Lanya gave Fyffe the small Southside bow. ‘Thank you. So much.’
They both turned to Sandor and me. ‘Tidy,’ said Fyffe. ‘You’ll pass. Now, Sandor comes with me in the car.’
Sandor looked stunned. ‘You have a car!’
She almost smiled. ‘A small one.’
‘A car!’ he crowed.
We took the lift down to the garage where a little green two-seater gleamed in the shadows. Sandor was instantly in love.
‘It’s new,’ I said.
Fyffe nodded. ‘It’s Dad, trying to say thank you for all the time I’ve spent looking after Mum up at the Hills.’
We eased Sandor into the front seat, and Fyffe said to me, ‘If you’re looking for your father, try Sentian. That’s supposed to be where the One City people are. But there’ll be soldiers there. If you’re back here before five o’clock I can let you in before Dad gets home.’
I said, ‘Do you want us to come back?’
She looked at me at last. ‘I want a lot of things, and most of them I’m not going to get. Yes, I want you to come back.’ She got in the car and drove off with Sandor.
Lanya and I walked across Clouden Street into the cool shadows of the alleyway opposite. Lanya said, ‘You don’t like to argue with your friends. Why didn’t you tell her you saved Nomu’s life?’
‘What’s she going to say? “Why did you bother?”’
‘Why are you so sure an exchange would go wrong?’
‘I’m not. It might go fantastically, perfectly right with happy endings all round.’
‘Hey,’ she stopped. ‘Take a breath. This is me you’re talking to.’
I kicked a tin can and watched it bounce to the end of the alley and out into bright sunshine.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Arguing with friends is dire.’
We walked on, and she said, ‘So, don’t. Work out a better way.’
‘What better way? Here’s this gift that could break the lockdown, and all we have to do is threaten to kill someone to get it. Terrific. Do you trust any of the people in charge to manage an exchange without somebody getting killed? Even our lot? Especially our lot.’
‘Then we don’t ask them,’ she said. ‘We ask her.’
I stopped.
‘She owes you, Nik. What if we go back and ask her to help us? To agree to come back but only once the lockdown is lifted.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s the matter? I think it’s a good idea.’
‘A good idea?’ I said. ‘It’s a freakin’ genius idea. You are officially in charge from now on.’
She grinned and we walked on. She said, ‘We can’t exactly row back in broad daylight and talk to her, and we still need to find the One City people and tell them about Frieda’s undercover agent. Let’s go to Sentian.’
‘Sentian it is,’ I said.
‘Good.’ She slowed to inspect a line of Break the Breken! posters: someone had gone down the line turning Breken into Banks on every one. Beneath those was another set demanding that people Report Breken Crimes! but the people with paint had other ideas and most of those now said Report Banking Crimes! A few had been amended to Support Breken Crimes! and one at the end, inevitably, now said Support Banking Crimes!
Lanya ran her finger along them. ‘Someone’s had fun. Why are you so interested in the people who are leaving for the Dry?’
‘Why do you think they’re leaving?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Not for business opportunities? You think Frieda’s told them to get out while Operation Havoc creates some unpleasantness over the river?’
‘Or they’ve told her that they’re off for a bit and could she deal with the pest problem while they’re away.’
I looked around, trying to work out where we were. The alleys were a lot grimier than I remembered: no one had emptied the overflowing skips and rubbish had blown about and ended up piled in stinking corners and soggy underfoot.
‘Let’s go this way,’ I said.
We travelled a zigzag of alleyways and short streets until we came to an intersection leading into Sentinel Parade. To go further was to step into sunlight and scrutiny: even if the cc-eyes had been vandalised everywhere else, here they would be working. We had to cross the Parade to get to Sentian.
‘Main Street, Cityside,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ Lanya looked up and down the Parade. ‘This is what I thought the city would be like.’
The Parade’s tall glass-fronted buildings framed a strip of blue sky that stretched from Sentinel Bridge all the way to Watch Hill. At pavement level, sandwich bars and cafes, flower shops, chemists and discreet, up-market money lenders were busy with their Saturday customers. Above that, the buildings shone, not with sunlight, but with huge flickering advertisements. A ribbon of breaking news ran along the bottom of each one.
I pointed over the road to a dark little side street like the one we were standing in. ‘That’s where we’re heading.’
‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘I want to look.’
She was wide eyed, drinking it all in, and even I was feeling the strangeness of it, like this was a whole other planet from the one Moldam was on. Lanya nodded up at the ads moving on the buildings. ‘What are they saying? They want you to buy things. What things? I don’t understand them.’
