Havoc

by Higgins, Jane

  Levkova noticed me. ‘Nik,’ she said. She got stiffly to her feet.

  ‘Ma’am, the commander’s moving us out. All of us.’

  She nodded. ‘Tell him I’m on my way. Oh, wait a minute. You wanted to tell me something about the bridge.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Later. We need to leave.’

  Her eyes narrowed, but she said, ‘All right. Go and tell him I’m coming.’

  I hesitated and got the full force of her glare.

  ‘Go! I’ll be there shortly. I don’t need young things hovering over me.’

  I went.

  Down by Shed 14 the exodus was underway. Vega was sitting on an upturned crate. He wouldn’t go until everyone was safely out. He must have decided that if he sat down he could direct proceedings for a bit longer, but the way he braced himself—hands on knees, hardly moving—you could tell he was mainly focused on staying upright. I told him Levkova was on her way, got a nod and was told to get off the hill. I went looking for Lanya but I couldn’t see her in the crowd.

  A woman in a squad uniform came pounding through the gates, struggling against the tide of people going the other way. She saluted Vega. ‘Sir, a Cityside convoy has crossed the bridge at Curswall—’ she checked her watch ‘—half an hour ago. Heading this way. About thirty of them.’

  Vega glanced at Levkova, who’d just arrived. ‘Thirty,’ he said. ‘They coming in?’

  ‘Don’t seem to be, sir. Looks like they’ve stopped on the Curswall boundary road.’ Vega rubbed a hand over his face, smearing dirt, dust and sweat. He stared at his palm and wiped it on his jacket. I wanted badly for my father to be standing beside him, shouldering some of the command and not off over the river having, for all I knew, a nice break from all this dust and destruction and counting bodies and trying to defend the place with practically no resources at all.

  Still no Lanya. I asked Jeitan, but he shook his head and turned back to allocating people to trucks and loading up whatever remained of the HQ—equipment, documents—that couldn’t be left behind for an enemy to find. I was pushing through the crowd, searching, when a truck came through the gate and a man jumped out, saluted Vega and pointed downriver towards Port.

  ‘Sir! Army trucks from the city! They’ve crossed the bridge at Gull’s Fort and halted on the boundary road. Setting up checkpoints, looks like.’

  Vega chewed his lip and looked at Levkova again. I swear those two could read each other’s minds.

  Vega said, ‘You say they’re not coming in?’

  ‘Didn’t look like it, sir, but I couldn’t guarantee it.’

  I stopped searching. Lanya wasn’t there: not in the crowd, not helping get people into trucks, not loading up boxes of stuff. Then I realised exactly who she’d be helping, and I ran for the graveyard.

  If the Cityside army was coming in, we needed to get out fast. If they were only setting up checkpoints, that wasn’t so bad. Checkpoints were nothing new. Set up on the borders between the townships on Southside, they made life difficult for everyone because you had to stop and queue and explain your reasons for travelling. That’s what they called it—travelling—when all you were doing was trying to go a few blocks down the road. It could take hours to get anywhere. We had to explain ourselves, at great length and in insane detail, but the checkpoints came and went with no explanation. Cityside usually did things with no explanation; it was part of keeping Southside off balance.

  And now we were seriously off balance, because we didn’t know what Frieda had in mind. What was the ‘next step’ that she was so pleased with herself about? And when was it going to happen? Chances are she had Moldam Hill in her sights, either for a takeover or for smashing, finally and completely, to dust.

  CHAPTER 06

  I found Lanya walking down the aisles between the graves doing Pathmaker work. Her arms were stretched out across the riverstones that they used for grave markers here, and she was chanting prayers for the peaceful journey of the souls whose bodies had been disturbed. That last rocket had blasted a crater in the western section where the older graves lay. The air there was still thick with the smell of explosives and upturned soil. I stood in the gateway and listened to the rising-falling chant in its long-ago language. I wanted to shout at her to hurry—we had to get out—but she was so calm and intent that I stopped and watched instead.

  When she had walked the last aisle and was heading back, I went to meet her and we walked towards the gate. She stopped before we got there.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘We have to go!’

  ‘Wait.’ She went over to the edge of the graveyard to the old house and peered into one of the lichen-covered stone urns that stood on either side of its front steps. She dipped her hands into the little pool of rainwater inside one of them, then flicked the water off her fingers and said to me, ‘You too.’

  I did the same. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re leaving the dead behind, moving back to the living. At least I hope we are.’

  ‘Not if we hang around here much longer.’

  We ran up to the others; Jeitan was helping Levkova into the last truck. He would have given Vega a hand up too, but you just can’t help some people. Vega hauled himself up and sat beside Levkova on the front seat: staunch, both of them, but Levkova was old and showing it, and Vega was hurt. Jeitan closed the door with a grunt and leaned on it for a second, his own injured shoulder giving him grief. Then he climbed in the back, calling to us, ‘Want a lift? We can squeeze you in.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Lanya. ‘We’ll walk.’

