“Hey,” I say back.
“You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Yeah.” He picks up a stone and tosses it into the night. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
Stars start to appear in the sky. My ships are up there somewhere. People who might’ve been able to help us, no, who would have helped us if I could’ve contacted them. Simone Watkin and Bradley Tench, good people, smart people who would have stopped all this stupidity and the explosions and–
I feel my throat clench again.
“You really killed someone,” Lee says, tossing another stone.
“Yeah,” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest.
Lee waits a moment. “With Todd?”
“For Todd,” I say. “To save him. To save us.”
Now that the sun’s gone, the real cold moves in swiftly. I hold my knees tighter.
“She’s afraid of you, you know,” he says. “Mistress Coyle. She thinks you’re powerful.”
I look over at him, trying to see him in the dark. “That’s stupid.”
“I heard her say it to Mistress Braithwaite. Said you could lead whole armies if you put your mind to it.”
I shake my head but of course he can’t see. “She doesn’t even know me.”
“Yeah, but she’s smart.”
“And everyone here follows her like little lambs.”
“Everyone but you.” He bumps me with his shoulder in a friendly way. “Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.”
We start to hear the low rumble from the caves that means the bats are readying themselves.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “Why do you follow her?”
I’ve asked before but he’s always changed the subject.
But maybe tonight’s different. It sure feels different.
“My father died in the Spackle War,” he says.
“Lots of fathers did,” I say and I think of Corinne, wondering where she is, wondering if–
“I don’t really remember him,” Lee’s saying. “It was just me and my mother and my older sister growing up, really. And my sister–” he laughs. “You’d like her. All mouth and fire and we had some fights you wouldn’t believe.”
He laughs again but more quietly. “When the army came, Siobhan wanted to fight but Mum didn’t. I wanted to fight, too, but Siobhan and Mum really went at it, Siobhan ready to take up arms and Mum practically having to bar the door to keep her from running out into the streets when the army came marching in.”
The rumbling is getting louder and the bats’ Noise starts to echo through the cave opening. Fly, fly, they say. Away, away.
“And then it was out of our hands, wasn’t it?” he says. “The army was here and that night they took all the women away to the houses east of town. Mum said to cooperate, you know, ‘just for now, just to see where it goes, maybe he’s not all that bad.’ That sort of thing.”
I don’t respond and I’m glad it’s dark so he can’t see my face.
“But Siobhan wasn’t going to go without a fight, was she? She shouted and screamed at the soldiers and refused to go along and Mum’s just begging for her to stop, to not make them angry, but Siobhan–” He stops and makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Siobhan punched the first soldier who tried to move her by force.”
He takes a deep breath. “And then it was uproar. I tried to fight and the next thing I know I’m on the ground with my ears ringing and a soldier’s knee in my back and Mum is screaming but there’s nothing from Siobhan and I black out and when I wake up, I’m alone in my house.”
Fly, fly, we hear, just inside the cave mouth. Away, away, away.
“I looked for them when the restrictions eased,” he says, “but I never found them. I looked in every cabin and dormitory and at every house of healing. And finally, at the last one, Mistress Coyle answered.”
He pauses and looks up. “Here they come.”
The bats swarm out of the caves, like the world’s been tipped on its side and they’re being poured out over the top of us, a flood of greater darkness against the night sky. The sheer whoosh of them makes it impossible to talk for a minute so we just sit and watch them.
Each is at least two metres across, with furred wings and short stubby ears and a green glowing dot of phosphorus on each outstretched wingtip which they use somehow to confuse and stun the moths and bugs they eat. The dots glow in the night, making a blanket of temporary fluttering stars above us. We sit, surrounded by the slapping of wings, the cheeping of their Noise, the fly fly away away away.
And in five minutes they’re gone, out into the surrounding forest, not to return until just before dawn.
“Something’s coming,” Lee says in the quiet that follows. “You know that. I can’t say what but I’m going along because there’s one more place to look for them.”
“Then I’ll go, too,” I say.
“She won’t let you.” He turns to me. “But I promise you, I’ll look for Todd. With the same eyes I look for Siobhan and my mother, I’ll look for him.”
A bell chimes out over the camp, signalling all raiding teams are off into town and all remaining people in camp are to go to bed. Lee and I sit in the dark for a while longer, his shoulder brushed up against mine, and mine brushed up against his.
[TODD]
“Not bad,” says the Mayor from atop Morpeth, “for an unskilled workforce.”
“There’d be more,” Davy says, “but it rained and then everything was just mud.”
“No, no,” the Mayor says, casting his eyes around the field. “You’ve done admirably, both of you, managing so much in just a month.”
We all take a minute to look at what we’ve managed admirably. We’ve got all the concrete foundayshuns poured for a single long building. Every guide wall is up, some have even started to be filled in by the stones we took from the monastery’s internal walls, and the tarpaulin makes a kind of roof. It already looks like a building.
He’s right, we have done admirably.
Us and 1150 Spackle.
“Yes,” says the Mayor. “Very pleasing.”
Davy’s Noise is taking on a pinkish glow that’s uncomfortable to look at.