She studied me, not believing. ‘Do you know anything about the symptoms?’ She was back looking down at the bodies.
I shook my head. ‘Don’t look at them.’
I still couldn’t find anything on the stupid system. I hunted round in the console drawer and found a pen and a scrappy notepad that looked like it had lost most of its pages to the shredder. I started jotting down the room codes, looking for patterns, but that gave me nothing. I tried tracking people who’d logged in to the observation room over the last seven days. Frieda had visited three days before. Had she then gone off to gloat in private over her store of vaccines? No, it looked like she’d gone back to her office. Who else had been in? Not that many people—half a dozen or so, including Jono who’d come with Frieda, but not Dash. Frieda’s Operation Havoc was looking like a close-kept secret.
Lanya was watching over my shoulder. When I sat back, thinking I’d reached a dead end, she said, ‘All right. At least we have something to work with.’
‘We do? What?’
Her voice began to lighten and lift as she got into problem-solving mode. ‘We—you and me—are now something that Frieda hasn’t planned for. Havoc on the loose.’
I looked at her. ‘That’s true.’
Dash came through the door. ‘All done. He’s locked up. I’ll go back and get him when he’s good and quiet.’ She peered out the observation window, frowning. ‘What is this place?’
‘You really don’t know?’ I said.
‘Never been here.’ She picked up the cannister Jono had been waving around and read the label on it. Her eyebrows shot up. ‘This really is nerve gas. You weren’t kidding.’ She looked out the window again. ‘What’s in the cages?’
‘You mean who,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Don’t be dim,’ I said. ‘What do you think the Marsh is for?’
She darted me a look of alarm and disbelief and then walked along the window trying to get a better view below. ‘Is that true? Are there people down there? I mean—’
‘Yes,’ said Lanya. ‘People. And yes, they’re dead.’
Dash had gone pale. ‘What did they die of? Not nerve gas, or you’d be dead too.’
‘They died,’ said Lanya, ‘of Frieda Kelleran’s plan for Moldam.’
Dash turned her back on the window and gave us her full attention. ‘From the top, please.’
‘But you know this,’ I said. ‘You heard Frieda in St John’s all of—I don’t know—six hours ago? She said they’d released the virus in Moldam. What did you think she meant?’
‘They what?’ said Lanya. ‘They’ve done it?’
I nodded. ‘Dash?’
‘I don’t know!’ she said. ‘I heard and didn’t hear. I thought she was trying to scare you. I didn’t know what she meant.’
She looked around the room at all the tech, out the window at the cages, and finally at me. ‘Tell me.’
She listened, grim-faced, until I got to the exodus by Cityside’s most powerful, and the blackmailing of the Dry-dwellers. She shook her head at that.
‘I don’t buy it,’ she said. ‘It has to be coincidence, that timing. Who told you?’
‘Someone I believe.’
Dash’s eyes narrowed. ‘The Hendrys wouldn’t be in on something like that.’
‘Take a look around you!’ I said. ‘D’you think Frieda’s on a power trip all her own to end the war? Someone’s pulling the strings.’
‘Yes, but not those families—’
‘Why not? She has her own lackeys, the ones who do the poisoned needles into necks and truncheons smashing knees so that she can claim no knowlege of any of that. But she’s a lackey too, and what she does is another version of the same thing.
‘You want rid of the people who might crowd your space and your comfortable life? Sure you do, but you’re not gonna do it yourself and you’re not gonna do it by taking the long way round—sitting down and talking—because that would mean compromise and mess and your comfortable life might get fractionally less comfortable at the margins, and let’s face it, you want it all, even at the margins. So you convince yourself that compromise means defeat, and you tell your lackey to deal with it, but you clear out while she does that because you can’t actually bear to watch what you’ve set in train. No, you go off to impose yourself on some other second-class people who only really exist for your benefit anyway.’
Dash and Lanya were both staring at me.
I shrugged. ‘End of rant. Except that Frieda didn’t count on Jono throwing Lanya in that room.’
‘No,’ said Dash. ‘I see that. How long were you in there?’
‘Long enough,’ I said.
‘Then you need help,’ said Dash, on firm ground now that she had something she could do. ‘A doctor. We need to find some vaccine for the two of you. To get you out of danger.’ She was at the door in two paces.
‘No,’ said Lanya. She’d been looking down into the cages below, listening. Now she turned round and said, ‘It’s not so easy.’
‘I know,’ said Dash. ‘I’ve no idea where to look, but if I find a doctor—’
‘I mean,’ said Lanya, and she looked at me, ‘all of Moldam gets the vaccine, or none of us gets it.’
She held my gaze to see how that settled on me, and I saw where she meant to go, and where I would have to go if I wanted to be with her.
