The Bridge

by Jane Higgins

  What do you do with that? With discovering your mother was Breken? Does that make you Breken too, even if you’ve grown up your whole life in the city? And what about her dying in the uprising in ‘87 – which side of the uprising was she on? And who was Frieda Kelleran, the woman who put me in Tornmoor? She must have had some clout to get me in. Or my father did. Whoever he was. Was he Breken too?

  It was like finding a mistake at the beginning of a pages-long proof – a single mistake and the whole thing unravels and you’re back to square one, knowing nothing.

  Not quite nothing.

  I got up and peered out the window. It was late afternoon. I wondered if Lanya had given Fyffe my message yet. I did know one thing. I’d come to find Sol and that’s what I’d do. Everything else would have to wait.

  Meanwhile, there was a night’s work ahead.

  Levkova had anticipated the Remnant takeover of CommSec; piles of paper from her backroom project crammed the wardrobes and kitchen cupboards in her home. Now that I knew how to read them, I went back over all the comms she’d kept since Saturday, looking for something about a windfall, a boy, and a plan to traffic or ransom him. But their secrets were tame: some declarations by the Remnant-controlled Councils about purging the army of CFM sympathizers, some crowing that victory over the city was imminent. Only one of them made me wonder.

  When Levkova came home about midnight, I handed it to her. ‘Take a look. This is about a meeting Cityside. On Pagnal Heath on Crossover Day.’ Which I figured must be a commemoration of the Crossover that Max had talked about – the mass expulsion of Breken workers from the city years before.

  ‘That’s next Thursday,’ said Levkova. ‘It doesn’t give us much time. Who does it say is meeting? If Remnant are making secret deals with the city and we can prove it, we’ve got them.’

  ‘According to this, Commander Vega and the guy they smuggled over the bridge, the one they called DFO.’

  ‘What?’ She snatched the page from me.

  ‘Look.’ I showed her how it worked. ‘Do you know Pagnal Heath?’

  ‘This can’t be right!’

  ‘But look where they’re meeting. Do you know Pagnal Heath?’

  ‘I haven’t been there in twenty years, but yes, I do. Why?’

  ‘You could read this as meaning the Commander is dealing with the enemy. Both enemies even – the city and Remnant – if this DFO guy is working for them.’

  ‘But – are you sure that’s what it says?’

  ‘That’s what it says. That might not be what it means.’

  ‘Explain.’

  Easy to say. Risky to do. But I owed her so I dived on in. ‘Pagnal Heath is also called Pagan Heath.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The reason it’s called Pagan Heath – so they say – is they used to execute pagans there. Centuries ago. They burned witches and—’

  She was looking at me oddly. ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I – I scavenge. I pick up stuff.’

  ‘I see. Is that what passes for scavenging these days? It’s not exactly scrabbling in the gutters for old gear and leftover food, then?’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe I’ve done that too. Do you want to hear this or not?’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘This guy DFO, who is he?’

  ‘DeFaux. He’s a Citysider. Used to be a top ISIS agent. He and Sim worked together once on a peace process that went nowhere.’ She shook her head. ‘Now he’s just a mercenary. Very good at what he does. Very expensive.’

  ‘Okay. A hired gun. So, what if this is not a meeting at all? What if it’s an assassination?’

  CHAPTER 26

  How do you count down to a killing? Levkova and her crew did it the same way they did everything – with a ground-down determination that looked the world in the eye and refused to be surprised by what it saw.

  By about 3am we’d gone through most of the memos, looking for evidence of an assassination plot and come up with a few that looked interesting. Levkova said, ‘Good. That’s enough for now. Sim needs to see these.’

  Five hours later Max shook me awake. ‘Up, youngster! Commander’s here.’

  He’d come straight from a night on patrol, Cityside. The cold came off him like the wind off the river, but he didn’t stop beside the fire or wait for the mug of tea Levkova was brewing. ‘Sit,’ he said to me, and ‘Show me.’ So I showed him the one about him meeting with DeFaux. When I was done, he sat staring at what I’d written, then looked up at Levkova.

  ‘They want you out of the way, Sim,’ she said. ‘They’ve brought in DeFaux to do it.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t have time for this. How can they afford DeFaux?’

  ‘According to Jeitan they’ve had a windfall: spoils of war. This is real. We must take it seriously. You must take it seriously.’

