Havoc

by Higgins, Jane

  I opened the door.

  She clapped a hand to her mouth and we stood staring at each other while whole seconds ticked by. I should have been trying to read her—whether she was about to yell for the guy downstairs, whether we were enemies now—but the sight of her standing there put my thinking brain on hold and flooded it with the memory of her striding over the bridge on that cold afternoon when we went after Sol’s kidnappers. Call it heart or courage or just plain stubbornness—whatever that quality of hers was, it was still there now, as strong as ever.

  I realised she was crying and I let out the breath I’d been holding. She opened her arms, charged across the room and gave me a huge hug. Then she pulled back and put a hand on my T-shirt.

  ‘That’s blood!’ she whispered.

  ‘Not mine,’ I said.

  She looked relieved, and darted a look over her shoulder. ‘You can’t be here, It’s too dangerous.’

  When I started to explain she shook her head. ‘Shh. My dad is here, and Alan, our guard. Go back in there.’ She gave me a push backwards. ‘I’ll let you know when it’s safe. Dad’s going to a meeting. I’ll get him to take Alan.’ She stared at me for a second as if she was making sure I was real. ‘Nik, I’m so glad to see you.’

  She closed the door and I could picture her on the other side of it, squaring her shoulders as though she was a lot more solid than she actually was, getting that determined look in her eye, and then marching up the stairs. She would smile at her father and kiss him on the cheek and try to convince him that she would be perfectly fine left alone for a few hours. He wouldn’t be happy; he would be horribly anxious. But in the end he would give way because Thomas Hendry would do absolutely anything for his daughter. He would, I’m certain, give away his entire fortune to make her happy. A thought crossed my mind then—about whether my father would give away his revolution for me. He wouldn’t. Hadn’t. I told myself to quit being pathetic. Then I turned back with thumbs up to Lanya.

  We waited, jumping at every voice and every whirr of the lift. Sandor surfaced, groaning. His wound had bled in the night but not a lot, and he looked a better colour than he had the day before, but his painkillers had worn off and he wanted food. We explained to him how unhelpful it would be to encounter another bullet at close range, so could he please shut up. Finally we heard farewells, the front door slamming and the beep of the downstairs alarm being switched on.

  Fyffe opened the door. ‘That’s that! They’ve gone for the day. Lanya!’ She hugged Lanya and slipped easily into Breken. ‘And who’s this?’ She looked down at our patient and turned the sheet back to get a better look at his bandaged side. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘Tell me over breakfast.’

  Sandor complained about being moved but the promise of food was a powerful painkiller. He lay on a couch in the main room, and Fyffe and I made breakfast.

  Lanya leaned on the breakfast bar and gave him a running commentary: ‘Pancakes, syrup, fresh eggs—none of your powdered stuff here—bacon, white bread, honey, berry jam made from, it looks like, actual berries. And real coffee.’

  We ate until we weren’t hungry anymore, and admitted under interrogation from Fyffe that we couldn’t remember the last time we’d done that. Then we had more toast and answered her questions about the attack on Moldam. She listened like she was the hungry one and this was food at last. ‘A lockdown! Why?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could be an operation with the codename Havoc. Does that mean anything to you?’

  She shook her head and sighed. ‘I’ve been up at Ettyn Hills, and all I heard was that there’d been a move against hostiles who were planning a strike on the city. It was a great success, apparently. God.’ She put her head in her hands. ‘I have to get back to this, to you, to something real, instead of sitting here stressing about what to wear to the Dry.’

  ‘So you are leaving,’ I said, looking round at the packing cases.

  She nodded. ‘Not for good, but for a good while.’ She paused then went on, ‘The place up at Ettyn Hills is… well, we buried Lou and Sol there, and it’s so quiet and empty. Dad tried his best to cope with it but Mum couldn’t cope at all. So then came this plan that we go away, to the Dry. There’s a oasis hub there that’s amazing, apparently. It’s built over this huge acquifer and there are orchards and meadows and everything’s built to handle the sun and the heat, and they say that the night sky there is—’

  She stopped.

  ‘Sorry. That’s my dad talking—it’s his spiel to get me excited about going. But it’s all beside the point, isn’t it. Here’s me packing to go on a break and here you are in the middle of rocket attacks and some kind of stupid punishment. I want to help. That’s why you’re here, right? To look for help?’

  I said, ‘Kind of. It wasn’t exactly our plan to come to you. But then Sandor got hurt—’

  Sandor, who was dozing under the influence of painkillers, lifted a hand and gave a pathetic wave.

  ‘Shot,’ he said. ‘Let’s be clear about that.’

  ‘Shot!’ Fyffe sat up straight.

