The Bridge (2 page)

He flicked on his notebook. The Tornmoor senior year held its collective breath.

‘When your name is called, come forward. Form a line in front of the stage.

‘Ashleigh Bannister, outstanding in physics and engineering.’ Dash beamed at me and strode forward.

‘Stephanie Domaine, outstanding in organic chemistry, applied mathematics, and scripture.’

‘Christof Freklin, outstanding in genetics and scripture.’

And on he went: Steve, Alistair, Jono (which drew an audible but unrepeatable crack from Lou), Ellis, Gaby (nods of approval all round), Mark, Jenna.

‘That’s all. God bless the city.’

That’s all. My brain jammed on
all
. That couldn’t be all. He was supposed to say,
Nikolai Stais, outstanding in …
I didn’t care what, as long as he said my name. But instead he was nodding to Gorton and Stapleton. He was clicking off his notebook. He was saying something to his new charges. I couldn’t hear what because my heart was pounding in my ears. Then he was walking towards the door and my classmates were marching behind him, already squaring their shoulders and walking taller. Some of them turned around to look at me, but the female agent said something and they turned away and then they
were gone. The door slid shut with me standing on the wrong, wrong side of it.

Lou was saying, ‘No, hell no! That can’t be right.’

Gorton said, ‘Hendry, be quiet. Stais, sit down.’ Everyone else was heading back to their seats and I was still standing, gawping at the door.

‘But what about Nik?’ said Lou, loud enough for the entire auditorium to hear.

‘You heard me,’ said Gorton. ‘Be quiet! Stais! Don’t make me tell you again.’

And that was that. A key moment, maybe
the
key moment in my life, gone. You can’t apply for ISIS. They choose you. Or not. I went back to my seat, heart still pounding. The whole auditorium had got too bright and hot. Lou was muttering furiously beside me but I didn’t hear a word.

People steered clear of me for the rest of the day, the way they do when you’re deep in it and no one knows what to say. Or maybe they do know what to say but they don’t want to say it when you’re around to hear.

We all landed back together in the dining hall that night: Lou and Bella, Fyffe and Jono, Dash and me. The lock-down siren had sounded so we were on generator power. The hall was the same vintage as the chapel, and gen-power made the place feel like a drafty old warehouse, all dark corners and dusty stores where the walls
were lined with portraits in thick cracked paint, forgotten by their owners. The gargoyles grinned and screamed silently from up in the gloom. Everyone’s face was shadowed, everyone’s voice muted, as though turning down the lights turned down the volume as well. But at least gen-power made it hard to see what we were eating.

Dash was bright and buzzy, but trying not to show it. Jono just sat, pleased with himself and the world, and didn’t say shit. Fyffe pushed her bowl of stew away and tried to change the unspoken subject. ‘That’s
so
disgusting! Whatever happened to real bread and butter? And roast potatoes, remember roast potatoes?’ She looked around at us but she got nothing – just some nodding and mumbling. She crushed her cracker and pushed a finger through the crumbs.

We looked at the watery custard and pseudo-fruit something that was supposed to be dessert and everybody passed, except Jono, who’d eat anything that wasn’t actually moving. Another silence arrived, so I said to Dash, ‘When do you start, then?’

‘Straightaway. Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow!’ Bella peered over her horn-rims. ‘That’s some hurry they’re in.’

Dash nodded. ‘Well, it’s escalating isn’t it. You heard the man. I know we’re supposed to think the army’s on top of it all, but ISIS knows the real score. They need everyone they can get.’

‘Yes they do.’ Lou looked around at everyone, but no one looked back. ‘So, if they’re desperate, why’d they pass on Nik?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Sure it doesn’t.’

‘Maybe there’ll be a second round,’ said Fyffe. ‘You know. Later in the year.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Lou. ‘Because Nik really needs that chance to improve his grades, doesn’t he?’

Jono woke up. ‘Don’t take it out on Fy. It’s not her fault.’

‘It’s someone’s fault,’ said Lou.

