Havoc (8 page)

In theory, it made sense. In practice, who knew? There were too many places where
the whole thing could come horribly unstuck. No one mentioned the most unthinkable.
Everyone was politely quiet on the fact that my father had gone over the river at
a suspiciously convenient time. What if the informer in the One City ranks
was him?
That thought sat in the back of my brain, as deep as I could bury it, but it never
went away.

Sitting on the riverwall, Lanya and I started devising backup Plans B through to
Z to cover some of the holes in our Plan A, not least of which was, how do we get
home to Moldam once we'd delivered our message? We gave up when we realised the complexity
of it all and lapsed into ‘it'll be all right because it has to be'.

Then we sat, not speaking, until Lanya said, ‘Yesterday, on the steps?'

‘Yeah. Sorry. I was—what did you call it?—wound up.'

‘But you've always said it's okay with you for us not to be…together, except as friends.'

‘And it is,' I said. I looked at her anxious face, brows pulled in, lips tight. ‘I
mean, it will be. Once you're back being a Maker.'

‘So when you said yesterday morning that they'd be mad if they didn't take me back—'

‘Did I say that?'

‘You did.'

‘Damn.'

She smiled. ‘Do you really believe that?'

‘Of course. They would be. Anyone would be mad to let you go.' Including me, I thought.
I went on, ‘It's what you want to do.'

She looked away. ‘What do you want to do?'

‘I want to get through the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, however long it takes
to get this thing done.'

‘That's not what I meant.'

‘I know. And I don't know.'

She thought for a bit, then she said, ‘Do you ever wish you'd become an agent with
the security services like you were meant to and never come here at all?'

‘And ended up on the other side of the wire? No. Not when I know what I know now.'

‘What do you know now?'

I looked at the moonlight on her cheek and the arch of her eyebrow and thought, there
are some things it doesn't help to say out loud, so I said, ‘Coming here is like
being told a secret. You can't unknow it.'

‘What secret?'

‘That the city is hungry. It's like a kid that wants. It wants and wants and wants
and it won't stop until it's got everything. It's shit hot to have everything, but
to have it, you have to take it.'

She studied me. ‘You would never have made it as an agent.'

‘How do you know?'

She gave this small shrug. ‘You're not the taking kind.'

We sat there a while longer then went back to Levkova's and prayed for fog.

Fog
didn't come. Only a pathetic morning mist that would burn off as soon as it saw the
sun.

Sandor was on the riverbank before us, waiting in the half-light with oars over one
shoulder and a canvas bag over the other. He squinted at Cityside through the mist.

‘You were supposed to pray,' he said. ‘Everyone says you're a heathen, and now I
believe them.' He dropped a bag at Lanya's feet and gave a mock bow. ‘For you, princess.'

‘What's that?' I asked.

‘It's a little something her highness here asked me to bring. Can't understand it,
myself, but whatever you're up to, I don't want to know. Just point me at the city
and let me at it!'

Lanya kicked the bag lightly. ‘Levkova's idea. In case things get sticky at the market.'

‘Market?' said Sandor. ‘That sounds promising. What market?'

I bent to open the bag and she and Sandor both said, ‘Don't!'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘What is it?'

‘A friendly Southside export to the city,' said Sandor. ‘Rats. Three big ones. They're
sedated, but they'll wake up in a couple of hours so you'd better be ready when they
do. What market?'

‘First things first,' I said. ‘Let's get this thing on the water.'

It was, without doubt, the loudest thing I'd ever done. The evac sirens that had
deafened us the other night seemed like a miserable background hum compared with
our attempts to get that boat on the water. Our feet crunched on the gravel—six boots,
six hundred bits of gravel grinding with every step.

Then, at the water's edge, the bottom of the boat rasped on the riverbed as we slid
it into the water. Then came the slapping of waves on its hull as it rocked there,
oblivious to the agonised care we were taking over it. At that point, Sandor ditched
his jeans for shorts and waded in, noisily, to stand thigh deep at the front of the
boat to hold it steady and guide it out, and I started to think that maybe he did
know something about boats after all. He gestured for Lanya and me to climb in, which
we did, the clumsiest, thumpingest falling into a boat there can have ever been.
Sandor followed, just as loudly. Then the stupid oars took on a life of their own,
rattling and clattering as we shipped them in the rowlocks.

