“Get off me!”
She slaps her hand over my mouth, holding it there, holding me there with the weight of her body as clouds of dust billow around us from the rubble of the communications tower. “Quit shouting,” she hisses.
I bite her hand.
She makes a pained face, fierce and angry, but she doesn’t let go, just takes the bite and doesn’t move.
“You can scream and shout all you want later, my girl,” she says, “but in two seconds, this place is going to be swarming with soldiers and do you honestly think they’re going to believe you just happened by?”
She waits to see my reaction. I glare at her but finally nod. She takes away her hand.
“Don’t you call me my girl,” I say, keeping my voice low but just as fierce as hers. “Don’t you call me that ever again.”
I follow her down a steep slope, heading back towards the road, sliding on fallen leaves and gathered dew but always down and down. I hop over logs and roots, the canvas bag like a stone around my shoulders.
I have no choice but to go with her.
I’d be captured and god knows what else if I went back to town.
And she took my other choice away.
She reaches a stand of bushes at the bottom of a steepening in the slope. She ducks fast under them and beckons for me to follow. I slide down next to her, my breath almost gone, and she says, “Whatever you do, don’t scream.”
Before I can even open my mouth, she’s jumped out through the bushes. They close up behind her and I have to fight my way through leaves and branches to follow. I’m still pushing them back when I practically tumble out the other side.
Onto the road.
Where two soldiers stand by a man with a cart, all of them looking straight at me and Mistress Coyle.
The soldiers look more astonished than angry, but they have no Noise, so there’s no way to know.
But they’re carrying rifles.
And they’re raising them at us.
“And who the hell is this?” one barks, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and a scar down his jaw line.
“Don’t shoot!” Mistress Coyle says, hands out and up.
“We heard the explosion,” says the other soldier, a younger one, not much older than me, with blond, shoulder-length hair.
Then the older soldier says something else, something unexpected.
“You’re late.”
“That’s enough, Magnus,” Mistress Coyle says, lowering her hands and stepping forward to the cart. “And put your rifles down, she’s with me.”
“What?” I say, still frozen to my spot.
“The tracer malfunctioned completely,” the younger soldier says to her. “We’re not even sure where it came down.”
“I told you they were too old,” Magnus says.
“It did its job,” Mistress Coyle says, bustling around the cart, “wherever it landed.”
“Hey!” I say. “What’s going on?”
And then I hear, “Hildy?”
Mistress Coyle stops in her tracks, the two soldiers do, too, and stare at the man driving the cart.
“Iss you, ain it?” he says. “Hildy hoo’s also called Viola.”
My mind’s been racing so fast, so completely focused on the soldiers, that I barely took in the man driving the cart, the nearly expressionless face, the clothes, the hat, the voice, the Noise flat and calm as the far horizon.
The man that once drove me and Todd across a sea of things.
“Wilf,” I gasp.
Now everyone looks at me, Mistress Coyle’s eyebrows so high it’s like they’re trying to crawl into her hair.
“Hey,” Wilf says, in greeting.
“Hey,” I say back, too stunned to say any more.
He touches two fingers to the brim of his hat. “Ah’m glad to see yoo mayde it.”
Mistress Coyle’s mouth is moving but no sound comes out for a second or two. “There’ll be time for that later,” she finally says. “We have to go now.”
“Will there be room for two?” the younger soldier asks.
“There’ll have to be.” She ducks down under the cart and removes a panel from the underside. She motions to me. “Get in.”
“In where?” I bend down and see a compartment hidden like a trick of the eye in the width of the cart, narrow and thin as a cot above the rear axle.
“Pack won’t fit,” Wilf says, pointing at the bag on my back. “Ah’ll take it.”
I slip it off and hand it to him. “Thank you, Wilf.”
“Now, Viola,” Mistress Coyle says.
I give Wilf a last nod, duck under the cart and crawl in, forcing my way across the compartment until my head’s nearly touching the far side. Mistress Coyle doesn’t wait and forces herself in after me. The younger soldier was right. There isn’t enough room. She’s pressed right up against me, face to face, her knees digging into my thighs, our noses less than a centimetre apart. She’s barely drawn her feet inside when the panel is replaced, plunging us into almost complete darkness.
“Where are we–” I start to say but she shushes me harshly.
