Jane Higgins - The Bridge

Near midnight Levkova told me to finish up and bring her the work I’d been doing. She said, ‘You and Lanya – I have not heard the full story, I think?’ I shuffled paper and didn’t answer. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The hearing will be ugly. You will be on the wrong side no matter what you say.’ Another pause. ‘What will you say?’

That I’m out of here, is what I wanted to say. That if you people are so desperate to tear each other apart, couldn’t you concentrate on doing that and leave those of us on the other side of the river alone?

‘Well?’ she asked.

I dropped the papers onto her desk. ‘That I stumbled on an argument I knew nothing about. That I barely spoke to either of them. That this is so obviously a set-up I can’t believe anyone is taking it seriously. That it has nothing at all to do with me. Will that work?’

‘Of course. If you were talking to reasonable people.’

‘No, then. So what happens next?’

‘They will try to cast you out.’ She looked at me. ‘To you that might just seem like moving on. What can they take from you that you haven’t already lost? Not a home. Or belongings. Even your name – you’d invent another one, wouldn’t you? But the borderlands are deadly this time of year, for the weather as much as the bandits. I think the best we can hope is that Lanya won’t accuse you and the Council sends you back to Gilgate.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Some would say that’s worse than being cast out. Anyway, then you can go and leave us to our madness.’ She picked up the papers. ‘Thank you, Nik. I am sorry. The misjudgment was Lanya’s not yours.’

‘She gave me some bread and fish. How can that be wrong?’

‘She’s a Maker. Surely even Gilgate has kept its Makers?’

When I didn’t answer she shook her head. ‘Have things become so degraded that even the dead are left to cross alone? Our Makers fast in all things in the hours before a Crossing – they take no food, submit to no touch, and should not even speak. Lanya most certainly should not have been arguing with Coly.’

The phone on her desk beeped. She pressed a button. ‘Levkova.’

‘You sent for Jeitan, ma’am?’ A woman’s voice.

‘I did.’

‘Not available, I’m afraid.’

Levkova took her finger off the button and frowned at me. ‘Who can I trust?’ She pressed the button again and said, ‘All right. Send me Rémy or Joseph.’

She turned back to me. ‘One last thing. They will ask you tomorrow what you’ve been doing here. What will you tell them?’

There are moments, now and then, when the world you thought you had sorted spins ninety degrees on its heel and when it stops you see everything slant. When Levkova asked me that, with an edge in her voice, I had one of those moments. From the start she’d told me not to talk to anyone about what I was doing in CommSec. And here she was, not wanting the Council to know. I heard Jeitan in my head talking about Levkova and Vega: they think if they’re found to be investigating Remnant it will undermine solidarity in the uprising . And I knew. Those comms I’d spent the last few days trying, and failing, to break hadn’t come from over the river at all. They weren’t encrypted Anglo. They’d come from here. Encrypted Breken. These people were spying on their own.

Levkova looked up. ‘Well?’

‘Filing?’ I said.

Her mouth twitched. ‘Filing. Yes. What’s your other name?’

‘Why?’

‘No reason. Curious. Your parents?’

‘I didn’t know them.’

She nodded. ‘You’re a good person, Nik. Who’d have guessed it?’

Remember that, I thought. Remember that if you ever find out where I’m from.

There was a knock on the door and my Jeitan substitute peered in. ‘Joseph,’ said Levkova. ‘Take him straight to Shed 3. No detours.’ She turned to me. ‘Off you go. And watch your back.’

But it wasn’t my back I needed to watch.

Joseph led me out into the nightand promptly disappeared. And I walked straight into somebody’s fist. Yes, I should have seen it coming, but I thought they wouldn’t bother. I’d already served Remnant’s purposes by walking in on Lanya’s fight on Saturday night. The hearing would get me banished and the Pathmakers branded as ‘unclean.’ There wasn’t much else I could do for them.

I don’t know how many there were. Four? Four hundred? The first punch knocked the breath out of me. Something soft dropped over my head, the lights went out and I gagged on a mouthful of cloth.

Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.

Someone behind me grabbed my arms and a fist landed in my gut. I doubled over, gasping, then straightened up fast as I could, heaved my shoulder upwards and connected with something, a jaw maybe. Its owner grunted, twisted my arms up my back then hurled me forwards. I hit the ground hard, on knee and shoulder. Pain went ringing through me. Still couldn’t breathe or see. I tore at the cloth around my head, but a boot rammed into my ribs, folding me up. Another one landed hard on my back. I ripped the cloth off my head in time to see a boot swinging towards my face.

I woke up in the dark with a thumping head.

Lay still and listened. Heard nothing. Tried to sit up and couldn’t. Panicked. Realized after a moment that I wasn’t tied up after all, just so cold and so sore that nothing wanted to move. I lay there and thought about going to sleep, but a vestige of sense in my brain told me I was cold and getting colder and colder, so shift . I managed to half sit up, and not to throw up – a triumph in its own way – and eventually got myself semi-upright. I crawled about, found a wall to lean on and inspected the damage.

I had a lump on my temple that was tight and sore but my face seemed to be in one piece. The rest of me, not great. Pain around ribs, shoulder, gut and back. And my shirt was wet. I sniffed at it, hoping it wasn’t blood. It smelled like alcohol. Someone in my welcoming party had been drinking and had upended their cheap vodka all over me. At least they hadn’t bashed my head in with the bottle – look on the bright side.

I struggled to my feet. Got there without throwing up or falling over, and looked around – the sort of looking you do when you think you’ve suddenly gone blind.

Directly ahead of me was a single faint line of gray light, a crack in a door maybe: I wondered if it came from the floodlit compound, or a lit street down in the town. I made my way around the walls towards it, fell over a few things – tools, bags of something, cement, I think – swore a lot, but got there in the end. It was a door, locked. I tried shaking it but it didn’t even creak on a hinge. I yelled a few times, or tried to, but it came out feeble as hell because my ribs objected to anything louder than breathing.

I sat on a sack of cement, leaned against the wall and hated everyone, individually and collectively, on this side of the stinking river. Including myself. I was a miserable failure at finding Sol. And at looking after Fy. I could see the thread between Sol and us stretching and thinning to breaking point as he moved further and further out of reach.

For a while I drifted in and out of sleep, but the cold and the nightmares kept waking me up. To take my mind off them, I went looking for a puzzle, a problem, an unfinished proof, anything that would occupy my brain until daylight, or someone in search of a wrench, arrived.

I found one ready-made: the pages I’d been staring at over the last week. I went back to the words I thought might be bridge names and tried decoding for Breken rather than Anglo. It was like a homework extension exercise: ‘For those with no friends and no social life to speak of, decipher the following code. Conditions: you must do this in a language not your own while in a vaguely concussed state of mind. You may have all night. You may not ask for help.’ But I was so cold and so angry those words took on a kind of desperate clarity that kept me occupied until – I don’t know how many hours later – I heard the door being unlocked.