“What now?” Maddy whispers.
“You said two minutes, then another pair.”
Maddy nods in the shadows. “Then another break of seven minutes.”
In that break, Maddy and I will start moving down the road, sticking to the trees, staying under cover, and see if we can get to the communications tower, if that’s even what it is.
See what’s there when we do.
“You all right?” I whisper.
“Yeah,” she whispers back. “Scared but excited, too.”
I know what she means. Out here, crouching in a ditch under the cover of night, it’s crazy, it’s dangerous, but I finally feel like I’m doing something, finally feel like I’m taking charge of my own life for the first time since being stuck in that bed.
Finally feel like I’m doing something for Todd.
We hear the crunch of gravel on the road and crouch a little lower as the expected pair of soldiers march past us and away.
“Here we go,” I say.
We stand up as much as we dare and move quickly down the ditch, away from the town.
“Do you still have family on the ships?” Maddy whispers. “Someone besides your mother and father?”
I wince a little at the sound she’s making but I know she’s only talking to cover her nerves. “No, but I know everyone else. Bradley Tench, he’s lead caretaker on the Beta, and Simone Watkin on the Gamma is really smart.”
The ditch bends with the road and there’s a crossroads coming up that we’ll have to negotiate.
Maddy starts up again. “So Simone’s the one you’d–”
“Shh,” I say because I think I heard something.
Maddy comes close enough to press against me. Her whole body is shaking and her breath is coming in short little puffs. She has to come this time because she knows where the tower is, but I can’t ask her to do it again. When I come back, I’ll come on my own.
Because if anything goes wrong–
“I think we’re okay,” I say.
We step slowly out from the ditch to cross the crossroads, looking all around us, stepping lightly in the gravel.
“Going somewhere?” says a voice.
Maddy takes in a sharp breath behind me. There’s a soldier leaning against a tree, his legs crossed like he couldn’t be more relaxed.
Even in the moonlight I can see the rifle hanging lazily from his hand.
“Little late to be out, innit?”
“We got lost,” I sputter. “We were separated from–”
“Yeah,” he interrupts. “I’ll bet.”
He strikes a match against the zip of his uniform jacket. In the flare of light, I see SERGEANT HAMMAR written across his pocket. He uses the match to light a cigarette in his mouth.
Cigarettes were banned by the Mayor.
But I guess if you’re an officer.
An officer without Noise who can hide in the dark.
He takes a step forward and we see his face. He’s got a smile on over the cigarette, an ugly one, the ugliest I’ve ever seen.
“You?” he says, recognition in his voice as he gets nearer.
As he raises his rifle.
“Yer the girl,” he says, looking at me.
“Viola?” Maddy whispers, a step behind me and to my right.
“Mayor Prentiss knows me,” I say. “You won’t harm me.”
He inhales on the cigarette, flashing the ember, making a streak against my vision. “President Prentiss knows you.”
Then he looks at Maddy, pointing at her with the rifle.
“I don’t reckon he knows you, tho.”
And before I can say anything–
Without giving any kind of warning–
As if it was as natural to him as taking his next breath–
Sergeant Hammar pulls the trigger.
[TODD]
“Your turn to do the bog,” Davy says, throwing me the canister of lime.
We never see the Spackle use the corner where they’ve dug a bog to do their business but every morning it’s a little bit bigger and stinks a little bit more and it needs lime powdered over it to cut down on the smell and the danger of infeckshun.
I hope it works better on infeckshun than it does on smell.
“Why ain’t it never yer turn?” I say.
“Cuz Pa may think yer the better man, pigpiss,” Davy says, “but he still put me in charge.”
And he grins at me.
I start walking to the bog.
The days passed and they kept passing, till there was two full weeks of ’em gone and more.
I stayed alive and got thru.
(did she?)
(did she?)
Davy and I ride to the monastery every morning and he “oversees” the Spackle tearing down fences and pulling up brambles and I spend the day shovelling out not enough fodder and trying and failing to fix the last two water pumps and taking every turn to do the bog.
The Spackle’ve stayed silent, still not doing nothing that could save themselves, fifteen hundred of ’em when we finally got ’em counted, crammed into an area where I wouldn’t herd two hundred sheep. More guards came, standing along the top of the stone wall, rifles pointed twixt rows of barbed wire, but the Spackle don’t do nothing that even comes close to threatening.
They’ve stayed alive. They’ve got thru it.
And so has New Prentisstown.
Every day, Mayor Ledger tells me what he sees out on his rubbish rounds. Men and women are still separated and there are more taxes, more rules about dress, a list of books to be surrendered and burned, and compulsory church attendance, tho not in the cathedral, of course.
But it’s also started to act like a real town again. The stores are back open, carts and fissionbikes and even a fissioncar or two are back on the roads. Men’ve gone back to work. Repairmen returned to repairing, bakers returned to baking, farmers returned to farming, loggers returned to logging, some of ’em even signing up to join the army itself, tho you can tell who the new soldiers are cuz they ain’t been given the cure yet.
“You know,” Mayor Ledger said one night and I could see it in his Noise before he said it, see the thought forming, the thought I hadn’t thought myself, the thought I hadn’t let myself think. “It’s not nearly as bad as I thought,” he said. “I expected slaughter. I expected my own death, certainly, and perhaps the burning of the entire town. The surrender was a fool’s chance at best, but maybe he’s not lying.”