  While they argued, I took off for the old chapel to meet Fy. We had two leads to follow. One was the man she’d seen down in the township. The other was the chance that Jeitan would help look for a connection between Remnant and the traffickers. If that connection might be financing an attempt on Vega’s life, I figured even Jeitan would break some rules to help.

  I heard feet on the floor before I reached the chapel, so I stopped short of the doorway and peered in. No sign of Fyffe, but Lanya was there. She was dancing. And had been for some time, I think – she’d discarded her boots, jacket and overshirt. Her feet were bare and her face and shoulders shone with sweat. Without music, the beat of her dance was her breath: sharp and rhythmic, punching the air, propelling her around the room. The sunlight glanced through the cracked stained glass, patterning the floorboards gold and blue and red. Lanya spun and leaped through the light; her braids whipped her face and the beads in her hair sparked in the sun. She reached the far side of the room, then turned back in a series of cartwheels that skipped over the puddles in the middle of the floor and stopped about a body length from me. She stayed there curled in a crouch, head bent, breathing deep for a minute or so. Then she said, ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘Not – not long.’ I wondered if I should say sorry, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

  She stood up and gestured across the room. ‘I don’t get the chance anymore, except here, in secret. Don’t tell.’

  ‘Who am I going to tell?’

  She pulled on her overshirt and stuck her feet in socks and boots. Sunlight filled the whole room now. I said, ‘Where’s Sina? Did you find her?’

  ‘Is she your girl?’

  ‘No. She’s a friend.’

  ‘Well, I asked at the infirmary.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They said she went down to the township yesterday afternoon on a supplies trip.’

  ‘And?’ My heart hammered.

  ‘And she met someone she knew and went off with him.’

  ‘She what? She what?‘

  ‘That’s what they told me. Yesterday afternoon. What’s the matter? If she isn’t your girl, you mustn’t mind too much.’

  Jesus. ‘Where? Where did she go? Who did she meet?’

  ‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. Why?’

  ‘I have to find her. I have to find her right now. Who did you talk to? Who told you she’d gone?’

  ‘Just someone at the infirmary.’

  ‘Let’s go there now. We have to ask.’ I started out the door but she darted in front of me.

  ‘You can’t go. You’ll get Levkova arrested for trying to hide you. I’ll go.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Later. I’m supposed to be at drill. As soon as I can I’ll go and ask.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After drill. But you can’t go out in the daylight. Everyone knows what’s happened with you and me. Meet me in the graveyard tonight after roll call. I’ll find out who she went away with, and we can go into town and look for her.’

  Commander Vega was sitting at the table looking at coded memos. He glanced up when I came in. ‘What’s the matter wit
h you? Sit down. I need to look at all the memos that allude to DeFaux.’

  The only thing that kept me sitting at that table was the chance of uncovering something about the windfall that was paying for DeFaux, and even then I was only concentrating with half a brain; the other half was careering through the township, searching for Fyffe.

  It was slow going. Vega wanted me to show him how I’d decoded each memo, and he wasn’t a man much given to fine detail. After a couple of hours it occurred to me that while I couldn’t lead him wildly astray – because Levkova would always be there to confirm or deny – I could lead him slightly astray, and she might not notice. So when we took a break for lunch I constructed a memo of my own. It meant embedding the question I wanted to ask in some inter-bridge chat and constructing the whole thing backwards, which gave me a headache, but in the end the heart of it went like this: Moldam–Ohlerton: Query: revisiting Night One targets.

  Vega frowned at it. ‘What does that mean? Why would they query that?’

  ‘What were they, the Night One targets?’

  He sat back. ‘What you’d expect. Watch Hill, financial hubs, comms hubs, a training school for the security services—’

  ‘A school?’

  ‘Of sorts. Why?’

  ‘I dunno. Kids, I guess.’

  ‘Privileged kids. Fascists-in-training, getting ready to join the interrogation specialists at the Marsh or follow their fathers onto comfortable seats on Watch Hill.’

  ‘Why not hit the security services directly?’

  ‘Ah, but where? They’re dispersed and mobile precisely for that reason. But they’ve got an elite training facility at Tornmoor. That’s what we targeted. They called it a school, but we know what it was. And for all that, we didn’t take down the dormitories with the trainees – just the admin center and the officer block.’ He was watching me. I doodled studiously in a margin, afraid that I’d pushed too far.

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER 27

  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 B
owman 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!’