‘Drugs, mainly,’ I said. ‘Pills for everything. Pills for being worried, pills for being fat, pills for getting old.’
She watched a few, engrossed. ‘These pills have great side effects,’ she said. ‘They give you many friends and make you rich and beautiful.’
Just then, floating above the street noise, the bells of St John’s struck two o’clock and every ad cut to a blue background followed by the fade-in of the silver crest of Security and Intelligence. It looked like a blue and silver banner being unfurled down each side of the Parade. People stopped and looked up at it, as though they had suddenly become robots waiting for instructions to be beamed at them from on high.
The first thing we saw was a two-storey tall picture of Nomu together with an announcement of a memorial service for her at St John’s in three days time.
The next thing we saw was a picture of my father.
CHAPTER 17
I read the news ribbon running along the bottom of the image. Lanya nudged me. ‘It’s too fast. What does it say?’
‘Wanted,’ I said.
‘Obviously.’
‘Former—’ I stopped and frowned at it.
‘For what? For murder?’
‘Close. Former army strategist—’
‘Oh!’
‘Former army strategist turned extremist, Nikolai Stais, is wanted for crimes against the City. Stais, the secretive head of extremist group One City, is believed to have ordered the destruction of Moldam Bridge—’
‘What?’
‘—in One City’s latest attempt to destroy the peace process. Stais is armed and dangerous and should not be approached. Reward offered, et cetera…’
‘Wow!’ said Lanya. ‘Some story!’
‘Oh, really?’
I stared up at my father’s face until it was replaced by someone else on the wanted list. Where was he? And could any of that be true? Secretive! Tell me about it.
Lanya said, ‘That makes no sense at all.’
I turned back to her. ‘It doesn’t have to make sense. But it means he’s not going to be hanging around on some street corner in Sentian waiting for us to find him.’
No one was hanging around on any street corners in Sentian. The place was crawling with army. Trucks blocked Bridge Street so we navigated the sidestreets instead, hunting for signs of One City people and slipping sideways into alleys and doorways when soldiers marched by, which was often. There didn’t seem much for them to do—most of the little shops and cafés were dark, with CLOSED signs on their doors—but I guess they were there to send a message: Sentian is occupied.
And not only occupied. Also under notice of demolition.
We stopped in front of Brown’s and the Bard, a couple of antique bookshops nestled side by side in Caravall Lane off Bridge Street. My old home-away-from-school in the city. Inside each bookshop were three ramshackle storeys of tiny rooms and creaking staircases, dimly lit by narrow windows and yellow lamplight and lovingly packed with books: second-hand, third-hand, hundredth-hand books. The interiors of both shops were unlit now, and wide red stickers were plastered across their front windows announcing their imminent destruction. All the way up the lane it was the same story: the whole block was coming down.
The lane was empty of soldiers so I put my nose to the window of Brown’s and squinted into the gloomy interior.
‘These shops have been here for a hundred years,’ I said. ‘They can’t just pull them down. I gotta see if he’s in there. Wait here a sec.’
‘Who? What are you doing? Nik!’
I shot round the side of Brown’s, tried the gate but it was locked so I climbed up and over it. Lanya threw Fyffe’s green coat over the top and followed.
I knocked on the back door, calling, ‘Mr Corman? Are you in there? Mr Corman!’
There was movement inside. The sound of footsteps. The door was opened a crack and then wider by an old man: a very upright old man, with grey hair, immaculate, and a suit about fifty years out of date but immaculate also. Mr Corman, proprietor of Brown’s and the Bard.
He opened the door wide and opened his arms too. ‘Nikolai! Come in! Come in!’
A few minutes later, Lanya and I sat in his office among teetering stacks of paper—Mr Corman spurned electronic versions of almost everything—and while he made tar-black coffee on his little gas stove I told Lanya about his two shops.
‘They’re like church to some people,’ I said. ‘You attend at least once a week, you keep silence while you’re here and you leave feeling like your soul is…I don’t know…quiet, calm, something like that.’
‘And would you be one of these people?’ she asked.
‘I have spent a few hours here.’
‘Many hours,’ said Mr Corman. ‘Many hours, well spent. In better days.’ He put tiny cups of coffee in front of us, ‘But now—’ He gestured out the office door towards the red-stickered front window. ‘Now we are in harm’s way, as you see.’
‘Why are they doing this?’ asked Lanya.
‘A rats’ nest of extremists, young woman. This is what they say. Sentian has become a rats’ nest of extremists. And how have we earned this description? By asking for some basic rights. An end to the military rule of our city. Free elections of a civic authority. A news channel free from political interference. Peacetalks with Southside. This is all. But this is extremist in the eyes of the authorities.’
