“Calm yourself, my girl.”
A voice–
In the brightness–
I blink open my eyes. Everything is a pure white so bright it’s almost a sound and there’s a voice out there in it and my head is groggy and there’s a pain in my side and it’s too bright and I can’t think–
Wait–
Wait–
He was carrying me down the hill–
Just now he was carrying me down the hill into Haven after–
“Todd?” I say, my voice a rasp, full of cotton and spit, but I run at it as hard as I can, forcing it out into the bright lights blinding my eyes. “TODD?”
“I said to calm yourself, now.”
I don’t recognize the voice, the voice of a woman–
A woman.
“Who are you?” I ask, trying to sit up, pushing out my hands to feel what’s around me, feeling the coolness of the air, the softness of–
A bed?
I feel panic begin to rise.
“Where is he?” I shout. “TODD?”
“I don’t know any Todd, my girl,” the voice says as shapes start to come together, as the brightness separates into lesser brightnesses, “but I do know you’re in no shape to be demanding information.”
“You were shot,” says another voice, another woman, younger than the first, off to my right.
“Hush your mouth, Madeleine Poole,” says the first woman.
“Yes, Mistress Coyle.”
I keep on blinking and I start to see what’s right in front of me. I’m in a narrow white bed in a narrow white room. I’m wearing a thin white gown, tied at the back. A woman both tall and plump stands in front of me, a white coat with a blue outstretched hand stitched into it draped over her shoulders, her mouth set in a line, her expression solid. Mistress Coyle. Behind her at the door holding a bowl of steaming water is a girl not much older than me.
“I’m Maddy,” says the girl, sneaking a smile.
“Out,” says Mistress Coyle, without even turning her head. Maddy catches my eye as she leaves, another smile sent my way.
“Where am I?” I ask Mistress Coyle, my breath still fast.
“Do you mean the room, my girl? Or the town?” She holds my eyes. “Or indeed the planet?”
“Please,” I say and my eyes suddenly start to fill with water and I’m angry about that but I keep talking. “I was with a boy.”
She sighs and looks away for a second, then she purses her lips and sits down in a chair next to the bed. Her face is stern, her hair pulled back in plaits so tight you could probably climb them, her body solid and big and not at all someone who you’d mess around.
“I’m sorry,” she says, almost tenderly. Almost. “I don’t know anything about a boy.” She frowns. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about anything except that you were brought to this house of healing yesterday morning so close to death I wasn’t at all sure we would be able to bring you back. Except that we were informed in no uncertain terms that our survival rather depended upon yours.”
She waits to see how I take this.
I have no idea how I take this.
Where is he? What have they done with him?
I turn away from her to try and think but I’m wrapped so tight in bandages around my middle I can’t properly sit up.
Mistress Coyle runs a couple of fingers across her brow. “And now that you’re back,” she says, “I’m not at all sure you’re going to thank us for the world to which we’ve returned you.”
She tells me of Mayor Prentiss arriving in Haven in front of the rumour of an army, a big one, big enough to crush the town without effort, big enough to set the whole world ablaze. She tells me of the surrender of someone called Mayor Ledger, of how he shouted down the few people who wanted to fight, of how most people agreed to let him “hand over the town on a plate with a bow tied round it”.
“And then the houses of healing,” she says, real anger coming off her voice, “suddenly became prisons for the women inside.”
“So you’re a doctor, then?” I ask, but all I can feel is my chest pulling in on itself, sinking as if under an enormous weight, sinking because we failed, sinking because outrunning the army proved to be of no use at all.
Her mouth curls in a small smile, a secret one, like I just let something go. But it’s not cruel and I’m finding myself less afraid of her, of what this room might mean, less afraid for myself, more afraid for him.
“No, my girl,” she says, cocking her head. “As I’m sure you know, there are no women doctors on New World. I’m a healer.”
“What’s the difference?”
