Besides, if I told them what the deal was with Frieda I’d lose control of anything that happened. They’d stop me selling them out, and so they should.
I ran and thought and thought and ran. At least running felt like doing something. We stopped on the outskirts of Moldam and eyed a patrol guarding the barbed wire looped across the River Road intersection. A bribe might work for getting us in, but getting out would be harder.
I went up to one of the soldiers and told him in Anglo what I wanted to do. He laughed at first, then I explained that if he didn’t let me in now and out again in an hour, he would be making Security Director Kelleran a very unhappy person. There was confusion. Then consultation with the rest of the patrol. Then more consultation up the line of command via a comms unit. I don’t know how high they went, but finally they arrived at bemused agreement and one of them clipped away some barbed wire and let us in.
It was late afternoon. I wanted to deliver Raffael to Levkova and get back over the river before curfew. Part of me hoped she’d be out and I could leave him on the doorstep with a message explaining who he was. I didn’t want to see her, because I figured she’d look right through me and know straight away that something was badly wrong.
Levkova answered the door and let us in without a word but with quick pressure on my arm, which was as close to an expression of affection as she ever got. ‘This is Raffael,’ I said and started to explain who he was, but she was nodding already.
‘Nomu was here,’ she said. ‘She’s gone over the river with your father. You’ve only missed them by a few hours.’
Raffael was delighted. ‘She is well then? She is safe!’
Levkova inclined her head. ‘She is well, but not safe. No one is safe right now. Please sit down.’
She gave me the long appraising gaze I’d been dreading and I couldn’t meet her eye, but whatever she thought about that she kept to herself.
She said to Raffael, ‘Your sister knows things that are dangerous to know. But thanks to her, we know them now too. A Cityside squad has been here looking for her. I don’t know how they found out she was here, but, fortunately, they came too late. You know that they do not mean to simply reunite her with your people?’
He looked at me. ‘I do not understand. Why not?’
Levkova clasped her hands on the table and began to explain. I liked Levkova, I respected her and I owed her a lot, but looking at her now, I thought of Frieda and the way the two of them wove their web of strategy and counter strategy from one side of the river to the other. They had been playing this game, fighting this battle, for years. It was impossible for me to grasp hold of a thread of it and not get hopelessly entangled in all of it.
Levkova was saying, ‘They are experimenting at the Marsh on a virus. Nomu has seen these experiments and seen people die because of them.’
‘Operation Havoc,’ I said. ‘You know what it is now?’
Levkova nodded, ‘And we know that it’s not only punishment for the uprising. It’s also a lesson to the rest of Southside from Cityside. Behave or else.’
I said, ‘Do you think it’s here yet?’
She shook her head. ‘Hard to know. No one’s been reported sick, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here. I think, though, that there has been a delay in its release in order to accommodate the departure of certain of Cityside’s families to the Dry.’
She gave Raffael a small smile. ‘Your people have done us a favour in refusing to leave without Nomu.’
‘They’re not going to wait much longer,’ I said. ‘They’re arranging a memorial service for her.’ I stood up. ‘I’m going back over the river. Do we have a plan?’
‘Nomu is our key,’ she said. ‘She’s agreed to help us make an alliance with the Dry-dwellers and to expose what’s going on. You must find her and your father. I can tell you where they’ve gone.’
She hunted for a pen and paper and wrote down the address for me. She said, in Breken, ‘Read it. Burn it. Tell no one, not even—’ she smiled at Raffael ‘—your companion.’
The note gave me a familiar name and address. Of course it did. It was one of the addresses Mace had given me: the very people I was supposed to be handing over to Frieda. I found some matches on the mantelpiece, lit one and burned the scrap of paper, dropping it into the fireplace, where it turned to glowing ash and smoked out. I watched it and imagined the Moldam settlement burning to the ground as people tried to cleanse it of a plague: terror and chaos as people tried to leave and weren’t allowed to. Piles of infected bodies. The rest of Southside watching and learning.
Something flickered at the corner of my brain—something about learning lessons. Who was this lesson for, exactly? Southside, obviously. But even with Moldam quarantined, everyone in Cityside and Southside was potentially at risk and would think themselves at risk. Frieda was offering disaster and reprieve: here’s a virus, with a vaccine if you behave, minus the vaccine if you don’t.
