She’s done talking to me and returns to quieter conference with the mistresses. Corinne starts eating again, a smug grin on her face. Maddy’s still staring at me wide-eyed, but all I can think of is the word left hanging in the air.
When she said Him?, did she also mean, Or her?
On our ninth day locked indoors, I’m no longer a patient. Mistress Coyle summons me to her office.
“Your clothes,” she says, handing me a package over her desk. “You can put them on now, if you like. Make you feel like a real person again.”
“Thank you,” I say genuinely, heading behind the screen she’s pointed out. I lift off the patient’s robe and look for a second at my wound, almost healed both front and back.
“You really are the most amazing healer,” I say.
“I do try,” she says from her desk.
I unwrap the package and find all of my own clothes, freshly laundered, smelling so clean and crisp I feel a strange pull on my face and discover I’m smiling.
“You know, you’re a brave girl, Viola,” Mistress Coyle is saying, as I start to dress. “Despite not knowing when to keep quiet.”
“Thank you,” I say, a little annoyed.
“The crashing of your ship, the deaths of your parents, the amazing journey here. All faced with intelligence and resourcefulness.”
“I had help,” I say, sitting down to put on clean socks.
I notice Mistress Coyle’s pad on a little side table, the one so full of notes from our little consultations. I look up but she’s still on the other side of the screen. I reach over and flip open the cover.
“I sense big things in you, my girl,” she says. “Leadership potential.”
The notebook is upside down and I don’t want to make a noise by moving it so I try to twist round to see what it says.
“I see a lot of myself in you.”
On the first page, before her notes start, there’s only a single letter, written in blue.
A.
Nothing else.
“We are the choices we make, Viola,” Mistress Coyle is still talking. “And you can be so valuable to us. If you choose.”
I lift up my head from the pad. “Us who?”
The door bursts open so loud and sudden I jump up and look around the screen. It’s Maddy. “There was a messenger,” she says, breathless. “Women can start leaving their houses.”
“It’s so loud out here,” I say, wincing into the ROAR of all the New Prentisstown Noise twining together.
“You get used to it,” Maddy says. We’re sitting on a bench outside a store while Corinne and another apprentice named Thea buy supplies for the house of healing, stocking up for the expected flood of new patients.
I look around the streets. Stores are open, people pass by, mostly on foot but on fissionbikes and horses, too. If you don’t look too closely, you’d almost think nothing was even wrong.
But then you see that the men who move down the road never talk to each other. And women are allowed out only in groups of four and only in daylight and only for an hour at a time. And the groups of four never interact. Even the men of Haven don’t approach us.
And there are soldiers on every corner, rifles in hand.
A bell chimes as the door of the store opens. Corinne storms out, arms full of bags, face full of thunder, Thea struggling behind her. “The storekeeper says no one’s heard from the Spackle since they were taken,” Corinne says, practically dropping a bag in my lap.
“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.”