Jane Higgins - The Bridge

I volunteered for library detail. Dr Bonn arched an eyebrow but spared me the knowing smile. ‘You can tidy up Nanotech.’ So I got to watch the recruits, because from the shelves of dusty old volumes on Nanotech, History of, Level Three, you could see the assault course.

Late one afternoon Sol Hendry came wandering by. I tried to look busy shelving books. How Lou had a brother like Sol was one of life’s genuine mysteries. He was a serious little kid with fair hair, big brown eyes, and a flair for mathematics. He’d only been at school a few terms and he was shy, not much of a talker, but he often turned up quietly at my shoulder to ask if I could make a number puzzle for him, and could I make it harder than last time, please.

‘Hi Sol,’ I said. ‘How’s things?’

He shrugged, hauled Nanobots: Fear and Fantasy in Classic Science Fiction off the shelf and leafed through it. I gave up pretending to work and stared out the window. Dash looked like she was born to the training. Fit, fast, graceful. By the end of it she’d be better still. Lethal.

Sol spoke behind me. ‘Why do you have to go away?’

‘Who says I’m going away?’

‘Everyone. Dr Stapleton. He said you’ll be gone soon. Into the army.’

‘Did he? Well, what would he know?’

‘I don’t see why you have to go. Fy said my dad will find you a job. But Lou said it’s not as easy as that. Do you want to go in the army?’

‘What else did Dr Stapleton say?’

Sol put Nanobots back on the shelf – in the right place. Sol, the perfectionist. ‘That we should do our work and not talk to people who’ll be going soon. That’s mean, hey? I think it’s mean.’ This judgment delivered, he shrugged Stapleton off and said, ‘Do you want to play football?’

‘Sol, my friend, what a good idea.’

By the time the bell went for dinner he and I were three goals up against Lou and Sol’s mate, Izzy. We’d yelled ourselves hoarse and I almost didn’t care about the ISIS woman standing under the oaks watching us.

Just like she’d promised, Bella sailed into the girl-infested swamp that is school gossip, in which sharper guys than me have vanished without trace and maybe you’d find their bones years later cast up on some shore, still with an air of surprise that they’d been crazy enough to stray there in the first place. Bella moved through it untroubled, gathering whispers of this and rumors of that, and she might have stooped, now and then, to something as ungainly as an ear to the ground, but I think she had people for that.

She came back the next day with nothing. No news, not a rumor, not a whisper. Lou grinned through an entire afternoon of calculus on the back of that.

‘Ha!’ he said at dinner. ‘See? Not so easy after all.’

‘But there can’t be nothing !’ said Bella. ‘Believe me – there can’t be. Nothing is strange. It’s much stranger than something.’ Her horn-rims flashed at me and I felt like saying sorry for denting her reputation.

I’d had enough by the end of dinner and as soon as it was dark outside I made for the kitchen. But this time I wasn’t quick enough to get out before anyone could say, Where the hell do you think you’re going, Stais? because someone said exactly that as I opened the door. Dr Williams. He stood in the pantry doorway with bread in one hand and a plate of corned beef in the other. ‘Well?’

All the halfway decent excuses I could have made evaporated from my brain and I was left with, ‘Out, sir.’

‘I can see that.’ He made himself a sandwich while I squirmed. ‘You know we’re in lockdown?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You know why we’re in lockdown?’

I looked out the door. The dark smelled smoky and damp, and I could hear dead leaves rattling in the wind.

‘Stais! Where were you going?’

I considered bolting, but if I did that I wouldn’t get back, and I wasn’t ready to go yet. I closed the door. ‘Not far, sir. Just want some air.’

I waited for a pronouncement of punishment or expulsion or doom or something, but he just stood there, eating his sandwich and eyeing me. When he’d finished, he said, ‘Come with me.’

He led me through the dorm, past talk and laughter in common rooms and silence in study rooms. He nodded to the occasional teacher and told off the occasional loiterer, unlocked the staff-only door into the library and marched across its deserted ground floor with me trekking behind him. In the foyer the spotlit flag looked as though it was floating in the darkness. We arrived at last in the staff wing and he stopped at the infirmary.

‘But, sir,’ I said, ‘I’m not sick. Can’t I just have a detention and—’

‘In.’ The place smelled of disinfectant and liniment. He opened some glass-panelled doors leading into a walled garden about ten paces square. ‘Air,’ he said. ‘Such as it is.’ I went through and he closed the doors and went to work at his desk.

I blew out a long breath, looked back to check that he wasn’t watching and thought about scaling the wall. But it was quiet in the garden and whatever was planted there made the air fresh and clean.

I lay on a bench and looked up at the dust of stars and space going on and on forever. We went there once. Humanity, I mean. Well, not there exactly: we got to the moon, and to Mars, but got lost on our way to Jupiter’s moons. As the oil ran out at home and the water wars began, we crept back to ourselves, to our squabbles and our sicknesses and our dying planet – like we’d pulled a blanket over our heads and not looked up ever again. I lay there and watched it – the stars and the space between – and wondered what it would be like to go there. How quiet would it be? And how dark?

Around me I could hear the school settling. When the bell clanged for Silence, I got up, kissed the talisman round my neck for luck, and went inside to ask Dr Williams a question.

He was working at a desk in a pool of lamplight. ‘Better?’

‘Thanks, sir.’

‘Good. I’ll call Security to take you back.’ He reached for the phone.

‘Sir? Can I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Do you know why they didn’t pick me?’

He put the phone down and studied me with his bedside-manner frown: his official version that was friendly but reminded you of your lowly student status. ‘I can’t talk to you about that,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. If it’s any help, I can tell you that you are as stable and sensible as any other senior student here – more than many, in fact.’

‘I must have done something, sir. To not be picked.’

‘Not in my book. But, as I say, I can’t talk to you about that.’

‘Will I have to leave?’

He looked down and tapped a pen on his papers. My heart sank through my boots. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Nik. I really am. You don’t have anyone to go home to, do you?’ I shook my head.

‘Remind me.’

‘My parents died in the uprising in ‘87.’

‘Do you remember them?’

‘My mother. A bit.’ I shrugged to show I was past that now and I didn’t need him coming over all sympathetic and nosy about it.

‘You were very young when you came here, weren’t you. I could look, if you like, to see if she left anything for you to have when you came to leave. Do you want me to?’

That floored me. It had never even crossed my mind. He smiled because I was standing there gaping at him, then he disappeared into his file room. He came back leafing through a folder but shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry. There’s just an enrollment application, and entry test results, which are…’ he peered at the page, ‘spectacular. No surprise there.’