by Patrick Ness
She's out there somewhere.
A month and she ain't come.
A month and-
(shut up)
(just effing shut up your effing whiny mouth) I start pacing again.
We've got glass in the openings now and a heater to protect us from the autumn nights. More blankets, too, and a light and approved books for Mayor Ledger to read.
"Still a prison, though, isn't it?" he says behind me, mouth full. "You'd think he'd have at least found a better place for you by now."
"I sure wish everyone would stop thinking it's okay to read me all the damn time," I say, without turning around.
"He probably wants you out of the town," he says, finishing up his meal, which is just over half what we used to get. "Wants you away from all the rumors."
"What rumors?" I say, tho I'm barely interested.
"Oh, rumors of the great mind-control powers of our Mayor. Rumors of weapons made from Noise. Rumors he can fly, I don't doubt."
I don't look back at him and I keep my Noise quiet.
I am the Circle, I think.
And then I stop.
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***
It's after midnight when the first one goes off. Boom!
I jump a little on my mattress but that's all.
"Where do you think that was?" Mayor Ledger asks, also not rising from his bed.
"Sounded near east," I say, looking up into the dark of the tower bells. "Maybe a food store?"
We wait for the second. There's always a second now. As the soldiers rush to the first, the Answer take the chance for a second--
Boom!
"There it is," Mayor Ledger says, sitting up in bed and looking out of an opening. I get up, too. "Damn," he says.
"What?" I say, moving next to him.
"I think that was the water plant down by the river."
"What does that mean?"
"It means we'll have to boil every stupid cup of--" BOOM!
There's a huge flash that causes me and Mayor Ledger to flinch back from the window. The glass shakes in its frames.
And every light in New Prentisstown goes off.
"The power station," Mayor Ledger says, unbelieving. "But that's guarded every hour of the day. How could they possibly get to that?"
"I don't know," I say, my stomach sinking. "But there's gonna be hell to pay."
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Mayor Ledger runs a tired hand over his face as we hear sirens and soldiers shouting down in the city below. He's shaking his head. "I don't know what they think they're accomp-"
BOOM!
Five huge explosions, one right after the other, shaking the tower so much that me and Mayor Ledger are thrown to the floor and a bunch of our windows shatter, busting inward, covering us in shards and powdery glass.
We see the sky light up.
The sky to the west.
A cloud of fire and smoke shooting so high above the prisons it's like a giant's flinging it there.
Mayor Ledger is breathing heavy beside me.
"They've done it," he says, gasping. "They've really done
it."
They've really done it, I think. They've started their war. And I can't help it-I can't help but think it-Is she coming for me?
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25 THE NIGHT IT HAPPENS
***
(Viola)
"I NEED YOUR HELP," Mistress Lawson says, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
I hold up my hands, covered in flour. "I'm kind of in the middle of-"
"Mistress Coyle specifically asked me to fetch you."
I frown. I don't like the word fetch. "Then who's going to finish these loaves for tomorrow? Lee's out getting firewood-"
"Mistress Coyle said you had experience in medical supplies," Mistress Lawson interrupts. "We've brought a lot more in and the girl I have now is hopeless at sorting them out."
I sigh. It's better than cooking, at least.
I follow her out into the dusk, into the mouth of a cave and through a series of passages until we get to the large cavern where we keep our most valuable supplies.
"This might take a while," Mistress Lawson says.
We spend most of the evening and into the night counting just how many medicines, bandages, compresses, bed
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linens, ethers, tourniquets, diagnostic bands, blood pressure straps, stethoscopes, gowns, water purification tablets, splints, cotton swabs, clamps, Jeffers root pills, adhesives, and everything else we have, sorting them out into smaller piles and spreading them across the supply cavern, right up the lip of the main tunnel.
I wipe cold sweat from my forehead. "Shouldn't we be stacking these up already?"
"Not just yet," Mistress Lawson says. She looks around at the neat piles of everything we've done. She rubs her hands together, a worried frown creasing her face. "I hope it's enough."
"Enough for what?" I follow her with my eyes as she goes from pile to pile. "Enough for what, Mistress Lawson?"
She looks up at me, biting her lip. "How much of your healing do you remember?"
I stare at her for a second, suspicions rising and rising, then I take off running out of the cavern. "Wait!" she calls after me, but I'm already out into the central tunnel, running out of the main mouth of the cave and shooting into the camp.
Which is deserted.
"Don't be angry," Mistress Lawson says after I've searched every cabin.
I stand there, stupidly, hands on my hips, staring around at the empty camp. Having found a distraction for me, Mistress Coyle left, along with all the other mistresses except for Mistress Lawson. Thea and the apprentices are gone, too.
And everyone else. Every cart, horse, and ox.
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And Lee.
Wilf's gone, too, though Jane is here, the only other one who stayed behind. Tonight's the night. Tonight's the night it happens.
"You know why she couldn't take you," Mistress Lawson says.
"She doesn't trust me," I say. "None of you do."