  ‘That’s right,’ he declared. ‘Took a bullet for these two.’

  ‘What?’ said Fyffe. ‘How? No, tell me later, we have to get him to a doctor.’

  ‘At last,’ he said. ‘Somebody cares.’

  ‘You’re doing okay,’ I said to him. ‘Shut up for a second. He’s okay, Fy, really. It’s a graze.’

  ‘Hey!’ he protested.

  ‘Quite a bad one,’ I admitted. ‘And seeing a medic would be a good idea, sometime soon, but not this instant.’

  Sandor muttered, ‘That’s gratitude for you.’ Soon after that he was snoring peacefully.

  ‘Your trip to the desert?’ I said to Fyffe.

  ‘Oh, it’s so pointless!’ she said. ‘We’re going with some others: the Coultens, the Venables, the Mar—’

  ‘The Marstersons, the Hallidays and the Tallins?’

  She looked at me, startled. ‘Yes, how do you know? It’s supposed to be a secret.’

  ‘When do you go?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. We were meant to leave this weekend. I’ve had my vaccinations and everything, but there’s a hold-up. Which is probably good, because as you can see, I’ll never be done packing in time.’

  She cast an eye over the boxes stacked against the walls: some were sealed, but most were half full and surrounded by odds and ends that hadn’t found a home in one yet. They were very different odds and ends from the ones we’d seen at the market the day before: these were tall porcelain vases, antique wind-up clocks, a large polished chunk of obsidian and ornaments like the linked silver fish that used to sit on the table at the top of the stairs.

  She saw me glance at it all and gave an apologetic smile. ‘Sometimes I want to sell the lot of it. It’s shiny and beautiful and useless and it will all be mine one day and I won’t have a clue what to do with it.’ She picked up the coffee pot and went to refill it. When she came back she said, ‘How did you find out who’s going to the Dry?’

  I didn’t answer. I was putting puzzle pieces together
in my head.

  ‘Don’t go all classified on me.’ She turned to Lanya. ‘What’s your plan? How did you get here? What do you need to do? How did your friend get shot? I want to know everything!’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘This trip to the desert. Why are so many people going?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t even want to talk about it, I’m so embarrassed.’

  ‘Don’t be. Just tell me.’

  She shrugged. ‘Business opportunities—that’s the main thing, you know, “investing in the Dry”. That’s what they say at the dinners and receptions they’re holding for the delegation of Dry-dwellers that’s come here. Also, no one says it, but Southside supporters are kicking up around the city. There’s this group called One City: they’re running a campaign of street protests and messing with the traffic and the phone system and hacking into media channels with messages about the crackdown on Southside. Some of the families want to leave because they’re fed up with all the disruption. My dad won’t let me near any of it, of course. In fact, you’re the closest I’ve got to anything Southside in six whole months.’

  ‘And what’s the hold-up?’ I asked. ‘You said there was a hold-up.’

  ‘It’s the delegation we’re supposed to be going with. One of their people has gone missing.’

  ‘Nomu,’ said Lanya quietly. She was curled in one of the big leather chairs, watching us thoughtfully, like she was putting together her own puzzle pieces.

  Fyffe turned to her. ‘Yes, that’s right. One minute she and her brother are all over the news and chat channels being famous for coming from the desert, and then she disappears. We don’t know if she’s run away or if something terrible has happened. Her people say they won’t leave without her, so we might not be going so soon after all.’

  Lanya and I looked at each other, and Fyffe said, ‘What? What did I say?’

  ‘We found her,’ said Lanya. ‘She washed up on the riverbank the night the bridge was bombed.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Fyffe. ‘Drowned?’

  ‘No,’ said Lanya. ‘She’s alive.’

  ‘Alive!’ She gripped Lanya’s arm. ‘No way! That’s fantastic! You must tell them!’

  She jumped up and began pacing and planning, delighted at the fact that the world can sometimes deliver random good stuff. Then a thought occurred to her, and she stopped and looked at me. ‘There won’t be a ransom will there? Or an exchange? Nik? Say there won’t be.’

  I was gazing at her, not really seeing her at all. Seeing instead an unlooked-for chance to fold back the barbed wire and send the squads of soldiers packing. The girl under the bridge. Could we do that? Could we ransom her for an end to the lockdown? How would that work? Would there be a handover on a bridge? Of course there would be. And as I thought that, I swear I felt Sol’s breath on the back of my neck.

  Fyffe was watching me, waiting for me to say ‘No, of course we wouldn’t do that.’

  I looked at her. ‘What would you do? You’ve got a whole township that needs Cityside to come to the table, and the one card you have to play is a girl so important that they’ll do almost anything—even talk to us—in order to get her back.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Fyffe. ‘They’ll punish you for it.’

