Havoc

by Higgins, Jane

  Salvatore was gigantic, and he did not look open to persuasion.

  I said, ‘Wait a second! Listen—’

  But we were out of there with our feet hardly touching the floor before I could finish that sentence. The giant slammed the door behind us and we heard the locks turn. We stood in the rubbish-strewn backyard of the Stag, emptyhanded.

  So, doors would open for me! That’s what Frieda had said. Like hell they would. After the Inkwell, the Stag had been my lead. My best, last, only lead. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. I picked up an empty bottle and hurled it at the brick wall opposite. Someone inside shouted, ‘Hey! Watch it!’ I picked up another bottle and turned towards the door.

  ‘No!’ said Raffael. He pulled on my arm. ‘We go.’

  He dragged me down Mercers Lane and around the corner out of sight of the Stag.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Be calm. Think.’

  I leaned on a wall, closed my eyes and tried to make my brain work.

  Raffael stood beside me, not talking. After a while he said, ‘Tell me. This matters very much to you. Why?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘A good friend will die soon—as good as die—by Friday night, if I do not find Macey and if Macey does not help me.’

  He nodded. ‘So, now what do you do? We. What do we do?’

  ‘Now, I don’t know.’ My voice was hardly working.

  ‘You can work it out. How to find him.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  That’s supposed to be what I’m good at, working things out, but I couldn’t think straight. Friday midnight was thirty-nine hours away. Thirty-nine measly, pathetic, short little hours.

  Raffael said, ‘Give me your watch.’

  I frowned. ‘Why?’

  He held out his hand. I took it off and gave it to him and he put it in his pocket.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘I need that!’

  He shook his head. ‘You look at it every minute. How can you think when you look at your watch every minute? You give yourself no time for thought. Now. Questions. Where does the man live?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought he was here. His family’s in Gilgate somewhere.’

  ‘Over the river?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then we go over the river.’

  I looked at him. ‘You can’t just walk over a bridge.’

  ‘Because of the guards?’

  ‘Armed guards. That’s right.’

  ‘I have this.’ He held out his VIP ID card.

  I shook my head. ‘Not enough.’

  ‘What would be enough?’

  Nothing, I thought. Nothing is ever enough over here. I remembered saying something like that to Lanya: the city wants and wants and wants. Its soldiers, badly paid and in the line of fire, wouldn’t be any different. My brain started to clear at last. ‘I have money,’ I said. ‘A lot of money.’

  The bridge to Gilgate is at Torrens Hill, not far from the Stag. Two soldiers in green fatigues and sunglasses paced in front of the bridge gate. They turned bored faces towards us; I could see our reflections in their dark glasses. I held up my fake ID and Raffael’s VIP one, put on my best Ettyn Hills accent and said that my friend, visiting from the Dry, would like to walk on the bridge to look at the river because he’d never seen a river up close before. The guards laughed like I knew they would and waved us away.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand. We really want to.’ I showed them a handful of notes.

  Eyebrows shot up above the glasses. One of them said, ‘I guess you really do. It’s going to cost you more than that though.’

  I put the money away. ‘You know what? There are other bridges. We might take a walk to them.’

  They glanced at each other. ‘Okay, wait,’ said one. ‘We can let you through. Don’t do anything stupid, right? Walk to halfway and come straight back.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  I handed over the notes. Easy as that. We walked through the gate and onto the bridge. When we got to the middle we stopped and leaned over the side looking down to the grey water flowing around the bridge supports.

  Raffael whistled. He shaded his eyes, looking upriver towards Westwall and down towards Port then kicked the side rail with the toe of his boot. ‘This took a lot of making. It would be hard to destroy.’

  ‘For sure,’ I said. ‘You’d have to really want to.’

  I was watching the guards. As soon as they stopped looking our way, I said, ‘Let’s go.’ We took off fast for the other side. The bridge gate on Southside was locked but unguarded. We climbed over it and dropped down into Gilgate.

  Raffael grinned at me. ‘This far, so good!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This far, so good.’

  We dived into the Gilgate market crowd. Finally my much reviled accent came into its own—people took me for a local. I talked to stall owners, kids, streetsweepers, vagrants, shoppers, anyone who would stop and talk to me. Macey, I asked, did anyone know him? First name George, short guy, sturdy, kind, has—or had—a wife and two daughters.

  By midday we had a lead and with the sun high overhead baking the streets and people retreating to any place shady, we made it to the old part of Gilgate. This part of town was built and long lived in before the division, before the bridges were controlled and the river laced with mines, when the city was just a city with a river flowing through it. We arrived in a road of tenement houses at a house that looked like any other. Windows above us reflected the sunlight; doors up and down the street were closed against the heat. Raffael waited while I climbed the steps and knocked.

