The Ask and the Answer

by Patrick Ness

  95

  "Ah," Mistress Coyle says, getting me back through the door to my room and onto my bed. "You do recognize there are sides then?"

  I lie back, my tongue pressed against the back of my teeth. "Did you give me two doses of Jeffers so I wouldn't have to speak to him for very long?" I say. "Or so I wouldn't be able to tell him very much?"

  She gives a nod as if to say how clever I am. "Would it be the worst thing in the world if it was a little of both?"

  "You could have asked."

  "Wasn't time," she says, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. "We only know him by his history, my girl, and his history is bad, bad, bad. Whatever he might say about a new society, there is good reason to want to be better prepared if he starts a conversation."

  "I don't know him," I say again. "I don't know anything."

  "But, done rightly," she says, with a little smile, "you might learn things from a man who takes an interest."

  I try to read her, read what she's trying to tell me, but of course women here don't have Noise either, do they?

  "What are you saying?" I ask.

  "I'm saying it's time for you to get something solid into your stomach." She stands, brushing invisible threads off her white coat. "I'll have Madeleine bring in some breakfast for you."

  She walks to the door, taking hold of the handle but not turning it yet. "But know this," she says, without turning around. "If there are sides and our President is on one...." She glances back at me over her shoulder. "Then I am most definitely on the other."

  96

  7 MISTRESS COYLE

  ***

  [VIOLA]

  "THERE ARE SIX SHIPS," I say from my bed, for the third time in as many days, days where Todd is still out there somewhere, days where I don't know what's happening to him or to anyone else outside.

  From the windows of my room, I see soldiers marching by all the time, but all they do is march. Everyone here at the house of healing half expected them to come bursting through the doors at any moment, ready to do terrible things, ready to assert their victory.

  But they haven't. They just march by. Other men bring us deliveries of food to the back doors, and the healers are left to their work.

  We still can't leave, but the world outside doesn't seem to be ending. Which isn't what anyone expected, not least, it seems, Mistress Coyle, who's convinced it only means something worse is waiting to happen.

  I can't help but think that she's probably right.

  97

  She frowns into her notes. "Just six?"

  "Eight hundred sleeping settlers and three caretaker families in each," I say. I'm getting hungry, but I know by now there's no eating until she says the consultation is finished. "Mistress Coyle-"

  "And you're sure there are eighty-one members total of the caretaker families?"

  "I should know," I say. "I was in school with their children."

  She looks up. "I know this is tedious, Viola, but information is power. The information we give him. The information we learn from him."

  I sigh impatiently. "I don't know anything about spying."

  "It's not spying," she says, returning to her notes. "It's just finding things out." She writes something more in her pad. "Four thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one people," she says, almost to herself.

  I know what she means. More people than the entire population of this planet. Enough to change everything.

  But change it how?

  "When he speaks with you again," she says, "you can't tell him about the ships. Keep him guessing. Keep him off the right number."

  "While I'm also supposed to be finding out what I can," I say.

  She closes her pad, consultation over. "Information is power," she repeats.

  I sit up in the bed, pretty much sick to death of being a patient. "Can I ask you something?"

  She stands and reaches for her cloak. "Certainly."

  98

  "Why do you trust me?"

  "Your face when he walked into your room," she says without hesitating. "You looked as if you'd just met your worst enemy."

  She snaps the buttons of the cloak under her chin. I watch her carefully. "If I could just find Todd or get to that communications tower..."

  "And be taken by the army?" She's not frowning but her eyes are bright. "Lose us our one advantage?" She opens the door. "No, my girl, the President will come a-calling and when he does, what you find out from him will help us."

  I call out after her as she goes, "Who do you mean by us?"

  But she's gone.

  "... and the last thing I really remember is him picking me up and carrying me down a long, long hill, and telling me that I wasn't going to die, that he'd save me."

  "Wow," breathes Maddy softly, wisps of hair sneaking out from under her cap as we walk slowly up one hallway and down another to build my strength. "And he did save you."

  "But he can't kill," I say, "not even to save himself. That's the thing about him, why they wanted him so bad. He isn't like them. He killed a Spackle once and you should have seen how he suffered for it. And now they've got him-"

  I have to stop and blink a lot and look at the floor.

  "I need to get out of here," I say, clenching my teeth. "I'm no spy. I need to find him and I need to get to that tower and warn them. Maybe they can send help. They have more scout ships that could reach here. They've got weapons ..."

  99

  Maddy's face looks tense, like it always does when I talk this way. "We're not even allowed outside yet."

  "You can't just accept what people tell you, Maddy. You can't just do that if they're wrong."

  "And you can't fight an army on your own." She turns me gently back down the hallway, giving me a smile. "Not even the great and brave Viola Eade."

  "I did it before," I say. "I did with him."

  She lowers her voice. "Vi-"

  "I lost my parents," I say and my voice is husky. "And there's no way I can get them back. And now I've lost him. And if there's a chance, if there's even a chance-"

  "Mistress Coyle won't allow it," she says, but there's something in her voice that makes me look up.

