Havoc (19 page)

He was watching me with this expectant look on his face, as though I was about to
conjure his sister out of the morning air.

I shook my head. ‘No. I've got something else I have to do. Ask the Hendrys. Ask
your friends at the Marsh.'

He gazed at me, processing what I'd said and realising it wasn't the answer he needed.
He looked up at the sky and took a breath.

I said, ‘Sorry,' and turned away, but he called after me.

‘You do not know what is coming.'

That stopped me. I turned back to him. ‘What did you say?'

He came up to me, close and dead serious. He was as tall as me so he could stare
me straight in the eye. He said quietly, ‘You do not know what is coming.'

As a veiled threat, it was a show stopper. ‘What do you mean?' I said.

He stepped back. ‘Help me. Then I help you.'

But he wasn't very good at threatening trade-offs because then he resorted to, ‘Please!
Please help us. We cannot ask the Security.'

‘Why not? You've been working right next to them.'

‘We…we do not trust them.'

Fair enough, I thought. Trust is in short supply and I really don't trust you.

‘Then why are you working in the Marsh?' I said.

His stare narrowed. ‘This is not our choice. You do not know.'

‘That's right,' I said. ‘I don't. Tell me.'

‘It is…complicated,' he said. ‘I could tell you.' The pause. The expectant look.

‘If I help you.'

He nodded.

I so did not need this. I stared at the scrawled-on
Break the Breken
posters and
listened to the city waking up around us: a gate slammed across the road, an underground
garage door whined, and a car revved up a ramp and out onto the street. Time was
in a hurry. I was too, but it was still early for Mace to be about. I sighed.

‘All right. Come with me. I'm looking for a friend who's a Southsider. If we find
him he might know someone who can help you get across a bridge and into Moldam.'

Raffael's face lit up. ‘Yes! Yes! Thank you!'

‘But,' I said, ‘You have to tell me what the hell is going on.'

He nodded, serious again. ‘I will do that.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘Let's find my friend. You can tell me on the way.'

The Inkwell was just opening its doors. I got a coffee for us both and asked the
guy who brought it if he'd seen George Macey about.

‘Macey? Nah, man, we don't serve shanty scum in here no more. Since they bombed the
shit out of Tornmoor? Hell, no. Why are you after him? Owe you money or something?'

I shrugged.

‘Try the Stag,' he said. ‘That's where they hang out, the leftovers, if they haven't
run back over the river. Only place that'll serve 'em now.'

The Stag and Poacher, he meant—a seedy little bar over Torrens Hill way. ‘Sure,'
I said. ‘Thanks.'

‘Watch your back, though,' he said helpfully. ‘Stab you as soon as look at you, that
lot.' He went off to serve Citysiders.

Raffael watched this conversation, frowning slightly as he concentrated on the Anglo.
‘Tell me about Nomu,' he said. ‘Is she all right? Are you sure?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘She's okay. Wherever she's been, it hasn't been great, but she's
being looked after in Moldam. She'll be fine.' I hoped that was true. ‘Now, tell
me what's going on in the Marsh.'

But he was still thinking about Nomu. ‘I should have looked after her better. We
had never been outside the Dry before we came here. She is a—' he searched for a
word ‘—a fierce person. Clever and fierce.' He spread his arms in a wide grasping
motion. ‘She wanted to do everything and see everything. There were dinners and
parties. And our minders said we must have new clothes and new hair styles and, for
Nomu, face paint, to look like the city women.' He shrugged mournfully. ‘I was the
big brother. I was too…' he dragged his hands down his cheeks and pulled a sour face.
‘You know? And the more I was like this, the more she became wild. As though she
wished to
take it all in, all the food and wine and richness, and then to—' he made
a violent motion with his hands, as though he was spewing it all out. ‘She stopped
coming to work with us in the laboratory. Then one day we came home and she was gone.'

This wasn't telling me what I needed to know. I finished my coffee and stood up.
‘Keep talking,' I said. ‘But let's go.'

