Jane Higgins - The Bridge

Levkova crooked a finger at me. ‘You. What’s your name?’

‘Nik.’

She raised an eyebrow, and Jeitan said, ‘That’s all I got out of him too.’

‘Well, Nik,’ she went behind her desk and opened a door to a cupboard-sized, windowless room. I could see a small table in there, an old-style light bulb swinging from the ceiling and stacks of paper on the table and the floor. ‘We’ve got quite a backlog, as you can see, and you’re going to look at all of it. Understood?’

My heart sank. I needed to be on the computers, not stuck in a cupboard processing old files.

‘Starting now,’ she said. ‘Leave him with me.’ When Jeitan looked doubtful she said, ‘I know. It’s risky. First sign of trouble, he’s out. But it’s also urgent. We make do with what we’ve got. Check in this afternoon and I’ll give you a report for Sim.’ She glanced at me. ‘For Commander Vega, I should say.’ Jeitan nodded. ‘And don’t look so aggrieved, lad,’ she said to him. ‘Your time will come. Anyone can charge off over the river to fight. Sim needs a deputy here who’s loyal and level-headed. That’s you. Be honored.’

He looked like he didn’t want to be honored, he wanted to be fighting, but he said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ gave his text-book salute and left.

‘Now.’ Levkova shooed me into the cramped little space behind her desk; it smelled of mice and mold. She stood over me with her beetle-bright eyes and said, ‘How’s your memory?’

Pretty damn near perfect is how my memory is, but I wasn’t telling her that. She said, ‘I’m not going to write down a list of instructions. Let’s try you remembering some and we’ll see how we go.’

She rattled off a bunch of letter and word combinations and showed me some places in documents where they appeared. ‘Find those. Mark them. Bring them to me. That’s all.’

I leafed through a pile of documents and found lines and lines of gibberish. Intercepted comms from our side of the river – that was my guess. My job was sifting, searching, marking. Levkova’s job with what I found was much more fun. Code-breaking.

I looked up to see her hesitating in the doorway.

‘Is there more?’ I asked, hoping she was about to let me use the computers.

‘One thing more. You will not talk about what you’re doing here to anyone beyond myself and Jeitan. And Commander Vega, of course.’ She gave me a tight smile that struggled onto her face from places unknown and looked like it was anxious to struggle away again. ‘Should you be tempted, just remember Jeitan can find you, and your young lady, much more unpleasant work to do than this. Is that clear?’

I nodded and made an effort to look at her and not past her to the room beyond. None of this paper was getting me near to finding Sol. I needed to get at those computers.

By the time I went downstairsthat night to eat, I had a measly nothing to report to Fyffe except the tantalizing possibility that the computers at CommSec might store the information we needed. ‘Well, you’ve done better than me,’ she said. ‘The infirmary’s got two wards with about twenty people crammed into each one, but there aren’t enough beds. Some people must have come from the fighting; they’ve got gunshot wounds and burns. There’s a clinic for everyone else, whether it’s fever or broken bones. And there’s a medicine room, but most of the shelves are empty. They’ve put me on cleaning. I wish I understood more Breken; my eavesdropping is hopeless.’

We were walking in the grounds away from prying ears, looking for somewhere to shelter out of the rain. We found an empty doorway and watched the gray evening creep across the compound: lights came on, people hurried about, doors were slammed and curtains pulled shut as the rain got heavier. Dismal. It had rained all afternoon – long enough for us to discover that all the roofs leaked and so did our boots, that the bricks of peat they used for fires were contaminated with other stuff and wouldn’t burn hot or for long, and that although we’d wrapped up in everything we had, it wasn’t enough. We were cold.

Fyffe said, ‘It’s Sunday, isn’t it? It seems like forever since last Sunday. D’you remember last Sunday?’

‘Don’t, Fy.’

‘A woman came into the infirmary this afternoon with a little kid with a broken wrist and the doctor was so careful and gentle about setting it and I thought, how could you do that? How could you take such care with this child here and plant a bomb in a school over there!’ She sniffed and wiped her arm across her face but the tears kept coming. ‘I wish… I wish that Lou…’

I put an arm around her and she buried her face in my shoulder and cried, and I had no words to help. Fy was always the one with the comforting words.

She was quiet after a while, then stood back and dabbed at my shoulder. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I want him back too. He’d have talked his way into this place and out of it again with all the intel he needed and people falling over themselves to help him out.’

‘Except he didn’t have Breken, the way you do.’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘You don’t like that, do you?’ I shrugged and she said, ‘I’m not about to accuse you of being in league with the enemy, you know.’

‘I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help thinking how Jono would spin all kinds of conspiracy theories out of it.’

She almost smiled. ‘Yeah. But he’s away over the bridge. I hope they’re safe. I wonder what they think we’re doing.’ She took a deep breath. ‘What are we doing? Do we stay here or go down into the township?’

‘Stay, I think. Let me see if I can get on the computers in CommSec.’

‘There’s always my plan.’

‘Your plan? Oh, you mean your turn-yourself-in-and-get-us-both-shot plan? Can you just hold off on that for a day or two? Give me a chance to break into the computers. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.’

Problem was CommSec was never empty. Levkova seemed to live there. Jeitan came and went, keeping half an eye on me and thinking I was slow as a skiddy on ‘shine. Which I was – because why should I help the hostiles break into our comms? I didn’t want to finish working on them before I’d had a chance at the computers.

In the room beyond my cupboard, Levkova ran the place with steely precision. The old computers and their printers whirred and clicked and taunted me from a distance. People came, sorted stuff and were dispatched. If there were crises they were also sorted, I guess, though Levkova never raised her voice and I think no one else dared to.

Monday, there was a power cut. Levkova had warned me. ‘Monday to Thursday this week, power will be down from fourteen hundred to seventeen hundred hours.’ The place emptied but that was no use to me because the computers were dead for the duration. I stayed in my cupboard and sat on the floor in the dark; Levkova thought I was asleep and left me to it. For three hours I ran the texts I’d been working on across my mind’s eye, looking at them again and again. I was looking for a key that would let me in. I played with algorithms, with old-style encryption devices, and with anything I could manage without a computer. I knew I was probably dreaming – city forces were unlikely to use anything so simple. But Levkova didn’t seem to be using a computer, and I wondered if the city was in such chaos that its army had resorted to primitive forms of communication. I hoped so. I wanted to crack these codes in case someone somewhere was saying something about Sol. Surely by now the army would be looking for him? I guessed and guessed again. At one stage I thought I’d found some words that tallied with bridge names, but they led me nowhere. You need luck when you don’t have anything solid to work with, and I had no luck at all that afternoon.