Havoc (9 page)

We'd got about halfway through Bethun when our luck turned bad. An army ute rounded
the corner ahead of us.

I whispered, ‘Oh, f—' and Lanya stopped. I gripped her hand and said, ‘Keep walking.
Look like you're talking to me.'

The ute trundled along the street and we pretended to ignore it, but I knew the men
inside wouldn't go past brown kids on an empty Bethun street. It stopped beside us.

A soldier, middle-aged, middle-ranking, leaned out the window. ‘Hey! What are you
doing here? Where are you going?'

‘Home,' I said, in my best Ettyn Hills accent. ‘Missed curfew last night and she
has to get home before her father knows she's gone.'

Lanya hung on my arm and giggled and waved at the men. Out of the corner of my eye
I could see Sandor on the other side of the street a few houses back, one hand in
his jacket pocket—I knew he was fingering the gun.

‘Where's home?' said the solider. ‘Show me some ID.'

Sandor was three houses away. I had no clue how trigger happy he might be. Two soldiers.
He could shoot
them both, wake the entire neighbourhood, bring any nearby patrols
crashing down on us and end everything right now.

‘Which home?' I said. ‘Town or Ettyn Hills?'

The soldier's eyebrows shot up. Ettyn Hills was wealthy and then some. ‘Just show
me some ID, kid.'

I didn't have any. Cityside IDs were unfakeable unless you had access to hi-tech
gadgetry, and imitations were so obvious that it was more dangerous to be found with
one than not have one at all. I could see Sandor hesitating, watching.

‘Look,' I said. ‘I don't have it, okay? My father confiscated it to stop me going
out.'

The soldier's eyes narrowed. ‘What's your name, then? Whose your father?'

If you're going to lie, I thought, lie big. ‘Stepfather,' I said. ‘Thomas Hendry.'

‘Sure,' said the driver. ‘Try again.'

‘It's true,' I said. ‘The Hendrys adopted me and sent me to Tornmoor.'

I gave the Hendry's Ettyn Hills address and their townhouse address down to the last
digit of the postcodes, then looked at my watch.

‘Can we go now?' I said. Right now, I thought. Because that guy over the road is
armed and Breken and he might not think twice about shooting you.

‘Look,' I held out my arms wide so they could see
I was unarmed. ‘I've got nothing
but a heap of trouble waiting at home if I can't get back there soon. If you want
to know for sure and really get me in deep, you can call him.' I reeled off the number.
‘It's unlisted, so he'll get mad at you as well as me, but do it if you have to.'

I put an arm around Lanya's shoulders, said, ‘Sorry, babe,' and tried to look resigned.

The other soldier said, ‘Give me that number again.' My stomach churned. I said it
one more time. He tapped it into his communicator and pushed a button.

CHAPTER 12

Time slowed right down until I could hold everything around us in one long moment:
the street in the early morning sunlight, quiet the way Moldam never was, Sandor
on the other side of it moving towards us, the two men conferring in the ute, Lanya
standing close, utterly still, and in the distance the bells of St John's tolling.

The guy with the communicator leaned over and said to his partner, ‘Comes up as Priority
List 1. You want me to call?'

Sandor was nearly at their door.

‘Shit, no,' said the driver. He jerked a thumb at us. ‘Go on, get!'

I gave him a quick salute, said, ‘Thanks! We won't do this again.'

Lanya and I walked away, resisting the urge to run, Sandor resumed his stroll and
the ute trundled off.

Once we got around the corner Sandor joined us.

‘Very cool,' he said.

I shook my head and blew out a long breath. ‘Yeah, not really. Just terror, plain
and simple.'

‘I thought he was calling that number,' said Lanya. She peered back round the corner
at the retreating ute. ‘Was it real?'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘But he'd be buying a lot of trouble if he called it. No one's supposed
to know it except family and a few high-ups.'

Lanya turned back to us. ‘You can sound very posh when you want to. I never knew.
Your Gilgate accent is so…Gilgate.'

‘So kind,' I said, and she smiled and relaxed a fraction.

‘Right,' I said, ‘We're not far from St John's. Those bells rang seven, so the market
should be kicking off about now.'