‘Are you part of the group called One City?’ she asked.
He sipped his coffee and didn’t answer.
‘Do you know where Nik’s father is?’
He smiled and placed his cup carefully on its tiny saucer. ‘Ah, the notorious Commander Stais. I have met him. Some weeks—perhaps eight weeks—ago. He came here, scoping the terrain, I believe that’s what it is called, and I said to him, I knew a boy once with your name.’
Lanya glanced at me.
‘What did he say?’ she asked.
Mr Corman gave that almost shrug of his that, like his accent, we used to make fun of at school but secretly wished we could perfect—a gesture of shoulders and eyebrows that was all world-weariness and sophistication.
‘I think he did not know what to say. He asked me what books you read. I said, “But you must ask him yourself!”’
That didn’t seem a wildly likely thing to happen.
‘Have you seen him since then?’ I asked.
He shook his head and held up a long, crooked finger. ‘I will tell you this.’ He looked at us with great seriousness. ‘You should leave Sentian—’
Furious pounding on the front door startled us. Mr Corman stood up but motioned us to stay put. ‘I will see. You must stay.’
More pounding.
‘Stay!’ he said again.
He went out and closed the office door, but I jumped up and opened it a crack to peer though. ‘Soldiers,’ I whispered to Lanya. ‘Two of them.’ Words were exchanged, then one of the soldiers marched in past Mr Corman, swept a whole lot of books off a table and planted a some kind of notice there. When they’d gone, with a mighty slam of the door, Mr Corman ripped the notice into tiny bits. We helped him pick up the books. ‘They come most days,’ he said. ‘They wish to intimidate, that is all.’
‘All!’ said Lanya.
‘But listen to me,’ he said as he ushered us back into the office. ‘Since they came to Sentian, young people have begun to disappear. One dozen, at least, in the last four weeks. Young people your age.’ He paused. ‘They are not the most cared-for young people—they are the ones who sit on the street corners singing or rattling a cup. One day there they are, the next—’ he lifted a hand in dismay, ‘—gone. The soldiers blame One City.’ He shook his head. ‘It is not the work of One City.’
‘You think the army is taking them?’ I said. ‘As conscripts?’
The head shake again. ‘They are young people without homes, without shoes, and not healthy. They are not ready to be soldiers. I do not know. These are bad times.’
‘In Moldam, too,’ I said and told him about the rocket attack and the lockdown.
‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘Do you know about the postings? No? These are attempts to spread the news, the real news: news of the army and the security service, news of protests and talks, arrests and hearings. The news on screens, we cannot trust, and all actions online are watched. So, with the ingenuity of the human race—’ he smiled to himself, ‘—we have returned to the news on paper! Posted on walls and windows and lampposts. Posted on posts!’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Every day at a different time and a different place, because they are no sooner posted than torn down or painted over. You see?’
I saw. ‘But do you know where and when?’
‘I like to read the news,’ he said. ‘People know this, so every day,
through my door, comes a slip of paper with news of the news: a time, a place.’
‘Every day?’ I said. ‘Today?’
‘Today has been. The corner of Gilley Street and West Oaks Avenue at 11am.’
‘Tomorrow then?’ I said.
‘I do not know until tomorrow. The slip of paper only comes a short time before.’
‘Can we come back here early tomorrow and wait for it?’
He nodded. ‘Surely.’
‘Okay,’ I sighed. A lead at last. If we could get to one of these postings, chances are we could make contact with One City.
The tall clock in the corner with its slow pendulum and antique face struck four.
‘We have to go,’ said Lanya.
Mr Corman told us to take care and walked us to his front door.
Back in the lane, Lanya said, ‘We will come back, won’t we? After all this is over. We’ll come back and help him move the books before the ’dozers come?’
There were thousands of books in there, and Mr Corman probably knew every one of them. I thought about ripping the demolition notice off the window, but that would only bring him more grief from the army. He had enough grief.
‘I don’t think he’ll be moving his books,’ I said.
She looked from the bookshop to me, taking in what that meant. ‘Or himself?’ she said.
‘Or himself.’
CHAPTER 18
Fyffe was on the lookout for us and hurried us up the stairs. ‘Dad’s due back in an hour. Then we’re supposed to be going out somewhere for dinner, but I’ve told him I’d rather stay in.’
Lanya and I paused at the top of the stairs. The games room was still in its half-dressed state and looked forlorn in the slanting afternoon sunlight.
‘You haven’t done much packing,’ I said, half joking, testing Fy’s mood.
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