Havoc (3 page)

I shook my head and looked at where the bridge had been. ‘I found her. After. I sat
with her—like you're doing now.'

Teo was watching me. ‘You're from Cityside.'

This wasn't a conversation I wanted to have. I looked around wishing Lanya would
turn up, hoping she was okay, but everything shantyside of us was still going off
with sirens and fires and yelling, and everything riverside of us was quiet. Almost
everything.

‘Listen!' I said. ‘Do you hear that?'

A sound, high pitched and wordless, pealed out of the dark.

‘It's a cat,' said Teo.

I wasn't so sure. It was coming from the bridge, but it couldn't be, because there
was nothing there—only mangled iron and yawning blackness. And this sound: something
was yowling from the ruins.

I stood up. ‘I'm going to look.'

CHAPTER 03

‘It's just a cat,' Teo called after me. ‘You should leave it. Leave it!'

He meant, stay off the riverbank. No one goes there, except the scavengers, and them
illegally. It's forbidden ground, officially, because it's littered with river mines
and sometimes with the bodies of people who have tried to swim or row across. But
that's also why, unofficially, it's out of bounds. Lost souls wander there—that's
what people will tell you and they're dead serious.

I needed a torch, but all I had was half the moon riding a rim of cloud low in the
sky upriver and even that was disappearing behind a haze of smoke. I walked over
to the bent uprights that had held the gates. The short strip—ten or so metres—of
what was left of the Mol gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond it the water shone black
and disturbed, sucking at the gravel on the bank.
The creature sound got louder.
I dropped flat and peered underneath. I was looking through a jungle of bent and
broken iron beams and piled-up concrete slabs. Right in the middle stood a thin stick
of a figure. It was lifting its face to the moon and calling out over and over as
if all that was left of the bridge was this ghost howling at the city.

But it wasn't a ghost, or a cat. It was a girl.

I leaned further out and called, ‘Hey! You! Grab my hand. I'll pull you up.'

The howling stopped, then started up again.

Behind me came a clatter of activity: the medics had arrived. One of them came over
to look at the remains of the bridge and swore softly. Then he saw me.

‘Oi! You! Get off that!'

I peered over my shoulder at him. ‘There's someone under here. A girl. I'm going
to get her.'

‘This whole lot's gonna go! Listen to it!'

‘I'll be quick.'

I scrambled back off the bridge, clambered over the broken stones and wire of the
riverwall and slid down the bank. I peered into the crisscross iron jungle: the girl
was dressed in something long and dirty white and she shone faintly in the moonlight.
‘Hey,' I called. ‘Come out of there. The rest of the bridge is gonna fall.' She stopped
calling out and looked at me, but she didn't move. I tried in Anglo as well as Breken,
but no joy. I was going to have to go in and get her.

I talked as I moved, in both languages, trying to give off this air of nothing-to-worry-about,
but my heart was going for it.

‘Don't be scared, okay? We're gonna climb out of here, you and me.'

Water dripped off the wreckage, freezing cold, on my head and down the back of my
neck, which made me shiver, and I tripped, smashed my shin on a concrete block and
came to halt, gasping. I knelt there for a second, sick and swearing, listening to
the weight of the bridge creak and graunch above us. The girl watched me. I got up
and moved on and when I thought I was near enough I crouched down and held out my
hand to her. She opened her mouth and howled. Scared the life out of me. The sound
of it made the ironwork ring and I thought she was going to bring the whole lot down
on top of us.

Someone on the bank yelled, ‘Get out of there!'

A chunk of iron girder thumped into the ground by the water's edge. I jumped and
swore, but at least it made the girl stop and look at me. She was older than I'd
thought—about my age. I held out my hand again but she backed away, deeper into the
wreckage. I kept talking, quietly, like we were just having a conversation on the
riverbank on a summer night and weren't about to be crushed to a painful death any
second now. She gave no sign of understanding any of it, but she stopped moving backwards.
Progress.

