Chapter Eight:

Family Matters

"This is quite excellent, Lana," the President said as he stood admiring the young girl's handiwork before a floor-length mirror. The sun was setting outside the Cathedral, lending a rosy glow to the stained glass windows which lit the President's office.

Lana said nothing, thinking only of her sister. Her hearing had only just returned to normal, and it was her first time outside of the House of Healing since the explosion at the Artillery workshop. Having passed out in the field from her injuries sustained in the second blast, Lana had awoken in the House of Healing being seen to by a Healer before being confined to her tiny work room in the dormitories with a guard stationed outside the door, with nothing to do but finish the President's suits. For a week her meals had been brought to her, and she had not been permitted to speak with anyone. Davy had come by on the first few nights, yelling up a storm and demanding to see her.

"Sorry, son," the guard had said. "Your father's orders."

Lana had heard nothing from him since. Now she stood at his father's side as motionless as a dead thing, having been summoned to the Cathedral as soon as she had sent word that the blue general's uniform was finished. With her work for the President completed, she wondered what would become of her.

"Very good indeed," Prentiss said. He looked very different without his usual head-to-toe white. The navy suit Lana had sewn was excellent work, and she couldn't deny that he wore it beautifully. It was a shame that her labour should be wasted on such a man.

"I'd like it a little more tapered here at the waist," Prentiss said, pinching at the fabric.

"Yes, sir," Lana said demurely. She had been uncharacteristically agreeable to him, worried that she if she said the wrong thing there would be consequences for her sister. She did not even know if Avery had survived the blast. When Captain Collins had brought Lana to the Cathedral, she had wept as she had begged for news of her sister. Collins had said nothing, though she could see that her tears bothered him. She had begged the President, too, but he would tell her nothing, other than that he had known from the very beginning that the two were related.

"I'd expected that there would be a few stragglers who made it out of Farbranch. I rarely forget a face, though yours was far bloodier when we first met. I must say, your nose has healed wonderfully."

"I had a wonderful Healer."

"Careful now. If you praise the Mistresses people might begin to think you're sympathetic to those terrorists; or, God forbid, that you're one of them."

Lana's chest tightened. Helena had been dragged away from the House of Healing for questioning, as had a handful of other suspected Answer members. They had not returned. She had seen how women came back from being interrogated for associating with the Answer, if they ever returned at all; beaten, half-drowned, fingernails torn from their hands. She feared for them all, and feared that, had she survived, Avery might be in the same position.

"Please tell me if my sister is okay. I'll do whatever you want, just don't hurt her."

There was a long pause as Prentiss seemed to decide what he wanted her to believe.

"She's been hurt enough already."

Lana breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever else might have happened to her, at least Avery was alive.

"It caused quite a stir among my men when I allowed Avery to join my army, I assure you. Poor confused soul. Living in Farbranch was bound to breed such confusion, a town which allowed itself to be ruled by women, pandering to feelings over the reality which stood before it. I had hoped that time among real men would help Avery to come to terms with the reality of who they are, but I'm afraid that my hopes were ill-founded."

"She's perfectly at peace with who she is," Lana said. "You seem to be the one with the problem."

"Your womanly feelings do you credit, but they also cloud your judgement, just as they have clouded Avery's. I admire your feminine passion; an asset when controlled, but dangerous when not. It was bold of you to infiltrate New Prentisstown, having no idea what you would be walking into. You clearly love Avery very much. But playing into these fantasies will be of no help in the long run."

"They're not fantasies."

"Yet another thing you and I might never agree on, I suppose. You think me a tyrant right now, but given time, you'll see. Everything I have done and continue to do is in aid of a harmonious life and the restoration of sanity."

"I saw what you did to the people in Farbranch. I saw what you did to every settlement you decimated on your way here. I hardly think you're qualified to bring about the restoration of sanity."

Prentiss' smile grew shark-like. "You've been vocal in your disapproval of the horrors of how women have been treated under my leadership. But those who are misguided need a firm hand to lead them. Your sister is alive, and moderately well; and if Avery wants so desperately to be a woman, perhaps the cure to such follies would be to show her exactly what it's like to be treated like one."

A dam broke inside Lana, releasing the flood of her pent-up rage. She felt her hand move seemingly without her influence, carried along by that vengeful current. She slapped him across the face as hard as she could. The sound was as crisp as the snapping of a bone. It hovered amongst the silence.

Prentiss held his face in the direction in which he had been struck, his eyes fixing upon the stained glass window. Lana would have been less frightened if he had yelled at her, or even hit her back. There was not a whisper of Noise from him. It was the coldness of him that chilled her blood. After a long moment, his frosty blue eyes latched onto her own.

