climb up on either side. The hills are lit only by moonlight, no sign of distant settlements or anyway of ones with lights still burning.
No sign of Haven ahead neither but we’re at the flattest point of the valley and can’t see much past the twists in the road either before us or back. Forest still covers both sides of the river and you’d be tempted to think that all of New World had closed up and everyone left, leaving just this road behind ’em.
We go on.
And on.
Not till the first stripes of dawn start appearing down the valley in front of us do we stop to take on more water.
We drink. There’s only my Noise and the river rushing by.
No hoofbeats. No other Noise.
“You know this means he succeeded,” Viola says, not meeting my eye. “Whatever he did, he stopped the man on the horse.”
I just
“And we never heard gunshots.”
I
“I’m sorry for shouting at you before,” she says. “I just wanted you to keep going. I didn’t want you to stop.”
“I know.”
We’re leaning against a pair of trees by the riverbank. The road is to our backs and across the river is just trees and the far side of the valley rises up and then only the sky above, getting lighter and more blue and bigger and emptier till even the stars start leaving it.
“When we left on the scout ship,” Viola says, looking up across the river with me, “I was really upset leaving my friends behind. Just a few kids from the other caretaker families, but still. I thought I’d be the only one my age on this planet for seven whole months.” I drink some water. “I didn’t have friends back in Prentisstown.”
She turns to me. “What do you mean, no friends? You had to have friends.”
“I had a few for a while, boys a coupla months older than me. But when boys become men they stop talking to boys,” I shrug. “I was the last boy. In the end there was just me and Manchee.”
She gazes up into the fading stars. “It’s a stupid rule.”
“It is.”
We don’t say nothing more, just me and Viola by the riverside, resting ourselves as another dawn comes.
Just me and her.
We stir after a minute, get ourselves ready to go again.
“We could reach Haven by tomorrow,” I say. “If we keep on going.”
“Tomorrow,” Viola nods. “I hope there’s food.”
It’s her turn to carry the bag so I hand it to her and the sun is peeking up over the end of the valley where it looks like the river’s running right into it and as the light hits the hills across the river from us, something catches my eye.
Viola turns immediately at the spark in my Noise. “What?”
I shield my eyes from the new sun. There’s a little trail of dust rising from the top of the far hills.
And it’s moving.
“What is that?” I say.
Viola fishes out the binos and looks thru ’em. “I can’t see properly,” she says. “Trees in the way.”
“Someone travelling?”
“Maybe that’s the other road. The fork we didn’t take.”
We watch for a minute or two as the dust trail keeps rising, heading towards Haven at the slow speed of a distant cloud. It’s weird seeing it without any sound.
“I wish I knew where the army was,” I say. “How far they were behind us.”
“Maybe Carbonel Downs put up too good a fight.” Viola points the binos upriver to see the way we came but it’s too flat, too twisty. All there is to be seen is trees. Trees and sky and quiet and a silent trail of dust making its way along the far hilltops.
“We should go,” I say. “I’m starting to feel a little spooked.”
“Let’s go then,” Viola says, quiet-like.
Back on the road.
Back to the life of running.
We have no food with us so breakfast is a yellow fruit that Viola spies on some trees we pass that she swears she ate in Carbonel Downs. They become lunch, too, but it’s better than nothing.
I think again of the knife at my back.
Could I hunt, if there was time?
But there ain’t no time.
We run past midday and into afternoon. The world is still abandoned and spooky. Just me and Viola running along the valley bottom, no settlements to be seen, no caravans or carts, no other sound loud enough to be heard over the rushing of the river, getting bigger by the hour, to the point where it’s hard even to hear my Noise, where even if we want to talk, we have to raise our voices.
But we’re too hungry to talk. And too tired to talk. And running too much to talk.
And so on we go.
And I find myself watching Viola.
The trail of dust on the far hilltop follows us as we run, pulling ahead slowly as the day gets older and finally disappearing in the distance and I watch her checking it as we hurry on. I watch her run next to me, flinching at the aches in her legs. I watch her rub them when we rest and watch her when she drinks from the water bottles.
Now that I’ve seen her, I can’t stop seeing her.
She catches me. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say and look away cuz I don’t know either.
The river and the road have straightened out as the valley gets steeper and closer on both sides. We can see a little bit back the way we came. No army yet, no horsemen neither. The quiet is almost scarier than if there was Noise everywhere.
Dusk comes, the sun setting itself in the valley behind us, setting over wherever the army might be and whatever’s left of New World back there, whatever’s happened to the men who fought against the army and the men who joined.
Whatever’s happened to the women.
Viola runs in front of me.
I watch her run.
Just after nightfall we finally come to another settlement, another one with docks on the river, another one abandoned. There are only five houses in total along a little strip of the road, one with what looks like a small general store tacked onto the front.
“Hold on,” Viola says, stopping.
“Dinner?” I say, catching my breath.
She nods.
It takes about six kicks to open the door of the general store and tho there clearly ain’t no one here at all, I still look round expecting to be punished. Inside, it’s mostly cans but we find a dry loaf of bread, some bruised fruit and a few strips of dried meat.
“These aren’t more than a day or two old,” Viola says, twixt mouthfuls. “They must have fled to Haven yesterday or the day before.”
“Rumours of an army are a powerful thing,” I say, not chewing my dried meat well enough before I swallow and coughing up a little bit of it.
We fill our bellies as best we can and I shove the rest of the food into Viola’s bag, now hanging round my shoulders. I see the book when I do. Still there, still wrapped in its plastic bag, still with the knife-shaped slash all the way thru it.