‘Forget it,’ Dash was saying. ‘You don’t bargain with Frieda. Do you think she cares about you dying of some virus?’
‘No,’ said Lanya. ‘But she will care about the whole city dying of it.’
‘Which is not about to happen,’ said Dash. ‘How could it?’ She looked at me.
‘Weaponised humans,’ I said, finding my voice at last. ‘Frieda made the virus into a weapon. But she thought it would be safely contained in Moldam. She didn’t count on Moldam coming to town.’
Dash’s blue eyes got wide. ‘But you’re not going into town. No way! I won’t let you. And even if you could, Frieda will hunt you down.’
‘Yes, she will,’ I said. ‘But only if she knows where to look.’
Dash shook her head. ‘I can’t be a part of this. I’m sworn to protect the city.’
‘The whole city?’ I asked.
Her comms unit buzzed.
‘Hold on,’ she said. She studied at its message, glanced at us, clipped it back on her belt.
‘The army’s here, upstairs, and—’
But before she could finish, an intercom buzzed and a voice blared in the corridor ordering everyone who was not authorised to be within the perimeter of the Marsh to leave now or face immediate arrest.
‘I’ve been ordered to report for duty,’ said Dash. ‘The mob’s being rounded up. It’s over.’
CHAPTER 34
Lanya bowed her head to her knees, took a deep breath and came upright with a long breath out and a look on her face that I knew well—that blaze of energy she found when she was in the heart of a Pathmaker dance, all of her focused and burning bright. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said.
/> Dash moved to the doorway. ‘I won’t let you do that.’
She unclipped her gun and hefted it in her palm.
‘Then shoot us,’ said Lanya. ‘The Kelleran woman will, when she finds us here.’
‘She won’t find you,’ said Dash. ‘Let me hide you here while I go and find the vaccine.’
The corridor intercom blared again and made us all jump. It repeated the order for people to leave or be arrested. Any minute now the army would be charging down to this level searching for troublemakers.
I shook my head. ‘They’ll find us. You have to take us into town or hand us over.’
‘You’ll be putting the whole city at risk,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘The whole city is already at risk,’ I said. ‘And Moldam’s well past risk. The virus is there, Dash. Thousands of people are about to get sick and die!’
‘But—’
‘There is no but,’ said Lanya. ‘There is mass death of people who have done nothing to deserve it except be born on the wrong side of the river, or there is all of Cityside in fear for their lives crying at the Kelleran woman to release the Havoc vaccine for Moldam. Those are your choices.’
Long pause. Long, long pause.
Dash said, to me, ‘You’d actually do this? Kill people?’
I said, ‘We have to put pressure on Frieda to vaccinate Moldam. What do you suggest? We ask nicely? Or we make people realise that the quarantine on Moldam won’t hold, because, look: here we are, from Moldam, infected, and in Cityside.’
Dash shook her head. ‘But why do you have to be infected—just the rumour should be enough.’
‘Do you know where the vaccines are?’
‘No.’
‘I was in Moldam yesterday and Lanya’s been in that room down there. Chances are, we’re infected.’
Another long pause.
‘I’ll take you to a med centre,’ she said. ‘It’s that or nothing. Frieda won’t find you, I promise. I’ll give her a message from you—you can make it as threatening as you like, because, God knows, what she’s done is so wrong, but I’m not taking you anywhere populated.’
Lanya and I looked at each other. I said, ‘Deal.’
The intercom warning rattled us again; it wouldn’t be long before this whole discussion became irrelevant. I grabbed back the pen, tore a page out of the notepad and wrote an ultimatum to Frieda. I showed it to Lanya who nodded and held it out to Dash.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You’ve been vaccinated, right?’
Dash nodded. ‘Routine protection against bio-terrorism. Which is what this is, by the way.’
‘Tell that to Frieda,’ I said.
Dash frowned at the message. ‘This is in Breken.’
‘I’m fairly sure Frieda can read Breken,’ I said.
Dash shot me a glance. ‘Yeah, that’s not what I meant. You really are gone, aren’t you.’
‘Will you give it to her?’
She nodded, eyeing the signature at the bottom. ‘Nikolai Stais. She won’t know if it’s you or your father.’
‘Good. She’s a lot more scared of him.’
‘Maybe,’ said Dash. ‘How do I explain why I didn’t shoot you on the spot?’
‘Tell her we were gone by the time you got here.’
She thought about that, then hefted her gun again. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Hold on,’ I said. I scrawled another note, folded it and handed it to Dash. ‘For Fyffe,’ I said.
‘What is it?’
