Jane Higgins - The Bridge

The night was cold but clear, and there was no one around, which was a relief from always having someone in your face or your back pocket. So I stayed and watched the night go by and the morning come – the light coloring the old brick walls and the windows.

I was thinking about going back in and whether I’d be seen, and if anyone had even noticed I hadn’t been to bed, when a song came down the path. Fyffe on a morning walk, fair hair swinging side to side, happy, somehow, with the world.

‘Hey, Nik,’ she waved and came over, sat on the bench beside me and gave me her sunny smile. She smelled of soap and linen. ‘You’re up early,’ she said. ‘Usually it’s just me. Isn’t it wonderful?’ She waved an arm at the sky, which was clear and blue, just losing the sunrise colors. No argument from me, but I mustn’t have looked too impressed because she spared me the full-on ‘praise be to God’ speech and said, ‘You shouldn’t feel bad, you know. There must be a reason. There’s always a reason.’

Yeah. Life Lesson No. 1. Hold your nerve when bad stuff happens because there’s a plan and a reason for everything, you just don’t know what it is yet, but you’ll find out one day even if you’re on your death bed when you do.

Well, maybe.

Fyffe hugged her knees and studied me. I didn’t even try to look back. People think Fyffe’s not very sharp because she’s all ‘wow! look at the trees!’ and ‘smell those flowers!’ and arms flung wide at the morning sky. But they’re wrong. She’s smart in ways that are completely out of my league. She can read you with a glance, and you don’t even know you’re being read. So you don’t go near her if you’re trying to pretend things are great when they’re not, because she’ll know.

I rubbed my hands over my face and she said, ‘You look awful.’

‘Yeah… thanks.’

‘So, what now, for you?’

‘Breakfast?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘The army, Fy. The army is what now for me.’ I smiled at her to try to show I didn’t care.

She looked away. ‘It swallows people before they’ve had a life,’ she said.

All too true. We’d got as far as senior school because we were either very rich or very bright. Whichever way, no conscription for us. Until now. Now it was my turn to join everyone who’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and assigned to one of the three Fs: Farms, Factories, Fighting. It used to be that after three years you could opt out of the one you were first sent to. But now, they can keep you fighting as long as they want. Until you’re killed or wounded or way too old to be useful. Which is why, if you don’t get into ISIS, you’re dead. Sometimes for real.

‘Gorton knows,’said Lou.

‘Yeah? Why do you say that?’

‘Did he act surprised? No.’ Lou blew smoke carefully out the dorm window. ‘Does he care? Probably not. But it makes no sense. And they took Jono. Go figure.’ He tapped ash onto the window sill. ‘Want one?’

I shook my head.

‘You should ask him,’ said Lou. ‘Gorton, I mean.’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not for him to say, apparently.’

‘Well, who the hell can say? Bastard.’

Sunlight poured through the high windows of our dorm room and lit twelve beds, mostly ‘made,’ desks swept clean of junk because it was Wednesday and inspection day, and mirrors stuck with photos of families, girlfriends, pets, and other hangers-on. I was supposed to be helping Lou with a programming assignment but we hadn’t got very far.

‘You need to know why,’ he said. ‘How’re you going to find out?’

‘No idea.’

‘A little hacking into Records wouldn’t hurt.’

I shook my head.

‘Come on! If not you, then who?’

Over the tops of our trees, I could see across to the hump of Watch Hill where the General sat in his office plotting the city’s next brilliant move. Or maybe not. What if he just paced and frowned as he looked out across Sentinel Square towards the river and didn’t have a clue what to do?

I looked back at Lou. ‘They’ll be hunting for an excuse to chuck me out now. I’ve got no one breathing down their necks to say they have to keep me, and my scholarship is theirs to stop when they want. If they catch me hacking anything, I’m gone.’ I was gone anyway, but I wanted to see out the year if I could.

‘Do you want me to try?’

‘Hacking? You?’

‘Dreams are free. Not hacking, then. I could just nosy around. Ask some people.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Dr Williams.’

‘ No way! ’

‘No, think about it – it can’t be your grades, and you’re too damn careful to have much of a conduct record. It’s brutal! If you’d known they were going to dump you, you could’ve had a helluva lot more fun. So it’s not grades, it’s not discipline. What’s left?’

I shrugged.

‘Jeez. What d’you think?’ Lou tapped his head.

‘Oh, great. So I’m psychotic?’

‘Well… you are sitting in a third-floor window in the middle of a city in the middle of a war. In full view of anyone with a telescopic sight.’

‘Where?’

He pointed a finger, trailing smoke. ‘There’s snipers out there, remember?’

‘Rumors of snipers.’

‘And where will that attitude get you? Nowhere you want to be. They’ve got, what, twelve years of records on you?’

‘So?’

‘So, who knows what they’ve made of them?’

‘Do I look psychotic to you?’

‘Only sometimes.’

‘Funny.’

‘Course it would help if you weren’t caught out and about all night.’

‘I wasn’t caught.’

‘And that’s down to me covering for you.’

‘Maybe I was in the infirmary, being psychotic.’

‘Fy said she saw you. She said you’d been out all night and you looked like shit.’

‘Fy said that?’

He grinned. ‘It’s what she meant.’ The lunch bell rang. ‘Oh, great.’ He picked up his assignment.

‘Give it here,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

It was weird. One minute they’re falling all over you and you’ve got extra assignments and one-on-one tutoring and all kinds of people checking that you’re okay and worried that they’re working you too hard but they want to push you because you’ve got ‘such promise’, and the next minute, nothing. Just nothing. I could’ve put my feet on a desk, lit a cigarette, and thumbed through a comic and they wouldn’t have cared. The difference between me and Lou is he would’ve done all that just to see what would happen. But I’d been schooled in school too long. Lou called me careful, and he was right. I always had been.

Part of that was, while I wasn’t the only brown face in school, I was the only one without back-up. The Hendrys, sure, they sent hampers and gave me a home in the holidays sometimes. But all I had keeping me there was my scholarship and a record that said ‘not too much of a problem’ or words to that effect. But now that I wasn’t an asset, had I turned into a problem? I didn’t know. I did my work and most of Lou’s, and watched them ignore me.

Lou nosed around, like he promised, and came up with nothing. He reported this at lunch one day, a week or so after Victory Day. Bella smiled pouty lips at him and called him a novice, a rookie, and a greenhorn. ‘Watch and learn,’ she said. And off she went to do her own investigations, hips swinging, black ponytail bobbing. Lou groaned.

Fyffe rolled her eyes. ‘Could you try not to drool in the soup there, Lou?’

We didn’t see Dash, or Jono. They were in training with the two ISIS agents who were living in while they took a look at their new recruits. They all sat at a separate table in the dining hall, spent the days in the staff labs, and morning and evening were out on the assault course in the back fields. Dash seemed to be doing okay. She gave Fyffe the thumbs up when she thought I wasn’t looking, and she looked high on it all.