CHAPTER 30
I left Anna and Samuel’s house early on Friday morning and walked to the Marsh. Fog hovered at ground level across its flat fields and the sun was just up in a pale, clear sky—I figured it was light enough that they wouldn’t shoot me without asking a question or two first. The air was cool and damp and it would have been a good time to be out and walking if my heart hadn’t been hammering so loud and I didn’t feel queasy with fear.
I stopped at the guardhouse by one of the vehicle barriers and told the guy inside that I had a message for Director Kelleran. I handed him a sealed envelope and said I’d wait there for her reply. He called in a minion who beetled off with it to the main cluster of buildings. I imagined him knocking tentatively on a basement door where Frieda slept hanging upsidedown from a rafter with her wings wrapped around her.
My note said: I have what you want. Bring Lanya to St John’s at midday.
Her reply came back fast: Yes.
This far, so good, as Raffael would say.
St John’s was cool inside and marble quiet. My father sat on the steps leading up to the altar, and I walked up and down the aisle until he told me to stop, I was making him nervous.
‘I’m making you nervous?’ I said.
‘Fair point. The likelihood of the army descending on us is making me nervous, but you’re not helping.’
‘I don’t think you should be here,’ I said. ‘What if the army does descend on us?’
‘Then we’ll cope. We’re bringing down the Marsh today, remember?’
I sat down beside him and tried to act as calm as he looked. As the bells began to strike noon over our heads the latch on the big double doors clacked and they swung open.
‘Ah, Frieda,’ he muttered. ‘Always one for a fanfare.’
I jumped to my feet as she marched up the aisle. She was as grey and pale as usual, wearing dark glasses that hid her expression. She left two agents at the door and another two walked around the perimeter, hand guns drawn, peering into side chapels. Behind Frieda came Dash and Jono, pinpoint neat in black, and between them they marshalled a wrecked-looking Sandor. I looked past him for Lanya with a fleeting thought that he’d be bugged by how filthy his clothes had got.
Frieda took off her glasses and raised her eyebrows at my father. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘The whole family.’
My father opened his hands. ‘As you see.’
I said, ‘Where’s Lanya?’
But Frieda was still looking at my father. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
He smiled.
Her gaze darted around the church as though she was expecting hostiles to leap from the upper balcony and abseil to the attack.
Behind us someone opened a door and peered in. The minister—I recognised him from when we’d sheltered here after the Tornmoor bombing. He was a youngish guy with receding hair and sharp, intelligent eyes. He wasn’t happy.
He pointed at the agent moving up the altar steps. ‘No guns in here!’
The agent looked back to Frieda who gestured towards the crypt. ‘Put him in there for now. Until we’re done.’
The minister objected, loudly, but no one was listening.
When they’d shut the door on him Frieda turned back to me. ‘So, you found your father. I should warn you, it won’t be to your advantage. He worked for us, did you know that?’
‘Where’s Lanya?’ I asked again.
‘Hey!’ called Sandor. ‘Pleased to see me?’
I said in Breken, ‘Sure, Sandor. You all right? You look terrible.’ Serves you right for trading on Nomu.
‘Yeah. Feel terrible.’ He leaned on a pew.
‘What about Lanya?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Frieda. ‘I brought you this one. You’ll get the other one when I’ve verified your information.’
She nodded to Dash who marched up to me and said, ‘I hope you’ve seen sense. Tell me you have.’
When I didn’t immediately hand over anything that looked like information she glared at me and muttered, ‘But what are the odds?’
I stepped around her and said to Frieda, ‘This wasn’t the deal.’
‘Hey!’ said Sandor. ‘Remember me? I’m not here to be haggled over, you know.’ He shuffled away from Jono, sat down in the front pew and wiped a hand over his face. ‘I need a medic,’ he said.
I said to Frieda, ‘We had a deal!’
Behind me, my father said, ‘Nothing changes.’
Her gaze slid past me to him. ‘What did you expect?’
‘This,’ he said. ‘How unoriginal of you.’
She shook her head. ‘Why are you here? You’re infecting your son with the same romantic revolutionary delusions you brainwashed Elena with. It will cost him the same way it cost her—’
‘No, no,’ said my father. ‘Let me at least correct the record. Elena was a much more principled idealist than I ever was. She convinced me there was hope for peace because Southside had a leader who was prepared to negotiate. The problem was, they had that leader and we didn’t. Some things don’t change. Many things.’
‘Good sense doesn’t change,’ said Frieda. ‘Daniel Montier was a dead man the moment he walked into the Marsh. What was the point of getting him out? You had everything to lose and you lost it.’
‘Not quite,’ said my father.