  ‘Get some sleep,’ said Jeitan.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You too.’

  The truck drove away, and we walked out the gate after it, leaving the HQ abandoned behind us.

  Back down in the heat and clatter of the township we stopped at a makeshift cookshop—a tarp awning rigged off the end of a lorry where an entrepreneurial type was selling the bitter black stuff that passed for coffee here, along with hot slabs of bread, semi-charred on the grill and piled with the salty little fish so beloved of Southsiders. We pooled coins, found enough to get some, and sat on a couple of old crates beside the truck.

  Lanya yawned. ‘I’d better go home. They’ll be wondering.’

  ‘I’ll go with you, if you like.’

  ‘We’ll have to queue.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Checkpoints. Because we haven’t been awake for long enough.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You can have many börek for your trouble.’

  ‘Promise?’

  It was a standing joke: her grandma made these fantastic spiced meat and cheese pastries but in a household always full of kids and their cousins and friends we never got to eat more than one or two in a plateful.

  She smiled. Salty oil shone on her lips and I wanted to kiss her. Her eyes did this slow, heavy-lidded blink.

  ‘Was Jeitan right? Did anyone give you a hard time about your father being on Cityside?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nah. They hardly noticed me. You were great, by the way. You were senior Pathmaker-in-residence.’

  She sighed wearily and drank the last of her coffee. ‘I hope no o
ne minded I was only an apprentice Maker, and on probation.’ She smiled at the thought. ‘It’ll either get me in a lot of trouble or taken back immediately with acclamation.’

  I knew which I’d pick but I said, ‘They’d be mad if they didn’t take you back.’ I took her empty cup and, briefly, her hand. Pathmakers wear a thin silver band on their right hand, third finger, but hers was bare while she was on probation. I ran my thumb over where it would be and let go.

  By the time we began our trudge back through Moldam the sun was high and blazing and the breeze off the river had given up trying. On River Road people sat about in groups, bleary eyed and slump shouldered, keeping an eye on their kids and guarding the little piles of belongings they’d managed to salvage.

  Once we were past the remains of the shantytown and into west Moldam, the crowds began to thin, but River Road was still noisy with people—everywhere in Moldam is always noisy with people. Everyone seemed to be stocking up: the roadside stalls hawking water and vegetables were frantically selling out of everything; bicycles loaded with provisions wobbled down the streets and people had that hunted, hurried look, like they thought there was more to come.

  We met a few people Lanya knew, and got a variety of greetings ranging from, ‘Are you okay?’ to ‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ to ‘You’re not still with that boy?’

  The west is the ‘better’ part of Moldam, but the only thing it’s better than is the shantytown beside it. There’s row after row of crumbling terrace houses with windows boarded up, laundry hanging from balconies, and ancient cars squatting wheelless and windowless on the side of the road. Curswall, where we were headed, is more or less a repeat of Moldam. They’re treated like separate townships but they’re not. That’s because Southside and Cityside were once a single city that crowded the riverbanks, sprawling back on both sides towards the hills, and linked by ferries crisscrossing the river and by the seven bridges. Dividing the south bank into Moldam, Curswall, Gilgate and all the rest was Cityside’s attempt, years ago, to turn Southside into a giant detention camp for refugees who flooded in from countries south and east escaping failed harvests and war and persecution by tin-pot generals. They arrived starving, with no money and the wrong papers or no papers at all. They crowded into cheap boarding houses and when those overflowed, the shantytowns mushroomed down by the bridges. At first, Southsiders worked at jobs that no one Cityside would touch, and they got paid almost nothing. Once they started asking questions about that, things became inconvenient for Cityside, and its own tin-pot general put them back in their place.

  And so here we were, generations later, with the whole rocket attack and checkpoint thing still going on, and no end in sight to any of it.

  Lanya and I were near the intersection of River Road and the Moldam–Curswall boundary road when we heard yelling up ahead and saw a crowd of people. Some were hefting stones and bits of rubble and hurling them towards the checkpoint, some waved sticks and iron bars. But no one was moving forward.

  ‘Dammit,’ said Lanya. ‘We’ll never get through while people are throwing stones. Can’t they just queue and get it over with?’

  Then shots slammed into the air—the rapid fire of automatic weapons. Everyone ran for cover, and that’s when we saw what they were shouting about. They weren’t rioting out of frustration at having to queue at a checkpoint. There was no queue because there was no checkpoint. There was a fence, two metres high, of coiled barbed wire.

  CHAPTER 07

  The burst of shooting stopped, and we peered back around the corner of the house we were sheltering behind.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Lanya. ‘Let’s try Hurrin Street.’

