The Ask and the Answer (10 page)

100

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 mustache, 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

101

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?

102

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."

103

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 says, 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."

104

"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.

105

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.

106

"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.

107

***

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."

108

8 THE NEWEST APPRENTICE

***

[ 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 appall 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?"