Fyffe and Lou Hendry – and Sol, their little brother – were as close to family as I had. Their parents had a house out in the country: a huge place, sprawling like you wouldn’t believe, with about twenty-six bathrooms and a front lawn the size of a football field and you had to travel for about a day and a half just to get down the driveway. They were the Hendrys of Hendry fuel cell fame – wealth-on-wheels, literally, since their cells powered all our vehicles and more besides. We’d had a normal enough start, Lou and me: rich kid wants assignment done, tries to beat not-rich kid into doing it for him. That didn’t work, but bribery did. His hampers from home were mind-boggling, packed with chocolates and biscuits and fudge and apples and plums and you-name-it, turning up fresh and frequent every term. Fyffe arrived in school a year
later and was so primly shocked by this arrangement that she shamed Lou into inviting me home. I’d been going home with them for holidays ever since.

I pushed my chair back. ‘I got work to do. I’ll see you later.’ I tried to smile at Dash, and escaped. Crowds parted for me like I was Moses walking the Red Sea. They closed behind me though, whispering, like crowds do. I lay on my bed and went over it again. I’d stayed behind in Gorton’s class that afternoon, but he took one look at me and held up a hand. ‘Don’t ask, Stais. It’s not for me to say.’

‘But, sir …’

‘What did I just say?’

‘Did you know?’

‘Did I know what?’

‘That they wouldn’t take me.’

‘Of course not.’

But you know, Dr G, you’re avoiding my eye. I don’t believe you.

When people started drifting into the dorm
I left – hurried down the stairs hoping not to be noticed. As I landed in the hallway, an arm shot out from under the stairs and pulled me into the shadows where the cc-eyes couldn’t reach.

Dash.

I muttered, ‘Hi,’ and didn’t know where to look.

She put her arms round my neck and rested her forehead on mine, studied me with that blue-black stare. ‘What’s going on?’

‘How do I know?’

‘Nik!’ She gave me a shake. ‘Think! Something’s wrong – a mistake in their records, or you’ve done something …’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Anything! It could be anything. This
wasn’t meant to happen!’

When I didn’t answer, she did what she often did when she was nervous: fished out the talisman I wore round my neck, breathed on it, and gave it a polish. It was silver, an elongated S with a long narrow hole at its center. It had belonged to my mother – it was all I had of hers. When I was little I used to think the S stood for Stais. Dash kissed it and put it back inside my shirt. ‘We’ll fix it,’ she said.

I shrugged.

‘Don’t do that!’ she said. ‘Don’t you give up. I said, we’ll fix it.’

‘Will you? You and your new buddies?’

She pulled away from me. I felt sick. ‘Gotta go,’ I said.

Macey was on duty at the main doors. ‘Lord, boy, slow down there –’ He put out a hand as I went past. ‘Hold up. You’re not going out. You heard the siren.’

‘Yes, I heard it. So?’

‘So that means you’re stopping here for the night. There’s a cell been busted up near Torrens Hill – six men, guns, ammo, explosives, you name it. No one’s goin’ anywhere tonight, not even you.’

‘Gotta get out, Macey.’

‘Well, not through these doors, son.’ Okay. I headed for the kitchens.

‘Nik!’

‘Mace?’

‘Watch how you go.’

‘Yeah, Mace.’

I’ve known Macey since I was five, but he’d guarded the doors for years before then. He used to walk in the grounds after his shift, smoking cigarillos and I’d follow him because I liked the smell – warm and dark and kind of cozy. After a while he gave up telling me to beat it and let me walk with him, and a while later he gave up the cigarillos, but I still walked with him. He was a Southsider and he talked a lot about his family across the river: two girls, a wife, and his old father. No mother; she died in an upsurge in fighting a few years back. He told me that one day he’d bring them all over. He was saving till he had enough to buy permits for them – that was a lot of money to save.
One of these fine days
, he’d say.
One of these fine days, Nik. You’ll see
. He was full of plans, old Mace.

He taught me a few Breken words. That’s what Citysiders called Southsiders: the Breken, the speakers of broken language, because of the mutilated Anglo they spoke across all their different groups. Mace had grown up speaking it. Sometimes, when there was no one else around, we’d talk to each other in Breken. But we were careful. It was the language of the hostiles, so you didn’t want to be caught speaking it, or even knowing it.

Years ago he’d told me the lock code for one of the
kitchen doors in the dorm wing
– just for when you want to get away, lad, and no one to know
. So before anyone could say,
Where the hell do you think you’re going, Stais?
I was out. I wandered down the walkway between the wall and the dorms and came around into the grounds.

