The Bridge (17 page)

‘You know,’ he said, ‘for every one of those privileged little monsters up there at Tornmoor I could show you a thousand kids down here in schoolrooms with no computers and no books, writing on recycled scrap and no chance,
no chance
, of becoming more than the serving class their fascist peers up there expect them to be. They’re not innocent up there, for all that they’re kids.’ He leaned over and took the pencil out of my hand. ‘You of all people should understand that. Tell me you’d rather be a scavenger than put that brain of yours to use with a decent education.’

I stared at the paper in front of me and my heart thudded so loud on my ribs I was sure he would hear it. Then he’d want to know why my curiosity about a Cityside school came charged with such panic.

‘Look at me,’ he said. I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. His stare went right through me; I could almost feel it bouncing off my bones, calculating the sum of me.

‘Do you think that’s what your father wanted for you? To spend your days raking through the rubbish of the city?’

‘I didn’t –’ I cleared my throat and tried again, ‘My father died in the uprising in ‘87. I don’t remember him.’

He tossed the pencil back on the table and sighed. ‘Then let me tell you. You deserve a decent education. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He stood up and stretched his shoulders. ‘How many more?’

‘Oh,’ I tried to keep the relief out of my voice. ‘Six? Five, six, something like that.’

‘Take a break.’

I looked at the memo I’d made. ‘Are you done with this one?’

‘I think so. I don’t know why they’re harking back to first night victories, but it’s not telling us where DeFaux is, so it’s not a lot of help.’

I put it on the fire and watched it burn.

‘It bothers you,’ he said. ‘That bombing.’

‘I guess.’

‘Why?’

‘How did you do it? It must’ve been well guarded, a place like that.’

‘It was a Gilgate–Ohlerton collaboration, that one. Your people, not mine. They will have had moles in there
a long time. Straightforward enough to move things in, set things up, if you’re careful. Patient. People come to be trusted. You just have to watch that they’re not discovered or turned. Always a risk if they’re there too long.’

I wanted to ask who. Who was their insider? Who set us up for that night? I was almost relieved that I couldn’t ask and that he wouldn’t know.

I said, ‘Would you have done it? If it had been on your patch?’

He gave me another long stare. ‘I have a war to fight. I’m not going to win it with a bleeding heart.’

The daylight was almost gone by the time we’d finished. Levkova came home and the doctor called in to see how Max was doing. I watched the clock. We ate cabbage soup and flatbread just for a change, and assessed progress to date: we had Remnant memos that put DeFaux on this side of the river and hinted at an assassination plot with Commander Vega as its target – perhaps at the Crossover commemoration ceremony, where the Commander would be speaking to the crowd. For all that, we had no idea where DeFaux was. It was Saturday. We had four days to find him. My own thought echoed back at me: we.

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor was saying. ‘Why are you so sure DeFaux is still alive?’

‘Kasimir saw him,’ said Vega. ‘In the Marsh.’ A little silence fell, then he went on, ‘And now the Marsh has been
liberated, the politicals are free, but so are the psychopaths. I think he’s out, and I think he’s here.’

Pitkerrin Marsh. There it was again. The hospital the Breken had taken in the first assault of this uprising. I remembered the old guy at the Crossing that Fyffe and I had watched, and the great roar of approval that greeted his announcement that ‘Moldam has the Marsh’. The Mad Marsh. And here was Vega talking about psychopaths and political prisoners. At school we’d never given a second thought to who was locked up there; hostiles and the criminally insane were all the same to us. Just like fascists-in-training and Cityside school kids were all the same to them.

I needed to get out and find Fyffe.

That night was standard issue winter:
blustery, sleeting rain that hooded people inside their coat collars and sent them racing heads down for whatever fire-warmed room they could find. I crouched beside the archway into the graveyard, wishing Lanya would arrive. Lines of stone markers reared out of the scrubby grass in front of me. They weren’t neat, sculpted monuments – just hunks of riverstone set in the earth at more or less regular intervals.

I thought of the troops I’d seen laid to rest Cityside: our own celebrated dead, wrapped in the flag and laid in familiar ground, the gunfire salute crackling across the gravestones in their manicured lawns. I put my hands on the cold earth. What if Sol was here? Or somewhere like here? Buried, nameless, in hostile ground. Would they even bury our dead? And with what prayers, I wondered.
Fyffe would want prayers for him, but I couldn’t say them. Fyffe, who thought she was so well looked after that she’d launched herself right at the enemy. Fearless. Crazy.