"In spite of it all," he drawled, as though nothing had happened, "I do not want you or anyone else to feel like a prisoner here. Everyone is welcome in New Prentisstown."

Lana held his gaze. She was unable to keep the tremor from her voice.

"I didn't come here to be a part of your town."

Prentiss snatched up the hand which had slapped him, cutting her off. The girl tensed as he pulled up the sleeve of her shirt, revealing the metal band underneath.

"That's healing nicely," Prentiss said. "Does it hurt at all?"

"No," Lana lied.

"Good," he smiled. "I think you rather belong here, Lana."

And there was the truth of it, burned into her skin for everyone to see. The truth which would be with her even in her grave, and which would only begin to corrode long after her flesh had turned to dust. 1595. Property of New Prentisstown, as they all were. Property of this man in particular, forever and ever.

Lana kept her head down, unable to look him in the eye now. There was no change in his expression, save the hint of a smirk. He let go of her hand.

"Captain Collins will meet you at the door," he said.

And she knew, in some small way, that he had won.

~oOo~

Davy came marching to the Cathedral the moment he'd seen from another soldier's Noise that Captain Collins had been leading Lana through the streets, his Noise buzzing and red. At the door to the huge church, Collins was stationed in his usual position, with a cigarette between his fingers. As Davy advanced on him, he held out a hand to stop him.

"I want to see her."

"Slow down, bud. You'll have to wait. She's in there now with your Pa. She's been doing some work for him the past few weeks. Did she tell you she's a seamstress?" Davy nodded. "And I'm guessing you've heard all about her sister? It's a shame, really. Avery was a decent kid."

"Was?"

"Captain Hammar's got her, Davy. If she is still breathing, she won't stay that way for long. Doesn't sit right with me. Makes me think about my own kids."

Davy looked at him in surprise. "You never told me you had kids."

"None of us like to talk much about life before Prentisstown."

"Did you have a wife? What was she like?"

Collins smiled. "Funny. Kind. Pretty as hell, all smiles and yellow hair."

Davy pushed away thoughts of Lana's smile, her golden waves.

"Did you love her?"

"Of course I loved her. I wouldn't very well have married her if I didn't."

Davy rubbed the toe of his boot back and forth over the stub of a long-extinguished cigarette. Then why'd you kill her? his Noise prodded.

Just then, the great oak doors behind the pair parted, and out stormed Lana, looking shaken. She hardly seemed to notice Davy; instead she marched right up to Collins.

"I want to see my sister," she said, her tone venomous. Collins rubbed what was left of his cigarette against the cobbled wall.

"Alright, doll face, don't cause a scene."

"I'll show you a scene!"

"Trust me, the last thing you want is to end up where Avery is. I'm supposed to take you back to the dormitories."

"I'll take her," Davy said. She looked at him then, really looked at him, as though only just noticing him. He held her gaze. "If you want me to."

Lana nodded, clenching her palm. It was still tingling and red from the force of the slap. Collins frowned, but began making his way down the steps.

"I'll leave you lovebirds to it."

The pair watched him disappear into town. Neither said a word for a long while. Davy saw Lana looking towards the three buildings which had once been the Houses of Healing; two abandoned, the other now nothing more than a prison. His Pa didn't seem to have any rules at all when it came to the treatment of New Prentisstown's women, or at least none for their benefit. The horrors which had been taking place in the dormitories were something of an open secret; Davy had spent several nights on guard duty with Todd, desperately trying to force conversations to drown out the screaming.

"I'm not taking you back there," Davy said. "I don't want you to ever have to spend another minute in that place."

He snuck her into his room above the stables. Lana could see how embarrassed Davy was over the smell which the citronella candles he rushed to light didn't quite mask. The room amounted to little more than a mattress, a kettle and a couple of stray pieces of furniture.

"Do you know where my sister is?" Lana asked.

"She's in the cells at the Office of the Ask." The colour vanished from Lana's face. "I've tried to go in and check on her, but they won't let me past the front door."

Lana buried her face in her hands. "What can I do, Davy? What can I do?"

He sat down beside her and laid a cautious arm around her shoulders. Not knowing how to comfort her, he said nothing. After some time, they began to talk; of the explosion, of their worries, and of the futures they imagined for themselves. The longer they talked, the more it felt to Davy as though they had known one another all of their lives. It was strange, but he felt that he knew more about her than he did most of the Prentisstown men he'd known all his life. She certainly knew more about him than any of them did, excluding his father and perhaps Todd.

As the evening rolled in, Davy stoked the fire and fetched them some pastries from the baker's which they ate with bottles of cider from the stash Davy had saved from his birthday party. Lana told him how she had slapped his father. Davy was unable to restrain a surprised grin.

