Finally we were there, ready, and we’d only just begun.
We sat for a moment, looked around us, behind us, up and down the river, then at each other. Listened. Heard the slap of the water, and nothing else. We were past the point of no return: if we were caught now, we’d be taking a quick-one way trip, straight down.
Sandor and I took an oar each and Lanya knelt in the front peering ahead for broken chunks of bridge, and we crawled, if you can crawl on water, towards the city. The oars clacked in the rowlocks and slapped the water with every stroke. Half of me wanted to race and get it over with no matter how loudly we did it, and the other half wanted to creep along so slowly that we’d never be heard, and maybe never get there at all.
But our luck held. The riverwall loomed in front of us at last.
Near the Mol on Cityside the riverwall plunges straight into the water without a riverbank, but the wall has mooring rings and ladders running up to street level. We bobbed there in the shelter of the wall for a while, listening for activity on the street above us, and looking back towards Southside. The sun had tipped over the horizon and was sending long glancing beams into Moldam and onto the water, lifting the mist.
‘Are we leaving the boat here?’ asked Lanya. ‘What if it’s not here when we come back?’
‘There’s a phrase for that,’ I said. ‘Something about crossing that bridge when we come to it?’
She gave me a tiny smile. ‘Unless they’ve blown it up.’
‘Right,’ said Sandor to me. ‘You lead, we’ll follow.’
Lanya looked at him. ‘You say we,’ she said. ‘But you’re not coming with us.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I am.’
‘Aren’t you going off to make your fortune?’ she said.
‘I intend to, princess. But you said you’re going to a market, and that means food. I’m coming with you that far.’ He looked at me. ‘You armed?’
I shook my head. ‘Are you?’
He held up his hand. A small gun sat neatly in his palm.
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘If they do a stop-and-search on us and find that, we’re dead, so you better ditch it fast if things go bad.’ I looked at Lanya. ‘You?’
‘It’s a very thin knife,’ she said. ‘They won’t find it. Why do you think I wear boots that are too big for me? Don’t fret. Come on, we’re following you. Anglo all the way from now on.’
I climbed the ladder and peered over the wall: up the street and down, the place was empty. We’d been lucky again. We wouldn’t keep being lucky—the world wasn’t like that—but for now I was taking any and all the good luck that came our way. I motioned the others to follow and we scrambled up and over the wall.
We were in Cityside.
CHAPTER 11
‘We’re way too obvious here,’ I said.
We hurried across bare courtyards that used to hum with breakfast crowds grabbing coffee before racing up Bethun Hill to the banks and trading houses or over to Sentinel to push paper for the army. Now the bars and cafes were shuttered with metal grilles and roller doors that looked like they’d been clamped down for months. They were all plastered with posters: Lights Out After Dark! and Break the Breken! and Report Deserters: Reward! And across all of that was a giant scrawl of commentary from people with plenty to say and plenty of spray paint to say it with.
We walked along the waterfront watching for trouble, but the place looked abandoned. Everything was shut and there was no one around except a few old guys sifting through rubbish bins. Even the remote watchers were absent because someone had gone down the riverside strip and smashed every cc-camera within reach. I wondered if there were cameras higher up, untouched, looking out across the water and whether a bored functionary sitting in a pokey little office had registered us coming ashore. I looked back to tell the others to hurry up.
Sandor had stopped.
‘Sandor! We don’t have time!’
‘Look!’ He pointed at a wall of posters. ‘It’s our girl.’
Lanya and I went back to see. A dozen images of a girl’s face smiled out at us, with Have You Seen Nomu? blasting across the top and Reward! across the bottom and a number to call.
‘Same name,’ I said.
But this girl had masses of long wavy hair and a face like a model in an ad, all bright lips and sculpted cheekbones. Hard to match her with the Nomu I’d found with the ultra-short hair, the too-thin face and the huge, terrified eyes.
‘It’s her,’ said Sandor. ‘Looks like she’s from here, after all.’
‘She’s from the Dry,’ said Lanya.
‘Oh, yeah? How do you know?’ said Sandor.
She gave him her best glare. ‘Because when Nik hauled her out from under the bridge she was talking a whole other language and yelling for the angel that they worship out there, that’s how.’
He glanced at me. ‘So it was you?’
I shrugged and looked away, and found myself staring at Fyffe’s name. The Hendry name, that is, right there on a poster.
‘Let’s go,’ said Lanya.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Look at this.’
Beside the Nomu posters was a line of Report Deserters! posters stuck across a steel roller door that had seen more than a few attempts to batter it down. Someone had written over it in red spray paint: Who are the real deserters? Then diagonally across each poster, in smaller, more careful letters, they’d written a name, different on each one: Hendrys, Venables, Coultens, Marstersons, Hallidays… On it went. In the bottom corner of each one was a C with a 1 inside it—the One City symbol.
