Of course I wanted to know more, but more of what? Which was better: knowing something through a Cityside lens that was at best spin and possibly complete fabrication, or knowing nothing at all? At least I’d seen her now. That, I would remember, and maybe that was enough.
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said.
‘You don’t know your mother at all. Yet.’ Dash took the reader from me and waggled it in my face. ‘Mrs Kelleran knows. You can ask her if you like.’
‘That’s not why I’m here. I’m here about Moldam.’
Dash turned the reader off and pocketed it. ‘So talk.’
Lanya and Fyffe and I had decided that I needed to call Frieda’s bluff in this conversation so I told Dash that we knew that an attack on Moldam was imminent and that if she didn’t want to be party to mass murder she could help us by finding out when it was likely to start and how.
She studied me, blank faced. ‘Who told you this?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Is it true?’
‘I need to know who told you.’
‘Why? So you people can work out how to shut them up?’
‘You know we could take you in and haul that information out of you? There are people at the Marsh who would happily do that. You have no idea how gentle we’re being with you—and that’s because of me. I’m telling them that your brain is worth saving, but I don’t know how much longer they’ll listen to me. You don’t want that drug, Nik. They say it’s harmless, but it’s not. If they use it on you too often it fries your brain.’
I looked around the café. It had emptied. A waiter wiped a table, and another one stood at the till gazing into space.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Nobody told me. I put two and two together: Frieda makes an unspecified threat, Moldam gets locked down. That means something’s in the wind. What is Operation Havoc? You must have some idea.’
Dash shook her head. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘What do you think the lockdown is for?’ I demanded.
‘To stabilise the situation.’
‘A ceasefire and talks would stabilise the situation.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘One City put paid to that when they blew up the bridge.’
I almost laughed. ‘You can’t believe they did that. That’s crazy.’
‘You think they’re not crazy? You don’t know them like we do. I can’t help you. And I have to go.’
She slid out of the booth, glancing at one of the waiters as she went.
I got half way to the back door before two agents came through it. Two more came in the front door.
Dash brushed past me saying, ‘Rescued you. Did I mention?’
CHAPTER 20
They shoved me into the back of their van and cuffed one of my wrists to a bar beside the window into the driver’s compartment. I couldn’t see through it because it was covered in wire mesh; the back window was too. The air stank of disinfectant, hot and thick and sick-making. Dash climbed in after me and the door was slammed and locked. She sat down in the corner by the door, out of my reach, holding her gun in both hands.
Stupid, I thought to myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid, to trust a promise from a security agent, even if she used to be a friend, more than a friend. I wiped the sweat off my face.
‘You promised Fy you’d come alone,’ I said.
She looked up at me, clear eyed and guilt free. ‘Some things are too important.’
The engine started up and I grabbed for a strap hanging from the roof and stood swaying as the van moved off. No prizes for guessing where we were going. I’d never been there; even though Security and Intelligence ran Pitkerrin Marsh, as well as Tornmoor, they didn’t exactly go in for guided tours. To us at school the place was always out there on the edge of the city: it was the Pit, the Mad Marsh, where dangerously insane people—criminals and politicals both—were locked away and got the help they needed or the punishment they deserved.
Dash spoke above the sound of the engine. ‘You haven’t been to the Marsh, have you. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Like I said, they need you. They won’t hurt you.’ Over the river, people told a different story. Everyone there knew someone who’d gone into the Marsh and come out broken or not come out at all.
‘Your father was there,’ she said. ‘He seems to have survived okay.’
Survived, yes, I thought. But okay? That might be pushing it. I didn’t know what he was like before he went there. I’d searched my memory for him and found nothing. I’d only known him after, in these last six months. Maybe he was always grim and silent, always turning away to the next thing he had to do. He never spoke about his time in the Marsh or, for that matter, about the time before that with my mother. All he’d said was that at the Marsh they specialised in so-called ‘therapeutic interrogation’, a process that had nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with interrogation.
We jolted and swayed through the streets. Dash didn’t put her gun away. Maybe that was regulation, but maybe she really would shoot if she had to. I wondered if she’d ever used it. She caught me looking and changed her grip on it.
‘If you’re genuinely keen on a ceasefire,’ she said, ‘Why not work with us?’
I looked away and wondered how Lanya and Fyffe were doing. It was early yet. They might not have even got to the posting, wherever it was—a long way, I hoped, from Sentian and its wall-to-wall army.
Dash said, ‘We know you’ve been to Sentian.’
I stared at the floor, careful not to look at her in case she read the alarm on my face.