‘The whole point of this is no one dies, right? On her own, Frieda would do a deal with us on the quiet and then backtrack and we’re dead. Simple. We need maximum exposure so that she can’t finesse her way out. That means the whole of Cityside watching. Fyffe can make that happen.’
Dash shook her head. ‘Two things. First, Frieda has the news channels under her thumb. They won’t go near this without instructions from her. And secondly, Fyffe? Are you serious?’
‘There you go, just like Jono. Give her the note, stand back and watch what happens.’
She shook her head again and pocketed the paper.
‘You were never so organised in the old days.’ She motioned us to the door. ‘Don’t breathe on anyone. Don’t touch anything. And pray that we don’t meet Frieda on the way out.’
In the corridor everything was blue lit, in power-saving mode, but ready to blaze up at any moment once the place was back under Frieda’s control. We retraced our way along corridors and up stairs until we reached the door that we’d come through so very long ago.
So far, so deserted.
Outside it was dusk, still hot as hell, and the air was full of fury. In the grounds to the left of our building a battle surged and roared: lines of army in riot shields and gas masks were marching step by step into the swirling crowd, halting as volleys of stones clanged off their shields then advancing again. Tear gas canisters shot into the crowd and a water cannon arced through the billowing clouds of gas. The crowd was driven back and back. Then it surged forward again, charging in, hurling stuff and darting away.
They weren’t your average Joe and Jo Public come to look for the vaccine. These people were dressed for battle in helmets and goggles, scarves wrapped round faces, and homemade shields cut from rubbish bins. Some of them picked up gas canisters with gloved hands and lobbed them back into the army ranks. Fires burned across the grounds adding smoke to the gas. Shouted orders came from both sides, as well as yells of outrage and abuse from the crowd. A megaphone blared at people to Move Out, Move Out and we heard shots fired—in the air, you hoped, but maybe not: we saw people with blood-streaked faces being dragged semi-conscious towards army trucks. By the time we’d gone a dozen paces our eyes were streaming and our lungs were burning.
‘Be cool,’ said Dash above the din. ‘They want people to leave and we’re leaving.’
Above us, above the smoke, the sky was glowing in the last light of a huge red sunset. Behind us the air rang with the echo of the megaphone, the explosion of gas canisters, the roar of the crowd and the clash of stone on riot shield. We reached the parking building where the vehicle fleet was kept. Dash waggled Jono’s swipe card with a grin and used to it get us inside.
‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a car.’
Lanya and I retreated into the shadows of a stairwell. She leaned back on the wall and closed her eyes.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘I am dead tired. And I stink.’
She plucked at her T-shirt in disgust. She was still wearing the black jeans and white T-shirt that Fyffe had given her but they were all kinds of filthy now.
‘What’s today?’ she said. ‘Friday? I haven’t had a change of clothes in three days. Four! Nearly four days!’
She shivered and I wished I had a jacket to give her—I was in jeans and a T-shirt too and couldn’t even remember what had happened to the jacket of Lou’s that Fyffe had given me.
The minutes ticked by. Lanya said, ‘I hope your friend hasn’t changed her mind
. Do you trust her?’
‘I used to.’
‘You were together, weren’t you?’ said Lanya. ‘Once.’
‘Yeah. There were six of us and we kind of paired up. People said we were good together.’
‘Were you?’
‘Mostly. Not always.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I don’t know if I trust her at all, not after she landed me in this place. She said she was rescuing me. She’s so sure of herself and her ideas about what’s the right thing to do, it’s pretty hard to convince her otherwise.’
Dash went everywhere with truckloads of confidence—always had. And that was great when you wanted to bask in the warm glow of infallibility while demolishing your opposition. Not so great when you were the opposition.
Lanya was quiet for a while but she shivered in little starts every half minute or so.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Are you going to ask me that every five minutes?’
‘Probably.’
‘Once every half hour, no more.’
‘Raffael took my watch,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to guess.’
A moment later Dash pulled up at the exit in a car with tinted windows. Lanya and I piled in the back.
Dash locked the doors. She was grim faced and unspeaking as she sped us towards the city, and I wondered what news she’d picked up when she went to get the car.
When we got to the parks and tree-lined streets of Bethun she said, ‘There’ll probably be roadblocks so keep quiet and let me do the talking.’
‘Roadblocks?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘The unrest is spreading. People are ransacking warehouses in search of the vaccine, and One City has grabbed the chance to tip the whole city towards chaos. They’ve reoccupied Sentian, they’re threatening to occupy Watch Hill and you’ve seen what they’re doing at the Marsh. I guess they want a strong place to bargain from. And they hate the Marsh. Anyway, it means that the army will be stretched to get the city under control any time soon.’
Havoc Page 21