  My heart was pounding. I knocked again, and this time the door opened. A young woman stood there, all dark-eyed frowning suspicion, with a hand on the door about to close it in my face. I racked my brain for the names of Mace’s daughters.

  ‘Jenna?’ I said. ‘Louisa? I’m Nik Stais. I’m looking for George Macey.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Not here.’

  She started to close the door, but her eyes had flickered when I said her name.

  ‘Louisa,’ I said. I put a hand on the door, not pushing but holding it. ‘Please? It’s important.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No strangers.’

  ‘I’m not a stranger,’ I said. ‘Look,’ I took the silver talisman from around my neck and handed it to her.

  ‘Show him this. Tell him my name. Nik Stais.’

  CHAPTER 27

  Louisa took the talisman and closed the door. I turned to Raffael and he gave me an encouraging smile. We waited. The sun beat down on us. I thought about why I was there and then couldn’t bear to think about why I was there. I stared at the door. Hurry, I thought. Hurry so I don’t have to think about what I’m doing.

  The door opened. Same woman. She said, ‘This way.’

  We went down a dark hallway, through a small, basic kitchen and out the back into a tiny garden with carefully hoed rows of vegetables. Under a ragged awning a figure sat in a cane chair. I had to look twice to see it was him, he was so bent and old.

/>   He put both hands on the arms of the chair and tried to straighten up. The lines in his face were etched deep, his brows were set in a grimace and his mouth was a thin line.

  ‘He has bad pain,’ said Louisa behind me. She didn’t need to tell me. I felt like I was towering over him, so I crouched down.

  ‘Mace?’

  He held out a hand and I gripped it. Tears filled his eyes.

  ‘It is you,’ he said. ‘Nik, lad. Well, well.’

  Louisa had brought out other chairs and a tray with a teapot, a fragile china thing that looked ancient, and some little matching cups the colour of old cream. We sat down and she sat beside Mace and held his hand while he told us what had happened the night of the Tornmoor bombing.

  ‘They found me fast that night,’ he said. ‘Couple of agents. Didn’t waste time. Broke my knees.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Southsider on campus. Easy target.’

  ‘Didn’t they take you in? Question you?’

  He shook his head. ‘In a hurry, weren’t they? A truncheon’s a quick way to do what their drugs’ll do slow. Besides, they were more interested in doing damage right then, than in findin’ out where the troubles were stemmin’ from. Thing is, I had nothing to tell ’em.’

  ‘Nothing? Really?’

  He smiled faintly. ‘See? You don’t believe me either.’

  Louisa poured black tea into the cups, and Mace sipped from his and put it down. ‘Listen, I got a job there ’fore you was ever born. Wanted to earn enough to take my family over there, away from this.’ He nodded up to the high walls of the flats looming over the little bit of garden that was his. ‘You could do that in those days. So I’d been there a few years, earning my money, counting it up, saving it, and one day this scrap of a kid turns up, and I’ve heard his name before, and I know about his parents, and now I got two good reasons to be there.’

  I bowed my head.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Who else was gonna look out for you? Scrawny, you were.’ He peered at me. ‘Still are. Anyways, I knew about that hidden backdoor in the gatehouse, sure I did. And I knew some folk came and went through there over the years. But, y’know, they played it down. They said you was just a bunch of kids and some retired agents. They planted bugs but I never knew if those were any much use. So when they blew the damn place to kingdom come it was a helluva surprise to me.’

  ‘You came looking for me,’ I said. ‘That night. You should’ve got out soon as you could.’

  ‘Ah well. I knew that, and I knew you didn’t. So least I could do was find you and send you on your way.’

  I nodded.

  He smiled at me, a crooked, weary smile. ‘Find out who you are yet?’

  I nodded again and his smile widened. ‘Good. That’s good. Used to watch you. Wanted to tell you. All those years. Couldn’t of course. Less you knew the better for you. Hope you know now how important they were, your mum and dad.’

  He settled back like he was about to tell me just how important they were and I knew I couldn’t listen. With what I was about to ask, I couldn’t bear to hear.

  ‘Mace, I need help.’

  He patted his legs. ‘Not much I can do for you, lad. Not now.’ He looked from Raffael to me and saw something on our faces that made him pause.

  ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘I need to find the One City network on Cityside. I need to find it now. Today.’

  He leaned forward, interested. ‘Why’s that?’ Not suspicious. Curious. Helpful.

