‘Either of you a medic? Didn’t think so. Then you’re not getting through. Get back to town. They need you. We don’t.’
But behind them I spied a friend. ‘Jeitan! You’re okay!’
Commander Vega’s go-to guy was not looking his usual shiny self. He had an arm in a dirty sling and a bloodied bandage round his head. He was smoking a cigarette with his good hand and leaning on a concrete wall plastered with peeling posters from the glory days of the uprising just a few months ago—all the bridge names were there: Port, Mol, Bethun, Sentinel, Clare, Torrens, Westwall. And across every one of them a thick stroke of black paint announced a Southside victory. Short-lived victories, as it turned out.
Jeitan waved us over.
‘You’re a mess,’ I said. ‘How are you even standing up?’ I looked up the hill. ‘Is it bad?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s bad.’
‘Vega? Levkova?’ I asked.
Commander Vega was Moldam’s head of military operations; Levkova was the sub-commander who let me bunk down at her house as long as I never mistook her for the helpless old granny she looked like but most certainly was not.
Jeitan grimaced. ‘Vega’s not good, but he’s upright so still in charge. Levkova’s still standing, last I saw. And she’s cross.’ He almost smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe how cross.’ He waved his cigarette at the fires burning across the settlement. ‘So much for our magnificent ceasefire!’
Sparks and glowing ashes spiralled in the wind off the river. The riverwind is supposed to be cool and fresh on your face: it wakes you up, makes you move, makes you run to keep warm. Right now it gusted hot. Which felt wrong, unholy wrong. A cloud of smoke made us turn away coughing.
‘You heading up there?’ Jeitan asked. He nodded us away from the guys on the roadblock. ‘You know your father’s not there?’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘There’s word about that he went across to Cityside yesterday.’
‘Oh.’
He frowned at me. ‘You didn’t know?’
Now they were both frowning at me and I realised they were expecting me to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember now, he told me x, y and z about his plans’. Which he hadn’t. Because, why would he? I was his kid, but I’d been brought up in a Cityside school run by his enemies—the same enemies that had killed my mother and thrown him into the Marsh as a political prisoner. I didn’t know what had happened to him in there, and I didn’t expect him ever to tell me. Jeitan and Lanya were still watching me, waiting.
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him maybe six times in the last month. He’s busy. He doesn’t have time to, you know, talk.’ I looked back across the settlement. ‘At least if he’s Cityside he’s out of this.’
‘Good for him,’ said Jeitan. ‘Tricky for you.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘What?’ said Lanya. ‘Why?’
Jeitan raised an eyebrow at her. ‘They don’t really know him here, do they. He’s kept a low profile for a lot of years, and he hasn’t lived in Moldam. But suddenly he turns up and people discover that he had a kid Cityside and now he’s disappeared into the city just before they land the biggest strike on us since ’87. Doesn’t look good. People will wonder.’
‘People might need a lesson in opening their eyes,’ said Lanya.
Jeitan gave us a grim smile. ‘Good luck with that.’
Lanya and I climbed the hill, past a procession of people being carried down it on stretchers and in body bags. Lanya, always a Pathmaker at heart, reached out as each body bag went by and touched it with a whispered prayer for a safe path from the land of the living. When we got to the top she wiped her face with her sleeve and said, ‘Did you count them? You always count.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Stupid thing to do.’
‘How many?’
‘Twenty-eight body bags. Twenty-three stretchers.’
She nodded, and we walked up to the gate. We were challenged for ID by a guard; there was order in the chaos. That meant Commander Vega—Sim to a very small number of people, not including me—was still in control. A rocket attack and a nearly totalled HQ were just a signal to him to get on with sorting everything out again. Not the panicky type.
Inside the compound the firelight and smoke turned the ruins of the buildings into a lifesize old movie, flickering and hazy in front of us. Fires were burning in the rambling brick admin centre and in a scatter of barracks and workshops. Generator-fed floodlights lit the bending backs and reaching arms of people clearing rubble, pulling out the dead and injured, laying them carefully on stretchers or blankets. Voices called out now and then, but the place was deadly quiet so that rescuers could hear people under the wreckage.
We found Commander Vega batting away a medic who was trying to bandage his head wound. The guy had got as far as getting him to sit on a wooden bench, but not as far as getting his attention except in the form of being waved at as though he was an annoying insect. Vega was coordinating rescue efforts in three directions at once, but he stopped when he saw us and beckoned us over.
‘Your father’s not here,’ he said to me. ‘He’s not in Moldam right now.’ He squinted at me from under the bandage. ‘That’s all I can tell you. But he’s not in the middle of this, so he’s probably better off than we are. All right?’
Not really, I thought. ‘Yes, sir.’
