‘I’m unpacking,’ she said, flopping down on a couch and casting a glance around the mess.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Because everyone is so keen for me to be leaving.’ She looked at me defiantly. ‘You have a problem with that?’
I held up both hands. ‘No, of course not.’
She beckoned us in. ‘Did you get to Sentian?’
Lanya sat on the edge of one of the leather armchairs, and I began a wander round the room, peering into half-packed boxes. We told her Lanya’s idea, that we try winning Nomu herself over to Moldam’s cause. It might at least put the lockdown front and centre on the news and force Frieda to back off.
Fyffe nodded. ‘That could work. But how do we get to her with Moldam closed off?’
‘We have a boat,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute.’ She fired up the flatscreen on the wall and zipped through the day’s archived news footage. ‘Not that boat?’
There it was, our boat in an item with a Southside Smuggling Shock banner headline and a news reporter offering commentary as the battered old thing was lifted from the water and carted away. We watched, forlorn.
‘Had a boat,’ said Lanya.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘We have to find the One City people. They must have links with Southside—comms links or tunnels or something. There’ll be a way.’
‘There’s something else,’ said Fyffe. ‘I went to see Dash.’
That stopped me.
‘I didn’t say anything about Nomu,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know why the lockdown, but she’s not letting on. She must know something. We’ll have to push her.’ She looked at me. ‘Actually, you’ll have to. She won’t take me seriously.’
‘And that would be fine,’ I said, ‘But last time I saw her she tried to arrest me.’
‘She won’t this time,’ said Fyffe.
‘This time?’
Fyffe looked down at her hands. ‘I told her that I’d seen you. I know—I probably shouldn’t have—I didn’t tell her you were here, but I said that you’d seen the lockdown and that it was for real. She wants to hear about it from you. She’ll be at the Inkwell tomorrow morning at eight. I made her promise to come alone.’
I looked at Lanya. We were going to the bookshop tomorrow morning. But suppose we found the One City people at the news posting, then we’d be swept off to do this deal with Nomu. I wanted to see Dash; I wanted to know if what she’d said at St John’s the day before was true. That my mother had been an agent for the security services, in other words, she’d been working with Frieda against Southside, against my father, against all things Breken even though she was Breken herself.
This was off mission, as any good spook would say. It was a bad idea that could only go wrong. Why not leave my mother to be the person I’d imagined her to be? Why go digging? Because, the kid in me was shouting, because I want to know! And the me that was trying to be a grownup was saying shut the hell up, it doesn’t matter. But it did.
‘We’re supposed to be going somewhere else tomorrow,’ I said. ‘To find us some One City people.’
‘I can go,’ said Lanya. ‘We can meet up after.’
‘You don’t know the way,’ I said. ‘And it’s—’
‘Don’t say it’s dangerous! What isn’t dangerous now?’
‘Okay, but you still don’t know the way.’
‘I’ll take you,’ said Fyffe. She smiled a sunny smile at me as though she’d just suggested a picnic on the heath. ‘You’re not keeping me out of this. And don’t look so worried!’
I looked at Lanya who nodded, and I felt a guilty relief.
Fyffe was saying, ‘You go and find out what you can from Dash. She’ll help, I know she will.’
Maybe, I thought. But Dash had changed. We all had.
We stayed the night, camped in the spare room. Thomas Hendry came home and went out again then Fyffe came in with a tray of ham sandwiches and chocolate cookies, and we sat on the bed and ate and talked about One City and fathers and old Mr Corman and school and Cityside food and what would it be like to leave all this and go somewhere new.
Late in the evening Fyffe went off to her room and came back holding out her hand. ‘Look at this,’ she said.
On her palm lay a finely crafted slip of silver, like an elongated S with as empty centre. The talisman of the Southside Charter: Not crescent, not cross…each to their own god and their own Rule, but space at the heart of every Rule for mystery, for the unknown. She said, ‘I thought it might help us tomorrow in Sentian, if we need to prove who we are.’ She looked at it doubtfully. ‘It might not too, I suppose. I don’t know.’
She handed it to Lanya, who took it and turned it in the light and asked, ‘Where did you get it?’
‘One of the nurses in the Moldam infirmary gave it to me,’ said Fyffe. ‘When she knew I was going back over the bridge with Sol. “A peace offering,” she said.’
Lanya nodded. ‘It’s precious.’
She passed it to me. The talismans are supposed to be handed down, parent to child, but sometimes, too often, parents reclaim them from the bodies of their dead children. Sub-commander Levkova wore one for her daughter Pia. The one I usually wore had been given to me by my father, but I’d left it behind to come to Cityside.
