The Ask and the Answer Read Free

sideways to the floor, taking the chair with me. I slam into the carpet, hands tied so I can't catch myself, my eyes filling up with little New Worlds till there ain't nothing else to see.
    I breathe into the carpet.
    The toes of the Mayor's boots approach my face. "I am not your enemy, Todd Hewitt," he says one more time. "Just tell me her name and this will all stop." I take in a breath and have to cough it away.
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    I take in another and say what I have to say.
    "Yer a murderer."
    Another silence.
    "So be it," says the Mayor.
    His feet move away and I feel Mr. Collins pull my chair up from the floor, taking me up with it, my body groaning against its own weight, till I'm sat up again in the circle of colored light. My eyes are so swollen now I can't hardly see Mr. Collins at all even tho he's right in front of me.
    I hear the Mayor at the small table again. I hear him moving things round on the top. I hear again the scrape of metal.
    I hear him step up beside me.
    And after all that promising, here it really, finally is. My end.
    I'm sorry, I think. I'm so, so sorry.
    The Mayor puts a hand on my shoulder and I flinch away from it but he keeps it there, pressing down steadily. I can't see what he's holding, but he's bringing something toward me, toward my face, something hard and metal and filled with pain and ready to make me suffer and end my life and there's a hole inside me that I need to crawl into, away from all this, down deep and black, and I know this is the end, the end of all things, I can never escape from here and he'll kill me and kill her and there's no chance, no life, no hope, nothing.
    I'm sorry.
    And the Mayor lays a bandage across my face.
    I gasp from the coolness of it and jerk away from his hands but he keeps pressing it gently into the lump on my forehead and onto the wounds on my face and chin, his
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    body so close I can smell it, the cleanliness of it, the woody odor of his soap, the breath from his nose brushing over my cheek, his fingers touching my cuts almost tenderly, dressing the swelling round my eyes, the splits on my lip, and I can feel the bandages get to work almost instantly, feel the swelling going right down, the painkillers flooding into my system, and I think for a second how good the bandages are in Haven, how much like her bandages, and the relief comes so quick, so unexpected that my throat clenches and I have to swallow it away.
    "I am not the man you think I am, Todd," the Mayor says quietly, almost right into my ear, putting another bandage on my neck. "I did not do the things you think I did. i asked my son to bring you back. I did not ask him to shoot anyone. I did not ask Aaron to kill you."
    "Yer a liar," I say but my voice is weak and I'm shaking from the effort of keeping the weep out of it (shut up).
    The Mayor puts more bandages across the bruises on my chest and stomach, so gentle I can barely stand it, so gentle it's almost like he cares how it feels.
    "I do care, Todd," he says. "There will be time for you to learn the truth of that."
    He moves behind me and puts another bandage around the bindings on my wrists, taking my hands and rubbing feeling back into them with his thumbs.
    "There will be time," he says, "for you to come to trust me. For you, perhaps, to come to even like me. To even think of me, one day, as a kind of father to you, Todd."
    It feels like my Noise is melting away with all the drugs, with all the pain disappearing, with me disappearing along
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    with it, like he's killing me after all, but with the cure instead of the punishment.
    I can't keep the weep from my throat, my eyes, my voice.
    "Please," I say. "Please."
    But I don't know what I mean.
    "The war is over, Todd," the Mayor says again. "We are making a new world. This planet finally and truly living up to its name. Believe me when I say, once you see it, you'll want to be part of it."
    I breathe into the darkness.
    "You could be a leader of men, Todd. You have proven yourself very