We ditched our coats, tied bandanas across our faces to keep out the dust, and joined a team clearing the smashed remains of the dining hall. CommSec—Communications Security where I worked for Sub-commander Levkova—had collapsed into it from the floor above. There’d been no one in CommSec when the rockets landed but a whole shift from the infirmary had been in the dining hall. It was so random—if you just happened to pull the first night shift and you just happened to be hungry when you knocked off, then you were in the dining hall when the upstairs floor came through the ceiling.
We edged forward in the light of two floodlamps, heaving aside rubble by hand, drawn by the sounds those people made. Eight—that’s how many we found. Five, we stretchered out to treatment down the hill. The others were dead. They were two nurses and the chatty receptionist who was always asking how you were and laughing about her kids doing nutty things. Lanya closed their eyes and arranged their bodies carefully, then sat with them until time came for them to go down the hill as well. I carried on clearing rubble until the squad leader in charge called a halt. ‘Right, everyone! We can’t do more without the heavy lifting gear.’
I pulled off my bandana and wiped my face.
The guy said, ‘You’re the City kid, right?’
I nodded. There was no point saying, ‘I am, but you know what—it’s more complicated than that.’ People don’t like complicated. Early on, I’d tried to explain but no one was interested in explanations so then I’d tried to leave it at ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ but they seemed to expect more than that, I don’t know what more. I’d tried, ‘Yeah. So?’ but not for long. Now whenever anyone said that to me I nodded and waited, because they’d usually made up their mind already. For the ones who wanted to pick a fight, I’d perfected the ‘shrug and walk on’, which usually worked, though it gave me a great education
in Terms of Abuse: Breken.
This guy looked at me and then nodded, clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Thanks.’ Which was good enough for me.
As the last body was stretchered away, Lanya followed the bearers, and I walked with her. Out east, over the sea, the sky was starting to pale and a fresh breeze, cooler now, drifted in. There was a stillness in Lanya that was maybe exhaustion but maybe more than that. It reached me, standing beside her, and slowed me down.
She said, ‘I’ve never done that before. Not with people killed like that.’
A sharp whistle came from over by the gates and a voice called, ‘Food! Choose it or lose it!’ We queued at a water pump to wash off the soot and dirt, shocking ourselves into wakefulness with the cold of it. Then we queued again at the remains of a bonfire, where a team was cooking sausages in the coals and handing them out wrapped in thick-cut bread. No one spoke much: we all stood near the fire and ate, realising how hungry we were. There was billy tea too, black and bitter, but welcome for being hot and chasing away the taste of smoke. Jeitan arrived with reports from down the hill that things were going okay, considering, and someone said, ‘Any bets on what Vega’s thinking right now?’
I thought to myself: Vega’s thinking, ‘Where the hell is Nikolai Stais when I need him?’ My father was AWOL, that’s how it seemed to me, and probably not only to me; maybe he was playing politics over the river, but the game had changed and he needed to be back here fast.
Jeitan said, ‘He’s thinking: why now? Why destroy the bridges now?’
We all looked at him and he shrugged, carefully.
‘They’ve always needed the bridges,’ he said. ‘And they’ve always needed us. Who else will do their shit jobs for shit pay? How are they gonna organise us going over there to work and back if they destroy the bridges?’
‘They taken down any others?’ asked someone.
Jeitan shook his head. ‘Just us, so far. But the night’s not over yet.’
CHAPTER 05
Commander Vega, Sub-commander Levkova and some senior staff arrived and the chat died down while people made room. I went over to Levkova and asked, ‘How are you? Are you okay?’
She gave me a curt nod, then on an afterthought, as though she realised that surviving the night was probably worth more than that, she almost smiled. ‘I am, thank you, Nik. You?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
Lanya appeared beside us. ‘Sub-commander? Something happened down by the bridge that I think you should know about.’ She nudged me. ‘Tell her.’
Levkova’s eyebrows lifted and she gave me a steely stare. ‘It’ll have to wait,’ she said. ‘You’re wanted.’
Jeitan came over. ‘The commander wants comms up. We need to talk to people upriver.’
Easier said than done, but we scavenged functional bits and pieces from different places and set up in one of the still-standing sleeping sheds. I spent an hour jury-rigging the system into something operational: it would work as long as I hovered over it and doctored it the whole time. I was trying to contact Curswall, the next township upriver, when the screen flickered.
‘Incoming!’ I called.
‘Ah!’ said a voice from the screen. ‘There you are.’
‘Commander?’ I said. ‘We’ve got audio.’
The feed stuttered. ‘Commander Vega? Are you there?’
Then we had visual, but it wasn’t coming from upriver at all. It was coming from across the river. A woman peered out of the screen. She had grey-streaked dark hair pulled tightly back, a sharp pale face, bird-dark eyes and a tiny, tight mouth. Frieda Kelleran, the woman who’d taken me, aged four, to the Tornmoor Academy after my mother had been killed by Cityside security agents and my father thrown in the Marsh. She’d been promoted for her efforts, and now she was a high-up for that same outfit—Director of Security in fact.