I handed it back to Fy. ‘Don’t be caught with it by the wrong side.’
‘No,’ she said and closed her fingers on it.
We talked some more, and I asked Fyffe if she ever saw Jono. Back in school, Fyffe and Jono used to be together, the way Dash and I were, and Lou and Bella. Like Dash, Jono had graduated straight from school into the security services.
Fyffe shrugged. ‘Not so much. We had a—’ she searched for the word ‘—a falling out. A disagreement. I guess I came back from Southside a different person. He didn’t like that. He wanted me to be quiet and scared, like before. And I am still, quite quiet and quite scared, but I don’t need him to be rescuing me or protecting me, you know? I told him that, but he wasn’t happy about it. He thinks we should still be together. But I do see Dash whenever I come to town. She doesn’t mean any harm to you, Nik. She thinks you’ve been brainwashed. As far as Dash and Jono are concerned, everything Breken is hostile, and all Breken are the enemy.’
She stacked the dishes and stood up. ‘I’d better go. I’ll see you both tomorrow.’
‘Fy?’ I said as she reached the door. ‘Thank you. I mean…’ I looked for more words, but I couldn’t find any big enough. ‘Thank you.’
Lanya took the bed and I took the couch. We turned out the light, telling each other how tired we were and how great it was to have somewhere safe to spend the night, but sleep deserted me completely. Her too, because after a while she said, ‘Nik?’
‘Mm?’
‘You asleep?’
‘I wish.’
‘What are you thinking about?’
Pause. ‘You. Me. You and me. Your family. Mine. Dash and Lou and Sol and Fyffe. Moldam and the Marsh, revenge and the end of the world. You?’
She laughed softly, low and throaty. I l
oved that laugh.
‘And did you come to any conclusions about any of that?’
‘Nope. Not a one.’
We were whispering in case the Hendry bodyguard on the floor below us had robo-hearing. She said, ‘I keep thinking, what if we’re too late? What if that Kelleran woman has ordered some kind of hit. I mean: Havoc. It means war and plunder and destruction…’ She rolled over and looked in my direction. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘Usually.’
She snorted a laugh. ‘You know why I like you?’
‘Wait. You like me?’
‘Shut up. You know why I like you?’
‘Is it for my extremely cool good looks and my amazing brain?’
She laughed again, into her pillow.
‘C’mon, humour me,’ I said.
‘Okay. Those—’
‘Thank you and good night.’
‘But.’
‘Oh.’
‘Actually I like you most for something you’re no good at.’
‘Terrific.’
‘I like that you’re no good at pretending. You don’t pretend you’re not afraid. You don’t pretend you know the answers. Even when you first came to Southside, you didn’t try and tell people you were a Breken scavenger, you just let us assume that’s what you were.’
‘But you told me I was a different person over here.’
‘That’s not you pretending, though. It’s what the city does to you when you’re here. You slot back into it because this is where you grew up. You know it, and you know how to work it.’
I thought about that for a while. Then the fact that it was too dark to see each other and the other fact that tomorrow we’d be walking in different directions into enemy territory made me brave.
I said, ‘How about pretending it doesn’t matter that you might go off and be a Pathmaker. How am I doing at that?’
There was a little silence. Then she said, ‘Um…’
‘Um?’
‘Okay. Not…badly, exactly….’
‘But not great?’
‘You give me space to think.’
I hesitated, unsure how to ask the next question. ‘How’s it going, that thinking?’
‘It’s got a little… derailed recently. I’ve had that plan my whole life. Derailing doesn’t come easy.’
‘So you feel like you’re in a train wreck, then?’
I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘No. I don’t,’ she said. ‘Not even a little bit. We’d better try and sleep.’
As if. But then I heard her breathing slide into a deep, easy rhythm. I lay there listening to her, but it was a long time before I slept.
In the morning, Fyffe came in, closing the door carefully behind her. We were up and dressed and waiting. She said, half whispering, ‘My medic friend just called. Sandor’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ said Lanya. ‘As in dead?’
‘No, no. Gone as in disappeared from his bed some time in the night. It’s crazy—it makes no sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘He knows where Nomu is. I’d bet any money he’s after the reward.’
We were about to lose our one chance to bring pressure on Cityside.
‘What do we do?’ asked Fyffe.
‘We carry on,’ said Lanya. ‘Find One City. Pressure Dash. And hope that we get to Nomu before the Kelleran woman does.’
CHAPTER 19
The Inkwell, known as the Drinkwell by Tornmoor seniors, was a café-bar down a narrow lane in the old student quarter in St Clare. It was just big and dark and busy enough that you could bunk study periods in there and not be easily spotted by a passing teacher.
