Havoc (2 page)

There was a scrabbling noise behind me.

‘Nik, hey there.' Lanya kissed me cheerily on the cheek, sent a shiver and an ache
right through me. She studied my face and read my mind. ‘Saved him yet?'

I made a face at her and she smiled.

‘You won't solve it,' she said. ‘For once, your brain is not your friend.'

We were always having this conversation. I was stuck in ‘if only' territory. If only
I'd stopped Sol being kidnapped and brought to Southside in the first place; if only
I'd convinced the militia here that they should let him go, no strings attached;
if only the exchange they'd set up, of Sol for Suzannah Montier, a Breken leader
held hostage on Cityside, hadn't been sabotaged by a Breken faction opposed to her
return…then he would be home free, instead of buried back on Cityside, having done
nothing, ever, to deserve that.

I said, ‘Okay. Here's another way.'

‘What?'

‘Revenge.'

Lanya nodded slowly. ‘Revenge.'

‘Yes. Why not? Everyone else is doing it.'

This was true: for every assassination, rocket attack and mass imprisonment perpetrated
by Cityside, some
group on Southside struck right back with its own murder, bombing
and kidnapping.

‘No one wins,' I said. ‘So rationally it's no answer but you said not to use my brain.'

She gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Any word on the ceasefire?'

I shook my head. ‘Waiting.'

‘There's a surprise.'

Southside was used to waiting on Cityside. It had tried not waiting, that's what
the uprising was all about—trying to push back, to drive both sides towards talks
and a less murderous future. Right through winter, Lanya and I had met on the riverwall
and exchanged what news we had about how it was going. By the beginning of spring,
things were looking grim. Cityside's security and intelligence service and its army
had quit squabbling with each other; the two had joined forces and hit Southside
hard. The uprising faltered and stalled. By late spring people on Southside were
talking surrender. Then came some good news at last: One City was back in business.

Southside had allies on Cityside and One City was the strongest of those allies.
Activists, urban guerillas, extremists—they came with various labels depending on
who was doing the labelling. Some of them had been years in Pitkerrin Marsh, but
when Breken forces had taken control there six months before—only for a day or two
before losing it again—they'd broken the politicals
out. Now those people were spreading
a shedload of chaos through the well-ordered Cityside streets: cyber attacks gridlocked
trains and traffic, maxed out the phone network and crashed the electronic payment
system in shops downtown. Graffiti was splashed across City Hall, churches and banks,
and the news channel was being intermittently hacked.

It all sounded a whole lot more fun than going quietly crazy in Moldam HQ propping
up a computer system that could have come off the Ark, which is how I spent my days.

Now Lanya and I were on the riverwall again, standing close—as close as you can get
when you're wearing big old army coats, which is not nearly close enough. Lanya looked
across the water. I looked at her. In the half-working streetlamp I could see her
wide eyes and long lashes, the curve of her cheek and all those beaded braids spilling
out from the twisted red scarf around her head.

Some people look at Cityside like it owes them. You can see it in the way their lip
curls and their eyes narrow. Not Lanya. When she looked across the river she saw
a new city where there was space for everyone. She dreamed it, and she wanted to
build it too—to muck in, get her hands dirty, raise a sweat and make it rise up whole
on both sides of the river. Me, I didn't see how that could happen. And anyway, no
one was building a new city yet, not without a lasting ceasefire.

Lanya said, ‘On with the lesson. What are we up to?'

She wanted to know what life was like over the river. I made up lists for her: we
were up to H.

‘Heating in winter,' I said. ‘Hot showers. Halfway decent chocolate.'

She looked sideways at me. ‘You said chocolate already, under C.'

‘And I'll probably say it again, under ‘R' for really-good-if-you've-got-enough-money
chocolate.'

She laughed. ‘Cheat.' Then she pointed towards Cityside. ‘Oh, look!' A light flashed
there. Then a series of lights—laser-bright—arced across the bridge. All in silence.

I got as far as ‘Holy sh—' when the shock wave slammed us off the wall and the roar
rolled over everything.

