Monsters of Men (45 page)

“I don’t know,” I say again.

“Viola?” Wilf says, appearing in the doorway.

“Ah,”
Lee says, his Noise reaching out to Wilf’s, almost unwillingly seeing what Wilf’s seeing–

Seeing his own scarred eyes.

“Phew,”
he whistles, but you can hear the nervousness, the fake bravery. “That’s not so bad. You two made it seem like I was practically Spackle.”

“Ah brought Acorn back from town,” Wilf says to me. “Stabled him wi’ my oxes.”

“Thank you, Wilf,” I say.

He nods. “And young Lee there,” he says. “If ya ever need me to see for ya, ya just gotta say.”

There’s a flood of surprised and touched feeling in Lee’s Noise, bright enough for Wilf to see his answer.

“Hey, Wilf?” I say, getting an idea, one that feels better by the second.

“Yeh?” he says.

“How would like you be on the new council?”

[T
ODD
]

“It’s a ruddy
great
idea,” I say, watching Viola’s face in my comm. “Every time they wanna do something stupid, Wilf won’t even say no, he’ll just say what we should obviously do instead.”

“That’s what I thought,”
she says and doubles up coughing again.

“How are them tests coming along?” I say.

“The women who’ve taken it haven’t shown any problems so far, but Mistress Coyle wants to do more checks.”

“She ain’t never gonna approve it, is she?”

Viola don’t disagree.
“What do
you
think about it?”

I take a long deep breath. “I don’t trust him,” I say, “no matter how much he says he’s redeemed.”

“He says that?”

I nod.

“Well, that’s exactly the kind of thing he
would
say.”

“Yeah.”

She waits for me to say more.
“But?”

I look back into her eyes, back thru the comm to her, there, on the hilltop, on this same world as me but so far away. “He seems to
need
me, Viola. I don’t know why, but it’s like I’m important to him somehow.”

“He called you his son once before, when we were fighting him. Said you had power.”

I nod. “I don’t trust him to do any of this outta the goodness of the heart he ain’t got.” I swallow. “But I think he’d do it to get me on his side.”

“Is that enough reason to risk it?”

“Yer dying,” I say, and then keep talking cuz she’s already talking over me. “Yer dying and yer lying to me that yer not and if something happened to you, Viola, if something
happened–
”

My throat chokes up hard, like I really can’t breathe.

And I can’t say nothing more for a second.

(
I am the Circle–)

“Todd?”
she finally says, for the first time not denying she’s sicker than she’s said.
“Todd, if you tell me to take it, I will. I won’t wait for Mistress Coyle.”

“But I don’t
know,
” I say, my eyes still flooded.

“We fly in tomorrow morning,”
she says.
“To ride up for the first council.”

“Yeah?”

“If you want me to do it,”
she says,
“I want you to put the bandages on me yourself.”

“Viola–”

“If it’s you doing it, Todd,”
she says,
“nothing can go wrong. If it’s you doing it, I know I’m safe.”

And I wait for a long minute.

And I don’t know what to say.

And I don’t know what to do.

{VIOLA}

“So you’re taking it, too, then?” Mistress Coyle says from the doorway after I click off with Todd.

I’m about to complain about her listening to a private conversation again but she’s done it so often I’m not even really mad. “It’s not decided yet.”

I’m alone with her. Simone and Bradley are preparing for tomorrow’s meeting, and Lee is out with Wilf, learning about the oxes, whose Noise he can see.

“How are the tests coming?” I ask.

“Excellent,” she says, not uncrossing her arms. “Aggressive antibiotics combined with an aloe Prentiss says he found in the weapons of the Spackle that allows for a dispersal of the medicine ten or fifteen times faster than we’d been doing it. Hitting it so fast it doesn’t have time to regroup. It’s quite brilliant, really.” She looks me square in the eye, and I swear I see sadness there. “A real breakthrough.”

“But you still don’t trust it?”

She sits down next to me with a heavy sigh. “How can I? After all he’s done? How can I not just sit here in despair at all the women who keep reaching for the cure, all the while sick with worry that they’re just walking into a trap.” She bites her lip. “And now you.”

“
Maybe,
” I say.

She takes a long breath and lets it out. “Not all the women are taking it, you know. There are some, a good number, who’d rather trust me to find a better cure for them. And I will, you know. I will.”

“I believe you,” I say. “But fast enough?”

She gets a look on her face so unusual for her it takes me a second to realize what it is.

She looks almost defeated.

“You’ve been so sick,” she says, “trapped in this little room, that you don’t really realize what a hero you are out there.”

“I’m not a
hero,
” I say, surprised.

“Please, Viola. You faced down the Spackle and won. You’re everything they want to be themselves. A perfect symbol for the future.” She shifts her weight. “Not like those of us left in the past.”

“I don’t think that’s true–”

“You went up a girl and came down a woman,” she says. “I get asked five hundred times a day how the Peacemaker is doing.”

And it’s only then I see the importance of what she’s saying.

“If I take the cure,” I say, “you think everyone else will, too.”

Mistress Coyle says nothing.

“And he’ll have completely won,” I continue. “That’s what you think.”

She still says nothing, looking at the floor. When she does speak, it’s unexpected. “I miss the ocean,” she says. “On a fast horse, I could leave right now and make it there by sundown, but I haven’t even seen it since we failed to make a fishing village. I moved to Haven and never looked back.” Her voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it. “I thought that life was over. I thought in Haven there were things worth fighting for.”

“You still
can
fight for them,” I say.

“I think I may be already beaten, Viola,” she says.

“But–”

“No, I’ve had power slip away from me before, my girl. I know what it feels like. But I always knew I’d come back.” She turns to me, her eyes sad but otherwise unreadable. “But you aren’t beaten, are you, my girl? Not yet.”

