Monsters of Men (11 page)

“Could you grab another one?” I ask her quietly.

“What for?”

“I’ll tell you outside. I don’t want to upset him any more.”

She looks at me suspiciously for a second but then grabs another bandage out of a drawer and we make our way to the door, Bradley’s Noise filling the little room from wall to wall.

“I still don’t understand it,” Simone says as we go. “I’m hearing it with my ears, but I’m hearing it inside my head, too. Words–” she looks at Bradley, her eyes growing wide “–and pictures.”

She’s right, pictures are starting to come from him, pictures that could be in your head or hanging in the air in front of you–

Pictures of us standing here watching him, pictures of himself on the bed–

Then pictures of what we saw in the probe projection, of what happened when a flaming Spackle arrow hit it and the signal gave out–

And then pictures of the scout ship coming down from orbit, pictures of this planet far below as they flew in, a vast bluish green ocean next to miles of forest, not even thinking to look for a Spackle army blending into the riverbank as the ship circled over New Prentisstown–

And then other pictures–

Pictures of Simone–

Pictures of Simone and Bradley–

“Bradley!” Simone says, shocked and taking a step back.

“Please!”
he shouts. “Just leave me alone! This is
unbearable
!”

I’m shocked, too, because the pictures of Bradley and Simone are really clear and the more Bradley tries to cover them, the clearer they get, so I take Simone’s elbow and pull her away, hitting a panel to close the door behind us, which only muffles his Noise in the way it might muffle a loud voice.

We head outside.
Girl colt?
Acorn says, coming over from where he’s been munching grass.

“And the animals, too,” Simone says, as I rub Acorn’s nose. “What kind of place
is
this?”

“It’s information,” I say, remembering Ben describing how New World was for the first settlers, telling me and Todd that night in the cemetery which seems so impossibly long ago now. “Information, all the time, never stopping, whether you want it to or not.”

“He seems so frightened,” she says, her voice breaking on the word. “And those
things
he was thinking–” She turns away and I’m too embarrassed to ask if Bradley’s pictures were things he was remembering or things he wished for.

“He’s still the same Bradley,” I say. “You’ve got to remember that. What would it be like if everyone could hear all the things you didn’t want to say out loud?”

She sighs, looking up to the two moons, high in the sky. “There are over two thousand male settlers on the convoy, Viola. Two thousand. What’s going to happen when we wake them all up?”

“They’ll get used to it,” I say. “Men do.”

Simone snorts through the thickness in her voice. “Do women?”

“Well, that’s sort of a complicated issue around here.”

She shakes her head again, then notices she’s still holding the bandage. “What did you need this for?”

I bite my lip for a second. “Now, don’t freak out.”

I slowly pull back my sleeve and show her the band on my arm. The redness of the skin around it is even worse than it was before, and you can see my number shining in the moons-light. 1391.

“Oh,
Viola,
” Simone says, her voice dangerously quiet. “Did that man do this to you?”

“Not to me,” I say. “To most of the other women, though.” I cough a little. “I did this to myself.”

“To
yourself
?”

“For a good reason. Look, I’ll explain later, but I could really use a bandage on it right now.”

She waits for a moment, then keeps her eyes on mine as she wraps the bandage gently around my arm. The coolness from the medicine feels immediately better. “Sweetheart?” she asks, so much fierce tenderness in her voice it’s hard to look at her. “Are you
really
okay?”

I try a barely-there smile to shake off some of her worry. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

“I think you do,” she says, tying off the bandage. “And maybe you should start.”

I shake my head. “I can’t. I’ve got to get to Todd.”

Her forehead furrows. “What . . . you mean
now
?” She stands up straighter. “You can’t wander down into the middle of a war!”

“It’s calmed down. We saw it.”

“We saw two huge armies camped at the front line and then our probe was shot out of the sky! There’s no
way
you’re going down there.”

“It’s where Todd is,” I say. “It’s where I
have
to go.”

“You aren’t. As Mission Commander, I forbid it and that’s the end of it.”

I blink. “You
forbid
it?”

And I feel a really surprising anger start to rise from my belly.

Simone sees the look on my face and softens her own expression. “Viola, what you’ve obviously survived for the past five months is beyond amazing, but
we’re
here now. I love you far too much to allow you to put yourself in that kind of danger. You can’t go. No way.”

“If we want peace, we can’t let the war get any bigger.”

“And how are you and one boy going to stop
that
?”

And then the anger
really
starts to rise, and I try to remember that she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what I’ve been through, what me and Todd have done. She doesn’t know I’m about a million miles past people forbidding me to do stuff.

I reach over for Acorn’s reins and he kneels down.

“Viola,
no,
” Simone says, stomping over–

Submit!
Acorn yells, startled.

Simone takes a frightened step back. I swing my sore but mending leg over Acorn’s saddle.

“No one is the boss of me any more, Simone,” I say quietly, trying to stay calm but surprised at how strong I feel. “If my parents had lived, it might be different. But they didn’t.”

She looks like she wants to come over, but she’s seriously wary of Acorn now. “Just because your parents aren’t here doesn’t mean there aren’t still people who care for you, who
can
care for you.”

“Please,” I say. “You have to trust me.”

She looks at me in a kind of sad frustration. “It’s too early for you to have grown up this much.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, “sometimes you don’t have a choice.” Acorn stands up, ready to go. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Viola–”

“I
have
to get to Todd. That’s all there is to it. And now that the fighting’s stopped, I’ll have to find Mistress Coyle, too, before she can start blowing things up again.”

“You shouldn’t go alone at least,” she says. “I’ll come with you–”

“Bradley needs you more than I do,” I say. “Whatever you might not want to find out, he needs you.”

