She runs a fingertip over her calluses. “The last time we went, I was eight. We walked south for three whole days, a present for how grown-up I was getting. God only knows how many miles away we were, but we were alone, just me and her and that was all that mattered.”
She lets a long pause go by. I don’t break it.
“She was bitten by a Banded Red, on her heel, as she cooled her feet in a stream.” She’s rubbing her hands again. “It’s fatal, red snake venom, but slow.”
“Oh, Corinne,” I say, under my breath.
She stands suddenly, as if my sympathy is almost rude. She walks over to my window. “It took her seventeen hours to die,” she says, still not looking at me. “And they were awful and painful and when she went blind, she grabbed onto me and begged me to save her, begged me over and over to save her life.”
I remain silent.
“What we know now, what the healers have discovered, is that I could have saved her life just by boiling up some Xanthus root.” She crosses her arms. “Which was all around us. In abundance.”
The ROAR of New Prentisstown is only just starting to rise with the sun. Light shoots in from the far horizon, but we stay silent for a moment longer.
“I’m sorry, Corinne,” I finally say. “But why–?”
“Everyone here is someone’s daughter,” she says quietly. “Every soldier out there is someone’s son. The only crime, the only crime is to take a life. There is nothing else.”
“And that’s why you don’t fight,” I say.
She turns to me sharply. “To live is to fight,” she snaps. “To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.” She takes an angry huff of air. “And now her, too, with all the bombs. I fight them every time I bandage the blackened eye of a woman, every time I remove shrapnel from a bomb victim.”
Her voice has raised but she lowers it again. “That’s my war,” she says. “That’s the war I’m fighting.”
She walks back to her chair and picks up a bundle of cloth sat next to it. “And to that end,” she says, “I need you to put these on.”
She doesn’t give me time to argue or even ask about her plan. She takes my apprentice robes and my own few much-washed clothes and has me put on poorer rags, a long-sleeved blouse, a long skirt, and a headscarf that completely covers my hair.
“Corinne,” I say, tying up the scarf.
“Shut up and hurry.”
When I’m dressed, she takes me down to the end of the long hallway leading out to the riverside by the house of healing. There’s a heavy canvas bag of medicines and bandages loaded up by the door. She hands it to me and says, “Wait for the sound. You’ll know it when you hear it.”
“Corinne–”
“Your chances aren’t very good, you have to know that.” She’s looking me in the eye now. “But if you get to wherever they’re hiding, you put these supplies to use as a healer, do you hear me? You’ve got it in you whether you know it or not.”
My breathing is heavy, nervous, but I look at her and I say, “Yes, Mistress.”
“Mistress is right,” she says and looks out of the window in the door. We can see a single bored soldier at the corner of the building, picking his nose. Corinne turns to me. “Now. Strike me, please.”
I blink. “What?”
“Strike me,” she says again. “I’ll need a bloody nose or a split lip at least.”
“Corinne–”
“Quickly or the streets will grow too crowded with soldiers.”
“I’m not going to hit you!”
She grabs me by the arm, so fiercely I flinch back. “If the President comes for you, do you honestly think you’ll return? He’s tried to get the truth from you by asking and then by trapping your friend. Do you honestly think the patience of a man like that lasts forever?”
“Corinne–”
“He will eventually hurt you,” she says. “If you refuse to help him, he will kill you.”
“But I don’t know–”
“He doesn’t care what you don’t know!” she hisses through her teeth. “If I can prevent the taking of a life, I will do so, even one as irritating as yours.”
“You’re hurting me,” I say quietly, as her fingers dig into my arm.
“Good,” she says. “Get angry enough to strike me.”
“But why–”
“Just do it!” she shouts.
I take in a breath, then another, then I hit her across the face as hard as I can.
I wait, crouched by the window in the door, watching the soldier. Corinne’s footsteps fade down the corridor as she runs to the reception room. I wait some more. The soldier is one of the many now who have had the cure taken from them and in the relative quiet of the morning I can hear what he thinks. Thoughts of boredom, thoughts of the village he lived in before the army invaded, thoughts of the army he was forced to join.
Thoughts of a girl he knew who died.
And then I hear the faint shout of Corinne coming from the front. She’ll be screaming that the Answer snuck in during the night, beat her senseless and kidnapped me under their very noses but that she saw us all flee in the opposite direction I’m going to be running.
It’s a poor story, there’s no way it’s going to work, how could anyone sneak in with guards everywhere?
But I know what she’s counting on. A legend that’s been rising, a legend about the Answer.
How can the bombs be planted with no one seeing?
With no one being caught?
If the Answer can do that, could they sneak past armed guards?
Are they invisible?
I hear thoughts just like this as soon as I see the soldier’s head snap up when he hears the ruckus. It grows louder in his Noise as he runs around the corner and out of view.
And as fast as that, it’s time.
I hoist the bag of medicines up onto my shoulder.
I open the door.
I run.
I run towards a line of trees and down to the river. There’s a path along the riverbank but I stick to the trees beside it and as the bag bashes my shoulders and back with heavy corners, I can’t help but think of me and Todd running down this same river, this same riverbank, running from the army, running and running and running.