I take in a breath and turn to put my feet on the floor. My legs don’t want to bend very fast but eventually they get there and eventually I can stand up and even walk to the door.
“Maddy said you were the best healer in town,” I marvel.
“Maddy tells no lies.”
She accompanies me down a long white hallway to a toilet. When I’ve finished and washed and opened the door again, Mistress Coyle is holding a heavier white gown for me to wear, longer and much nicer than the backwards robe I have on. I slip it over my head and we walk back up the hallway, a little wobbly, but walking all the same.
“The President has been asking after your health,” she says, steadying me with her hand.
“Corinne told me.” I look up at her out of the corner of my eye. “It’s only because of the settler ships. I don’t know him. I’m not on his side.”
“Ah,” Mistress Coyle says, getting me back through the door to my room and onto my bed. “You do recognize there are sides then?”
I lie back, my tongue pressed against the back of my teeth. “Did you give me two doses of Jeffers so I wouldn’t have to speak to him for very long?” I say. “Or so I wouldn’t be able to tell him very much?”
She gives a nod as if to say how clever I am. “Would it be the worst thing in the world if it was a little of both?”
“You could have asked.”
“Wasn’t time,” she says, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. “We only know him by his history, my girl, and his history is bad, bad, bad. Whatever he might say about a new society, there is good reason to want to be better prepared if he starts a conversation.”
“I don’t know him,” I say again. “I don’t know anything.”
“But, done rightly,” she says, with a little smile, “you might learn things from a man who takes an interest.”
I try to read her, read what she’s trying to tell me, but of course women here don’t have Noise either, do they?
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“I’m saying it’s time for you to get something solid into your stomach.” She stands, brushing invisible threads off her white coat. “I’ll have Madeleine bring in some breakfast for you.”
She walks to the door, taking hold of the handle but not turning it yet. “But know this,” she says, without turning around. “If there are sides and our President is on one . . .” She glances back at me over her shoulder. “Then I am most definitely on the other.”
{VIOLA}
“There are six ships,” I say from my bed, for the third time in as many days, days where Todd is still out there somewhere, days where I don’t know what’s happening to him or to anyone else outside.
From the windows of my room, I see soldiers marching by all the time, but all they do is march. Everyone here at the house of healing half-expected them to come bursting through the doors at any moment, ready to do terrible things, ready to assert their victory.
But they haven’t. They just march by. Other men bring us deliveries of food to the back doors, and the healers are left to their work.
We still can’t leave, but the world outside doesn’t seem to be ending. Which isn’t what anyone expected, not least, it seems, Mistress Coyle, who’s convinced it only means something worse is waiting to happen.
I can’t help but think that she’s probably right.
She frowns into her notes. “Just six?”
“Eight hundred sleeping settlers and three caretaker families in each,” I say. I’m getting hungry, but I know by now there’s no eating until she says the consultation is finished. “Mistress Coyle–”
“And you’re sure there are eighty-one members of the caretaker families?”
“I should know,” I say. “I was in school with their children.”
She looks up. “I know this is tedious, Viola, but information is power. The information we give him. The information we learn from him.”
I sigh impatiently. “I don’t know anything about spying.”
“It’s not spying,” she says, returning to her notes. “It’s just finding things out.” She writes something more in her pad. “Four thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one people,” she says, almost to herself.
I know what she means. More people than the entire population of this planet. Enough to change everything.
But change it how?
“When he speaks with you again,” she says, “you can’t tell him about the ships. Keep him guessing. Keep him off the right number.”
“While I’m also supposed to be finding out what I can,” I say.
She closes her pad, consultation over. “Information is power,” she repeats.
I sit up in the bed, pretty much sick to death of being a patient. “Can I ask you something?”
She stands and reaches for her cloak. “Certainly.”
“Why do you trust me?”
“Your face when he walked into your room,” she says without hesitating. “You looked as if you’d just met your worst enemy.”
She snaps the buttons of the cloak under her chin. I watch her carefully. “If I could just find Todd or get to that communications tower . . .”
“And be taken by the army?” She’s not frowning but her eyes are bright. “Lose us our one advantage?” She opens the door. “No, my girl, the President will come a-calling and when he does, what you find out from him will help us.”
I call out after her as she goes, “Who do you mean by us?”
But she’s gone.
“ . . . and the last thing I really remember is him picking me up and carrying me down a long, long hill, and telling me that I wasn’t going to die, that he’d save me.”
“Wow,” breathes Maddy softly, wisps of hair sneaking out from under her cap as we walk slowly up one hallway and down another to build my strength. “And he did save you.”
“But he can’t kill,” I say, “not even to save himself. That’s the thing about him, why they wanted him so bad. He isn’t like them. He killed a Spackle once and you should have seen how he suffered for it. And now they’ve got him–”
I have to stop and blink a lot and look at the floor.
“I need to get out of here,” I say, clenching my teeth. “I’m no spy. I need to find him and I need to get to that tower and warn them. Maybe they can send help. They have more scout ships that could reach here. They’ve got weapons . . .”