Levkova was watching me with a calculating frown.
‘I think it’s worth pursuing,’ she said.
The makeshift infirmary was a cluster of dust-coloured tents pitched on land that used to be a park west of the shantytown, in the older part of Moldam. I told a medic that I wanted to see the girl who’d been found under the bridge, and she laughed and said, ‘Who doesn’t!’
She pointed me towards a queue outside one of the tents. About two dozen people were sitting, standing, shifting from foot to foot, patient the way people are patient in queues on Southside. ‘There’s not much point, though,’ she said. ‘Girl swallowed the river—she’s got God-knows-what running through her at the moment and she’s sick as a dog. You won’t get any sense out of her for a couple of days at least. And even then…’ She paused and studied me. ‘You’re that Cityside boy, aren’t you? She’s got no Breken, but she does speak some Anglo, so you probably could talk to her. But not for two days. At least.’
I couldn’t wait two days.
I went over to the queue and asked what they were waiting for and they said, ‘A blessing.’
‘A what?’ I said, but all I got in answer were stares and thumbs pointing me to the back of the line. Then this guy came out of the tent. I knew him, vaguely. Sandor something. He was a couple of years older than me, and he was making a name for himself as a doer of deals. A smooth talking southerner, his dark hair cut carefully, always dressed to impress—doing well for himself, but then you looked closely and saw the mending on his clothes and how threadbare it all was. It wasn’t your pockets and your wallet that you watched when you saw Sandor sliding through a crowd, more like your life savings and your hopes for the future—for a little cash, or not so little, he’d turn your dreams into schemes that couldn’t go wrong. So he said.
Now he stood at the front of the queue and told the people that he’d seen the girl, that she was called Nomu, and that she’d blessed him and spoken to him from a trance-like state about the angel Raphael. They watched him, almost with reverence, and when he’d finished, people reached out to touch him. A neat trick: he’d become sacred by association. He walked down the queue talking to people and nodding like he understood their problems and was sure he could help them, for a small price no doubt.
He saw me watching him; I should have just left but when he got to the end of the queue I said, ‘Why do you do that? Feed people that stuff? You don’t believe any of it.’
He looked at me, sly and sideways. ‘Nik Stais, right? Why do you care?’
‘Did you really see her—the girl?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Me, obviously.’
He looked around and waved at someone in the queue. ‘And why would you be interested in her?’
I nodded towards the tent. ‘How did you even get in there?’
‘Well,’ he looked extra pleased with himself, ‘I rescued her last night. Risked my life to do it.’
He peered at me. ‘What’s funny?’
‘Nothing. Never mind. Did she tell you anything, apart from that she was sent by an angel?’
He turned his back to the crowd. ‘Look, these people have just had the shit kicked out of them and they’re locked in like it’s the Marsh or something—they want to be told everything will be okay. I’m telling them. You got a problem with that?’
‘No, no, you go for it,’ I said. ‘But I know who got her off the bridge and I know a medic who will swear it wasn’t you.’
‘So?’
‘So, tell me what she said to you. Did she say where she’d come from? How she got here? Why she’s here?’
He shrugged. ‘She might have.’
I closed my eyes, which wanted to be still sleeping, and tried to get a grip.
‘I’ll do you a deal. Tell me what she said and I won’t let on that it wasn’t you who rescued her.’
He thought about it and shrugged again. ‘Couldn’t understand much of it. Her Breken is really stink.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s probably cos it isn’t Breken.’
He sneered and stepped away. ‘Okay, be a jumped-up little Citysider then.’
‘No! Wait. Sorry.’
‘You want to hear this or don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, okay. She’s real sick, so mostly she’s rambling and talking gibberish—I don’t think she’s one of ours, I think she’s from City. My best guess—she was on a boat from City and it got swamped by the wave from the bridge going up, she gets thrown out and lands near the riverbank, crawls ashore.’ His eyes narrowed at me. ‘Is it a boat you’re after? Think you can get outta here on a boat?’ He hooted with laughter. ‘Things getting too tough? The City boy wants to go home.’
‘Yep, that’s right.’ I turned away.
He said, ‘You think I’m just a scavenger. You know the only thing worse than a Southside scavenger? A Citysider pretending to be one.’
I walked away, but he must have rethought the possibilities because after a minute he was back beside me saying, ‘Hold up! Wait! I’ll help you find the boat if I can go with you. It’ll probably take two to handle it anyway.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We’re under lockdown and you think we can just row away from here without being shot by a Cityside grunt or blown up by a river mine. Besides, why leave when you’ve got such a nice thing going here?’
‘Why leave? Why leave? Let me count the reasons.’