  ‘Won’t do you no good,’ said a man crouched on the ground beside us.

  ‘But I have to get to Curswall,’ said Lanya.

  He looked up at her, then back to the soldiers pacing beyond the coils of wire. ‘Then, girl, you are shit outta luck. They’ve fenced us in all round. I’ve looked, so I know.’ He hefted an iron bar. ‘But if they think they’re lockin’ me in they got another think coming.’

  He got to his feet, gave us a grin and jogged away up the road.

  Lanya watched him go. ‘All round?’ She looked at me. ‘All round!’

  ‘Let’s find out,’ I said.

  At the intersection of Hurrin Street and the boundary road it was the same story. The way through to Curswall was blocked by steel bars resting on big steel X’s that had been rammed against the buildings on each side of the road. Great rolls of vicious-looking barbed wire were looped along the bars. The road was impassable.

  There was a crowd here but they were mainly standing about, quiet and curious, like they were waiting for it all to be over. On the other side of the wire were three soldiers in full battle gear—sunglasses, helmets, combat rifles slung over shoulders, the works. They were talking to each other, joking about, not paying much attention to us.

  Lanya chewed her lip and watched them.

  I said, ‘I’m gonna ask.’

  We shouldered our way through, and when we got to the wire I called out, ‘Hey!’ and waved my arms at the soldiers.

  They stopped talking, and one of them sauntered over to look at us.

  I said, in Anglo, ‘She needs to get through. Her family’s in Curswall.’

  He jerked his head riverwards. ‘Piss off, kid.’

  ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘She lives there. We’re not armed. We just want to get her back home. It’s only a few streets away.’

  People were starting to gather round.

  The guy glanced back to his mates and said, ‘Get a load of this. They talk proper here now.’ He lifted his gun off his shoulder and looked back at us. ‘You talk it. Don’t you understand it? Piss. Off. Now!’ He stabbed the gun at us and laughed when we flinched.

  Lanya tugged at my arm. ‘It’s no good. Let’s go.’

  I pulled away. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? It’s just a simple ask. I want to know what’s going on.’

  The guy with the gun watched us from behind his shades and his riot of wire. ‘You’re still here,’ he said. ‘Do I have to spell it out? P. I.—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just tell us what’s going on. What’s the deal? Why the lockdown?’

  The soldier called back to the others. ‘Hey! We got trouble.’

  Lanya pulled at my arm. ‘Don’t do this, Nik. Let’s go!’

  ‘We’re not trouble,’ I said to him. ‘We want to visit her family, that’s all.’

  ‘You thick or something?’ he said. ‘You’re not leaving, right? You’re stayin’ put and doin’ what you’re told. All of you. Until…’

  All right, I thought, I’ll play your stupid game. ‘Until when?’

  He smirked. ‘Further notice.’

  I ignored Lanya’s unspoken resistance and said, ‘When will we be able to get through, then? How long are you going to be here? This an overnight stay or are you settling in?’

  ‘Talk a lot, don’t you,’ he said. ‘You know what I think? I think you should quit talking Anglo. It’s not yours to talk. You got your own shitty language. You talk that.’

  ‘Look—’ I said.

  ‘No
pe,’ he stepped back. ‘Ask me in Breken-speak. Go on! Ask me in Breken and I might tell you.’

  ‘He won’t,’ said Lanya. ‘You know he won’t. He’s just a grunt. He doesn’t know why they’re here or how long for. C’mon. Let’s go.’

  ‘See?’ said the guy. ‘The girl talks it. Now you try. Or is it such a crap language you’re ’shamed to?’ He came closer to the wire and stuck his head forward. ‘Go on! Do as you’re told, you little shit. Say something!’

  His mates were taking an interest, so I called to one of them, ‘Hey! How long are you gonna be here?’

  The gun jerked up level with my face.

  ‘Say it in Breken or I’ll blow your fucking head off!’

  People scattered like a flock of starlings. I held up both hands and backed away.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said in Breken, ‘Going now.’

  He lowered the gun and put a hand to his ear. ‘What’d you say?’ he asked. ‘Can’t understand you. Crap language.’ He laughed like a maniac at how hilarious he was.

  I said, ‘Moron,’ in Breken and the gun came back up.

  ‘What’d you call me?’ he yelled. ‘What’d you call me?’ But we were backing away faster now, and then his mates must have told him to chill because he lowered the gun a millimetre. We turned and dashed back around the corner to safety.

  Lanya was stooped, hands on knees, staring at the ground like she was going to be sick.

  ‘Why did you do that? That was mad.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  I picked up a stone from a pile of broken building on the roadside, turned back round the corner and hurled it hard as I could. It landed in the wire. The three of them spun towards it, guns coming up, and I ducked back to safety.

  Lanya threw up her hands. ‘What are you doing?’