Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online

means the beginning of the rest of this whole empty planet.
    Ben don’t start talking again till we get to the treeline. “There’s food in yer rucksack to last you for a bit but you should make it stretch as far as you can, eating what fruit you find and anything you can hunt.”
    “How long do I gotta make it last?” I ask. “How long till I can come back?”
    Ben stops. We’re just inside the trees. The river’s thirty metres away but you can hear it cuz this is where it starts rushing downhill to get to the swamp.
    Suddenly it feels like just about the loneliest place in the whole wide world.
    “You ain’t coming back, Todd,” Ben says, quietly. “You can’t.”
    “Why not?” I say and my voice comes out all mewing like a kitten but I can’t help it. “What’d I do, Ben?”
    Ben comes up to me. “You didn’t do anything, Todd. You didn’t do anything at all.” He hugs me real hard and I can feel my chest start to press again and I’m so confused and frightened and angry. Nothing was different in the world this morning when I got outta bed and now here I am being sent away and Ben and Cillian acting like I’m dying and it ain’t fair and I don’t know why it ain’t fair but it just ain’t fair.
    “I know it ain’t fair,” Ben says, pulling himself away and looking me hard in the face. “But there is an explanashun.” He turns me round and opens my rucksack and I can feel him taking something out.
    The book.
    I look at him and look away. “You know I don’t read too good, Ben,” I say, embarrassed and stupid.
    He crouches down a bit so we’re truly face to face. His Noise ain’t making me comfortable at all.
    “I know,” he says, gentle-like. “I always meant to try and spend more time–” He stops. He holds out the book again. “It’s yer ma’s,” he says. “It’s her journal, starting from the day you were born, Todd.” He looks down at it. “Till the day she died.”
    My Noise opens wide.
    My ma. My ma’s own book.
    Ben runs his hand over the cover. “We promised her we’d keep you safe,” he says. “We promised her and then we had to put it outta our minds so there was nothing in our Noise, nothing that would let anyone know what we were gonna do.”
    “Including me,” I say.
    “It had to be including you. If just a little bit got into yer Noise and then into the town . . .”
    He don’t finish.
    “Like the silence I found in the swamp today,” I say. “Like that getting into town and causing all this havoc.”
    “No, that was a surprise.” He looks up at the sky, like he’s telling it just how completely a surprise it all was. “No one woulda guessed that happening.”
    “It’s dangerous, Ben. I could feel it.”
    But all he does is hold out the book again.
    I start shaking my head. “Ben–”
    “I know, Todd,” he says, “but try yer best.”
    “No, Ben–”
    He catches my eyes again. He holds ’em with his own. “Do you trust me, Todd Hewitt?”
    I scratch my side. I don’t know how to answer. “Course I do,” I say, “or at least I did before you started packing bags I didn’t know about for me.”
    He looks at me harder, his Noise focused like a sun ray. “Do you trust me?” he asks again.
    I look at him and yeah, I do, even now. “I trust you, Ben.”
    “Then trust me when I say that the things you know right now, Todd, those things ain’t true.”
    “Which things?” I ask, my voice rising a little. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
    “Cuz knowledge is dangerous,” he says, as serious as I’ve ever seen him and when I look into his Noise to see what he’s hiding, it roars up and slaps me back. “If I told you now, it would buzz in you louder than a hive at honey-gathering time and Mayor Prentiss would find you fast as he could spit. And you have to get away from here. You have to, as far away as you can.”
    “But where?” I say. “There ain’t nowhere else!”
    Ben takes a deep breath. “There is,” he says.