I’m sorry.
And the Mayor lays a bandage across my face.
I gasp from the coolness of it and jerk away from his hands but he keeps pressing it gently into the lump on my forehead and onto the wounds on my face and chin, his body so close I can smell it, the cleanliness of it, the woody odour of his soap, the breath from his nose brushing over my cheek, his fingers touching my cuts almost tenderly, dressing the swelling round my eyes, the splits on my lip, and I can feel the bandages get to work almost instantly, feel the swelling going right down, the painkillers flooding into my system, and I think for a second how good the bandages are in Haven, how much like her bandages, and the relief comes so quick, so unexpected that my throat clenches and I have to swallow it away.
“I am not the man you think I am, Todd,” the Mayor says quietly, almost right into my ear, putting another bandage on my neck. “I did not do the things you think I did. I asked my son to bring you back. I did not ask him to shoot anyone. I did not ask Aaron to kill you.”
“Yer a liar,” I say but my voice is weak and I’m shaking from the effort of keeping the weep out of it (shut up).
The Mayor puts more bandages across the bruises on my chest and stomach, so gentle I can barely stand it, so gentle it’s almost like he cares how it feels.
“I do care, Todd,” he says. “There will be time for you to learn the truth of that.”
He moves behind me and puts another bandage around the bindings on my wrists, taking my hands and rubbing feeling back into them with his thumbs.
“There will be time,” he says, “for you to come to trust me. For you, perhaps, to come to even like me. To even think of me, one day, as a kind of father to you, Todd.”
It feels like my Noise is melting away with all the drugs, with all the pain disappearing, with me disappearing along with it, like he’s killing me after all, but with the cure instead of the punishment.
I can’t keep the weep from my throat, my eyes, my voice.
“Please,” I say. “Please.”
But I don’t know what I mean.
“The war is over, Todd,” the Mayor says again. “We are making a new world. This planet finally and truly living up to its name. Believe me when I say, once you see it, you’ll want to be part of it.”
I breathe into the darkness.
“You could be a leader of men, Todd. You have proven yourself very special.”
I keep breathing, trying to hold on to it but feeling myself slip away.
“How can I know?” I finally say, my voice a croak, a slur, a thing not quite real. “How can I know she’s even still alive?”
“You can’t,” says the Mayor. “You only have my word.”
And waits again.
“And if I do it,” I say. “If I do what you say, you’ll save her?”
“We will do whatever’s necessary,” he says.
Without pain, it feels almost like I don’t have a body at all, almost like I’m a ghost, sitting in a chair, blinded and eternal.
Like I’m dead already.
Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don’t hurt?
“We are the choices we make, Todd,” the Mayor says. “Nothing more, nothing less. I’d like you to choose to tell me. I would like that very much indeed.”
Under the bandages is just further darkness.
Just me, alone in the black.
Alone with his voice.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know anything.
(what do I do?)
But if there’s a chance, if there’s even a chance–
“Is it really such a sacrifice, Todd?” the Mayor says, listening to me think. “Here, at the end of the past? At the beginning of the future?”
No. No, I can’t. He’s a liar and a murderer, no matter what he says–
“I’m waiting, Todd.”
But she might be alive, he might keep her alive–
“We are nearing your last opportunity, Todd.”
I raise my head. The movement opens the bandages some and I squint up into the light, up towards the Mayor’s face.
It’s blank as ever.
It’s the empty, lifeless wall.
I might as well be talking into a bottomless pit.
I might as well be the bottomless pit.
I look away. I look down.
“Viola,” I say into the carpet. “Her name’s Viola.”
The Mayor lets out a long, pleased-sounding breath. “Good, Todd,” he says. “I thank you.”
He turns to Mr. Collins.
“Lock him up.”
[TODD]
Mr. Collins pushes me up a narrow, windowless staircase, up and up and up, turning on sharp landings but always straight up. Just when I think my legs can’t take no more, we reach a door. He opens it and shoves me hard and I go tumbling into the room and down onto a wooden floor, my arms so stiff I can’t even catch myself and I groan and roll to one side.
And look down over a thirty-metre drop.
Mr. Collins laughs as I scrabble back away from it. I’m on a ledge not more than five boards wide that runs round the walls of a square room. In the middle is just an enormous hole with some ropes dangling down thru the centre. I follow ’em up thru a tall shaft to the biggest set of bells I ever saw, two of ’em hanging from a single wooden beam, huge things, big as a room you could live in, archways cut into the sides of the tower so the bell-ringing can be heard.
I jump when Mr. Collins slams the door, locking it with a ker-thunk sound that don’t brook no thoughts of escape.
I get myself up and lean against the wall till I can breathe again.
I close my eyes.
I am Todd Hewitt, I think. I am the son of Cillian Boyd and Ben Moore. My birthday is in fourteen days but I am a man.
I am Todd Hewitt and I am a man.
(a man who told the Mayor her name)
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
After a while, I open my eyes and look up and around. There are small rectangular openings at eye level all around this floor of the tower, three on each wall, fading light shining in thru the dust.
I go to the nearest opening. I’m in the bell tower of the cathedral, obviously, way up high, looking out the front, down onto the square where I first entered the town, only this morning but it already feels like a lifetime ago. Dusk is falling, so I musta been out cold for a bit before the Mayor woke me, time where he coulda done anything to her, time where he coulda–