The Ask and the Answer (44 page)

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But it sorta makes me wanna hit him, too.

"I'm not leaving Todd," she says. "Not now that I've found him again. I'm sorry, Lee, but that's the way it is."

Lee takes a step back, unable to keep the hurt outta his Noise. Viola's voice softens. "I'm sorry," she says again.

"Viola-" Lee says.

But she's shaking her head. "The Mayor thinks he knows everything. He thinks he knows what's coming. He's just sitting there
waiting
for me and Todd to show up and try and stop him."

Lee tries to interrupt but she don't let him.

"But what he's forgetting," she says. "What he's forgetting is that me and Todd, we ran halfway across this planet together, by
ourselves.
We beat his craziest preacher. We outran an entire army and survived being shot and beaten and chased and we bloody well
stayed alive
this whole time without being blown up or tortured to death or dying in battle or anything."

She takes her hand off Lee so she's balancing just against me.

"Me and Todd? Together against the Mayor?" She smiles. "He doesn't stand a chance."

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38 MARCH TO THE CATHEDRAL

***

(V iola)

"DID YOU MEAN what you said in there?" Todd says, pulling the strap on the saddle. His voice is low and he's keeping his eyes on the horse work. "Bout him not standing a chance against us?"

I shrug. "It helped, didn't it?"

He smiles to himself. "I gotta go talk to the men." He nods over to Lee, standing away from us, hands in his pockets, watching us chat. "You try and make this easy on him, okay?"

He gives Lee a wave and goes to where our escort of seven soldiers stands huddled by the big stone gate. Lee comes over.

"Are you sure about this?" he says.

"No," i say, "but I'm sure of Todd."

He breathes out through his nose, looking at the ground, trying to keep his Noise flat. "You love him," he says. Not an asking, just a fact.

"I do," I say. Also a fact.

"In
that
way?"

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We both look over at Todd. He's gesturing with his arms and telling the men what we're planning and what they should do.

He's looking like a leader.

"Viola?" Lee asks.

I turn back to him. "You need to find the Answer before the army does, Lee, if you can at all."

He frowns. "They may not believe me about Mistress Coyle. A lot of people need her to be right."

"Well," I say, gently taking up the reins of the horse.
Boy colt?
she thinks, watching Todd, too. "Think of it this way. If you can reach them and we can take care of the Mayor, this could all be over today."

Lee squints into the sun. "And if you don't take care of him?"

I try to smile. "Well, then, you're just going to have to come rescue us, aren't you?" He tries to smile back.

"We're ready," Todd says, coming back over. "This is it," I say.

Todd holds out his hand to Lee. "Good luck." Lee takes his hand. "And to you," he says. But he's looking at me.

After Lee's set off into the woods, running to scale the hills and intercept the Answer before the army does, the rest of us start our march down the road. Todd leads Angharrad, who keeps saying
Boy colt?
over and over again in her Noise, nervous at someone new on her back. Todd murmurs things

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to keep her calm, rubbing her nose and petting her flank as we go.

"How do you feel?" he asks me as we approach the first set of dormitories.

"My feet hurt," I say. "My head, too." I rub my hand on my sleeve where the band is hiding. "And my arm."

"Other than that?" He smiles.

I look at the guards around us, marching in formation, as if they really are escorting me and Todd to the Mayor as ordered: Ivan and another in front, two behind, two to my right and the last to my left.

"Do you believe we can beat him?" I ask Todd.

"Well," he says and laughs, low, "we're going, ain't we?"

We're going.

Up the road and into New Prentisstown. "Let's pick it up," Todd says, a bit louder. The men pick up the pace.

"It's deserted," whispers the guard with flaming red hair as we pass through areas with more and more buildings. Buildings but no people.

"Not deserted," another guard says, one with a big belly poking out in front of him. "In hiding."

"It's spooky without the army," the red-haired one says. "Without soldiers marching up and down the street."

"We're marching, Private," Ivan says. "We're soldiers, too."

We pass houses with shutters closed tight, storefronts with locked shutters, roads with no carts or fissionbikes or

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even people walking. You can hear the
ROAR
from behind closed doors but it's half the volume. And it's
scared.

"They know it's coming," Todd says. "They know this could be the war they've been waiting for."

I look around from atop Angharrad. No homes have any lights on, no faces peep out of windows, no one even curious as to what this band of guards is doing around a horse carrying a girl with bandaged feet.

And then the road bends and there's the cathedral.

"Holy moly," says the red-haired guard, as we come to a stop.

"You lived through
that?"
the pot belly says to Todd. He whistles in appreciation. "Maybe you
are
a bit blessed."

The bell tower still stands, though it's hard to see how, teetering on top of an unsteady ladder of bricks. Two walls of the main building stand, too, including the one with the colored glass circle.

But the rest of it.

The rest of it's Just a pile of stone and dust.

Even from behind, you can see that most of the roof has caved in and the largest parts of two walls have been blown out onto the road and the square in front of it. Arches lean dangerously out of balance, doors are twisted off their hinges, and most of the inside lies open to the world, receiving the last of the sun as it heads down to the horizon.

And there's not one soldier guarding it.

"He's unprotected?" says the red-haired one.

"That sounds like something he'd do," Todd says,

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staring at the cathedral as if he can see the Mayor somewhere through the walls.

"If he's even inside," Ivan says.

"He is," Todd says. "Trust me."

The red-haired soldier starts backing away down the road. "No way," he says. "We're walking to our deaths here, boys. No way."

And with a final frightened look, he takes off running back the way we came.

Todd sighs. "Anyone else?" The men look to each other, their Noises wondering why they came in the first place.