Finally we were there, ready, and we'd only just begun.

We sat for a moment, looked around us, behind us, up and down the river, then at
each other. Listened. Heard the slap of the water, and nothing else. We were past
the point of no return: if we were caught now, we'd be taking a quick-one way trip,
straight down.

Sandor and I took an oar each and Lanya knelt in the
front peering ahead for broken
chunks of bridge, and we crawled, if you can crawl on water, towards the city. The
oars clacked in the rowlocks and slapped the water with every stroke. Half of me
wanted to race and get it over with no matter how loudly we did it, and the other
half wanted to creep along so slowly that we'd never be heard, and maybe never get
there at all.

But our luck held. The riverwall loomed in front of us at last.

Near the Mol on Cityside the riverwall plunges straight into the water without a
riverbank, but the wall has mooring rings and ladders running up to street level.
We bobbed there in the shelter of the wall for a while, listening for activity on
the street above us, and looking back towards Southside. The sun had tipped over
the horizon and was sending long glancing beams into Moldam and onto the water, lifting
the mist.

‘Are we leaving the boat here?' asked Lanya. ‘What if it's not here when we come
back?'

‘There's a phrase for that,' I said. ‘Something about crossing that bridge when we
come to it?'

She gave me a tiny smile. ‘Unless they've blown it up.'

‘Right,' said Sandor to me. ‘You lead, we'll follow.'

Lanya looked at him. ‘You say
we
,' she said. ‘But you're not coming with us.'

‘Yeah,' he said, ‘I am.'

‘Aren't you going off to make your fortune?' she said.

‘I intend to, princess. But you said you're going to a market, and that means food.
I'm coming with you that far.' He looked at me. ‘You armed?'

I shook my head. ‘Are you?'

He held up his hand. A small gun sat neatly in his palm.

‘Brilliant,' I said. ‘If they do a stop-and-search on us and find that, we're dead,
so you better ditch it fast if things go bad.' I looked at Lanya. ‘You?'

‘It's a very thin knife,' she said. ‘They won't find it. Why do you think I wear
boots that are too big for me? Don't fret. Come on, we're following you. Anglo all
the way from now on.'

I climbed the ladder and peered over the wall: up the street and down, the place
was empty. We'd been lucky again. We wouldn't keep being lucky—the world wasn't like
that—but for now I was taking any and all the good luck that came our way. I motioned
the others to follow and we scrambled up and over the wall.

We were in Cityside.

CHAPTER 11

‘We're way too obvious here,' I said.

We hurried across bare courtyards that used to hum with breakfast crowds grabbing
coffee before racing up Bethun Hill to the banks and trading houses or over to Sentinel
to push paper for the army. Now the bars and cafes were shuttered with metal grilles
and roller doors that looked like they'd been clamped down for months. They were
all plastered with posters:
Lights Out After Dark!
and
Break the Breken!
and
Report
Deserters: Reward!
And across all of that was a giant scrawl of commentary from people
with plenty to say and plenty of spray paint to say it with.

We walked along the waterfront watching for trouble, but the place looked abandoned.
Everything was shut and there was no one around except a few old guys sifting through
rubbish bins. Even the remote watchers
were absent because someone had gone down
the riverside strip and smashed every cc-camera within reach. I wondered if there
were cameras higher up, untouched, looking out across the water and whether a bored
functionary sitting in a pokey little office had registered us coming ashore. I
looked back to tell the others to hurry up.

Sandor had stopped.

‘Sandor! We don't have time!'

‘Look!' He pointed at a wall of posters. ‘It's our girl.'

Lanya and I went back to see. A dozen images of a girl's face smiled out at us, with
Have You Seen Nomu?
blasting across the top and
Reward!
across the bottom and a number
to call.

‘Same name,' I said.

But this girl had masses of long wavy hair and a face like a model in an ad, all
bright lips and sculpted cheekbones. Hard to match her with the Nomu I'd found with
the ultra-short hair, the too-thin face and the huge, terrified eyes.