  ‘They’re punishing us now! We’ve run out of medical supplies and pretty soon we’ll run out of food. People are gonna start dying. You want them to starve us into submission?’

  ‘They’ll march in and take her.’

  ‘They might try.’

  I thought of the mayhem and tear gas on Battleby Road.

  ‘Moldam is angry, Fy. They might not succeed.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Fyffe stared at me for a second then turned away and began to collect the breakfast things with an angry clatter. We’d done half of the dishes in silence before she said, ‘You really would ransom her, even after Sol?’

  I couldn’t look at her. ‘For this,’ I said, ‘I would.’

  More silence. When we’d finished, she walked away and stared out the window. Beyond her, the black arch of Sentinel Bridge took your eye across the river to the concrete and bare dirt spread of Southside.

  Fyffe said, ‘You’d have to threaten to kill her for it to work.’

  ‘I know,’ I said quietly.

  She turned back to me. ‘It’s not her fault she’s landed in the middle of something that has nothing to do with her.’

  ‘That’s Sol you’re talking about.’

  She blinked and looked away. ‘It’s Nomu too.’

  I nodded over her shoulder out the window. ‘And the people over there? They landed in the middle of it too, just by being born in Moldam. Bad luck for them, but not a whole lot they can do about it.’

  ‘Have you even met her?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve met her.’

  She was watching me with guilt-inducing intensity.

  ‘It may never happen,’ I said. ‘I have to find my father. It’s not up to me to put anyone in the firing line.’

  ‘In the firing line!’ she said. ‘See! You know what a ransom could mean.’

  ‘I know what the lockdown means too. Operation Havoc, Fy. Does that sound like peacekeeping to you?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she came up to me and put her hands lightly on my arms. ‘Six months ago, threatening someone’s life like this would have been the last, the absolutely last, option for you and even then you would have argued against it. Now you’re seizing on it like it’s the answer to everything.’

  ‘Fy—’

  She turned away saying, ‘I’m going to invite the Dry-dweller group for dinner tomorrow night. You should meet them before you make those sorts of decisions. And we should try some other options. Every other option. What about Dash? Do you think Dash knows what the lockdown’s about?’

  I thought about what Dash knew. About my mother working as a Cityside spook, for example. Hard to imagine that knowledge ever seeming irrelevant, but right then, it did.

  ‘Nik?’ said Fyffe.

  ‘I don’t know!’ I said.

  ‘What if I ask her?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘So that’s it?’ she demanded. ‘You threaten Nomu’s life when you haven’t even tried anything else? Why would it be different from when they tried to exchange Sol? Why would it be any less risky?’

  ‘Sol’s not the only one who’s dead.’

  She turned and walked away. I watched her and thought, so this is it. This is how my last link with the Hendrys breaks. Not a clean break, either.

  ‘We’ll go,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, still with her back to me. ‘Your friend has to see a doctor. I know one who won’t ask questions. Can you wake him up and find some clothes of Lou’s for you both? You can’t go out in those things, they’ve got blood all over them.’ She turned to Lanya. ‘Come with me.’

  I didn’t want to do that, go picking through Lou’s stuff. I wanted to get out, but it did make sense and it went okay until Sandor picked up the leather jacket that had been Lou’s favouri
te piece of clothing.

  ‘You’re not taking that,’ I said.

  He ignored me and held it against his chest, admiring himself in the mirror.

  ‘Are you deaf?’ I said. ‘No freakin’ way are you taking that.’

  ‘Why not?’ He sat on the bed. ‘The guy’s dead, right?’

  I nearly thumped him. I would have if he hadn’t been stooped over with the gunshot wound. I grabbed the collar of the jacket and hissed in his ear, ‘Put it down.’

  ‘Hey! Take it easy—injured person here. Sorry and all that. I didn’t know him, did I.’ He dropped it on the bed and let it slide onto the floor, then he smoothed his hair in the mirror and gave me a cool stare.

  ‘You know what they say about you over the river? Can’t rile him, they say. Never loses it, they say. But look at you now.’ He flicked open his fingers like a mini explosion.

  ‘Shut up. Get dressed.’

  I picked up the jacket and hung it up, then chucked a shirt at him. In the end, we settled on jeans, T-shirts and a couple of Lou’s expensive cotton shirts. Also a dark jacket for me and a denim one for Sandor. We looked smart and unremarkable, which was exactly how we needed to look.

  Lanya, on the other hand, looked amazing. Fyffe had given her some black jeans and a creamy white T-shirt with a wide neck. Also some silver beads and a short, bright green coat.

  ‘There,’ said Fyffe. ‘That’s better. No one’s going to ask you for ID looking like that.’