Chaos Walking

by Patrick Ness

  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 . . .”

  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 re-open. I’ll bet 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 moustache, 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 Coyle– 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 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?

  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.”

  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 say
s, 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.”

  “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.

  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.

  “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 that 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.

  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.”

  She looks around to see if we’re being overheard. “Mistress Coyle is brilliant,” she says, “but sometimes she can only hear her own opinion.”

  She waits, biting her upper lip.

  “Maddy?”

  “We’ll watch out,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “If the right moment arrives, and only if,” she looks around again, “we’ll see what we can do about contacting your ships.”

  {VIOLA}

  “But slavery is wrong,” I say, rolling up another bandage.

  “The healers were always opposed to it.” Mistress Coyle ticks off another box on her inventory. “Even after the Spackle War, we thought it inhuman.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop it?”

  “If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.”

  “War makes monsters of men,” I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead.

  “And women,” Mistress Coyle says. She taps her fingers on boxes of syringes to count them.

  “But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Thirteen years now.”

  “Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong.”

  She finally looks at me. “Life is only that simple when you’re young, my girl.”

  “But you were in charge,” I say. “You could have done something.”

  “And who told you I was in charge?”

  “Corinne said–”

  “Ah, Corinne,” she says, turning back to her clipboard, “doing her best to love me no matter what the facts.”


  I open up another bag of supplies. “But if you were head of this Council thing,” I press on, “surely you could have done something about the Spackle.”

  “Sometimes, my girl,” she says, giving me a displeased look, “you can lead people where they don’t want to go, but most of the time you can’t. The Spackle weren’t going to be freed, not after we’d just beaten them in an awful and vicious war, not when we needed so much labour to rebuild. But they could be treated better, couldn’t they? They could be fed properly and set to work humane hours and allowed to live together with their families. All victories I won for them, Viola.”

  Her writing on the clipboard is a lot more forceful than it was. I watch her for a second. “Corinne says you were thrown off the Council for saving a life.”

  She doesn’t answer me, just sets down her clipboard and looks on one of the higher shelves. She reaches up and takes down an apprentice hat and a folded apprentice cloak. She turns and tosses them to me.

  “Who are these for?” I say, catching them.

  “You want to find out about being a leader?” she says. “Then let’s put you on the path.”

  I look at her face.

  I look down at the cloak and the cap.

  From then on, I barely have time to eat.

  The day after women were allowed to move again, there were eighteen new patients, all female, who’d been suffering all kinds of things– appendicitis, heart problems, lapsed cancer treatments, broken bones– all trapped in houses where they’d been stuck after being separated from husbands and sons. The next day, there were eleven more. Mistress Lawson went back to the children’s house of healing the second she was able, but Mistresses Coyle, Waggoner and Nadari were suddenly rushing from room to room, shouting orders and saving lives. I don’t think anyone’s been to sleep since.

  There’s certainly no time for me and Maddy to look for our moment, no time to even notice that the Mayor still hasn’t come to see me. Instead, I run around a lot, getting in the way, helping out where I can, and squeezing apprentice lessons in.