She stood still, gripping the iron and whispering her word, the one she'd been howling.
It sounded like ‘fire' in Anglo. I kept my hand held out, wanting to tell her that
enough people had died on this bridge, but fear had dried up my throat. I had no
more words.

We looked at each other for about an hour—it felt like an hour, it was probably about
ten seconds—then she held out her thin, brown hand. I wanted to grab her and run
like mad, but I made myself take it gently. I edged towards her, crouched down and
put her arms round my neck. She climbed on my back and clung there like Sol used
to, no weight at all.

I said, ‘Hold on, put your head down, close your eyes.' And we started to crawl out.
Every time I put a hand on a piece of iron I could feel it vibrating like someone
was slamming it with a hammer. The girl started to sing softly in my ear in a language
I'd never heard—a small whispered voice. It was a chant, like a lullaby or a hymn.
I tried to listen to that and not to the creaking of the Mol a few handspans above
our heads.

She was still singing as we came out under the sky. We breathed air that was alive
with sirens and shouting and smelled of smoke and ash and river sludge. I lifted
her off my back, and she gripped my arms, eyes wide in her thin face, and rattled
off something incomprehensible. It might have been her version of ‘thank you' but
it sounded too urgent for that.

Lanya clambered down the bank. ‘Hey!' she said breathlessly. ‘That was crazy-brave.'

The medics took the girl and behind us the bridge groaned mightily. Lanya grabbed
my arm and pulled me back from it. We watched the last of the Mol smash down onto
the bank, jolting the earth all the way out to Port and beyond.

Lanya shuddered. ‘You could have been under that.'

I managed to say, ‘You would have done the same thing.'

She looked at me and put a hand on my cheek. I held it there and kissed her palm.
I knew she could feel the tremor in me.

‘Cold,' I said.

‘You're soaking wet.'

‘Where's the girl? Is she all right?'

‘She's up with the medics. What about you? They should take a look at you.'

‘No. What for?'

She gave me her lopsided smile. ‘Nothing flaps you, is that the idea? You were under
the bridge—you're allowed to be a wreck too, you know.'

We climbed back up the riverbank and stood on the edge of operations: people were
gathered around the girl wrapping her in a patched grey army blanket. She was sipping
from a plastic mug, but now and then she threw back her head and cried out her word.
Someone said,
‘She's calling on the angel.'

‘Angel?' I said to Lanya.

‘Shh,' she said, ‘This is not good company to be a heathen in.'

‘She sounds like she's saying ‘Fire.'

Lanya shook her head. ‘She's saying Raphael.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Who's Raphael?'

‘An angel worshipped by some bands in the Dry. Do you think she could be from the
Dry? Did she say anything to you?'

‘Yeah, she did, but I couldn't understand her. Except…'

‘What?'

I looked at her. ‘She said two words—she kept repeating them—that sounded Anglo.'

‘What were they?'

‘Havoc,' I said. ‘And Marsh.'

CHAPTER 04

We left the girl and the remains of the bridge behind and sped on towards the hill,
fearing—knowing, really—that up there the destruction would be much worse and the
death toll higher. There were no guarantees that the people we knew had survived.

At the bottom of the hill we met a roadblock and three smoke-streaked guys from a
squad, all of them on a short fuse. One pulled the bandana from his face.

‘Either of you a medic? Didn't think so. Then you're not getting through. Get back
to town. They need you. We don't.'

But behind them I spied a friend. ‘Jeitan! You're okay!'

Commander Vega's go-to guy was not looking his usual shiny self. He had an arm in
a dirty sling and a bloodied bandage round his head. He was smoking a
cigarette with
his good hand and leaning on a concrete wall plastered with peeling posters from
the glory days of the uprising just a few months ago—all the bridge names were there:
Port, Mol, Bethun, Sentinel, Clare, Torrens, Westwall. And across every one of them
a thick stroke of black paint announced a Southside victory. Short-lived victories,
as it turned out.

Jeitan waved us over.

‘You're a mess,' I said. ‘How are you even standing up?' I looked up the hill. ‘Is
it bad?'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘It's bad.'

‘Vega? Levkova?' I asked.

