Jane Higgins - The Bridge

It was slow going. Vega wanted me to show him how I’d decoded each memo, and he wasn’t a man much given to fine detail. After a couple of hours it occurred to me that while I couldn’t lead him wildly astray – because Levkova would always be there to confirm or deny – I could lead him slightly astray, and she might not notice. So when we took a break for lunch I constructed a memo of my own. It meant embedding the question I wanted to ask in some inter-bridge chat and constructing the whole thing backwards, which gave me a headache, but in the end the heart of it went like this: Moldam–Ohlerton: Query: revisiting Night One targets .

Vega frowned at it. ‘What does that mean? Why would they query that?’

‘What were they, the Night One targets?’

He sat back. ‘What you’d expect. Watch Hill, financial hubs, comms hubs, a training school for the security services—’

‘A school?’

‘Of sorts. Why?’

‘I dunno. Kids, I guess.’

‘Privileged kids. Fascists-in-training, getting ready to join the interrogation specialists at the Marsh or follow their fathers onto comfortable seats on Watch Hill.’

‘Why not hit the security services directly?’

‘Ah, but where? They’re dispersed and mobile precisely for that reason. But they’ve got an elite training facility at Tornmoor. That’s what we targeted. They called it a school, but we know what it was. And for all that, we didn’t take down the dormitories with the trainees – just the admin center and the officer block.’ He was watching me. I doodled studiously in a margin, afraid that I’d pushed too far.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘for every one of those privileged little monsters up there at Tornmoor I could show you a thousand kids down here in schoolrooms with no computers and no books, writing on recycled scrap and no chance, no chance , of becoming more than the serving class their fascist peers up there expect them to be. They’re not innocent up there, for all that they’re kids.’ He leaned over and took the pencil out of my hand. ‘You of all people should understand that. Tell me you’d rather be a scavenger than put that brain of yours to use with a decent education.’

I stared at the paper in front of me and my heart thudded so loud on my ribs I was sure he would hear it. Then he’d want to know why my curiosity about a Cityside school came charged with such panic.

‘Look at me,’ he said. I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. His stare went right through me; I could almost feel it bouncing off my bones, calculating the sum of me.

‘Do you think that’s what your father wanted for you? To spend your days raking through the rubbish of the city?’

‘I didn’t—’ I cleared my throat and tried again, ‘My father died in the uprising in ‘87. I don’t remember him.’

He tossed the pencil back on the table and sighed. ‘Then let me tell you. You deserve a decent education. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He stood up and stretched his shoulders. ‘How many more?’

‘Oh,’ I tried to keep the relief out of my voice. ‘Six? Five, six, something like that.’

‘Take a break.’

I looked at the memo I’d made. ‘Are you done with this one?’

‘I think so. I don’t know why they’re harking back to first night victories, but it’s not telling us where DeFaux is, so it’s not a lot of help.’

I put it on the fire and watched it burn.

‘It bothers you,’ he said. ‘That bombing.’

‘I guess.’

‘Why?’

‘How did you do it? It must’ve been well guarded, a place like that.’

‘It was a Gilgate–Ohlerton collaboration, that one. Your people, not mine. They will have had moles in there a long time. Straightforward enough to move things in, set things up, if you’re careful. Patient. People come to be trusted. You just have to watch that they’re not discovered or turned. Always a risk if they’re there too long.’

I wanted to ask who. Who was their insider? Who set us up for that night? I was almost relieved that I couldn’t ask and that he wouldn’t know.

I said, ‘Would you have done it? If it had been on your patch?’

He gave me another long stare. ‘I have a war to fight. I’m not going to win it with a bleeding heart.’

The daylight was almost gone by the time we’d finished. Levkova came home and the doctor called in to see how Max was doing. I watched the clock. We ate cabbage soup and flatbread just for a change, and assessed progress to date: we had Remnant memos that put DeFaux on this side of the river and hinted at an assassination plot with Commander Vega as its target – perhaps at the Crossover commemoration ceremony, where the Commander would be speaking to the crowd. For all that, we had no idea where DeFaux was. It was Saturday. We had four days to find him. My own thought echoed back at me: we.

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor was saying. ‘Why are you so sure DeFaux is still alive?’

‘Kasimir saw him,’ said Vega. ‘In the Marsh.’ A little silence fell, then he went on, ‘And now the Marsh has been liberated, the politicals are free, but so are the psychopaths. I think he’s out, and I think he’s here.’

Pitkerrin Marsh. There it was again. The hospital the Breken had taken in the first assault of this uprising. I remembered the old guy at the Crossing that Fyffe and I had watched, and the great roar of approval that greeted his announcement that ‘Moldam has the Marsh’. The Mad Marsh. And here was Vega talking about psychopaths and political prisoners. At school we’d never given a second thought to who was locked up there; hostiles and the criminally insane were all the same to us. Just like fascists-in-training and Cityside school kids were all the same to them.

I needed to get out and find Fyffe.

That night was standard issue winter:blustery, sleeting rain that hooded people inside their coat collars and sent them racing heads down for whatever fire-warmed room they could find. I crouched beside the archway into the graveyard, wishing Lanya would arrive. Lines of stone markers reared out of the scrubby grass in front of me. They weren’t neat, sculpted monuments – just hunks of riverstone set in the earth at more or less regular intervals.

I thought of the troops I’d seen laid to rest Cityside: our own celebrated dead, wrapped in the flag and laid in familiar ground, the gunfire salute crackling across the gravestones in their manicured lawns. I put my hands on the cold earth. What if Sol was here? Or somewhere like here? Buried, nameless, in hostile ground. Would they even bury our dead? And with what prayers, I wondered. Fyffe would want prayers for him, but I couldn’t say them. Fyffe, who thought she was so well looked after that she’d launched herself right at the enemy. Fearless. Crazy.

Lanya arrived in front of me as quietly as ever. ‘Hurry,’ she said. ‘Before we’re seen.’ We set off around the walls. ‘Makers look after this place,’ she told me. ‘Or did. It’s not used anymore. They’re supposed to watch over it still, but I don’t think they do.’ She kicked at the rough grass. ‘I don’t think anyone does. There should be a key still hidden here somewhere.’ We’d reached a wrought-iron gate. She counted bricks and prized one out of the wall. ‘Here.’ She flashed a smile at me and unlocked the gate. ‘Lucky for us. Let’s go.’

We hurried down the hill. The rain and wind had dropped and puddles were already sheeting with ice. ‘We’re looking for a man called Goran,’ said Lanya. I scanned my mental list of traffickers, but there was no Goran on it. ‘Bowman, that’s the supplies officer at the infirmary, he took Sina down to the hospital yesterday afternoon to collect some medicines for the infirmary. This man Goran came in with a delivery. He’s a courier. Sina told Bowman she knew him and she was going to visit him.’ Lanya peered at me. ‘Bowman said he was expecting her to come back, but she hasn’t yet. Is that why you’re worried?’