"He'll put the band on you," Ivan says. He nods up at me. I pull up my sleeve and show them. The skin is still red and hot to the touch. Infection, I think. The first aid creams aren't doing what they're supposed to.

"And then he'll enslave you," Ivan continues. "I don't know about you, but that's not why I joined the army."

"Why
did
you join?" asks another guard but it's clear he doesn't want an answer.

"We take him down," Ivan says. "And we're heroes."

"Heroes with the cure," says the pot belly, nodding. "And he who controls the cure-"

"Enough talking," Todd says and I hear the discomfort in his Noise about how this is going. "Are we gonna do this or not?"

The men look to one another. And Todd raises his voice. Raises it so it commands. Raises it so even
I
look at him. "I said, are we
ready!"

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"Yes, sir," the men say, seeming almost surprised to hear it coming out of their mouths. "Then let's go," Todd says.

And the men start marching again,
step step step,
crunching through the loose gravel scattered across the road, down a small slope, through the town and toward the cathedral, getting bigger and bigger the closer we get.

We file past some trees and I look to our left, to the hills on the southern horizon.

"Sweet Jesus," Pot Belly says.

Even from here you can see the army marching in the distance, a single black arm twisting up a path too narrow for them, up to the summit of the hill with the notch on top, up to where they'll meet the Answer.

i look at the setting sun.

"Maybe an hour," Todd says, seeing me check. "Probably less."

"Lee won't get to them in time," I say.

"He might. There must be shortcuts."

The snake of the army slithers up the hillside. So many there's no way the Answer will be able to fight them if it comes to open battle.

"We can't fail," I say.

"We won't," Todd says.

And we reach the cathedral.

We march up the side. This is where most of the damage is, the whole north wall having collapsed straight onto the road.

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"Remember," Todd murmurs to the men, as we climb over rubble. "Yer taking two prisoners to see the President like you were ordered to do. Nobody needs to be thinking nothing but that."

We pick our way down the road. The pile of stones is so high you can't see into the cathedral. The Mayor could be in there anywhere.

We come around the corner to where the front used to be, now just a gaping hole into the vast lobby and sanctuary, still watched over by the bell tower and by that circle of colored glass. The sun, behind us, shines right into it. Open rooms hang from upper walls, their floors crumbling. Half a dozen redbirds pick through the remains of food and worse in amongst the stones. The rest of the structure leans in on itself, like it's grown suddenly tired and might fall down to rest at any time.

And inside its shell-

"No one," Ivan says.

"That's why there aren't any guards," says Pot Belly. "He's with the army."

"He's not," Todd says, looking around, frowning.

"Todd?" I ask, sensing something-

"He told us
himself
to bring Todd here," Ivan says.

"Then where is he?" asks Pot Belly.

"Oh, I'm here," says the Mayor, stepping out of a shadow that shouldn't have been able to hide him, almost seeming to step straight out of the brick, out of a shimmer where he couldn't be seen.

"What the devil-?" says Pot Belly, stepping back.

"Not the Devil," the Mayor says, taking his first steps down the rubble toward us, his hands open at his sides. The

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guards all raise their rifles at him. He doesn't even look like he's armed.

But here he comes.

"No, not the Devil," he says, smiling. "Much worse than that."

"Stop where you are," Todd says. "There are men here who would happily shoot you."

"I know it," the Mayor says, stopping on the bottom step of the cathedral entrance, resting one foot on a large stone toppled there. "Private Farrow, for example." He nods at Ivan. "Still seething for being punished for his own incompetence."

"You shut your mouth," Ivan says, looking down the barrel of his rifle.

"Don't look into his eyes," Todd says quickly. "Nobody look into his eyes."

The Mayor slowly puts his hands in the air. "Am I to be your prisoner then?" He takes a look around at the soldiers, at all the guns pointed at him. "Ah, yes, I see," he says. "You have a plan. Returning the cure to the people, capitalizing on their resentment to install yourselves in power. Yes,
very
clever."

"That ain't how it's gonna be," Todd says. "Yer gonna call off the army. Yer gonna let everyone be free again."

The Mayor puts a hand to his chin like he's thinking about it. "The thing is, Todd," he says, "people don't really
want
freedom, no matter how much they might bleat on about it. No, I should think what will happen is that the army will crush the Answer, that the soldiers accompanying you will be put to

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death for treason, and that you and I and Viola will have that little chat about your future I promised."

There's a loud snap as Ivan cocks his rifle. "You think so, do you?"

"Yer our prisoner and that's the end of it," Todd says, taking out a length of rope from Angharrad's saddle bag. "We'll just have to see how the army reacts to that."

"Very well," the Mayor says, sounding almost cheerful. "But I should send one of your men to the cellar so you can start taking the cure immediately. I can read all your plans perfectly clearly, and you wouldn't want that."

Pot Belly looks back. Todd nods at him and Pot Belly jogs on up the steps past the Mayor. "Just back and down," the Mayor points. "The way's quite clear."

Todd takes the rope and walks toward the Mayor, moving past the guns pointed at him. My hands are sweating into the reins.

It can't be this easy.

It can't-

The Mayor holds out his wrists and Todd hesitates, not wanting to actually get near him. "He tries anything funny," Todd says, without looking back. "Shoot him."

"Gladly," Ivan says.

Todd reaches forward and starts winding the rope around the Mayor's wrists.

We hear footsteps in the cathedral. Pot Belly comes jogging back, out of breath, his Noise a storm.

"You said it was in the cellar,
Lieutenant."

"It is," Todd says. "I saw it there."

Pot Belly shakes his head. "Empty. Completely empty."