“Well, yes, but–”

“It’s because we came so close to being wiped out last time. That’s not something you ever forget.”

“All the more reason to stop it from happening again,” I say. “We’ve shown the Spackle how much power we have–”

“Matched by the power they have to release the river and destroy the town,” she says. “Making the rest of us easy pickings for an invasion. It’s a stalemate.”

“But we can’t just sit here and wait for another battle. That’s giving the Spackle more advantage, that’s giving the Mayor more advantage–”

“That’s not what’s happening, my girl.”

And her voice has a funny note to it.

“What do you mean by that?” I say.

I hear a little moan beside me. Jane has stopped handing out food, distress all over her face. “Yer gonna get in trouble,” she whispers loudly to me.

“I’m sorry, Jane, but I’m sure it’s okay if I talk to Mistress Coyle.”

“She’s the one who gets maddest.”

“Yes, Viola,” Mistress Coyle says. “I am the one who gets maddest.”

I pull my lips tight. “What did you mean?” I say, under my breath for Jane’s sake. “What’s happening with the Mayor?”

“You just wait,” Mistress Coyle says. “You just wait and see.”

“Wait and see while people die?”

“People aren’t dying.” She gestures to the queue, to the line of hungry faces looking back at us, mostly women, but some men, too, and children, all haggard and dirtier than I expect they’re used to being, but Mistress Coyle’s right, they’re not dying. “On the contrary,” she says, “people are living, surviving together, depending on each other. Which is exactly what the Mayor needs.”

I narrow my eyes. “What are you saying?”

“Look around you,” she says. “Here’s half the human planet right here, the half that isn’t down there with him.”

“And?”

“And he’s not going to leave us here, is he?” She shakes her head. “He needs us to have complete victory. Not just the weapons on your ship, but the rest of us to rule afterwards and no doubt the convoy, too. That’s how he thinks. He’s been down there waiting for us to come to him, but you watch. There will come a day, there will come a day soon when he comes to us, my girl.”

She smiles and goes back to handing out food.

“And when he does,” she says. “I’ll be waiting.”

[TODD]

By the middle of the night, I’ve had enough tossing and turning and I go out to the campfire to warm up. I can’t sleep after the weird thing with James.

I controlled him.

For a minute there, I did.

I ain’t got no idea how.

(but it felt–)

(it felt powerful–)

(it felt good–)

(shut up)

“Can’t sleep, Todd?”

I make an annoyed sound. I hold my hands out to the fire and I can see him watching me across it.

“Can’t you just leave me alone for once?” I say.

He laughs a single time. “And miss out on what my son got?”

My Noise squawks outta sheer surprise. “Don’t you talk to me about Davy,” I say. “Don’t you even dare.”

He holds up his hands in a make-peace kinda way. “I only meant the way you redeemed him.”

I’m still raging but the word catches me. “Redeemed?”

“You changed him, Todd Hewitt,” he says, “as much as anyone could. He was a wastrel, and you nearly made him a man.”

“We’ll never know,” I growl. “Cuz you killed him.”

“That’s how war goes. You have to make impossible decisions.”

“You didn’t have to make that one.”

He looks into my eyes. “Maybe I didn’t,” he says. “But if I didn’t, it’s you who’s showing that to me.” He smiles. “You’re rubbing off on me, Todd.”

I frown hard. “Ain’t nothing on this earth can redeem you.”

And it’s just then that all the lights in the city go off.

From where we’re standing we can see ’em in a cluster cross the square, keeping the townsfolk feeling safe–

And in an instant they go black.

And then we hear gunfire from a different direkshun–

Just one gun, lonely on its own somehow–

Bang and then bang again–

And the Mayor’s already grabbing his rifle and I’m right behind him, cuz it’s coming from behind the power stayshun, off a side road near the empty riverbed and some soldiers are already running towards it, too, with Mr O’Hare, and it gets darker as we all race away from the army camp, darker with no more sounds of anything happening–

And then we get there.

There were just two guards on the power stayshun, no more than engineers really, cuz who’s gonna attack the power stayshun when the whole army’s twixt it and the Spackle–

But there are two Spackle bodies on the ground outside the door. They’re lying next to one of the guards, his body in three big, separate pieces, blown apart by the acid rifle things. Inside, the power stayshun is a wreck, equipment melting from the acid, which is just as good at destroying things as it is people.

We find the second guard a hundred metres away, halfway cross the dry riverbed, obviously firing at Spackle as they ran.

The top half of his head is missing.

The Mayor ain’t happy at all. “This isn’t how we’re meant to fight,” he says, his voice low and sizzling. “Slinking around like cave rats. Night-time raids rather than open battle.”

“I’ll get reports from the squadrons we sent out, sir,” says Mr O’Hare, “see where the breach was.”

“You do that, Captain,” the Mayor says, “but I doubt they’ll tell you anything other than that they saw no movement at all.”

“They wanted our attenshun somewhere else,” I say. “Looking out rather than in. That’s why they killed the spies.”

He looks at me slowly, carefully. “Exactly right, Todd,” he says. Then he turns back to look at the town, darker now, with townsfolk out in their bedclothes, lined up to see what’s happened.

“So be it,” I hear the Mayor whisper to himself. “If that’s the war they want, then that’s the war we’ll give them.”

The Embrace of the Land

(THE RETURN)

The Land has lost a part of itself, the Sky shows, opening his eyes. But the job is done.

I feel the hollowness that echoes through the Land at the loss of those who led the smaller attack on the heart of the Clearing, those who went knowing they probably would not return, but that by their actions, the voice of the Land might sing on.

I would give my own voice, I show to the Sky as the campfire warms us in the cold night, if it would mean the end of the Clearing.

But what a loss the silencing of the Return would be, he shows, reaching out his voice to mine. Not when you travelled so far to join us.

Travelled so far, I think.

For I did travel far.

After the Knife pulled me from the bodies of the Burden, after I showed him my vow to kill him, after we heard the approach of horses on the road and he begged me to run–

I ran.

The town was in burning turmoil at the time, the confusion and smoke letting me pass through the southern end of it unseen. Then I hid myself until nightfall, when I made my way up the crooked road out of town. Sticking to the underbrush, I crept up, zig by zag, until there was no cover left and I had to stand and run, fully exposed for the last stretch, expecting every moment for a bullet to the back of my head from the valley below–

An end which I craved but also feared–

But I made it to the top and over.

And I ran.

I ran towards a rumour, a legend that lived in the voice of the Burden. We were of the Land, but some of us had never seen it, some of the young like me, born into the war that left the Burden behind when the Land made a promise never to return. And so the Land, like their battlemores, was shadows and fables, stories and whispers, dreams of the day the Land would return to free us.