‘Nonsense. You lost the boy, you lost Elena, you lost the uprising. I think that counts as everything.’
My father looked at her for a moment then said, ‘We’re not here to reinvent the past. We’re here to get Lanya back. And you haven’t brought her.’
‘I’m waiting for some genuine intelligence,’ she said. ‘And I mean that in both senses of the word.’
Her comms unit buzzed and she squinted at it, then said to me. ‘Don’t make the mistake your mother made.’
‘I’ve already made it,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d keep your word.’
‘And I will. As soon as you provide the information and it’s been verified. Your mother’s fate, for the record—’ she glared at my father ‘—had nothing to do with me. I would have kept her on as an agent but my superiors decided she was too compromised. They were probably right. Loose ends, you see. We don’t like them.’
‘What happened to her?’ I asked.
She sighed impatiently. ‘I don’t have time for this.’
My father said, ‘Yes, you do. You’ve got at least two spare minutes and all the guns. Tell him.’
Frieda looked from my father to me. Her eyebrows lifted slightly as if she was calculating the pros and cons. Then she relented.
‘Elena discovered you were at Tornmoor. She went to get you back. Stapleton reported that she wouldn’t leave until she’d seen you, so we were sent to take her away: myself, and two others.’
She hesitated and I thought I saw a shadow of regret pass over her face, but maybe I imagined it.
She went on, ‘We persuaded her to come with us to the Marsh and in the car on the way one of the agents pressed a poisoned needle into her neck. Very simp
le. Very quick. Within an hour she was dead. I didn’t know that was going to happen—you won’t believe that, but it’s true. At least it was quick and relatively painless. There’s some mercy in that.’
Mercy. Everything this war was not.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You do not get to use that word.’
I turned away and walked back towards my father.
‘Wait!’ she called. ‘What about my information? What about the girl?’
‘Taking my chances on that,’ I said.
Her comms unit buzzed a second time.
I turned back to her. ‘You should answer that. It’s probably important.’
‘Arrest them,’ she said as she unhooked her comms unit and looked at its message.
Jono pulled his gun and yelled, ‘Freeze!’ in a voice that bounced all the way up to the roof and back.
‘Cool it, Jono,’ muttered Dash.
Dash, I trusted not to shoot me, but Jono, never, not even in a church. I retreated to the altar steps and sat down beside my father. Jono advanced up the aisle, gun still raised until he stood close enough that I could see the sweat on his upper lip and the glint in his eyes over the gun.
Dash came up beside him. ‘I said, cool it. He’s not going anywhere. Enough already.’
Jono lowered the gun, but he didn’t holster it. I was getting his very best stare. I thought about asking him if he practised it in the mirror every morning. I said, ‘Thanks,’ to Dash instead.
‘You’re such an idiot,’ she said to me.
‘Hey,’ wailed Sandor. ‘What about me? I need a medic.’
I fished in a pocket and found the remains of Mr Hendry’s cash, handed some of it to Dash. ‘Give him this.’
He brightened immediately, pocketed it and gave me a nod then heaved himself upright and headed slowly for a door.
‘It’s for a medic,’ I called after him.
Frieda was still on her comms unit talking ferociously and directing angry glances towards us.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Dash asked Jono.
‘I do,’ I said.
They both looked at me as if to say ‘Yeah, right.’
‘It’s Nomu,’ I said. ‘The lost girl from the Dry. She’s been found, and right now she’s appearing on Cityside News, telling everyone that the disease that came to her people in the Dry has come to town and if people here want the vaccine they can get it from the Marsh. But they’d better hurry because there’s not enough for everyone.’
Dash looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?’
I smiled at her and didn’t answer.
Frieda had finished on her comms unit in time to hear the last of what I was saying.
‘So this is your plan?’ she said. ‘You think a mob will descend on the Marsh and bring it down?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
She looked at me like I was deluded. ‘No mob will be taking the Marsh while its under my command.’
‘Your command?’ said my father. ‘You do the bidding of people in the shadows who’ll never admit to what happens in the Marsh. You do as you’re told and that’s all you do. The Marsh is not under your command.’
She advanced on him, eyes blazing. This was an old argument born of old enmity. She almost hissed at him.
‘All I do? All? No. This is my time. I’m ending this war. You have failed, as usual. Moldam is finished. The virus is there now. Surrender of the South will follow because every other settlement will know that they could be next and that we hold the vaccine.’
My mouth went dry. My father swore.
‘That’s right,’ said Frieda. ‘The squad that went to Moldam looking for the Dry-dweller girl. They left it wherever they went.’