The reception was blurred and crackling, and Frieda’s voice, speaking Anglo, was blaring one minute and indecipherable the next. But it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been invisible and speaking ancient Croat—we’d received her message loud and clear about seven hours earlier. I glanced around. Not a muscle moved on any face. They watched, impassive. Listened. Someone nudged me to translate so I murmured along with her to a small group gathered close.
‘I don’t have visual on you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps your equipment is damaged. I’ll assume you can hear me.’ She waved a hand towards us. ‘What do you think of our handiwork? We haven’t touched the township but those of you on the hill may have casualties.’
The guy standing next to me opened his mouth as though he was about to yell at her, but Vega held up a hand for quiet and he subsided.
Frieda said, ‘What we’ve done tonight is a small thing—a shrug. See how you shake when we shrug?’ She leaned forward, her head filled the screen. She was so pale that she kept disappearing into the static, except for her eyes, black beads in the white. ‘I have this to say. Listen carefully. We do not negotiate with extremists. We reject your so-called ceasefire. As for what happens next…Now that I have your attention, I could ask you where your One City friends are hiding, but I know what your answer will be. We have reliable intelligence on that in any case, and we’ll be acting on it shortly. So we’ll skip that step, shall we, and move right along.’ She smiled thinly. ‘To what, you ask. Patience, patience. You’ll see. I have plans for Moldam. But for now, it’s been a long night so if you’ll excuse me…’ She nodded to someone we couldn’t see then the screen went blank and the static died away.
A wave of swearing and muttering went through the room. Then someone called out, ‘Listen!’ Everyone stopped, and we heard it, the hum—the high-pitched hum that makes your teeth ache and your skin crawl. The hum that will kill you when it lands.
Vega yelled, ‘Take cover!’ and we dived under the bunkbeds. The hum became a whine, then a scream, then an almighty roar shook the building and the ground and us to our bones.
What do you think about in those moments? If you’re me your brain freezes: there’s no before or after, there’s just fear, which isn’t even a thought, it’s an adrenalin rush that leaves your body ringing, like the bridge in the aftershock of its destruction. The thought comes after, once you realise you’re still whole and alive, and it’s this: they hate us. And in that moment, you hate them right back.
When it stopped everyone lay still and waited. And waited. Frieda would have been profoundly pleased—she was in control even of our silences. At last, we rolled out from under the bunks, coughing in the dust, picked ourselves up to stand on shaking legs and went outside to look at the damage. The rocket had struck down the hill, destroying part of an old wall that ran alongside a graveyard, and leaving a smoking crater and a far flung scatter of pulverised bricks.
Lanya said, ‘Oh, no! How dare they!’ and marched off towards it, but somebody grabbed her arm before I could and started to argue with her about unexploded ordnance.
Vega spoke to Jeitan who nodded and walked into the middle of the crowd. He shouted, ‘Listen up! We’re moving out! Moving out! Now! That means everyone! Walk if you can. We’ll find trucks if you can’t.’
Then he beckoned to me. ‘Nik, where’s Levkova?’
I looked around and realised
that the sub-commander hadn’t been in the bunkhouse with the rest of us. I went round the handful of other buildings that were standing, putting my head into each one. They all looked like they’d been picked up by a toddler in a tantrum and slammed down again; clothes, bedding and broken glass lay everywhere. I called out, but got no answer. No point hunting about inside any of them—she wasn’t going to be hiding under a bed. And she wasn’t going to be wandering through the rubble of the main building for old time’s sake either—you could never accuse Levkova of being sentimental.
Where then? Where would you go if you weren’t the type to hide under a bed in the face of a rocket attack, if you were the type to stand your ground and stare it down?
I headed to the lookout near the top of the compound, a knobbly bit of bare hillside above the graveyard. It had a bench, where you could sit and ponder the dead and the city and the connection between them, and, beside it, an ancient perspex-covered stand with a profile of the view from there. I could see the early sunlight bouncing off the stand, and then I saw Levkova sitting ramrod straight on the bench, with one wrinkled hand clasping her walking stick. She was scowling across the river. A blustery wind brought the smell of smoke and the noises of the rescue effort from the shantytown below, but she didn’t move. A layer of dust and flakes of ash had settled on her black uniform and grey hair and in the lines of her face, making her look like a stone statue. Except for her eyes—they were alive and fierce. I thought of Frieda and Levkova glaring at each other across the river, but then I thought of Frieda’s casual nod that had sent that last rocket screaming our way. I could imagine that after she’d given that nod and a smile to her 2IC, she’d poured herself a drink and strolled out onto a balcony with her army buddies to watch their handiwork unfold. I couldn’t imagine Levkova doing that.
Havoc Page 3