‘We caught you on a cam,’ she said. ‘You and a girl crossing Sentinel Parade yesterday afternoon, and then heading back a couple of hours later. Did you find what you were after?’
I started counting the tiny indentations on the rubber mat under my feet.
‘Is Fyffe hiding you?’ she asked. ‘She must be. Does her father know? I wish you’d leave her out of this. She’s got enough worries.’
Like friends lying to her, I thought.
‘Okay, don’t talk to me,’ she said at last. ‘You can talk to Mrs Kelleran.’
The van stopped. Voices called out, and then we rumbled on a short way and stopped again. The back door swung wide. We’d stopped in a stone-paved courtyard surrounded by the high walls of a grey concrete building with barred windows. In the distance behind us was a ring of fencing but it was so far away I could only guess at the loops of barbed wire that topped it and the sentry boxes that watched over it.
They took me into the building, down a narrow, brightly lit hallway, then down some stairs and along another hallway into a windowless room where they took my wallet, my watch and my boots. My wallet, I didn’t care about, but I knew I’d miss my watch and my boots.
When they’d gone I tried the door but it was metal and solid. I looked around for something else. A single fluro tube glowed pale and faint above me: everything else was blank, grey concrete—ceiling, walls and floor—all radiating cold and the stink of stale sweat and urine. I walked around the walls, and arrived back at the door. Nothing. It was a concrete box with a hole in the floor in one corner. I thought about yelling at Frieda t
hat she was wasting her time because I didn’t know anything, and that’s when I realised that there were no cameras. Not a single cc-eye. That meant that whatever happened in this room was deniable. More than that—it wasn’t a room for gathering evidence, it was a room for scaring the shit out of people. It was doing a good job on me, and no one had even arrived yet.
It might have been summer outside, but it was ice cold in that room. The floor was too cold to sit on, so I wandered around the edge of it trying and failing to keep warm while I waited. And waited. And waited. On Southside you get used to waiting because there you wait for everything, especially if it’s coming from Cityside: food, medicine, permits for traveling to Cityside as well as for who can work there and under what conditions. I had no clue how much time was going by: it was long enough for me to get very cold, and plenty long enough to get me thinking about the people who’d been in the room before me, and wondering what had happened to them. I didn’t have to wonder too hard; I had many Breken stories of the Marsh to keep me company. And of course, the one closest to home—the one my father hadn’t told me.
Minutes then hours of freezing in the semi-dark ticked by, and I thought, what if these minutes and hours turned into days and weeks and months, years even. How would I cope? How would anyone? What if the only people you ever saw were the ones bringing the occasional tray of food, and syringes packed with ‘truth-telling’ drugs? You could be fairly sure that you’d betray your friends under the hammer of those drugs. And what if you found out while you were here that you’d not only betrayed your friends, but you’d lost your wife and your kid? You would be completely alone. You’d despair, wouldn’t you? What could possibly keep you going?
Revenge might. Hope for revenge. But that’s not what I’d seen in my father. Strategic, determined and utterly single-minded, he was all those, but I’d never seen him vengeful. What then? A promise. Suppose you made a promise to yourself here in the dark, that if you ever got out you would pour everything you had into the cause they’d made you betray.
Suddenly the lights blazed up and left me flinching. When I could see again, a light metal table and two chairs had appeared. Frieda was standing inside the door with Jono at her shoulder. He held out a chair for her and she sat down. Jono was in the black uniform now, same as Dash, and he looked huge and solid, as if he ate often and worked out even more. His eyes flicked over me then returned to a blank, straight-ahead stare.
Frieda pointed to the chair opposite her and said, ‘Sit down, please.’
I thought about retreating and refusing to talk to her, but Jono would have other ideas. Some things are worth a useless act of defiance, but this wasn’t one of them. Besides, there were things I wanted to know. I sat.
Frieda smiled her thin smile and placed her hands, one on top of the other, on the table. ‘Nikolai Stais,’ she said.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Still alive, no thanks to you. Do you know how many people died in your latest attack?’
‘Time of war,’ she said smoothly. ‘How did you get out of Moldam?’
‘Twenty-eight people,’ I said. ‘At least. Twenty-eight on the night, probably more by the time I left.’
‘When you left,’ she said, musing. ‘And how did you leave?’
‘I flew.’
She tutted and shook her head. ‘I shall have to punish someone for their failure to maintain a simple cordon.’
‘What’s it for?’ I asked, because anything was worth a try.
She considered for a moment then said, ‘Since you ask, I’ll tell you. It’s going to end this seemingly endless war. I intend to bring it all to a close within a matter of days.’
Days. Not good. I said, ‘A ceasefire could have brought it to a close a week ago.’
