Lanya spoke, in halting Anglo. ‘You sent rockets to our town.’
Frieda inclined her head. ‘That was regrettable, but necessary. A message to an old generation of leaders. I’m offering this to you, a new generation.’
Lanya nodded.
‘So you understand?’ said Frieda. ‘You see what’s possible?’
‘I do,’ said Lanya. ‘Will you tear down the wire around Moldam?’
‘In time.’
‘Tell us what it’s for,’ I said.
Lanya said, ‘Why not tear it down now?’
Frieda shook her head. ‘I said, in time. You must answer on the information you have.’
‘Then my answer is no,’ said Lanya. Her hand tightened in mine. ‘I do not speak for Nik.’
Frieda raised her eyebrows at me and I said, ‘What do you think? No, of course.’
She said, ‘You are foolish, both of you.’ She spoke to Jono. ‘Take the girl to Ward 23.’
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘I can give you something else.’
Frieda held up a hand, and Jono paused halfway to Lanya. ‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘What would that be.’
‘I know where Nomu is,’ I said.
I was watching Jono about to plant his hands on Lanya so I barely registered that Frieda gave a little start and moved her hands off the table out of sight to her lap. Several seconds went by. Then she said, ‘That’s irrelevant for our purposes—’
‘But not for her people,’ I said.
She stood up abruptly. ‘Don’t interrupt me! You don’t get to bargain.’ She nodded to Jono. ‘Get on then.’
‘No!’
I moved between Lanya and Jono. He slammed his fist into my gut. I doubled up and he drove his knee into my temple, and then I was breathing floor dust.
He said something like ‘Pathetic’ and stepped around me. Through a blur I saw him grab Lanya’s arm, and they were out of the room before I could see clearly or stop gasping.
I climbed onto my hands and knees, pulling in air. I heard Frieda say, ‘So like your father.’ She stood and watched me until I was breathing evenly again. I was fairly sure that if I stood up I’d fall over, so I sat on the ground and looked at her.
She sighed. ‘I did try. You are my witness that I tried. How like your father you are. So stubborn. Uselessly, stupidly stubborn. You have forced my hand. Here’s what you will do now. You will find a way into the network of One City sympathisers and report back to me on the whereabouts of their leadership. For every day that you fail to locate these subversives, we will inject that young woman with a cocktail of sodium pentothal and other useful drugs. Sadly it’s not as reliable as we would like; it can take time to get a result, so we’ll be starting immediately. Even so, perhaps she will be unreceptive. I rather think she will.’ Frieda paused, watching me, to check she was making an impact. She was.
She went on, ‘That means we’ll have to escalate the drug regime day by day. On the third day—Friday—she’ll start to hallucinate. By Saturday she’ll no longer be able to tell dreams from reality and her personality will begin to change, permanently, in unfortunate ways. Shall I go on? No, I can see that you understand. I’m going to send you out now, into the city, and the sooner you return with information—reliable information—of the One City network, the sooner we’ll stop the injections and you and your friend will be free to go. You have until Friday at about midnight before the irreparable harm begins. Sooner would be better for her, obviously.’
I thought about grabbing her and breaking her neck.
‘Why—’ I stopped and got my breath under control. ‘Why should I believe you—that you’ll let us go if I do what you want?’
She frowned, impatient with me. ‘Because you are living proof that I keep my word.’
I was staring at her like an idiot.
‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘Alive and well, and not a casualty of war.’
It was dawning on me, oh so slowly. I said, ‘You promised my mother.’
She didn’t answer.
‘You promised my mother that if she turned in my father and his network, you’d let me live.’
She inclined her head and watched me.
My mother’s choice was my choice now: betray the uprising and my father, or lose Lanya for good. I struggled to my feet and managed to stay there. I looked from Frieda’s self-satisfied face to Dash’s blank one.
I said to Dash, ‘Is this what you wanted?’
She stared straight ahead and said nothing.
I turned to Frieda. ‘Look, this is mad. You’ve got all those agents and the army at your back. If you can’t find them why do you think I can? Don’t you have a plant in there? You said you did.’
She smiled. ‘I did say that. We don’t, as it happens, have a presence in One City at the moment. You are about to be it. Doors will open for you, you’ll see. Take these.’ She handed me a bag with my watch and wallet and boots. ‘You’re a fool, like your father, but that’s your choice. Now you’re wasting time.’
Jono came back, and she said to him, ‘We’re done. He can go.’ She marched out the door.
I put my boots on, and when Jono came to grab me I swung an elbow and connected with his cheek. He yelled in surprise and in the nanosecond of advantage I had, I landed a fist on his face. It hurt like crazy, but was it ever gratifying. He staggered backwards and I put a boot in his belly. My advantage ended there. He grabbed my boot and wrenched me off balance. We landed on the floor and tore into each other, fists, feet, everything. It lasted longer than it would have once, but the short version is that he beat the shit out of me. Finally he had me pinned on the ground with his arm pressing on my throat. His nose was bloody and he was breathing hard, but he managed a sneer.
