Today I would find Mace, and make a plan. By tonight it would be in play. Soon she would be out of there. Soon. The clock was ticking down. Thursday already. Far too fast, it would be Friday midnight, and she would be lost.
I hurried down the steps and across the road into the alleyway with the Break the Breken Banks posters. I was halfway down it when footsteps pounded behind me. I swung round and came face to face with Raffael.
‘I was waiting, on the street, for you,’ he said. ‘Hiding. Since last night. Many hours.’
‘All night?’
He nodded.
‘What for?’
‘My sister. You can help us find her.’
He was watching me with this expectant look on his face, as though I was about to conjure his sister out of the morning air.
I shook my head. ‘No. I’ve got something else I have to do. Ask the Hendrys. Ask your friends at the Marsh.’
He gazed at me, processing what I’d said and realising it wasn’t the answer he needed. He looked up at the sky and took a breath.
I said, ‘Sorry,’ and turned away, but he called after me.
‘You do not know what is coming.’
That stopped me. I turned back to him. ‘What did you say?’
He came up to me, close and dead serious. He was as tall as me so he could stare me straight in the eye. He said quietly, ‘You do not know what is coming.’
As a veiled threat, it was a show stopper. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
He stepped back. ‘Help me. Then I help you.’
But he wasn’t very good at threatening trade-offs because then he resorted to, ‘Please! Please help us. We cannot ask the Security.’
‘Why not? You’ve been working right next to them.’
‘We…we do not trust them.’
Fair enough, I thought. Trust is in short supply and I really don’t trust you.
‘Then why are you working in the Marsh?’ I said.
His stare narrowed. ‘This is not our choice. You do not know.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I don’t. Tell me.’
‘It is…complicated,’ he said. ‘I could tell you.’ The pause. The expectant look.
‘If I help you.’
He nodded.
I so did not need this. I stared at the scrawled-on Break the Breken posters and listened to the city waking up around us: a gate slammed across the road, an underground garage door whined, and a car revved up a ramp and out onto the street. Time was in a hurry. I was too, but it was still early for Mace to be about. I sighed.
‘All right. Come with me. I’m looking for a friend who’s a Southsider. If we find him he might know someone who can help you get across a bridge and into Moldam.’
Raffael’s face lit up. ‘Yes! Yes! Thank you!’
‘But,’ I said, ‘You have to tell me what the hell is going on.’
He nodded, serious again. ‘I will do that.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s find my friend. You can tell me on the way.’
The Inkwell was just opening its doors. I got a coffee for us both and asked the guy who brought it if he’d seen George Macey about.
‘Macey? Nah, man, we don’t serve shanty scum in here no more. Since they bombed the shit out of Tornmoor? Hell, no. Why are you after him? Owe you money or something?’
I shrugged.
‘Try the Stag,’ he said. ‘That’s where they hang out, the leftovers, if they haven’t run back over the river. Only place that’ll serve ’em now.’
The Stag and Poacher, he meant—a seedy little bar over Torrens Hill way. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Watch your back, though,’ he said helpfully. ‘Stab you as soon as look at you, that lot.’ He went off to serve Citysiders.
Raffael watched this conversation, frowning slightly as he concentrated on the Anglo. ‘Tell me about Nomu,’ he said. ‘Is she all right? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s okay. Wherever she’s been, it hasn’t been great, but she’s being looked after in Moldam. She’ll be fine.’ I hoped that was true. ‘Now, tell me what’s going on in the Marsh.’
But he was still thinking about Nomu. ‘I should have looked after her better. We had never been outside the Dry before we came here. She is a—’ he searched for a word ‘—a fierce person. Clever and fierce.’ He spread his arms in a wide grasping motion. ‘She wanted to do everything and see everything. There were dinners and parties. And our minders said we must have new clothes and new hair styles and, for Nomu, face paint, to look like the city women.’ He shrugged mournfully. ‘I was the big brother. I was too…’ he dragged his hands down his cheeks and pulled a sour face. ‘You know? And the more I was like this, the more she became wild. As though she wished to take it all in, all the food and wine and richness, and then to—’ he made a violent motion with his hands, as though he was spewing it all out. ‘She stopped coming to work with us in the laboratory. Then one day we came home and she was gone.’
This wasn’t telling me what I needed to know. I finished my coffee and stood up. ‘Keep talking,’ I said. ‘But let’s go.’
He gazed around the cafe with a thoughtful look on his face. ‘I do not understand. You speak Anglo, you know the city, you went to school with Fyffe. To me you are a Citysider.’
‘I lived here once.’
‘But you found Nomu over the water, among the savages.’
