“I may not return,” I say. “You may never see me again. It’d be nice to know something good about you so I don’t die thinking you’re just a huge pain in my ass.”
She almost grins but it disappears quickly, her eyes looking troubled again. “Who did I save?” she says to herself. She takes a deep breath. “I saved an enemy of the state.”
“You what?”
“The Answer was never exactly authorized, you see.” She walks us off in a different direction, towards the shore of the freezing lake. “The men fighting the Spackle War didn’t really approve of our methods, effective as they might have been.” She looks back at me. “And they were very effective. Effective enough to get the heads of the Answer onto the ruling Council when Haven was being put back together.”
“That’s why you think it’ll work now. Why you think it’ll work against a bigger force.”
She nods and rubs her forehead again. I’m surprised she hasn’t built a callus up there. “Haven restarted itself,” she continues, “using the captured Spackle to rebuild and so on. But some people weren’t happy with the new government. Some people didn’t have as much power as they thought they should.” She shivers under her cloak. “Some people in the Answer.”
She lets me realize what this might mean. “Bombs,” I say.
“Quite so. Some people get so caught up in warfare, they start doing it for its own sake.”
She turns away, so that maybe I can’t see her face or that maybe she can’t see mine, see the judgement on it.
“Her name was Mistress Thrace.” She’s talking to the lake now, to the cold night sky. “Smart, strong, respected, but with a liking for being in charge. Which was exactly the reason no one wanted her on the Council, including the Answer, and why she reacted so strongly to being left off.”
She turns back to me. “She had her supporters. And she had her bombing campaign. Not unlike the one we’re giving the Mayor now, except of course, that was meant to be peacetime.” She glances up at the moons. “She specialized in what we took to calling a Thrace bomb. She’d leave it somewhere soldiers were gathered and it would look like an innocent package. Wouldn’t arm itself until it felt the heartbeat in the skin of the hand picking it up. Your own pulse would make it dangerous, and at that point, you knew it was a bomb and that it would only go off when you let it go. So if you dropped it or couldn’t disarm it.” She shrugs. “Boom.”
We watch a cloud pass between the two rising moons. “Meant to be bad luck, that is,” Mistress Coyle murmurs.
She loops her arm in mine again and we start walking back towards the healing tent. “And so there wasn’t another war exactly,” she says. “More of a skirmish. And to the delight of everyone, Mistress Thrace was mortally wounded.”
There’s a silence where you can only hear our footsteps and the Noise of the men, crisp in the air.
“But not mortally wounded after all,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I’m a very good healer.” We reach the opening of the healing tent. “I’d known her since we were girls together on Old World. As far as I saw it, I had no choice.” She rubs her hands together. “They kicked me off the Council for it. And then they executed her anyway.”
I look at her now, trying to understand her, trying to understand all that’s good in her and all that’s difficult and conflicted and all the things that went into making her the person that she is.
We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren’t anything else.
“Are you ready?” she says again, finally this time.
“I’m ready.”
We go into the tent.
My bag is there, packed by Mistress Coyle herself, the one I’ll carry on the cart with Wilf, the one I’ll carry into town. It’s full of food, completely innocent food which, if all goes according to plan, will be my entry into town, my entry past the guards, my entry into the cathedral.
If all goes well.
If it doesn’t, there’s a pistol in a secret pouch at the bottom.
Mistresses Lawson and Braithwaite are also in the tent, healing materials at the ready.
And Lee is there, as I’d asked him to be.
I sit down on the chair facing him.
He takes my hand and squeezes it and I feel a note in the palm of his hand. He looks at me, his Noise filled with what’s about to happen.
I open the note, keeping its contents out of view of all three mistresses around me, who no doubt think it’s something romantic or stupid like that.
Don’t react, it reads. I’ve decided I’m coming with you. I’ll meet your cart in the woods. You want to find your family, I want to find mine, and neither of us should do it alone.
I don’t react. I refold the note and look back up at him, giving him the smallest of nods.
“Good luck, Viola,” Mistress Coyle says, words echoed rapidly by everyone else there, ending with Lee.
I wanted him particularly to do this. I couldn’t stand for it to have been Mistress Coyle, and I know Lee will take the best care.
Because there’s only one way I’m going to be able to move around New Prentisstown without getting caught. Only one way based on the intelligence we’ve gathered.
Only one way I can find Todd.
“Are you ready?” Lee asks, and it feels different coming from him, so much so that I don’t mind being asked yet again.
“I’m ready,” I say.
I hold out my arm and roll up my sleeve.
“Just make it quick.” I look into Lee’s eyes. “Please.”
“I will,” he says.
He reaches into the bag at his feet and takes out a metal band marked 1391.
[TODD]
“Did he tell you what he wanted?” Davy asks.
“When would I have talked to him when you weren’t there?” I say.
“Duh, pigpiss, you live in the same building.”
We’re riding to the Office of the Ask, the sun setting on the end of our day. Two hundred more women labelled. It goes faster with Mr. Hammar watching over it all with a gun. With the other teams around town led by Mr. Morgan and Mr. O’Hare, word is we’ve got nearly every one of ’em, tho the bands don’t seem to be healing as fast on women as they do on sheep or Spackle.
I look up at the dusky sky as we move along the road and I realize something. “Where do you live?”
“Oh, now he asks.” Davy slaps the reins on Deadfall/Acorn, causing him to canter for about two steps and then drop back into a trot. “Five months we’re working together almost.”