"That's neither here nor there right now," she says, her voice taking on that stern mistress tone I've grown to hate. "What matters is that when they come back, we're going to need all the healing hands we can get."
I'm about to argue but I see how much she's still wringing her hands, how worried her face looks, how much is going on beneath the surface.
And then she says, "If any of them make it back at all."
There's nothing left to do but wait. Jane makes us coffee, and we sit in the increasing cold, watching the path out of the woods, watching to see who returns down it.
"Frost," Jane says, digging her toe across the small breath of ice frozen on a stone near her foot.
"We should have done it earlier," Mistress Lawson says into her cup, face over the rising steam. "We should have done it before the weather turned."
"Done what?" I ask.
"Rescue," Jane says simply. "Wilf tole me when he was leavin."
"Rescue of who?" I say, though of course it can only be-
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We hear rocks fall on the path. We're already on our feet when Magnus comes barreling over the hill. "Hurry!" he's shouting. "Come on!"
Mistress Lawson grabs some of the most urgent of the medical supplies and starts running after him up the path. Jane and I do the same.
We're halfway up when they start to come out of the forest.
On the backs of carts, across the shoulders of others, on stretchers, on horseback, with more people pouring down the path behind them and more cresting the hill behind them.
All the ones who needed rescuing.
The prisoners locked away by the Mayor and his army.
And the state of them-
"Oh, m'Gawd," Jane says, quietly, next to me, both of us stopped, stunned. Oh, my God.
The next hours are a blur, as we rush to bring the wounded into camp, though some of them are hurt so bad we have to treat them where they are. I'm ordered from one healer to another
and another, racing from wound to wound, running back for more supplies, going so fast it's only after a while that I start to realize that most of the wounds being treated aren't from fighting.
"They've been beaten," I say.
"And starved," Mistress Lawson says angrily, setting up a fluid injection into the arm of a woman we've carried into the cave. "And tortured."
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The woman is just one of a growing number that threatens never to stop. Most of them too shocked to speak, staring at you in the most horrible silence or keening at you without words, burn scars on their arms and faces, old wounds left untreated, the sunken eyes of women who haven't eaten for days and days and days.
"He did this," I say to myself. "He did this."
"Hold it together, my girl," Mistress Lawson says. We rush back outside, arms full of bandages that don't begin to cover what's needed. Mistress Braithwaite waves me over with a frantic hand. She tears the bandages from me, furiously wrapping up the leg of a woman screaming beneath her. "Jeffers root!" Mistress Braithwaite snaps.
"I didn't bring any," I say.
"Then bloody well get some!"
I go back to the cave, twisting around healers and apprentices and fake soldiers crouched over patients everywhere, up the hillsides, on backs of carts, everywhere. It's not just women injured either. I see male prisoners, also starved, also beaten. I see people from the camp wounded in the fighting, including Wilf with a burn bandage up the side of his face, though he's still helping carry patients on stretchers into the camp.
I run into the cave, grab more bandages and Jeffers root, and run back to the gully for the dozenth time. I cross the open ground and look up the path, where a few more people are still arriving.
I stop a second and check the new faces before running back to Mistress Braithwaite.
Mistress Coyle hasn't returned yet.
Neither has Lee.
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***
"He was right in the thick of it," Mistress Nadari says, as I help her get a freshly drugged woman to her feet. "Like he was looking for someone."
"His mother and sister," I say, taking the woman's weight against me.
"We didn't get everyone," Mistress Nadari says. "There was a whole other building where the bomb didn't go off-"
"Siobhan!" we hear someone shout in the distance.
I turn, my heart racing a lot faster and bigger than I expect, a smile breaking my cheeks. "He's found them!"
But you can see right away it's not true.
"Siobhan?" Lee is coming down the path from the forest, the arm and shoulder of his uniform blackened, his face covered in soot, his eyes looking everywhere, this way and that through all the people in the gully as he walks through them. "Mum?"
"Go," Mistress Nadari says to me. "See if he's hurt."
I let the woman lean onto Mistress Nadari and I run toward Lee, ignoring the other mistresses calling my name.
"Lee!" I call.
"Viola?" he says, seeing me. "Are they here? Do you know if they're here?"
"Are you hurt?" I reach him, taking the blackened sleeve and looking at his hands. "You're burned."
"There were fires," he says, and I look into his eyes. He's looking at me but he's not seeing me, he's seeing what he saw at the prisons, he's seeing the fires and what was behind them, he's seeing the prisoners they found, maybe he's seeing guards he had to kill.
He's not seeing his sister or his mother.
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"Are they here?" he pleads. "Tell me they're here."
"I don't know what they look like," I say quietly.
Lee stares at me, his mouth open, his breath heavy and raspy, like he's breathed in a lot of smoke. "It was ..." he says. "Oh, God, Viola, it was ..." He looks up and past me, over my shoulder. "I've got to find them. They've got to be here."
He steps past me and down the gully. "Siobhan? Mum?" I can't help it and I call after him. "Lee? Did you see Todd?"
