‘Bastards,’ she said. ‘Bastards, bastards—’
She broke away from me and yelled across the river, ‘Ceasefire, you bastards! What d’you think that means!’
The air was gusting with smoke and sour with the ammoniac stink of explosives. It made me sick at the back of my throat, but that’s not all that was making me sick. I looked up at the hilltop.
Lanya saw where I was looking and said, ‘Did you just come from there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who’s up there?’
‘Everyone. Levkova, Vega, Jeitan…’
‘Your father?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Didn’t see him today.’
She looked back across the water, then ahead of us into the blaring night. ‘Is it over? Do you think it’s over?’
‘Maybe. They’ve made their point: no rules, and to hell with your act of good faith.’
She took a deep, ragged breath and blew it out. ‘That was terrible. That was…terrible.’ Then she nodded towards the hill. ‘We have to get up there. Come on!’ She put on her best ‘don’t mess with me’ face and we joined the crowds on River Road.
We were heading along the edge of the shantytown, now a mess of flattened wood and iron sheeting that was starting to burn in a scatter of fires. The shacks around the bridge gate were flimsy patchworks that shuddered in the everyday breeze off the river. The rockets had flattened them without touching them. People were shouting to hear each other above the sirens and screaming kids and bellowed instructions from evacuation officers. Turns out that Moldam was well prepared for this kind of attack, which surprised me but shouldn’t have. Evac officers stood along the road under the few remaining streetlights bawling to everyone, ‘This is an evacuation!’ They must’ve been picked for their voices: they could have woken Cityside coma patients. Small groups of people pushed past us heading into the shanty: evac teams on the move, hunting for the injured in collapsed and burning shacks.
‘Let’s get to the bridge gate,’ said Lanya. ‘We’ll take the road up the hill from there.’
Between the cookhouses and makeshift market stalls on one side of the road and the riverwall on the other, a crush of people emerged from their flattened homes and streamed out of alleyways. Some had kids wrapped tight around them, others were hauling whatever they’d grabbed before the fires took hold, the precious stuff like cooking pots, rugs, the family mattress. The clamour and smoke and sharp fear took me right back to the bombing of Tornmoor—my school on Cityside. That had been a Southside attack. This was a Cityside one. Difference when you’re in the middle of it? Nil.
Then I lost Lanya. One minute she was holding tight to my hand, the next our grip was broken and she disappeared into the crowded dark. I dived after her, yelling her name, but I couldn’t even hear myself in the noise. I stood for a second being jostled, then sped on, watching for her red scarf and beaded braids. Lanya would marshal an army better than most; she didn’t need me playing nursemaid. In fact, in this whole mess of a war, she didn’t really need me at all. She had a plan: she wanted to dance, and on Southside the way to do that was to be a Pathmaker—a dancer in ritual ceremonies and celebrations. After tonight, the Makers would be busy with funerals, but she wouldn’t be one of them. She was on probation after breaking the rules six months ago. I’d said to her once that being seen with me didn’t exactly square with her probation conditions, especially since I was the reason she was on probation at all, but she’d grinned and mentioned the army coats. Now her probation was nearly up and she had to decide, soon, if that’s what she was going to do. So she was thinking. And I was watching her think.
Makers don’t partner. She’d told me that as soon as she knew she had a chance to follow that future again. We could be friends, yes, close friends even, but there it stopped. She wanted to know if I was okay with that. Sure, I said. No problem. Which was mostly a lie, but I was trying not to get in the way of her doing what she most wanted to do.
I arrived at the bridge gate—or where it used to be. There was nothing there except the remains of the gate uprights: they were splayed out as though something giant had marched through, pushing them aside, and stormed off into the township.
Moldam Bridge was gone.
It had been ripped from its moorings, broken in pieces and hurled into the water. All that was left were its ragged beginnings jutting towards the river. People grew quiet when they came near it. They stood and looked, then hurried back into the mayhem. I thought of Fyffe and how we’d walked over this bridge for the first time only half a year ago. That stupid nursery rhyme arrived in my head:
Over the bridge it’s dark not day,
Over the bridge the devils play,
Over the bridge their souls are black,
Go over the bridge and you won’t come back.
No one was going back over the Mol ever again.
The gate had been a square steel frame, taller than me, with bars running top to bottom. Now it was lying in a mangled heap across the road. People were dead. That was why everyone who came near went quiet. The two guards on the gate had been blasted to the other side of the road. The medics hadn’t arrived yet, but someone had stopped to care for the bodies: they’d been moved out of the foot traffic to lie side by side near the remains of the gate and had been partly covered by a couple of coats.