Commander Vega was Moldam's head of military operations; Levkova was the sub-commander
who let me bunk down at her house as long as I never mistook her for the helpless
old granny she looked like but most certainly was not.

Jeitan grimaced. ‘Vega's not good, but he's upright so still in charge. Levkova's
still standing, last I saw. And she's cross.' He almost smiled. ‘You wouldn't believe
how cross.' He waved his cigarette at the fires burning across the settlement. ‘So
much for our magnificent ceasefire!'

Sparks and glowing ashes spiralled in the wind off the river. The riverwind is supposed
to be cool and fresh on your face: it wakes you up, makes you move, makes you run
to keep warm. Right now it gusted hot. Which felt wrong, unholy wrong. A cloud of
smoke made us turn
away coughing.

‘You heading up there?' Jeitan asked. He nodded us away from the guys on the roadblock.
‘You know your father's not there?'

‘Oh,' I said.

‘There's word about that he went across to Cityside yesterday.'

‘Oh.'

He frowned at me. ‘You didn't know?'

Now they were both frowning at me and I realised they were expecting me to say, ‘Oh,
yeah, I remember now, he told me x, y and z about his plans'. Which he hadn't. Because,
why would he? I was his kid, but I'd been brought up in a Cityside school run by
his enemies—the same enemies that had killed my mother and thrown him into the Marsh
as a political prisoner. I didn't know what had happened to him in there, and I didn't
expect him ever to tell me. Jeitan and Lanya were still watching me, waiting.

‘No, I didn't know,' I said. ‘I've seen him maybe six times in the last month. He's
busy. He doesn't have time to, you know, talk.' I looked back across the settlement.
‘At least if he's Cityside he's out of this.'

‘Good for him,' said Jeitan. ‘Tricky for you.'

‘Yeah, I guess.'

‘What?' said Lanya. ‘Why?'

Jeitan raised an eyebrow at her. ‘They don't really
know him here, do they. He's
kept a low profile for a lot of years, and he hasn't lived in Moldam. But suddenly
he turns up and people discover that he had a kid Cityside and now he's disappeared
into the city just before they land the biggest strike on us since '87. Doesn't look
good. People will wonder.'

‘People might need a lesson in opening their eyes,' said Lanya.

Jeitan gave us a grim smile. ‘Good luck with that.'

Lanya and I climbed the hill, past a procession of people being carried down it on
stretchers and in body bags. Lanya, always a Pathmaker at heart, reached out as each
body bag went by and touched it with a whispered prayer for a safe path from the
land of the living. When we got to the top she wiped her face with her sleeve and
said, ‘Did you count them? You always count.'

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘Stupid thing to do.'

‘How many?'

‘Twenty-eight body bags. Twenty-three stretchers.'

She nodded, and we walked up to the gate. We were challenged for ID by a guard; there
was order in the chaos. That meant Commander Vega—Sim to a very small number of people,
not including me—was still in control. A rocket attack and a nearly totalled HQ were
just a signal to him to get on with sorting everything out again. Not the panicky
type.

Inside the compound the firelight and smoke turned the ruins of the buildings into
a lifesize old movie, flickering and hazy in front of us. Fires were burning in
the rambling brick admin centre and in a scatter of barracks and workshops. Generator-fed
floodlights lit the bending backs and reaching arms of people clearing rubble, pulling
out the dead and injured, laying them carefully on stretchers or blankets. Voices
called out now and then, but the place was deadly quiet so that rescuers could hear
people under the wreckage.

We found Commander Vega batting away a medic who was trying to bandage his head wound.
The guy had got as far as getting him to sit on a wooden bench, but not as far as
getting his attention except in the form of being waved at as though he was an annoying
insect. Vega was coordinating rescue efforts in three directions at once, but he
stopped when he saw us and beckoned us over.

‘Your father's not here,' he said to me. ‘He's not in Moldam right now.' He squinted
at me from under the bandage. ‘That's all I can tell you. But he's not in the middle
of this, so he's probably better off than we are. All right?'

Not really, I thought. ‘Yes, sir.'