‘It's her,' said Sandor. ‘Looks like she's from here, after all.'

‘She's from the Dry,' said Lanya.

‘Oh, yeah? How do you know?' said Sandor.

She gave him her best glare. ‘Because when Nik hauled her out from under the bridge
she was talking a whole other language and yelling for the angel that they worship
out there, that's how.'

He glanced at me. ‘So it was you?'

I shrugged and looked away, and found myself staring at Fyffe's name. The Hendry
name, that is, right there on a poster.

‘Let's go,' said Lanya.

‘Hold on,' I said. ‘Look at this.'

Beside the Nomu posters was a line of
Report Deserters!
posters stuck across a steel
roller door that had seen more than a few attempts to batter it down. Someone had
written over it in red spray paint:
Who are the real deserters?
Then diagonally across
each poster, in smaller, more careful letters, they'd written a name, different on
each one:
Hendrys, Venables, Coultens, Marstersons, Hallidays
… On it went. In the
bottom corner of each one was a C with a 1 inside it—the One City symbol.

‘Who are these people?' asked Lanya.

‘Families,' I said. ‘High-up families.'

‘What d'you mean
high-up
?' asked Sandor.

‘I mean, everyone knows those names.'

He pushed in front of us and peered at them, poster by poster. ‘I don't. Never heard
of them.'

‘Everyone on Cityside knows those names.'

‘Why?' he asked. ‘Who are they?'

‘They're the Cityside rich list,' I said, frowning at the Hendry name. What did it
mean ‘the real deserters'? What had they deserted? Were they the ones who'd torpedoed
the ceasefire?

‘How rich?' asked Sandor. He was staring at the names as though he was trying to
memorise them. ‘Are we talking small scale, like fancy computers, or big, like buildings?'

‘Bigger,' I said. ‘Computer networks and whole chunks of the city.'

He straightened up and turned to look at me. ‘Are they friends of yours? Go on—say
they are!'

‘Sure they are,' I said. ‘No, of course they're not. The Hendrys maybe. Once.'

The Hendrys, Thomas and Sarah, were uber rich and their kids—Lou and Fyffe and Sol—had
been friends of mine. They'd opened up their family to me, let me spend summers at
their house, sent presents on my birthday, food hampers during exams.

Then, when Sol died on the Mol in the exchange-gone-wrong, Thomas and Sarah Hendry
decided that they couldn't stand the sight of me.

‘I knew it,' said Sandor. ‘I
knew
it.' He slung an arm around my shoulder. ‘Let's
go and find them.'

‘Oh, grief!' said Lanya and walked away.

I shrugged Sandor off and followed Lanya, but he marched up beside us.

‘Seriously, why not?' He was practically waving his arms in excitement. ‘You front
up to them with the whole
I've been stuck on Southside and now I've made it home
and I need help to get back on my feet.
That could work. Why not?'

Lanya rounded on him. ‘You have no idea why, so shut up.'

He did this exaggerated shrug at her as if to say, ‘What's eating you?' and said
to me, ‘If you're friends with these people—'

‘I'm not!' I said. ‘Listen, we're about to go through Bethun. No way do we look smart
enough or cool enough to be wandering around that part of town, so we're going to
split up.'

‘You're not losing me that easy.'

‘Otherwise,' I went on, ‘We'll just look like a bunch of brown kids on the prowl.'

‘Bethun home to the rich list, is it?'

‘Pretty much.'

He nodded. ‘Sounds like fun. I'll go on the other side of the road and about half
a block behind you. That do?'

‘I guess. Try not to shoot anyone.'

He gave me a mock salute, ‘Commandah!' and sauntered away.

Lanya and I had shed our squad gear for civvies. I wore jeans and a T-shirt and Lanya
wore black leggings, a short skirt and a denim jacket—a combo that would have been
an eye-opener for any respectable aunt back over the river. But, like I said to Sandor,
we didn't look nearly smart enough to be where we were. Bethun's terrace houses smelled
of money: their cream-coloured stone was clean,
their bay windows were inviting,
their solid wooden doors had heft against the outside world, and their signs—Property
Alarmed: Armed Response—were in Breken and Anglo, just to be absolutely clear.