Lanya arrived in front of me as quietly as ever. ‘Hurry,’ she said. ‘Before we’re seen.’ We set off around the walls. ‘Makers look after this place,’ she told me. ‘Or did. It’s not used anymore. They’re supposed to watch over it still, but I don’t think they do.’ She kicked at the rough grass. ‘I don’t think anyone does. There should be a key still hidden here somewhere.’ We’d reached a wrought-iron gate. She counted bricks and prized one out of the wall. ‘Here.’ She flashed a smile at me and unlocked the gate. ‘Lucky for us. Let’s go.’

We hurried down the hill. The rain and wind had dropped and puddles were already sheeting with ice. ‘We’re looking for a man called Goran,’ said Lanya. I scanned my mental list of traffickers, but there was no Goran on it. ‘Bowman, that’s the supplies officer at the infirmary, he took Sina down to the hospital yesterday afternoon to collect some medicines for the infirmary. This man Goran came in with a delivery. He’s a courier. Sina told Bowman she knew him and she was going to visit him.’ Lanya peered at me. ‘Bowman said he was expecting her to come back, but she hasn’t yet. Is that why you’re worried?’

When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘Bowman said to try the coffeehouse on the corner of River Road and Gantry
Lane. We might find him there. That’s this way.’

We cleared the shadows of the half-demolished buildings across the road, and the township spread out below us. A scatter of fires burned on street corners. Shacks hunched in dark alleyways; lines of light leaked through their walls and doors. The smoky haze that hung across all of it was thick and bitter in the back of my throat. Across the river, darkness – you’d never guess a city lay there.

On the flat, every corner we passed had people huddled around brazier fires. They called greetings to us and invited us to join them. I wanted to head straight for the coffeehouse, but Lanya grabbed my sleeve and said, ‘Come this way! I want to show you something.’

‘No –’

‘Yes! It’s too early for the coffeehouse. People won’t be there yet.’ Then she was speeding upriver past stacks of empty market stalls wrapped in patched tarpaulins. ‘Quick, it’s nearly time.’ We came to a place in the riverwall where the barbed wire across it was cut and bent back. We leaned on the wall and looked across the water.

‘Watch,’ said Lanya.

‘For?’

‘You’ll see. It can’t be long now.’

We waited. The night got colder. Below us, the water lapped against the stones of the wall and behind us the township muttered into the darkness. The bridge towered above us, a shadowy monster presence. It never looked the
same twice. The time of day, the weather, your mood – they all painted it differently. That night a mist lifted off the river and mingled with the peat smoke of ten thousand hearth fires. The moonlight and the mist turned it blue-black and silver. We could have been standing in an old photograph.

I said, ‘What are we waiting for? I need to find this man.’

‘Wait! Wait, wait, wait – look, there!’

Back west, across the river, a light blazed in the middle of the city, where everything else was black.

‘I think it’s their command center,’ said Lanya. ‘The Citysiders – Witch Hill, it’s called. It’s come on at this time the last three nights. What do you think it means? Does it mean they’re back in charge? The Commander said there’d been a hard battle for it. Maybe they’ve retaken it.’ She watched it like a drowning person watching the land. ‘What’s it like?’

‘What?’

‘The city. You were scavenging over there. What’s it like?’

‘It’s a war zone.’

She turned and looked at me. ‘It won’t always be. When we’ve won it, things will be different. We’re going to throw open the bridges and smash the prisons and bring home the prisoners. There’ll be hospitals full of medicine, and markets full of food, and banks of fuel cells for the
taking. And we won’t make the Citysiders slaves, even though that’s what they did to us. But we’ll punish their army. We’ll make them grovel and be sorry and they’ll be shamed because, unlike them, we’ll be just and honorable. And everyone will have enough to eat and children won’t die in the winter, and old people will be warm and fed.’ She smiled at me and her eyes blazed. ‘When we’ve won it.’

‘And you think that can happen?’

‘Yes! Don’t you?’

I turned back towards the township. ‘I’m going to look for this coffeehouse.’

‘Tell me what you did over there,’ she said, catching up with me. ‘Tell me what you saw.’

