Havoc (23 page)

She hesitated and I thought I saw a shadow of regret pass over her face, but maybe
I imagined it.

She went on, ‘We persuaded her to come with us to the Marsh and in the car on the
way one of the agents pressed a poisoned needle into her neck. Very simple. Very
quick. Within an hour she was dead. I didn't know that was going to happen—you won't
believe that, but it's true. At least it was quick and relatively painless. There's
some mercy in that.'

Mercy. Everything this war was not.

‘No,' I said. ‘You do not get to use that word.'

I turned away and walked back towards my father.

‘Wait!' she called. ‘What about my information?
What about the girl?'

‘Taking my chances on that,' I said.

Her comms unit buzzed a second time.

I turned back to her. ‘You should answer that. It's probably important.'

‘Arrest them,' she said as she unhooked her comms unit and looked at its message.

Jono pulled his gun and yelled, ‘Freeze!' in a voice that bounced all the way up
to the roof and back.

‘Cool it, Jono,' muttered Dash.

Dash, I trusted not to shoot me, but Jono, never, not even in a church. I retreated
to the altar steps and sat down beside my father. Jono advanced up the aisle, gun
still raised until he stood close enough that I could see the sweat on his upper
lip and the glint in his eyes over the gun.

Dash came up beside him. ‘I said, cool it. He's not going anywhere. Enough already.'

Jono lowered the gun, but he didn't holster it. I was getting his very best stare.
I thought about asking him if he practised it in the mirror every morning. I said,
‘Thanks,' to Dash instead.

‘You're such an idiot,' she said to me.

‘Hey,' wailed Sandor. ‘What about me? I need a medic.'

I fished in a pocket and found the remains of Mr Hendry's cash, handed some of it
to Dash. ‘Give him this.'

He brightened immediately, pocketed it and gave me a nod then heaved himself upright
and headed slowly for a door.

‘It's for a medic,' I called after him.

Frieda was still on her comms unit talking ferociously and directing angry glances
towards us.

‘Do you know what's going on?' Dash asked Jono.

‘I do,' I said.

They both looked at me as if to say ‘Yeah, right.'

‘It's Nomu,' I said. ‘The lost girl from the Dry. She's been found, and right now
she's appearing on Cityside News, telling everyone that the disease that came to
her people in the Dry has come to town and if people here want the vaccine they can
get it from the Marsh. But they'd better hurry because there's not enough for everyone.'

Dash looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?'

I smiled at her and didn't answer.

Frieda had finished on her comms unit in time to hear the last of what I was saying.

‘So this is your plan?' she said. ‘You think a mob will descend on the Marsh and
bring it down?'

‘Something like that,' I said.

She looked at me like I was deluded. ‘No mob will be taking the Marsh while its under
my command.'

‘Your command?' said my father. ‘You do the bidding of people in the shadows who'll
never admit to what happens in the Marsh. You do as you're told and
that's all you
do. The Marsh is not under your command.'

She advanced on him, eyes blazing. This was an old argument born of old enmity. She
almost hissed at him.

‘All I do? All? No. This is my time.
I'm
ending this war. You have failed, as usual.
Moldam is finished. The virus is there now. Surrender of the South will follow because
every other settlement will know that they could be next and that we hold the vaccine.'

My mouth went dry. My father swore.

‘That's right,' said Frieda. ‘The squad that went to Moldam looking for the Dry-dweller
girl. They left it wherever they went.'

CHAPTER 31

The Marsh was going up in flames. The fence on the western perimeter was down—a combination
of the weight of numbers pushing on it and a judicious use of boltcutters. If the
order to fire on the crowd had been given, it hadn't been obeyed; maybe the guards
had abandoned their posts to be first in line to grab a box of the vaccine or, better,
maybe they'd seen people they knew coming over the fence and couldn't face killing
their own. Either way, the crowd was now going from building to building unopposed.