She gave a little shake of her head. ‘I intend to bring it to a close on my terms.’
‘How?’ I asked.
But that she didn’t answer. There was a knock on the door, and Dash came in and whispered in her ear. Frieda nodded, murmured, ‘Oh, good,’ and looked even more pleased with herself than usual. Dash left without looking at me.
‘What’s the point of bringing me here?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘I’m less interested in what you know than in what you can find out,’ she said.
Whatever that meant. I didn’t ask.
I said, ‘Don’t expect my father to come for me. He won’t.’
Her eyebrows rose. ‘Actually, I think you’re wrong about that. But I have a quicker way of getting what I want than tracking down your father, who is proving, I must say, to be rather elusive.’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘I think he would come for you, but he knows our ways here and has built up, shall we say, some measure of resistance to them.’
Unlike me, I thought. Not reassuring.
‘But in fact,’ she sat back, ‘I don’t want to trade you for your father. I want to persuade you to join us. I’m a fair person. I’m giving you a chance. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you take it.’ The eyebrows went up, the mouth tried to smile again, but that wasn’t its natural state and the attempt was short lived. ‘What do you say?’ she said. ‘Now that you know the facts about your mother, you’ve no reason to oppose us.’
‘I don’t know the facts about my mother, and I have twenty-eight reasons to oppose you,’ I said. ‘And that’s just in the last week.’
‘Oh, please. That’s no argument. Southside has plenty of blood on its hands.’
‘Southside is prepared to talk.’
‘Only because it’s losing. And it is going to lose, make no mistake. Why tether yourself to a losing side that you only encountered a few months ago? So your mother was Breken—so what? She made the right choice. Listen, Nikolai, your mother—’
‘Don’t talk to me about my mother!’ I said, louder than was maybe wise.
Jono made a move towards me.
But Frieda said, ‘Now, now. Calm down. Thank you, Agent.’
Jono returned to his post behind her shoulder, but now he was staring at me as though he was sizing me up for dismemberment.
I pushed my chair back and walked to the far wall.
Frieda said, ‘Loyalty is admirable, but you cannot be loyal to both your father and your mother. You must choose.’
But I wasn’t thinking about loyalty right then. Standing against that wall, feeling its cold seep into me, I was thinking about the people who’d been in this room before me, including, possibly, my father. People whose sweat was ingrained in the walls and floor, people who’d cried here and bargained and bled. Some must have died here: we held memorials on Southside for those who went into the Marsh and never came out. And I knew, too, from half-heard conversations, that some people left and died later, unable to live with the bargains they made here. Who would be next? Mr Corman, if he stood in the doorway of his bookshop and defied the bulldozers? Those behind the posters, who were trying to get the real news out?
‘Well?’ said Frieda. ‘I don’t have time to waste. What do you think?’
I said, ‘I think that if you need a room like this to run your city, you can count me out.’
She shook her head. ‘You are naive and foolish. It’s time you saw the world for what it is.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Like all those people who are deserting the city so they don’t have to watch what happens next? They’re not so keen on seeing the world for what it is, even though they’re the ones who could change it.’
She looked at me impatiently, ‘I’m not getting anywhere, am I? Time for a new approach.’
She nodded at Jono who took a step back and knocked on the door.
It opened and Dash came in. And with her, Lanya.
CHAPTER 21
My heart lurched and all the breath leaked out of me. Lanya looked around, defiant. She didn’t even come up to Jono’s shoulder but she was ready for a fight. Her eyes locked on mine and she mouthed, ‘I’m okay.’
No, I thought. Neither of us is okay.
Frieda said, ‘How are those ideals now? Let’s see if you can hold onto them in the real world.’
I barely heard. My heart was hammering too loud.
Dash moved back to stand guard by the door and Lanya came across the room holding out her hand. I grasped it, held it tight.
‘Now,’ said Frieda. ‘Let’s talk, seriously this time, about what you want. What you both want. Southside is beaten, you know this to be true. But you want a future, perhaps together, worthwhile work, food, money, a place to live. I can give you that.’
Sure you can, I thought. But not for nothing. ‘For what?’ I said. ‘What do you get?’
‘Something very simple. We need to locate the Breken sympathisers here on Cityside. They call themselves One City. They aren’t Breken, they’re misguided Citysiders, clinging to an old cause while the world moves on. We are going to rebuild and revitalise the city. You can help with that. The bridges will open. People from Southside will move freely: they’ll work here, even live here. A new start.’ She held up a hand. ‘Don’t answer yet. Think for a minute. Imagine how it might be.’
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