On Southside, hunger nags at you the whole time; it's a voice you can't ignore, always
murmuring, never entirely shutting up. You learn to live with it because you don't
starve—there is food, just never quite enough. No surprises, then, that after a few
months there, I'd started to daydream about the market in St John's Square: the lines
of stalls and trestle tables stretching towards the steps of the big old church and
piled with food: pies and pastries
and crazily decorated cakes, baskets of apples
and oranges and lemons, boxes of new potatoes and carrots, trays of eggs, huge round
cheeses.

I hadn't been to the market since summer a year ago, and maybe my dreams had exaggerated
things, but no way was I ready for what we found. We stood on the edge of it and
Sandor scanned it with a disbelieving eye.

‘Where's the food?' he said. ‘I was promised food.'

‘No, you weren't,' I said. But I had promised it to myself.

‘Look, burgers.' I pointed at an open-sided caravan with a grubby awning, a chalkboard
menu and a queue worthy of Southside.

He screwed up his nose and sniffed in disgust. ‘Do better at home. Might as well
be at home. This is a sore, friggin' disappointment, this is.'

He was right. The market had become a dumping ground. People had raided cellars and
cupboards and sheds for anything that might raise a few coins and now they stood
watching at their tables as other people pawed it. Worn clothes on racks hung drably
above piles of battered shoes, and there were tables spread with old locks, door
handles, tottering stacks of plates and cups, and drawers of blunt knives and bent
forks; there were clocks all telling different times and cartons of ancient, broken-spined
books: you name it, if it was second- or third-hand and done for, it was here. Snarly,
underfed
dogs sniffed around people's feet.

Like Sandor said, it wasn't so different from a market over the river, although,
there, Southsiders would be trawling through it like it was treasure; here, people
seemed to realise they'd come down in the world—they picked stuff up and inspected
it at arm's length as though it smelled as bad as it looked.

It hadn't occurred to me until then that people on Cityside might be as hungry as
the rest of us. It looked like money was short too; people were haggling over prices
and counting coins carefully into the eager palms of stall holders. There were all
shades of desperation here. The war was costing them.

You'd think that if the fighting was sending the place to the dogs they'd grab a
ceasefire when we offered one. But no—‘We don't negotiate,' Frieda had said.

The market was shoulder-to-shoulder busy, so we moved slowly, avoiding the outskirts
because there were soldiers wandering about there, toting guns and watching for trouble
and troublemakers. Sandor headed off towards the food stall and I called after him,
‘Hey! The bag.'

‘Oh, yeah,' he said. He slung it from his shoulder to the ground and considered it.
‘What are you two up to? You don't get this till you tell me.'

‘It's nothing,' said Lanya. ‘Nothing you're going to be interested in, anyway.'

He smiled. ‘I'll be the judge of that.' He hefted the
bag back on his shoulder. ‘I
think I'll hang around for a while, see what happens.'

‘Suit yourself,' I said. We made our way towards the church steps wanting three-sixty
vision because there wasn't just my father to look for, but also the soldiers on
the perimeter and anyone else who, maybe literally, smelled a rat.

We got to the steps, and Lanya said, ‘He should be here by now.'

‘Might be inside,' I said. ‘I'll go and look.'

‘Be careful,' said Lanya.

‘Careful of what?' asked Sandor.

I climbed the steps to the porch and stopped in the shelter of a column to look across
the crowd. I stood there for as long as I dared, thinking that if he was down there
and on the lookout he might spot me, but then I got nervous about the soldiers and
ducked inside.

The marble interior breathed silence. I hurried down one side aisle then the other,
peering into the small chapels and around the gigantic columns that held up the roof.
Last time I was here was the night Southside had launched the first offensive in
the uprising. The place had been buzzing with people who'd fled their homes. They'd
piled their belongings on pews and in the side chapels and stood about arguing and
worrying and waiting in vain for the army or the police or the emergency services
to arrive. Now the building was empty and echoing. I reached the
door of the crypt.
This was where we'd camped—Dash and Jono, Fyffe and Sol, and me—before heading off
on our disasterous attempt to take Sol and Fy home.