He stopped and his eyes got positively misty at the thought of the pots of gold just out of reach on the other side of the river.
I walked and didn’t answer. But he caught up again.
‘You know, that boat’ll be long gone by now. There’s scavengers here that put you and me to shame. It’ll be under lock and key for sure, if it’s still in one piece, smashed for scrap if it’s not. That’s if the soldier boys didn’t find it first.’
When I didn’t say anything, he said, ‘If it’s been locked away by our people, I know where it might be.’
‘Do you,’ I said and kept walking.
‘I’ll show you. You’ll never find it on your own.’
I was trying to ignore him, but my feet slowed.
‘You won’t,’ he said and smiled.
I reported back to Levkova and Lanya. ‘Two days, at least, before she’s well enough to talk.’
I was standing in the back doorway of the kitchen looking out onto a riot of colour and greenery that was fresh from yesterday’s rain.
‘But,’ I turned back to them, ‘I think she was on a boat, and I might be able to find it.’
I sat down at the table and told them about Sandor. ‘Only thing is, if he helps me find it, I’ll have to take him with me.’
‘No.’ Lanya shook her head. ‘He’s a low-life. You don’t need him. I’ll help you look.’
She met my eye, at last, and gave me a small smile. ‘And then,’ she said. ‘When we’ve found it, I’m going with you.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘No.’ I glanced at Levkova, who was watching us thoughtfully.
Lanya leaned over the table and whispered, ‘You are not my mother.’ She sat back. ‘Think about it. Do you really want to be a lone brown male wandering the city streets? You think they won’t pick you up as soon as they lay eyes on you?’
I shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t…I can’t keep you safe over there.’
She smiled. ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You look so sad. You can’t keep everyone safe the whole time, you know.’
‘I haven’t been able to keep anyone safe at any time. Maybe you noticed?’
‘I can take care of myself, thank you. Besides, you’ll need someone to watch your back.’
I looked at Levkova again, but she shrugged and said, unhelpfully, ‘She’s right.’
In the half-light of dusk Lanya and I scoured the riverbank, upriver and down, separately and together. We managed not to get caught, but we didn’t find a boat. As it was getting dark we admitted defeat and climbed back up the bank. On the river wall we came face to face with Sandor, sitting there, kicking his heels.
‘Told you,’ he said.
CHAPTER 10
The bridge girl’s boat was lightweight carbon fibre, big enough for four people, and even in the narrow gleam of Sandor’s kero lamp we could tell it was not in great shape.
We were standing in a hold dug deep into the riverwall about ten minutes walk downriver from where the Mol used to be: the door looked like the entrance to an electricity substation and was plastered with Danger—Do Not Enter signs.
We asked Sandor how he knew about it, but he just winked and looked smug.
He held up the lamp. ‘Look at this thing. Will it still float?’
I gave the crushed outboard motor a kick. ‘Well, we couldn’t have used that anyway.’ I peered at the smashed searchlight. ‘Or that.’
Sandor leaned in and inspected the bent half-canopy with its cracked windshield, then glanced at me. ‘Might work. If we take off all this broken stuff.’
Lanya watched us, tight lipped and frowning. ‘Can you even row?’ she said.
‘Sure I can.’ Sandor lifted the lamp in her direction. ‘How do you think I knew this was here? Boats go way back in my family.’
She snorted and walked over to me. ‘It’s not a trafficker’s boat,’ she said. ‘It’s too smart. It’s a boat for carting important people around. Who do you think that girl is?’
‘Yeah,’ said Sandor. ‘It’s a Cityside boat, all right. You know what that means?’
‘As if we care,’ Lanya muttered.
But Sandor was undaunted. ‘It means if they see us on the river, they won’t blow us out of the water right away. They’ll wait till they find out who we are.’ He slapped the side of it and grinned. ‘Then, they’ll blow us away.’
Lanya folded her arms. ‘You think you’re coming?’
He stared right back. ‘I have oars. Which you’ll find you need. And anyway, a deal is a deal.’
‘So it is,’ I said. ‘Now we pray for fog.’
That night Lanya and I walked to the end of Levkova’s street and sat on the riverwall looking across at the moonlit spread of the city. We talked through the plan that Levkova and a walking-wounded Commander Vega had come up with. We’d find my father who was with our Cityside allies; we’d warn him that they had an informer in their midst; and we’d tell him what was going on here so that they could work out a way to (a) discover what Frieda’s Operation Havoc was and if it had anything to do with us, and (b) scuttle it. Neither Levkova nor Vega could tell me where my father was because he hadn’t told them and anyway knowledge of where he was would be dangerous if we got picked up. Instead, Levkova sent an encrypted message setting up a meeting. She’d sent it electronically, which was risky on an eye-watering scale, but what else could we do—we were short of homing pigeons.