‘Temper, temper.’
I tried to push him off me. I had no chance.
Somewhere behind us Dash said, ‘Enough already. Get off him, Jono.’
Jono pressed harder on my throat till I was choking, and then he climbed off me. I sat up, my breath rasping, and watched him walk out the door. He was limping, but not much.
Dash said, ‘Well that was wasted effort. Stupid, both of you. Come with me. You can’t go out of here looking like that.’
I followed her to a sick bay where she gave me a towel and I splashed cold water on my face, washed off the blood.
‘You betrayed us,’ I said.
She handed me a bottle of antiseptic and didn’t answer.
‘So you owe us.’
I pressed on a cut lip and a grazed cheek and held a cold flannel to my left eye which was starting to swell. I glared at her with my working eye.
‘It wasn’t me that brought your friend in,’ she said. ‘You were both spotted yesterday on Sentinel Parade, so she was on a watch list.’ She paused. ‘We know she’s more to you than a friend.’
How the hell could they know that? ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘A friend is exactly what she is to me.’
‘Well, I can’t help her.’
I looked at the damage in the mirr
or. Not as bad as it could have been. Other damage was starting to make itself felt in my stomach and back, but there wasn’t anything to do but wear it. I leaned on the bench feeling sick.
‘Do you really not know that Frieda has plans for Moldam?’
‘No. It’s propaganda, Nik. Let it go.’
‘It’s not propaganda. Operation Havoc—go and look. Find out what it is.’
She sighed. ‘I can drive you into town, if you want.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why do you have to be like this?’
‘Because.’ I threw the towel on the floor.
We drove without exchanging a word and she let me off near St John’s Square. She said, ‘I’d say be careful, but you’d laugh.’
I said, ‘You owe me. I won’t forget.’ I slammed the door.
CHAPTER 22
I went to Clouden Street. Its houses basked in the golden glow of the late afternoon sun, smug, beautiful and bristling with security cameras, bars and barbed wire. Inside, there’d be no sign of any of that heavy fortressing: chandeliers would be bright above marble floors and staircases, tall windows and wide glass doors would be opening onto river views to catch the breeze, and kitchens would be busy with prep for dinners that would last late into the night because these people would all have curfew exemptions.
I walked up the middle of the street. I got yelled at by drivers of sleek black cars that slid past me and disappeared into underground garages, and I got frowned at, then pointedly ignored, by pedestrians hurrying past on their way home from work. The only time they stopped was to punch secret codes into wrought-iron gates and multi-lock front doors that opened silently to let them in and closed silently behind them. It was like walking through a virtual game where people vanish as soon as you lay eyes on them and every door shuts just as you reach it. A few times I saw people peering from windows, watching me, and one person took a photo. I stopped and bowed at him and he stepped back into the shadows.
I reached Number 11 without being arrested, climbed the steps and punched the doorbell. I was past caring who answered. The guard, Alan, as it turned out. He barked, ‘Yes?’ into the intercom.
I’d thought about summoning up bright and cheery and a story about being an old school friend of Fyffe’s but my battered face in the security camera would give the lie to that so I simply said, ‘Can I see Fyffe, please?’
He said, ‘Get lost,’ and flicked off the intercom.
I pounded on the door until he came and wrenched it open.
‘I said, get lost!’ he demanded.
I stuck a hand on the door before he could close it. ‘Please!’ I said. ‘It’s important.’
Fyffe’s voice came from the stairs behind him. ‘Alan? Who is it?’ Then her face peered around his bulk, and she said, ‘Oh! Come in, come in!’ and almost dragged me through the doorway.
The bodyguard wasn’t happy. He frisked me, hit on a few Jono-inflicted bruises, then followed us to the doors of the pool room and planted himself there while we went inside. The room was stifling; Fyffe pushed open the riverside doors and we left the guard behind and went out onto the wide balcony. We leaned on the glass barrier, trying to catch some breeze but the air was still and heavy with the day’s heat and the salt smell of decaying seaweed. To our right Fyffe’s neighbours were having a small elegant party on their balcony; half a dozen people were dressed for dinner, each with a glass in hand, chatting and laughing to the clink of bottles in buckets of ice. One of the women waved at Fyffe and she waved back, but moved away to the far corner of the balcony. I followed.