CHAPTER 02

The roar didn't stop. It slammed us into the ground, stomping through our bodies
and shaking our insides to water. Rockets shrieked overhead and smashed into the
hillside, breaking it open in jagged bursts of light. We clung to the cobblestones,
blinded, deafened, frozen with fear.

The rockets pounded.

Kept pounding.

Then stopped abruptly. There was quiet, except for the ringing in my ears.

We lifted our heads, bodies shaking, breath gasping. The old street lamp above us
flickered. Moldam held its breath. One minute. One twenty, one forty. Two. Lanya
and I looked at each other and breathed out cautiously. People appeared from all
around us, calling out, organising; sirens multipled. My eyes began to clear after
the
blinding glare of the explosions. I got to my feet and put a hand out to Lanya.
She grasped it and stood up, and we hugged each other fiercely.

I wanted to stay there, letting the world go off, spinning around us, with Lanya
alive and breathing in my arms, but someone touched my shoulder and said, ‘You kids
okay?' and we broke apart and nodded. Tears smeared Lanya's face. I kissed her forehead,
tasted salt and dust.

‘Bastards,' she said. ‘Bastards, bastards—'

She broke away from me and yelled across the river, ‘Ceasefire, you bastards! What
d'you think that means!'

The air was gusting with smoke and sour with the ammoniac stink of explosives. It
made me sick at the back of my throat, but that's not all that was making me sick.
I looked up at the hilltop.

Lanya saw where I was looking and said, ‘Did you just come from there?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Who's up there?'

‘Everyone. Levkova, Vega, Jeitan…'

‘Your father?'

‘I don't know. Probably. Didn't see him today.'

She looked back across the water, then ahead of us into the blaring night. ‘Is it
over? Do you think it's over?'

‘Maybe. They've made their point: no rules, and to hell with your act of good faith.'

She took a deep, ragged breath and blew it out. ‘That was terrible. That was…terrible.'
Then she nodded towards the hill. ‘We have to get up there. Come on!' She put on
her best ‘don't mess with me' face and we joined the crowds on River Road.

We were heading along the edge of the shantytown, now a mess of flattened wood and
iron sheeting that was starting to burn in a scatter of fires. The shacks around
the bridge gate were flimsy patchworks that shuddered in the everyday breeze off
the river. The rockets had flattened them without touching them. People were shouting
to hear each other above the sirens and screaming kids and bellowed instructions
from evacuation officers. Turns out that Moldam was well prepared for this kind of
attack, which surprised me but shouldn't have. Evac officers stood along the road
under the few remaining streetlights bawling to everyone, ‘This is an evacuation!'
They must've been picked for their voices: they could have woken Cityside coma patients.
Small groups of people pushed past us heading into the shanty: evac teams on the
move, hunting for the injured in collapsed and burning shacks.

‘Let's get to the bridge gate,' said Lanya. ‘We'll take the road up the hill from
there.'

Between the cookhouses and makeshift market stalls on one side of the road and the
riverwall on the other, a crush of people emerged from their flattened homes and
streamed out of alleyways. Some had
kids wrapped tight around them, others were hauling
whatever they'd grabbed before the fires took hold, the precious stuff like cooking
pots, rugs, the family mattress. The clamour and smoke and sharp fear took me right
back to the bombing of Tornmoor—my school on Cityside. That had been a Southside
attack. This was a Cityside one. Difference when you're in the middle of it? Nil.

Then I lost Lanya. One minute she was holding tight to my hand, the next our grip
was broken and she disappeared into the crowded dark. I dived after her, yelling
her name, but I couldn't even hear myself in the noise. I stood for a second being
jostled, then sped on, watching for her red scarf and beaded braids. Lanya would
marshal an army better than most; she didn't need me playing nursemaid. In fact,
in this whole mess of a war, she didn't really need me at all. She had a plan: she
wanted to dance, and on Southside the way to do that was to be a Pathmaker—a dancer
in ritual ceremonies and celebrations. After tonight, the Makers would be busy with
funerals, but she wouldn't be one of them. She was on probation after breaking the
rules six months ago. I'd said to her once that being seen with me didn't exactly
square with her probation conditions, especially since I was the reason she was
on probation at all, but she'd grinned and mentioned the army coats. Now her probation
was nearly up and she had to decide, soon, if that's what she was going to do. So
she
was thinking. And I was watching her think.