CHAPTER 31
The Marsh was going up in flames. The fence on the western perimeter was down—a combination of the weight of numbers pushing on it and a judicious use of boltcutters. If the order to fire on the crowd had been given, it hadn’t been obeyed; maybe the guards had abandoned their posts to be first in line to grab a box of the vaccine or, better, maybe they’d seen people they knew coming over the fence and couldn’t face killing their own. Either way, the crowd was now going from building to building unopposed.
But the Marsh is big—almost a small town. And a lot of it is classified; you’re supposed to know where you’re going or you shouldn’t be there, so there weren’t any signs saying HV–C6 Vaccines: Get them here! There must have been people still in the grounds who knew where that storehouse was but they were lying low.
Frieda had brought my father and me back to the Marsh from St John’s. She’d left us in different buildings to be processed separately and she’d gone off with Dash and Jono to pull the situation out of the fire—that was before any actual fires were lit. Now it was looking like she wouldn’t be getting a performance bonus this year.
Meanwhile, I’d got away from the guy taking me to my cell by the fairly simple ploy of threatening to breathe on him. As we walked down a corridor I’d grabbed the comms device clipped to his belt and when he yelled, ‘Hey!’ and went to take it off me, I backed away and said, ‘I was in Moldam yesterday. In a house where your special ops team planted that virus. Want me to breathe on you?’
He said ‘Christ,’ or words to that effect and stood there eyeing me and the device.
I waved it at him. ‘Touched it now.’
Then I lunged towards him, and he bolted. The device was multifunctional and let me pull up a plan of the Marsh. I was looking for some reference to who was being held where. And yes, there she was: Breken female, adolescent. Order: interrogation. Regime: sodium pentothal. Authorised by: Dir. Kelleran. Ward 23.
Found a map. Went for it.
The first time I ever saw Lanya she was holding her own in a knife fight on a Moldam back street. The second time I saw her, a few hours later, ten thousand other people were watching her too as she and the other Moldam Pathmakers danced with firesticks across a barren stretch of land near Moldam Bridge to honour six people killed in the uprising. She was barefoot and fierce, those braids and beads flying, and all of her, body and spirit moving to the needs of the fight and the beat of the drums and their song.
I remembered that as I ran through the corridors of the Marsh trying to find her and not knowing how she would be when I got there. I remembered it and told myself she would survive. I ran three flights of stairs, eight corridors, twenty-one sets of firedoors to get to Ward 23.
No one stopped me. Everyone else was going the other way, because the siren ordering the evacuation of the building was blasting in every corridor. The staff had taken off: computer monitors were blank, paper cups of tea sat half drunk on desks and empty ones rolled on the floor.
I yelled in Breken, ‘Lanya! Are you here? Where are you?’ I looked into every room off the main corridor—all of them empty. It looked like the staff had let the inmates go. ‘Lanya!’
Then a figure came out of a room at the end of the corridor. A familiar figure and not in a good way.
Jono. My stomach did a flip.
‘What are you doin
g here?’ I said. ‘Everyone’s left, hadn’t you noticed?’
He leaned in a doorway. ‘Yeah, I noticed. I was waiting for you.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone where?’
He smirked.
‘I’m sick,’ I said. ‘Infected. I’ll breathe on you if you don’t tell me.’
The smirk widened. ‘I’ve been vaccinated—one of the perks of being on Kelleran’s team. You’re no threat, never were.’
I turned away and yelled again. ‘Lanya! You here?’
The sirens drowned me out; they were doing my head in. I went along the corridor looking again into every room. Jono watched me, and eventually I came back to him.
‘Where is she?’
‘She was here,’ he said. ‘Until a couple of hours ago. I took her away when we got back from St John’s. I decided she should be with her own kind.’
His comms unit pinged. He glanced at it. ‘Dash. Gone soft, has Dash.’ He nodded up the corridor. ‘I’ll take you. Cos they’re your kind too.’
We retraced my steps down to the ground floor until we were right back where I’d started but Jono kept going—outside, away from those ear-busting sirens. There was full scale looting going on now; some people seemed to have forgotten their quest for the vaccine and were carrying away computers and cc-eyes along with all kinds of other tech, and some were even clumsily lugging furniture away. The speed of the collapse was mind boggling: the most feared place in the city brought to its knees by fear. A reporter with a microphone and a cameraman in tow was trying to pull people together to organise a search for the vaccine storehouse. He was shouting, ‘People! People! Listen to me! Let’s divide into search groups!’
Jono headed east along an asphalt walkway lined with trees and bushes. I was so preoccupied with being scared for Lanya that when Jono swung round and punched me hard in the gut I didn’t see it coming. I hit the ground. He stood over me and I thought I was going to get a boot in the face. I rolled away and stumbled up gasping, ‘What the f—?’
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