The Ask and the Answer (25 page)

252

I turn back round to the work site.

1,150 pairs of Spackle eyes are watching us, watching
me,
like they're just effing farm animals looking up from their grazing cuz they heard a loud noise.

Stupid effing
sheep.

"GET TO WORK!" I shout.

"You look like hell," Mayor Ledger says, as I fall onto my bed.

"Stuff it," I say.

"Working you hard, is he?" He brings me over the dinner that's already waiting for us. It don't even look like he ate too much of mine before I got here.

"Ain't he working
you
hard?" I say, digging in to the food.

"I think he's forgotten about me, truth to tell." He sits back on his own bed. "I haven't spoken to him in I don't know how long."

I look up at him. His Noise is gray, like he's hiding something, tho that ain't unusual.

"I've just been doing my rubbish duties," he says, watching me eat. "Listening to people talk."

"And what're they saying?" I ask, cuz it seems like he wants to talk.

"Well," he says. His Noise shifts uncomfortably.

"Well what?"

And then I see the reason his Noise is so flat is cuz there's something he don't wanna tell me but feels like he has to, so here it comes.

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"That house of healing," he says. "That one in particular."

"What about it?" I say, trying not to make it sound important, failing.

"It's closed down," he says. "Empty."

I stop eating. "What do you mean, empty?"

"I mean
empty,"
he says gently, cuz he knows it's bad news. "There's no one there, not even the patients. Everyone's gone."

"Gone?" I whisper.

Gone.

I stand up tho there ain't nowhere to go, my stupid plate of dinner still in my hand.

"Gone where? What's he done with her?"

"He hasn't done anything," Mayor Ledger says. "Your friend ran. That's what I heard. Ran off with the women just before the tower fell." He rubs his chin. "Everyone else was arrested and taken to the prisons. But your friend ... got away."

He says
got away
like that's not what he means, like what he means is she was planning to get away all along.

"You can't know that," I say. "You can't know that's true about her."

He shrugs. "Maybe not," he says. "But I heard it from one of the soldiers who was guarding the house of healing."

"No," I say, but I don't know what I mean. "No."

"How well did you really know her?" Mayor Ledger says.

"You shut up."

I'm breathing hard, my chest rising and falling. It's good that she ran, ain't it?

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Ain't it?

She was in danger and now-- (but)

(but did she blow up the tower?)

(why didn't she tell me she was going to?)

(did she lie to me?)

And I shouldn't think it, I shouldn't think it, but here it comes--

She promised. And she left. She left
me.
(Viola?)

(did you leave me?)

255

21 THE MINE

***

(Viola)

I OPEN MY EYES to the sound of wings flapping outside the door, something I already know in the few days I've been here means that the bats have returned to the caves after their night's hunting, that the sun is about to rise, that it's almost time to get myself out of bed.

Some women start to stir, stretching in their cots. Others are still dead to the world, still snoring, still farting, still drifting on in the empty nothing of sleep.

I spend a second wishing I was still there, too.

The sleeping quarters are basically just a long shack, swept earth floor, wood walls, wood door, barely any windows and only an iron stove in the center for not enough heat. The rest is just a row of cots stretched from one end to the other, full of sleeping women.

As the newest arrival, I'm at one end.

And I'm watching the occupant of the bed at the other end. She sits up straight, body fully under her command, like

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she never actually sleeps, just puts herself on pause until she can start work again.

Mistress Coyle turns in her cot, sets her feet on the floor, and looks over the other sleepers straight at me.

Checking on me first.

To see, no doubt, if I've run off sometime in the night to find Todd.

I don't believe he's dead. And I don't believe he told the Mayor on us, either.

There must be another answer.

I look back at Mistress Coyle, unmoving.

Not gone,
I think.
Not yet.

But mainly because I don't even know where we are.

We're not by the ocean. Not even close, as far as I can tell, though that's not saying much because secrecy is the watchword of the camp. No one gives information out unless it's absolutely necessary. That's in case anyone gets captured on a bombing raid or, now that the Answer have started running out of things like flour and medicine, raids for supplies as well.

Mistress Coyle guards information as her most valuable resource.

All I know is that the camp is at an old mine, started up-like so many other things seem to have been on this planet-with great optimism after the first landings but abandoned after just a few years. There are a number of shacks around the openings to a couple of deep caves. The shacks, some new, some from the mining days, serve as sleeping quarters and meeting rooms and dining halls and so on.

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The caves-the ones where there aren't bats, anyway-are the food and supply stores, always worryingly low, always guarded fiercely by Mistress Lawson, still fretting over the children she left behind and taking out her fretting on anyone who requests another blanket for the cold.

Deeper in the caves are the mines, originally sunk to find coal or salt and then when none was found, diamonds and then gold, which weren't found either, as if they'd do anyone any good in this place anyway. The mines are now where the weapons and explosives are hidden. I don't know how they got here or where they came from, but if the camp is found, they'll be detonated, probably wiping us all off the map.

But for now it's a camp that's near a natural well and hidden by the forest around it. The only entrance is through the trees at the bottom of the path Mistress Coyle and I bumped our way down, and it's so steep and hard you'd hear intruders come from a long way away.

"And they'll come," Mistress Coyle said to me on my first day. "We'll just have to make sure we're ready to meet them."