‘Who are these people?’ asked Lanya.
‘Families,’ I said. ‘High-up families.’
‘What d’you mean high-up?’ asked Sandor.
‘I mean, everyone knows those names.’
He pushed in front of us and peered at them, poster by poster. ‘I don’t. Never heard of them.’
‘Everyone on Cityside knows those names.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Who are they?’
‘They’re the Cityside rich list,’ I said, frowning at the Hendry name. What did it mean ‘the real deserters’? What had they deserted? Were they the ones who’d torpedoed the ceasefire?
‘How rich?’ asked Sandor. He was staring at the names as though he was trying to memorise them. ‘Are we talking small scale, like fancy computers, or big, like buildings?’
‘Bigger,’ I said. ‘Computer networks and whole chunks of the city.’
He straightened up and turned to look at me. ‘Are they friends of yours? Go on—say they are!’
‘Sure they are,’ I said. ‘No, of course they’re not. The Hendrys maybe. Once.’
The Hendrys, Thomas and Sarah, were uber rich and their kids—Lou and Fyffe and Sol—had been friends of mine. They’d opened up their family to me, let me spend summers at their house, sent presents on my birthday, food hampers during exams.
Then, when Sol died on the Mol in the exchange-gone-wrong, Thomas and Sarah Hendry decided that they couldn’t stand the sight of me.
‘I knew it,�
� said Sandor. ‘I knew it.’ He slung an arm around my shoulder. ‘Let’s go and find them.’
‘Oh, grief!’ said Lanya and walked away.
I shrugged Sandor off and followed Lanya, but he marched up beside us.
‘Seriously, why not?’ He was practically waving his arms in excitement. ‘You front up to them with the whole I’ve been stuck on Southside and now I’ve made it home and I need help to get back on my feet. That could work. Why not?’
Lanya rounded on him. ‘You have no idea why, so shut up.’
He did this exaggerated shrug at her as if to say, ‘What’s eating you?’ and said to me, ‘If you’re friends with these people—’
‘I’m not!’ I said. ‘Listen, we’re about to go through Bethun. No way do we look smart enough or cool enough to be wandering around that part of town, so we’re going to split up.’
‘You’re not losing me that easy.’
‘Otherwise,’ I went on, ‘We’ll just look like a bunch of brown kids on the prowl.’
‘Bethun home to the rich list, is it?’
‘Pretty much.’
He nodded. ‘Sounds like fun. I’ll go on the other side of the road and about half a block behind you. That do?’
‘I guess. Try not to shoot anyone.’
He gave me a mock salute, ‘Commandah!’ and sauntered away.
Lanya and I had shed our squad gear for civvies. I wore jeans and a T-shirt and Lanya wore black leggings, a short skirt and a denim jacket—a combo that would have been an eye-opener for any respectable aunt back over the river. But, like I said to Sandor, we didn’t look nearly smart enough to be where we were. Bethun’s terrace houses smelled of money: their cream-coloured stone was clean, their bay windows were inviting, their solid wooden doors had heft against the outside world, and their signs—Property Alarmed: Armed Response—were in Breken and Anglo, just to be absolutely clear.
We’d got about halfway through Bethun when our luck turned bad. An army ute rounded the corner ahead of us.
I whispered, ‘Oh, f—’ and Lanya stopped. I gripped her hand and said, ‘Keep walking. Look like you’re talking to me.’
The ute trundled along the street and we pretended to ignore it, but I knew the men inside wouldn’t go past brown kids on an empty Bethun street. It stopped beside us.
A soldier, middle-aged, middle-ranking, leaned out the window. ‘Hey! What are you doing here? Where are you going?’
‘Home,’ I said, in my best Ettyn Hills accent. ‘Missed curfew last night and she has to get home before her father knows she’s gone.’
Lanya hung on my arm and giggled and waved at the men. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sandor on the other side of the street a few houses back, one hand in his jacket pocket—I knew he was fingering the gun.
‘Where’s home?’ said the solider. ‘Show me some ID.’
Sandor was three houses away. I had no clue how trigger happy he might be. Two soldiers. He could shoot them both, wake the entire neighbourhood, bring any nearby patrols crashing down on us and end everything right now.
‘Which home?’ I said. ‘Town or Ettyn Hills?’
The soldier’s eyebrows shot up. Ettyn Hills was wealthy and then some. ‘Just show me some ID, kid.’