And then I realised I might have my chance after all. A small chance. Born, it’s true, out of disaster and terrible danger. And small, very, very small, but a chance nonetheless. What I realised was this: I had a way to change the rules of Frieda’s game. She worked by picking on people one at a time, identifying their breaking point—most likely, the people that they loved—and applying intolerable pressure by threatening the lives and sanity of those people. That’s what she’d done to my mother: choose between your husband and your son. That’s what she’d done to me: choose between this person who is precious to you and your father and his people. And it worked because you couldn’t, by the nature of the deals she struck, tell anyone that this was happening. The very people that you’d look to for help were the ones you had to betray.
But whoever had decided to use this virus—maybe Frieda, maybe her superiors—had sown seeds that made its release everyone’s urgent problem, not mine alone.
I turned around. Levkova and Raffael were watching me. She said, ‘Do you want to tell the rest of us now?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I guess I do. You wanted to know how a Cityside squad could turn up here looking for Nomu. It’s my fault. I told Frieda Kelleran yesterday—as good as told her—that Nomu was here.’
‘You told her!’ Shocking Levkova wasn’t something you did every day. ‘Why?’
‘Lanya’s in the Marsh,’ I said. ‘I have until tomorrow night to get her out. Frieda will let her go for—you can guess what.’
Her gaze narrowed. ‘The name I just gave you.’
‘I had it already. And another one.’
‘I see.’ She was quiet for a moment, watching me. ‘What are you going to do?’
I managed to look her straight in the eye for the first time since we’d arrived. ‘I’m going to find my father,’ I said. ‘And Nomu, and whoever else is over there who can help, and we are going to break Frieda’s rules.’
CHAPTER 29
Raffael and I got back over the river as the first siren for curfew was sounding. Once the guards on the Cityside bridge had searched us for weapons and taken the money I offered, they told us to hotfoot it indoors before the second siren, and that was that. We took off.
It was dark by the time we arrived in a rundown street at the back of Bethun, close to the he
ath. No light shone in any window. I tapped on a door, and after a nerve-racking minute it was opened by a tall woman with a lined face, white hair and dark brown eyes.
I said, ‘Are you Anna? Tasia Levkova sent us. I’m Nik Stais. This is Raffael.’
She studied my face and a smile bloomed on hers. ‘Nik Stais,’ she said, nodding. ‘Yes. Yes, you are. Come in.’
She closed out the night. ‘This way!’
She led us down the unlit hallway and opened a door with a flourish and a cry of ‘Good news! Look who’s here!’
We walked in to a candlelit room crowded with antique furniture, paintings on the walls and a piano in one corner with sheet music strewn over it.
My father was there talking to an older man, and Nomu was there too, sitting on a rocking chair. She cried, ‘Raff!’ and flew past me to her brother. She seized him in a hug and burst into tears on his shoulder. They spoke in a rush of their own language, then stood each other at arm’s length and made some kind of formal greeting with bows and quiet words and then that dissolved into laughter and tears and hugging again. It made us all smile.
I said, ‘Hello,’ to my father.
Got a nod and a handshake.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said. ‘Meet Samuel.’ I shook the older man’s hand.
Raffael and Nomu sat on the couch with their heads together and ignored the rest of us.
One happy ending at least.
We ate a feast that night: a roasted chicken, carrots and green beans, potatoes tossed in butter, fresh bread, then figs and dates stuffed with walnuts, and we drank a lip-pursing dry white wine and then strong sweet coffee. Anna said we must celebrate every small victory, so we toasted peace and family reunions and then, over the crumbs of our meal, she said, ‘Now, to work.’
Around the table we brought together everything we knew about Operation Havoc: the virus, the vaccine, the quarantine of Moldam, the exodus to the Dry, and the people of ours in the Marsh.
Samuel sat back and whistled. ‘Where to start?’
‘With Lanya,’ I said.
He had a wrinkled face with craggy white eyebrows overhanging dark brown eyes.
‘You’re very sure of that, young man.’
‘By Friday midnight it will be too late for her.’ I looked at the old clock on the mantelpiece. ‘We’ve got twenty-six hours to get her out.’
Samuel’s wrinkles grimaced. ‘We can’t bring down the Marsh in a single day, lad.’
‘I think we can,’ I said.
They exchanged looks. Then my father said, ‘Frieda offered you a deal?’
I nodded.
‘Which was?’
‘You can guess.’
‘I can. It’s what she does. And you came here instead of going to her with this address.’
He looked at Samuel, who nodded slowly and said, ‘Ah well, for that we’re grateful. So we must try.’
By midnight we’d thrashed our ideas around and come up with something that looked like a workable plan. Anna took Nomu and Raffael to show them where they could sleep and returned for Samuel but he was deep in discussion with my father about the ethics of some political movement I’d never heard of and she raised her eyes to heaven and smiled at me. I helped her clear the table and as I piled the dishes by the kitchen sink I said, ‘Thank you—that food was fantastic.’