“
Viola–”

“It’s not as if I
want
to go riding into a war zone,” I say, a little softer, trying to apologize now that I realize how scared I am. I look up at the scout ship. “Maybe you could send another probe to follow me?”

Simone looks thoughtful for a moment, then she says, “I’ve got a better idea.”

[T
ODD
]

“We’ve rounded up blankets from the houses nearby,” Mr O’Hare says to the Mayor. “Food, too. We’ll be getting some to you as soon as possible.”

“Thank you, Captain,” says the Mayor. “Make sure you bring enough for Todd as well.”

Mr O’Hare looks up sharply. “Everything’s pretty scarce, sir–”

“Food for Todd,” the Mayor says, more firmly. “And a blanket. It’s getting colder.”

Mr O’Hare takes in a breath that don’t sound too happy. “Yes,
sir
.”

“For my horse, too,” I say.

Mr O’Hare scowls at me.

“For his horse, too, Captain,” the Mayor says.

Mr O’Hare nods and storms off.

The Mayor’s men have cleared a little area for us at the edge of the camp the army’s made. There’s a fire and space to sit around it and a coupla tents being put up for him and his officers to sleep in. I sit a bit away from him, but close enough to keep watch. I have Angharrad here with me, her head still down, her Noise still silent. I keep petting her and stroking her, but she’s not saying nothing, nothing at all.

So far there ain’t been much to say to the Mayor neither. It’s been one report after another, Mr Tate and Mr O’Hare updating him on this and that. And plain soldiers, too, who keep coming up all shy-like to congratulate him on his victory, seeming to forget he’s the one who caused all this trouble in the first place.

I lean my face into Angharrad. “What do I do now, girl?” I whisper.

Cuz what
do
I do now? I set the Mayor free and he won the first battle, keeping the world safe for Viola, just like I made him promise.

But he’s got an army that’ll do anything he says, that’ll
die
for him. What does it matter if I can beat him if there’s all these men who wouldn’t even let me try?

“Mr President?” Mr Tate comes up now, carrying one of the Spackle’s white sticks. “First report on the new weapons.”

“Do tell, Captain,” the Mayor says, looking very interested.

“They seem to be a sort of acid rifle,” Mr Tate says. “There’s a chamber with what looks to be a mixture of two substances, probably botanic.” He moves his hand up the white stick to a hole that’s been cut into it. “Then a kind of ratchet aerates a dose and mixes it with a third substance that’s instantly permeated through a gel via a small incendiary–” Mr Tate points to the end of the stick “–and fired out here, vaporizing yet somehow holding cohesion until it hits its target, at which point–”

“At which point it’s a burning acid corrosive enough to take your arm off,” the Mayor finishes. “Impressive work in a short space of time, Captain.”

“I encouraged our chemists to work quickly, sir,” Mr Tate says with a grin I don’t like.

“What the hell did all that mean?” I ask the Mayor as Mr Tate leaves.

“Didn’t you finish your chemistry in school?”

“You closed the school and burnt all the books.”

“Ah, so I did.” He looks to the hilltop, to the glow we can see up above it in the spray from the waterfall, the glow from the campfires of the Spackle army. “They used to be just hunters and collectors, Todd, with some limited wild farming. Not exactly scientists.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means,” he says, “that our enemy has spent the thirteen years since the last war listening to us, learning from us, no doubt, on this planet of information.” He taps his chin. “I wonder
how
they learn. If they’re all part of some larger single voice.”

“If you hadn’t killed all the ones in town,” I say, “you coulda
asked
.”

He ignores me. “All of which adds up to the fact that our enemy gets more formidable by the moment.”

I frown. “You sound almost happy.”

Captain O’Hare comes back over to us, his hands full and his face sour. “Blankets and food, sir,” he says. The Mayor nods towards me, forcing Mr O’Hare to hand them over to me himself. He does and then storms away again, tho like Mr Tate, you can’t hear his Noise to see what’s making him so mad.

I spread the blanket over Angharrad, but she still ain’t saying nothing. Her wound is healing already so it ain’t that. She just stands there, head down, staring at the ground, not eating, not drinking, not responding to nothing I do.

“You could tie her up with the other horses, Todd,” the Mayor says. “She’d at least be warmer that way.”

“She needs me,” I say. “I gotta stick by her.”

He nods. “Your loyalty is admirable. A fine quality I’ve always noticed in you.”

“Seeing as you don’t got none at all?”

In reply, all he does is smile that smile again, that one that makes you want to knock his head right off. “You should eat and sleep while you can, Todd. You never know when the battle will need you.”

“A battle you started,” I say. “We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t–”

“Here we go again,” he says, his voice sharper. “It’s time you stopped whining about what might have been and start thinking about what
is
.”

And this makes me a little mad–

And so I look at him–

And I think about what is–

I think about him falling in the ruins of the cathedral after I blasted him with Viola’s name. I think about him shooting his own son without even pausing for thought–

“Todd–”

I think about him watching Viola struggle under the water in the Office of the Ask as he tortured her. I think about my ma talking about him in her journal when Viola read it to me and what he did to the women of old Prentisstown–

“That isn’t true, Todd,” he says. “That’s not what happened–”

I think about the two men who raised me, who
loved
me, and how Cillian died on our farm to buy me time to escape and how Davy shot Ben on the roadside for doing exactly the same thing. I think about Manchee, my brilliant bloody dog, dying after saving me, too–

“Those were nothing to do with me–”

I think about the fall of Farbranch. I think about the people there being shot while the Mayor watched. I think about–