A kid sat beside them. He was a few years younger than me and he wore the red bandana of the Breken uprising around his head. People hurrying by nodded to him. Some said a word of greeting or prayer, recognising that he was doing what someone needed to do: sit with the dead. There was no sign of Lanya so I crouched in front of this kid.
‘Did you know them?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘My sister’s gone to get the medics. I said I’d stay.’
‘Have you seen a girl about this tall?’ I stuck a hand in the air. ‘She’s wearing a red scarf in her hair and a baggy dark coat and boots that are too big for her.’
‘I haven’t been lookin’ too close. It’s dark, you know? And I’ve been saying the Charter to—’
He stopped.
I nodded. ‘Good idea.’ To keep the ghosts at bay.
‘Yeah. So I haven’t seen a girl like that. She hasn’t stopped here.’
Not what I wanted to hear. ‘Okay, thanks.’ I stood up.
He said, ‘You can wait for her here, if you want.’
He seemed really young and not liking what he was there to do. I couldn’t blame him. I sat down.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Teo.’
‘I’m Nik.’
‘You from Gilgate?’
That made me smile. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But no.’
‘Sure sound like it.’
‘Yeah, well, the man who brought me up came from Gilgate.’ That was Macey. He’d been a security guard at Tornmoor, a Southsider, and as close to a parent as I’d had for the last decade.
‘Where you from then?’ Teo asked.
‘Different places. You?’
‘I’m from here. Are you Nik Stais?’
That shut me up for a second. ‘Yeah. I am. How’d you know?’
‘Heard of you. You were on the bridge with Suzannah.’
Suzannah Montier. Southside’s leader-in-waiting. She’d achieved first name status with everyone. Much loved. Lost. Even the stain of her blood on the Mol was being washed away right now at the bottom of the river.
Teo was saying, ‘It was supposed to be a swap, wasn’t it: Cityside were gonna give us Suzannah back.’
‘For my friend, Sol, yeah.’
‘But they both died.’
‘That’s right. How did you hear about that?’
‘Everyone knows. You were the last one that seen her alive.’
I shook my head and looked at where the bridge had been. ‘I found her. After. I sat with her—like you’re doing now.’
Teo was watching me. ‘You’re from Cityside.’
This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. I looked around wishing Lanya would turn up, hoping she was okay, but everything shantyside of us was still going off with sirens and fires and yelling, and everything riverside of us was quiet. Almost everything.
‘Listen!’ I said. ‘Do you hear that?’
A sound, high pitched and wordless, pealed out of the dark.
‘It’s a cat,’ said Teo.
I wasn’t so sure. It was coming from the bridge, but it couldn’t be, because there was nothing there—only mangled iron and yawning blackness. And this sound: something was yowling from the ruins.
I stood up. ‘I’m going to look.’
CHAPTER 03
‘It’s just a cat,’ Teo called after me. ‘You should leave it. Leave it!’
He meant, stay off the riverbank. No one goes there, except the scavengers, and them illegally. It’s forbidden ground, officially, because it’s littered with river mines and sometimes with the bodies of people who have tried to swim or row across. But that’s also why, unofficially, it’s out of bounds. Lost souls wander there—that’s what people will tell you and they’re dead serious.
I needed a torch, but all I had was half the moon riding a rim of cloud low in the sky upriver and even that was disappearing behind a haze of smoke. I walked over to the bent uprights that had held the gates. The short strip—ten or so metres—of what was left of the Mol gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond it the water shone black and disturbed, sucking at the gravel on the bank. The creature sound got louder. I dropped flat and peered underneath. I was looking through a jungle of bent and broken iron beams and piled-up concrete slabs. Right in the middle stood a thin stick of a figure. It was lifting its face to the moon and calling out over and over as if all that was left of the bridge was this ghost howling at the city.
But it wasn’t a ghost, or a cat. It was a girl.
I leaned further out and called, ‘Hey! You! Grab my hand. I’ll pull you up.’
The howling stopped, then started up again.
Behind me came a clatter of activity: the medics had arrived. One of them came over to look at the remains of the bridge and swore softly. Then he saw me.
‘Oi! You! Get off that!’
I peered over my shoulder at him. ‘There’s someone under here. A girl. I’m going to get her.’
‘This whole lot’s gonna go! Listen to it!’
‘I’ll be quick.’
I scrambled back off the bridge, clambered over the broken stones and wire of the riverwall and slid down the bank. I peered into the crisscross iron jungle: the girl was dressed in something long and dirty white and she shone faintly in the moonlight. ‘Hey,’ I called. ‘Come out of there. The rest of the bridge is gonna fall.’ She stopped calling out and looked at me, but she didn’t move. I tried in Anglo as well as Breken, but no joy. I was going to have to go in and get her.
