“You look like hell,” Mayor Ledger says, as I fall onto my bed.
“Stuff it,” I say.
“Working you hard, is he?” He brings me over the dinner that’s already waiting for us. It don’t even look like he ate too much of mine before I got here.
“Ain’t he working you hard?” I say, digging in to the food.
“I think he’s forgotten about me, truth to tell.” He sits back on his own bed. “I haven’t spoken to him in I don’t know how long.”
I look up at him. His Noise is grey, like he’s hiding something, tho that ain’t unusual.
“I’ve just been doing my rubbish duties,” he says, watching me eat. “Listening to people talk.”
“And what’re they saying?” I ask, cuz it seems like he wants to talk.
“Well,” he says. His Noise shifts uncomfortably.
“Well what?”
And then I see the reason his Noise is so flat is cuz there’s something he don’t wanna tell me but feels like he has to, so here it comes.
“That house of healing,” he says. “That one in particular.”
“What about it?” I say, trying not to make it sound important, failing.
“It’s closed down,” he says. “Empty.”
I stop eating. “What do you mean, empty?”
“I mean empty,” he says gently, cuz he knows it’s bad news. “There’s no one there, not even the patients. Everyone’s gone.”
“Gone?” I whisper.
Gone.
I stand up tho there ain’t nowhere to go, my stupid plate of dinner still in my hand.
“Gone where? What’s he done with her?”
“He hasn’t done anything,” Mayor Ledger says. “Your friend ran. That’s what I heard. Ran off with the women just before the tower fell.” He rubs his chin. “Everyone else was arrested and taken to the prisons. But your friend . . . got away.”
He says got away like that’s not what he means, like what he means is she was planning to get away all along.
“You can’t know that,” I say. “You can’t know that’s true about her.”
He shrugs. “Maybe not,” he says. “But I heard it from one of the soldiers who was guarding the house of healing.”
“No,” I say, but I don’t know what I mean. “No.”
“How well did you really know her?” Mayor Ledger says.
“You shut up.”
I’m breathing hard, my chest rising and falling.
It’s good that she ran, ain’t it?
Ain’t it?
She was in danger and now–
(but)
(but did she blow up the tower?)
(why didn’t she tell me she was going to?)
(did she lie to me?)
And I shouldn’t think it, I shouldn’t think it, but here it comes–
She promised.
And she left.
She left me.
(Viola?)
(did you leave me?)
{VIOLA}
I open my eyes to the sound of wings flapping outside the door, something I already know in the few days I’ve been here means that the bats have returned to the caves after their night’s hunting, that the sun is about to rise, that it’s almost time to get myself out of bed.
Some women start to stir, stretching in their cots. Others are still dead to the world, still snoring, still farting, still drifting on in the empty nothing of sleep.
I spend a second wishing I was still there, too.
The sleeping quarters is basically just a long shack, swept earth floor, wood walls, wood door, barely any windows and only an iron stove in the centre for not enough heat. The rest is just a row of cots stretched from one end to the other, full of sleeping women.
As the newest arrival, I’m at one end.
And I’m watching the occupant of the bed at the other end. She sits up straight, body fully under her command, like she never actually sleeps, just puts herself on pause until she can start work again.
Mistress Coyle turns in her cot, sets her feet on the floor, and looks over the other sleepers straight at me.
Checking on me first.
To see, no doubt, if I’ve run off sometime in the night to find Todd.
I don’t believe he’s dead. And I don’t believe he told the Mayor on us, either.
There must be another answer.
I look back at Mistress Coyle, unmoving.
Not gone, I think. Not yet.
But mainly because I don’t even know where we are.
We’re not by the ocean. Not even close, as far as I can tell, though that’s not saying much because secrecy is the watchword of the camp. No one gives information out unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s in case anyone gets captured on a bombing raid or, now that the Answer has started running out of things like flour and medicine, raids for supplies as well.
Mistress Coyle guards information as her most valuable resource.
All I know is that the camp is at an old mine, started up– like so many other things seem to have been on this planet– with great optimism after the first landings but abandoned after just a few years. There are a number of shacks around the openings to a couple of deep caves. The shacks, some new, some from the mining days, serve as sleeping quarters and meeting rooms and dining halls and so on.
The caves– the ones where there aren’t bats, anyway– are the food and supply stores, always worryingly low, always guarded fiercely by Mistress Lawson, still fretting over the children she left behind and taking out her fretting on anyone who requests another blanket for the cold.
Deeper in the caves are the mines, originally sunk to find coal or salt and then when none were found, diamonds and then gold, which weren’t found either, as if they’d do anyone any good in this place anyway. The mines are now where the weapons and explosives are hidden. I don’t know how they got here or where they came from, but if the camp is found, they’ll be detonated, probably wiping us all off the map.
But for now it’s a camp that’s near a natural well and hidden by the forest around it. The only entrance is through the trees at the bottom of the path Mistress Coyle and I bumped our way down, and it’s so steep and hard you’d hear intruders come from a long way away.
“And they’ll come,” Mistress Coyle said to me on my first day. “We’ll just have to make sure we’re ready to meet them.”