But the Marsh is big—almost a small town. And a lot of it is classified; you're supposed
to know where you're going or you shouldn't be there, so there weren't any signs
saying
HV–C6 Vaccines: Get them here!
There must have been people still in the grounds
who knew where that storehouse was but they were lying low.

Frieda had brought my father and me back to the Marsh from St John's. She'd left
us in different buildings to be processed separately and she'd gone off with Dash
and Jono to pull the situation out of the fire—that was before any actual fires were
lit. Now it was looking like she wouldn't be getting a performance bonus this year.

Meanwhile, I'd got away from the guy taking me to my cell by the fairly simple ploy
of threatening to breathe on him. As we walked down a corridor I'd grabbed the comms
device clipped to his belt and when he yelled, ‘Hey!' and went to take it off me,
I backed away and said, ‘I was in Moldam yesterday. In a house where your special
ops team planted that virus. Want me to breathe on you?'

He said ‘Christ,' or words to that effect and stood there eyeing me and the device.

I waved it at him. ‘Touched it now.'

Then I lunged towards him, and he bolted. The device was multifunctional and let
me pull up a plan of the Marsh. I was looking for some reference to who was being
held where. And yes, there she was:
Breken female, adolescent. Order: interrogation.
Regime: sodium pentothal. Authorised by: Dir. Kelleran. Ward 23.

Found a map. Went for it.

The first time I ever saw Lanya she was holding her own in a knife fight on a Moldam
back street. The second time I saw her, a few hours later, ten thousand other people
were watching her too as she and the other Moldam
Pathmakers danced with firesticks
across a barren stretch of land near Moldam Bridge to honour six people killed in
the uprising. She was barefoot and fierce, those braids and beads flying, and all
of her, body and spirit moving to the needs of the fight and the beat of the drums
and their song.

I remembered that as I ran through the corridors of the Marsh trying to find her
and not knowing how she would be when I got there. I remembered it and told myself
she would survive. I ran three flights of stairs, eight corridors, twenty-one sets
of firedoors to get to Ward 23.

No one stopped me. Everyone else was going the other way, because the siren ordering
the evacuation of the building was blasting in every corridor. The staff had taken
off: computer monitors were blank, paper cups of tea sat half drunk on desks and
empty ones rolled on the floor.

I yelled in Breken, ‘Lanya! Are you here? Where are you?' I looked into every room
off the main corridor—all of them empty. It looked like the staff had let the inmates
go. ‘Lanya!'

Then a figure came out of a room at the end of the corridor. A familiar figure and
not in a good way.

Jono. My stomach did a flip.

‘What are you doing here?' I said. ‘Everyone's left, hadn't you noticed?'

He leaned in a doorway. ‘Yeah, I noticed. I was waiting for you.'

‘Where is she?'

‘Gone.'

‘Gone where?'

He smirked.

‘I'm sick,' I said. ‘Infected. I'll breathe on you if you don't tell me.'

The smirk widened. ‘I've been vaccinated—one of the perks of being on Kelleran's
team. You're no threat, never were.'

I turned away and yelled again. ‘Lanya! You here?'

The sirens drowned me out; they were doing my head in. I went along the corridor
looking again into every room. Jono watched me, and eventually I came back to him.

‘Where is she?'

‘She was here,' he said. ‘Until a couple of hours ago. I took her away when we got
back from St John's. I decided she should be with her own kind.'

His comms unit pinged. He glanced at it. ‘Dash. Gone soft, has Dash.' He nodded up
the corridor. ‘I'll take you. Cos they're your kind too.'

We retraced my steps down to the ground floor until we were right back where I'd
started but Jono kept going—outside, away from those ear-busting sirens. There was
full scale looting going on now; some people seemed to have forgotten their quest
for the vaccine and were carrying away computers and cc-eyes along with
all kinds
of other tech, and some were even clumsily lugging furniture away. The speed of the
collapse was mind boggling: the most feared place in the city brought to its knees
by fear. A reporter with a microphone and a cameraman in tow was trying to pull people
together to organise a search for the vaccine storehouse. He was shouting, ‘People!
People! Listen to me! Let's divide into search groups!'