  "But?" I say.

  Maddy says no more, just walks us over to the hall window that looks out onto the road. A troop of soldiers passes by in the bright sunlight, a cart full of dusty purple grain passing by the other way, the Noise we can hear from the town coming down the road like an army all on its own.

  At first it was like no Noise I'd ever heard, this weird buzzing sound of metal grinding against metal. Then it got even louder than that, like a thousand men shouting at once, which I guess is pretty much what it is, too loud and messy to be able to pick out any individual person.

  Too loud to pick out one boy.

  "Maybe it's not as bad as we all think." Maddy's voice is slow, weighing every word as if she's testing them out for herself. "I mean, the town looks peaceful. Loud, but the men who deliver the food say the stores are about to reopen. I'll bet

  100

  your Todd is out there working away at a job, safe and alive and waiting to see you."

  I can't tell if she's saying this because she believes it or because she's trying to get me to believe it. I wipe my nose with my sleeve. "That could be true."

  She looks at me for a long time, obviously thinking something but not saying it. Then she turns back to the glass.

  "Just listen to them roar," she says.

  There are three other healers here besides Mistress Coyle. Mistress Waggoner, a short round puff of a woman with wrinkles and a mustache, Mistress Nadari, who treats cancers and who I've only seen once closing a door behind her, and Mistress Lawson, who treats children in another house of healing but who was trapped here while having a consultation with Mistress Coyle when the surrender happened and who's been fretting ever since about the ill children she left behind.

  There are more apprentices, too, a dozen besides Maddy and Corinne, who-because they work with Mistress Co
yle-seem to be the top two apprentices out of the whole house, maybe even all of Haven. I rarely see the others except when they're trailing behind one of the healers, stethoscopes bouncing, white coats flapping behind them, off to find something to do.

  Because the truth of it is, as the days go by and the town gets on with whatever it's doing beyond our doors, most of us patients are getting better and new ones aren't arriving. All the male patients were taken out of here the first night, Maddy

  101

  told me, whether they could travel or not, and no new women have been brought here even though invasion and surrender aren't bars to getting sick.

  Mistress Coyle worries about this.

  "Well, if she can't heal, then who is she?" Corinne says, snapping the elastic band around my arm a little too tight. "She used to run all of the houses of healing, not just this one. Everyone knew her, everyone respected her. For a while, she was even Chair of the Town Council."

  I blink. "She used to be in charge?"

  "Years ago. Quit moving around." She jabs the needle into my arm harder than she needs to. "She's always saying that being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day." She catches my eye. "Which is something I believe, too."

  "So what happened?" I ask. "Why isn't she still in charge?"

  "She made a mistake," Corinne says primly. "People who didn't like her took advantage of it."

  "What kind of mistake?"

  Her permanent frown gets bigger. "She saved a life," she says and snaps loose the elastic band so hard it leaves a mark.

  Another day passes, and another, and nothing changes. We're still not allowed out, our food still comes, and the Mayor still hasn't asked for me. His men check on my condition but the promised talk never happens. He's just leaving me here, so far.

  Who knows why?

  102

  He's all anyone ever talks about, though.

  "And do you know what he's done?" Mistress Coyle says over dinner, my first one where I'm allowed out of bed and in the canteen. "The cathedral isn't just his base of operations. He's made it into his home."

  There's a general clucking of disgust from the women around her. Mistress Waggoner even pushes her plate away. "He fancies himself God now," she says.

  "He hasn't burned the town down, though," I say, wondering aloud from the other end of the table. Maddy and Corinne both look up from their plates with wide eyes. I carry on anyway. "We all thought he would, but he hasn't."

  Mistresses Waggoner and Lawson give Mistress Coyle a meaningful look.

  "You show your youth, Viola," Mistress Coyle says. "And you shouldn't challenge your superiors."

  I blink, surprised. "That's not what I meant," I say. "I'm only saying it's not what we expected."

  Mistress Coyle takes another bite while eyeing me. "He killed every woman in his town because he couldn't hear them, because he couldn't know them in the way that men could be known before the cure."

  The other mistresses nod. I open my mouth to speak but she overrides me.

  "What's also true, my girl," she says, "is that everything we've been through since landing on this planet-the surprise of the Noise, the chaos that followed-all of that remains unknown to your friends up there." She's watching me closely now. "Everything that happened to us is waiting to happen to them."

  103

  I don't reply, I just watch her.

  "And who do you want in charge of that process?" she asks. "Him?"

  She's done talking to me and returns to quieter conference with the mistresses. Corinne starts eating again, a smug grin on her face. Maddy's still staring at me wide-eyed, but all I can think of is the word left hanging in the air.

  When she said Him?, did she also mean, Or her?

  On our ninth day locked indoors, I'm no longer a patient. Mistress Coyle summons me to her office.

  "Your clothes," she says, handing me a package over her desk. "You can put them on now, if you like. Make you feel like a real person again."

