Havoc (21 page)

We went out into the sunbaked town. I went down the steps, across the road into the
shadow of the tenement block and threw up.

Raffael stood at my shoulder looking alarmed. ‘You are sick. You need help?'

I leaned back on the cool concrete wall, dragged the back of my hand over my mouth
and closed my eyes. Lanya would be deeply drugged by now. As far as I knew she'd
never taken any kind of drug—she didn't smoke, she didn't drink, she didn't do any
of the adulterated crap that did the rounds over here, knocking people out of their
grim reality into some kind of fantasy world for a while. You saw them sitting outside
the shacks in the shantytown, out of their skulls, escaping. The Marsh drugs would
hit
Lanya hard. Tomorrow midnight, Frieda had said, irreparable harm begins. Maybe
it had already begun.

I had something to give Frieda now, in exchange for Lanya: a couple of safe houses,
a password, the names of two people.

I had made my mother's choice.

I could tell myself that those people had signed up for this in a way that Lanya
never had, but that didn't make it any easier. And it wouldn't just be two people,
would it? It would be everyone connected to those people in the network. Including
my father. Is this what had happened once my mother had turned him in? Had he talked
in the Marsh under the influence of their drugs, delivering his allies into their
hands?

How do you live knowing you've done that?

I was about to find out.

Raffael was watching me. ‘You
are
sick.'

Mace and I had spoken Breken. Raffael couldn't know what I'd just done.

I pushed myself off the wall. ‘I'm not sick. We need to go back to the city.'

I headed towards the river and got half way down the road before I realised that
Raffael hadn't moved. I looked back and called, ‘Come on!'

He jogged up to me. ‘I do not go with you this time.'

I frowned. ‘Why not?'

‘Nomu,' he said. ‘She is here, on this side of the river.
I will go and find her.
I thank you for helping me, truly.' He turned away.

‘No! Wait!' I grabbed his arm. ‘You can't do that. You don't know where to look.
You don't know Breken, and if you speak Anglo here people will think you're the enemy.
And Moldam is quarantined. You'll never get through. If you wait a day—just one day,
until I've done this…this thing I have to do, then I'll help you.'

He hesitated. ‘But she is here and I am here. I will find a way to ask. Tell me the
direction.'

I said, ‘It's a long way, and I don't know what you'll find when you get there.'

He didn't care, of course. He was going whatever I said. He'd be picked up by a squad
in no time, and then what would happen to him? Nothing good. He was a complication
I didn't need. What I needed was to concentrate on whether to try and save Lanya
by selling out a whole bunch of people who'd end up like Mace, or worse. I knew Lanya
would be appalled to be rescued like that. But leaving her in the Marsh meant she
would be lost, not just to me, but to herself.

There were no right answers. I needed a miracle. I didn't believe in miracles.

Raffael was watching me, impatient to leave. I decided to go with the problem standing
in front of me: the one that I could solve.

‘I'll take you,' I said. ‘But we have to hurry.'

CHAPTER 28

Following the river took us to Moldam in as direct a line as there was, through Ohlerton,
Blackbyre and Curswall. We jogged down the riverwall road, stopping once at a roadside
stall to buy two cups of water from a woman who seemed needlessly cheerful. Those
townships were new territory to me, but I didn't see them. I was inside my head the
whole way, trying to find a way through, one that didn't lead to a deadend and someone's
execution.

What if I went to the people Mace had pointed me towards and told them what Frieda's
deal was? Would they feel honour bound to storm the Marsh and get Lanya out? Unlikely,
because even if they wanted to, the odds made no sense. A whole lot of people could
lose their freedom, at the very least, to rescue a girl they'd never met who wasn't
even under threat of death—just some mind-altering drugs. Just.

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 heath. 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.