Dash was waiting for me. The place was busy with the breakfast crowd but everyone made a small clear space around her. That’s the power of that uniform. I squeezed my way through to her booth and sat down opposite her. Her eyebrows rose and she smiled at me with so much confidence I felt like getting up and leaving.
She said, ‘I didn’t know whether to expect you or not after your disappearing act on Friday.’
‘You had a gun. You were trying to arrest me.’
‘Rescue you.’
‘I don’t need rescuing.’
One of the staff appeared with a platter of fresh bread and small curls of yellow butter. ‘With our compliments,’ he said, almost bowing at her. ‘Would you like breakfast, ma’am?’
Dash shooed him away, hardly looking at him. He did the almost-bowing thing once more and left.
I watched him go.
‘Times change, huh? Remember when they’d just about X-ray our money to make sure it was real before doling out the food? And now, look. Free food and service with a squirm.’
‘Don’t be like that.’
She glanced across the tables, sharp eyed, with the kind of look that went with the uniform: it said, I’m in charge and I’m watching. ‘We provide a service, too. And they’re grateful for it. Why shouldn’t they be? We keep them safe.’ She pushed the bread to one side and put a small reader in front of me. ‘Take a look.’
‘I’m here about Moldam,’ I said.
‘Just one look, it’ll only take a second.’
‘I want to talk about Moldam and Operation Havoc.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’ She nodded at the reader. ‘Take a look first.’
I tapped the screen. A photo: Frieda Kelleran, half turned away, and with her a younger woman facing almost full on to the camera. She had dark brown skin, wide black eyes, a gentle mouth, a braided rope of black hair trailing over her shoulder, a long orange scarf and a thread of gold across her throat. My breath stalled in my lungs. I widened the photo until there was only her face filling the screen, smiling at me.
Dash said, ‘Well? What do you think?’
I tried to keep my face blank, but I didn’t trust my voice. Finally I managed, ‘How…how do I know it’s her? I was four the last time I saw her.’
Dash smiled. ‘You know. I can see it.’ She reached out and touched the corner of my eye, ‘Here,’ and the corner of my mouth, ‘And here. You know.’ I pulled away. ‘There are more,’ she said.
I scrolled to the next photo: the same woman in a garden, smiling broadly straight at the camera. There were six more: of her with Frieda, and with other people I didn’t recognise. She looked relaxed in all of them—no signs of fear or compulsion. I stared at her hard, trying to read her expression, trying to hear what she was saying across all those years. Why was she smiling at Frieda? Because Frieda was telling her lies that she wanted to hear? Or because she and Frieda shared a secret? I went back through them again. It was her. I did know it—something in her eyes, or her smile. Something in me wanted badly to reach out and climb into the photo.
I put a hand over the screen. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘She’s talking to Frieda, but I don’t know what they’re talking about. It could be anything. I already know that they knew each other—this doesn’t prove she was an agent.’
Dash�
�s smile was still all confidence and superior knowledge. She said, like she was reciting from some official file, ‘Elena Osei worked as an interpreter at the Marsh before the uprising in ’87. Mrs Kelleran recruited her to work as an asset because she was everything they needed: very bright, beautiful, Breken—and loyal to the city. Perfect.’ She leaned forward. ‘She joined a group of Breken sympathisers here on Cityside and got together with your father and when the time came she did what was required and took him out of the picture.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Get your story straight. The line your bosses are running at the moment is that he was army.’
She nodded. ‘That’s right, army with a dishonourable discharge. He took his revenge by joining the hostiles on Southside.’
‘What was he dishonourably discharged for?’
Why was I even asking—no way would the official record be the truth.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That was years ago. The point is, why would you trust someone with that on his record?’
‘Why would I believe you about any of this? About his so-called record or about Elena?’
‘You think those pictures are lying?’
I picked up the reader and stared at the photo of Elena looking straight at me.
‘Probably. They’re Frieda’s pictures.’
She sat back with an exasperated sigh. ‘Explain to me then, how you ended up in Tornmoor and your father ended up in the Marsh. It was Elena’s doing, Nik: she arranged to send you to Tornmoor because she knew that if what she was really doing was discovered by the Breken, they would probably kill her but that you would be safe.’
She stopped and watched me. When I didn’t say anything, she said, ‘They killed her, Nik. Not us.’
She held out her hand for the reader and saw my fingers tighten around it. ‘See?’ she said. ‘You know it’s her. Now you have to decide whether you want to know more.’
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