I got ten million things I wanna say but my curiosity wins out first. “So there is a cure then? For the Noise?”
“Oh, yes,” he says, his face twitching a bit at me, like he’s tasting something bad. “Native plant with a natural neurochemical mixed with a few things we could synthesize and there you go. Quiet falls at last on New World.”
“Not all of New World.”
“No, well,” he says, turning to look out the rectangle with his hands clasped behind his back. “It’s very hard to make, isn’t it? A long and slow process. We only got it right late last year and that was after twenty years of trying. We made enough for ourselves and were just on the point of starting to export it when . . .”
He trails off, looking firmly out onto the town below.
“When you surrendered,” I say, my Noise rumbling, low and red. “Like cowards.”
He turns back to me, the wincing smile gone, way gone. “And why should the opinion of a boy matter to me?”
“I ain’t a boy,” I say again and are my fists still clenched? Yes, they are.
“Clearly you are,” he says, “for a man would know the necessary choices that have to be made when one is facing one’s oblivion.”
I narrow my eyes. “You ain’t got nothing you can teach me bout oblivion.”
He blinks a little, seeing the truth of it in my Noise as if it were bright flashes trying to blind him, and then his stance slumps. “Forgive me,” he says. “This isn’t me.” He puts a hand up to his face and rubs it, smarting at the bruise around his eye. “Yesterday, I was the benevolent Mayor of a beautiful town.” He seems to laugh at some private joke. “But that was yesterday.”
“How many people in Haven?” I say, not quite ready to let it go.
He looks over at me. “Boy–”
“My name is Todd Hewitt,” I say. “You can call me Mr. Hewitt.”
“He promised us a new beginning–”
“Even I know he’s a liar. How many people?”
He sighs. “Including refugees, three thousand, three hundred.”
“The army ain’t a third that size,” I say. “You coulda fought.”
“Women and children,” he says. “Farmers.”
“Women and children fought in other towns. Women and children died.”
He steps forward, his face getting stormy. “Yes, and now the women and children of this city will not die! Because I reached a peace!”
“A peace that blacked yer eye,” I say. “A peace that split yer lip.”
He looks at me for another second and then gives a sad snort. “The words of a sage,” he says, “in the voice of a hick.”
And he turns back to look out the opening.
Which is when I notice the low buzz.
Asking marks fill my Noise but before I can open my mouth, the Mayor, the old Mayor, says, “Yes, that’s me you hear.”
“You?” I say. “What about the cure?”
“Would you give your conquered enemy his favourite medicine?”
I lick my upper lip. “It comes back? The Noise?”
“Oh, yes.” He turns to me again. “If you don’t take your daily dose, it most definitely comes back.” He returns to his corner and slowly sits himself down. “You’ll notice there are no toilets,” he says. “I apologize in advance for the unpleasantness.”
I watch him sit, my Noise still rattling red and sore and full of askings.
“It was you, if I’m not mistaken?” he says. “This morning? The one who the town was cleared for, the one the new President greeted himself on horseback?”
I don’t answer him. But my Noise does.
“So, who are you then, Todd Hewitt?” he says. “What makes you so special?”
Now that, I think, is a very good asking.
Night falls quick and full, Mayor Ledger saying less and less and fidgeting more and more till he finally can’t stand it and starts to pace. All the while, his buzz gets louder till even if we wanted to talk, we’d have to shout to do it.
I stand at the front of the tower and watch the stars come out, night covering the valley below.
And I’m thinking and I’m trying not to think cuz when I do, my stomach turns and I feel sick, or my throat clenches and I feel sick, or my eyes wet and I feel sick.
Cuz she’s out there somewhere.
(please be out there somewhere)
(please be okay)
(please)
“Do you always have to be so bloody loud?” Mayor Ledger snaps. I turn to him, ready to snap back, and he holds up his hands in apology. “I’m sorry. I’m not like this.” He starts fidgeting his fingers again. “It’s difficult having one’s cure taken away so abruptly.”
I look back out over New Prentisstown as lights start coming on in people’s houses. I ain’t hardly seen no one out there the whole day, everyone staying indoors, probably under the Mayor’s orders.
“They all going thru this out there, then?” I say.
“Oh, everyone will have their little stockpile at home,” Mayor Ledger says. “They’ll have to have it pried out of their hands, I imagine.”
“I don’t reckon that’ll be a problem when the army gets here,” I say.
The moons rise, crawling up the sky as if there was nothing to hurry about. They shine bright enough to light up New Prentisstown and I see how the river cuts thru town but that there ain’t nothing much north of it except fields, empty in the moonlight, then a sharp rise of rocky cliffs that make up the north wall of the valley. To the north, you can also see a thin road coming outta the hills before cutting its way back into town, the other road that Viola and I didn’t take after Farbranch, the other road the Mayor did take and got here first.
To the east, the river and the main road just carry on, going god knows where, round corners and farther hills, the town petering out as it goes. There’s another road, not much paved, that heads south from the square and past more buildings and houses and into a wood and up a hill with a notch on the top.
And that’s all there is of New Prentisstown.
Home to three thousand, three hundred people, all hiding in their houses, so quiet they might be dead.
Not one of them lifting a hand to save theirselves from what’s coming, hoping if they’re meek enough, if they’re weak enough, then the monster won’t eat ’em.
This is where we spent all our time running to.
I see movement down on the square, a shadow flitting, but it’s only a dog. Home, home, home, I can just about hear him think. Home, home, home.
Dogs don’t got the problems of people.
Dogs can be happy any old time.
I take a minute to breathe away the tightness that comes over my chest, the water in my eyes.
Take a minute to stop thinking bout my own dog.
When I can look out again, I see someone not a dog at all.
He’s got his head slumped forward and he’s walking his horse slow across the town square, the hoofs clopping against the brick and, as he approaches, even tho Mayor Ledger’s buzz has started to become such a nuisance I don’t know how I’m ever gonna sleep, I can still hear it out there.