I talked as I moved, in both languages, trying to give off this air of nothing-to-worry-about, but my heart was going for it.
‘Don’t be scared, okay? We’re gonna climb out of here, you and me.’
Water dripped off the wreckage, freezing cold, on my head and down the back of my neck, which made me shiver, and I tripped, smashed my shin on a concrete block and came to halt, gasping. I knelt there for a second, sick and swearing, listening to the weight of the bridge creak and graunch above us. The girl watched me. I got up and moved on and when I thought I was near enough I crouched down and held out my hand to her. She opened her mouth and howled. Scared the life out of me. The sound of it made the ironwork ring and I thought she was going to bring the whole lot down on top of us.
Someone on the bank yelled, ‘Get out of there!’
A chunk of iron girder thumped into the ground by the water’s edge. I jumped and swore, but at least it made the girl stop and look at me. She was older than I’d thought—about my age. I held out my hand again but she backed away, deeper into the wreckage. I kept talking, quietly, like we were just having a conversation on the riverbank on a summer night and weren’t about to be crushed to a painful death any second now. She gave no sign of understanding any of it, but she stopped moving backwards. Progress.
She stood still, gripping the iron and whispering her word, the one she’d been howling. It sounded like ‘fire’ in Anglo. I kept my hand held out, wanting to tell her that enough people had died on this bridge, but fear had dried up my throat. I had no more words.
We looked at each other for about an hour—it felt like an hour, it was probably about ten seconds—then she held out her thin, brown hand. I wanted to grab her and run like mad, but I made myself take it gently. I edged towards her, crouched down and put her arms round my neck. She climbed on my back and clung there like Sol used to, no weight at all.
I said, ‘Hold on, put your head down, close your eyes.’ And we started to crawl out. Every time I put a hand on a piece of iron I could feel it vibrating like someone was slamming it with a hammer. The girl started to sing softly in my ear in a language I’d never heard—a small whispered voice. It was a chant, like a lullaby or a hymn. I tried to listen to that and not to the creaking of the Mol a few handspans above our heads.
She was still singing as we came out under the sky. We breathed air that was alive with sirens and shouting and smelled of smoke and ash and river sludge. I lifted her off my back, and she gripped my arms, eyes wide in her thin face, and rattled off something incomprehensible. It might have been her version of ‘thank you’ but it sounded too urgent for that.
Lanya clambered down the bank. ‘Hey!’ she said breathlessly. ‘That was crazy-brave.’
The medics took the girl and behind us the bridge groaned mightily. Lanya grabbed my arm and pulled me back from it. We watched the last of the Mol smash down onto the bank, jolting the earth all the way out to Port and beyond.
Lanya shuddered. ‘You could have been under that.’
I managed to say, ‘You would have done the same thing.’
She looked at me and put a hand on my cheek. I held it there and kissed her palm. I knew she could feel the tremor in me.
‘Cold,’ I said.
‘You’re soaking wet.’
‘Where’s the girl? Is she all right?’
‘She’s up with the medics. What about you? They should take a look at you.’
‘No. What for?’
She gave me her lopsided smile. ‘Nothing flaps you, is that the idea? You were under the bridge—you’re allowed to be a wreck too, you know.’
We climbed back up the riverbank and stood on the edge of operations: people were gathered around the girl wrapping her in a patched grey army blanket. She was sipping from a plastic mug, but now and then she threw back her head and cried out her word. Someone said, ‘She’s calling on the angel.’
‘Angel?’ I said to Lanya.
‘Shh,’ she said, ‘This is not good company to be a heathen in.’
‘She sounds like she’s saying ‘Fire.’
Lanya shook her head. ‘She’s saying Raphael.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Who’s Raphael?’
‘An angel worshipped by some bands in the Dry. Do you think she could be from the Dry? Did she say anything to you?’
‘Yeah, she did, but I couldn’t understand her. Except…’
‘What?’
I looked at her. ‘She said two words—she kept repeating them—that sounded Anglo.’
‘What were they?’
‘Havoc,’ I said. ‘And Marsh.’
CHAPTER 04
We left the girl and the remains of the bridge behind and sped on towards the hill, fearing—knowing, really—that up there the destruction would be much worse and the death toll higher. There were no guarantees that the people we knew had survived.
At the bottom of the hill we met a roadblock and three smoke-streaked guys from a squad, all of them on a short fuse. One pulled the bandana from his face.
Havoc Page 2