Makers don't partner. She'd told me that as soon as she knew she had a chance to
follow that future again. We could be friends, yes, close friends even, but there
it stopped. She wanted to know if I was okay with that. Sure, I said. No problem.
Which was mostly a lie, but I was trying not to get in the way of her doing what
she most wanted to do.

I arrived at the bridge gate—or where it used to be. There was nothing there except
the remains of the gate uprights: they were splayed out as though something giant
had marched through, pushing them aside, and stormed off into the township.

Moldam Bridge was gone.

It had been ripped from its moorings, broken in pieces and hurled into the water.
All that was left were its ragged beginnings jutting towards the river. People grew
quiet when they came near it. They stood and looked, then hurried back into the mayhem.
I thought of Fyffe and how we'd walked over this bridge for the first time only half
a year ago. That stupid nursery rhyme arrived in my head:

Over the bridge it's dark not day,

Over the bridge the devils play,

Over the bridge their souls are black,

Go over the bridge and you won't come back.

No one was going back over the Mol ever again.

The gate had been a square steel frame, taller than me, with bars running top to
bottom. Now it was lying in a mangled heap across the road. People were dead. That
was why everyone who came near went quiet. The two guards on the gate had been blasted
to the other side of the road. The medics hadn't arrived yet, but someone had stopped
to care for the bodies: they'd been moved out of the foot traffic to lie side by
side near the remains of the gate and had been partly covered by a couple of coats.

A kid sat beside them. He was a few years younger than me and he wore the red bandana
of the Breken uprising around his head. People hurrying by nodded to him. Some said
a word of greeting or prayer, recognising that he was doing what someone needed to
do: sit with the dead. There was no sign of Lanya so I crouched in front of this
kid.

‘Did you know them?' I said.

He shook his head. ‘My sister's gone to get the medics. I said I'd stay.'

‘Have you seen a girl about this tall?' I stuck a hand in the air. ‘She's wearing
a red scarf in her hair and a baggy dark coat and boots that are too big for her.'

‘I haven't been lookin' too close. It's dark, you know? And I've been saying the
Charter to—'

He stopped.

I nodded. ‘Good idea.' To keep the ghosts at bay.

‘Yeah. So I haven't seen a girl like that. She hasn't stopped here.'

Not what I wanted to hear. ‘Okay, thanks.' I stood up.

He said, ‘You can wait for her here, if you want.'

He seemed really young and not liking what he was there to do. I couldn't blame him.
I sat down.

‘What's your name?'

‘Teo.'

‘I'm Nik.'

‘You from Gilgate?'

That made me smile. ‘You'd think so, wouldn't you. But no.'

‘Sure sound like it.'

‘Yeah, well, the man who brought me up came from Gilgate.' That was Macey. He'd been
a security guard at Tornmoor, a Southsider, and as close to a parent as I'd had for
the last decade.

‘Where you from then?' Teo asked.

‘Different places. You?'

‘I'm from here. Are you Nik Stais?'

That shut me up for a second. ‘Yeah. I am. How'd you know?'

‘Heard of you. You were on the bridge with Suzannah.'

Suzannah Montier. Southside's leader-in-waiting. She'd achieved first name status
with everyone. Much
loved. Lost. Even the stain of her blood on the Mol was being
washed away right now at the bottom of the river.

Teo was saying, ‘It was supposed to be a swap, wasn't it: Cityside were gonna give
us Suzannah back.'

‘For my friend, Sol, yeah.'

‘But they both died.'

‘That's right. How did you hear about that?'

‘Everyone knows. You were the last one that seen her alive.'