He gazed around the cafe with a thoughtful look on his face. ‘I do not understand.
You speak Anglo, you know the city, you went to school with Fyffe. To me you are
a Citysider.'

‘I lived here once.'

‘But you found Nomu over the water, among the savages.'

‘I live there now.'

He gave me half a smile. ‘You do not seem to be a savage.'

‘There's time.'

‘Explain to me,' he stared into his empty cup, ‘There is a war. You must choose a
side, yes?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I've told you about Nomu. Now you tell me what's coming.'

CHAPTER 25

The city morning was bright and busy. Shopkeepers were swinging open their doors
and stacking crates of food outside to entice customers inside: potatoes with the
dirt still clinging to them, apples that looked like they'd been individually polished
and bunches of carrots with their green leafy tops. It still surprised me, the amount
of food on view here.

‘This way,' I said, and we headed for the rundown, rat-infested squats of Torrens
Hill by way of the back lanes that were too narrow for army vehicles.

‘A fold in a hub in the Dry,' Raffael told me. ‘That is our home.'

‘A fold?' I asked.

‘Like the tents of our ancestors,' he closed his palms together. ‘Folded when it
was time to move on.'

‘Okay. Go on.'

‘Thirty folds make our hub. One hundred families in each fold. We do not move on.
We have water, so there is no need. It is in the rocks deep under the desert. We
are careful with it, and our science is strong, so we can manage the water and also
the heat and light of the Dry to grow food and keep animals—for ourselves and to
trade with towns far away—and we trade our knowledge too, our science. We have a
good life: perhaps…narrow, you would say? But there is safety in the hub and there
is adventure outside it in the Dry for those who wish it.

‘Three months ago a traveller came to our fold. We welcomed him—travellers bring
news and we're glad to see them. After he had stayed two weeks, our people began
to fall sick. A fever caught them and they bled inside, under their skin.' He rubbed
the back of his hand. ‘In their chests, even in their eyes. Death came quickly, in
three days or four. Six people in one week, thirteen in two.'

He spread his hands in front of him and stared at them as though he wanted more fingers
to count the number of his dead. ‘It was nothing we had seen before.' He closed his
fists. ‘We had no answer, so we sent out word for help. And help came. From here.
From this city. Men came with a drug that stopped the deaths, and with a vaccine.
They promised it would make our people safe. For this we were very grateful. But
then they said, “There is a price.”'

‘There's a surprise. What price?'

‘Space in our hub. An
entire
fold of their own. They are escaping a war, they said.
We said that we have no room for them, and yet they demand it in return for giving
us knowledge of the drug and the vaccine. What could we say? We said, yes. And here
we are, working in Pitkerrin Marsh, learning how to make the drugs and vaccine that
will save our people. And soon, twenty-five of your families will come to the Dry
and take our fold. And we must make way: one hundred families must find another place
to live because your people—'

‘They're not
my
people.'

‘Because these people are greedy. More than greedy. The sickness was no mistake.
The man who brought it knew he brought it, and the city men knew too. They pretended
to be strangers to each other, but Nomu saw them together. She was outside climbing
an old watchtower; she saw them laughing.'

I walked and thought: a virus deployed as blackmail by a bunch of Cityside's most
powerful people. Why? What were they so desperate to grab out in the Dry? Or, looked
at another way, what were they desperate to leave behind here?'

The closer we got to the Stag and Poacher the seedier things became: rows of tiny
shops sat cramped together, dingy with neglect. The Hotel Grande was grand no more
and looked like it had become a squat for people who couldn't afford a room next
door in the creepy Best
Boarding House, or Beast Boarding House as the sign now had
it. Pawn shops displayed people's treasures in their barred windows, and chipped,
badly painted signs were wired to streetlamps or hung from doorways, offering to
buy (no questions asked) and quick money, a way out of your troubles. People lounged
on the steps and in doorways, smoking and watching us with drugged-out blandness.
Raffael got the jitters and kept turning in circles trying to look behind us and
ahead at the same time. I was more worried about the stares from cc-eyes and was
glad to see that a lot of them had been knocked off their perches and dangled blind
in mid air.