And outside I hear soldiers marching fast up the road, led by the clopping of horse’s hooves.
“Report!” one of them shouts as they stop by the cart.
His voice–
It’s up high and I hear the horse whinnying beneath it–
But his voice–
“Heard the explosion, sir,” the older of our soldiers replies. “This man says he saw women heading past him down the river road about an hour ago.”
We hear the real soldier spit. “Bitches.”
I recognize his voice–
It’s Sergeant Hammar.
“Whose unit you two in?” he says.
“First, sir,” says our younger soldier, after the briefest of pauses. “Captain O’Hare.”
“That pansy?” Sergeant Hammar spits. “You wanna do some real soldiering, transfer to the Fourth. I’ll show you what’s what.”
“Yes, sir,” says our older soldier, sounding more nervous than I’d want him to.
I can hear the Noise of the soldiers in Sergeant Hammar’s unit. They’re thinking of the cart. They’re thinking of the explosions. They’re thinking about shooting women.
But there’s no Noise coming from Sergeant Hammar.
“Arrest this man,” Sergeant Hammar finally says, meaning Wilf.
“We were just doing that, sir.”
“Bitches,” Sergeant Hammar says again, and we hear him spur his horse (yield, it thinks) and he and his men march off at speed.
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “He wasn’t even punished,” I whisper, more to myself than to Mistress Coyle.
“Later,” she whispers back.
I hear Wilf snap the reins and we rock as the cart plods slowly forward.
So the Mayor was a liar. All along.
Of course he was, you idiot.
And Maddy’s killer walks free to kill again, his cure still in place.
And I’m bumping and juddering against the woman who destroyed the only hope of contacting the ships that might save us.
And Todd is out there. Somewhere. Being left behind.
I’ve never felt so lonely in my life.
The compartment is hellishly small. We share too much of each other’s air, elbows and shoulders bruising away as we ride along, the heat soaking our clothes.
We don’t speak.
Time passes. And then more. And more after that. I fall into a kind of doze, the close warmth sucking the life right out of me. The rocking of the cart eventually flattens all my worries and I close my eyes against it.
I’m awakened by the older soldier knocking on the wood and I think we’re going to finally get out, but he just says, “We’re at the rough bit. Hold on.”
“To what?” I say, but I don’t say any more as the cart feels like it drops off a cliff.
Mistress Coyle’s forehead smacks into my nose and I smell blood almost at once. I hear her gasp and choke as my stray hand is shoved into her neck and still the cart tumbles and bumps and I wait for the moment where we topple end over end.
And then Mistress Coyle is working both arms around me, pulling me close to her and bracing us in the compartment with one hand and one foot pressed against the opposite side. I resist her, resist the implied comfort, but there’s wisdom in it as almost immediately we stop knocking each other about, even though the cart lurches and stutters.
And so it’s in Mistress Coyle’s arms that the last bit of my journey is taken. And it’s in Mistress Coyle’s arms that I enter the camp of the Answer.
Finally the cart stops and the panel is removed almost immediately.
“We’re here,” says the younger soldier, the blond one. “Everyone okay?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Mistress Coyle says sourly. She lets go of me and scoots her way out of the compartment, extending a hand to help me out, too. I ignore it, getting myself out and looking at my surroundings.
We’ve come down a steep rocky path that’s barely fit for a cart and into what looks like a gash of rocks in the middle of a forest. Trees press in on every side, a row of them on the level ground in front of us.
The ocean must be beyond them. Either I dozed off for longer than I thought or she lied and it’s closer than she said.
Which wouldn’t surprise me.
The blond soldier whistles when he sees our faces, and I can feel caked blood under my nose. “I can get you something for that,” he says.
“She’s a healer,” Mistress Coyle says. “She can do it herself.”
“I’m Lee,” he says to me, a grin on his face.
For a brief second, I’m completely aware of how terrible I must look with my bloody nose and this ridiculous outfit.
“I’m Viola,” I say to the ground.
“’Ere’s yer bag,” Wilf says, suddenly next to me, holding out the canvas sack of medicines and bandages. I look at him for a second and then I pretty much throw myself at him in a hug, pulling him tight to me, feeling the big, safe bulk of him. “Ah’m glad to see yoo, Hildy,” he says.
“You, too, Wilf,” I say, my voice thick. I let him go and take the bag.