Lockdown blacked out the school so I was alone in the dark, which suited me fine. I sat on a bench, thought about ISIS, thought about Dash, walked under the old oaks that lined the walls, listened to the wind rustle their autumn leaves, thought some more about ISIS and wished I hadn’t said what I’d said to Dash. Now and then a siren wailed, and sometimes gunfire crackled down near the river. But mostly it was quiet out there, the way cities ought not to be.

Cold too. Autumn had come early. Penance, it felt like – payment for the summer just gone. It had sweltered, pavements baking from early morning till sundown, with no let-up after dark because then the city breathed it all back out in one long, hot, pent-up sigh.

I’d roamed the streets that summer. Everyone else had gone and Lou wasn’t allowed to bring anyone home while he made up for his bad grades with a private tutor. I stayed at school. Same old story: you watch parents arrive and gather up their kids, and for all that everyone complains about families, the kids look pretty happy slouching out of school towards summer in the country house and the parents look proud. I tell myself every time not to watch,
but it’s like picking a scab. You know it’ll bleed and take longer to heal, but you can’t resist.

Once they’d gone it wasn’t so bad. I played football with the little kids in the alleyways around Sentian and Sentinel Park, which made me popular with the kids and their parents. No one ever left their kids to play outside unsupervised – there were too many stories of them being grabbed by hostiles. The kids from rich families might make it back home, because rich kids were ransomed, but others were lost forever, sold Oversea or into the Dry. Little kids were prized by the hostiles because they were ‘pure’ – uncontaminated by drugs or disease. White kids, especially. The hostiles thought their blood and organs held some kind of life-giving power. A white kid was worth a gruesome fortune over the river. Which meant everyone watched their kids every minute, and felt frantic about letting them out of sight. And everyone was happy to let me organize football in the summer.

At the end of each day I’d go and sit on Pagnal Heath and watch the sun go down over St Clare Bridge, make plans for when I got picked by ISIS, and wonder about the shadow city over the river.

Then summer was gone. The school gates were locked with the early dark and while a few of us were allowed out now and then, we had other things to worry about. Like getting the grades we needed to catch the ISIS eye.

We were told, all this time, that the fighting was going well, but we heard rumors too, of how deep the hostiles were reaching into the city. The worst unrest was upriver. Locking the bridge gates and seeding the river with mines hadn’t stopped them crossing over. Kenton Woods and Boxton out on the western perimeter had copped it bad in the last few months: those church workers hanging from Westwall Bridge, a nail bomb ripping into a crowd queuing for bread, and a church graffitied in blood. The powers-that-be said these were flare-ups that happened from time to time, nothing to indicate an organized onslaught. It was hard to know if that was true, or if in fact the war was coming, as they say, to a town near you.

Problem was, we had no real news to chew on. Every night, curfew drove people back into their homes, and us back to our dorms and dining hall, to pick over dinner and the day in private. The General or his sidekick made weekly telecasts about how great everything was going, and
City News
drip-fed us details now and then, but it was news-lite about the fighting. All we got from it were things like a day in the life of our boys/girls in the fray from first ‘prayer and swear’ through to supper in the mess with grinning thumbs-up from everyone. All of which was about as satisfying as candy at a carnival but it was seized on anyway, then people looked around, hungry for the next thing. We wanted to know. One of
the great things about being in ISIS is that you would know.

I walked in the grounds, listened to the quiet, watched the moon rise above the walls, and kept an eye out for the security boys. I’d get a lecture if they saw me. There’d be paperwork and reporting and junk like that, so I did them a favor and stayed out of sight when their torch beams came waving around. Said hello to Hercules though – that’s their giant wolfhound. He sniffed around and found me sitting on a bench but he knows me, so no problem.

When they’d all gone back into the dark, I talked to my mother for a while, told her that my life was pretty much sunk now that I was heading for the army with no get-out-of-jail card. But then I felt guilty about telling her that because it wasn’t her fault that ISIS didn’t want me. She’d probably had all kinds of grand plans for me and here I was trashing all her plans and she’d probably say to not give up, where there’s life there’s hope, and all those other cheery things that people like Mace are always saying, and maybe even believing.