‘Later. Another time. Can we find Goran first?’

‘There you go, running away again.’

‘What?’

‘You run. Every time we get near you, away you go.’ She jogged backwards in front of me. ‘If you’re only a stray, where did you learn to read and write? And why aren’t you fighting in a squad in Gilgate?’

‘Look out,’ I said. A little knot of people was gathered around a fire across the road. Lanya turned round and walked beside me, still talking. ‘And how do you know about that window with the saint and the birds? That marks you as an easterner, which I wouldn’t have guessed to look at you because you’re too dark. But your
name does too, I suppose – if you’re a Nikos or a Nikolai. Are you? All right, not telling. Tell me this though: why, in the name of all that is holy, do you swear like a Citysider?’

‘How do you know what Citysiders swear like?’

‘No one here would blaspheme like you do – even in someone else’s Rule. Do that in some people’s hearing and you’ll be lying in a gutter with a knife in your back before you know what’s happened. You should know that. Why don’t you know that?’

‘So it’s different in Gilgate, so what?’

She turned in front of me and put her hands out to stop me. ‘Don’t do it here. Don’t. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, all right.’

But she didn’t move. ‘I don’t know who you are, Nikos or Nikolai or whatever your name is. And I don’t know why you’re here. Or what you’re hiding from – or who. Maybe you’re just afraid to fight – you’ve come to the wrong place if you are. But I do know this. You should tread with care. People here like to know what side everyone’s on. And no one can tell what side you’re on, because no one knows who you are and you never say.’

‘Maybe I’m just on my side.’

‘Maybe you are. But at the hearing you didn’t turn me in for my knife fight. Which you would have if you were looking out for you and no one else.’

I walked around her but she danced back in front
of me. ‘One more thing!’

‘What?’

‘If a patrol comes by they’ll ask for papers. Do you have papers?’

I did, as it happens, have papers. But they were a thousand miles away in whatever was left of the school safe. They’d be ash and atoms now.

‘So I’ll vanish if a patrol comes anywhere near,’ I said. ‘Is that all?’

She smiled. ‘For now.’

‘You’re enjoying this.’

Her smile got wider. ‘It is better than sitting in barracks listening to another lecture on basic words and phrases of the enemy.’ She walked on. ‘What are you going to say to Goran?’

‘No idea.’

‘You should have asked Levkova for help.’

‘She has troubles of her own.’

‘Shall I ask her for you?’

‘No!’

‘You don’t look very keen. You’re more a behind-the-desk person, I think – than in the field.’

‘Thanks. You’re a great help.’

‘Look! There’s Gantry Lane. That must be it.’

The coffeehouse was a low, concrete building
lit from inside by candles and noisy with laughter and music. We peered through a cracked window. The place was wall-to-wall people. ‘What if we meet someone who knows about the hearing?’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be in Gilgate by now.’

‘Don’t worry. You’re not important enough for the Council to have notified anyone down here about you. And even if people know about the hearing, they’ll only know that some Gilgate low-life has been sent packing. They won’t know what you look like.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You ready?’

‘I’m ready,’ said Lanya. I pushed open the door. People grumbled at us as we shouldered our way in, and after about six steps we reached a waist-high slab of wood that was the counter. The air was thick with smoke from
a fire smoldering in a grate, and from whatever dried weed people were sucking on. You could probably get high from just standing there breathing. And whatever it was they were drinking, it did not smell like coffee. In one corner a singer was crooning,
Freedom’s hour is comin’; set your feet to walk her path; freedom’s hour is comin’; set your face for her return …

‘Help you squaddies?’ A heavy, gray-haired man pushed past us, fingers clutching empty mugs. He clattered the mugs into a sink and peered at us from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Well?’

‘I’m looking for Goran,’ I said. ‘Got a message for him from up the hill.’

‘He’s out the back.’

We followed the direction of his thumb into a yard. A fire burned in a brazier and three men and a woman stood around it. The woman checked out our squad clothes and made room for us. She was the first richly dressed person I’d seen in Southside. She had thick, black hair falling to folds of fabric around her shoulders. Gold in her scarf and on her fingers shone in the firelight. She swayed in my direction. ‘You’re a ways from barracks, soldier boy. Night on the town is it, before you march off all brave over the bridge?’