  "Thank you," I say genuinely, heading behind the screen she's pointed out. I lift off the patient's robe and look for a second at my wound, almost healed both front and back.

  "You really are the most amazing healer," I say.

  "I do try," she says from her desk.

  I unwrap the package and find all of my own clothes, freshly laundered, smelling so clean and crisp I feel a strange pull on my face and discover I'm smiling.

  "You know, you're a brave girl, Viola," Mistress Coyle is saying, as I start to dress. "Despite not knowing when to keep quiet."

  "Thank you," I say, a little annoyed.

  "The crashing of your ship, the deaths of your parents, the amazing journey here. All faced with intelligence and resourcefulness."

  104

  "I had help," I say, sitting down to put on clean socks.

  I notice Mistress Coyle's pad on a little side table, the one so full of notes from our little consultations. I look up but she's still on the other side of the screen. I reach over and flip open the cover.

  "I sense big things in you, my girl," she says. "Leadership potential."

  The notebook is upside down and I don't want to make a noise by moving it so I try to twist round to see what it says. "I see a lot of myself in you."

  On the first page, before her notes start, there's only a single letter, written in blue. A.

  Nothing else.

  "We are the choices we make, Viola," Mistress Coyle is still talking. "And you can be so valuable to us. If you choose."

  I lift up my head from the pad. "Us who?"

  The door bursts open so loud and sudden I jump up and look around the screen. It's Maddy. "There was a messenger," she says, breathless. "Women can start leaving their houses."

  "It's so loud out here," I say, wincing into the ROAR of all the New Prentisstown Noise twining together.

  "You get used to it," Maddy says. We're sitting on a bench outside a store while Corinne and another apprentice named Thea buy supplies for the house of healing, stocking up for the expected flood of new patients.

  105

  I look around the streets. Stores are open, people pass by, mostly on foot but on fissionbikes and horses, too. If you don't look too closely, you'd almost think nothing was even wrong.

  But then you see that the men who move down the road never talk to each other. And women are allowed out only in groups of four and only in daylight and only for an hour at a time. And the groups of four never interact. Even the men of Haven don't approach us.

  And there are soldiers on every corner, rifles in hand.

  A bell chimes as the door of the store opens. Corinne storms out, arms full of bags, face full of thunder, Thea struggling behind her. "The storekeeper says no one's heard from the Spackle since they were taken," Corinne says, practically dropping a bag in my lap.

  "Corinne and her spacks," Thea says, rolling her eyes and handing me another bag.

  "Don't call them that," Corinne says. "If we could never treat them right, what do you think he's going to be doing to them?"

  "I'm sorry, Corinne," Maddy says before I can ask what Corinne means, "but don't you think it makes more sense to worry about us right now?" Her eyes are watching some soldiers who've noticed Corinne's raised voice. They aren't moving, haven't even shifted from the veranda of a feed store.

  But they're looking.

  "It was inhuman, what we did to them," Corinne says. "Yes, but they aren't human," Thea says, under her breath, looking at the soldiers, too.

  106

  "Thea Reese!" A vein bulges out of Corinne's forehead. "How can you call yourself a healer and say-"

  "Yes, yes, all right," Maddy says, trying to calm her down. "It was awful. I agree. You know we all agree, but what could we have done about it?"

  "What are you talking about?" I say. "Did what to them?"

  "The cure," Corinne says, saying it like a curse.

  Maddy turns to me with a frustrated sigh. "They found out t
hat the cure worked on the Spackle."

  "By testing it on them," Corinne says.

  "But it does more than that," Maddy says. "The Spackle don't speak, you see. They can click their mouths a little but it's hardly more than like when we snap our fingers."

  "The Noise was the only way they communicated," Thea says.

  "And it turned out we didn't really need them to talk to us to tell them what to do," Corinne says, her voice rising even more. "So who cares if they needed to talk to each other?"

  I'm beginning to see. "And the cure ..."

  Thea nods. "It makes them docile."

  "Better slaves," Corinne says bitterly.

  My mouth drops open. "They were slaves?"

  "Shhhh," Maddy shushes harshly, jerking her head toward the soldiers watching us, their lack of Noise among all the ROAR of the other men making them seem ominously blank.

  "It's like we cut out their tongues," Corinne says, lowering her voice but still burning.

  But Maddy is already getting us on our way, looking back over her shoulder at the soldiers.

  Who watch us go.

  107

  ***

  We walk the short distance back to the house of healing in silence, entering the front door under the blue outstretched hand painted over the door frame. After Corinne and Thea go inside, Maddy takes my arm lightly to hold me back.

  She looks at the ground for a minute, a dimple forming in the middle of her eyebrows. "The way those soldiers looked at us," she says.

  "Yeah?"

  She crosses her arms and shivers. "I don't know if I like this version of peace very much."

  "I know," I say softly.

  She waits a moment, then she looks at me square. "Could your people help us? Could they stop this?"

  "I don't know," I say, "but finding out would be better than just sitting here, waiting for the worst to happen."