“At least signing up was your idea,” I say, fingers cramping on my own fowl. The feathers hover in the air like a swarm of sticky flies, catching everywhere they touch. I’ve got little green puffs under my fingernails, in the crooks of my elbows, glopped in the corner of my eyes.
I know this because Lee’s got them all over his face, too, all through his long golden hair and in the matching golden hair on his forearms.
I feel my face flush again and pull out a furious rip of feathers.
A day turned into two, turned into three, turned into a week, turned into the week after and the week after that, cooking with Lee, washing up with Lee, sitting out three days of solid rain stuck in this shack with Lee.
And still. And still.
Something’s coming, something’s being prepared for, no one’s telling me anything.
And I’m still stuck here.
Lee tosses a plucked fowl onto the table and picks up another one. “We’re going to make this species extinct if we’re not careful.”
“It’s the only thing Magnus can shoot,” I say. “Everything else is too fast.”
“A whole animal lost,” Lee says, “because the Answer lacked for an optician.”
I laugh, too loud. I roll my eyes at myself.
I finish my own fowl and pick up a new one. “I’m doing three of these for every two of yours,” I say. “And I did more loaves this morning and–”
“You burnt half of them.”
“Because you stoked the oven too hot!”
“I’m not made for cooking,” he says, smiling. “I’m made for soldiering.”
I gasp. “And you think I’m made for cooking–”
But he’s laughing and keeps laughing even when I throw a handful of wet feathers at him, smacking him straight on the eye. “Ow,” he says, wiping it away. “You got some aim, Viola. We really need to get a gun in your hands.”
I turn my face quickly back down to the millionth fowl in my lap.
“Or maybe not,” he says, more quietly.
“Have you–?” I stop.
“Have I what?”
I lick my lips, which is a mistake because then I have to spit out a mouthful of feathery puffs, so when I do finally say it, it comes out more exasperated than I meant. “Have you ever shot someone?”
“No.” He sits up straighter. “Have you?”
I shake my head and see him relax, which makes me immediately say, “But I’ve been shot.”
He sits back up. “No way!”
I say it before I mean to, before I even know it’s coming, and then I’m saying it and I realize I’ve never said it, not out loud, not to myself, not ever, not since it happened, and yet here it is, tumbling out in a room full of floating feathers.
“And I’ve stabbed someone.” I stop plucking. “To death.”
My body feels suddenly twice as heavy in the silence that follows.
When I start to cry, Lee just hands me a kitchen towel and lets me, not crowding me or saying anything stupid or even asking about it, though he must be dying of curiosity. He just lets me cry.
Which is exactly right.
“Yes, but we’re gaining sympathy,” Lee says near the end of dinner with Wilf and Jane. I’m putting off finishing because as soon as I do, we have go back to the kitchens to start preparing the yeasts to cook tomorrow’s bread. You wouldn’t believe how much bloody bread a hundred people can eat.
I take half of my last bite. “I’m just saying there aren’t very many of you.”
“Of us,” Lee says, looking at me seriously. “And we’ve got spies working throughout the city and people join us when they can. Things are only getting worse there. They’re rationing food now and no one’s getting the cure any more. They’re going to have to start turning against him.”
“And so many in prisons,” Jane adds. “Hundreds of women, all locked up, all chained together underground, starving and dying by the dozen.”
“Wife!” Wilf snaps.
“Ah’m only sayin what Ah heard!”
“Yoo din’t hear nothin of the sort.”
Jane looks sullen. “Don’t mean it’s not true.”
“There are a lot of people who’d support us in prison, though,” Lee says. “And so that might turn out–”
He stops.
“What?” I ask, looking up. “Turn out what?”
He doesn’t answer me, just looks over to another table where Mistress Coyle is sitting with Mistresses Braithwaite, Forth, Waggoner and Barker, and Thea, too, like they always do, discussing things, whispering in low voices, devising secret orders for other people to carry out.
“Nothing,” Lee says, seeing Mistress Coyle stand and come towards us.
“I’m going to need the cart hitched up for tonight, Wilf, please,” she says, approaching our table.
“Yes, Mistress,” he says, getting to his feet.
“Eat a little longer,” she says, stopping him. “This isn’t forced labour.”
“Ah’m happy to do it,” Wilf says, brushing off his trousers and leaving us.
“Who are you blowing up tonight?” I ask.
Mistress Coyle pulls her lips tight. “I think that’s enough for now, Viola.”
“I want to come,” I say. “If you’re going back into the city tonight, I want to come with you.”
“Patience, my girl,” she says. “You’ll have your day.”
“Which day?” I ask as she walks off. “When?”
“Patience,” she says again.
But she says it impatiently.
It gets dark earlier and earlier every day. I sit outside on a pile of rocks as night falls, watching tonight’s mission-takers head on out to the carts, their bags packed with secret things. Some of the men have Noise now, taking reduced amounts of cure from our own dwindling supply stashed in the cave. They take enough to blend in with the city but not enough to give anything away. It’s a tricky balance, and it’s getting more and more dangerous for our men to be on city streets, but still they go.
And as the people of New Prentisstown sleep tonight, they’ll be stolen from and bombed, all in the name of what’s right.
“Hey,” Lee says, hardly more than a shadow in the twilight as he sits down next to me.