As for a meeting place: I’d put up a bunch of possibilities and they’d shot down every one. Nowhere was safe. The city was riddled with cc-eyes peering along alleyways and under bridges, monitoring plazas and parks and shops. In the end they decided that meeting in a crowd was best, so Lanya and I were going to make our way to the Friday morning market in St John’s Square beside the old church where, lifetimes ago, some friends and I had hidden in the crypt after running from our bombed-out school.
In theory, it made sense. In practice, who knew? There were too many places where the whole thing could come horribly unstuck. No one mentioned the most unthinkable. Everyone was politely quiet on the fact that my father had gone over the river at a suspiciously convenient time. What if the informer in the One City ranks was him? That thought sat in the back of my brain, as deep as I could bury it, but it never went away.
Sitting on the riverwall, Lanya and I started devising backup Plans B through to Z to cover some of the holes in our Plan A, not least of which was, how do we get home to Moldam once we’d delivered our message? We gave up when we realised the complexity of it all and lapsed into ‘it’ll be all right because it has to be’.
Then we sat, not speaking, until Lanya said, ‘Yesterday, on the steps?’
‘Yeah. Sorry. I was—what did you call it?—wound up.’
‘But you’ve always said it’s okay with you for us not to be…together, except as friends.’
‘And it is,’ I said. I looked at her anxious face, brows pulled in, lips tight. ‘I mean, it will be. Once you’re back being a Maker.’
‘So when you said yesterday morning that they’d be mad if they didn’t take me back—’
‘Did I say that?’
‘You did.’
‘Damn.’
She smiled. ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Of course. They would be. Anyone would be mad to let you go.’ Including me, I thought. I went on, ‘It’s what you want to do.’
She looked away. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to get through the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, however long it takes to get this thing done.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know. And I don’t know.’
She thought for a bit, then she said, ‘Do you ever wish you’d become an agent with the security services like you were meant to and never come here at all?’
‘And ended up on the other side of the wire? No. Not when I know what I know now.’
‘What do you know now?’
I looked at the moonlight on her cheek and the arch of her eyebrow and thought, there are some things it doesn’t help to say out loud, so I said, ‘Coming here is like being told a secret. You can’t unknow it.’
‘What secret?’
‘That the city is hungry. It’s like a kid that wants. It wants and wants and wants and it won’t stop until it’s got everything. It’s shit hot to have everything, but to have it, you have to take it.’
She studied me. ‘You would never have made it as an agent.’
‘How do you know?’
She gave this small shrug. ‘You’re not the taking kind.’
We sat there a while longer then went back to Levkova’s and prayed for fog.
Fog didn’t come. Only a pathetic morning mist that would bu
rn off as soon as it saw the sun.
Sandor was on the riverbank before us, waiting in the half-light with oars over one shoulder and a canvas bag over the other. He squinted at Cityside through the mist.
‘You were supposed to pray,’ he said. ‘Everyone says you’re a heathen, and now I believe them.’ He dropped a bag at Lanya’s feet and gave a mock bow. ‘For you, princess.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘It’s a little something her highness here asked me to bring. Can’t understand it, myself, but whatever you’re up to, I don’t want to know. Just point me at the city and let me at it!’
Lanya kicked the bag lightly. ‘Levkova’s idea. In case things get sticky at the market.’
‘Market?’ said Sandor. ‘That sounds promising. What market?’
I bent to open the bag and she and Sandor both said, ‘Don’t!’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’
‘A friendly Southside export to the city,’ said Sandor. ‘Rats. Three big ones. They’re sedated, but they’ll wake up in a couple of hours so you’d better be ready when they do. What market?’
‘First things first,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this thing on the water.’
It was, without doubt, the loudest thing I’d ever done. The evac sirens that had deafened us the other night seemed like a miserable background hum compared with our attempts to get that boat on the water. Our feet crunched on the gravel—six boots, six hundred bits of gravel grinding with every step.
Then, at the water’s edge, the bottom of the boat rasped on the riverbed as we slid it into the water. Then came the slapping of waves on its hull as it rocked there, oblivious to the agonised care we were taking over it. At that point, Sandor ditched his jeans for shorts and waded in, noisily, to stand thigh deep at the front of the boat to hold it steady and guide it out, and I started to think that maybe he did know something about boats after all. He gestured for Lanya and me to climb in, which we did, the clumsiest, thumpingest falling into a boat there can have ever been. Sandor followed, just as loudly. Then the stupid oars took on a life of their own, rattling and clattering as we shipped them in the rowlocks.
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