The Bridge

by Jane Higgins

  I could see it: the bread burned cinder black on the bakery shelves in Kendon Street; the ashes of books swirling through the blown-out roofs of Brown’s and The Bard, the little bookshops along Sentian; the glass cracked behind the bars in the banks’ windows on St Clare Road; trees turned to torchwood across Pagnal Heath; and then the whole city falling in a cascade of glass and brick and concrete from the river to the hills.

  ‘…nothing to worry about.’

  I turned round to see Levkova talking to me. She sighed. ‘I said, it’s upriver, Cityside. Them, not us. I think it’s the armory at Sentinel. We were aiming to take it to stop their rocket attacks. I’d say that’s the sound of it being destroyed.’ She studied me. ‘It’s not Gilgate, is what I’m trying to tell you.’ I turned back to the window and hoped she wouldn’t come near, because right then I couldn’t pretend.

  ‘Who’s in Gilgate that you’re afraid to lose?’ she asked.

  ‘No one. Everyone. Doesn’t matter.’ But it did, of course. It’s my city, I thought. I’m afraid to lose it.

  And I’m afraid for it to lose me.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fy backed off and didn’t say a word about the talisman at breakfast the next morning. She was all business – hair tied back, brows straight, eyes focused. All her movements burned with contained energy. She was going down to the main hospital in the township with the supplies officer. ‘A shipment of medicine has come in from somewhere,’ she said. ‘So I’m hoping it will draw some of their dealers and traffickers out into the daylight.’

  I told her about the Jeitan–Levkova conversation the day before, and the rumor that Remnant had snatched something valuable Cityside.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You have to ask Jeitan. Would he help? It sounds like he would.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I want to connect the names on our list with Remnant and follow that trail. Plus, I’ll see their big names tomorrow at the hearing. Could be useful. Especially if someone challenges them about what they’re doing.’

  We stopped to listen to the breakfast briefing, given by Jeitan this time: ‘…continue to hold the strategic posts we’ve taken, but we’re coming under heavy pressure, especially at Torrens Hill, Sentinel, and Clare where forces loyal to the city are regrouping under ISIS… major disruption continues across the city… food distribution a shambles, fuel scarce, power out… the roads north clogged with refugees.’ He finished with, ‘The place has been looted from Westwall to Port – but not by us. Commander Vega reminds all squad members that There Will Be No Looting. Looters will be punished. Clear? Thank you, that’s all.’

  Fyffe watched him sit down and I could see she was desperate to go up to him and ask him point-blank about Sol. But she said, ‘No looting. I can’t get it straight in my head how they can be bombers and kidnappers and at the same time be saying that looting and trafficking are illegal.’ She stood up to go.

  I said, ‘Be careful, okay?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Just don’t imagine anything short of a small army will keep you safe from these people if they find out who you are.’

  That afternoon, Levkova went off to talk to the two independents on Council and left Jeitan to hold the fort at CommSec. I plonked a pile of documents on her desk in front of him and tried my luck. ‘You know your suspicions about Remnant?’

  He looked at me as though I was being nosy about his love life. ‘What do you care?’

  ‘Are you going to do anything about them? Run a check on their finances? For example? No?’

  ‘I don’t have clearance.’

  ‘Why would that stop you?’

  ‘I don’t know how they keep order in Gilgate, but we have lines of command here. They stop us descending into anarchy.’

  ‘I don’t have clearance either. I’ll do it if you like.’

  He chewed a thumbnail and frowned at me. ‘Why would you want to? Why would I let you?’

  ‘You’re looking for dirt on them, right? And you want to find it before the hearing, but you’re running out of time.’

  He sat back and folded his arms, but his frown was more calculating now. ‘And, of course, breaking news about Remnant crimes would distract the Council from the actual purpose of the hearing. Is that what you’re hoping?’

  I shrugged. ‘Okay, so I have an interest. Do you want to try or not?’

  ‘You won’t be able to get in.’

  ‘Want a bet?’

  He looked around the room, which was empty, and back at me. ‘You know how much we trust you?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. You can watch me every step of the way.’

  He stood up. ‘Go on, then. You’ve got,’ he glanced at his watch, ‘an hour, I’d say, before Levkova comes back.’

  ‘Want to help?’

  He watched over my shoulder as I got into the system, which I did in as clumsy a way as I could, hoping he wouldn’t click that I’d been there before. ‘Hmm,’ he said when I got in. ‘Okay. Help how?’

  ‘Remnant finances – how do we find them?’

  He had a few suggestions and we dived in.

  ‘Suppose we find something,’ I said. ‘You think Vega or Levkova would use it?’

  ‘I wish. Depends how solid it is. They’re so focused on what’s happening over the river, they’re not guarding their backs. They think the independents are as focused as they are, but they’re wrong. And they think that if they’re found to be investigating Remnant it will undermine solidarity in the uprising. It’d have to be very, very solid before they’d use it. Which is why Levkova will not be impressed if she finds us doing this. Hour’s nearly up.’ We’d found nothing that looked like a windfall. Which we wouldn’t if that windfall was sitting in a cellar or an attic somewhere, cold and hungry and terrified, and hadn’t been translated into cash yet.