"Why haven't they come already?" I asked. "People must know there's a mine here."

All she did was wink at me and touch the side of her nose.

"What's
that
supposed to mean?" I asked. But that was all I got, because information is her most valuable resource, isn't it?

At breakfast, I get my usual snubbing by Thea and the other apprentices I recognize, none of whom will say a word to me,

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still blaming me for Maddy's death, blaming me for somehow being a traitor, blaming me for this whole damn war, for all I know.

Not that I care.

Because I don't.

I leave them to the dining hall, and I take my plate of gray porridge out in the cold morning to some rocks near the mouth of one of the caves. As I eat, I watch the camp start to wake itself, start to put itself together for the things that terrorists spend their days doing.

The biggest surprise is how few people there are. Maybe a hundred. That's all. That's the big Answer causing all the fuss in New Prentisstown by blowing things up. One hundred people. Mistresses and apprentices, former patients and others, too, disappearing in the night and returning in the morning, or keeping the camp running for those that come and go, tending to the few horses the Answer has and the oxes that pull the carts and the hens we get our eggs from and a million other things that need doing.

But only a hundred people. Not enough to have a whisper of a prayer if the Mayor's
real
army comes marching down toward us.

"All right, Hildy?"

"Hi, Wilf," I say, as he comes up to me, a plate of porridge in his hands, too. I scoot over so he can sit near me. He doesn't say anything, just eats his porridge and lets me eat mine.

"Wilf?" we both hear. Jane, Wilf's wife, is coming for us, two steaming mugs in her hands. She picks her way over the rocks toward us, stumbling once, spilling some coffee and

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causing Wilf to rise halfway up, but she recovers. "Here ya go!" she practically shouts, thrusting the mugs at us. "Thank you," I say, taking mine.

She shoves her hands under her armpits against the cold and smiles, eyes wide and searching around, like she eats with them. "Awful cold to be eating outside," she says, like an overly friendly demand that we explain ourselves.

"Yup," Wilf says, going back to his porridge.

"It's not too bad," I say, also going back to eating.

"Didja hear they got a grain store last night?" she says, lowering her voice to a whisper but somehow making it louder at the same time. "We can have
bread
again!"

"Yup," Wilf says again.

"D'you like bread?" she asks me.

"I do."

"Ya gotta have bread," she says, to the ground, to the sky, to the rocks. "Ya gotta have bread."

And then she's back off to the dining hall, not another word, though Wilf doesn't seem to much mind or even notice. But I know, I
definitely
know that Wilf's clear and even Noise, his lack of words, his seeming blankness doesn't describe all of him, not even close.

Wilf and Jane were refugees, fleeing into Haven as the army swept behind them, passing us on the road as Todd slept off his fever in Carbonel Downs. Jane fell ill on the trip and, after asking directions, Wilf took her straight to Mistress Forth's house of healing, where Jane was still recovering when the army invaded. Wilf, whose Noise is as free of deception as

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anyone's on this planet, was assumed by the soldiers to be an idiot and so allowed to visit his wife when no other man was.

When the women ran, Wilf helped. When I asked him why, all he did was shrug and say, "They were gone take Jane." He hid the less able women on his cart as they fled, built a hidey-hole in it so others could return for missions, and for weeks on end has risked his life taking them to and fro because the soldiers have always assumed a man so transparent couldn't be hiding anything.

All of which has been a surprise to the leaders of the Answer.

But none of which is a surprise to me.

He saved me and Todd once when he didn't have to. He saved Todd again when there was even more danger. He was even ready the first night I was here to turn right back around to help me find him, but Sergeant Hammar knows Wilf's face now, knows that he should have been arrested, so any trip back is pretty much a death sentence.

I take a last spoonful of my porridge and sigh heavily as I pop it into my mouth. I could be sighing at the cold, sighing at the boring porridge, sighing at the lack of anything to do in camp.

But, somehow, Wilf knows. Somehow, Wilf always knows.

"Ah'm shur he's okay, Hildy," he says, finishing up his own porridge. "He survives, does our Todd."

I look up into the cold morning sun and I swallow again, though there's no porridge left in my throat.

"Keep yerself strong," Wilf stays, standing. "Strong for what's comin."

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I blink. "What's coming?" I ask as he walks on toward the dining hall, drinking his mug of coffee. He just keeps on going.

I finish my coffee, rubbing my arms to gather some heat, thinking I'll ask her again today, no, I'll
tell
her I'm coming on the next mission, that I need to find-

"You're sitting out here all by yourself?"

I look up. Lee, the blond soldier, is standing there, smiling all toothy.

I immediately feel my face go hot.

"No, no," I say, standing straight up, turning away from him, and picking up the plate.

"You don't have to leave-" he's saying. "No, I'm finished-"

"Viola-"

"All yours-"

"That's not what I meant-"

But I'm already stomping back to the dining hall, cursing myself for the redness of my face.

Lee isn't the only man. Well, he's hardly a
man,
but like Wilf, he and Magnus can no longer pretend to be soldiers and go to the city, now that their faces are known.

But there are others who can. Because that's the biggest secret of all about the Answer.

At least a third of the people here are men, men who pretend to be soldiers to shuttle women in and out of the