Jane Higgins - The Bridge

‘See?’ said Vega. ‘Gilgate breeds heathens. He’ll do.’

‘He won’t stay non-aligned for long. Remnant will make him an offer.’

‘First offer he takes, he and his young lady are going back to Gilgate. And I don’t think they’re keen on that, or they would have gone last night when you lost them.’ Cue Jeitan looking crushed. ‘Besides,’ Vega went on, ‘he won’t understand what he’s reading, and you’ll be checking with CommSec on a daily basis to make sure he’s following orders. Clear?’

‘Sir.’ The smart shoulders slumped. Not the guns and glory he was hoping for.

But we got the breakfast we were hoping for. Or at least a breakfast. A sludge of porridge slapped in a bowl and a mug of black coffee. Not much, but it stuck to my ribs and was a whole lot better than the nothing we’d had the last couple of days.

We were back at HQ where Jeitan had taken us the day before. The big dining hall echoed with chatter and the scrape of chairs, its windows steamed up by a bitter brew of coffee. So, phase one of our plan – get back to HQ – turned out to be surprisingly easy. Phase two – actually finding useful intel – was quite likely impossible. I looked at my porridge and wondered what Sol was eating. If Sol was eating. That kid was skinny. I hoped they thought him prize enough to feed him.

At the back of the room, Commander Vega stood up and rapped on a table and everyone shut up. He waited for absolute hush, then said, ‘Thank you. As you heard at the Crossing last night, our first foray has gone to plan.’ He held up a hand to quiet the cheering. ‘It’s a beginning only. We hold strategic posts that we will use to bring the city to the negotiating table. However. The mutiny of their armed forces that has given us this chance poses problems for us. It will take time to organize talks with a credible city command. In the meantime, our plan must be to hold the posts we have taken. Do not assume this will be easy. City forces are fragmented but they still have more weapons, more ammunition, more fuel, and more vehicles than we do. At present, they appear to lack an organized command structure. That will not last. Overconfidence is an enemy – watch for it. Your squad leaders have your orders.’

I was looking at Fyffe to see how much of that she had understood when the chair opposite me banged down. Coly, the knife-boy, leaned across the table and stared at me like he couldn’t quite place me. I could just about see the cogs ticking round in his head. I waited, thought about trying to distract him with a hot coffee in the face, decided that wasn’t such a good idea and waited some more. Eventually the little cogs in his brain clicked and his mouth opened. ‘You’re in deep shit.’

Yeah, surprise me. ‘You were in a knife fight with a girl,’ I said.

‘She started it.’

‘Sure.’

‘You stay away from her.’

I got up to move away but he was round the table and in my face before I’d taken a step. ‘D’you get it? Stay. Away.’ He was a head shorter than me, but a whole lot more solid. Something was burning inside him that I wasn’t keen to stir up. I turned away but he grabbed my arm and sent my tray crashing to the ground.

About a hundred and fifty heads turned in our direction. Just what I needed. Jeitan came storming over. ‘You are asking to be sent back to Gilgate. What’s going on?’

Coly looked smug. ‘I’m reporting a transgression.’

Jeitan’s eyebrows shot up. He glanced over to where Vega was talking – arguing, in fact, if you looked closely – with the man who’d stood on the other side of the old guy who’d given the speech the night before. ‘Report to me,’ said Jeitan. ‘I’ll decide if it goes further.’

Smug turned to sullen, but Coly pressed on. ‘Him and a Maker. I saw them. Together. I saw him touch her. Last night.’

‘ What? ‘ That was me, so appalled my voice cracked.

‘You saw what, exactly?’ said Jeitan.

‘I’m not saying here,’ said Coly. ‘I’ll say in a hearing.’

Jeitan swore. ‘You want to call a Pathmaker to a hearing?’

A sharp nod from Coly.

‘You’d better be sure about this.’

‘This is mad!’ I said.

They ignored me. ‘He touched her. She’s unclean,’ said Coly. ‘She danced unclean at the Crossing.’ That fire of his was burning bright and ugly. Breakfast turned sour in my stomach.

Jeitan chewed his lip and looked at me with even more loathing than before. ‘I’ll talk to Commander Vega. You,’ to me. ‘Clean this up – and hurry. There’s work to do.’

Fyffe had gone pale and was staring at us, but there was no chance to explain. A girl had arrived at Jeitan’s elbow and was waiting for him to finish. When he turned to her she asked could she take the Gilgate girl, and he sent them both off with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Fyffe and I were on our own, two Citysiders among a horde of Breken. A slip from either of us would send us both crashing and burning. We were going to try and meet at the next meal, but weren’t even sure if we’d have mealtimes in common. Fyffe had this crazy confidence that we’d be ‘looked after.’ It scared the shit out of me.

CommSec was Communications Security –anything from ordering supplies that kept the squads in boots and bread to high-security memos winging their way between bridges, not that I was supposed to see any of those.

The ogre/expert at the center of all this was Sub-commander Tasia Levkova: from a distance, a sweet old granny with a limp and a walking stick; up close, sharp and hard as knives and nails together.

‘Jeitan.’ She tossed a document onto her desk as we came in. ‘Good, I wanted to see you. I want a word.’ She eyed me. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Commander Vega found him.’ Jeitan pointed me towards the far end of the room. ‘Go sit.’

While he gave Levkova the info, such as it was, on me, I wandered around. We were upstairs, in a high-ceilinged room with tall, dusty windows that rattled in the wind. From that vantage point I could see down to the river. The shantytown, with its jigsaw of iron roofing lapped the hill where this old school was perched and ran west, up the river towards Curswall district. Further upriver, and away south down the other side of this hill, lay the remains of the original Southside. My guess: the shantytown marked a kind of blast radius – our army had flattened everything near the bridge, and maybe done it more than once. But people had come back, as people do, and now their washing flapped on lines strung between their shacks, and smoke from their cooking fires settled in a dirty haze above them.

Sol was out there somewhere, in a shack, or an attic or a basement. And here were we, in the middle of the enemy camp, Fyffe madly confident and me not at all. I wondered if they’d got fed up with him because he couldn’t understand Breken. Thinking what they might do scared me sick. They didn’t need much to keep him quiet – a number puzzle, a bowl of noodles, a book about animals from the old wild places or with pictures of star fields and planets from the space telescopes. Not much. A friendly face. A familiar face.

Behind me a strip light hung low over a couple of trestle tables spread with piles of paper. Against one wall were four of the oldest computers I’d ever seen. I tapped the keyboard of one of them and the monitor lit up. Something pinged the back of my head. I spun round – Grandma Levkova was giving me the full flinty-eyed treatment and aiming another pen at me. ‘ Don’t. Touch. Anything! ‘

I stuck my hands in my pockets and wandered on, but my heart was beating fast. Would traffickers send progress reports to HQ? If trafficking was part of the overall Breken strategy, they just might. Maybe I’d come to the right place after all. Maybe it was all here at my fingertips – who the traffickers were, where they kept their captives, timetables for transporting them south, all that. I just had to get at it before Sol was gone beyond reach, and before Fyffe threw herself on the greed of the enemy.