She runs her fingers across her brow again. “What’s the difference indeed?” She drops her hands in her lap and looks at them. “Even though we’re locked up,” she says, “we still hear rumours, you see. Rumours of men and women being separated all over town, rumours of the army arriving perhaps this very day, rumours of slaughter coming over the hill to vanquish us all no matter how well we surrendered.”
She’s looking at me hard now. “And then there’s you.”
I look away from her. “I’m not anyone special.”
“Are you not?” She looks unconvinced. “A girl whose arrival the whole town has to be cleared for? A girl whose life I am ordered to save on pain of my own? A girl,” she leans forward to make sure I’m listening, “fresh from the great black beyond?”
I stop breathing for a second and hope she doesn’t notice. “Where’d you get an idea like that?”
She grins again, not unkindly. “I’m a healer. The first thing I ever see is skin and so I know it well. Skin tells the story of a person, where they’ve been, what they’ve eaten, who they are. You’ve got some surface wear, my girl, but the rest of your skin is the softest and whitest I’ve seen in my twenty years of doing the good work. Too soft and white for a planet of farmers.”
I’m still not looking at her.
“And then there are the rumours, of course, brought in by the refugees, of more settlers on the way. Thousands of them.”
“Please,” I say quietly, my eyes welling up again. I try to force them to stop.
“And no girl from New World would ever ask a woman if she was a doctor,” she finishes.
I swallow. I put a hand to my mouth. Where is he? I don’t care about any of this because where is he?
“I know you’re frightened,” Mistress Coyle says. “But we’re suffering from an excess of fright here in this town and there’s nothing I can do about that.” She reaches out a rough hand to touch my arm. “But maybe you can do something to help us.”
I swallow but I don’t say anything.
There’s only one person I can trust.
And he’s not here.
Mistress Coyle leans back in her chair. “We did save your life,” she says. “A little knowledge could be a large comfort.”
I breathe in deep, looking around the room, around at the sunlight streaming in from a window looking out onto trees and a river, the river, the one we followed into what was supposed to be safety. It seems impossible that anything bad could be happening anywhere on a day so bright, that there’s any danger on the doorstep, that there’s an army coming.
But there is an army coming.
There is.
And it won’t be any friend to Mistress Coyle, no matter what’s happened to–
I feel a little pain in my chest.
But I take a breath.
And I start to talk.
“My name,” I say, “is Viola Eade.”
“More settlers, huh?” Maddy says with a smile. I’m lying on my side as she unwraps the long bandage around my middle. The underside is covered in blood, my skin dusty and rust-coloured where it’s dried. There’s a little hole in my stomach, tied up with fine string.
“Why doesn’t this hurt?” I say.
“Jeffers root on the bandages,” Maddy says. “Natural opiate. You won’t feel any pain but you won’t be able to go to the toilet for a month either. Plus, you’ll be sound asleep in about five minutes.”
I touch the skin around the bullet wound, gently, gently. There’s another on my back where the bullet went in. “Why aren’t I dead?”
“Would you rather be dead?” She smiles again, which changes to the smiliest frown I’ve ever seen. “I shouldn’t joke. Mistress Coyle’s always saying I lack the proper seriousness to be a healer.” She dips a cloth in a basin of hot water and starts washing the wounds. “You aren’t dead because Mistress Coyle is the best healer in all of Haven, better than any of those so-called doctors they’ve got in this town. Even the bad guys know that. Why do you think they brought you here instead of a clinic?”
She’s wearing the same long white coat as Mistress Coyle but she’s also got on a short white cap with the blue outstretched hand stitched on it, which she told me is something apprentices wear. She can’t be more than a year or two older than me, whatever way they measure age on this planet, but her hands are sure, gentle and firm all around the wounds.
“So,” she says, her voice deceptively light. “How bad are these bad guys?”
The door opens. A short girl in another apprentice cap leans in, young as Maddy but with dark brown skin and a storm cloud hanging over her head. “Mistress Coyle says you need to finish up right now.”
Maddy doesn’t look up from taping new bandages to my front. “Mistress Coyle knows I’ve only had time to get halfway done.”