Jono headed east along an asphalt walkway lined with trees and bushes. I was so preoccupied
with being scared for Lanya that when Jono swung round and punched me hard in the
gut I didn't see it coming. I hit the ground. He stood over me and I thought I was
going to get a boot in the face. I rolled away and stumbled up gasping, ‘What the
f—?'

‘You turned Fy,' he said. ‘I won't forgive that.'

I put my head down, hands on knees, and tried to breathe. When I had air enough I
said, ‘Wasn't me. It was all her.'

‘Bullshit! She was never like that before.'

‘Yeah, she was.' I found a tree to prop me up. ‘We never noticed, that's all.' Before
he could object I said, ‘She's her own person, you moron. She's not gonna do what
someone says just because they're in charge or they're giving the orders that day.'

‘Had a nice cosy time over the river, did you?'

‘Looking for Sol? Sure. It was a bundle of laughs.'

Then it dawned on me what he meant. I straightened up.

‘Is that what you're aggro about? You think we got together over the river?'

He didn't say anything but his gaze slid away.

I said, ‘Well, I'm sorry to set whatever mind you have at rest, but we didn't.'

His eyebrows went up, and then came the smirk again. ‘Just friends, then.'

‘As if that's a small thing. You know fuck-all. Can we get going?'

We arrived at last way out on the eastern fenceline, at a boring-looking building
that I took to be a storehouse. But inside we went downstairs through a series of
doors that Jono had the codes for, and two levels down the place opened up into a
maze of corridors and labs. We stopped outside a double set of doors in an airlock
arrangement so that you went through the first one and waited for it to close before
you could open the second. There should have been biohazard suits hanging in there,
but I guess they'd suddenly become valuable and someone had filched them.

Behind me Jono pressed an intercom switch. ‘Visitor for you,' he said and opened
the first door. I went in and peered through the window in the next door. Lanya came
straight up to it, eyes wide, hands on the glass.

I punched the door button to go in. Nothing
happened. Pushed it again. Still nothing.

I turned round to Jono saying, ‘You want me to go in or don't you?'

But the door back to him was shut. And locked. I yelled and pounded on it. He smiled
at me, tapped the glass and went away. I found the intercom.

‘Lanya? Can you hear me?'

She nodded.

‘Can you open this door?'

She shook her head.

‘Find the intercom switch,' I said.

She looked around and found something, pressed it and I heard her voice. ‘Nik! Get
me out of here!'

‘I'm trying,' I said.

I levered the cover off the elock and peered at its insides. Then I realised something
important and looked back at her.

‘Hurry!' she said. ‘What's the matter?'

I was looking into her eyes and she was looking right back with all the smarts I
knew she had.

‘You're supposed to be all drugged up.' I was starting to smile.

She shook her head. ‘They gave me one injection early on and that's all. Hurry, Nik.
There are bodies in cages.'

‘Cages?'

‘Hurry!'

‘I'm trying, I'm trying. Don't touch anything.'

‘I said a crossing prayer for them. They're just kids. Please hurry!'

I was looking at the elock innards, still puzzling over what she'd said.

‘Did you say one injection?' Then I remembered what Jono had said about Dash. ‘Did
you see Dash?'

‘Wasting your time,' said Jono's voice. I spun round to see where he was. ‘Look up!'
he said.

‘Up?' I stared round my small airlock space. Then Lanya knocked on the glass and
pointed. And there he was, in the observation window high in the wall of the room
she was in.

His voice came through my intercom and presumably hers as well.

‘Dash went soft, like I said. You won't open that door. There's a master control
here that overrides it.'

‘What are you doing?' I said.

‘Justice,' he said. ‘I'm doing justice. I lost Fyffe cos of you. Now you get to find
out what that's like.'

I think my heart stopped, then it started again with a thump and went full-on like
someone had rammed a lever up to maximum.

‘Jono—'