The Ask and the Answer recap

Todd and Viola reach the city of Haven only for it to fall at once to Mayor Prentiss, now calling himself President, who separates the two and holds each as leverage over the other. Todd is set to grim labor branding and corralling the planet's native Spackle alongside the Mayor's cruel son Davy, while Viola recovers among the city's healers and is drawn into a rising resistance, the Answer, led by the fierce Mistress Coyle. As Prentiss's regime, the Ask, tightens its grip, the Answer strikes back with bombings, and the city slides into a spiral of attack and reprisal that compromises everyone caught in it, Todd most of all. Both sides commit terrible acts in the name of their cause. The enslavement of the Spackle finally provokes them to rise, and the book ends as a vast Spackle army sweeps toward the city and the first scout ship of the long-awaited settler convoy arrives, leaving Todd and Viola facing a three-sided war.

Previously: On a colonized planet where the Noise makes every man's thoughts audible, Todd Hewitt was the last boy in the isolated, all-male settlement of Prentisstown, raised on the lie that his town was all that survived of the colony. Fleeing before the birthday meant to make him a man, he found Viola, a silent girl who had crashed there as the advance scout of thousands more settlers to come. Together they raced across the wider world toward the city of Haven, pursued by the fanatical preacher Aaron, whom Todd was finally forced to kill, and by the cold Mayor Prentiss and his army. Todd lost his dog Manchee along the way. They reached Haven at last only to find it had already surrendered to Mayor Prentiss, who proclaimed himself President, with Viola gravely wounded and no refuge left. This book opens in the captured city, in the Mayor's power.

The struggle between President Prentiss's regime, the Ask, and Mistress Coyle's resistance, the Answer, escalates into open, brutal conflict, with both sides willing to do terrible things and Todd increasingly implicated in the regime's cruelty. In the chaos Mayor Prentiss coldly kills his own son Davy, severing the fragile bond that had formed between Davy and Todd and showing just how far the man will go. The regime's long enslavement and abuse of the native Spackle finally ignites their revolt, and the book closes as an enormous Spackle army advances on the city, promising all-out war. At the same moment the first scout ship of the settler convoy, thousands of colonists still en route, touches down, drawing Viola's people directly into the conflict. Todd and Viola, battered and morally scarred by what they have done to survive and to protect each other, are left facing a new and far larger war on three sides, with the outcome entirely unresolved.