She said, ‘Lanya and I got to the posting but never got to talk to anyone because the army arrived. They rounded everyone up, even Mr Corman! Then they realised who I was and dropped me like I was poison, but they wouldn’t let Lanya go. I tried to stop them, I really tried. I threatened all kinds of things but they piled everyone into their trucks and left me standing on the roadside. I’ve spent all afternoon trying to find out where Lanya is. I went out to the Marsh, but I couldn’t get hold of Dash, so I left a message for her to call me.’ She studied my face. ‘She hasn’t yet. You look terrible. Tell me everything.’
I did, and she swore with un-Fyffe-like explicitness. ‘But Dash—’
‘Yeah, Dash. Tell me about it.’
Fyffe shook her head in disbelief. ‘She promised. She promised me! They can’t do this!’
‘Yes, they can. They can do whatever the hell they want.’
‘We’ll see about that. What are you going to do?’
‘I have no idea. None.’
‘I mean—are you going to look for the One City people? You could try Sentian again, but the place is kind of a ghost town, except for the army.’
‘Suppose I find them,’ I said. ‘What then? What am I supposed to do with that? I turn them in and they go to the Marsh. I don’t turn them in and Lanya—’ I stopped. Started again. ‘Everywhere I go takes me to a deadend where somebody’s hurt or killed.’
Glasses clinked next door and someone laughed long and high. Fyffe watched them for a moment and then said, ‘I’ll go and see Dash tomorrow and I’ll ask to see Lanya. I’ll demand to see her. I’ll wear Dash down and make her help.’ She looked at my bruises and said, ‘You should stay here tonight.’
Tonight seemed a long way away, with a lot of thinking to do before I got there. ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’
‘Please stay. And we’ll…we’ll…’ She was casting about but, like me, coming up with nothing.
‘We’ll what?’ I asked.
She screwed up her face. ‘I want to say we’ll work something out and it will be all right.’
I managed half a smile. ‘Go on, then.’
She smiled ruefully back. She was dressed in something long and pale and floaty; the setting sun turned it a faint red-gold.
She said, ‘I used to think there was always an answer, you know? Just do the right thing and the answer will pop up and be there for you. Her eyes brightened with tears. ‘But we did the right thing for Sol, didn’t we. Every step along the way we did the best thing we could think of.’
‘Do you think so?’
She looked surprised and blinked her tears away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. You did. I did. You don’t doubt that?’ She peered at me. ‘You do. Look at you. Well please don’t. It wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t mine either. We did the best we could, and we almost managed it.’ She dabbed at her eyes. ‘Not that that helps us now. We know the worst can happen, whatever we do. But, you know, maybe there are people along the way who can help and…and chances…there might be chances for us to take. We have to hope for that. Go forward a step at a time and watch for those people and those chances?’ She grimaced. ‘Best I can do. Sorry. It’s not much help. I wish you’d stay, you need food and sleep.’
Being kind may seem small compared to being brave but it’s not, and Fyffe was both of those.
I said, ‘You are a huge help. Always.’
‘Feeling pretty helpless right now. Still—’ she glanced at her watch ‘—the people from the Dry are coming for dinner tonight. Should I tell them about Nomu being safe? They’re expecting a memorial for her a
nd it seems wrong to keep them in the dark. I don’t think they’ll go running to Frieda.’
‘It won’t matter if they do. Frieda knows.’
Fyffe’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh no. How? Did Sandor—’
‘No. Nothing to do with Sandor.’ I stared out over the river. ‘I told her. Fy, I told her without a second thought. Our one chance to bargain for Moldam and I gave it away.’
All that time I’d spent thinking Sandor was a lowlife and here I was giving away our one great secret at the first hint of pressure.
‘You thought it would save Lanya?’
I nodded. ‘And you know what? Frieda barely noticed. “Irrelevant,” she said.’
Fyffe thought about that and shook her head. ‘That’s curious,’ she said. ‘It’s been huge, here, Nomu’s disappearance. It’s been top of the news for days. Look at this.’
She went back into the pool room and turned on a wall screen. She found a news channel and sped through its archive until it showed a picture of Nomu. ‘Look.’
She played though the footage: there was Nomu getting off the boat from the Dry, smiling shyly at the cameras and being hurried into one of those long black cars. She and her group were dressed in the loose, cream-coloured clothes of the Dry, but the next shots showed them arriving at some official function or other and this time her hair was curled and piled high, and she wore a bright flower-patterned dress and some very high-heeled red shoes that made her awkward on her feet. She waved nervously at the crowds as the group was ushered up some steps and inside someone’s fancy house.
‘We got invited to lots of these functions,’ said Fyffe. ‘Someone did a makeover on Nomu and her brother so she looks like one of us now, which is kind of a pity.’
Next came the distressed Dry-dwellers pleading for anyone who’d seen her to get in touch, and, finally, shots of plastic flowers and soft toys piled on the steps of an apartment building.
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