally sunk to find coal or salt and then when none were found, diamonds and then gold, which weren’t found either, as if they’d do anyone any good in this place anyway. The mines are now where the weapons and explosives are hidden. I don’t know how they got here or where they came from, but if the camp is found, they’ll be detonated, probably wiping us all off the map.
But for now it’s a camp that’s near a natural well and hidden by the forest around it. The only entrance is through the trees at the bottom of the path Mistress Coyle and I bumped our way down, and it’s so steep and hard you’d hear intruders come from a long way away.
“And they’ll come,” Mistress Coyle said to me on my first day. “We’ll just have to make sure we’re ready to meet them.”
“Why haven’t they come already?” I asked. “People must know there’s a mine here.”
All she did was wink at me and touch the side of her nose.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
But that was all I got, because information is her most valuable resource, isn’t it?
At breakfast, I get my usual snubbing by Thea and the other apprentices I recognize, none of whom will say a word to me, still blaming me for Maddy’s death, blaming me for somehow being a traitor, blaming me for this whole sodding war, for all I know.
Not that I care.
Because I don’t.
I leave them to the dining hall, and I take my plate of grey porridge out in the cold morning to some rocks near the mouth of one of the caves. As I eat, I watch the camp start to wake itself, start to put itself together for the things that terrorists spend their days doing.
The biggest surprise is how few people there are. Maybe a hundred. That’s all. That’s the big Answer causing all the fuss in New Prentisstown by blowing things up. One hundred people. Mistresses and apprentices, former patients and others, too, disappearing in the night and returning in the morning, or keeping the camp running for those that come and go, tending to the few horses the Answer has and the oxes that pull the carts and the hens we get our eggs from and a million other things that need doing.
But only a hundred people. Not enough to have a whisper of a prayer if the Mayor’s real army comes marching down towards us.
“All right, Hildy?”
“Hi, Wilf,” I say, as he comes up to me, a plate of porridge in his hands, too. I scoot over so he can sit near me. He doesn’t say anything, just eats his porridge and lets me eat mine.
“Wilf?” we both hear. Jane, Wilf’s wife, is coming for us, two steaming mugs in her hands. She picks her way over the rocks towards us, stumbling once, spilling some coffee and causing Wilf to rise halfway up, but she recovers. “Here ya go!” she practically shouts, thrusting the mugs at us.
“Thank you,” I say, taking mine.
She shoves her hands under her armpits against the cold and smiles, eyes wide and searching around, like she eats with them. “Awful cold to be eating outside,” she says, like an overly friendly demand that we explain ourselves.
“Yup,” Wilf says, going back to his porridge.
“It’s not too bad,” I say, also going back to eating.
“Didja hear they got a grain store last night?” she says, lowering her voice to a whisper but somehow making it louder at the same time. “We can have bread again!”