The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness

Author:Patrick Ness [Ness, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5217-3
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2009-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Even with all this Spackle labour, it’s still gonna take a coupla months to even come close to finishing this building, whatever it is, and by that time it’ll be mid-winter and the Spackle won’t have the shelter they were sposed to be building for themselves and I know they live outside more than men do but I don’t think even they can live unsheltered in the winter frost and I ain’t heard of nowhere else they’re gonna be going yet.

Still, we had all the internal walls torn down in seven days, two ahead of schedule, and no Spackle even died, tho we did have a few with broken arms. Those Spackle were taken away by soldiers.

We ain’t seen ’em since.

By the end of the second week after the tower bomb, we’ve nearly dug all the trenches and blocks for the foundayshuns to be poured, something Davy and I are sposed to supervize even tho it’s gonna be the Spackle who know how to do it.

“Pa says they were the labour that rebuilt the city after the Spackle War,” Davy says. “Tho you wouldn’t know it from this bunch.”

He spits out a shell from the seeds he’s eating. Food’s getting a bit scarce what with the Answer adding supply raids to the ongoing bombs but Davy always manages to scrounge up something. We’re sitting on a pile of rocks, looking out over the one big field, now dug up with square holes and ditches and so full of rock piles there’s barely any room for the Spackle to crowd into.

But they do, cramming onto the edges and huddling together in the cold. And they don’t say nothing about it.

Davy spits out another shell. “You ever gonna talk again?”

“I talk,” I say.

“No, you scream at yer workforce and you grunt at me. That ain’t talking.” He’s spits out another shell, high and long, hitting the nearest Spackle in the head. It just brushes it away and keeps on digging out the last of a trench.

“She left ya,” Davy says. “Get over it.”

My Noise rises. “Shut up.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

I turn to look at him, eyes wide.

“What?” he says. “I’m just saying, you know? She left, don’t mean she’s dead or nothing.” Spit. “From what I remember, that filly can take plenty care of herself.”

There’s a memory in his Noise of being electrocuted on the river road. It should make me smile, but it don’t, cuz she’s standing right there in his Noise, standing right there and taking him down.

Standing right there and not standing right here.

(where’d she go?)

(where’d she effing go?)

Mayor Ledger told me just after the tower bombs that the army had gone straight for the ocean cuz they’d got a tip-off that that’s where the Answer were hiding–

(was it me? did he hear it in me? I burn at the thought–)

But when Mr. Hammar and his men got there, they didn’t find nothing but long-abandoned buildings and half-sunken boats.

Cuz the informayshun turned out to be false.

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