But he keeps on walking, stumbling away.
"Viola!" I hear and at first I think it's just another mistress calling for my help.
But then a voice beside me says, "Mistress Coyle!"
I turn and look up. At the top of the path is Mistress Coyle, on horseback, clopping down the rocks of the path as fast as she can make the horse go. She's got someone in the saddle behind her, someone tied to her to keep them from falling off. I feel a jolt of hope. Maybe it's Siobhan. Or Lee's mum.
(or him, maybe it's him, maybe-)
"Help us, Viola!" Mistress Coyle shouts, working the reins.
And as I start to run up the hill toward them, the horse turns to find its footing and I see who it is, unconscious and leaning badly.
Corinne.
"No," I keep saying, under my breath, hardly realizing it.
"No, no, no, no, no," as we get her down onto a flat of rock
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and as Mistress Lawson runs toward us with armfuls of bandages and medicines. "No, no, no," as I take her head in my hands to cradle it from the hard rock and Mistress Coyle tears off Corinne's sleeve to prepare for injections. "No," as Mistress Lawson reaches us and gasps as she sees who it is.
"You found her," Mistress Lawson says.
Mistress Coyle nods. "I found her."
I feel Corinne's skull under my hands, feel how the skin burns with fever. I see how sharp her cheeks look, how the bruising that discolors her eyes is against skin sagging and limp. And the collarbones that jut up from above the neckline of her torn and dirty mistress cloak. And the circles of burns against her neck. And the cuts on her forearms. And the tearing at her fingernails.
"Oh, Corinne," I whisper and wet from my eyes drops onto her forehead. "Oh, no."
"Stay with us, my girl," Mistress Coyle says, and I don't know whether she's talking to me or Corinne.
"Thea?" Mistress Lawson asks, not looking up.
Mistress Coyle shakes her head.
"Thea's dead?" I ask.
"And Mistress Waggoner," Mistress Coyle says, and I notice the smoke on her face, the red angry burns on her forehead. "And others." Her mouth draws thin. "But we got some of them, too."
"Come on, my girl," Mistress Lawson says to Corinne, still unconscious. "You were always the stubborn one. We need that now."
"Hold this," Mistress Coyle says, handing me a bag of
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fluid connected to a tube injected into Corinne's arm. I take it in one hand, keeping Corinne's head in my lap.
"Here it is," Mistress Lawson says, peeling away a strap of crusted cloth on Corinne's side. A terrible smell hits all of us at the same time.
It's worse than how sickening it stinks. It's worse because of what it means.
"Gangrene," Mistress Coyle says pointlessly, because we can all see that it's way past infection. The smell means the tissue's dead. It means it's started to eat her alive. Something I wish I didn't remember that Corinne taught me herself.
"They didn't even give her basic bloody treatment," grunts Mistress Lawson, getting to her feet and running back toward the cave to get the heaviest medicines we've got.
"Come on, my difficult girl," Mistress Coyle says quietly, stroking Corinne's forehead.
"You stayed until you found her," I say. "That's why you were last."
"She'd never yield, this one," Mistress Coyle says, her voice rough and not just because of smoke. "No matter what they did to her."
We look down at Corinne's face, her eyes still closed, her mouth dropped open, her breath faltering.
Mistress Coyle's right. Corinne would never yield, would never give names or information, would take the punishment to keep other daughters, other mothers, from feeling it themselves.
"The infection," I say, my throat swelling. "The smell, it means-"
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Mistress Coyle just bites her lips hard and shakes her head. "Oh, Corinne," I say. "Oh, no."
And right there, right there in my hands, in my lap, her face turned up to mine-She dies.
There's only silence when it happens. It isn't loud or struggled against or violent or anything at all. She just falls quiet, a certain type of quiet you know is endless as soon as you hear it, a quiet that muffles everything around it, turning off the volume of the world.
The only thing I can hear, in fact, is my own breathing, wet and heavy and like I'll never feel lightness again. And in the silence of my breath I look down the hillside, I see the rest of the wounded around us, their mouths open to cry out in pain, their eyes blank with horrors still being seen even after rescue. I see Mistress Lawson, running toward us with medicine, too late, too late. I see Lee, coming back up the path, calling out for his mother and sister, not willing to believe yet that in all this mess, they're still not here.
I think of the Mayor in his cathedral, making promises, telling lies.
(I think of Todd in the Mayor's hands)
I look down at Corinne in my lap, Corinne who never liked me, not ever, but who gave her life for mine anyway.
We are the choices we make.
When I look up at Mistress Coyle, the wet in my eyes makes everything shine with pointed lights, makes the first peek of the rising sun a smear across the sky.
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But I can see her clearly enough.
My teeth are clenched, my voice thick as mud.
"I'm ready," I say. "I'll do anything you want."
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26 THE ANSWER
***
[TODD]
OH, GOD, Mayor Ledger keeps saying under his breath. "Oh, God."
"What're you so upset about?" I finally snap at him.