‘I live there now.’
He gave me half a smile. ‘You do not seem to be a savage.’
‘There’s time.’
‘Explain to me,’ he stared into his empty cup, ‘There is a war. You must choose a side, yes?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you about Nomu. Now you tell me what’s coming.’
CHAPTER 25
The city morning was bright and busy. Shopkeepers were swinging open their doors and stacking crates of food outside to entice customers inside: potatoes with the dirt still clinging to them, apples that looked like they’d been individually polished and bunches of carrots with their green leafy tops. It still surprised me, the amount of food on view here.
‘This way,’ I said, and we headed for the rundown, rat-infested squats of Torrens Hill by way of the back lanes that were too narrow for army vehicles.
‘A fold in a hub in the Dry,’ Raffael told me. ‘That is our home.’
‘A fold?’ I asked.
‘Like the tents of our ancestors,’ he closed his palms together. ‘Folded when it was time to move on.’
‘Okay. Go on.’
‘Thirty folds make our hub. One hundred families in each fold. We do not move on. We have water, so there is no need. It is in the rocks deep under the desert. We are careful with it, and our science is strong, so we can manage the water and also the heat and light of the Dry to grow food and keep animals—for ourselves and to trade with towns far away—and we trade our knowledge too, our science. We have a good life: perhaps…narrow, you would say? But there is safety in the hub and there is adventur
e outside it in the Dry for those who wish it.
‘Three months ago a traveller came to our fold. We welcomed him—travellers bring news and we’re glad to see them. After he had stayed two weeks, our people began to fall sick. A fever caught them and they bled inside, under their skin.’ He rubbed the back of his hand. ‘In their chests, even in their eyes. Death came quickly, in three days or four. Six people in one week, thirteen in two.’
He spread his hands in front of him and stared at them as though he wanted more fingers to count the number of his dead. ‘It was nothing we had seen before.’ He closed his fists. ‘We had no answer, so we sent out word for help. And help came. From here. From this city. Men came with a drug that stopped the deaths, and with a vaccine. They promised it would make our people safe. For this we were very grateful. But then they said, “There is a price.”’
‘There’s a surprise. What price?’
‘Space in our hub. An entire fold of their own. They are escaping a war, they said. We said that we have no room for them, and yet they demand it in return for giving us knowledge of the drug and the vaccine. What could we say? We said, yes. And here we are, working in Pitkerrin Marsh, learning how to make the drugs and vaccine that will save our people. And soon, twenty-five of your families will come to the Dry and take our fold. And we must make way: one hundred families must find another place to live because your people—’
‘They’re not my people.’
‘Because these people are greedy. More than greedy. The sickness was no mistake. The man who brought it knew he brought it, and the city men knew too. They pretended to be strangers to each other, but Nomu saw them together. She was outside climbing an old watchtower; she saw them laughing.’
I walked and thought: a virus deployed as blackmail by a bunch of Cityside’s most powerful people. Why? What were they so desperate to grab out in the Dry? Or, looked at another way, what were they desperate to leave behind here?’
The closer we got to the Stag and Poacher the seedier things became: rows of tiny shops sat cramped together, dingy with neglect. The Hotel Grande was grand no more and looked like it had become a squat for people who couldn’t afford a room next door in the creepy Best Boarding House, or Beast Boarding House as the sign now had it. Pawn shops displayed people’s treasures in their barred windows, and chipped, badly painted signs were wired to streetlamps or hung from doorways, offering to buy (no questions asked) and quick money, a way out of your troubles. People lounged on the steps and in doorways, smoking and watching us with drugged-out blandness. Raffael got the jitters and kept turning in circles trying to look behind us and ahead at the same time. I was more worried about the stares from cc-eyes and was glad to see that a lot of them had been knocked off their perches and dangled blind in mid air.
Raffael stopped and turned to me. ‘They think they have defeated us, but once we have the vaccine we will fight back. When these people come to the Dry there may not be the welcome they expect.’ He gave a little nod, as though this was the end of his story, and walked on.
‘Hold up!’ I jogged after him. ‘What does that mean—there may not be the welcome they expect?’
He glanced at me. ‘People of ours are dead—friends, family—and our fold is taken from us. Should there not be a reckoning?’
‘What kind of reckoning?’
‘I cannot say. It is not for me to decide.’
I thought about Fyffe walking into that.
‘Wait,’ I stopped.
He turned back, eyebrows raised.
‘Fyffe was kind to you,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for her you wouldn’t know about Nomu. You wouldn’t be here now.’
‘That’s true. But—’
He shrugged.
‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘You can’t just shrug that off. D’you still want my help?’
His shoulders sagged. ‘Yes, of course. But it’s not for me—’
‘To decide. Yeah, you said.’ I looked up the alley and pointed. ‘See that?’
‘What?’
I picked up a stone and hurled it hard. It clattered off the cc-eye. ‘That,’ I said. ‘That is a camera. There’s probably one of those for every five or six people living here. Oh shit, it’s not dead.’
The camera was swivelling towards us.
‘Come on!’
We sprinted into the next alley. Two cameras there were also on the move, as though the buildings had alien eyestalks and were coming to life. We kept running till we got to Mercers Lane where all the cameras had been yanked from their roosts.
We slowed to a walk, and I said, ‘The people who put those cameras up—the Security that you don’t trust anymore—they don’t trust you either. They’re watching and waiting; they’re always ready for anyone who wants to fight back. They are not the kind of people who are going to bow to your so-called reckoning. They’re not going to say, “Oops, sorry, won’t happen again and by the way here’s your fold back.” It doesn’t end like that. There’ll be a basement in the Marsh where they’re working right now on a different version of the sickness and a new vaccine because they know you’ll want revenge and they will be a step ahead of you. Then what happens? It goes on and on and it gets bigger and bloodier every time. And before you know it, you might as well be here firing rockets at each other over the river. Forever.’
I stopped. Raffael did too—I didn’t know if he’d followed the rant, but we’d arrived at the Stag and Poacher so I didn’t care right then. The little pub looked very shut. I tried to get my head back around the reason I was here: find Macey, and through Macey find One City, and then? But then the path diverged depending on what I decided to do with that knowledge. I was carefully not thinking about that.
Raffael stood at my shoulder and said, ‘The sickness is a weapon more accurate and powerful than any rocket. Whoever has control of it and its vaccine does not need rockets because they can decide who gets sick and who does not. The Security has spent all this time making it. Do you think they will use it only on us?’
CHAPTER 26
Pieces of the puzzle were slotting together fast now. Frieda had a bioweapon on a leash. Alongside that, Cityside’s powerful families were desperate to get out of town, and Moldam was effectively under quarantine. I said to Raffael, ‘Do you know what disease it is? Does it have a name?’
He shrugged. ‘It is a hemorrhagic virus. We call it HV–C6.’
HVC. Havoc. I felt cold to my bones. Frieda was planning to end the war by ending Moldam. She’d set it up perfectly: inside the lockdown, Moldam’s medics were stretched, food was short, and people were camping on the street. What better way for a virus to spread unchecked?
And the deserters were sufficiently worried about it all going wrong that they were getting out.
My choice was starkly simple. I could work with One City to save Moldam from a deadly epidemic, or I could betray them to save Lanya. Whatever I decided, I had practically no time to do it. If the disease wasn’t in Moldam yet it must be only days away. And days is all I had to get Lanya out: two days and counting down.
Macey was my gatekeeper. I had to find him first, and soon. Now would be best. I crossed the road to the Stag and Poacher.
Round the back we found an open door and this huge guy lugging out armfuls of empty bottles and dropping them with a crash into a bin.
The Stag is a place where the ambiance rears up and grabs you by the throat as soon as you walk in. The stink of old beer and cigarette smoke has soaked into every surface: the stained lino, the brown walls, the yellow-brown lampshades, the faded black-and-white photos of old horseraces and even older ball games. The glory days of the Stag and Poacher are long, long gone.
Inside, we found a solitary person at a corner table with half a bottle of whisky at his elbow and some papers in front of him. He folded them away fast when he saw us. He had pale skin and greasy grey hair pulled back in a tight ponytail.
He turned a narrow stare on us. ‘We’re not open yet! Scram!’
I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. ‘We’re looking for George Macey. Has he been about?’
He sat back, still with the stare. ‘Who?’
‘George Macey. You know. Security guard. Used to work at Tornmoor.’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Nik Stais,’ I said.
His face was unreadable. ‘That so?’
‘Have you seen him? Recently?’
‘Nope.’
‘When did you see him last?’
‘Couldn’t say.’
‘C’mon. Really?’
‘Really. Scoot, kid. You’re not old enough to be in here.’
‘I’m not moving till you tell me where he is. I know he used come here and I know you know him. I just want to find him. Look.’ I opened my jacket and arms wide. ‘I’m harmless. I want to talk to him, that’s all.’
‘That’s too bad. Can’t help you.’ He raised his voice, ‘Salvatore!’
The guy who’d been clearing the bottles lumbered into the room. ‘These kids are done here.’
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