Havoc (29 page)

Frieda arrived in a bustle of busyness. She talked to the news team, she talked to
the minister, she talked to her army chum.

Lanya and I sat on the altar steps and watched her make her way up the aisle, breezy
with confidence. She led them all up past us to the wide space in front of the altar
and said to the news team, ‘Set up here.'

She looked around and noticed that people had started to drift in and occupy seats.
She seemed slightly puzzled, as though she wasn't expecting an on-site audience
as well as a city-wide one, but then she decided to capitalise on that.

She said to the news team, ‘Make sure they'll be able to hear me too.'

Then she turned to Lanya and me. ‘Here we are again. I told you the Marsh would stand.'

‘It looked like it was burning to me,' I said.

She stared down her nose at us and walked away.

I looked across the crowd. Mr Corman had arrived, looking immaculate and in no way
as if he'd just come from the street battle for Sentian. I saw Anna and Samuel, from
the house in Bethun where I'd stayed when Lanya was in the Marsh. My father was talking
to them. After a while he made his way up to the front. He stopped there, didn't
look at Frieda, just stood with arms folded, watching, looking unhappy.

A minor commotion at the big front doors announced the arrival of the Dry-dwellers—Nomu
and Raffael and the other three members of their team. They'd ditched their Cityside
clothes and gone back to their own things: tunics, leggings and soft leather sandals.
Nomu's tunic was a brilliant blue, Raffael's, almost white. They glided in a group
through the crowd towards the front. People were curious and almost deferential towards
them.

Lanya nudged me and nodded towards a side door: Fyffe had just come through it, all
but dragging her parents inside. They look as nervous and out of place as she looked
excited. Frieda couldn't hide that she was surprised to see them, and the newsman
could barely contain his glee. He scurried down the steps, beckoning a camera operator
to follow, and zeroed in on Sarah, who was more likely than her husband to deliver
on the audience's appetite for grief.

The crowd cleared a space around them and the reporter said, ‘Mrs Hendry, you've
lost two sons to the hostiles. One of them shot by Moldam militants. Perhaps you're
feeling that what's happening in Moldam right now is divine justice?'

He pushed a microphone at her, but she looked at him with cool intensity and said,
‘I have nothing to say to you.'

The reporter looked surprised and disappointed that he had to abandon a heartfelt
beginning to his coverage. He and his cameraman hurried back up the steps to where
Frieda and the minister were talking. The minister was asking for a chance to welcome
the crowd and the wider city audience to his patch and she said, ‘All right, but
keep it short.'

By now the crowd had fallen quiet and watchful. The minister, wired up with a little
lapel microphone, went to the top of the altar steps. He opened his arms wide and
welcomed everyone to St John's, which, he said, was a place of peace and reconciliation,
and he hoped that this would be an instance of exactly those things. He turned to
Frieda and said, ‘Director Kelleran, over to you,' and he went down into the crowd.

The reporter took his place and did his own piece about how we were all here to calm
the spreading panic. Then he said to Frieda, ‘Director. We've heard some alarming
stories about these two young people here. Can you set our minds at rest?'

‘Yes, Peter, I can. People seem to be concerned that the illness afflicting Moldam
could jump the river. I can assure everyone that it is not an airborne virus. It
will
not
jump the river. And we will be strengthening the quarantine around Moldam.
Now, we don't know if these two individuals are infected or not, but I'm pleased
to be able to dispense the vaccine to them here and now to put minds at rest.'

She beckoned to the medics and to Lanya and me. We stood up and moved front and centre.
Frieda made a great
show of taking a little black case from the leader of the Dry
delegation and opening it. Inside were two syringes and two vials. She held up a
vial to show the crowd and the cameras, then held out the box to the medics who took
a syringe and vial each.

I looked at the vials and thought, here it is: rescue. No more speeding freight train.
No more staring at a future that was short and full of horror. Both of us safe. Home,
free.

‘Ready?' said one of the medics to me. ‘Hold out your arm.'