She nods, as if to herself, then she does it again and gets up.

“Where are you going?” I call after her.

But she keeps on and doesn’t look back.

[T
ODD
]

I hold up my ma’s book. “I wanna read the end.”

The Mayor looks up from his reports. “The end?”

“I wanna find out what happened to her,” I say. “In her own words.”

The Mayor leans back. “And you think I’m afraid to have you hear it?”

“Are you?” I say, keeping his gaze.

“Only in how sad it will be for you, Todd.”

“Sad for
me
?”

“Those were terrible times,” he says. “And there’s no version of that history, not mine, not Ben’s, not your mother’s, where there’s a happy ending.”

I keep staring at him.

“All right,” the Mayor says. “Open it to the end.”

I look at him for another second, then I open her book, flipping thru the pages till I get to the last entry, my heart skipping a little at what I’ll find there. The words are the usual scramble, spilling out everywhere like a rockslide (tho I’m getting better at picking some of ’em out, it’s true) and my eyes go right to the end, the very last paragraphs, to the very last things she ever wrote to me–

And then suddenly, almost before I’m ready–

This war, my dearest son–

(there she is–)

This war that I
hate
because of how it threatens all yer days to come, Todd, this war that was bad enough when we were just fighting the Spackle, but now there are divisions forming, divisions twixt David Prentiss, the head of our little army here, and Jessica Elizabeth, our Mayor, who’s been rallying the women and many of the men to her side, Ben and Cillian included, over how the war’s being conducted.

“You were dividing the town?” I say.

“I wasn’t the only one,” the Mayor says.

And
oh
it makes my heart sick, Todd, to see us split like this, split before we’ve even made peace, and I wonder how this can be a real New World when all we do is bring our old quarrels to it.

The Mayor’s breathing is light and I can somehow tell he ain’t struggling half as hard as he used to.

(and the faint
hum
there, too–)

(that I know is him connecting us–)

But then there’s you, son, as of right now the youngest boy in town, maybe even in this whole world, and yer gonna have to be the one who makes it come right, you hear? Yer a native born New Worlder, so you don’t have to repeat our mistakes. You can shake off the past and maybe, just maybe, you’ll bring paradise to this place.

And my stomach pulls a little cuz she’s wished that for me from the very first page.

But that’s probably enough responsibility for one day, huh? I have to leave now for that secret meeting Mayor Elizabeth’s called.

And oh, my beautiful boy, I’m afraid of what she’s going to suggest.

And that’s it.

After that, it’s just blank.

Nothing more.

I look up to the Mayor. “What did Mayor Elizabeth suggest?”

“She suggested the attack on me and my army, Todd,” he says. “An attack which they lost, as much as we tried not to make it a dangerous fight. And then they killed themselves to ensure our doom. I’m sorry, but that’s what happened.”

“No, it ain’t,” I say, starting to boil. “
My
ma wouldn’t do that to me. Ben said–”

“I can’t convince you, Todd,” he says, frowning sadly. “There’s nothing I can say that ever will, I know that. And I’m certain I made mistakes back then, maybe even mistakes that led to worse consequences than I’d ever intended. Maybe that’s even true.” He leans forward. “But that was before, Todd. That’s not now.”

My eyes are still wet, thinking of my ma, signing off.

Being afraid of what was to come.

Whatever it was.

Cuz the answer ain’t there. What really happened ain’t there. I know as much about the Mayor as before.

“I am a bad man, Todd,” the Mayor says. “But I’m getting better.”

I touch my fingertips to the cover of my ma’s journal, feeling along the knife mark. I don’t believe his verzhun of the story, I just don’t and never will.

I believe
he
believes it tho.

I believe he might even be sorry.

“If you ever hurt Viola,” I say, “you know I’d kill you.”

“One of the many reasons why I never would.”

I swallow. “The cure will make her well? It’ll save her life?”

“Yes, Todd, it will.” And that’s all he says.

I look up into the sky, into another freezing night, cloudy still, but no snow yet. Another night with little or no sleep, the night before the first big council meeting. The night before we start making the new world for real.

Just like my ma said.

“Bring me the bandages,” I say. “I’ll put ’em on her myself.”

He makes a low sound, almost as if in his Noise, and his face is holding back a smile, a real, true and feeling smile.

“Thank you, Todd,” he says.

And he sounds like he means it.

I wait a long time before I say it–

But I do finally say it.

“Yer welcome.”

“Mr President?” we hear. Mr O’Hare’s come up to us, waiting to interrupt.

“What is it, Captain?” the Mayor says, still looking at me.

“There’s a man here,” Mr O’Hare says, “been hassling the men all night about a meeting with you. Wants to pledge his support.”

The Mayor don’t even try to hide his impayshunce. “If I have to listen to every man on this planet pledge his support–”

“Said to tell you his name is Ivan Farrow,” Mr O’Hare says.

And the Mayor looks surprised.

And then he gets a different kinda smile on his face.

Ivan Farrow. Who goes where the power is.

{VIOLA}

“Look how beautiful,”
Simone says over the comm system as we feel the scout ship rise slowly into the air. There’s a click and all the screens in the healing room show the sun, rising pink over the far ocean.

It’s only there for a brief moment before the clouds cover it away again.

“Sunrise,” Bradley says, his Noise reaching out to Lee to show it to him.

“A good omen,” Lee says. “Sun peeking through on a grey morning.”

“We fly down to make a new world,” Bradley says, his Noise warm and excited. “A
real
new world this time.” He smiles and the room fills up with it.

Wilf is the only one not with us, because he’s riding Acorn down to town for me and will meet us there. Mistress Coyle is sitting on the chair next to my bed. She was gone all night, no doubt off thinking of the best way to get back on top in her fight with the Mayor.