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me directly in the eye. ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘So like your mother. All evening I have been sitting at the table wishing she could see you now.’
Her eyes got misty and she turned away to run water.
I hunted for a teatowel—the kitchen was like the dining room, crowded with old stuff, all of it hard used, but beautiful too: a wooden dresser with blue-and-white plates and cups, a work table made of a great hunk of wood whose surface had worn unevenly, a solid, ancient-looking oven. It felt well lived in; it invited you to relax and tell the story of what you’d done with your day. I was trying to work out how to ask Anna about my parents, but she was way ahead of me.
‘You should talk to your father,’ she said before I’d opened my mouth. She looked at me with smiling dark eyes. ‘About your mother. Why not? Are you afraid to?’
‘No, of course not.’ I dried a plate and put it up on a shelf. ‘A bit…maybe.’
‘Talk to him. You both deserve that conversation.’
When we went back to the dining room Anna hooked her arm through Samuel’s and said, ‘Come, old man.’ He grumbled but he stood up, grunted goodnight and they left.
My father hunted in his pockets for a cigarette, found one, stared at it and put it away unlit. He saw me watching and said, ‘Saving it for when I really need it.’
I sat down opposite him at the table and said, ‘Tell me about Elena and the security services.’
He took the cigarette out again.
‘Funny,’ I said.
He snorted a laugh, then grew serious. ‘Elena. Your mother was Breken, you know that. She grew up on Cityside in the days when that was still allowed. She was a gifted linguist—she spoke five languages fluently and could handle another two or three, no trouble. And, yes, she worked for the security services.’
He lit the cigarette, waved out the match and drew long squinting at me through the smoke.
‘So did I.’
A bunch of things went ‘click’ in my head.
He waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t he looked at me closely and said, ‘You’re not surprised.’
‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘Frieda hates you. She hates you. Where does that come from except from you turning your back on something you believed in together.’ I thought of Dash’s scorn, Jono’s contempt. Not so different. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I grew up on Cityside,’ he said. ‘I went into the army when I was about your age, but after a few years I applied to be a security agent and went to the Marsh to learn how. That’s where I met Elena. We were both working in the Marsh when you were born. But then Daniel Montier was captured and brought in. He’d been leading the Southside uprising at that time and I was assigned to follow his interrogation.’
He sighed and ran a hand through his short greying hair. ‘Montier was a wise, intelligent, committed man with a gift for leadership and a desire for peace and we slowly destroyed his mind. Elena was the interpreter for his interrogation. In the end she and I conspired to get him out. Not soon enough though.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘He was never again the man who went into the Marsh. We lost a leader we sorely needed. Your mother and I were found out soon enough and we had to get out.’
‘Why didn’t Elena go over the river then?’ I asked. ‘Why did she stay here?’
‘She didn’t stay here. But Southside was being shelled every day and it was too dangerous to take you there, so she took you west to a safehouse.’
‘Oh. What happened?’
He smoked the last of the cigarette and pitched it into the fireplace. ‘It wasn’t safe enough,’ he said. ‘They found her and took you.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t reme
mber.’
His smile was grim. ‘I do.’
‘Why don’t I remember? I remember being with her when someone raided our rooms. I remember standing with Frieda at the gates of Tornmoor. I don’t remember anything in between.’
‘You know what they’re good at. Work it out.’
‘They drugged me? They drugged a four year old?’
‘That would be my guess.’
I put the pieces together. ‘So Frieda makes a deal with Elena and Elena hands you over. For me. To get me back.’
He nodded. ‘We talked about it and that’s what we came to.’
‘You knew!’
‘Of course. I told them I’d come in, alone, but no, they had to send someone to bring me in. They sent De Faux.’
The man who’d tried to assassinate Commander Vega in the winter just gone. I remembered Levkova telling me about him.
‘He killed Daniel Montier,’ I said.
My father nodded. ‘May he roast in his own private corner of hell.’
‘And Elena?’ I asked. ‘What happened to her?’
‘I never found out. And, believe me, I tried.’
‘Do you think she’s dead?’
He glanced at me. ‘I do.’
Silence fell between us. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It came out as a whisper.
‘I am too,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t know her better, or for longer. She was remarkable.’
I said, ‘“Your dead stay with you.” That’s what you said to me on the Mol last winter. “They pitch camp in your mind.”’ I looked at him. ‘She has stayed with me.’
He smiled a genuine smile. ‘And me.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We get Lanya out.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we do.’
Havoc Page 18