I looked at Lanya.

She was staring at her own vial of vaccine.

Then she gave a small nod and said, ‘Now!'

She grabbed a vial. I grabbed a vial.

We dropped them on the floor and crunched them underfoot.

CHAPTER 39

The reporter swore loudly into his microphone. My father closed his eyes and bowed
his head. I took the lapel mic the minister had given me earlier in the day out of
my pocket and spoke into it.

My voice boomed through the sound system of the church. ‘Do you want to know how
we got infected?'

Frieda burst out, ‘There's no evidence that you are infected!'

I pointed across to Nomu. ‘That room that Nomu talked about at the news conference
yesterday. Underground in the Marsh, where they've been testing this disease. We've
been there. And we're not the only ones here who know about it.'

I turned towards Dash and held out the microphone.

Her eyes got wide and she mouthed, ‘
What?
'

‘There is no such room!' Frieda cried. ‘There
never was!'

People were starting to yell out. ‘Tell the truth!' ‘What are you hiding?'

Dash was staring at me. I kept holding out the mic, kept meeting her eye, willing
her to move.

Frieda turned to the cameras. ‘This is a fabrication! A girl from the Dry who's too
ashamed to admit she's a runaway, and two Breken youths—
Breken,
let me remind you—who
want to terrorise this city.'

The crowd was shouting at her, and she was starting to lose her cool and shout back,
and the reporter was trying to break in, calling, ‘Calm, everyone! If we can just
calm down. Let the director speak—'

Then Dash moved.

She marched past her boss to me, took the mic and spoke.

‘That room exists,' she said.

Everybody stopped and Dash spoke into the hush. ‘I've been there. I've seen bodies
there.' She pointed to the two medics. ‘So have they.' She held out the mic to them.

After a brief, frozen moment one of them gave a little groan, set his mouth in a
thin line and walked up to take it from her. He stared at it for a second then put
it to his lips and said in a low, broken voice, ‘Yes, God forgive me, I've been there
too.'

Lanya prised the mic from the man's hand. ‘The virus is a bioweapon,' she said in
her careful Anglo. ‘It has
been released in Moldam to break us. But do you think
it will stop there?'

‘This is fantasy!' snapped Frieda. ‘There is no secret room. There are no bioweapons.
Moldam's problems are of its own making. If they agree to cease hostilities we will
negotiate medical assistance for them. We've said it time and time again.'

She gestured to Jono and another of her agents. ‘Take them out of here. All of them.'

Then she turned to the camera saying, ‘This charade is over.'

She tore off her own lapel mic, dumped it into the hands of the dazed-looking reporter
and turned for a side door.

But the crowd had other ideas. A ripple of movement, a step here, a shuffle there,
and the doorways were blocked. Frieda paused, head high, imperious as ever.

She grabbed back the mic. ‘I said, this is over.' And, to the army guy, ‘Major? Clear
the doorways.'

Someone yelled, ‘It's not over till you tell us the truth!'

Then another, louder voice said, ‘I'll tell you the truth.'

It was the minister, still wired up with a mic. He made his way out of the crowd
and halfway up the steps.

Frieda was shaking her head at the reporter, but the cameras were still rolling and
she was maybe wary of insulting a churchman. She walked down a couple of steps
to
be level with him and gave him a full-on stare as if to say, you can't see the gun
I'm holding to your head, but do not doubt that it is there.

The minister looked across the crowd. ‘We're tired of war,' he said.

The crowd stirred, some shrugged, tired of platitudes.

‘We're hungry for peace.'

People murmured and a few shouted in agreement.

The minister turned to Frieda, ‘Director, you have told us that Moldam does not want
peace. That we cannot help them.' Then he turned back to the crowd, ‘My friends,
the director is lying. In fact, she is responsible for planting this virus in Moldam.
I accuse Director Kelleran of a war crime.'

Uproar.

Frieda yelled at her two sidekicks to seize the minister, but he walked back into
the crowd and to get to him the agents would have had to abandon Lanya and me and
Dash and the turncoat medic.