Heart thumping, I turned the handle and pulled the door open, hoping, praying even,
that my father would be there and I could tell him what Frieda had told us, and he
would know what to do: that it might be as easy as that.

Someone was there. Down the steps standing in the shadows by the altar. But it wasn't
my father. And, no, it wasn't going to be easy after all.

‘Dash,' I said, and my voice stuck in my throat. Everything was wrong with this picture.

‘Hello, Nik.'

She came to the foot of the steps and looked up at me, smiling the Dash smile—so
familiar that my heart almost lifted. Her short fair hair gleamed in the half-light,
her eyes were dark in her shadowed face, and she stood as straight as ever in her
black security-agent uniform. Behind her three candles burned in front of the altar
icon, making its gold leaf flicker and shine. She saw me glance at them.

‘I lit them for Lou and Bella and Sol,' she said.

I backed away, thinking, ‘Run! RUN!' and at last my feet obeyed.

Dash called out ‘No! Wait!' and I heard her racing up the steps behind me. ‘Stop!
Or I'll shoot!'

I skidded to a halt. Looked back. I was staring down
the barrel of her gun.

‘Seriously?' I said. ‘You lit candles for Lou and Bella and Sol, and now you're gonna
shoot me?'

She reset her grip on the gun and gave me her concentrated blue stare. ‘I have things
to tell you.' She answered someone in her ear piece. ‘Yes, he's here. Any sign of
the father? Right, will do.' Then, to me, ‘There are things you need to know. About
your mother. Who she was. What happened to her.'

‘Sure,' I said, backing away. ‘Like I'm gonna fall for that.'

The gun didn't waver.

‘Come on, Dash, you're not going to shoot me.'

I was almost certain of that.

I turned and ran.

She yelled after me, ‘She worked for us, Nik! She was an agent!'

I charged out the door, yelling, ‘Go!' to Lanya and Sandor who were standing at the
bottom of the church steps. Sandor stared up at me in wide-eyed confusion but Lanya
grabbed the canvas bag off his shoulder, pulled it open and upended it. The rats
shot out under tables and feet. Then there was screaming and panic and fury everywhere.

Under the cover of chaos we took off.

We pushed a path through the market crowd and out into the maze of alleyways surrounding
St John's. I
was making for Skinners Lane where the cc-eyes were usually out of action,
vandalised as a matter of pride by the local kids and as a matter of business by
the local dealers in contraband and illegal highs. We swung into the lane at speed,
stopped halfway down it beside an overflowing rubbish skip and collapsed, breathing
hard.

‘What the hell?' demanded Sandor. ‘What's going on?'

‘What happened?' asked Lanya.

‘Dash,' I said. ‘In the crypt.'

I stopped, remembering her blue eyes and her gun. And what she'd said about my mother.
I parked that.

‘They must have intercepted Levkova's message. They were expecting my father to show.
I don't know why he didn't—maybe he thought it looked like a trap.'

‘What d'you mean a trap?' said Sandor. ‘A trap for who? C'mon! Tell me what's going
on!'

‘Shut up!' said Lanya. She turned to me. ‘What now? How do we find him?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘We have to think.'

We sat there sucking in air, trying to pretend that this wasn't a deadend. On the
other side of the alley a whole line of
Have you seen Nomu?
posters competed with
graffiti and other posters demanding,
Break the Breken! Got Information? Support
Your City and Call It In!

Sandor eyed the posters. ‘They sure want her back.'

I was trying to think. What did it mean that my father
hadn't shown? Dash and her
team had been expecting to pick him up, which meant they had intercepted our comms—no
surprises there—but it also meant that he was on their hit list. Which was good,
in a way: if it meant he wasn't their informer. Unless he was, and Dash was trying
to make me believe that he wasn't. I put my head in my hands—this stuff could turn
you paranoid and send you down the rabbit hole at speed.

Lanya said, ‘What do we do now?'

‘You can count me out, for a start,' said Sandor, standing up. ‘You people have things
to do. I dunno what they are, but you can leave me out of them. I'm off. Got a city
to see.'