Jane Higgins - The Bridge

‘What about them?’ I said.

‘They can be remotely disarmed.’

‘How?’

‘There are jamming devices.’

‘But?’

‘They’re locked away.’

‘Can you get one?’

‘I can. But, there’s a problem. Their range is poor – to be effective, they’d have to be used on the bridge.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. The triggermen get searched for jammers and the like, but I think I can get you on the bridge as a calming influence on the boy. And I think I can manage to forget to search you. Do you know how to operate a jammer?’

‘Yeah. The fascist-in-training, remember?’ He ignored that, so I said, ‘Do you know what the frequency range will be?’

‘I can find out.’

‘For both triggers?’

‘For both triggers.’ His stare told me not to ask how he was going to discover the Cityside one. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘What if I don’t come back?’

‘I don’t think you want ISIS finding you any more than we do.’

True enough. ‘All right. When?’

‘The exchange is planned for first light, two days from now.’

‘Tell me what to do.’

Mol Bridge. 7am. Suicide switch day. The sun didn’t rise that morning so much as seep grayly through thick cloud so that the gloomy light became slowly less gloomy until you could see the other end of the bridge. The giant ribcage of the Mol arched over us gleaming faintly, radiating cold, and the whole thing creaked and groaned like a beast in pain. You could taste the sea on the river breeze.

I took Sol to one side so he wouldn’t see the women wrapping his sister in explosives. ‘Okay, Sol, now listen. We’re going to walk halfway across the bridge. We can’t run. We just walk. Then we’re going to stop for a minute, right in the middle, then you and Fyffe are walking on, to the other side.’

He thought this through behind wide blue eyes. ‘Not you?’

‘I’m staying here for a while.’

‘Why?’

‘Got some things to do. I’ll come back later.’

‘Okay.’

‘Not long to go now. Who do you think is waiting for you over there?’

‘Mama.’

‘For sure.’ I stood up as Lanya came over.

‘They’re ready,’ she said.

‘Right. Let’s do it.’

She put her hand lightly on my chest. ‘God go with you.’

My voice stuck, so I picked up her hand and kissed it, then took Sol back to Fyffe.

I’d thought hard about whether to tell Fyffe about the plan to jam the triggers. Vega had said that no one else should know, besides him and me. If word got out that Southside were doing this, there wouldn’t be any more exchanges. But Fy was the one wearing the explosives, not Vega. I told her.

When I saw her on the bridge that morning, wearing the padded jacket, I could tell she didn’t think the jamming would make us any safer. She was standing very still as if she was afraid to breathe, and the smile she directed at Sol was brittle and too bright. She held out her hand to me. I took it and squeezed it.

‘Ready?’ I said. She nodded. ‘It’ll all be over in fifteen minutes. Can you handle fifteen minutes?’

‘I think so,’ she whispered.

‘Okay.’ I took Sol’s hand.

So there we stood, Fyffe, me, Sol, hand in hand on the bridge in front of the gate. Behind us stood an armed squad and behind them a crowd of jostling onlookers. Ahead of us, in the middle of the bridge, an ISIS agent held the trigger for the explosives on the Breken hostage, and with him stood the triggerman from Moldam who had gone over to verify the hostage and to hold the trigger for the explosives on Fyffe. At the gate at the other end where the Breken hostage stood there’d be ranks of troops too, and maybe there was a crowd, I couldn’t see. I wondered if Dash was watching.

A foghorn bellowed on Cityside and we all jumped. An answering bellow came from Southside. That was my signal. Not sooner, Vega had said. Save the battery. I put a hand inside my coat, felt in the inside pocket for the buttons I’d practiced with. Pressed them. A tiny vibration told me the jammer had winked into life. No outcry sounded behind us. No alarms went off. So far, so uneventful. I grasped Fyffe’s hand again and we started to walk. Five minutes, Vega had said. Five long minutes to walk slowly to the middle of the bridge and another five to make the exchange.

I looked down at Sol. ‘Okay?’

‘Yep.’

I found myself counting steps so I wouldn’t freak out. Even so, everything pushed itself at me: the hardness of the concrete through my boots; the salt of the sea wind on my tongue; Fyffe’s hand, slim and tense in mine, and Sol’s, small and sweaty; the gulls – there were gulls that morning, wheeling and crying high over the bridge. By the time I’d counted to a hundred, the hostage coming from Cityside was close, the noise of the crowd had faded and all I could hear were the gulls.

Then, the crack of a shot.

We hit the ground.

Panic charged through me.

A second shot split the air.

The silence that followed was as loud as anything I’d ever heard. I lifted my head from my arms, got up on hands and knees. Fyffe was frozen in a crouch, her lips moving, her eyes closed.

Sol was sprawled in a pool of blood.

The world went blank for a heartbeat – then it all came roaring back. Sol’s blood spread under my fingers and knees. Fyffe’s wail filled the air. I turned Sol over. Blood spilled out of his mouth and down his white face. I gathered him up in my arms. His chest was a pulp of bloody clothes. His head fell back. His eyes stared up at the bridge, at the sky, at heaven, at nothing.

City voices were shouting all around us and comms units crackled with bursts of Anglo. I held Sol close, brushed his hair back, tried to see a spark in his eyes, rocked him and said, ‘No, no – it’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. We’ll get you home. I promise. I promise.’

Then, above me there was just one voice, barking orders, and another, quiet, in my ear, while Sol bled his life out on my coat.

The voice in my ear was Breken. A woman had crouched beside me. I remember thinking that she looked like Lanya, but older. She put a hand on Sol’s face and whispered a Breken prayer, then men came and stood around us, bristling with guns and orders and marched her back towards the city.

They wouldn’t let me carry Sol. They took him Cityside on a stretcher surrounded by paramedics as if that would do any good. But they let Fyffe and me walk off the bridge together.

She went straight into her mother’s outstretched arms. And I went into the waiting arms of ISIS.

City forces had taken back the hospital near Bethun Bridge. They took me there and put me in a white room that had a chair and a cabinet and a narrow bed and a window too high up to see out of and a small bathroom. They were kind. They checked that the blood all over me wasn’t my own and gave me a hot drink and clean clothes. They told me to take my time, get cleaned up, rest. Someone would come by presently to see how I was. They locked the door.

Someone did come by presently, but I hadn’t drunk the drink, or got cleaned up or changed my clothes. They said Dash wanted to see me and wouldn’t it be better for me not to be covered in Sol’s blood when she arrived? They brought me another hot drink.

So I drank it, and had a shower – it was strange to stand under hot water. I put on the clean clothes and stared at myself in the mirror. They’d given me an old cadet uniform: green fatigues and brown boots. Maybe it was all they had to spare.

I should have looked like a standard issue ISIS cadet, but my hair was too long and I was too thin and what I really looked like was a hostile in a stolen uniform. I turned away, picked up my bloodstained clothes and stood holding them. I didn’t know what to do with them. In the end I folded them and laid them on the chair. Then I sat on the bed holding my coat, Levkova’s coat, and waited for Dash.