  I said, ‘It’s a long story and I’ll tell you one day but I can’t now. Can you give me a name or an address—anything that will get me in?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Passwords change, of course. But I’ve heard one or two things since I’ve been back over here. I can give you a trail to follow. Should get you somewhere today.’

  I nodded and heard myself say, ‘That would be great. Thanks.’

  He gave me two names, a password and two places to go looking back on Cityside.

  ‘Now don’t go writin’ those down,’ he said. ‘But you won’t need to, smart lad like you.’

  He smiled and I felt sick. This is it, I thought. This is what you do: you want something bad enough, you decide who and what you’ll sacrifice to get it. I stood up. Truth is, I couldn’t bear to look at him anymore, sitting there with his smashed knees, and me contemplating pointing Frieda towards more people like him.

  ‘Here,’ he held out the talisman that I’d given to Louisa, the one Fyffe had given me for luck.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t wear it now. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You keep it. I’ll come back for it one day.’

  He smiled. ‘I will, then. Take care of y’self now. Come and see me again soon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

  We went out into the sunbaked town. I went down the steps, across the road into the shadow of the tenement block and threw up.

  Raffael stood at my shoulder looking alarmed. ‘You are sick. You need help?’

  I leaned back on the cool concrete wall, dragged the back of my hand over my mouth and closed my eyes. Lanya would be deeply drugged by now. As far as I knew she’d never taken any kind of drug—she didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink, she didn’t do any of the adulterated crap that did the rounds over here, knocking people out of their grim reality into some kind of fantasy world for a while. You saw them sitting outside the shacks in the shantytown, out of their skulls, escaping. The Marsh drugs would hit Lanya hard. Tomorrow midnight, Frieda had said, irreparable harm begins. Maybe it had already begun.

  I had something to give Frieda now, in exchange for Lanya: a couple of safe houses, a password, the names of two people.

  I had made my mother’s choice.

  I could tell myself that those people had signed up for this in a way that Lanya never had, but that didn’t make it any easier. And it wouldn’t just be two people, would it? It would be everyone connected to those people in the network. Including my father. Is this what had happened once my mother had turned him in? Had he talked in the Marsh under the influence of their drugs, delivering his allies into their hands?

  How do you live knowing you’ve done that?

  I was about to find out.

  Raffael was watching me. ‘You are sick.’

  Mace and I had spoken Breken. Raffael couldn’t know what I’d just done.

  I pushed myself off the wall. ‘I’m not sick. We need to go back to the city.’

  I headed towards the river and got half way down the road before I realised that Raffael hadn’t moved. I looked back and called, ‘Come on!’

  He jogged up to me. ‘I do not go with you this time.’

  I frowned. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Nomu,’ he said. ‘She is here, on this side of the river. I will go and find her. I thank you for helping me, truly.’ He turned away.

  ‘No! Wait!’ I grabbed his arm. ‘You can’t do that. You don’t know where to look. You don’t know Breken, and if you speak Anglo here people will think you’re the enemy.
And Moldam is quarantined. You’ll never get through. If you wait a day—just one day, until I’ve done this…this thing I have to do, then I’ll help you.’

  He hesitated. ‘But she is here and I am here. I will find a way to ask. Tell me the direction.’

  I said, ‘It’s a long way, and I don’t know what you’ll find when you get there.’

  He didn’t care, of course. He was going whatever I said. He’d be picked up by a squad in no time, and then what would happen to him? Nothing good. He was a complication I didn’t need. What I needed was to concentrate on whether to try and save Lanya by selling out a whole bunch of people who’d end up like Mace, or worse. I knew Lanya would be appalled to be rescued like that. But leaving her in the Marsh meant she would be lost, not just to me, but to herself.

  There were no right answers. I needed a miracle. I didn’t believe in miracles.

  Raffael was watching me, impatient to leave. I decided to go with the problem standing in front of me: the one that I could solve.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ I said. ‘But we have to hurry.’

  CHAPTER 28

  Following the river took us to Moldam in as direct a line as there was, through Ohlerton, Blackbyre and Curswall. We jogged down the riverwall road, stopping once at a roadside stall to buy two cups of water from a woman who seemed needlessly cheerful. Those townships were new territory to me, but I didn’t see them. I was inside my head the whole way, trying to find a way through, one that didn’t lead to a deadend and someone’s execution.

  What if I went to the people Mace had pointed me towards and told them what Frieda’s deal was? Would they feel honour bound to storm the Marsh and get Lanya out? Unlikely, because even if they wanted to, the odds made no sense. A whole lot of people could lose their freedom, at the very least, to rescue a girl they’d never met who wasn’t even under threat of death—just some mind-altering drugs. Just.