“Corinne pack that?” Mistress Coyle asks.
I fish out a bandage and start cleaning the blood from my nose. “What do you care?”
“You can accuse me of many things,” she says, “but not caring isn’t one of them, my girl.”
“I told you,” I say, catching her eye, “never call me that again.”
Mistress Coyle licks her teeth. She makes a quick glance to Lee and to the other soldier, Magnus, and they leave, quickly, disappearing into the trees ahead of us. “You, too, Wilf.”
Wilf looks at me. “Yoo gone be all right?”
“I think so, Wilf,” I say, swallowing, “but don’t you go far.”
He nods, touching the brim of his hat again and walking after the soldiers. We watch him go.
“All right.” Mistress Coyle turns to me, crossing her arms. “Let’s hear it.”
I look at her, at her face full of defiance, and I feel my breath quicken, the anger rising up again so fast, so easily, it feels like I might crack in two. “How dare you–”
But she’s interrupting, already. “Whoever contacts your ships first has the advantage. If he’s first, he tells them all about the nasty little terrorist organization he’s got on his hands and can they please use their guidance equipment to track us down and blow us off the face of New World.”
“Yes but if we–”
“If we got to them first, yes, of course, we could have told them all about our local tyrant, but that was never going to happen.”
“We could have tried–”
“Did you know what you were doing when you ran towards that tower?”
I clench my fists. “No, but at least I could have–”
“Could have what?” Her eyes challenge me. “Sent out a message to the very coordinates the President’s been searching for? Don’t you think he was counting on you trying? Just why exactly do you think you haven’t been arrested yet?”
I dig my nails into my palms, forcing myself not to hear what she’s saying.
“We were running out of time,” she says. “And if we can’t use it to contact help, then at the very least we prevent him from doing the same.”
“And when they land? What’s your brilliant plan then?”
“Well,” she says, uncrossing her arms and taking a step towards me, “if we haven’t overthrown him, then there’s a race to get to them first, isn’t there? At least this way, it’s a fair fight.”
I shake my head. “You had no right.”
“It’s a war.”
“That you started.”
“He started it, my girl.”
“And you escalated it.”
“Hard decisions have to be made.”
“And who put you in charge of making them?”
“Who put him in charge of locking away half the population of this planet?”
“You’re blowing people up!”
“Accidents,” she says. “Deeply regrettable.”
Now it’s my turn to take a step towards her. “That sounds exactly like something he would say.”
Her shoulders rise and if she had Noise, it would be taking the top of my head off. “Have you seen the women’s prisons, my girl? What you don’t know could fill a crater–”
“Mistress Coyle!” A voice calls from the trees. Lee steps back into the rocky gash. “There’s a report just come in.”
“What is it?” Mistress Coyle says.
He looks from her to me. I look at the ground again.
“Three divisions of soldiers marching down the river road,” he says, “full out for the ocean.”
I look up sharply. “They’re coming here?”
Both Mistress Coyle and Lee look at me.
“No,” Lee says. “They’re going to the ocean.”
I blink back and forth between them. “But aren’t we–?”
“Of course not,” Mistress Coyle says, her voice flat, mocking. “Whatever made you think we were? And whatever, I wonder, makes the President think we are?”
I feel an angry chill, despite the sun, and I notice I’m shaking inside these big stupid puffy sleeves.
She was testing me.
As if I would tell the Mayor where–
“How dare you–” I start to say again.
But the anger suddenly fades as it comes flooding back.
“Todd,” I whisper.
Ocean all over his Noise.
How he promised to hide it.
And how I know he’d keep that promise–
If he could.
(oh, Todd, did he–?)
(are you–?)
Oh, no.
“I have to go back,” I say. “I have to save him–”
She’s already shaking her head. “There’s nothing we can do for him right now–”
“He’ll kill him.”
She looks at me, not without pity. “He’s probably dead already, my girl.”
I feel my throat closing up but I fight it. “You don’t know that.”
“If he’s not dead, then he must have told the President voluntarily.” She cocks her head. “Which would you rather be true?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No–”
“I’m sorry, my girl.” Her voice is a little calmer than before, a little softer, but still strong. “I truly am, but there are thousands of lives at stake. And like it or not, you’ve picked a side.” She looks over to where Lee stands. “So why don’t you let me show you your army?”