Страница 39 из 80
“I know.”
And then we don’t say nothing for a minute. There’s blame in the air but maybe it’s all coming from me.
Who can tell with a silent girl?
“My fault,” I say. “It’s all my fault.”
Viola rereads the note to herself. “They should have told you,” she says. “Not expected you to read it if you can’t–”
“If they’d told me, Prentisstown would’ve heard it in my Noise and known that I knew. We wouldn’t’ve even got the head start we had.” I glance at her eyes and look away. “I shoulda given it to someone to read and that’s all there is to it. Ben’s a good man.” I lower my voice. “Was.”
She refolds the map and hands it back to me. It’s useless to us now but I put it back carefully inside the front cover of the book.
“I could read that for you,” Viola says. “Your mother’s book. If you wanted.”
I keep my back to her and put the book in my rucksack. “We need to go,” I say. “We’ve wasted too much time here.”
“Todd–”
“There’s an army after us,” I say. “No more time for reading.”
So we set off again and do our best to run for as much and as long as we can but as the sun rises, all slow and lazy and cold, we’ve had no sleep and that’s no sleep after a full day’s work and so even with that army on our tails, we’re barely able to even keep up a fast walk.
But we do, thru that next morning. The road keeps following the river as we hoped and the land starts to flatten out around us, great natural plains of grass stretching out to low hills and to higher hills beyond and, to the north at least, mountains beyond that.
It’s all wild, tho. No fences, no fields of crops, and no signs of any kind of settlement or people except for the dusty road itself. Which is good in one way but weird in another.
If New World isn’t sposed to have been wiped out, where is everybody?
“You think this is right?” I say, as we come round yet another dusty corner of the road with nothing beyond it but more dusty corners. “You think we’re going the right way?”
Viola blows out thoughtful air. “My dad used to say, There’s only forward, Vi, only outward and up.”
“There’s only forward,” I repeat.
“Outward and up,” she says.
“What was he like?” I ask. “Yer pa?”
She looks down at the road and from the side I can see half a smile on her face. “He smelled like fresh bread,” she says and then she moves on ahead and don’t say nothing more.
Morning turns to afternoon with more of the same. We hurry when we can, walk fast when we can’t hurry, and only rest when we can’t help it. The river remains flat and steady, like the brown and green land around it. I can see bluehawks way up high, hovering and scouting for prey, but that’s about it for signs of life.
“This is one empty planet,” Viola says as we stop for a quick lunch, leaning on some rocks overlooking a natural weir.
“Oh, it’s full enough,” I say, munching on some cheese. “Believe me.”
“I do believe you. I just meant I can see why people would want to settle here. Lots of fertile farmland, lots of potential for people to make new lives.”
I chew. “People would be mistaken.”
She rubs her neck and looks at Manchee, sniffing round the edges of the weir, probably smelling the wood weavers who made it living underneath.
“Why do you become a man here at thirteen?” she asks.
I look over at her, surprised. “What?”
“That note,” she says. “The town waiting for the last boy to become a man.” She looks at me. “Why wait?”
“That’s how New World’s always done it. It’s sposed to be scriptural. Aaron always went on about it symbolizing the day you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and go from i
She gives me a fu
I shrug. “Ben said that the real reason was cuz a small group of people on an isolated planet need all the adults they can get so thirteen is the day you start getting real responsibilities.” I throw a stray stone into the river. “Don’t ask me. All I know is it’s thirteen years. Thirteen cycles of thirteen months.”
“Thirteen months?” she asks, her eyebrows up.
I nod.
“There are only twelve months in a year,” she says.
“No, there ain’t. There’s thirteen.”
“Maybe not here,” she says, “but where I come from there’s twelve.”
I blink. “Thirteen months in a New World year,” I say, feeling dumb for some reason.
She looks up like she’s figuring something out. “I mean, depending on how long a day or a month is on this planet, you might be . . . fourteen years old already.”
“That’s not how it works here,” I say, kinda stern, not really liking this much. “I turn thirteen in twenty-seven days.”
“Fourteen and a month, actually,” she says, still figuring it out. “Which makes you wonder how you tell how old anybody–”
“It’s twenty-seven days till my birthday,” I say firmly. I stand and put the rucksack back on. “Come on. We’ve wasted too much time talking.”
It ain’t till the sun’s finally started to dip below the tops of the trees that we see our first sign of civilizayshun: an abandoned water mill at the river’s edge, its roof burnt off who knows how many years ago. We’ve been walking so long we don’t even talk, don’t even look around much for danger, just go inside, throw our bags down against the walls and flop to the ground like it’s the softest bed ever. Manchee, who don’t seem to ever get tired, is busy ru
“My feet,” I say, peeling off my shoes, counting five, no, six different blisters.
Viola lets out a weary sigh from the opposite wall. “We have to sleep,” she says. “Even if.”
“I know.”
She looks at me. “You’ll hear them coming,” she says, “if they come?”
“Oh, I’ll hear them,” I say. “I’ll definitely hear them.”
We decide to take turns sleeping. I say I’ll wait up first and Viola can barely say good night before she’s out. I watch her sleep as the light fades. The little bit of clean we got at Hildy’s house is already long gone. She looks like I must do, face smudged with dust, dark circles under her eyes, dirt under her nails.
And I start to think.
I’ve only known her for three days, you know? Three effing days outta my whole entire life but it’s like nothing that happened before really happened, like that was all a big lie just waiting for me to find out. No, not like, it was a big lie waiting for me to find out and this is the real life now, ru
I take a sip of water and I listen to the crickets chirping sex sex sex and I wonder what her life was like before these last three days. Like, what’s it like growing up on a spaceship? A place where there’s never any new people, a place you can never get beyond the borders of.
A place like Prentisstown, come to think of it, where if you disappeared, you ain’t never coming back.
I look back over to her. But she did get out, didn’t she? She got seven months out with her ma and her pa on the little ship that crashed.
How’s that work, I wonder?
“You need to send scout ships out ahead to make local field surveys and find the best landing sites,” she says, without sitting up or even moving her head. “How does anyone ever sleep in a world with Noise?”
“You get used to it,” I say. “But why so long? Why seven months?”
“That’s how long it takes to set up first camp.” She covers her eyes with her hand in an exhausted way. “Me and my mother and father were supposed to find the best place for the ships to land and build the first encampment and then we’d start building the first things that would be needed for settlers just landing. A control tower, a food store, a clinic.” She looks at me twixt her fingers. “It’s standard procedure.”