The crowd was yelling for the army guy to arrest Frieda, and he was ordering his
four underlings to take control, but they didn't have a chance unless they shot someone.

The cameras were still rolling.

Everyone who had a gun had drawn it and was aiming down into the crowd.

The minister tried calling for quiet but things just got louder so he shouted over
the mayhem. ‘Stop! Listen to me! Listen! Three days ago I heard the director say
she had ordered the virus release in Moldam! I heard her say how it was done! Please!
Please be quiet!'

People shut up at last.

‘First things first,' he said. ‘We must save Moldam!'

Someone started pushing towards the front of the crowd. Two people: Fyffe, who climbed
the steps and came to stand with Lanya and Dash and me, and her mother, who held
out her hand for the microphone that Lanya was holding. Sarah looked across the crowd,
which was quiet, watching her, and then into the cameras and spoke to the city.

‘People seem to think I want retribution for my sons. This is not true. What good
would that do? What I want is a future for my daughter.' She looked at Fyffe and
then at Thomas Hendry in the crowd. ‘And that means taking the vaccine to Moldam.
You understand why? The only way to stop this disease is to stop it in Moldam. There
is enough vaccine to do that. So let's do that. We, all of us, have given too many
of our children to this war.'

There was rustling and a rising tide of talk. Someone yelled, ‘We don't know where
it is—the vaccine!'

‘I do,' said the turncoat medic.

Someone else yelled, ‘It'll need an escort.'

And you knew, from the frisson in the air in that
church that every one of those
people would walk the vaccine to Moldam, and so would everyone outside in the square,
and in Sentinel Square and in Sentian. They'd all do it. But it wouldn't be enough.

Sarah Hendry knew that too. She turned to the army high-up who stood beside his soldiers,
their guns still trained on the crowd. She didn't speak. She didn't need to.

He looked out at the crowd, then at all of us standing beside him, then at the cameras.
And maybe he thought about the logic of what Sarah had said, and maybe he thought
about the weight of numbers out there in the square and beyond, and maybe he thought
about his own kids.

He gestured to his team and said, ‘Stand down.'

CHAPTER 40

There was total hush for a good ten seconds, as though everyone was astonished that
we'd arrived at this moment. Then they all began talking at once. Fyffe flashed me
a jubilant smile and went to her mother. Frieda turned back towards us with a look
of utter disbelief on her face.

I breathed out shakily: all I could think was that no one had been shot.

Then Lanya's hand gripped mine and I realised, first, that she was breathing as shakily
as I was and second, that something mighty had just happened.

Frieda marched across to the army commander. ‘Major, what do you think you're doing?
You have your orders and they are certainly not to—'

‘My orders, Director, are to protect you and your team and to maintain order here.'

‘That's right. And so—'

‘I'm placing you in protective custody.' He looked around and called two of his people
over.

‘Take Director Kelleran and her team to the crypt.' He put a detaining hand on the
shoulder of Frieda's turncoat medic. ‘Except you,' he said. ‘You, we need.'

Frieda drew herself up tall. ‘You have no authority to do this,
Major
.'

The emphasis was to remind him, I guess, that he was middle ranking at best. But
he wasn't subordinate to her, and she knew that.

He glanced across the crowd, which was still blocking all the doors and was starting
to turn its attention from euphoric air punching and back slapping to what would
happen next.

‘Director,' he said. ‘Right now I can't guarantee your safety in any other way.'

He nodded to his underlings and they swept her away, along with her five remaining
agents, including Dash and Jono.

The major beckoned to my father. I wondered if the guy was itching to arrest this
man who had been Cityside's most wanted for so long.

Turns out, he was.

He called his remaining two grunts over and said, ‘Nikolai Stais, you're under arrest.'

I shouted, ‘No!' and started to move, but my father shot me a warning look and I
backed off.

The major glanced at me, then turned to the crowd, put thumb and finger to his mouth
and whistled hard.