"You didn't," he said. No man had ever mustered up such courage that Davy knew of. It made him like her even more. When the time finally came to sleep, he'd laid out a horse blanket on the floor in the corner of the room.

"You don't have to," she said, moving over on the mattress to make room. "You won't feel the benefit of the fire so well there. Stay."

Davy clutched nervously at the blanket. "You sure?"

"I trust you," she said. "You won't hurt me."

Davy's Noise turned rosy, and he lay down at her side. Still, he was unable to get comfortable, frightened almost to move. He lay staring straight up at the ceiling, his Noise racing. I trust you, she'd said. But was she right to? He watched the strange hellish shapes painted against the walls by the flickering of the fire. The crackling of the flames reminded him of the clicks of the dead Spackle. He remembered how they had hissed and spat at him as he'd banded them. He remembered the one Spack in particular with the band around its neck, the one he had almost… but no, he squashed the memory down, not wanting Lana to see. What did it matter now, anyway? They were all dead. He had watched their bodies burn, tasted their ashes on his tongue. The past was past; nothing would change it.

An hour ticked by. Still Davy could not sleep. He sat up carefully in the bed, trying not to wake Lana. She was dreaming, her eyelids fluttering a little, her mouth gently open. He found himself reaching for Todd's Ma's journal, and the little piece of his own mother which resided within. As he opened the book to take out the fabric which had belonged to her, he saw the first words at the top of one of the pages.

My Dearest Son, they read. My Dearest Son.

Davy snapped the book closed. He couldn't bear to read what Todd's Ma had to say, not a word of it. Karyssa, she had been called. He knew that from the Noise of Ben and Cillian, but Davy had never heard a thing about his own Ma. He decided that he would take the book out and burn it. Why should Todd have a piece of his mother, when Davy had nothing more than a torn up bit of fabric? Why should Karyssa Hewitt go on living, when his mother and Lana's had long been forgotten?

Davy got up from the mattress and headed out into the cold evening air. As he rounded the front of the Cathedral, he saw that Cliff was once more sitting out on the steps, his father's first line of defence. Seeing the book tucked underneath Davy's arm, he called out,

"What you got there?"

"Nothing," Davy said. He looked down at the book in his hands. The leather was slashed in the centre where it had been stabbed through with a knife. He imagined the book being eaten up by flames, imagined the pages curling to the smoke. My Dearest Son.

"Just something of Todd's that I gotta give back to him."

Cliff offered him a cigarette. He took it for appearances sake and sat beside the man on the steps, clutching Todd's book to his knees.

"It was his Ma's," Davy said quietly.

Cliff sucked his teeth. "Karyssa Hewitt. Now there was a woman, make no mistake."

"You remember her?"

"I remember all of 'em, lad. Karyssa Hewitt and Julie Phelps and all the rest. Christ, after what we did, do you think any of us could ever forget?"

Davy exhaled a stream of smoke. The words rode up his throat with the smoke before he had a chance to stop them.

"Do you remember my Ma?" he asked.

"Yeah. I remember her."

"Pa never talks about her. Or about Old World."

"Ain't my business to be telling you nothing you don't already know. It's up to your Pa to tell you this stuff."

"Please," Davy said, a little embarrassed to be saying it. "I won't say nothing to him. I'm a man now. Don't a man deserve to know where he comes from?"

Collins frowned, using the stub of his cigarette to light a new one.

"Just tell me he didn't kill her," Davy pleaded. It was the asking which he had never been brave enough to ask, but one that had consumed him since Lana had questioned him the night of the artillery attack. Captain Collins met his stare.

"He loved her, Davy. I mean, he really loved her. She was about the only thing holding him together after the Spackle War. He would never have hurt her."

Collins' head disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

"Go on," Davy implored. Collins sighed.

"Your Ma and Pa were among the first settlers to arrive in Haven. Your father built this damn Cathedral with his own hands; it's no wonder he thinks he's got more claim to it than God. Then the war with the Spackle started. He may not get his hands dirty now, lad, but my God, he was a warrior out there. You should have seen the way he tore through the Spacks back then. You should be proud to be his son."

"I am," Davy said, mesmerised. "Always have been. Go on."

Cliff gave a deep sigh. "We'd all have been dead without him… but all that work, all those sacrifices, and what did General Prentiss, war hero, get for his efforts? He got Jessica Elizabeth."

Davy new the name. She was the original Mayor for whom Old Prentisstown had originally been named, back when it had been New Elizabeth.