  ‘But look,’ I said, ‘if they’ve stolen something from over the river, maybe they haven’t sold it yet.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So what if we cross check Remnant names with records of known dealers and traffickers?’

  ‘Later. Get off there before Levkova comes back.’

  ‘When later?’

  ‘After the hearing. Get off there now!’

  When Fyffe came back from the township she was all fired up. At the evening meal, which that day wasn’t half bad – a chunk of grainy bread and a bowl of thick potato-and-bacon soup – she led me to an empty table in the corner of the dining hall. Jeitan eyed us from the food queue but left us alone.

  Fy spoke fast and soft in Anglo. ‘The supplies officer here is a dealer. He spent the day organizing something, I’m sure. He thinks I’m slow – that’s why I’m the one to go with him – but I’m sure he’s creaming off medicines from the shipment and selling them.’ She paused and tore her bread into pieces, then went on in Breken. ‘It’s terrible. People here need those supplies. That boy, last night – they ran out of medicine for him. If he was over the river he’d still be alive. And if they weren’t dealing in their medicines here, he might still be alive too. His mother just cried and cried.’ Fy scowled and ate her soup.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘One of the people the supplies man talked to looked familiar. I’m sure he was one of the men who took Sol. Almost sure. So I followed him—’

  ‘You what? Are you crazy?’

  ‘—but I lost him. I’m going back tomorrow.’

  ‘Jeez, Fy. D’you think he saw you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I was careful.’

  ‘Can you wait for me before you go following people? I think Jeitan might help us, but we have to wait till after the hearing. Don’t do anything drastic, okay?’

  Near midnight Levkova told me to finish up and bring her the work I’d been doing. She said, ‘You and Lanya – I have not heard the full story, I think?’ I shuffled paper and didn’t answer. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The hearing will be ugly. You will be on the wrong side no matter what you say.’ Another pause. ‘What will you
say?’

  That I’m out of here, is what I wanted to say. That if you people are so desperate to tear each other apart, couldn’t you concentrate on doing that and leave those of us on the other side of the river alone?

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  I dropped the papers onto her desk. ‘That I stumbled on an argument I knew nothing about. That I barely spoke to either of them. That this is so obviously a set-up I can’t believe anyone is taking it seriously. That it has nothing at all to do with me. Will that work?’

  ‘Of course. If you were talking to reasonable people.’

  ‘No, then. So what happens next?’

  ‘They will try to cast you out.’ She looked at me. ‘To you that might just seem like moving on. What can they take from you that you haven’t already lost? Not a home. Or belongings. Even your name – you’d invent another one, wouldn’t you? But the borderlands are deadly this time of year, for the weather as much as the bandits. I think the best we can hope is that Lanya won’t accuse you and the Council sends you back to Gilgate.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Some would say that’s worse than being cast out. Anyway, then you can go and leave us to our madness.’ She picked up the papers. ‘Thank you, Nik. I am sorry. The misjudgment was Lanya’s not yours.’

  ‘She gave me some bread and fish. How can that be wrong?’

  ‘She’s a Maker. Surely even Gilgate has kept its Makers?’

  When I didn’t answer she shook her head. ‘Have things become so degraded that even the dead are left to cross alone? Our Makers fast in all things in the hours before a Crossing – they take no food, submit to no touch, and should not even speak. Lanya most certainly should not have been arguing with Coly.’

  The phone on her desk beeped. She pressed a button. ‘Levkova.’

  ‘You sent for Jeitan, ma’am?’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Not available, I’m afraid.’

  Levkova took her finger off the button and frowned at me. ‘Who can I trust?’ She pressed the button again and said, ‘All right. Send me Rémy or Joseph.’

  She turned back to me. ‘One last thing. They will ask you tomorrow what you’ve been doing here. What will you tell them?’

  There are moments, now and then, when the world you thought you had sorted spins ninety degrees on its heel and when it stops you see everything slant. When Levkova asked me that, with an edge in her voice, I had one of those moments. From the start she’d told me not to talk to anyone about what I was doing in CommSec. And here she was, not wanting the Council to know. I heard Jeitan in my head talking about Levkova and Vega: they think if they’re found to be investigating Remnant it will undermine solidarity in the uprising. And I knew. Those comms I’d spent the last few days trying, and failing, to break hadn’t come from over the river at all. They weren’t encrypted Anglo. They’d come from here. Encrypted Breken. These people were spying on their own.

  Levkova looked up. ‘Well?’

  ‘Filing?’ I said.

  Her mouth twitched. ‘Filing. Yes. What’s your other name?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. Curious. Your parents?’

  ‘I didn’t know them.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re a good person, Nik. Who’d have guessed it?’

  Remember that, I thought. Remember that if you ever find out where I’m from.

  There was a knock on the door and my Jeitan substitute peered in. ‘Joseph,’ said Levkova. ‘Take him straight to Shed 3. No detours.’ She turned to me. ‘Off you go. And watch your back.’

  But it wasn’t my back I needed to watch.

