Jane Higgins - The Bridge

Jeitan pushed me back.

I shouted at Levkova, ‘You know what this makes you?’

Jeitan punched me. ‘Shut up!’

I gasped, ‘It makes you… everything your enemies… believe you… to be.’ He punched me again. I doubled over on my knees.

I heard Levkova say, ‘Are you lecturing me?’

I had no breath. ‘Re… minding… you.’ I looked up at her, willing her to remember that night when she’d refused to throw me to the dogs.

She limped across to where I was kneeling, grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled my head back. ‘Tell me your name, city boy. Your real name. Not a placeholder. Not a joke. What’s your name?’

‘Nikolai…’ I gasped,’… Stais.’

She looked at me hard. Then she let me go. ‘Why would they tell him to say that? Once, all right, it’s a taunt. But to persist. It’s suicide. I’d have thought they’d want him back.’ She stuck a hand under my chin and lifted my head. ‘Don’t they want you back?’

‘No one wants me back. I’m not with anyone.’

She turned to Fyffe and said, ‘Enough’ to the doctor and Benit. The doctor stepped away and Benit took his hands from Fyffe’s neck. Fyffe blew out a breath. I blew out a breath. Levkova spoke to Fyffe in Anglo, ‘His parents? Have you met them? Do you know them?’

Fyffe shook her head.

‘Never?’ said Levkova. ‘They never came to Tornmoor?’

Fyffe spoke slow, careful Breken. ‘They’re dead. He used to talk about his mother sometimes. Not much. You had to push him for it. And I never heard him talk about his father. Everyone knew they were dead.’

‘What did he say about his mother?’

‘He remembered her, kind of, from before he came to school.’

‘Did he tell you her name?’

Fyffe looked at me. ‘Eleanor.’

‘Eleanor,’ said Levkova quietly, and walked away to the window. She stood staring at the wild day and at last turned back to Fyffe. ‘Why would he take such a risk for you? Are you lovers?’

Fyffe went red. ‘No. Friends. He’d do that for a friend. Wouldn’t you?’

‘And ISIS? Tell me about him and ISIS.’

‘They didn’t want him. We couldn’t understand why. He’s so smart, we thought they’d be sure to take him. We tried to find out, but no one would say. But then, after the school was bombed, they came looking for him.’

‘Did they find him?’

‘I don’t know.’

Levkova turned to me. ‘Yes, they found me,’ I said. ‘They didn’t like my name either.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘No.’

She leaned on her walking stick and studied me. ‘You really don’t, do you.’ She turned away to talk to Vega and the doctor. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, so I sat on the floor and looked at Fyffe and she looked back at me and we didn’t move; we just sat there looking, as though, if we stayed still and watched each other, we could somehow keep Benit and Jeitan and the whole pack of them at bay.

In the middle of all that the door burst open and a woman charged in. ‘Sir, I’m sorry—’ She looked around at us and stuttered to a halt.

‘Go on,’ said Vega.

‘They got to Goran.’

‘And?’

‘He’s dead. In his cell. We don’t know how.’ The doctor picked up his bag, but she said, ‘They’ve got the body. You won’t get a look at him now.’

‘Faster than we thought,’ said Vega. ‘But it can’t change our plans.’

‘Sim, no,’ said Levkova. ‘You can’t go ahead with this now.’

‘I’ve got to. We call them out with what we’ve got.’

‘What we’ve got is nothing. Except you, standing on that platform, waiting to be shot.’

‘Then be ready.’ He nodded to Benit and Jeitan. ‘Lock these two up again. Then go with the sub-commander and make preparations to get out.’

‘Sir, no!’ said Jeitan. ‘You need someone with you at the ceremony.’

‘No,’ said Vega. ‘This is my call. Go. Now. That’s an order.’

So they marched us away. At the door of my cell I said to Jeitan, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what’s going on?’

But all he said was, ‘Keep your boots,’ and he shut me back in the dark.

My name is Nikolai Stais. It’s just a name. No big deal. No one cares what school kids are called. But to the ISIS agents who came to Tornmoor it was a problem. Here on Southside, according to Levkova, it was a taunt. And then there was Dr Williams. I thought of Dr Williams as I sat, adding things up, in that underground cell at Breken headquarters in Moldam. I could see him with my file in his hand, standing behind his lamplit desk in the school infirmary, asking me, did I remember my mother, and did I know my father’s name. ‘Nikolai, perhaps?’ he’d said. I thought he was guessing, to make me feel better. But then he broke the rules by giving me the name of the woman who’d enrolled me at Tornmoor – Frieda Kelleran – from a file I wasn’t supposed to see. Now, I realized, he’d given me a lot more than that.

I knew my father’s name.

That was all I knew about him. I thought that if I ever saw Levkova again I would ask her who he was. I was the enemy to her now. But maybe, for the sake of the ten days we worked together, she’d tell me.

The door opened and a torch shone in my eyes. Jeitan’s voice said, ‘Come with me.’

‘Where? Is Fyffe okay?’

‘With your Maker friend. Hurry up. And keep your mouth shut. We get heard, we’re dead.’

I followed his torchlight along a twisting basement tunnel, through a series of doors. He fumbled with a bunch of keys to unlock each one, then locked them carefully after us. We went up some old stone steps to a ladder and a trapdoor, where he stopped. ‘This takes us outside. I’ll have to kill the torch and if you choose to run, I won’t stop you.’ He looked hard at me, the ‘guns and glory’ guise all gone.

‘But?’ I said.

‘Commander Vega could be killed tonight. Levkova has a plan to stop that. She needs us to put it in play.’

‘Us?’

‘You and me. She doesn’t know who Remnant has got to, so she can’t trust anyone in the squads. She thinks she can trust you.’ He shrugged in a God-knows-why sort of way. ‘Up to you.’

That was it: no threats – no ‘help us or we hurt you’ or, worse, ‘help us or we hurt Fyffe,’ just ‘help us.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

We’d come out on the west side of the hill, beyond the compound fence. The moon shone so bright that we cast shadows as we hurried down the slope. Jeitan broke into a jog once we reached the flat and after about twenty minutes we came into an unlit street where the houses all had tiny square patches of grass beside their steps, and broad pavements where bare-branched trees gleamed faintly in the moonlight. He unlocked the door of one of them and nodded me inside. ‘Levkova’s in the kitchen at the end. Go on.’

How do you front up to your enemy – that you’ve lied to and whose trust you’ve betrayed, and who has recently scared the living, breathing daylights out of you – how do you front up and ask them the most important question of your life?

I knocked and Max opened the door on a big old kitchen with a fire burning and a hefty table where Levkova was sitting. He patted my shoulder. ‘Youngster. Here you are. Jeitan’s lost his wager then.’ He cackled to himself as he left. I watched him go. I couldn’t look at Levkova.

‘He’s a good man,’ she said as the door closed. ‘A good man… I think I said that about you once. I was surprised, you see, that a scavenger from Gilgate should behave with such… humanity. And now I’m even more surprised.’

‘I lied to you.’