"She was a battle-axe, make no mistake. Here she comes, ex-congresswoman, swaggering along with her mission to lead a group of us up river to establish our own colony away from Haven. Your Ma had just fallen pregnant with you and she wanted a fresh start. Your Pa didn't want to leave this town which he had built, where he had dreamed of raising his son; but he loved her even more than this place, so he agreed to follow instead of lead. My wife and I joined them, took our two little ones with us. Todd's parents and Ben and Cillian too. A big group of us headed up river, and New Elizabeth was born. We practically lived off Cassors back in the day. Big stupid bastards they were, not enough sense in 'em to know we humans were no good. I remember your Pa and I would go out hunting them, wringing their long necks. The road was long, too long for a pregnant woman like your Ma. The town was just about habitable by the time you came along. Your Pa was the happiest man alive, holding you in his arms. Here was a man who had seen the stars, and he saw them anew in your eyes. But your poor Ma… the birth wasn't easy, Davy. We had no real doctors, and it left her weak as a kitten. She caught the same sickness that killed Todd's father. When she passed she was holding you in her arms. She didn't suffer. She was peaceful as a lamb in death, just as she had been in life."

Davy sat deep in thought for a moment. The cigarette had burned so low that it was burning his fingers. He threw it down into the dirt and stubbed it out with his steel-capped boot.

"But your father... when she went to the grave, she took a piece of him with her. The bitterness your Ma had helped him stomp down, the rage that had served him so well on the battlefield, returned tenfold. He started making his plan to take back this world that he'd created. I'm ashamed to tell you I was one of the first on board when he suggested segregating the men from the women. After that, things snowballed… you don't need me to tell you how it all turned out."

"What about your wife and your two kids?"

"We had three little ones by that point," Collins reminiced. "Two boys and a girl. When things started getting real bad the women started sneaking the kids away in the night to the other settlements; I knew where things were going, and I knew they weren't going to be pretty, so I turned a blind eye, let it happen. It's different when it's your own kids, I guess. I pretended to be none the wiser when your Pa came asking. He threw my wife into the makeshift prison after that. I never saw her again."

Davy frowned. "But when Pa headed out for Haven, you were with the army. You tore through the other settlements. Tons of people died. Your kids…"

"You think I don't think about that all the time?" Collins said. "Jesus, I do. I really do. I might have shot one of my boys in the head, or burned my daughter's house down with her in it. But I like to think that if I saw one of them, I'd feel it. I'd just know. Like I said… it's different, when it's your own kids."

Collins threw the stub of his cigarette into the dirt. Davy felt a million emotions; shock, at all the revelations. Relief that his Pa had never hurt his Ma, and sadness that he had never got to meet her.

"How did you know?" he asked quietly.

"Know what?"

"That you were in love with yer wife."

Cliff narrowed his eyes. "This isn't about that bit of skirt you had on your birthday, is it?"

"No," Davy said, but Lana's face was all over his Noise. Cliff chuckled.

"Christ, son. She's a pretty picture to be sure, but just because you've had it off with her doesn't mean you're head over heels. Blimey, if I'd fallen in love with every woman I slept with-"

"It's not like that," Davy interrupted. "It ain't just that she's pretty or whatever. She makes me feel… I don't know, kinda sick."

"Well, if that ain't the height of romance."

"Nah, I mean… she makes me feel nervous, like I'm always gonna say the wrong thing and make an idiot of myself. But good, too; when I'm with her the world doesn't seem so God damn awful."

Davy let his words trail off, feeling stupid for taking to Cliff this way, Cliff who was the closest thing he had to an uncle, and the closest thing his father had to a friend.

"I don't know," Davy mumbled. "It's like a spell. Ain't that what love is?"

"Don't panic, lad. You can't be in love with someone if you've only known them for five minutes. You fancy her, that's all. I suppose it's all new to you, growing up with no women around. I can see how you'd get the two confused. Didn't your Pa ever explain any of this to you?"

Davy shrugged. "You know how he is; cold, like a statue. I didn't think he'd ever felt it himself. What's the difference?"

"What you're feeling is just a fleeting thing. Love, that's something deeper, something you can't shake. When you're in love, that magic feeling starts to go… it's like you know each other inside and out, like you're made of the same stuff."

Davy stood up.

"I better give this to Todd," he said; but before he headed up the steps, he paused to look at the other man.

"Thanks, Cliff."

"No problem, son."

The boy went inside, and Cliff smiled a little to himself. The poor young bugger hardly knew he was born. Something brushed up against his foot, and he looked down to see a little wad of floral fabric which must have fallen out of the book. Collins picked it up, and found that there was something tucked away inside of it; a photograph of a family. Three of their faces were familiar to him; two blond boys, and a smiling blonde girl.

He'd been right.

Seeing them, in that moment…

It was different.