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words."
    I lick my lips nervously. "How do I know yer keeping yer end of the bargain?"
    "You don't," he says, his eyes on mine, like he's peering right past every lie I could tell him. "I want your faith in me, Todd, and faith with proof is no faith at all."
    He turns back down the road and I'm left with Davy snickering to my side so I just whisper "Whoa, girl," to my horse. Her coat is dark brown with a white stripe down her nose and a mane brushed so nice I'm trying not to grab onto it less it make her mad. Boy colt, she thinks.
    She, I think. She. Then I think an asking I ain't never
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    had a chance to ask before. Cuz the ewes I had back on the farm had Noise, too, and if women ain't got Noise--
    "Because women are not animals," the Mayor says, reading me. "No matter what anyone claims I believe. They are merely naturally Noiseless."
    He lowers his voice. "Which makes them different."
    It's mostly shops that line this part of the road, dotted twixt all the trees, closed, reopening who knows when, with houses stretching back from side streets both toward the river on the left and the hill of the valley on the right. Most of the buildings, if not all, are built a fair distance from one another, which I spose is how you'd plan a big town before you found a cure for the Noise.
    We pass more soldiers marching in groups of five or ten, more men heading west with their belongings, still no women. I look at the faces of the men going by, most of them pointed to the road at their feet, none of them looking ready to fight.
    "Whoa, girl," I whisper again cuz riding a horse is turning out to be powerfully uncomfortable on yer private parts.
    "And there's Todd," Davy says, pulling up next to me. "Moaning already."
    "Shut it, Davy," I say.
    "You will address each other as Mr. Prentiss Jr. and Mr. Hewitt," the Mayor calls back to us.
    "What?" Davy says, his Noise rising. "He ain't a man yet! He's just-"
    The Mayor silences him with a look. "A body was discovered in the river in the early hours of this morning," he
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    says. "A body with many terrible wounds to its flesh and a large knife sticking out of its neck, a body dead not more than two days."
    He stares at me, looking into my Noise again. I put up the pictures he wants to see, making my imaginings seem like the real thing, cuz that's what Noise is, it's everything you think, not just the truth, and if you think hard enough that you did something, well, then, maybe you actually did.
    Davy scoffs. "You killed Preacher Aaron? I don't believe
    it."
    The Mayor don't say nothing, just moves Morpeth along a little faster. Davy sneers at me, then kicks his own horse to follow.
    "Follow," Morpeth nickers.
    "Follow," Davy's horse whinnies back.
    Follow, thinks my own horse, taking off after them, bouncing me even worse.
    As we go, I'm on the constant lookout for her, even tho there's no chance of seeing her. Even if she's still alive, she'd still be too sick to walk, and if she weren't too sick to walk, she'd be locked up with the rest of the women.
    But I keep looking-
    (cuz maybe she escaped--)
    (maybe she's looking for me--)
    (maybe she's-)
    And then I hear it.
    I am the Circle and the Circle is me.
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    Clear as a bell, right inside my head, the voice of the Mayor, twining around my own voice, like it's speaking direktly into my Noise, so sudden and real I sit up and nearly fall off my horse. Davy looks surprised, his Noise wondering what I'm reacting to.
    But the Mayor just rides on down the road, like nothing happened at all.
    The town gets less shiny the farther east we get from the cathedral and soon we're riding on gravel. The buildings get plainer, too, long wooden houses set at distances from each other like bricks dropped into clearings of trees.
    Houses that radiate the silence of women.
    "Quite correct," the Mayor says. "We're entering the new Women's Quarter."
    My heart starts to clench as we go past, the silence rising up like a grasping hand.
    I try to sit up higher on my