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She nods.
“Viola,” I say again.
She don’t nod this time.
“I’m Todd,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
She’s not quite meeting my eye.
“So you can talk then?” I say, but all she does is look at me again quickly and then away. I turn to the still burning bridge, to the smoke turning into a fogbank twixt us and the other side of the river, which I don’t know if it makes me feel safer or not, if not seeing the Mayor and his men is better than seeing them. “That was–” I start to say, but she’s getting up and holding out her hand for her bag.
I realize I’m still holding it. I hand it to her and she takes it.
“We should go on,” she says. “Away from here.”
Her accent’s fu
Manchee’s just in awe of her. “Away,” he says lowly, staring up at her like she’s made of food.
There’s this moment now where it feels like I could start asking her stuff, like now she’s talking, I could just hit her with every asking I can think of about who she is, where she’s from, what happened, and them askings are all over my Noise, flying at her like pellets, but there’s so much stuff wanting to come outta my mouth that nothing is and so my mouth don’t move and she’s holding her bag over her shoulder and looking at the ground and then she’s walking past me, past Manchee, on up the trail.
“Hey,” I say.
She stops and turns back.
“Wait for me,” I say.
I pick up my rucksack, hooking it back over my shoulders. I press my hand against the knife in its sheath against my lower back. I make the rucksack comfortable with a shrug, say “C’mon, Manchee”, and off we go up the trail, following the girl.
On this side of the river the path makes a slow turn away from the cliffside, heading into what looks like a landscape of scrub and brush, making its way around and away from the larger mountain, looming up at us on the left.
At the place where the trail turns, we both stop and look back without saying that we’re go
“What was in that box?” I say to the girl.
She looks at me, opens her mouth, but then closes it again, turning away.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not go
She looks at me again and my Noise is full of just a few minutes ago when I was just about to hurt her, when I was just about to–
Anyway.
We don’t say no more. She turns back onto the path and me and Manchee follow her into the scrub.
Knowing she can speak don’t help with the silence none. Knowing she’s got words in her head don’t mean nothing if you can only hear ’em when she talks. Looking at the back of her head as she’s walking, I still feel my heart pull towards her silence, still feel like I’ve lost something terrible, something so sad I want to weep.
“Weep,” Manchee barks.
The back of her head just keeps on walking.
The path is still pretty wide, wide enough for horses, but the terrain around us is getting rockier, the path twistier. We can hear the river down below us to our right now but it feels like we’re tending away from it a bit, getting ourselves deep into an area that feels almost walled, rockface sometimes coming up on both sides, like we’re walking at the bottom of a box. Little prickly firs grow out of every crevice and yellow vines with thorns wrapping themselves around the firs’ trunks and you can see and hear yellow razor lizards hissing at us as we pass. Bite! they say, as a threat. Bite! Bite!
Anything you might want to touch here would cut you.
After maybe twenty, thirty minutes the path gets to a bit where it widens out, where a few real trees start growing again, where the forest looks like it might be about to restart, where there’s grass and stones low enough for sitting on. Which is what we do. Sit.
I take some dried mutton outta my rucksack and use the knife to cut strips for me, for Manchee, and for the girl. She takes them without saying anything and we sit quietly apart and eat for a minute.
I am Todd Hewitt, I think, closing my eyes and chewing, embarrassed for my Noise now, now that I know she can hear it, now that I know she can think about it.
Think about it in secret.
I am Todd Hewitt.
I will be a man in twenty-nine days’ time.
Which is true, I realize, opening my eyes. Time goes on, even when yer not looking.
I take another bite. “I ain’t never heard the name Viola before,” I say after a while, looking only at the ground, only at my strip of mutton. She don’t say nothing so I glance up in spite of myself.
To find her looking back at me.
“What?” I say.
“Your face,” she says.
I frown. “What about my face?”
She makes both of her hands into fists and mimes punching herself with them.
I feel myself redden. “Yeah, well.”
“And from before,” she says. “From–” She stops.
“Aaron,” I say.
“Aaron,” Manchee barks and the girl flinches a little.
“That was his name,” she says. “Wasn’t it?”
I nod, chewing on my mutton. “Yep,” I say. “That’s his name.”
“He never said it out loud. But I knew what it was.”
“Welcome to New World.” I take another bite, having to tear an extra-chewy bit off with my teeth, which catches one sore spot among many in my mouth. “Ow.” I spit out the bit of mutton and a whole lot of extra blood.
The girl watches me spit and then sets down her food. She picks up her bag, opens it, and finds a little blue box, slightly larger than the green campfire one. She presses a button on the front to open it and takes out what looks like a white plastic cloth and a little metal scalpel. She gets up from her rock and walks over to me with them.
I’m still sitting but I lean back when she brings her hands to my face.
“Bandages,” she says.
“I’ve got my own.”
“These are better.”
I lean back farther. “Yer . . .” I say, blowing out air thru my nose. “Yer quiet kinda . . .” I shake my head a little.
“Bothers you?”
“Yes.”
“I know,” she says. “Hold still.”
She looks closer at the area around my swollen eye and then cuts off a piece of bandage with the little scalpel. She’s about to put it over my eye but I can’t help it and I move back from her touch. She don’t say nothing, just keeps her hands up, like she’s waiting. I take a deep breath, close my eyes and offer up my face.
I feel the bandage touch the swollen area and immediately it gets cooler, immediately the pain starts to edge back, like it’s all being swept away by feathers. She puts another one on a cut I have at my hairline and her fingers brush my face as she puts another one just below my lower lip. It all feels so good I haven’t even opened my eyes yet.
“I don’t have anything for your teeth,” she says.
“’S okay,” I say, almost whispering it. “Man, these are better than mine.”