  CHAPTER 21

  Joseph led me out into the night and promptly disappeared. And I walked straight into somebody’s fist. Yes, I should have seen it coming, but I thought they wouldn’t bother. I’d already served Remnant’s purposes by walking in on Lanya’s fight on Saturday night. The hearing would get me banished and the Pathmakers branded as ‘unclean.’ There wasn’t much else I could do for them.

  I don’t know how many there were. Four? Four hundred? The first punch knocked the breath out of me. Something soft dropped over my head, the lights went out and I gagged on a mouthful of cloth.

  Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.

  Someone behind me grabbed my arms and a fist landed in my gut. I doubled over, gasping, then straightened up fast as I could, heaved my shoulder upwards and connected with something, a jaw maybe. Its owner grunted, twisted my arms up my back then hurled me forwards. I hit the ground hard, on knee and shoulder. Pain went ringing through me. Still couldn’t breathe or see. I tore at the cloth around my head, but a boot rammed into my ribs, folding me up. Another one landed hard on my back. I ripped the cloth off my head in time to see a boot swinging towards my face.

  I woke up in the dark with a thumping head.

  Lay still and listened. Heard nothing. Tried to sit up and couldn’t. Panicked. Realized after a moment that I wasn’t tied up after all, just so cold and so sore that nothing wanted to move. I lay there and thought about going to sleep, but a vestige of sense in my brain told me I was cold and getting colder and colder, so shift. I managed to half sit up, and not to throw up – a triumph in its own way – and eventually got myself semi-upright. I crawled about, found a wall to lean on and inspected the damage.

  I had a lump on my temple that was tight and sore but my face seemed to be in one piece. The rest of me, not great. Pain around ribs, shoulder, gut and back. And my shirt was wet. I sniffed at it, hoping it wasn’t blood. It smelled like alcohol. Someone in my welcoming party had been drinking and had upended their cheap vodka all over me. At least they hadn’t bashed my head in with the bottle – look on the bright side.

  I struggled to my feet. Got there without throwing up or falling over, and looked around – the sort of looking you do when you think you’ve suddenly gone blind.

  Directly ahead of me was a single faint line of gray light, a crack in a door maybe: I wondered if it came from the floodlit compound, or a lit street down in the town. I made my way around the walls towards it, fell over a few things – tools, bags of something, cement, I think – swore a lot, but got there in the end. It was a door, locked. I tried shaking it but it didn’t even creak on a hinge. I yelled a few times, or tried to, but it came out feeble as hell because my ribs objected to anything louder than breathing.

  I sat on a sack of cement, leaned against the wall and hated everyone, individually and collectively, on this side of the stinking river. Including myself. I was a miserable failure at finding Sol. And at looking after Fy. I could see the thread between Sol and us stretching and thinning to breaking point as he moved further and further out of reach.

  For a while I drifted in and out of sleep, but the cold and the nightmares kept waking me up. To take my mind off them, I went looking for a puzzle, a problem, an unfinished proof, anything that would occupy my brain until daylight, or someone in search of a wrench, arrived.

  I found one ready-made: the pages I’d been staring at over the last week. I went back to the words I thought might be bridge names and tried decoding for Breken rather than Anglo. It was like a homework extension exercise: ‘For those with no friends and no social life to speak of, decipher the following code. Conditions: you must do this in a language not your own while in a vaguely concussed state of mind. You may have all night. You may not ask for help.’ But I was so cold and so angry those words took on a kind of desperate clarity that kept me occupied until – I don’t know how many hours later – I heard the door being unlocked.

  CHAPTER 22

  I waited for someone to appear but no one did, so I stumbled over and gave the door a push. Daylight came crashing in. It hammered my eyes and I threw up, which left me gasping. I crawled outside and put my face to the sun. I sat there with my eyes closed, letting the warmth soak into me and unknit the knots in my bones. Mending. The air was warm; it was one of those autumn mornings that made you want to skip class and head up to the heath. A shadow fell
on me. I opened an eye.

  ‘Jeitan,’ I croaked. My mouth felt like paper. ‘Looking sharp, as always. Can you stand out of my sun?’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here? The hearing has started. They sent me to get you and you’ve been bloody nowhere. Come on!’

  I shook my head.

  He crouched in front of me. ‘Gods, you stink! You’re drunk! You’re not fronting up like this.’

  ‘Don’t intend to. I’m not going.’

  ‘Don’t be funny. They’ll drag you in there if they have to.’ He looked furious. ‘Alcohol’s forbidden here. You must know that?’

  Right. Like knives.

  ‘And you know what’s at stake!’

  I closed my eyes. ‘I don’t care. It’s your fight. Go away and fight it without me. Just get out of my sun.’

  ‘Not a chance. You are going to that hearing.’ The voice of conviction, unfortunately. ‘Come on, you’re getting cleaned up.’

  I thought about just staying put, but I knew he really would drag me there if he had to. And I hurt too much for that. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go if you do me a favor.’

  ‘A what? You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I am, though.’

  He sighed. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Ask at the hearing about Remnant’s windfall.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘It’ll take the heat off me.’

  ‘Council doesn’t work that way. Levkova might raise it. I asked her to. But I doubt she will.’