I didn’t have any. Cityside IDs were unfakeable unless you had access to hi-tech gadgetry, and imitations were so obvious that it was more dangerous to be found with one than not have one at all. I could see Sandor hesitating, watching.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t have it, okay? My father confiscated it to stop me going out.’
The soldier’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s your name, then? Whose your father?’
If you’re going to lie, I thought, lie big. ‘Stepfather,’ I said. ‘Thomas Hendry.’
‘Sure,’ said the driver. ‘Try again.’
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘The Hendrys adopted me and sent me to Tornmoor.’
I gave the Hendry’s Ettyn Hills address and their townhouse address down to the last digit of the postcodes, then looked at my watch.
‘Can we go now?’ I said. Right now, I thought. Because that guy over the road is armed and Breken and he might not think twice about shooting you.
‘Look,’ I held out my arms wide so they could see I was unarmed. ‘I’ve got nothing but a heap of trouble waiting at home if I can’t get back there soon. If you want to know for sure and really get me in deep, you can call him.’ I reeled off the number. ‘It’s unlisted, so he’ll get mad at you as well as me, but do it if you have to.’
I put an arm around Lanya’s shoulders, said, ‘Sorry, babe,’ and tried to look resigned.
The other soldier said, ‘Give me that number again.’ My stomach churned. I said it one more time. He tapped it into his communicator and pushed a button.
CHAPTER 12
Time slowed right down until I could hold everything around us in one long moment: the street in the early morning sunlight, quiet the way Moldam never was, Sandor on the other side of it moving towards us, the two men conferring in the ute, Lanya standing close, utterly still, and in the distance the bells of St John’s tolling.
The guy with the communicator leaned over and said to his partner, ‘Comes up as Priority List 1. You want me to call?’
Sandor was nearly at their door.
‘Shit, no,’ said the driver. He jerked a thumb at us. ‘Go on, get!’
I gave him a quick salute, said, ‘Thanks! We won’t do this again.’
Lanya and I walked away, resisting the urge to run, Sandor resumed his stroll and the ute trundled off.
Once we got around the corner Sandor joined us.
‘Very cool,’ he said.
I shook my head and blew out a long breath. ‘Yeah, not really. Just terror, plain and simple.’
‘I thought he was calling that number,’ said Lanya. She peered back round the corner at the retreating ute. ‘Was it real?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But he’d be buying a lot of trouble if he called it. No one’s supposed to know it except family and a few high-ups.’
Lanya turned back to us. ‘You can sound very posh when you want to. I never knew. Your Gilgate accent is so…Gilgate.’
‘So kind,’ I said, and she smiled and relaxed a fraction.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘We’re not far from St John’s. Those bells rang seven, so the market should be kicking off about now.’
On Southside, hunger nags at you the whole time; it’s a voice you can’t ignore, always murmuring, never entirely shutting up. You learn to live with it because you don’t starve—there is food, just never quite enough. No surprises, then, that after a few months there, I’d started to daydream about the market in St John’s Square: the lines of stalls and trestle tables stretching towards the steps of the big old church and piled with food: pies and pastries and crazily decorated cakes, baskets of apples and oranges and lemons, boxes of new potatoes and carrots, trays of eggs, huge round cheeses.
I hadn’t been to the market since summer a year ago, and maybe my dreams had exaggerated things, but no way was I ready for what we found. We stood
on the edge of it and Sandor scanned it with a disbelieving eye.
‘Where’s the food?’ he said. ‘I was promised food.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ I said. But I had promised it to myself.
‘Look, burgers.’ I pointed at an open-sided caravan with a grubby awning, a chalkboard menu and a queue worthy of Southside.
He screwed up his nose and sniffed in disgust. ‘Do better at home. Might as well be at home. This is a sore, friggin’ disappointment, this is.’
He was right. The market had become a dumping ground. People had raided cellars and cupboards and sheds for anything that might raise a few coins and now they stood watching at their tables as other people pawed it. Worn clothes on racks hung drably above piles of battered shoes, and there were tables spread with old locks, door handles, tottering stacks of plates and cups, and drawers of blunt knives and bent forks; there were clocks all telling different times and cartons of ancient, broken-spined books: you name it, if it was second- or third-hand and done for, it was here. Snarly, underfed dogs sniffed around people’s feet.
Like Sandor said, it wasn’t so different from a market over the river, although, there, Southsiders would be trawling through it like it was treasure; here, people seemed to realise they’d come down in the world—they picked stuff up and inspected it at arm’s length as though it smelled as bad as it looked.
It hadn’t occurred to me until then that people on Cityside might be as hungry as the rest of us. It looked like money was short too; people were haggling over prices and counting coins carefully into the eager palms of stall holders. There were all shades of desperation here. The war was costing them.
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