“We’ve been summoned,” says the girl.
“You say that like we get summoned all the time, Corinne.” The bandages are almost as good as the ones I had from my ship, the medicine on them already cooling my torso, already making my eyelids heavy. Maddy finishes on the front and turns to cut another set for my back. “I am in the middle of a healing.”
“A man came by with a gun,” Corinne says.
Maddy stops bandaging.
“Everyone’s been called to the town square,” Corinne continues. “Which includes you, Maddy Poole, healing or not.” She crosses her arms hard. “I’ll bet it’s the army coming.”
Maddy looks me in the eyes. I look away.
“We’ll finally see what our end looks like,” Corinne says.
Maddy rolls her eyes. “Always so cheerful, you,” she says. “Tell Mistress Coyle I’ll be out in two ticks.”
Corinne gives her a sour look but leaves. Maddy finishes up the bandages on my back, by which time I can barely stay awake.
“You sleep now,” Maddy says. “It’ll be all right, you just watch. Why would they save you if they were going to . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought, just scrunches her lips and then smiles. “I’m always saying Corinne’s got enough proper seriousness in her for all of us put together.”
Her smile is the last thing I see before I sleep.
“TODD!”
I jolt awake again, the nightmare dashing away, Todd slipping from me–
I hear a clunk and I see a book drop from Maddy’s lap as she blinks herself awake in the chair by the bed. Night’s fallen, and the room is dark, just a little lamp on where Maddy was meant to have been reading.
“Who’s Todd?” she asks, yawning, already smiling through it. “Your boyfriend?” The look on my face makes her drop the tease immediately. “Someone important?”
I nod, still breathing heavily from the nightmare, my hair plastered to my forehead with sweat. “Someone important.”
She pours me a glass of water from a pitcher on the bedside table. “What happened?” I say, taking a drink. “You were summoned.”
“Ah, yes, that,” Maddy says, sitting back. “That was interesting.”
She tells me about how everyone in the entire town– not Haven any more, New Prentisstown, a name that makes my stomach sink– gathered to watch the army march in and watch the new Mayor execute the old one.
“Except he didn’t,” Maddy says. “He spared him. Said he would spare all of us, too. That he was taking away the Noise cure, which the men weren’t too happy about and good Lord it’s been nice not to hear it yammering for the past six months, but that we should all know our place and remember who we were and that we would make a new home together in preparation for all the settlers that were coming.”
She widens her eyes, waits for me to say something.
“I didn’t understand half of that,” I say. “There’s a cure?”
She shakes her head but not to say no. “Boy, you really aren’t from around here, are you?”
I set down the glass of water, leaning forward and lowering my voice to a whisper. “Maddy, is there a communications hub near here?”
She looks at me like I just asked her if she’d like to move with me to one of the moons. “So I can contact the ships,” I say. “It might be a big, curved dish? Or a tower, maybe?”
She looks thoughtful. “There’s an old metal tower up in the hills,” she says, also whispering, “but I’m not even sure it is a communications tower. It’s been abandoned for ages. Besides, you won’t be able to get to it. There’s a whole army out there, Vi.”
“How big?”
“Big enough.” We’re both still whispering. “People are saying they’re separating out the last of the women tonight.”
“To do what?”
Maddy shrugs. “Corinne said a woman in the crowd told her they rounded up the Spackle, too.”
I sit up, pressing against the bandages. “Spackle?”
“They’re the native species here.”
“I know who they are.” I sit up even more, straining against the bandage. “Todd told me things, told me what happened before. Maddy, if the Mayor’s separating out women and Spackle, then we’re in danger. We’re in the worst kind of danger.”
I push back my sheets to get up but a sudden bolt of lightning rips through my stomach. I call out and fall back.
“Pulled a stitch,” Maddy tuts, standing right up.
“Please.” I grit my teeth against the pain. “We have to get out of here. We have to run.”
“You’re in no position to run anywhere,” she says, reaching for my bandage.
Which is when the Mayor walks in the door.