Raffael stopped and turned to me. ‘They think they have defeated us, but once we
have the vaccine we will fight back. When these people come to the Dry there may
not be the welcome they expect.' He gave a little nod, as though this was the end
of his story, and walked on.

‘Hold up!' I jogged after him. ‘What does that mean—there may not be the welcome
they expect?'

He glanced at me. ‘People of ours are dead—friends, family—and our fold is taken
from us. Should there not be a reckoning?'

‘What kind of reckoning?'

‘I cannot say. It is not for me to decide.'

I thought about Fyffe walking into that.

‘Wait,' I stopped.

He turned back, eyebrows raised.

‘Fyffe was kind to you,' I said. ‘If it wasn't for her you wouldn't know about Nomu.
You wouldn't be here now.'

‘That's true. But—'

He shrugged.

‘No, no, no,' I said. ‘You can't just shrug that off. D'you still want my help?'

His shoulders sagged. ‘Yes, of course. But it's not for me—'

‘To decide. Yeah, you said.' I looked up the alley and pointed. ‘See that?'

‘What?'

I picked up a stone and hurled it hard. It clattered off the cc-eye. ‘That,' I said.
‘That is a camera. There's probably one of those for every five or six people living
here. Oh shit, it's not dead.'

The camera was swivelling towards us.

‘Come on!'

We sprinted into the next alley. Two cameras there were also on the move, as though
the buildings had alien eyestalks and were coming to life. We kept running till we
got to Mercers Lane where all the cameras had been yanked from their roosts.

We slowed to a walk, and I said, ‘The people who put those cameras up—the Security
that you don't trust anymore—they don't trust you either. They're watching and waiting;
they're always ready for anyone who wants to fight back. They are not the kind of
people who are going
to bow to your so-called reckoning. They're not going to say,
“Oops, sorry, won't happen again and by the way here's your fold back.” It doesn't
end like that. There'll be a basement in the Marsh where they're working right now
on a different version of the sickness and a new vaccine because they know you'll
want revenge and they will be a step ahead of you. Then what happens? It goes on
and on and it gets bigger and bloodier every time. And before you know it, you might
as well be here firing rockets at each other over the river. Forever.'

I stopped. Raffael did too—I didn't know if he'd followed the rant, but we'd arrived
at the Stag and Poacher so I didn't care right then. The little pub looked very shut.
I tried to get my head back around the reason I was here: find Macey, and through
Macey find One City, and then? But then the path diverged depending on what I decided
to do with that knowledge. I was carefully not thinking about that.

Raffael stood at my shoulder and said, ‘The sickness is a weapon more accurate and
powerful than any rocket. Whoever has control of it and its vaccine does not need
rockets because they can decide who gets sick and who does not. The Security has
spent all this time making it. Do you think they will use it only on us?'

CHAPTER 26

Pieces of the puzzle were slotting together fast now. Frieda had a bioweapon on a
leash. Alongside that, Cityside's powerful families were desperate to get out of
town, and Moldam was effectively under quarantine. I said to Raffael, ‘Do you know
what disease it is? Does it have a name?'

He shrugged. ‘It is a hemorrhagic virus. We call it HV–C6.'

HVC. Havoc. I felt cold to my bones. Frieda was planning to end the war by ending
Moldam. She'd set it up perfectly: inside the lockdown, Moldam's medics were stretched,
food was short, and people were camping on the street. What better way for a virus
to spread unchecked?

And the deserters were sufficiently worried about it all going wrong that they were
getting out.

My choice was starkly simple. I could work with
One City to save Moldam from a deadly
epidemic, or I could betray them to save Lanya. Whatever I decided, I had practically
no time to do it. If the disease wasn't in Moldam yet it must be only days away.
And days is all I had to get Lanya out: two days and counting down.

Macey was my gatekeeper. I had to find him first, and soon. Now would be best. I
crossed the road to the Stag and Poacher.